Former Republican Strategist Steve Schmidt did not pull any punches as he described the path that has led to the current dysfunctional nation.
Steve Schmidt hits the nail on the head again
Many are wary of recent Republicans-turned-Democrats’ advice. I am not. I take advice from anyone who seems to make sense. Recently I interviewed Matthew Dowd, President George W. Bush’s political advisor. Bush won an election he should have won because of the narrative Dowd and other political operatives forced down our throats. Democrats remained on the defensive instead of mounting an effective offense. Matthew Dowd explained that they made it a national security campaign and disregarded the failing economy as a significant issue. Democrats failed to adjust or tag their failures.
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt renounced the Republican Party. Unlike many who became Independents, he became a Democrat. He gave a precise reason then why he did it.
“What I believe is, to the core of my being, for the rest of my life,” Steve Schmidt said. “We are in a fight now between an autocratic sensibility that’s taken root in this country in four short years. And the leaders of the country are going to matter. It is going to matter what party they come out of. In the Republican Party, a majority of them voted for this autocratic moment.”
“Look, they are in a coalition of conservatives and autocrats,” Steve said. “And that is bad for America.”
“The party that’s going to defend American liberty,” Steve said. “Is the Democratic Party. And that is why I joined it.”
To make a change, one must understand the pathology of the problem. Steve Schmidt does a great job in framing it in the embedded clip.
This is a coherent, organized ideology. And that ideology has a name. It’s called fascism. The argument that Tucker Carlson is making and that JD Vance and others are making is that American freedom that American culture in that in order for it to be saved, we have to deal with the problem of American democracy.
And the great flaw in American democracy, according to them, is that it treats everyone equally. And because it treats everyone equally, his vote, their vote, a group vote, a group of people that look alike to them, white people who have a similar worldview, their vote, their power, in their view, is lessened. And so, therefore, democracy becomes the opposite of freedom, because freedom cannot be something where they and people who are less than them are treated equally.
Schmidt points out that Democrats because of inattention to certain areas ceded areas of the country to those who would mislead their inhabitants. That neglect created fascist cancer that is proving hard to eradicate.
Schmidt ends the segment with a dire warning which most thinking Americans likely agree with now.
They are susceptible to the lie because the lie is able to take root when people lose faith. And so the choice is ahead. Where does the country go? And what the country is going to have to decide is if it wants to live in a world where fear and division is able to take root. So I’ll just tell you what happens at the end of all of this after you dehumanize everybody That’s when the killing start. And we can watch that play out in Ukraine.
I continue to be hopeful. It isn’t blind faith, but the expectation that we will supersede the irrationality as more engaged people understand the existential nature of the fight.
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I don’t share your acceptance of all those former Republicans who now see what most of us have seen in the GOP for decades. Those who served in legislatures, I see as more complicit, knowing the agenda they set years ago. I view them with the same skepticism as I do those Trump cabinet members who now come out with books revealing criminal and seditious activity in their books. They should have revealed all those things while they were under oath to the people to uphold and protect the constitution. They served a twice impeached despot and through two trials kept their secrets. “When people show you who they are, believe them.” Trust is something we earn, and all of us take hits on it even when we try to be better.
I probably could muster a little more acceptance for them, but I’m in my eighth decade and I have this memory of every right and glimpse of freedom that POC, LGBTQ, Muslims, et cetera have, has been wrenched from the grasp of racist white straight christian males only after years of struggle. Being a straight white male, I have been on the wrong side of these issues myself. I have been able to, if not free myself of racist tendances absolutely, to do my best at being a human, freeing myself of all that Christian garbage.
You are Black. My hope is that someday soon, you will be able to experience democracy. I’m White. I have never experienced democracy, but I have enjoyed the privilege of the lack of skin pigment, religious persecution, sexual orientation, and whatever “other” discrepancies the religious, capitalist, conservative arbiters of social order may find for us next.