The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Those of us who somehow survived the hellscape year of 2020 and the first half of 2021 and came away with a victory in the presidential election, made it through the Capitol insurrection, and beat COVID, deserved a break.

We got one after receiving our vaccine shots and ventured outside once again to enjoy live music and danced for the first time in 13 months.

It would be nice to think we could all sit back for the next three years in a comfortable chair and eat popcorn watching CNN as President Joe Biden rolls back all the bad policies of the Trump years, like suspending oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and restoring the Endangered Species Act and restoring EPA’s fight against global warming and climate change.

Unfortunately, the other side is not sitting back cowering in defeat.

The New York Times is now reporting that Donald Trump began his next act Saturday night at the North Carolina Republican convention, running through a litany of conservative culture war issues in a 90-minute address that ended with an extended frontal attack on voting and American democracy, in which he endorsed a long list of Republican voter suppression proposals.

“The former president is both a diminished figure and an oversized presence,” the Times‘ White House correspondents writes. “He shut down his blog after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant, according to a person familiar with his thinking. But he remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination in every poll, and believes he could be ‘reinstated’ to the White House in August.”

That bit about coming back in August is obviously a fantasy right out of the fake Republican playbook interpretation of the Bible. But what Democrats on Facebook who share these stupid memes don’t get is that it works with a large enough segment of the population to keep them engaged and ready to vote in November 2022 and 2024.

“If you’re a one-term president, you usually go quietly into the night,” a presidential historian said. “He sees himself as leading the revolution, and he’s doing it from the back of a golf cart.”

Always the first to obtain most of the good leaks, the Times also reports Sunday on a 70-page report assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups talking about threats to democracy dead ahead.

“Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin,” the Times reports. “In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat,” this new report warns.

A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.

Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joe Biden’s support with voters of color who loathed Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.

Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.

“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”

It’s true that the Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.

Yes, the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the Republicans mainly because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in statewide Senate races and the Electoral College.

Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.

Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.

“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.

Yes, and on every channel, including independent news sites on the web, on Facebook, even talk radio and Fox News.

The analysis that is missing from this report is a mass communications analysis of what works in this era of social media. Algorithms consider mainstream, moderate positions blasé. Nobody likes or shares them. Sensationalism and controversy win every time. We can’t just blame the tabloid press or the broadcast media for this anymore.

Biden has made progress by appealing to working people, including white union members. But Democrats are never going to win with most of the rank and file who consider their religion paramount to the government, abortion a sin against their god, possession of guns a sacrosanct Constitutional right, and alternative lifestyles of the LGBT community an abomination.

If a few Republican votes (or one key Democrat) could be bought in the U.S. Senate, we could pass the For the People Act and fix most of the problems with our voting system. Of course the Republican Party might well be as dead as many Democrats hoped it would be by now, if only we could get rid of the Jim Crow filibuster.

Related: National Action on a Federal Voting Rights Law is Now Critical, Even if it Takes Eliminating the Jim Crow Era Senate Filibuster

Unfortunately, one Democrat stands in the way of that, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and the progressive left in the Democratic Party appears to be on permanent vacation.

Maybe that’s what Biden wants, and what Manchin wants, and what the report indicates. But I say there are a couple of lost lessons here people need to consider.

Lost Lessons from Alabama History

We got a moderate Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in Alabama in 2017, Doug Jones, not because of a moderate campaign, but because of an overwhelming media presence surrounding and attacking the other guy, pedophile Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore. In running for reelection in 2020, the people running the Jones campaign decided on a strategy based on an outdated concept of incumbency and a slogan of “One Alabama,” a misguided plan to try to “unite” the people of the state around a concept of good governance.

But he lost that reelection campaign — by 20 points — to an idiot football coach who was willing to kiss Trump’s golden ring and backside and not say one word about government solutions to anything.

Trump’s people don’t “believe” in government. That’s not how former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville got their votes. They believe in Jesus, and the white picture of him in the fake story books they grew up with.

So how do you counter that?

The report may be right that defunding the police is not the answer. I knew that last year and mostly avoided the subject. But if you understand history, like we did in Alabama back when, you understand that voting rights is the issue that can galvanize a nation. If John Lewis were alive today, he would be leading a new movement to stand up for voting rights for all Americans.

Look, we have to learn to use the marketing tools we have. Trump’s supporters are all up in arms still about honest elections and voting rights. All we have to do is champion honest elections FOR ALL, and do it all day long every day on every channel. Do not let Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill seize the day here.

We need new leaders and a new set of activists to rise up and take on this issue. That may not be Black Lives Matter or Antifa. It’s not Occupy or the Tea Party either.

Who will step up with the new idea to seize the day, carpe diem, and carry us to the new promised land and past this Trump era of fake news and blatant, out in the open racism?

I am sick and tired of fighting the Civil War over and over again. Aren’t you?

Come on people, the press and media in America. Do your part. Flood the airwaves with the facts. That’s the only antidote to the other virus that is killing us, fake news memes. Stop reporting the fake news side – and we win. It could be that damned simple.