Enough Russia: after Mueller, it's time for Democrats to focus on America | Mudde case | Opinion



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FFinally, the moment has arrived. After almost two years of feverish speculation about what she might discover, the investigation by Robert Mueller's special advocate ends. From what we know up to now, the Mueller report is good news for the Republican Party in general and for Donald Trump in particular. But it is also good news for the country. The special council found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The Russian interference was obvious, but it was done without high treason.

Clearly, in today's polarized world, the Mueller report is bad news for the Democratic Party. But it's mostly a self-inflicted injury. The Mueller Inquiry should never have been at the heart of its political agenda, nor treated as a show to score political points.

The Mueller Inquiry has never been particularly interested in the general population and has increasingly viewed it as further evidence of everything that would be wrong with Washington, that is, elites obsessed with the navel and obsessed with themselves, who are more anxious to fight than to help the country.

For the Democrats, the only advantage of the Mueller report is that it is completed instead of next year, when the elections will be held soon. This gives the Democratic Party about a year and a half to finally give priority to issues of concern to the electorate. And I'm not even sure it will be enough time. Because, as Democrats continue to be obsessed with Trump's historically low approval rating and revel in it, and to celebrate the "blue wave" of mid-term elections, he is always ready to be re-elected.

The reason is simple: he stood up to the groups that matter. The Christian Right is delusional in front of the Supreme Court justices whom Trump has named, as well as for the many lower courts which he discreetly fills with right-wing judges. And as long as it is likely that more judicial vacancies will open in the next term, the Gospel right will be mbadively re-enacted in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans who vote with a paperback look forward to tax reform and the rise of the US economy. shallow and unsustainable that growth could be. And major donors love Trump's frontal attack on (already weak) environmental and financial regulations, the dismantling of state regulatory and surveillance agencies, and his symbolic actions against Israel.

While the Wall remains a critical topic for right-wing experts, such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, Trump can easily convince his core base that he is striving and that he it only takes him a second term to finally break the "deep state". Moreover, its base has few expectations of politicians in general and is the most polarized part of the electorate. So she has nowhere to go and will turn around, fed by a nostalgia frenzy Fox News and the conservative radio.

Democrats will not win by engaging in "moderate Republicans" or the white nativist working clbad. Nor will they see their fortunes improve if they go exclusively to the liberal (coastal) base.

If the Democrats want to win, they must avoid repeating the mistakes of the 2016 Clinton campaign, that is, to reduce their program to a single Donald Trump criticism. The only way to win in 2020 is to lead a positive campaign in which Trump, and more broadly the radicalized Republican Party, only appears in the background. It is encouraging that a growing number of renowned Democrats have already highlighted this point, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg. And, to his credit, Bernie Sanders has said that since the beginning. In other words, the party has to go back to simple problems, such as economic redistribution, social justice and welfare provisions. Democrats should tackle the dominant Republican problems and reframe them: instead of focusing on economic growth, they should problematize extreme economic equality. They should refocus the issue of abortion on the lack of choice that already exists in many parts of the country and turn the debate on the second amendment into a battle for gun control. All of these issues have important clbad and racial dimensions that need to be explicitly discussed in the context of a larger discussion – rather than isolating the "identity issues" from other discussions. fundamental policies.

Finally, Democrats should insist on the importance of all elections (not just the presidential elections) and the urgency of the political struggle. It is this sense of urgency that has led to the mbad mobilization of the Tea Party – still misinterpreted by many liberals – as a mere creation of AstroTurf – and which has consolidated the vast rightwing coalition around the improbable Republican candidate Donald Trump. The urgency is there to see everything.

Climate change and environmental degradation are occurring at a dizzying pace, making many irreversible developments decades or even years away. The sustained attack against legal abortion is entering its final phase – to name just one example among so many others, the recent bill on heart rate in Georgia – and Roe v Wade could be overthrown or rendered useless in the coming years.

The war on drugs has destroyed generations of African-American men, while opioids continue to destroy communities of all races across the country. And the extreme level of economic inequality as well as the consolidation of financial institutions after the crisis make inevitable the next economic crisis if we do not act quickly. The surest way for Democrats to defeat Trump is to come up with solutions to these problems. The clock is turning. They have no time to lose.

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