THE COMING “CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION”

OCTOBER 27, 2020 – When I say what I’m about to say, my wife frowns, telling me I’ll jinx my prediction. In reply I quip, “But I believe in math and science.”

Despite the darkness that now shadows our nation, I think we’re on the cusp of a much brighter era. Within a reasonably short while we’ll reflect upon the current age and identify Trump and Republicans as catalysts as much as villains.

Yesterday evening’s brazen political theater—Amy Coney Barrett’s swearing-in ceremony by Justice Clarence Thomas—will be viewed as a tipping point. In future Halloween celebrations, McConnell’s little speech on the Senate floor earlier in the day will haunt the Republicans’ fanatical religious base. “If we lose [the election],” he said (paraphrased), “we’ve still won the long game.”

As I argued in my recent post, “Just say NO to Canada,” many signs point to a Democratic sweep—if not next Tuesday night, then in the days or couple of weeks that follow, once all votes are counted.  But let me take it a step further.

I foresee a watershed moment in American political history, when a power shift catches up to demographic changes that have been building for quite some time. Those changes have translated to a leftward move in majority sentiments regarding a host of policy matters, from economic justice to racial equality to judicial reform to electoral reform to climate change to the acute crisis regarding Covid—and future pandemics.

What we’re about to witness is the disintegration of the Republican Party as currently constituted. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, will undergo a major overhaul. We’ll see two new parties: 1. The Progressive Party, drawing from the Bernie/Warren end of today’s Democratic Party; and 2. The Lincoln Party, attracting today’s moderate Democrats and more notably, (former) Republican backers of the Lincoln Project.

“But here’s the deal,” as Ol’ Joe is fond of saying: the difference between the two new parties will not be over principles. It will be over the pace of reform.  No serious member of either new party will argue about what’s fundamentally right and wrong with America. The focus of dispute and subject of compromise will be over how fast things should change, not the direction of that change. The FoxNews/QAnon/Anti-American element will survive but with vastly reduced political power and ever-shrinking numbers.

In time, historians will see the Trumpian disruption as an era in which by over-reach, reactionary forces exposed America’s ugly underbelly. The consequence: A great awakening in which a solid majority of Americans were shocked out of complacency. This collection of Americans across the spectrum of the world’s most pluralistic society will have saved the country from itself.

And a generation of psychology and sociology PhD candidates, not to mention political scientists, will have a field day explaining how the nation zig-zagged from eight years of Obama to four years of Trump to . . . the “Constructive Revolution.”

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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson