It's Time for a Grand Anti-Trump Coalition

This is a time to put aside old fights and unite, for now, against a clear and present danger.

MICHAEL TOMASKY
11.28.17 5:00 AM ET

Benjamin Wittes is one of those names you may have gotten to know in the Trump era. Not that you shouldn’t have known him before, but in the past 11 months, the Brookings scholar has produced more than his share of posts that have gone viral on the Lawfare blog, especially the ones he wrote about his friendship with James Comey just after President Trump fired him.

That friendship and his frank posts have helped him carve out a unique space for himself in the Age of Trump. And he seems to know it and is prepared to use it. Over the weekend, in a move that ignited animated discussions in my circles, Wittes took to Twitter and produced 18 tweets dedicated to the proposition that all decent people of left and right must set aside their differences and unite to defeat Trump and Trumpism.

Under the hashtags #CoalitionofAllDemocraticForces and #IBelieve, Wittes argued that he wants to see “a temporary truce on all [questions of disagreement], an agreement to maintain the status quo on major areas of policy dispute while Americans of good faith collectively band together to face a national emergency. #IBelieve that facing that national emergency requires unity.” He wants Americans “across the political spectrum [to] unite around a political program based on the protection of American democracy and American institutions.”

It’s a new and bold idea in the current context. In larger historical terms, of course, nothing is new. It’s reminiscent of the old Popular Front idea on the left. The PF was the project of the communists of the 1930s who thought it would be of greatest strategic value to band together with socialists and even liberals—who communists in normal times reviled as servants of capitalism—to defeat Hitlerian fascism. The project was launched in Moscow and thus took many different forms in England, France, and other countries. Here in the United States, the CPUSA under Earl Browder decided to support the New Deal. And when the USSR became our ally during World War II, Roosevelt and Stalin, two men with very different and indeed irreconcilable world views, were both Popular Frontists.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-time-for-a-grand-anti-trump-coalition