The Long Wait

Up at 5:30 am. Calling Ohio from 6 to noon. Parent-Teacher conferences all afternoon. Piano lessons. Somehow I managed to cast a ballot in between. And now that the polls are closing out east, there is the long wait out here.

Should I be circumspect? Should I be hopeful? (Tried that. Didn’t work.) Should I be realistic? Cynical?

Even if all of my election-day wishes came true, we would still be strapped with a center-right Congress and White House whose members — nearly all of them — are bought and paid for by private wealth, by oikonomia, and therefore do not and cannot represent the wealth we hold in common, the commonwealth, res publica. And, so, no matter what happens, we will not win.

And, yet, there is a real choice here. The Republican Party openly, lustily, defiantly opposes its very namesake. It is militantly against res publica, against the Republic, and so cannot knowingly win the vote of anyone who considers him or herself a patriot.

The Democrats, by contrast, most of them, still believe that the wealth we hold in common should play a leading role in our life together. They are the “mudsill” against the complete destruction of public life in America. And so we vote for them.

But they too, most of them, are not sufficiently militant defenders of republican values and institutions. They want to hedge their bets. They don’t want to burn the bridges built for them by their corporate donors. And, rightfully, they believe that we will vote for them because the alternative is unthinkable.

Win or lose, however, tomorrow, the 7th of November, I would like to challenge the readers of this blog to occupy the Democratic Party in much the same way as the Tea Partiers have occupied the Republican. Storm this institution with the militant republican creed: res publica. The wealth we hold in common.

More later. It’s already late. 8 pm on the East Coast.

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