The primary reason that our government is broken is the simple truth that both Democrats and Republicans have moved too far to the right. Extremists are destroying the Republican Party. Democrats are split between old party members who have moved over the center line to the right, and ‘new, progressive Democrats’ who want to move back towards the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I tend to side with the latter.

Democrats must return to taking action for minorities, women, the LGBTQ community and others instead of offering empty rhetoric.

“We need to be firm and deliberate with [North Korea], but reckless rhetoric is not a strategy to keep America safe,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted in August, after Trump infamously threatened Pyongyang with “fire and fury.”

Younger and more liberal Democrats share a slightly different opinion.

In a letter sent to Trump before his departure for the G7 and the North Korean Summit in Singapore, Schumer and other old line Democrats urged Trump to be tough and demand total nuclear disarmament. Younger and more aggressive Democrats disagreed.

“We’re stuck in an old way of thinking on foreign policy, and that letter reflected it,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a phone interview. “That letter could have been written by John Bolton.”

A more progressive wing of the Democratic Party believes that a hard line approach will fail. Without experienced and talented diplomats at the table, the talks will likely be futile.

“It was worse than useless, and it was irresponsible,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and Colin Powell’s former director of policy planning at the State Department, said in a phone interview. “[The letter] was a truly unrealistic and unhelpful intervention. … It was totally consistent with what the national security adviser has been arguing.”

We will all know in a few days if any level of success was accomplished at the meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un. We will all hope for the best, but some of us have doubts.

Op-ed by James Turnage

SOURCE

Image courtesy of DonkeyHotey

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