Why I’m Not Joining the Economic Blackout Day
Why is it wrong for The New York Times to be evenhanded (its mission is to report news “without fear or favor”) but OK for People’s Union USA? I’m a partisan for the Democratic Party—not because it’s perfect, but rather because it’s the only major party that’s remotely sane. I’m in no mood to hear it even hinted that, as George Wallace famously put it in 1968, there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. There’s a billion-dollar difference. The GOP has completely lost its mind.
We’re in an emergency, but the emergency isn’t that “the system as a whole” is unsatisfactory in some ill-defined way. The emergency is that Donald Trump is president, and he’s trying to turn this country into a dictatorship. Let’s focus on that. As they said in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, “Keep your eyes on the prize.” The prize in this instance is preserving the rule of law, which Trump defies at every turn. The civil rights movement, Thomas E. Ricks argues in his excellent book Waging a Good War, was plotted with the precision of a military campaign. We need to apply that same military-style discipline to fighting Trump.
People’s Union USA acknowledges in a backhanded way that Trump is the problem by making the boycott partly about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs. These are in eclipse largely because Trump and his fellow Republicans are bullying corporations to drop them. But boycotting all of corporate America doesn’t work here, because not all of corporate America has abandoned DEI. Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Costco, Delta Airlines, and Microsoft are all standing by their DEI programs. To whatever extent this protest is about DEI, punishing good actors (on this issue, anyway) along with bad ones defeats the purpose.
