Some of you are already snickering.
“Health, Hope and Justice? Seriously? Is that the best we can do?”
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But it is as good a place to start as any, unless and until someone comes up with something better. In this brainstorming stage of preparing for 2022, all offerings are welcome.
The point of this Messaging Monday series is that complaining about what is wrong is the easy way out. Writing a few hundred words making concrete suggestions and offering specific ideas is a better use of everyone’s time.
Therefore, building on the success of the similar slogan that worked so well for the Georgia Senate races, let’s run #HealthHopeAndJustice up the flagpole and see who salutes.
Health
Health comes first for obvious reasons. Sometime later this month, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 will pass 800,000. One political party is encouraging vaccinations and boosters, promoting mask-wearing and physical distancing, and making free home testing kits available. The other party is divided between one group of people who claim the disease is not happening at all, and another group relying on increasingly bizarre home remedies including anti-parasitic drugs, anti-malarial drugs, and eating dirt laced with lead and arsenic.
In addition to fighting COVID-19 and all its variants from delta to mu to omicron and beyond, Democrats are also the party of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, all of which were vehemently opposed by Republicans when they started. All three programs are under attack from Republicans even now, with irritating ad campaigns to entice seniors away from traditional Medicare into privatized care systems, red-state governors still rejecting federal funding for Medicaid, and dozens of attempts to repeal Obamacare that will certainly continue if they return to power.
Furthermore, Democrats are the party of a big picture of health for the country through promoting the use of green energy and the clearing of toxic waste sites. Republicans are much more dependent on campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies and industrial polluters.
The health theme can also cover all the ways Democrats are pro-family, pro-woman, pro-child, pro-worker, pro-immigrant, pro-science, and pro-life (yes, I said it). Our policies promote health and well-being for all, while Republican policies (wait, do they have any?) are about tearing down and destroying people, our system of government, our education system, and other valuable institutions.
Hope
Hope is most likely the word that caused the snickering folks to roll their eyes, but wait just a moment. We could do worse than connecting ourselves to a theme adopted by our most recent two-term Democratic presidents. The alliteration with the H in “health” helps make the slogan memorable, and having only one syllable helps keep the slogan short.
But in all seriousness, for quite a while now, Republicans have been the party of fearmongering and chaos. They are close kin to the hostile alien in the Star Trek episode “Day of the Dove” that could only feed on hatred and strong emotions, so it orchestrated a trumped up conflict on the ship, and then moved among the crew stirring up discontent, provoking fights, and keeping everyone in a state of permanent anger and outrage.
Hope is a forward-looking word at a time when Republicans are longingly looking backward to the 1950s, or the 1850s, or the 1750s. Hope is an optimistic word at a time when no one in their right mind thinks Republicans are offering an optimistic vision of what will happen to the country if they retake power.
Some folks, even on the Blue Team, are too cool or too cynical to react to the word “hope” in a positive way. They dismiss the concept of hope altogether, calling it undefinable and impossible to quantify, equating it with mere wishing, or dreaming, or even fantasizing that things will get better.
Nevertheless it is undeniable that many other people have been deeply moved by the strengthening power of hope, either through personal experience or by observing the example of others in reality or in literature. They’ve seen that surge of survival energy that rises up when all seems lost and the situation seems irredeemable and yet somehow, somehow, people manage to keep going, keep fighting, and keep holding on.
Without bringing religion into it, some of us still have hope in the rule of law, or hope in the Constitution, even with a 6-3 majority against us on the Supreme Court. Some of us have hope that the American experiment with democracy is not ready to be destroyed yet. Some of us place our hope in our friends and neighbors and family members who are still in their right minds, and believe we can come together and pull ourselves back from the brink.
