The time to reBLUEvinate is now.
I lived in Europe during the Bush years. Time and again, I had to differentiate myself from their perceptions of what an American was. I wasn’t dumb, brash, arrogant, and I didn’t expect the world to revolve around me. I just watched the president and the vice president launch an ambush on a world leader and declare for the world to see that view of us is not only warranted, but that’s being nice. Trump openly declared the USA no longer is the leader of the free world, undoing decades of established world order. Trump announced MAGA is full mask-off authoritarian, and it can no longer be questioned.
Nixon got the ball rolling with his infamous “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” attempt. As we know from Watergate, Nixon tried to cheat, but it, perhaps, could have ended there. Nixon could have faced accountability for his actions but was instead pardoned by Ford. I think that moment wherein we announced accountability was optional was the turning point. From there, the seeds of things like Fox News were born, and the ball was accelerated.
Reagan’s acceleration is hard to sum up succinctly. The devastation of Reaganomics is still being felt today as the House GOP just passed a bill that gives the billionaires even more tax cuts at the expense of services for the everyperson and is projected to add between 3 and 4.5 trillion to the deficit at a time when people struggle to afford housing, groceries, and healthcare. Trickle-down has been demonstrated to not work again and again, but somehow, we have three people (Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerburg) with a combined wealth more than the bottom 50% of the country.
Reagan’s infamous and terrible ‘War on Drugs’ can be summed up by his own domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” Hey, at least Reagan was tough on the Soviets, yeah?
Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich pushed the acceleration further by making politics increasingly incendiary to the point of aggressively lying in their attacks against the opposition (read, Democrats). By the Mid-Nineties, hostile attack politics were here to stay. Gingrich, fun fact, was also having an extramarital affair while he was going after President Clinton. Party of Family Values indeed. The success of the GOP’s attack politics gave rise to people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and others who would be a mouthpiece that divorced people from reality even further.
Bush lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq, saying later Saddam Hussein “had the capacity” when pressed by journalists and when asked about the link between Iraq and 9/11, Bush said, “Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”
Now, up until this point, despite huge glaring problems that compounded upon each other it can be easily argued The USA was committed to its allies, treaties, and place in the world. Even Bush’s “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” line was never followed by spiteful policy decisions and petty public arguments like we just saw today. The Oval Office Ambush even had Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend ask why President Zelenskyy wasn’t in a suit. Still, Elon Musk can roam around in casual clothes, hat included, and even bring in his kid to shush Trump, and it’s fine. Furthermore, President Zelenskyy has dressed like this since his country was invaded, so the cheapness of it all was even more tragic to see, almost making you forget the backdrop of this was The USA arm-twisting Ukraine into a minerals-for-arms deal, which wasn’t signed because of this embarrassment.
I’ve struggled with the question, “What meaning does/did my service have?” for some time. Seeing Trump align The USA with Russia so brazenly – the invading and occupying force, after Trump abandoned the Kurds in his first term and threatened to turn Gaza into some gaudy tourist trap gives me an answer: To Help Resist. All this acceleration of division, of hostility, away from any principles we even pretended to have has to be fought, and anyone who says both sides are the same is lying to your face (or is willfully ignorant).
reBLUEvinate is something I just came up with, but I don’t think it’s hard to understand. The lines in the sand couldn’t be any more clear. You’re MAGA, or you’re on the side of The Rule of Law, The Constitution, Our Allies, Objective Reality, and basic human emotions like empathy and compassion. We’re all in this together, and isolating ourselves is not the answer to how we’re going to solve our problems. The road ahead was always long, but it just got longer and much more difficult.
So, how can you help reBLUEvinate? If you have that feeling in your gut that says this is wrong, but you haven’t expressed it yet? Now’s a good time to start. Be intolerant of the things we used to just keep quiet about because we’ve let it go too far. What’s happening now is not normal; it’s not right, and it’s ok to not only be angry about it but act. Anger is an actionable emotion driven from a desire to protect. We aren’t just protecting an ideal of ‘America’ as a vague concept. Trump’s tariffs, tax cuts, government purging, and authoritarian alignments are going to have real-world impacts. Trump is going to hurt you – more than he has already.
You are not alone. ‘Woke’ and ‘DEI’ are not the causes of whatever happens to be in the headlines right now. First, let’s address ‘Woke.’ Woke has been around since the 1930s in Black communities as a way to describe being awake or aware of racial and social injustice, with the Blues musician Lead Belly using ‘stay woke’ as lyrics in 1938. It’s a term that’s been around and has resurfaced over time, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. DEI can be seen as just an offshoot of Woke in terms of social and racial (in)justice.
reBLUEvinate. Now is the time for outward expressions and actions of support of one another in the face of this onslaught. Whether we’re protesting, checking in with each other, bringing someone back to objective reality, or just being kind in this age of needless cruelty – you are not powerless. The stripping of Human Rights (Women’s, LGBTQ+, Immigrants, etc) is not a foregone conclusion. You are not only just a cog in a machine transferring wealth endlessly upwards. The United States of America is not just for this generation’s brown shirts, the red hats. The USA is not some island that has turned its back on the world despite the Russian Asset-In-Chief. Now is the time to show it.
reBLUEvinate.