The split in the Democratic Party is sure to be exploited in the weeks ahead and even more so heading into the 2028 election. Electability will be the operative word. Let us wrestle with it all but the opposing factions need to show up for whomever emerges as the candidate.
To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, The trouble with this country is that right-wing nitwits are cock-sure of themselves and Liberals are full of doubt. True a hundred years ago and even truer today. However along with doubt are nuances, mitigation, forgiveness, empathy etc…
Ten years ago Judge Amy Berman Jackson castigated Paul Manafort for fifty minutes in what seemed like a prelude to an additional ten years in prison. Yet the final sentence was a mere three years plus. Spoken like a true Talmudic scholar. There’s this yet there’s this also that. The Jewish tradition is disputative of text.
Search in and out and roundabout
And you’ll discover never
A tale so free of every doubt
All probable, possible shadow of doubt
All possible doubt whatever.
So sings a character in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Gondoliers. There comes a time when doubt begs for resolution.
Tyrants make no room for doubt. I have never heard of Trump cogitating. Nor did Jim Jones. If I may be permitted to plagiarize myself, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. This comes from a poem I wrote a long time ago addressed to my friends at Jonestown before they lost their two teenage children. Doubt encourages the freedom they were denied.
The trouble with the world, as Russell saw it, is also our strength. Progress can be measured in the extent to which we move away from absolutes, and dogma. People of true faith wrestle with doubt in their dark moments of dread. Keats wrote of negative capability which asks for one to live in a place of uncertainty and mystery without reaching for resolution. Sounds like doubt to me. The pre-condition for allowing the imagination full sway.
In 1933 Germany the Nazi Party had about 37% of the vote yet Hitler became chancellor. The other three parties hated each other more than they feared the Nazis. Our Centrists must reconcile with Progressives and DSA for the greater good.
When objective facts are gathered and well-considered by scrupulous, deliberative minds, doubt can be overcome and conclusions drawn. In other words oust the man in the Oval who soils our national fabric. The alternative is to invite American style fascism
What Keats described applies to the creative, not the political, process. He, himself, was fiercely opposed to the conservative agenda of his day. There can be no equivocation in the search for truth.