And when we do bring religion into it, hope is an extremely significant word for people of faith. Holy hope for me is an ineffable sense of deep trust, believing the same divine power that brought me through every difficulty of life thus far is not going to abandon me now, just as you might trust your best friend or parent or spouse or someone else who has always come through for you over and over again whenever you face hard times and need extra support. With this help I have survived 100% of the situations I thought were going to destroy me. God never failed me yet. Hope in this theological sense is more than passive waiting, it is an active verb, a state of expectation, fueling inspiration and movement and action that would be impossible without hope.
oh, oh, oh, can’t turn around / we’ve come this far by faith
Hope as a source of spiritual power is a concept found in many ancient philosophies and traditions. Maybe the word can serve as a bridge uniting secular people and progressive people of faith in our common cause. We may mean different things by it, but the word resonates with all of us and each of our most recent Democratic presidents found a way to connect with it. Six weeks after the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson wrote a book called My Hope for America. The Carter Center released a book of photography called Building Hope that highlights the work of that foundation in eradicating disease in Africa. Bill Clinton’s biographical video at the 1992 Democratic National Convention was A Place Called Hope, and Obama wrote a bestselling book, The Audacity of Hope. So what Biden said so many times on the campaign trail makes perfect sense: We choose science over fiction; we choose truth over lies; we choose hope over despair and fear.
Hope is our brand.
Justice
Justice is probably the most self-explanatory of the three words and the one that most clearly differentiates the parties from each other.
The passionate intensity driving white grievance politics comes from gut-wrenching fear: How will they ever manage to survive without the systemic oppression, traditional misogyny, and institutional racism that have served them so well up until now? They must keep those Confederate battle flags flying and those traitor monuments standing! They must keep those qualified immunity laws sheltering killer cops, and stand your ground laws sheltering trigger-happy vigilantes! They must keep those mask and vaccine mandates at bay so they can offer their bodies as places for the coronavirus to mutate and grow stronger! They must keep accurate history out of public schools so their children won’t know how viciously racist their great-grandparents were! They must keep the filibuster and the Electoral College in place to maintain white supremacist minority rule in the Senate and the White House, and pass new laws allowing gerrymandered state legislatures to declare the Republican candidate the winner regardless of how many votes are cast! They turn their desperate eyes to the Republican Party, standing ready to do anything and everything to prevent those interlocking injustices from being dismantled.
Needless to say, it is our job as Democrats to dismantle it.
“Justice” is also a word Republicans must be afraid of, since they are working so hard to try to devalue it, throwing around the phrase “social justice warrior” as if it were some kind of insult.
Damn right I am a social justice warrior! Been one for decades and proud of it! A recent diary where Daily Kos members were calling each other “Warrior” as a title of respect really got my juices flowing! Hillary said half the Republican base belonged in a basket of deplorables, and they responded by putting it on T-shirts. If those same deplorables want to call me a social justice warrior, I’ll gladly wear that label as a badge of honor (and on T-shirts too, if necessary).
I am hoping we do not descend into the kind of civil war conservative domestic terrorists are hoping for, but we have already been fighting one pitched battle after another in the never-ending culture war for quite a few decades now. Democrats have won some big battles and lost a few. We may lose a big one soon when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is decided. Justice work can be heartbreaking. But we are in this for the long haul.
If the Democratic Party claims the moral high ground on justice issues, it has the potential to create a lot of excitement among younger voters, intermittent voters, formerly apathetic voters, and many others who are just figuring out which party is on the right side of history with respect to racial justice, reproductive justice, gender justice, environmental justice, and many other areas of systemic inequality.
Health, Hope and Justice
So this is what I am proposing as a unifying campaign slogan for 2022 and beyond.
Democrats are the party of health, hope and justice.
It’s short, it’s memorable. The words are easy to understand. It rolls off the tongue and it starts conversations.
Best of all, it would be a real pretzel twist for Republicans to try to co-opt any of those three words for themselves.
Agree? Disagree? Comments are invited and welcome below! The story will be accepting comments all week.
You can also make comments here about any previous week in the series. 💙 💙 💙
time is truly wastin’ / there’s no guarantee / smile is in the makin’ / we gotta fight the powers that be
Previously in the series:
29 Nov 21 ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control’, updated for 2022
22 Nov 21 How to get better message discipline in the Democratic party