Outright Nazis are running as Republicans, so don't worry about the Democratic left [Opinion]

[Uncle Joe]

In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic 3rd District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”

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Now, however, Hillary Clinton’s defeat has overshadowed McGovern’s as the Democratic Party’s paradigmatic trauma. There are several lessons you can draw from her loss, some of them conflicting — some voters saw her as too corporate, others as too liberal. But it’s clear that in a polarized electorate, grass-roots fervor and a candidate’s charisma matter a lot, and an agenda that seems too modest can be as risky as one that appears overly ambitious.

After all, the economic demands that animate the left are generally quite popular. Though “Medicare For All” means different things to different people, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from 2017 found that 62 percent of Americans view it positively. A recent Rasmussen poll found 46 percent of likely voters support a federal jobs guarantee, a more radical proposal that was barely present in U.S. politics a couple of years ago.

(snip)

Democrats will not defeat Trump and his increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by promising the restoration of what came before him; the country is desperate for a vision of something better. Whether or not you share that vision, if you truly believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, you should welcome politics that inspire people to come to democracy’s rescue.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Outright-Nazis-are-running-as-Republicans-so-13099210.php