Democracy Diary: Once again, an African American woman leads the way

Michael Moore. And a worry.

Yesterday I learned who Cheryl Johnson is.

I am grateful for her service.

And it’s so appropriate: an African American woman stands in the breach and defends democracy and decency against a pack of white supremacist white men and their supporters and wanna-bes who are bent on tearing down even the mild and imperfect form of representative democracy We the People have been able to wrest from them so far.

This year I had a goal to learn more about the history of the civil rights movement, especially the role of African American women. I figured, if anyone knows how to fight for democracy in the face of Christian nationalism and fascism, it’s African American women.

I learned about people I had shamefully never heard of before: Ella Baker. Pauli Murray. Constance Baker Motley. I learned more about Rosa Parks, how the bus boycott fit into her activism before that and the lifelong activism that followed, despite what it cost her and her family.

I was proud to doorknock for Deirdre DeJear, who pledged to fight for public money in public schools and full human rights for women.

***

I recently discovered Michael Moore’s podcast, The Rumble. He has a substack newsletter too, all about how to win blue victories in states that are currently red. So I’ve been listening for ideas.

Bowling for Columbine was so illogical and incoherent that I stopped trusting him and didn’t listen for a long time. But anyone can have a bad movie. And there are three things he’s been very, very right about.

I once went to hear Moore speak, along with my lovely cousin Angela, when I lived in Cambridge. Moore called out the Dems for abandoning working people, and warned that if the Dems didn’t start delivering for them again, the working class would abandon them for the right. This was about 1996.

Because it was Cambridge, some white guy with a big old beard in the back shouted out, “Yeah, yeah, Noam Chomsky wrote all about this years ago. Read Chomsky!”

And Moore shouted right back, pointing at him, “That right there! That is why the Dems are losing the working class and we’re going to see a hard swing to the right.” As a working class kid lost and bewildered and often hugely irritated in the Ivy League, I loved Moore for that.

Though we could parse the nuances of whether it’s really the white working class supporting MAGA, or the white middle class and college educated women, skillfully played by Russian fourth generation warfare — Moore wasn’t wrong.

He said Trump would win in 2016 when no one else thought so. And he said there wouldn’t be a red wave in 2022 when the mainstream media was unanimous in believing the R push polls. So I’m listening again.

***

I jokingly say that one of the things I resent most about the GQP (isn’t that a delicious way to signify them, btw? B/c that’s what they are now) is that they’ve just ruined conspiracy theories for the rest of us.

Which is a shame, because I have a few of my own. I highly doubt that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. I’m totally clear that the Democrats don’t really have the best interests of me and my family and women and working class people and people of color at heart, they’re just better than the alternative (okay, I guess that’s not really a conspiracy theory. I’m just saying that I don’t really believe in any mainstream dogma).

And right now, I’m a little worried about tomorrow. I hope I’m wrong. But the Republicans are many things: immoral, traitors, insurrectionists, betrayers of Christianity, white supremacist haters of women and people of color — but they have also been highly effective in recent years.

The pundit class and the Twitterverse today are filled with the idea that the R’s are “in disarray” and that what’s happening in the House is a “clown show.”

But. The metal detectors were removed from the Chamber, even though, since there’s no Speaker, it’s not clear who had the authority to order that.

Tomorrow is January 6. The traitors have not been held accountable — as Moore points out, 121 of them are about to be reseated (118 in the House, 3 in the Senate). What if they’ve purposely been delaying until tomorrow for some nefarious purpose? I don’t know what the end game would be. But these are people who hate America, and have demonstrated they have no loyalty to the Constitution or anything else besides holding power.

So it concerns me.

Hopefully I’m wrong.