Every so often, indirectly and
sometimes directly, I mention my parents in my writing. My father is 85 and my
mother is 83. They're both at the age where the body starts to fail them and
their mental capacities are not what they once were but they'll still very
sharp on certain subjects, to the point I would trust their opinions on today's
politics infinitely more than 90 to 95 percent of the people on sites like this
one.
If this offends the sensibilities of
the readers on this site or elsewhere, I'm used to that and have an incredibly
thick hide. The truth is, even as a teenager I always trusted the opinions of
people much older than me and got along with them far better than people my own
age. I was always raised to respect my
elders and betters out of basic courtesy and to hear people out even if I
disagreed with them, styles have essentially expired because this generation
thinks it knows everything because it can use an iPhone and their parents
can't.
Just to be clear my parents do have iPhones and will use them to look things
up online but its basically to refresh their often failing memories. I'll use
it for the same purposes which is basically research. Neither of us are using
it as a replacement for education and all kinds of information and we certainly
don't believe that just because you see something on YouTube its gospel. Indeed
my parents have no idea how to use Twitter or TikTok or Instagram and I have
assured them they are the lucky ones on this planet, not the ones who refresh
it every minute of every day.
There are some areas in which I
disagree with my parents as well as somewhere they are well behind me in
certain areas of culture but at the end of the day I still trust them more than
the people on the Internet. Like Farmer's said, they know a thing or two
because they've seen a thing or two. And that essentially applies to politics
today.
Now I should mention that my parents,
like me, are lifelong Democrats. We've occasionally voted for Republicans in
some elections – my father refused to vote for Carter in 1980 because of his
disgust at handling the hostage crisis, for example – but we're loyal to the
party. Both of them were part of
left-wing environments – my father was a law professor; my mother was raised in a household where her
parents were actually Communists at one point – but they've always been fine
with the Democratic Party as it is. Neither is thrilled with the direction the
Republicans have taken under Trump and they are, like so many people concerned
about the country at large in recent years, but they've never really gone in to
the complete left-wing agenda that is held by Bernie Sanders and AOC the way
that so many other progressives these days they have. They may disagree with me
about how much of a problem they are to the Democratic Party as a whole – we've
had some lively debates on the subject – but they are based in reality in a way
I'm really not convinced so many of the people who call themselves progressives
are either in journals or in film.
My father, because he is a historian,
has often tried to look at so much of this in terms he can understand. For a
while when I referred to these people as 'progressives' he couldn't understand
why this was bad because of the historical context. To him "Progressive'
refers to the Progressive Era between the 1890s and 1914 when both the
Democratic and Republican party had a progressive wing and where left-wing
parties such as the Populist and TR's Progressive Party held sway with the
electorate. In his mind the Progressives had been responsible for amendments
leading to the direct election of Senators, the Income Tax and giving women the
right to vote as well as the Presidencies of TR and Woodrow Wilson.
When I told him that, in fact, AOC and
the Justice Democrats were more in line with the Socialist Party that Eugene
Debs led during that period then Progressives as he knew it he instantly saw
what I was driving at and agreed with me almost immediately that in fact Bernie
has more in common with Norman Thomas than Bob LaFollette. We've been able to
talk on that level ever since.
When I visited them last week and the
discussion turned to the midterms as well as an update on my work for the
Peltola campaign as always he had encouraging words. He told me he hadn't
caught up with my blog in recent weeks and I assured him it was perfectly fine;
at this point I'm so prolific in my writing if he ever tried to make hard
copies of it (which he will occasionally make printouts of because like me he
wants a physical record of things) he'd drown in paper. We both chuckled at
that.
When we talked about whether I should
share some of my writing with family friends, some of whom are more left-wing
then them, he warned me that my criticisms of the left, despite being in good
faith, might bother them. I joked that in many ways I'm more progressive then
many actual progressives. I agree with 90 percent of what the left stands for
and what they write about on this blog and because of that I want it to become
a reality. Where I differ is how.
