One of the brightest spots in the 2016 election came many months ago, when Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin won the Democratic primary to succeed Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who will soon join the Senate. Raskin had a reputation as a progressive hero coming into his race, but it’s not just because he votes the right way or believes in the right things. It’s because he has the right attitude about how Democrats need to fight, and hot DAMN did he ever put that on display at a rally Wednesday night in the D.C. suburbs:
“They can make a white supremacist the chief strategist for the White House,” he said, invoking Steve Bannon. “They can make an anti-public school activist [Betsy DeVos] the secretary of education. They can make Jeff Sessions the attorney general of the United States of America, but my friends, we are still here.”
“They can put Goldman Sachs back in charge of the Treasure Department, but we are still here. They can try to dismantle the EPA, but we are still here. They can put a fox in charge of every hen house—they can put the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin in charge of Gotham City—but we are still here, and we’re not going anywhere.” [...]
Raskin had a bit more to say about Bannon. “We’re not letting any prepped-out Harvard Business School neo-Nazi strategize us into becoming Germany 1933,” he vowed, “and we will not let a cabinet of robber barons and white nationalists destroy everything the civilizing movements of the last century created.”
Exactly fucking right. The Democrats’ job right now is not to “find common ground” with Donald Trump and his enablers. It’s not about “striking deals” or “working together.” It’s about refusing to normalize Trump and refusing to give the Republican Party an inch. Yes, we will lose a lot of battles in the coming years, but it is far, far better to lose than to be co-opted. And when you stand up and fight, even if you lose, Americans will know what you believe in.
Raskin understands just that, and Democrats need to heed his call. They could do a lot worse than to let Raskin lead the way.