All Of These Words Are Offensive (But Only Sometimes)

 I am sure there are more words that can be interpreted than those listed on the article below, but the big question still remains, are offensive-seeming words ALWAYS offensive or only in how they are used?

https://www.dictionary.com/e/words-that-are-bad-in-some-contexts/

How can a word be insulting sometimes … but not always?

One of the many complexities of English is the ability of words to have multiple definitions, which opens the door for some words to be both derogatory and not derogatory, depending on who is using them or when.

These words can be confusing, especially to people who are just learning English and all of its complex nuances. “Why is that word OK to say here … but not there?”

Let’s take a look at some of the words that often draw debate, so we can see when they’re OK to say and when we should steer clear.

monkey and ape

Curious George and those winged creatures who did the Wicked Witch of the West’s bidding in the Wizard of Oz are monkeys, and you’ve probably been using that word to describe them for as long as you can remember. And, King Kong—that is what we might refer to as an ape. That’s as it should be.

A monkey, by definition, is “any mammal of the order Primates, including the guenons, macaques, langurs, and capuchins, but excluding humans, the anthropoid apes, and, usually, the tarsier and prosimians.” Ape is defined as “any of a group of anthropoid primates characterized by long arms, a broad chest, and the absence of a tail, comprising the family Pongidae (great ape), which includes the chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan, and the family Hylobatidae (lesser ape), which includes the gibbon and siamang.”

Calling the animals by their appropriate names is not a slur.

It’s even OK to call certain people “monkeys.” After all, small children are often likened by their parents to the person-like beasts, and this affectionate appropriation of the term has been in existence since the 1600s. And, ape and monkey can both be used as verbs. To ape something is “to imitate it,” while monkeying with something means “to play with it.”

So, where’s the problem?Ape and monkey are considered offensive terms when they’re used to describe a person of color. It’s what is known as dehumanizing language, “language that deprives a person of human qualities or attributes.”

Exactly when the words became slurs is unknown, but offensive comparisons of black people to apes date back hundreds of centuries. As recently as the late 1800s, for example, when scientists Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon created the 1854 Types of Mankind (then the leading scientific text on race), they compared black people not to other (white) people but to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.

When used in these contexts, monkey and ape are considered extremely derogatory slang.

ghetto

The word ghetto comes from Italian, a noun derivative of 
ghettare, which means “
to throw.” Officials in Venice, Italy were among the first to force Jewish residents to live together in isolated areas, away from other citizens. The Italian name for those places? Ghettos. 

The word was later used to describe similar isolated areas in which the Nazis forced Jewish people to live, cut off from their friends and neighbors and typically stuck in deplorable conditions. By the time the word made its way into English, the relationship with Jewish people was gone. Ghetto came to mean “sections of cities where marginalized people lived, typically segregated from other citizens, often living in poverty.”

oriental

Head to an estate sale, and you may find yourself discussing the price of an oriental rug or some oriental jewelry. Surely these words are OK to use, right?

Well, yes … if you’re talking about jewelry or rugs rather than people. When used as an adjective, oriental means “of, relating to, or characteristic of the Orient, or East; Eastern.” It’s a way to describe things that come from the area of the world once known as the Orient but more commonly referred to as East Asia or Southeast Asia today.

It’s a word that was also once used to refer to people who were either born in that sector of the world or whose ancestors were, but using oriental as a noun is now considered offensive slang. It’s even been banned from usage in federal law, as well as in a number of states, where official documents may only refer to people as Asian Americans, rather than the dated term.

savage

The word savage has taken a circuitous path through the lexicon over the years, first showing up in English in the 1200s from Middle English. As an adjective, it’s typically meant “fierce, ferocious, or cruel; uncivilized; barbarous.” When referring to a savage lion ripping an antelope apart on the African Sahara, that’s all well and good.

But, the use of savage as a noun to describe human beings dates back to approximately the 1400s. At a time when Christopher Columbus was enslaving Native Americans and claiming their lands and work for his own, the word became a slur used by white Europeans to describe Native American people. The usage stuck around for hundreds of years, and it’s still a word that many indigenous peoples around the world find offensive.

