You are a nice person. You don't have a lot of opinions. In high school, you were friends with all five Breakfast Club archetypes. You see both sides of most arguments.
On Tuesday, the rest of us are going to need you to cut that out. Because people like me, who follow politics closely and have chosen a side, we generally don't decide elections. You do.
You don't talk politics, and you follow them peripherally, if at all. Sometimes, you don't even vote. Again, on Tuesday, the rest of us are going to need you to cut that out.
I understand the polite argument. They're all crooks. Democrats and Republicans are both icky ingredients in the same turd salad. So it kind of doesn't really matter.
The rest of us need you to understand that this convenient argument is, at the moment, lazy, untrue, and utterly destructive.
Right now, Republicans have all the power. Right now, they are responsible and they are the problem. Say what you want about Democrats, and I'll only champion them as a smarter class of crooks for the most part. But we need them right now, just like we need you. This president is not a normal Republican. Eisenhower would not recognize him. Even Reagan wouldn't recognize him. His admiring remarks about dictators highlight the danger he has placed us in. His refusal to defend us against what 17 of 17 spy agencies agree is an ongoing Russian cyber-attack makes him a traitor. Hippies are not shooting up Republican country clubs. American Nazis are attacking yoga classes, gay bars, black churches and synagogues. I know it's impolite to point this out. I know it's easier to say "I see both sides". But the facts don't bear that out at the moment, and the truth is, your desire to be universally loved across the aisle can't exist at this moment in history. By refusing to choose a side, you are choosing the wrong side. You are a bystander next to a bully. Nonintervention is a form of shameful participation.
I understand you'd rather be neutral, and stay friends with everyone. I understand your desire to equate Antifa with American Nazis, but please study history before making that convenient argument. Antifa groups have never made an attempt to take over. They out Nazis, forcing them back underground. Once far-right Nazi groups go underground, Antifa follow them back into the shadows. Antifa break windows and destroy property, but should vandalism matter right now? Antifa did not run over and kill a peaceful, protesting woman in Charlottesville the summer before last, American Nazis did. Some Antifa champion Communism and Anarchy, which is stupid. But in America, it will never be deadly. We are a culture of consumers, for better or worse. We will be insane shoppers again in a few weeks, as we will every year until the next Republican economic crash (see 1929, 1987, or 2008...) renders us broke, or the next Climate Change disaster renders us unable to shop. We will never be in any real danger of becoming Communists, and we never have been.
We are, however, in danger of falling to fascism. Not because of any fault in our national character, but because it's easy for deregulated capitalism to spoil that way, especially when economic and social anxiety cause a lot of people to look for easy scapegoats. Let's look at the arguments being made to Middle America, side by side.
From the left: Your jobs were outsourced because of a combination of automation and a careless deregulation of nationless corporate mega-entities that probably never should've been allowed to exist, given how their financial gravity undermines democracy. This was perpetrated mostly by the exact powerful white men you admire and hope to become one day, even though your belief in this system ensures you will never have more than the slightest chance of ever being rich and neither will your children or grandchildren.
From the right: Your jobs are gone because Mexicans.
The first argument only has the benefit of being accurate. The second is simple, thus making it far more seductive in these troubling, complex times. And that's what all fascists ultimately become: murderous salesmen of simplicity. Worried about having to learn about all these groups and their "special rights"? Don't worry about all that. They're heading for internment camps, conversion camps, or death camps once we set them up.
You might think I'm being melodramatic, and I understand your desire to believe things aren't all that bad. But again, I ask you to study your history. We're already on the edge of this little slide to hell, and it won't take much more for us to fall. Study the headlines of last week's far-right massacres. Then compare them with the relatively tame headlines of three years ago, five years ago, seven years ago as we began to recover from the last crash. Look how far we've already fallen into chaos again.
American Nazis have scurried out into the daylight. Their repugnant leader has enabled them. A Democratic congress will at least slow the bleeding, and given how vulnerable Trump left himself with his failure to divest, he could be this one election away from an impeachment that could put us back on the road to a fairer, more progressive and inclusive economy, recognition of climate science, fair prescription prices, support of solar and wind energy, gay rights, women's rights, job training programs, fair education funding, prison reform, treating addicts based on science, sane military spending, defense against the cyber-attacks we're willing to admit the existence of, and a decline in the divisive rhetoric that fringe groups feed off of. At the very least, the election of a Democratic congress would put us one step closer to a return to normalcy, and wouldn't that be a welcome relief at this point? How tired are you, nice person, of wondering what scandalous stupidity will fall out of your president's broken mind today?
We'll only achieve a return to balance if more of you nice people get off the bench and vote correctly, for Democrats, in an attempt to restore fact-based reality. I hope you can revisit the comfort of neutrality one day. On Tuesday, the rest of us need you to not do that. On Tuesday, nice, neutral people will either act to save the republic, or you will fail and we will all go down together into that nationalist place, that darkest place in known political history. We need you. Please come help pull us back from the edge of all this madness. People like you decide elections. You have far more power than you realize, and that means you have a responsibility. Your nice neutrality is, I'm sorry to say, deadly for everyone. When the gays and Jews and Mexicans and women have all been marginalized or murdered, the fascist machine will turn on you as well. American Nazis, like all of history's monsters, don't just stop looking for new victims one day. Help us slow them Tuesday, or there may be no stopping them at all.
