Room for a Little More Optimism
Published at 10:31 on 9 July 2021
Now that the House has committed itself to forming a select committee to investigate the events of last January 6th, there is room for a little more optimism about the future.
A little more. We are still in a world where the Democrats have damned themselves via their own reluctance to form such a committee in the first place. This indicates an overall, collective lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the current situation.
Also, these are Democrats we are talking about, the party that continually squanders opportunities and has a long, sad history of losing easily winnable elections. A competent Democratic Party would leverage the work of such a select committee to help inspire voters to oppose the GOP in the coming election (the GOP sure wasn’t shy about leveraging the work of the Benghazi select committee). But that is not the sort of Democratic Party we have; instead, we have one that by and large labors under the delusion that the voting public is, in general, comprised of rational actors who are concerned about political issues and who will naturally tend to reward the Democrats when they do things that are in the interest of the vast majority.
Thankfully, the antifascist coalition consists of more than just Democrats. In particular, it consists in part of dissident conservatives who have left the Trump-era Republican Party in disgust, and some of these individuals are the very political operatives who have long helped the GOP eat the Democrats’ lunch in campaigns. Thus, we can expect the Lincoln Project (which, contrary to my expectations, seems to have weathered the storm of its earlier scandal) to not be shy about doing what is necessary to politically capitalize on the fallout from January 6th.
The question is whether or not it will be enough. The Lincoln Project is something of a political oddball, and is not well tied-in to conventional sources of funding, thus limiting its power to do the politically savvy things that its leaders know need to be done. Then again, they recently did manage to spank Toyota good and hard for bankrolling seditious politicians, so do not underestimate that organization’s ability to make up in talent for it lacks in funding.
So: a little more optimism is called for at this stage, but not any more.