The Searchlight Institute, founded by John Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson and profiled lavishly by the New York Times this week, pledges to devote its ten million dollar annual budget to the cause of nailing the Democratic Party to the political center. “The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” Jentleson told the Times. One problem for this line of thinking, Tope Folarin observes in his contribution to Issue Fifteen, is that Donald Trump does not believe in the concept of indefensible positions, and his electoral fortunes have not suffered accordingly.
Perhaps even the opposite, Folarin argues: Trump’s refusal to accommodate himself to supposedly immutable political realities helps supply his movement with a dynamic force conspicuously absent on the other side of the aisle. Rather than shifting towards the right’s policy positions, Folarin insists, Trump’s opponents should cultivate an analogous kind of faith in their own political mission — and act as if they really believe in what they’re fighting for. Read his Dispatch online today.
God-Like Confidence | Donald Trump’s Cult of Faith
TOPE FOLARIN
Members of today’s Democratic Party have attempted to claim the mantle of struggles for civil and labor rights, but without the conviction displayed by those movements’ leaders. Instead, our politicians seem perpetually ready to jettison their values — and the most vulnerable members of their coalition — at the first sign of trouble.
At the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, we’ll be selling discounted issues and merch. Be sure to stop by Table 607, right outside Borough Hall, any time from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Mr. Folarin's logic seems a bit inside out from where I'm sitting- although Democrats could gain a great deal from calling a spade a damn shovel when they trip over it in a graveyard at midnight, (i.e. hit a controversy head on instead of hiding behind carefully crafted legalese ) they are far from the most outstanding examples of pols who toss their principles at the first sight of a storm cloud. The Jim Jones nature of the Trump electorate has been obvious for years, and although Democrats might gain a point or two from being able to throw a bit of Scripture at them, (Deuteronomy 18:22, 1st Kings 20-23 among the more applicable) midterms will swing on how many of these people are willing to lose jobs, miss meals, and generally have their faces rubbed in the mud for their perfect leader. As someone recently pointed out, " If you vote for Democrats, some of them will turn out to be bums...If you vote for the GOP, all of them are." The weapons are there; it's just a matter of picking them up, people...