There has been some reclamation of the word as internet slang, as more people use the adjective form to describe actions they deem to be especially fierce. However, the racist connotations are hard to ignore, and it may be wise to choose another word to describe something you love on the internet. Might we suggest badass?

chink

When the word chink first showed up in the English language back in the 1500s, it was a simple word to explain “a crack or split.” That’s what chine meant in Middle English, after all, and the addition of the k created a word that’s often used today to describe that crack between the curtains that lets the light through.

Sometime in that era the phrase chink in one’s armor was also born. It was a time when armor was made of chainmail—think medieval knights—and a gap or chink in the armor was a dangerous vulnerability. Which is why the idiom is now used today to mean a vulnerable area.

So, how do you go from the innocent chink to the incredibly offensive version?

That happened some time in the 1900s when people started using chink to refer to people from China (or people who the speaker believed were from China). Believed to be an irregular formation of the word China, the word is derogatory when used to describe a human being.

coon

When a raccoon is feasting in your garbage cans, you might call pest control to come take care of that coon, and no one would think poorly of you.Coon is what linguists call an aphetic form of raccoon, a word formed when a vowel or syllable has been dropped. When used to refer to the nocturnal critter with a taste for days-old food, it’s otherwise inoffensive.

The same goes for the saying in a coon’s age. Although the reference is dated and not often used in modern English, when it was coined as a more colorful way to say “in a long time,” the phrase referred to the trash-eating critters with the black fur masks. The idiom was born thanks to a belief that raccoons lived for a long time (a myth disproven by biologists).

It’s when the word is used to describe a person of color that it becomes an extremely derogatory slur.

This form is believed to have shown up in English in the 1800s, although a lead character in the colonial comic opera “The Disappointment” from the 1740s is a black man named Raccoon. It’s believed that the origin of the slur could be from the Portuguese barracoos, “building constructed to hold slaves for sale.”

Wherever it originated, it’s yet another word that should not be used regarding people.

As an added note: why is honky not on the list? 

Hungarian

Honky may be a variant of hunky, which was a derivative of Bohunk, a slur for various Slavic and Hungarian immigrants who moved to America from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900s.

Wolof

Honky may also derive from the term "xonq nopp" which, in the West African language Wolof, literally means "red-eared person". The term may have originated with Wolof-speaking people brought to the U.S.^[ It has been used by Black Americans as a pejorative for white people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honky

Maybe time to ban the song Honky Tonk Women by The Rolling Stones?

Testing Lowen's thesis about history textbooks and the recent past

 In a recent post, James Lowen's savaging of history textbooks was discussed, and this quote was offered:

We read partly in a spirit of criticism, assessing what the authors got wrong as well as agreeing with and perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive [learning]. Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read. .... Thus authors tiptoe through the [recent past] with extreme caution, evading the main issues, all the main “why” questions.

This struck me as a highly implausible view of how 8th grade middle school students (at least that was my grade for American history) are likely to read discussions of the recent past.  Their parents and grandparents may remember the recent past, but those kids will not be able to.  

I think instead, that history textbooks are subject to the same issues that all textbooks are -- the PARENTS of kids, do not read critically, but sometimes get worked up by politicians or troublemakers agitating over a misrepresented passage. A textbook subject to a fulminating local talk show host in even one district, is a textbook in marketing trouble nationwide.

I would like to offer a test to my thesis, by citing a few of what I consider to be pretty clear lessons from recent history, ands see if they get our board here worked up.

Lesson 1, Wholesale socialism does not work

Motivated by the failures of market capitalism: the sweatshops, terrible wages and political control by oligarchs at the turn of the last century, a wide selection of alternatives were advocated for, and tried, in over half of the world, for most of the last century.  These efforts ranged from social welfarism, socialism, democratic communism, thru bloody communist dictatorships.  This represented a massive uncontrolled experiment to evaluate alternatives to market capitalism.  Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, notes that democracies prove the most rapid feedback loop for correcting bad government policy, but that other forms of government may learn in a feedback loop as well.  At any rate, by ~1990, almost all the communist states had replaced their controlled economies with market economies, and the democratic socialist states had replaced much of their bureaucratic controlled sectors of their economies with contracted or privatized sectors.  

There HAS been some successes with the massive experiment in socialism.  Wholesale literacy, and both primary and secondary education were mostly implemented.  Much more access to Housing, and more widespread medical care, were among the benefits. And socialist states often did a better job with infrastructure investments.  

