John, if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of this week looking at what’s happening in Congress with equal parts awe and horror. Never before in American history has a Speaker of the House been ousted like this—and this is just the latest in a cascade of failures by the national Republican party which make it clear that their party has been taken hostage by a right flank more interested in burning down the government than running it.
To make matters worse, the dysfunction we’re seeing in the national Republican Party is a microcosm of what we’ve seen right here at home, in North Carolina. Oh, our statewide Republicans may not have ousted a sitting Speaker of the House, but to be honest, watching the back-and-forth between the different sides of the GOP in Congress over the last few weeks felt eerily like what I’ve seen of the “negotiation” over the budget between the NC House and the NC Senate.
But here’s the most baffling part of all this. This is the part that Democrats will spend so much of our time hand-wringing over, as if we haven’t spent enough time on that already. There will be so many op-eds written about this that it would take a lifetime to read them all, because even though we all know it’s going to happen, most of us just don’t understand it—or maybe refuse to.
Ready?
Next year, lots of people will see that dysfunction and vote for the Republican Party anyway. In fact, a pretty solid chunk of our neighbors will point to it as the reason why they’re voting for Republicans.
And we won’t win until we understand why.
It seems astounding that people would actually vote for a party intent on burning everything around them down, whose goal is to leave the government so completely hollowed-out that it can hardly even perform its most basic functions (if that). But you want to know something else, John?
A lot of our neighbors feel like the current government has left them behind. Whether you believe they’re justified in their reasoning or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s their perception, and trying to tell them that “no, actually, the economy’s great! Just… you know… over in Charlotte” hasn’t worked yet. It’s not so different from what our friend John Maynard Keynes said way back in 1919 on the heels of WWI. When people don’t see any party in government working for them, when they feel cornered and abandoned and hopeless, then they’re liable to start voting for anyone who seems to empathize with their anger in some way, even if that person is extreme. Even if that person is an arsonist.
The people who see what Matt Gaetz did in Congress earlier this week and think, “Yes! That’s the party for me!” mostly aren’t saying that because they have a deep knowledge of Gaetz’s fiscal agenda and agree with it on principle. They’re saying that because they’re angry with the way the government has abandoned them, and this week, they saw someone who shares their anger.
If we want to save our government—if we want to save our state—if we want to save our Republic, it’s not enough to point out the chaos and madness happening in Raleigh and Washington. We have to understand that these people were elected to cause chaos, we have to understand why there are people voting for it, and we have to present those people a different vision for the future.
We have to understand why dysfunction has become a winning strategy for the extremists.
I’m running for State Treasurer because I decided to stake my name on the ideas that have motivated my political career. I’m running for State Treasurer because I think—I hope—that if we have a statewide candidate who’s actually talking about the ways that government can be a force for good in our communities and what we can become when we invest in our people, then maybe enough of our neighbors will start to hope again. Then maybe they’ll realize there’s a better way out than burning everything down.
But inherently, John, the people we’re talking about are living on the margins. They’re in places that have been left behind. That have lacked support and investment. If it were easy to reach these people, everyone would be doing it, but as a great Democrat once said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
The State Treasurer’s office may not be the Moon, but no one ever said that winning was easy, and it’s going to take all of us to get there, too.
So, John, that’s why I’m asking if I can count on you to make a contribution to my campaign today. Because reaching out to corners of our state that haven’t heard from us in decades is going to be hard. It’s going to take a lot of time, and energy, and yes, money. But you know what? It’s work that will matter. It will be worth it. And with your support, I know we can get there.
