Letter to the Editor "The Crisis We Face"

 This is the text of a letter I sent to the editor of my local newspaper, the Everett Herald, of Everett Washington.

Today our country faces a political crisis more extreme than any it has faced since the Civil War over a century and a half ago. An anti-democratic movement has taken over the Republican Party. That movement’s leaders seek to destroy the rule of law so that they can impose their will on the country without legal obstacles in their way. They care only for power so they can accomplish that goal. Facts mean nothing to them or to their followers. They seek to impose their simplistic, bigoted views of gender identity and abortion on all Americans. They want to roll back the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement including in particular the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They want to repeal Medicare and Social Security, two federal insurance programs we all pay for and that make life better than it otherwise would be for millions of Americans, myself included. Their policies would take this country back to the nineteenth century world of the robber barons and Jim Crow segregation. Every American who values liberty, the US Constitution, and the rule of law should be greatly alarmed at the direction our politics are taking. Some of us are, but the Democratic Party is acting as though it were facing merely another ordinary election against the Republican Party the way it used to be. That is not what it is facing. It is facing a radicalized, anti-democratic, authoritarian, populist movement that threatens to overturn all of the core values this country has always said it holds. Unless the freedom-loving opposition to that movement gets more active and energized than it is, the political future of the United States is bleak indeed.