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Perhaps
unintentionally, the Democratic Party is failing its base
constituents after they handed it thrilling victories in the 2020
elections to gain control of the Oval Office and the U.S. Senate, and
after already holding a majority in the House of Representatives. In
its unexpected return from the political wilderness, the Party seems
to have lost its way.
While
pressing issues continue to burden and assail Democratic base voters,
especially its rising New American Majority of ethnic minorities,
Democrats are doing little to address them. Public education
continues to deteriorate; voter suppression and restrictions are
being designed and moving through legislatures in 48 states; and many
of these same legislatures are also passing laws to enable
Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn elections.
In
public education, New American Majority students are awash in
lead-contaminated water in school and at home. This issue, which the
Obama administration highlighted in Flint, Michigan in 2014,
continued unabated during the Trump administration, and the Biden
administration has been barely mentioned it so far. Neither
Democratic nor Republican administrations have meaningfully addressed
this problem.
Lead
poisoning is taking a vicious toll on the physical and mental
development of ethnic minority public school students in the cities
hardest hit by the lead crisis—Flint, Michigan; Milwaukee,
Wisconsin; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta,
Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; Gary and Indianapolis, Indiana;
Durham, North Carolina; Los Angeles, California; and hundreds of
other small, medium, and large urban communities throughout the
nation.
Several
communities have organized and pushed to have this matter dealt with.
Mayors, Governors, and Presidents have promised to enhance their
lead abatement efforts and replace the lead-infused pipes delivering
water to homes, schools, and other facilities. But as soon as the
media focus subsides, these commitments fall by the wayside or lag in
their implementation.
In
Milwaukee, the Freshwater For Life Action Coalition (FLAC), led by
Chris Johnson, has led a years-long initiative to force the city and
state to rectify the lead disaster which is eviscerating low-income
African American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian and Pacific Islander
communities.
In
its dogged persistence to improve this situation, FLAC has met with
the Department of Public Health, the Mayor’s Office, and the
Wisconsin Attorney General, published numerous policy papers and
provided testimony to local and state bodies that can remedy this
escalating health disaster which will have a decidedly negative
impact on future generations.
At
the same time, the aforementioned ethnic groups are also the primary
victims of rampant voter suppression strategies that are pervading
their communities throughout the nation. The Republicans’ goal
here is to remove them from the voting rolls and voting participation
as their numbers are increasing at a more rapid pace since their
votes delivered the Democratic Party control of the federal
government in 2020.
Meanwhile,
other than making immediate progress in eradicating the COVID-19
pandemic and providing temporary economic support to working-class
citizens of all social, racial, political, and economic backgrounds,
Democrats have not attended to the broader problems of their base
voters who put them in power.
Their
response to the most urgent needs of their constituents outlined
above has been halfhearted at best. While their lives and political
inputs are under siege, Democrats are engaged in destructive
political infighting to determine which branch of the Democratic
Party—progressives, moderates, or centrists—will prevail.
This
is occurring while the Republicans have fallen in line behind an
increasingly authoritarian agenda in its goal of establishing an
autocracy that will allow them to rule without significant opposition
to whatever they decide to do. Their deposed Fuhrer—former
President Donald J. Trump—has maintained a policy stranglehold
on rank-and-file Republicans notwithstanding his defeat by Joe Biden
in 2020.
But
the most disturbing aspect of the Republican storm-trooper-like march
toward autocracy is their public commitment to getting rid of
democracy as we know it. By passing laws that will enable
Republican-controlled state governmental bodies to decide
unilaterally who wins and who loses an election anywhere in the
state, and thus, becoming the ultimate arbiters of victory.
To
facilitate this goal, they are revising/lessening the statutory
powers of other state and county officials, e.g., Secretaries of
State, county election boards, etc. to weaken their authority in
local, state, and national elections. Democrats have yet to advance
a comprehensive political blueprint to forestall or negate these
electoral shenanigans.
With
these barriers to voting and the counting of votes, the base voters
of the Democratic Party are being rendered superfluous even if they
somehow get to cast a vote. If nothing changes before 2022, The
Democratic Party may be rendered obsolete or existing as nothing more
than a relic of a political past like the 19th century Whig Party.
Today’s
Democratic Party needs to refocus its priorities on serving the needs
and protecting the voting rights of its New American Majority voting
base. Otherwise, its current status will dissipate further. Sadly,
the Democrats act as if they have no clue as to the gravity of their
political condition. They are on life support.
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