By Edwin Cooney
Since the election of Senator Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, millions of Americans have begun to worry about their socio/political future. White Anglo-Saxon Americans worry that soon they will be a minority group rather than a secure and controlling majority voting force at the polls — and they are determined to adjust voting laws and procedures to alter the situation. Blacks deeply resent and fear ongoing inequality and they are determined to use affirmative action (or reverse discrimination) to get even. Many believe that they ought to receive government reparations as redress for their traditional secondhand social status since 1619. Women long to be hired and compensated just as men are. LGBT citizens resent and fear efforts to continuously harass them thereby dehumanizing them.
The left and right fear one another. Women fear the loss of control over their bodies. Men fear that their wives, daughters, and sisters may have to share a bathroom at school with people they regard as "sexual perverts." Even more, we fear the possibilities of becoming politically and socially socialistic or oligarchic. Christians, Jews, and other religious leaders fear agnosticism, atheism, and secular humanism. However, another entity is even more dangerous and potentially destructive. This entity is not a political ideology but a catastrophic behavior that knows no political philosophy. Let me describe it before I identify it!
(1.) In the fall of 2020, a group of Michiganders attempted to kidnap Michigan's Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer due to her strict anti-covid regulations within the Wolverine State. Nearly as disheartening, there wasn't the traditional bipartisan condemnation of the incident by outraged politically active citizens and office holders.
(2.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul was brutally attacked in the early hours of the morning on October 28th, 2022 in his San Francisco home. Aside from the traditional outrage to such an act, some right wing commentators have even suggested that Mr. Pelosi's attack was stage-managed by Democrats and perhaps by the Pelosi’s themselves. The tradition of such behavior stems at least as far back as the Third Reich.
This behavior has no political heritage. This behavior has been used by extreme ideologies of all sorts. Its proper name is “gangsterism.” It celebrates the late Al Capone. Paul Pelosi's attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, explained that it was his intention to break Speaker Pelosi's knees so that she could be seen being wheeled in and out of the House of Representatives as a punished liar in denial of the 2020 presidential "steal." Up until this time, this form of gangsterism wasn't generally accepted behavior by potential candidates for public office, but now it's too close to the edge of acceptability for this American citizen's comfort. The acceptability of gangsterism at present is closer to practice in the Republican Party than it is in the Democratic Party. However, the fear is that not even the Democratic Party is safely above employing gangsterism if it really turns out to be a workable way to successful policy and decision-making in 21st Century American electoral politics!
The most hopeful factor coming out of last Tuesday's off-year elections was that both thievery and violence were lacking.
I believe this is the most fearful time in our history since before the Civil War, but it doesn't have to be ultimately catastrophic! Perhaps the political process itself will soon rectify the apparent hold Donald Trump and his supporters have over the GOP via the possible candidacies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The ambitions of three men may flush Donald Trump away and, at the same time, minimize what can be called “GOP gangsterism.”
Back in 2005 when I began writing these columns, I quoted the 1952 Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson when he asserted: "Neither political party has a monopoly of virtue or rascality!"
I've spent most of my life believing that assertion. Right now I'm desperately clinging to it!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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