The voters who can calm down the 'chaos'
You can call it a republic, or a constitutional republic, or a democracy – I don’t care. As long as you were among the independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians, centrists and those progressives who voted down what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) termed “too much chaos” and “too much negativity” in Republican candidates, you can call our form of self-governance whatever you want to.
And whatever threat you saw as too much chaos — candidates threatening to throw out election results they didn’t agree with; people pushing total bans on any abortions; pitches to limit social security; those fomenting lies and conspiracies; degrading electoral processes — or whatever was too much negativity for you, again I really don’t care. Through your votes on November 8 you bought us some time to try to mend our troubled nation and repair our democracy. If you are a lifelong Republican, let those in the MAGA camp call you a RINO or radical socialist, as long as you voted your principles to preserve civility and the norms of election behavior that sustains our system. Thank you for joining the rescue coalition to save our country.
For a while I lost my hope, and my voice, that there was a community of folks to build a bridge across the political divide. I know that our country’s political system still faces a lot of threats. The next two or three elections will be crucial. But after this last election I see that a coalition of independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats, centrists, Libertarians, and some progressives can propel us out of this sad state of affairs. The final vote tallies for sanity were much, much too close for comfort. This probably is not the most enduring coalition. But for now, it’ll have to do.
We need this "rescue coalition" to hang in there for a bit longer, to give us some distance from nastiness, craziness and authoritarianism threatening our nation. According to CNN, in a national exit poll nearly 50% who “somewhat disapprove” of Biden as president still voted for Democrats over voting for the MAGA movement and Trumpism. This likely reflects a Reuters/Ipsos poll in September, where 58 percent of respondents said that the MAGA movement was threatening America’s democratic foundations.
For those who don’t like Biden but voted for our system of government — thank you and welcome to the rescue coalition. We’ll have plenty of time to disagree on policy later. Maybe once sanity is restored, we’ll be able to find common ground on the contentious issues that some people use to divide us – creating jobs, immigration, abortion, gun rights, responding to the climate, to name a few.
Put another way, as columnist David Brooks said recently on the PBS NewsHour, voters who don’t like Democrats in the mid-term just told us they “preferred a party that was sort of out of touch to a party that was out of their minds.” The closeness of many races proves you couldn’t deliver the mid-term results we just saw with Democratic voters alone. It was the addition of enough independents and moderate Republicans who wouldn’t put up with more corrosion of the foundations of our constitutional order. Even while recognizing the continuing danger, let’s celebrate and build on that.
As unsatisfying as it is to some Democrats, we need to resist our most extreme tendencies for independents and moderate Republicans and Libertarians find a place to join us during these trying times. Adam Frisch, who ran an extremely close race against MAGA Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, caught what is at stake. “I heard time and time again on the campaign trail, America is tired of the circus, tired of the lack of respect for our institutions and our democracy, and tired of the lack of civility in our discourse,” Mr. Frisch recently said.
To give us the time and distance to define who we are — whatever part of the rescue coalition you call home — we all need to turn down the temperature, recognizing decency in the other, and work harder at building bridges with one another.
Dr. Marc Miller is the board chair of FairVote Washington, http://fairvotewa.org. He lives on Bainbridge Island.
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: The range of voters who can unite to calm down the 'chaos'
