By Ande Jacobson
Here we are almost a month into a new year, and it’s been eventful so far. 2024 is a consequential presidential election year with democracy on the line, something that’s fast becoming a mainstay of our political process. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the two major parties may have preferred different approaches to solving the nation’s problems, but they worked together to try to make things better for everyone. FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way were two sides of the same coin from a Democratic and a Republican president respectively. Both held that the government had a role in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and aiding in making the U.S. a more fair and equal society.
Our current president, Joe Biden, has worked with his administration and with Congress on several crucial bipartisan initiatives to push the U.S. into the fastest recovery from the pandemic related downturn of any developed nation. Economically, the country is doing very well. Inflation is way down from its recent highs. The stock market is hitting new highs. The unemployment numbers are the lowest they’ve been in two generations, so good that the Federal Reserve is talking about starting to reduce interest rates. More people in the U.S. have health coverage than ever before. Wages have increased, particularly for those in the middle and bottom of the economic spectrum. The Biden Administration has cancelled or reduced significant amounts of student debt. And the administration is working with our international allies to address hostilities in Ukraine and Israel to keep them from expanding and bring an end the current conflicts in those regions. President Biden made the strongest statement of any U.S. president in history in support of labor unions when he joined the United Auto Workers on the picket line during their strike late last year. He clearly supports the average American both in word and in deed.
The GOP by contrast is bent on ending democracy in the U.S. and punishing those they don’t like, which includes women, LGBTQ+, racial minorities, and anyone supporting democracy. They want to end public education and all semblance of a social safety net making the U.S. far more predatory than it already is. They have made the current House of Representatives the least productive in modern times, preventing needed legislation from being passed and throwing the House into chaos by ousting their own leadership for the “crime” of working with Democrats to pass critical continuing resolutions to prevent government shutdowns over the budget and the debt ceiling.
The GOP’s frontrunner is still former president Donald Trump based on two smaller caucuses or primaries that have been completed. So far, he also is under criminal indictment at both the state and federal level on a combined 91 charges. In just the last week, he lost a second defamation civil law suit for a combined total of over $88 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A third civil suit regarding fraudulent business practices is soon to be decided, very likely not in his favor, something that could greatly reduce his ability to compete in his primary industry. And then there are the criminal trials in the offing. While still in pretrial motions or on hold due to questionable challenges, they aren’t going away anytime soon. Despite all of this, he still retains voluminous support from those registered with his party. Unsurprisingly though, he doesn’t have much support outside of that, and in fact, Joe Biden won a primary where he wasn’t even on the ballot. He was a write-in winner.
I was fortunate. I grew up during a time before the current extremists took hold of a major political party. I went to public school, and history and civics were required courses. We learned our nation’s history, including the good, the bad, and the ugly, not to make us feel good, but to help us understand what came before so that we could make informed decisions as adults. We learned how our government was structured and how it operated. We also saw first-hand that when a government official, even a president, overstepped, they weren’t accepted even by their own party. When former president Nixon’s crimes came to light, his own party convinced him to resign telling him that if he didn’t, he would be both impeached and convicted and then ousted from the presidency. That was the way it was supposed to work.
The mistake made at that time was after Nixon’s resignation when his successor, President Gerald Ford, pardoned him for his crimes as president and prevented his being held accountable by the courts as a private citizen. At the time, Ford claimed that he issued that pardon to allow the country to move on more quickly. The significance of that pardon has been debated ever since, but the consensus among historians is that had it never happened, our path would likely have been very different from that point forward. The complete takeover of the GOP by the Movement Conservatives would likely not have happened. Instead, because of that takeover, we have seen our highest court shifted far out of balance to the extreme right by subsequently more extreme GOP Presidents.
As a result of the Supreme Court’s current imbalance, we’ve seen the constitutional separation of church and state successfully attacked and weakened. We’ve seen the right for women to control their own reproduction rescinded at a federal level leaving states to decide whether women are full citizens or not. That has created a significant division between the states. The states under Democratic control have largely protected that right. The states under Republican control have by contrast have enacted cruel abortion bans that not only prevent women from choosing whether to end an unwanted pregnancy or not, they prevent women from receiving critical care in cases of complications even in wanted pregnancies where their lives and future fertility are threatened. Interestingly, even in deep red states when the question of protecting choice arises, voters overwhelmingly vote down restrictions making it clear that the public wants abortion to remain safe and legal despite what GOP lawmakers enact.
It’s in our hands to make 2024 either the year that democracy triumphs and we help the U.S. and the world thrive or that democracy fails and pushes the world into a wide-scale autocratic downturn. If it’s the former, 2024 could usher in a very bright future for us all. If it’s the latter, it would take generations to repair, if ever. The choice is collectively ours to make in 2024. Learn the facts about the issues facing us this election year, and please vote responsibly. Our collective futures are in the balance.
References:
Letters from an American
Teri Kanefield’s Blog
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance/
The Status Kuo
The Hopium Chronicles
https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/trump-criminal-investigations-cases-tracker-list/
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