Enough with the whining about those mean Republicans

Yes, they're trying to disenfranchise voters, but we aren't going to let them.

We’re hearing an awful lot of keening lately about the imminent death of democracy, and I reached my limit with the Atlantic’s January/February cover, “January 6 was practice.” It was the fourth pitch-black Atlantic cover in two years. If Joe Hill’s motto was “Don’t mourn, organize,” the Atlantic’s (and liberalism’s generally) has become, “don’t organize, mourn.”

In my latest New Republic essay I write that this “fetish for crêpe-hanging, of which the Atlantic is the most notable but hardly the sole practitioner, is overwrought, unhelpful, and all too typical of liberalism. I’m a dedicated liberal myself, but let’s face it. We get this way from time to time.”

Trump tried to rig the last election but he failed. Now a Democrat is in the White House and Democrats hold majorities in the House and Senate. Trump’s prospects for returning to the White House are dimming fast, and the kind of crap he and his followers want to pull in 2024 won’t work provided Democrats anticipate and resist it as they have in the past. Ballot restrictions are not the tactics of an ascendant party. They’re the tactics of a weak Republican party in steep decline, and they predate Trump. The Trumpian pressures to invalidate popular-vote majorities in state legislatures are real, but these likely will fare poorly in the courts and at the ballot box. So don’t let’s lose our heads, Democrats. Let’s see a little more of that FDR-style confidence that the good guys will win. You’ll never win a fight by announcing that you’ve already lost.

My piece is getting an unfriendly reception on Twitter. Apparently there are a lot of people who take offense when you tell them life isn’t hopeless. I think they’d do better to seek effective ways to resist Trump’s depredations because, as I say in my piece, democracy’s fate lies always in democracy’s hands.

You can read the piece here.