JUSTICE IS COMING

The founder of the Young Turks presents a hopeful thesis that present polarization will resolve itself in a left-leaning democracy.

The Republican Party comes in for heavy shellacking throughout Uygur’s pages. The people who voted for Trump, by that account, didn’t vote for him based on policy issues or a reasoned platform. “They wanted racism, cruelty, and authoritarianism,” writes the author. They certainly got that and more. Yet, Uygur insists, that party is in power despite the fact that it consistently loses the popular vote. Most Americans “are just not fundamentally conservative”; they are opposed to social injustice and the authoritarian suppression of civil rights and the right to choose, wholly in favor of the social safety net provided by government programs. Race, greed, and religion on the one hand, social equity on the other: It’s small wonder, Uygur writes, that young voters are so overwhelmingly left-leaning, to the extent that 60% polled on the matter believed socialism to be more humane than capitalism, and that the Republican Party is therefore doing all it can to disenfranchise them. For all their efforts, writes the author, extreme right-wing politicians will not succeed in passing any spectacularly awful laws, such as making Trump president for life or stripping civil rights away from the LGBTQ+ community, despite a certain amount of fearmongering among progressives that they’re plotting to do just such things. (“It’s so easy to scare Democratic voters.”) That’s not to say they won’t try, though Uygur remains firm in his view that progressives will win in the end because they will somehow convince “our conservative brothers and sisters” that progressives love them—and “when you give out love, it doesn’t make you smaller, it makes you larger.” Magical thinking? Perhaps, but it’s a nice thought.

An optimistic prophecy that a saner, more equitable politics will take the place of whatever it is we have now.