he 2018 “Blue Wave” that dominates our national healing is, in fact, a mere ripple within the HUUUUUGE “Rainbow Tsunami” that has two years to transform the nation.
It embodies the rise of a new generation – led by women – that embraces diversity and voted that way. Its larger destiny (we hope) is to help move our bleeding nation away from a male-dominated fossil/nuclear autocracy and toward a matriarchal, green-powered social democracy.
It’s now epitomized by the first open refusal of a major Democratic candidate to concede an obviously stolen election. If Stacey Abrams helps remake our elections into an actual democracy, a whole new world is possible.
Let’s count the ways:
This Rainbow vote was powered by a ten-point jump in turnout among citizens under 30, who went more than two-thirds against Trump.
They put close to 120 women into Congress, far more than ever before.
That includes the first two Muslim and the first two Indigenous female representatives, plus (pending Arizona’s outcome) the first openly bi-sexual US senator.
Colorado has America’s first openly gay governor. Tennessee has its first female US senator, and South Dakota its first female governor (both Republicans). Pending a runoff, Mississippi could get its first black US senator since Reconstruction.
Georgia and Florida could get their first black governors (much more on that later). God-awful Trumpists Kris Kobach and Scott Walker lost governorships in Kansas and Wisconsin, as did Bruce Rauner in Illinois. California’s brutal Representative Dana Rohrabacher will leave the House.
That very Blue House can now resist Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. Imagine the Fascist Hell we’d now occupy if this had gone Red.
The substance of this Rainbow has yet to prove itself. It needs to stand and not break in the face of a psychotic mobster who has transformed the Republican Party into a personal machine of totalitarian terror. Control of one house of Congress will mean little if its progressive members don’t stand firm for peace, social justice, and the American freedoms of speech and press ... and then move forcefully to transform both the Democratic Party and the way this nation does its political and ecological business.
There is much more:
Thanks to Stacey Abrams and the Georgia/Florida electorates, we may see real change in our warped electoral system.
Voting to transcend Jim Crow and restore their citizens’ rights to some 1.5 million ex-felons, Floridians reshaped their electoral calculus.
But these two states have been wracked with exactly the kind of election fraud and theft that the media and major parties have been denying since at least Florida 2000. That year, Bev Harris and Greg Palast reported on then-governor Jeb Bush’s cynical registration roll-stripping and electronic machine-flipping that put his brother George in the White House.
Four years later, Bob Fitrakis and I reported on much, much more than was “test marketed” in Ohio to give Bush a second term.
Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry has yet to say a peep about it. For more than a decade, the major media – left, right, and center – has thoroughly trashed us as “conspiracy theorists” for exposing the obvious.
That it happened again in 2016, with Hillary Clinton saying nary a word, has brought us Donald Trump’s reign of terror.
But finally, thanks to Stacey Abrams, the realities of our porous, corrupt, thoroughly hacked system of fake elections are barreling into the mainstream. Journalists breathlessly reporting on exactly what we saw happen in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 will be lining up for Pulitzers in 2018.
It again started in Florida, with the usual tight outcomes in the races for Secretary of Agriculture (a position of real consequence in Florida) US Senate, and governor.
Andrew Gillum, Democratic candidate to become Florida’s first black governor, prematurely conceded. He should have known better.
Georgia’s Stacey Abrams made no such mistake. In election night’s most defiant moment, she became the first major Democrat to refuse to concede an obviously stolen election. She could become America’s first black female governor.
But like Florida, Georgia was defined by dirty tricks and the usual Jim Crow chaos in black and Hispanic precincts. Stacey’s white supremacist opponent, the since-resigned Secretary of State Brian Kemp, may have trashed more than 50,000 registration forms.
Abrams has refused to follow Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who won presidential elections in 2000, 2004 and 2016 but continue to ignore the stripped registration rolls and flipped vote counts that enthroned Shrub and Trump. We now have a chance, as the battle unfolds, to thoroughly unmask – and hopefully remake – a system of balloting that’s made an utter mockery of American democracy.
In some rarified places with farsighted election officials actually paying attention, 2018 highlighted new voting machines producing unhackable ballot images with reliable paper backups.
State and local officials still resist. But as promoted by election integrity activist John Brakey, over the coming years they could help end much of the tally flipping that’s helped move our governance so far to the right.
New Democrat governors and newly controlled or split state legislatures will help undo some of the gerrymandering that’s also poisoned us.
Overall the Democrats won the nation’s House votes by more than 8% and picked up some 30 seats. But gerrymandered district maps in Ohio and North Carolina (and in Florida and Georgia if Trump wins governorships there) will embody serious barriers to democracy for years to come.
On the Senate side, some 48 million votes (57%) went to the Democrats versus 34 million for the Trumpists. But Trump still picked up seats.
California, with 40 million people, has just two US senators to match 40 from some 20 states with the same total population. Sooner or later, that has to change.
Judicial appointments from Trump and a warped Senate will remain a horror show for years to come.
Referenda expanded legalized pot, raised some wages and protected transgender rights. California kept a gas tax.
But the transformative potential of the Rainbow momentum toward 2020 is epic.
The Republican Party is now Trump’s personal cult.
And the corporate Democrats continue to wage their own uncivil war against the social democrats of Bernie Sanders, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the rest of the grassroots groundswell.
The Democratic Party’s entrenched gerontocracy, with its lack of tangible accomplishments and unwillingness to fight for election integrity, has given Trump his shot at outright dictatorship.
If Nancy Pelosi (as is likely) becomes speaker again, maybe she’ll mentor a new generation while driving Trump crazy.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Party Chair Tom Perez must be replaced with people less corrupt, more progressive, and maybe even a little bit charismatic.
A new generation’s grassroots social democracy must now transform the Democratic Party as a whole.
This mid-term election may be ultimately remembered as the one where we dodged America’s deadliest dictatorial bullet.
But only if the Rainbow Tsunami brings us a whole new way of thinking, voting, doing and winning.
Original at Reader Supported News: https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/53340-2018s-rainbow-tsun...