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Est. April 5, 2002
 
           
July 22, 2021 - Issue 875
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Perhaps unintentionally, the Democratic Party is failing its base constituents after they handed it thrilling victories in the 2020 elections to gain control of the Oval Office and the U.S. Senate, and after already holding a majority in the House of Representatives. In its unexpected return from the political wilderness, the Party seems to have lost its way.

While pressing issues continue to burden and assail Democratic base voters, especially its rising New American Majority of ethnic minorities, Democrats are doing little to address them. Public education continues to deteriorate; voter suppression and restrictions are being designed and moving through legislatures in 48 states; and many of these same legislatures are also passing laws to enable Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn elections.

In public education, New American Majority students are awash in lead-contaminated water in school and at home. This issue, which the Obama administration highlighted in Flint, Michigan in 2014, continued unabated during the Trump administration, and the Biden administration has been barely mentioned it so far. Neither Democratic nor Republican administrations have meaningfully addressed this problem.

Lead poisoning is taking a vicious toll on the physical and mental development of ethnic minority public school students in the cities hardest hit by the lead crisis—Flint, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; Gary and Indianapolis, Indiana; Durham, North Carolina; Los Angeles, California; and hundreds of other small, medium, and large urban communities throughout the nation.

Several communities have organized and pushed to have this matter dealt with. Mayors, Governors, and Presidents have promised to enhance their lead abatement efforts and replace the lead-infused pipes delivering water to homes, schools, and other facilities. But as soon as the media focus subsides, these commitments fall by the wayside or lag in their implementation.

In Milwaukee, the Freshwater For Life Action Coalition (FLAC), led by Chris Johnson, has led a years-long initiative to force the city and state to rectify the lead disaster which is eviscerating low-income African American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian and Pacific Islander communities.

In its dogged persistence to improve this situation, FLAC has met with the Department of Public Health, the Mayor’s Office, and the Wisconsin Attorney General, published numerous policy papers and provided testimony to local and state bodies that can remedy this escalating health disaster which will have a decidedly negative impact on future generations.

At the same time, the aforementioned ethnic groups are also the primary victims of rampant voter suppression strategies that are pervading their communities throughout the nation. The Republicans’ goal here is to remove them from the voting rolls and voting participation as their numbers are increasing at a more rapid pace since their votes delivered the Democratic Party control of the federal government in 2020.

Meanwhile, other than making immediate progress in eradicating the COVID-19 pandemic and providing temporary economic support to working-class citizens of all social, racial, political, and economic backgrounds, Democrats have not attended to the broader problems of their base voters who put them in power.

Their response to the most urgent needs of their constituents outlined above has been halfhearted at best. While their lives and political inputs are under siege, Democrats are engaged in destructive political infighting to determine which branch of the Democratic Party—progressives, moderates, or centrists—will prevail.

This is occurring while the Republicans have fallen in line behind an increasingly authoritarian agenda in its goal of establishing an autocracy that will allow them to rule without significant opposition to whatever they decide to do. Their deposed Fuhrer—former President Donald J. Trump—has maintained a policy stranglehold on rank-and-file Republicans notwithstanding his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.

But the most disturbing aspect of the Republican storm-trooper-like march toward autocracy is their public commitment to getting rid of democracy as we know it. By passing laws that will enable Republican-controlled state governmental bodies to decide unilaterally who wins and who loses an election anywhere in the state, and thus, becoming the ultimate arbiters of victory.

To facilitate this goal, they are revising/lessening the statutory powers of other state and county officials, e.g., Secretaries of State, county election boards, etc. to weaken their authority in local, state, and national elections. Democrats have yet to advance a comprehensive political blueprint to forestall or negate these electoral shenanigans.

With these barriers to voting and the counting of votes, the base voters of the Democratic Party are being rendered superfluous even if they somehow get to cast a vote. If nothing changes before 2022, The Democratic Party may be rendered obsolete or existing as nothing more than a relic of a political past like the 19th century Whig Party.

Today’s Democratic Party needs to refocus its priorities on serving the needs and protecting the voting rights of its New American Majority voting base. Otherwise, its current status will dissipate further. Sadly, the Democrats act as if they have no clue as to the gravity of their political condition. They are on life support.


BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools, and public school privatization. He has served as Professor of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as Professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Contact Dr. Farrell and BC.

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is published  Thursday
Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA
Publisher:
Peter Gamble



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