Recently, we posted commentary by Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall and Brian Beutler to the effect that America and Democrats can't go back to a status quo ante following the destruction and abnormality of the Malignant Fascist's coup on our democracy. Now, in a similar vein, Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Effing Times that "America Broke Something When It Gave Trump A Second Chance":
... “Broken eggs can never be mended,” he [Abraham Lincoln] wrote in reference to the fate of slavery as the war carried on, “and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.”
Fort Sumter broke the Union and with it, slavery. Whatever the nation was or would be in the aftermath of the war, neither the nation nor its Constitution would protect, support or sanction human bondage.
You can think of this Trump administration as a similar state of affairs. The American people broke something when they gave Trump a second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery, much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of the matter.
Broken eggs cannot be mended. To try to do so, to try to return to some notion of normality, is to court failure. Worse, it is to play a repeat of the last Democratic administration when, in pursuit of the familiar, the Democratic Party all but passed the baton back to reactionaries working toward something revolutionary.
We share the concern that the embedded establishment Democrats and their consultants currently playing catch-up to the will of the voters will misread what needs to be done, some of which Bouie, et al outline in their commentaries. That can't be allowed to happen, because if a new Democratic administration becomes an exercise in mending broken eggs, is to court the kind of failure from which America will never recover. We need junkyard dogs, not cosseted schmoozers.