What they did not do well. was technology innovation, product quality, or response to fluxuating demand.  .

The socialist democracies basically abandoned the socialist goal of the public owning the means of production, and instead adopted a social welfare program, of providing the education, medical care, housing, and safety net that markets do poorly.  The countries of the world have, coming out of this experiment, converged on a model of 50-70% market economics, with 25-50% state services.  

Lesson 2, Burke was right, anarchists wrong

Burkian social conservatism is -- basically, a Darwinian belief that a successful societies norms and institutions are GOOD norms and institutions, as they are the ones that a successful society used to out-compete the legions of societies that are now historical footnotes.  Burke basically advocated for stability and social convention above all, out of a concern that societies are fragile, and institutions and norms difficult to recreate.  Lord of the Flies was a Burkian book. 

Robert Heinlein, a mid century Science fiction writer, was a leading advocate of an alternative more optimistic  anarchist view.  He advocates that breaking social conventions, leads to societies that spontaneously form new structures and norms, and that these are generally better than what they replace.  Much economic market theory basically assumes this spontaneous emergence of unplanned order is expected.   

We got to test these two models, in China, and Eastern Europe, when they each de-socialized.  China did this gradually, fearing instability.  Eastern European leaders were assured by market advocates of the ability for spontaneous order to emerge, and the old controlled Soviet economy was basically shut down overnight, and sold off for a pittance.  China, gradually built up an effective and innovative market economy, while state employers have been gradually scaled back over a period of decades.  China is now a global economic superpower.  While Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe -- have yet to experience the economic windfall that was promised decades ago by anarchist libertarians.  

Lesson 3, Armed revolutions work, except when they don't.  Ideas are more powerful.  

The 2oth century started with most of the world occupied by a few European powers. Under the Enlightenment values that those nations supposedly held, this was unjustifiable.  And the peoples in these occupied regions became restive.   There were world wide violent revolutionary movements against colonialism over much of the 20th century.  The cost and blood needed to maintain those empires, was more than those countries were willing to pay anymore, and revolutionary movements gained control of newly freed colonies worldwide.  This gave the illusion that popular revolutions are easy, and readily successful.

Other than the decolonization by democracies whose own value system did not support colonization, there were few other successes.  Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua and Soviet Afghanistan were among the few. Thousands of other revolutionary movements died in remote jungles and mountains, and the torture chambers of secret police.  Most states, are stable.  At least against armed revolution.  

What works far better to overthow a state, is to subvert it, with more attractive ideas.  Note, that is how the decolonization happened -- the colonial powers were forced, by internal civil rights movements, to confront the racism that was behind their occupations.  And enough of the state decision-makers were no longer believing in the racist/imperialist principles that are needed to be a colonial power.  

The Shah as also overthrown by ideas -- democratic theocracy in his case.  His army was unwilling to fight the popular will for democratic theocracy, so he fled.  Ferdinand Marcos fell the same way, although to democracy not theocracy,.   And both Eastern Europe, an South America, democratized due to a groundswell adoption of enlightenment principles by the dictatorial state's own agents!

Ideas matter, and have replaced many times more abusive states than armed revolution has.  .  

Lesson 4.  9-11, and Iraq Invasion.  Blunders all Around.  And good by accident.  

Both Lowen and Germaine seem pretty off here on even this very recent history.  Here is Lowen:

Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign policy because from beginning to end they typically assume the America as “the international good guy” model .... Like all nations, the United States seeks first to increase its own prosperity and influence in the world. .... We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

And here is Germaine: 

 the 9/11 attacks are inexplicable [I assume meant "Are only explicable] if most Arabs and other people in the Muslim world see America as a great hypocrite, not an innocent international good guy? 

For Germaine, the 9-11 attack was not a popular attack.  The entire world, arab, muslim, and everyone, rallied to assist us in destroying Al-Quaida.  Russia offered their bases.  Iran offered their intelligence info, etc.  For Lowen -- the US reputation, has nothing to do with the attack.  

Osama Bin Laden was a zealot.  He believed in religious purity, AND that a community of religious purists would triumph over rivals.  This is a common view in history.  Zealots want their society to adopt their zealotry, in order to defeat other societies.  This generally means purging those who oppose Zealotry.  

