Ten years ago my husband, former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, and I wrote an op-ed for The Denver Post asking this question: Is Democracy really up to the task of solving the myriad of challenges we are facing?
As I review our question a decade later, I would reverse it to ask: Are we up to the task of saving democracy?
As a progressive Democrat and a Hillary Clinton supporter, I find myself in good conservative company — such as that of New York Times columnists Ross Douthat and David Brooks and author Andrew Sullivan — when I warn that the 2016 election is more than a game changer. It could be a disastrous direction changer if Donald Trump is elected president.
The possibility of electing such an egotistical, autocratic, violence-inspiring, gun-promoting, crude, boastful, know-nothing, xenophobic, racist and sexist candidate to the highest office in the land would be a tragedy, not just to the Republican Party, but to democracy itself.
As Brooks writes, “Each candidate has to cross some basic threshold of dependability as a human being before itap even relevant to judge his or her policy agenda. Trump doesn’t cross that threshold.”
But to defeat this self-promoting bully, we have to better understand the forces that propelled him to become the Republican Party standard-bearer.
One reason is that people — including some middle-class, working and educated people — are angry. Their jobs are going overseas, their real wages have not been raised in 40 years, they do not see their children going to college or rising above them in economic status.
They resent undocumented workers taking their jobs and crowding their children’s schools.
They are angry at the factories that have closed down and closed them out, and that government has done almost nothing to train them for new positions.
They feel downtrodden and immobilized by their, or their children’s, enormous student debts.
They are frightened of terrorism and do not feel it is prejudicial to worry about Muslim immigration.
And none of this necessarily makes these Trump supporters racist xenophobes.
But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and what a potential disaster that such an autocrat as Trump might move into this leadership vacuum. History — particularly the rise of fascism in Europe only 80 years ago — has shown that when a political vacuum occurs, an autocrat will move in.
Pollsters have found that the theme running through all the issues that voters are angry about is the feeling that “People like me don’t have any say.” They feel they are disenfranchised.
So for those of us who fear a Trump presidency, our job is to listen to, empathize with, then proselytize the disenfranchised.
Trump’s excesses can prevent discussion of the many nuances of the issues he raises.
For example, many progressives are not “open-border liberals.” We worry about the effects of overpopulation in our own country, and the fact that immigrants sometimes take the jobs of our own poor and unemployed at the time that so many U.S. jobs are simply disappearing.
Yet we are stymied from expressing these views as they may line us up with Trump’s anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim views, which we strongly disavow.
Clearly, this is crisis time in America. And the times are moving fast, mostly in the wrong direction. In order to reverse that direction, we may have to stretch well outside our comfort zones — to listen more intently and then to engage those who confront us even when we fear them.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”
Dottie Lamm (dolamm59@gmail.com) is a former first lady of Colorado. She is a member of Colorado Women for Hillary.
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