My father and I are in agreement that
elections are referendums on how the country wants to go and both of us do
agree with Churchill's definition of
democracy. I told him what I've send in this blog numerous times. If Americans
truly wanted the agenda of the Justice Democrats or DSA in the aftermath of
Trump's election, they have had five election cycles to vote for candidates to
back it and a party that wants it. And given the results of those candidates in
the last five cycles (which I've repeated before ad infinitum and won't do so
here) it is very clear that the electorate doesn't want what the progressives
are selling. And since the people have made their opinion clear I believe it is
incumbent on the Democratic Party to go to the center rather then more to the
left.
My father couldn't disagree with me on
that. Because whenever I have presented him with the facts and figures and
statistics, he accepts that as reality. To be clear he also follows every
Supreme Court decision, every act of legislation that Congress does and watches
the news. He is very informed. He doesn't like what the conservatives
have done to America in the 21st century but he can't argue that
Americans would prefer the progressive
agenda because there's no evidence say they do besides the occasional poll. He reads
the same magazines and papers I do and like me he has empathy and sympathy for
what the left wants. But he knows the voters have a very specific way of
telling you what they want and he's not going to disagree with them because AOC
or Mamdani have millions of followers on TikTok.
As for my mother, well, she's always
been more active in politics then me. In 2023 she wrote hundreds of postcards
for elections in the Virginia Statehouse which ended up working out rather well
for them. Now earlier this year, she agreed to write 100 postcards to voters in
Michigan urging them to vote in the next election.
I've actually got one in front of me
right now:
Thank you for being a voter! When will
you vote in the Tuesday November 3rd election? Please plan ahead!
Thank you!
Again my mother's 83. Her hands
are shaky. Her coordination's not great. In a few cases she made mistakes and
she actually bought white out to erase some of her errors. And because
my parents are going on a trip to Europe this week, she was going to miss the
deadline to mail them out, which is tomorrow.
So when I saw my parents this Thursday
she asked me and my father to apply stamps to the 89 postcards she'd written
and asked me to mail them tomorrow. I agreed to both without a thought. So we
spent twenty minutes doing just that.
To be clear my 83 year old mother
handwrote 89 postcards urging people in Michigan to vote in the next election.
And because she thought the speech was a little dry, she ended each postcard
with 'Thank you!" because she knows courtesy matters.
Now she has no illusions this will
make much of a difference in the Michigan's elections for Senate or Governor
this cycle in the grand scheme of things. I don't know what she thinks of Abdul
El-Sayid or some of the more far left Michigan candidates running for Congress.
The point is she was concerned about America and she wanted to do something,
however small, to help in a way that might be substantial. It does kind of
raise the bar a bit for the rest of us.
Tomorrow morning I will do right by my
parents and drop the postcards that my mother has painstakingly written and
that we all stamped in the mail and send them on their way to Michigan. Then
that evening I will do my most recent phone banking for Alaska – Peltola for
Senate, JKT for Governor, Bill Hill for Congress. It will represent the peak
level of the Morris household in the fight for democracy in America which will
conclude on election day when we cast our votes for Tom Suozzi a Democrats in
one of the swing districts in play.
Will this things lead to the Democrats
taking back Congress? We'll see. Will it make America a better place? Hard to
know. But that's not the point. The point is the work, the point is that we
tried to do something of substance, even if we failed and even if we never know
we made a difference.
My family knows that you don't solve
the problems facing the country by getting followers or creating content. You
do it by doing the long, messy, frequently unsatisfying work of trying in small
and unnoticeable ways to make America better. You knock on doors and have them
slammed in your face. You make phone calls and get cursed out. You write
postcards until your hand hurts and then you write some more. And you do all of
it knowing that are no guarantees, no certainties. But you keep doing it
because that's the point of democracy.
I'll actually add a challenge. Until someone
on this site or a left-wing journal comes up with a better one, until they come
up with a way to make the majority of Americans accept it, until they come up
with a way to put in place on day one and not miss a beat when they dispose of
this one, then I'm going to keep doing my part for American democracy. It is
the worst form of government, except for all the others. So until you guys come
up with that alternative, me and my family and millions of other Americans will
keep doing our part for this one. If you call us suckers and sheep, well, we've
been called worse by better.
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