Detonators

It’s useful to deploy the word “detonator” in a political context. In that realm, a detonator is an issue that can blow to smithereens a candidate’s efforts to win public office. Often a Democratic candidate has one or two in his back pocket that he’s counting on to destroy his rival. Likewise, the Republican candidate has one or two bombs he’s planning to drop on the Democrat. The 2020 presidential election, however, will depart from the norm. Strange to say, the Democrats will have no detonators whatsoever, and the Republicans will have at least three.

Inconceivable, you say? Not at all. Here’s how it happens …. Thanks to Nancy Pelosi and the moral rot in the Republican Party, Trump is again nominated for president. The Democratic nominee, on the stump and in the presidential debates, fires these charges at Trump:

None of them detonate! They’re all true, but they’re all duds. The electorate long ago absorbed this litany of atrocities and processed it to the point of numbness. Trump simply smiles and replies, “Blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.” Laughter and applause break out all over the South, the Midwest, the Rustbelt, and wherever Trumpkins breed. This is the moment when we know how badly we’ve been bludgeoned and how intractable our stupidity is.

Of course, Trump will have his chance to level charges. Some of them, like “Socialism!”  and “Dangerously Naive,” will draw a little blood, but a skillful debater can parry these easily. Some others, though, will leave craters.

Late-Term Abortions

I dealt with this a bit in my last post. It’s a blind spot that almost all progressive Democrats share. They literally don’t see late-term abortions as an issue and seem unaware that Roe v. Wade allows them only under exceptional circumstances. Kirsten Gillibrand is their spokesperson. She says it’s a non-issue because “they make up only 1% of all abortions.” In other words, “pff, meaningless.”

If you don’t think that abortion is a form of homicide, then you’re with Kirsten. But if you do think it is, and a great many do, you have to ask, “In what other cases of homicide do we write off 1% as not worth our attention?”

If Trump cross-examines Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders on this issue, they are screwed. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will answer appropriately.

Abolishing Private Health Insurance

Most of the Democratic front-runners want Medicare for All. Fine, they should let it go at that. If asked, “Would you then abolish private health insurance,” there’s only one correct answer: “No.”

Most employed Americas under 65 get private health insurance from their employers and share a small part of the cost. They may prefer this arrangement to Medicare for All, which will not be totally free by any means. However, even though they may want to stick with their employers, their employers won’t want to stick with them! The burden on the employers is just too great. Sooner or later, they’ll hand the employees a Medicare for All pamphlet and wish them good luck.

In other words, private health insurance will pretty much abolish itself, so insisting on its abolition is absurd. But Sanders and Warren seem prepared to go to the mat on this issue. If either is nominated, Trump will put the question, and tens of millions will hear, “Like it or not, it’s going away.” Coercion makes enemies.

Reparations for Black Americans

Oppression is as natural to humans as hydrant-peeing is to dogs. If you crave superiority, justify yourself with some agreeable nonsense, find a like-minded group, merge your resources, and before you know it, you’re oppressing people! It’s a way to vent, grow more powerful, and feel superior all at the same time!

Try making a list of peoples known to have been oppressed. Begin with all the conquered ethnicities of the ancient world. Make sure the Jews are near the top. They share their prominent place with women, who, with some rare cultural exceptions, have been oppressed for all of recorded history. In feudal times, noble houses oppressed the serfs and peasants. Religious zealots fought and tortured each other. Along the Barbary Coast, for more than two centuries, Muslims captured and enslaved white Europeans traveling on the Mediterranean. Tack on the English oppression of the Irish and Scottish, the genocides perpetrated by the Turks, and the oppression by dictators of their own people.

In the New World, there’s much to add. Of course, there’s the enslavement of Africans and the oppression of Native Americans, atrocities that are comparable in cruelty and duration. When waves of European immigrants began arriving at America’s eastern shores in the 19th century, their assimilation was stiffly resisted. In the West, Hawaiians and Asians were treated cruelly well into the 20th century.

The point of this exercise is to show that no ethnicity, race, or religion can reasonably step forward and say, “We are the most aggrieved people in this country. Our historical wounds should have the greatest claim on your attention and your charity.” Just try to devise the criteria supporting such a claim, and you’ll quickly find yourself in a web of arbitrary judgments. You’ll also see that “historical wounds” means nothing, because reparations for suffering have nothing to do with the dead. You can’t put money in a dead man’s hand and say, “There, now we’re square!”

Reparations are only for people who have suffered and are living still. Fittingly, the German government has paid reparations to concentration camp survivors, and our government has done the same to living Japanese Americans who were once in internment camps. But there are no living black slaves, so reparations for black slavery makes no sense. Yet black people are still oppressed today. Might there still be a case for reparations?

Yes, but to say that present-day American oppression is race-based trivializes the subject. The oppression in our country is class-based! People who are poor or living from paycheck to paycheck are being oppressed by a majority of American oligarchs, who own the Republican Party. Several of the Democrats running for the presidency have made proposals — a wealth tax, universal health care, a Green New Deal, free preschool, free in-school meals, free state colleges, full or partial forgiveness of college loans — that are, in fact, class reparations. This is how they should frame their programs.

With the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, they have not put their case this way. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and even Sanders have endorsed bills in the House and Senate that would establish a commission to study reparations for Black Americans. Not oppressed Americans or struggling Americans, but Black Americans. This is a call to give money and care to a single American demographic in a hate-filled climate. It’s difficult to imagine a proposal that would be more divisive.

If Trump raises this issue in the 2020 election campaign, only Joe Biden would be able to defuse it. That does not give me much comfort.