Letter: Don’t fall for the smears leveled at Democrats
After reading recently that some Republicans, in fear of mid-term losses, are hoping to demonize the Democrats as Communists, atheists and terrorists, in the same way they have successfully branded people of color as criminals and the poor as lazy. I am curious as to how well that will work in Dubois County where, up until 1980, most of the voters were Democrats, and nearly all elected officials were as well. All of us who are old enough will have had family and friends who were lifelong Democrats. You who are younger will have had Democratic parents and grandparents. We all know full well that Democrats are not Communists or atheists.
To understand what is happening here, we need to look at history. The Democratic Party that arose after the Civil War was the advocate of liberalism, supporting the changes needed to curb the greed that is the dark side of capitalism, and to safeguard the liberties of us all. They were the party that championed labor unions, women’s suffrage, social justice, and the concept of a level playing field.
The Republican Party, having lost the ideals of Abraham Lincoln, evolved into a conservative rampart to protect big capital, accumulated wealth, and the growing power of corporations by keeping a firm cap on individual liberty.
As is necessary in a healthy democracy, both sides prevailed some of the time and neither ever realized all of its ambitions. The Great Depression of 1929 gave the Democrats the opportunity to create Social Security, one of the most successful programs in our nation’s history, and the turmoil of the 1960s gave us Medicare and the Civil Rights Act.
The Republican Party has been trying ever since to chip away at all three of these crucial programs. They have continued to be the party of wealth, seeing it as their mission to keep government as small as possible to prevent any control over their efforts to funnel money to the wealthiest among us. Their rationale for doing this has been the assertion that this process fuels job growth and affords prosperity for all. The reality is that we now have the greatest income inequality in history, a cancer that eats at the heart of our collective well-being. Less and less of the accumulated wealth owned by the very rich fuels the larger economy. It does not lead to the creation of well-paying jobs. It is invested around the globe in managing money, creating fictitious currency, and building robots to replace workers. This situation leads to many of our current problems – young people no longer have access to long-lasting jobs that pay enough to live on. They can’t buy homes because investors, some of them foreign, have bought up housing stock in order to profit from rent. The Republican goal is to privatize everything so someone can profit from it. Even the public lands still owned by all of us are being exploited by private developers.
Obviously, the Democratic Party has been complicit in some of these actions and cannot offer a quick solution to fix them. But overall, the Democratic Party still exists to put the brakes on greed and to help all people have access to a better life. In return, Democrats are being branded as advocating Communism rather than Democratic Socialism, the hybrid economic system practiced in much of Europe. The citizens of many European countries enjoy a much higher quality of life than do many Americans. In return for the high taxes they pay, they have access to health care, child care, affordable housing and other benefits. We pay high taxes here as well, and what we get is a huge number of our citizens with no access to health care, the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth, staggering rates of homelessness, drug abuse and civil disorder. People go hungry in the richest country on earth. The Democratic Party, open to change and ideas, is better equipped for these challenges than the stagnant Republican quagmire, which has collectively worked at worsening everything in American life.
Nor are Democrats terrorists, although they have been branded as such for exercising the right of free speech to protest the cruelty of immigrant detentions and for trying to assist the victims of abusive law enforcement. Statistics show that far-right groups are responsible for the vast majority of political violence in America
Lastly, Democrats are not atheists. Many of us are Christians, observing the teachings of Jesus that tell us we need to care for each other and love our neighbors as ourselves. Many more practice Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and the numerous other faiths humans have devised to provide themselves with a moral framework. As did our founding fathers, versed in the long and bloody history of religious wars in Europe, Democrats recognize that the merger of church and state promotes intolerance and hate and is inconsistent with individual freedom. We inherited a Republic where no religion is established, all faiths are welcome and tolerated, and where free exercise of religion is a God-given right, as is the freedom to practice none. Our mission is to keep it that way.
As we approach the mid-term elections, I encourage you all to challenge the Republican majority’s party line. Do not believe the smears, the name-calling, the vicious character attacks. It is hard to learn the truth in the information age – there are so many sources of disinformation. To learn the truth, you have to employ critical thinking – you have to look behind the ads and the headlines, and you have to look at more than one source. And here in Dubois County, you can do something else – you can ask a Democrat. You all know us; you have gone to school with us, worked with us and have blended families with us. You will find that, like yourselves, we all want a political system that will work for all of us, that does not require us to close our eyes to injustice, that finds a place in the heart for all. We don’t have to agree on all the ways to achieve that, but we certainly need to be challenging all the ones that don’t.
Julie Melchior
Ferdinand
