The Democratic Party must successfully embrace the populist uprising against Trumpism, and the hijacked-GOP will not allow that to happen without a fight

If a populist swell rises up in 2018 -- one whose ranks are increased by many first-time young voters -- you can be absolutely sure that the craven brains behind the kidnapped-GOP will do everything in their power to steer that populist wave away from the DNC and toward 3rd party candidates.

THIS WILL BE THE DEFINING BATTLE AT THE END OF AMERICAN EMPIRE.

We survive if the DNC successfully embraces the populist uprising against fascism and corruption, incompetence and inhumanity.

We do not survive if the GOP fools even a few hundred thousand of them in key places to imagine -- ludicrously -- that the GOP (a veritable existential threat to the human species, soon to invite massive global coordination against our trade, nuclear and environmental policies, as well as a damning force for plutocracy and the death knell for Constitutional democracy) and the Democrats are "the same."

The GOP's task is made much easier by how very easily the disenchanted leftist skeptics fell prey to this damning logic before.

The DNC must do more than they did in 2016. I said at the time that HRC needed to invite Sanders to run with her -- and even that may not have been enough as many Sanders supporters (we don't know how many were Russian bots) appeared to think like radical rightists who are quick to call Republicans with a conscience RINOs, and freaked out about Sanders supporting Hillary over Trump -- the only rational and ethical course of action available to anyone in his position.

Righteous indignation and passion have their place, even more so when those in control of government threaten to tear children from the arms of their mothers, when corporations are let loose to destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink, when environmental and nuclear proliferation treaties are abandoned with narcissistic caprice.

BUT unbridled passion -- the kind we see on the radical right (1/3 of Americans, shockingly) and the radical left (perhaps 1/10 of us) -- the sort that cannot stop to reason, learn something new, COMPROMISE -- will kill us all.

Those of us who have not yet descended into the primordial ooze of American ignorance -- fueled by blinding anger -- must remember Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION; WHILE THE WORST

ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Compromise between the DNC and the populist uprising against the evils of Trumpism must happen or we are all lost. Set aside your passions long enough to think through what must be done. The GOP will be fueling divisions on the left from now through the elections.

Stand together. Don't be fooled. Don't be a fool. There is too much at stake.