His model for this all came from his early life, as a Muhajideen volunteer in the Afghan war against the Soviets.  Zealots frm around the musllim world came together, defeated the Soviets, and their secular/communist Afghan quislings, who were killed and their ideas have not resurfaced.  THEN, compromisers and corrupt leaders squabbled, until a MORE pure zealot movement swept the corrupt away, and unified the country.  Something very similar had also just happened in Lebanon, during an Israeli occupation.   Osama wanted to apply this model to the world, by:

1. start a war with the USA  
2. provoke the US to become an occupier, like the Soviets were
3. rally the zealots of all of Islam to fight the US
4. Use war with US to purge Islam of secularists and corrupt non-zealots
5. Us will be defeated more easily than the soviets, because we have no staying power (lesson he learned from Vietnam)
6. A victorious unified Isalm, under a new Caliphate government, will then replicate Mohammed's success in conquering and converting much of the world.  

Note the US plays the role that war with weak foreign powers has often played in domestic politics -- a bogey-man threat to use for domestic power grabbing purposes.  

9-11 was not about hypocrisy, or ANYTHING the US did.  Only what we were -- a secular state, with an army, and no backbone.  

Osama was right about roughly 2/3 of his agenda.  The US became an occupier, he was successfully able to propagandize this, and rally millions to Al Quaida, and Zealots killed thousands of secular educators, writers, and screen personalities across the Muslim world.  But the Zealots could not defeat stable states, nor unify.  And the Us DID eventually pull out, but after MUCH longer than he predicted.  His 2/3 agenda -- had harmed the world immensely.  

Note, the US WAS an innocent target for 9-11.  

Then, the Bush admin, run by the "Valkyries" who believed that mass movements were irrelevant, in the greatest foreign policy  blinder in my recent memory, decided to use 9-11 as a pretext to "take some pieces off the board" by invading the uninvolved Iraq.  they were convinced that AlQuaida, and the GWOT was actually irrelevant, because they were not state actors.  ,

Much of the Left's criticism of the Bush2 admin was valid.  We did invade on a lie.  Part of the calculation, was that we could take Iraqi oil as payment for our military costs in liberating them.  The centrist critique, that there was no plan to govern, was only partly true.  The Bush2s -- after all -- were mostly Heinlein optimists about spontaneous organization. Many of the others has thought "roll in, roll out" should have been the plan.  

Blunders accumulate:  When the lack of any police or courts became a clear problem, The Bush admin overruled the Valkyries, actually did set up a military occupation, and seemed to be trying to learn from and copy the successful Japan occupation from a half century earlier.  That occupation had been for over a decade, and left Japan a stable democracy.  But the Bush people had not looked at the Lebanon example, that Osama had.  Religious/nationalist zealots increasingly attacked the US forces.  An election was coming up, Iraq was spiraling out of control, Bush's Valkyrie and post WW2 advisor teams were both out of ideas.  Kerry put a proposal together of transferring Iraq to an appointed administration of Iraqis, and planned to run on it.  So Bush -- implemented Kerry's plan the very next month!

The US was an innocent, attacked for domestic political purposed, by a purging religious zealot.  And then, while the US was deceitful about it, for about half of the Bush admin the planned outcome of the Iraq invasion was to eventually leave them with a democracy.  Lowen's own example does not support his apparent thesis that the US was attacked for justified reasons on 9/11, and invaded Iraq purely for selfish reasons.  

Lesson 5 -- Marx was mostly right (if you drop the historical determinism)

Karl Marx was a pretty good economist, and a pretty good sociologist, and he built a toy model for both, to try to understand our future.  He ALSO believed in historical determinism, which got in the way of his understanding his own models. But we can look at the models without the determinism.  Those models predict that oligarchs will maintain economic affluence, basically forever, and they will use that money to buy governments that help them maintain their wealth.  This model was true of the time he contracted it. Both democracies and monarchs protected and assisted oligarchs.  

But soon after he constructed it, the income of workers went up, as did their political power, and the western democracies imposed OSHA requirements, and work week requirements, etc that ended the sweatshop era.  There is a question here -- why was his model wrong?  And more importantly will it STAY wrong? 

The answer appears to be no -- we have seen a gradual re emergence of oligarchs, along with a decline in worker income.  Which, as per his sociology model, leads to a more pro-oligarch government.  

