I was listening to the news and again heard analysts with a Progressive leaning say “Democrats have to learn to fight like Republicans”. There is a major flaw in this premise. Frist the Democratic Party is a big tent, under it are constituencies that often have conflicting interests. White Women and Black Women don’t always have the same interests. Different minority groups, i.e. Black, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQ and all the subgroupings, do not always have the same interests. Neither of these groups has the economic, social, and political power to consistently control how the country is governed and develops culturally.
The Republican Party is largely driven by Religious Conservative White Males who control the underlying economic forces of the country and have the financial resources to buy the political influence that they need at all times, even when it is useful to them to appropriate various elements of cultures they wish to restrict if it drives profitability.
Recently it hit me. When Progressives say ‘Democrats need to be more like Republicans’, that is tantamount to asking “Why don’t Jedi act more like Stiths? Why don’t Jedi use more of the Dark Side of the Force?” This was a startling clarifying realization for me because to the amazing cultural impact and insights that ‘Star Wars’ has had on our society and how it has subtly interpreted the history of human governance and greed for absolute power.
Let’s be completely honest here. Today’s Republicans were once associated with the Democratic Party as a racist subgroup called ‘Dixiecrats. They originated ‘Jim Crow Laws’ after Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull Federal troops, protecting freed slaves, out of the southern states in 1877, about 12 years after they arrived in Galveston Texas in 1865. That action took place about 18 months after the Emancipation Proclamation went into affect..
Let there be no misunderstanding, the marginalization of White males who didn’t own property, women, Aboriginal Peoples, African, Asian, and other immigrants has always been at the foundation of American public policy. So racism and sexism are human characteristics that have always been a part of the American experiment in democracy. However, along the way White woman gained the right to vote, But for years POC were terrorized for their efforts to gain access to the vote in southern states, but also met resistance in northern states during the ‘Great Migration’ when POC fled the south for work in the north.
Because White males in the north were threaten by the competition in the labor force many turned a blind eye to what was going on in the south and not grasping why minorities were migrating form the south for work and what they perceived were safer living conditions. In addition to this White males and females found if possible to accept racial hatred or indifference within the context of their religious practices, accepting that god had somehow ordained this acceptable despite the ’10 Commandments’.
The basic point of the analogy here is simple, Eurocentric Whites have always found comfort and use in the ‘Dark Side of the force’.. Minorites seeking to gain favor with Whites have also found the ‘Dark Side of the force’ could provide a measure of acceptability from Whites if they proved themselves to be useful to the overall efforts of subjugation non-Whites. It was also easier to obtain compliance if it was framed in a religious context. This method proved successful world wide as almost all aboriginal peoples and cultures succumbed to one of the Abrahamic religions.
So the basic premise here is that the Big Tent Democratic Party should become more like the White Nationalist racially hateful Republican MAGA base. But if we have learned nothing else from the ‘Star Wars Saga’ we know that the axiom of Master Yoda is true, once you start down the path of the ‘Dark Side’, you inevitably fall to the ‘Dark Side’.
The answer is not to do that, The answer is this, those of us who know we are targeted and are potential targets of White Nationalist racial subjugation must become involved and remain involved in fighting off these efforts. We have known this since 1863. We were told that SCOTUS was where we would find challenges, Tavis Smiley told us this before he lost his focus in the early days of the Obama campaign for President. You fight the ‘Dark Side’ by standing for your own interests, our collective interests, and not expecting any one else to do that for us.
How did we end up in this place today? Too many of us chose to believe that others would look out for us. What they did was look out to catch us not looking out for ourselves and they moved on our lack of focus and attention. Democrats don’t need to be more like Republicans, voters need to be more like what we are, ‘We The People’, not the corporations, not the top 1%, but the larger majority voice, We need to be willing to hold those accountable who would work to subjugate and marginalize us.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/04/why-do-jedi-turn-to-the-dark-side.html
A Reasonable Point of View 