By ADAM GOODMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | NOV 12, 2020
Most times being included on an exclusive list is an honor, like a wedding party, the starting lineup of a sports team, or a VIP invitation to the Academy Awards. This week, the “list” means you are being outed and targeted. This is exactly what some are floating, that anyone and everyone associated with President Trump should be blacklisted. One of the lead cheerleaders: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who considers anyone in the Trump orbit to be sycophants and enablers who should be tarred and feathered in the public square. The message: brand, berate and banish them. With “cancel culture” running amok trashing reputations and ruining lives, will they be satisfied with a few Trump staffers and RNC operatives garnering their wrath, or will they reach farther and deeper to donors, friendly media and/or every elected GOPer who stood by him through thick and thin? Or even decide to ostracize ordinary supporters and donors? This demonization by association is clearly bothering the president-elect, who said he wants to make sure all Americans feel invited to the dance. Joe Biden knows partisanship has become a tinder box with a fuse so short any event, disturbance or perceived wrong can lead to a conflagration neither he nor any other force can control.
History is rife with precedents here. When England’s Charles I was executed, the responsible “regicides” were themselves taunted, tortured and killed when the monarchy was restored under Charles II.
Closer to home, American workers in mining towns were blacklisted for the temerity of wanting better working and living conditions. Then there’s the McCarthy era, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, where the pretext of eradicating Communism in America led to the public pummeling of some of Hollywood’s best and most patriotic talents.
Twenty years later, the political arena turned gladiatorial when Charles Colson, an adviser to then-President Richard Nixon, put together an “enemies list” of political adversaries. As presidential counsel John Dean described it, “how can (we) use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
Fast forward to today, where stories are emanating from some on the left that Trump and his merry band must be punished, that to a person they represent the very “deplorables” Hillary Clinton admonished as responsible for taking America down into the bowels of infamy.
If this is allowed to continue without dissent, if Biden doesn’t quickly denounce any and all talk of recrimination against those who served a president who garnered 75 million votes, many of those Americans will feel they too are on a blacklist, that the words of national conciliation from the president-elect are hollow.
In 2020, Americans not only voted for a president but for a system of government that leans center-right. How else do you explain Trump’s loss while Republicans appear to have held onto the Senate and gained in the House? How else do you explain how Sen. Susan Collins of Maine weathering vicious partisan attacks to win, or Lindsey Graham in South Carolina beating a $130-million opponent, or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell surviving a years-long Democratic assault to put him out to pasture?
With all that said, America has been given a golden opportunity, to put up or shut up, to show that leaders on both sides of the aisle can align when the most important challenges — COVID, China, civil unrest, saving jobs — will ultimately determine whether any of us feel like winners.
It’s time to enlist, not blacklist, every American ready and willing to do their part.
Goodman is a partner at Ballard Partners in Washington, D.C., and the first Edward R. Murrow Senior Fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
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