The problem in his economic model was he trusted Malthus, and assumed workers would multiply without limit.  Remove unlimited workers, and add a cost to ship goods, and one can get a local labor shortage when industries co-locate to minimize transport costs.  We had a labor shortage in N America for a half century.  Industries are relocating to the 3rd world, and that drops our wages here, and increases oligarch profits.  

Note, we have seen previously that oligarchs will own our democracy if they have all the wealth,   One of the major themes of this board is how to prevent that from happening.  This lesson -- shows we really need to figure that out.  

Do these belong in a history textbook?  

Here were 5 controversial, yet potentially critically important lessons I at least see from recent history.  But does anyone else here agree with all of them?   Note I am a centrist -- my views are probably less offensive to more people than that of most historians.  I would be surprised if everyone on this board could agree on more than one or two minor lessons from recent history.  Do what should a text do?  Just make some parents apoplectic?  

Democrats and Republicans for a Pro-Democracy Coalition?

 

Yesterday (Oct. 11), the NY Times published an op-ed piece by former Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman and Miles Taylor (a former Trump employee who published an anonymous critical article about Trump while working for him). They suggest a strategy that may sound familiar to those who remember the Lincoln Project and similar groups of Never-Trump Repubs that threw their lot in with the Dems to elect Biden last year. Their idea is simple: the best way to make sure the House does not end up in the hands of Trump loyalists next year is for moderate, center-right Repubs to become part of a pro-democracy coalition  with the singular goal of defeating Trump-loyalists who have made embracing The Big Lie  about Trump's "stolen election" a litmus test for GOP races. In the abstract, the idea sounds promising as a strategy to minimize chances of a pro-Trump GOP ascendancy. But we've seen this movie before in the form of the Lincoln Project and other similar ones that spent millions on ads, but didn't seem to have much of an effect on Republicans. As a matter of fact, 92% of them voted Trump, an increase from the 2016 election. The Lincoln Project says that it had more impact on undecided independents, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. Meanwhile, the fragile Dem coalition is already having a hard time maintaining unity among moderates, conservatives (e.g. blue dog types) and progressives like "the squad."

The article generated close to 3,000 comments at the NYT, an unusually high number there. Readers' responses range from enthusiastic support to firm rejections of such a coalition. Some think we should throw out all purity tests and build bridges wherever we can to contain and ultimately defeat the pro-Trump GOP. Others point out how much trouble we already have on our hands trying to deal with the so-called "moderate" dems, (esp. Manchin and Sinema) on the one hand, and the no-compromise Justice Democrats https://justicedemocrats.com/  like AOC and "the squad"  on the other. I tilt towards being a single-issue voter right now, because the issue is, I believe, defeating Trumpism, which amounts to rejecting an autocrat with a tight grip on a party willing to abandon constitutional principles in order to win elections. In other words, as many, including Whitman and Taylor have warned, we stand to lose democratic governance with free and fair elections if we can't defeat the Trumpists. This does seem like a once in a lifetime emergency, and if it were possible to unite people around this idea I would support it. But unfortunately, many people do not share this fear, or at least not enough so to overlook intra-party differences within the Dem party, as made evident by the disputes between Dems who have failed to pass Biden's signature bill in any form thus far. Such a failure, if not remedied, could result in losses in 2022.

I'm posting the article here, and hope it will stimulate thoughtful debate on the idea of a broad anti-Trumpist (or put positively, pro-democracy) coalition. Also, here's a link to the NYT article for those interested in the many and diverse opinions expressed in their comments section today: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html

 

Guest Essay

We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.

Oct. 11, 2021

 

By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman

Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.

 

After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the party would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take it back. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national and state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.

Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.

This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.

It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.

Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.

But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.

To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.

And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.

For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.

 

In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.

These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.

For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong Republicans to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.

One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the departing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist who is running for the seat

 

For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.

Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.

We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe” seats in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.

More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.

To work, it will require trust building between both camps, especially while they are fighting side by side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.

A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.

A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected to.

Blog note: Falling behind in responding to comments

My in-box has over 300 comments I have not reviewed. I don't respond to all comments, but I usually have time to at least read most of them. More than a few are complex and require a lot of time to read and think about. It will take me another day or two to catch up. I'll post again after I've worked my way through. 🙂