We Treated It Like a Game but Now It’s a Life and Death Struggle

In less than a month, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has managed to divide our country in ways that are more dangerous and intractable than ever before. While falsely accusing Democrats of stealing elections, Republican’s have become masters at rigging the game. They’ve even gone so far as to undermine our constitutional democracy by creating a topsy-turvy world of legal gibberish in which minority opinions prevail over those of the majority.

In its decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, the court ruled in favor of the some 41% of Americans who oppose abortion and against the 59% of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, according to CNN a week after the decision. In rendering the environmental protection agency (EPA) impotent in the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions last week, the Supreme Court set itself against an even larger majority of Americans, some 63%, who want the United States to more vigorously pursue solutions to climate change caused by fossil fuels. In making it far easier to carry a concealed weapon, the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol v. Bruen on June 23, went against an overwhelming 66% of Americans who want stricter gun controls, according to the Gallop Poll.

It appears that our country is not only being ripped apart at the seams by partisan furies, but that we’re on the road to becoming a perverse, self-devouring anti-democracy, one in which the minority wins and the majority loses. This is all too reminiscent of what the political sensitivities of German social mystic and champion of the poor, Simone Weil, saw in the 1930s. According to Jacqueline Rose in a critique of a biography of Weil in the New York Review of Books recently, Weil held that Germany’s pre-Nazi democracy was made up of opposing parties that “had been powerless to prevent the formation of a party whose aim was the overthrow of democracy itself.”

New York Times columnist Jonathan Weisman last week wrote that recent Supreme Court decisions have “spurred” the creation of a country divided along a Red-Blue Axis” that shows “the United States…drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.” This analysis seems true enough, but the country doesn’t vote in red and blue blocks. It votes in 50 separate states, each with their own cultures and histories, and each one deeply and endlessly different from all the others. So while national media revels in various distractions generated in Washington D.C., the real struggle for the heart and soul of the country is waged in every one of the 3,143 counties spread across our 50 states.

New Mexico at the moment is a blue state, part of a sizable American majority that leans liberal, and embraces in its policies and customs a passion for equality, community, and fairness — moral attributes that the founders used to ennoble the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which are the inspiration for every state constitution in the country, sometimes of course, unhappily, in word only.

And yet, New Mexico is a solidly blue state with a sizable red minority. According to the Pew Research Organization, we are 37% Republican, 48% Democrat, and 15% undecided in 2021. This division, empowered by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, will cause New Mexico liberals to spend the next half century perhaps fending off assault after assault by local representatives of an American conservative minority who demeans women, defames science, and who vigorously seeks total control of our country, votes or no votes, motivated by one form of Trumpism or another.

New Mexico is seeing this now in the gubernatorial candidacy of a Trumpian TV weatherman, Mark Ronchetti whose values and views are overwhelmingly opposed by the state’s majority and yet who’s chances for an upset seem more than middling, according to local spin doctors. It seems likely, too, that Democrats will pull out all the stops not to let that happen.

Since 2020, the blue majority in our state has controlled all branches of state government, in a backlash against eight years of Republican vacuity, scandal, do-nothingness and intransigence in the Round House. Democrats, so far, legalized cannabis, including potentially lucrative hemp agriculture. They’ve given long overdue raises to teachers, guaranteed paid sick leave, raised the minimum wage, ended co-pays for behavioral health care, passed humane “end of life options” legislation, increased funding for childcare and early childhood education, lowered the cost of prescription drugs and adopted stringent climate change standards. And for the last two years, have helped to keep New Mexico one of the safest states in the country when it comes to combating the COVID pandemic.

We are also among the 21 states in which abortion is legal with no current credible legal threat on the horizon. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an executive order recently ensuring “safe harbor” for people seeking abortions in our state that prohibits cooperating with other states in a way that “might interfere with abortion access in New Mexico,” according to the Associated Press. But as in every blue state in the country, the game of politics in New Mexico will remain for years a life and death struggle for women and their families because of the totalitarian and theocratic rule of the national conservative judiciary and those who push an extremist radical right agenda.

It may be trivializing to use a sports metaphor to describe American politics, but the current 6 to 3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court makes it crystal clear that Republicans have been, since the 1960s, learning how to play the political game far more aggressively than the Democrats. In fact, many pundits think Republicans could be establishing something of a “dynasty” that might become, nationally, almost undefeatable, unless Democrats around the country take a lesson from New Mexico and get serious about beating back Trumpians, working to gain undeniably large majorities in local elections and stabilizing their ascendancy.

Even if the old game of give and take, of passive aggression, and occasional tantrums and coup counting has changed completely, many Democrats, young and old, are realizing that politics in America actually has turned into a life and death contest involving the lives of women, the life of the planet and the lives of ordinary people snuffed out by the horrific random terror of gun violence. This deadly combat is taking place in the political fight cage of every state and electoral district in the union. And it’s all played out on an arena of constant and numbing national news while the actual battles themselves, all profoundly local, get scant and obscure coverage if any at all.

But as the brilliant handling of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capital has shown us, we are still a country run by votes not by death squads. And in ways that are perfectly consistent with the tangled perversions of our politics, the U.S. Supreme Court and Donald Trump —both unmitigated extremists — have given liberal America a powerful new motivation to begin a serious reconquest of American politics.

Despite everything, I still feel there’s a good chance, if not this year then in 2024, for liberal America to pull a startling backlash against Republican authoritarian rule and give to the nation what liberal New Mexicans gave to their state after the disastrous reign of Susanna Martinez — a resurgent, vigorous, toughminded majority and, along with it, a solid, enlightened and uncorrupted new hope for a woman’s freedom to choose, for climate’s stabilization and for the reestablishment of a respectful, less violent society.

It’s all within our grasp, if we don’t lose our nerve, if we make the most of our numerical majority, and if we keep in mind what might happen if Republicans take over the country, dissolve our imperfect union and botch the challenges facing us in the future — more lethal pandemics, deeper economic inequality and the social unrest it brings, wave upon wave of climate change disasters and a tsunami of authoritarian enemies just as ruthless, I suspect, as the forces of so-called Pax Americana ever were.

It is imperative that the liberal majority assert itself again and make its democratic majority mean something more than fleeting victories in the blood sport of politics. Although given the magnitude of our challenges, that might be a good enough place to start this year in a realistic effort to elevate America’s ideal of success to include an ever more humane, inclusive and empowering vision of the common good.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it