Slogans win elections. I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but I have to acknowledge that his 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was brilliant.
And Trump was brilliant to never answer questions about what his slogan meant. This enabled everyone who was open to voting for him – non-college-graduate white men without decent jobs and without hope; evangelicals who believe abortion is murder and wanted the Supreme Court to overturn Roe; everyone who hated or distrusted Hillary – to give Trump’s slogan their own personal meaning and thus give Trump their vote.
But in the 2020 election, the Democrats, no matter who their presidential candidate may be, can have an even more powerful campaign slogan than Trump’s. Before I tell you what this slogan should be, let me tell you what a Democrat future can be beginning in 2021:
■In dealing with climate change, we can again become the world’s leader, not the world’s loser (to use Trump’s word). If we don’t, our children and grandchild will have no future.
■We can institute a massive new infrastructure program to restore our existing roads, bridges, harbors, airports and sewer systems; to create a nationwide 21st-century information technology structure; and thus to give meaningful and decently paid jobs and a meaningful future to tens of millions of men and women who currently lack them.
■We can institute major new programs to help victims of fentanyl, crystal meth, OxyContin and other vicious drugs – programs that will acknowledge their suffering and their humanity and will enable them to escape their addiction and thus to regain their future.
■We can enact major new income taxes, Social Security taxes, estate taxes and wealth taxes to finance infrastructure work and the treatment of addicts and thus have a future without our current massive income and wealth inequality.
■We can restore the close and powerful alliances we have had for so many decades, and can have again in the future, with Canada, Mexico, the countries of Western Europe and Southeast Asia, and all of our other allies whom Trump has so profoundly alienated.
■We can make it clear to the leaders of Russia, North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Hungary, Italy and other similar countries that we reject their dictatorial fascism and their massive violations of human rights and that as long as they are fascists, we believe they will have no future.
■We can reject the cruel divisiveness of the Trump regime and re-establish community among the left, the right and the middle. This communal spirit was what made America great in the past. It is the only thing that can make America great in the future.
■We can treat would-be immigrants who long for American citizenship not as rapists and drug dealers but as welcome contributors to our nation’s future.
■We can act with compassion for the children of these would-be immigrants. We can free them from the chain-link cages in which Trump has imprisoned them and we can share with them our future.
■We can restore our nation’s reverence, once so widely shared, for the values of honesty, civility, the rule of law, a free press and the U.S. Constitution. These values are our future.
In short, the campaign slogan and policy commitment not only of Democratic presidential candidates but of Democratic candidates for every local, state and federal office should be this: Win the Future.
(John M. Cunningham lives in Concord.)