Mike Rant #2 — It's Not My Party, and I'll Rant If I Want To

by Mike Davenport, Prosperity, Pennsylvania

Graphic by Rowan Procter

People ask me if I'm a Republican or Democrat. Here's your answer: Republicans are sadists. Democrats are cowards. We need political leaders who serve everyday people and put their interests first.

I served one term as Mayor of Prosperity, Pennsylvania. I was not a politician; I was an outraged citizen. I promised the voters that I’d work with them to make their lives better. Our program was simple and radical: everyone gets a job, everyone gets a meal, and everyone gets to see a doctor no matter how poor. No bureaucrats, no accountants, no red tape, no gatekeepers, just friends helping friends. Socialism without government. Let’s get busy.

What we’ve done has united Republicans and Democrats. Both parties hate us! Why? Because we’ve proven that people are better off without them, because the whole rotten system is a con.

So this is me ranting against both parties. (But I do have a better idea.)

The Republicans: The Economics of Sadism

In a country where 40% of our children worry about their next meal, Republicans want to cancel school lunch programs. We’ve got Walmart workers who can’t afford an apartment, so they sleep in their cars…and Republicans want to throw 14 million people off their healthcare to fund tax breaks for people who make over $4 million a year. They shovel billions to defense contractors while cutting taxes, adding trillions to the deficit they claim to care about.

Now they're telling parents they don't have to vaccinate their kids. So you send your kid to school not knowing if the kid next to them has measles or whooping cough. And they call this “Freedom!”

None of this helps anyone in my hometown. More hunger, more anger, less healthcare, and higher prices from chaotic tariffs. Remember those manufacturing jobs Trump promised? His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act incentivized companies to move jobs overseas by taxing foreign profits at lower rates than domestic ones. He literally paid corporations to abandon American workers.

The Democrats: Profiles in Cowardice

Democrats like to think they're better. For years, I was a “hold my nose” Democrat who grudgingly voted for the “just slightly less evil” party. They're not trying to starve children or strip healthcare from the poorest people. But just when we need ‘em the most, they’re on the sidelines claiming to feel “grave concern” that Trump and his goons are grabbing people off the street and sending them to God-knows-where with no day in court.

As the Trumpies feed vital government agencies into the woodchipper, the Democrats huddle in backrooms trying to parse the nuances of focus group feedback. “If only we had ‘our own Joe Rogan’! That would solve everything!” People are in the street screaming for Democracy and justice, and the Democrats are trying to find a “viable message.” WTF?? Here’s a viable message: “Let’s stop breaking stuff that’s not broken and obeying the law.” Democrats are beholden to the same plutocratic billionaires as Republicans. They're just more polite about it.

The Prosperity Party: A Real Alternative

We need a new party built on what works for everyday people. Call it the Prosperity Party, based on what we've done here.

EVERYONE WHO NEEDS A JOB GETS ONE. In my hometown, we created three thousand jobs in two months (in a town of ten thousand). We renovate buildings for affordable housing and new businesses. This country needs millions of workers to handle our transition to clean energy and defeat global warming (not "climate change," that sanitized phrase oil companies made up to make eco-collapse sound manageable.) Let’s put people to work making America a better place!

EVERYONE WHO IS HUNGRY GETS A MEAL. In Prosperity, we grow our own food and enjoy it together at our noon community meal. Nobody goes hungry, especially children. The richest country on earth can’t feed its people? Of course we can. We tell ourselves, “It’s too hard, and we can’t afford it.” Well, my hometown proved it’s not, and we can. So let’s!

EVERYONE GETS HEALTHCARE, PERIOD. Our wellness clinic sees everyone on a “pay what you can” basis. Let’s do this everywhere. Too expensive? Maybe we can claw back some of the billions we’re spending on aircraft carriers and manned fighter jets that can be brought down by a swarm of Radio Shack drones.

You want to see Democracy in action? Come to Prosperity, Pennsylvania. Lunch is on us.

But fair warning: once you see what's possible when people stop waiting for permission to help each other, you'll get to work doing this in your own hometown. And that’s what keeps the people in both parties up at night.

AUTHOR NOTE: Mike Davenport is a character in the book “Prosperity, Pennsylvania.” You can buy a copy here and here.

You can find the Audible version here.

The book is about how an everyday collection of optimists transformed a downtrodden Rust Belt town. The town isn’t saved by a miraculous intervention of government or big business. The people save themselves by imagining a society that works together to work for them and then gets to work to make this vision a reality.

Here’s what reader Max Sand shared on Amazon about the book: “Against all odds, a ragtag collection of regular folks come together to turn their lives around. Powerful forces are arrayed against them, but what they do to push past them is surprising and clever and totally grounded in reality. If you like It's A Wonderful Life or Meet John Doe, you'll love Prosperity PA. Once the citizens of Prosperity PA realize no one is coming to save them, they save themselves. And in these dark and divided times, it's so great to read a story about people coming together and finding a way forward.”

The book is a ‘how-to’ manual for how we can all get beyond the stale ‘hate-your-neighbor’ red-blue, right-left narratives. What do we want? The love of family and friends, enough to eat, a home, health care, and a loving community where we belong. We can create these things for ourselves.

I didn’t make anything up. Everything in the book happened somewhere in the world. I just put it together in a new way.