Hello. I’m Alan Keele, a retired BYU Professor of German Studies, and a candidate for Utah House District 60 in South West Orem.

I’m a life-long Democrat for numerous good reasons. But I’ve added a new reason quite recently, which is, paradoxically, that it grieves me to see our Republican friends hopelessly locked in a death spiral of their own making. It’s the kind of death spiral which always follows in the wake of one-party rule. Because it favors the most extreme elements in society, one-party rule nearly inevitably leads – in the USA, no less than in Putin’s Russia or in Nazi Germany– first to corruption and then finally to utter calamity. It’s the reason Lord Acton could say that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Tragically, this death spiral created by our Republican friends is now clearly dragging the whole country and even the whole world down with them.

How did it come to this? Paradoxically, it’s because after the death of Lincoln, under the influence of growing numbers of anti-Lincoln extremists in its ranks, the Republican movement gradually shriveled into a small-tent minority party, insecure, outnumbered, racially and economically exclusive, intellectually vacuous, fundamentally fearful of honest interaction and fair competition with others: a fading zero-sum party, in other words, which fears that anyone else’s gain is at their expense.

So, under the influence of extremists, and by a whole series of nefarious machinations, our outnumbered Republican friends, frightened and desperate, began to subvert our fair and open political process for their own advantage in any number of sleazy ways:

1) for example by flagrantly gerrymandering voting districts to neutralize the advantage of other parties, thus allowing politicians to essentially pick their own voters.

2) by shamelessly suppressing free and open voting opportunities for minorities, for the disadvantaged, for the elderly, in short: for anyone extreme anti-Lincoln Republicans rightly suspect may not want to vote for their miserly and often downright kleptocratic policies.

3) by dog-whistle appeals to the basest emotions of their frightened followers, stoking fears of racial minorities, immigrants, gays, advocates for choice..., fears of having guns confiscated, portraying all these and many more as the most horrible evils in the history of the world and pinning them all on Democrats. (When I ran for this office once before, in 2010, my neighbor said, to my face: “I’d never vote for a Democrat: they are all baby killers!”)

4) by brazenly flaunting the Constitution to deny Merrick Garland a seat on the Supreme Court, for example, leaving the Court out of balance and still capable of making such outrageous decisions as

5) the infamous Citizens United fiasco, opening the floodgates to limitless dark money pouring from the extremist Koch Brothers (whose father helped found the John Birch Society), the Mercer family, and other ultra wealthy corporations, fundamentally corrupting our Democracy by destroying the very principle of “One Person, One Vote.”

6) once such an unfair imbalance, as we have here in Utah, is achieved, Republican insiders can then secretly choose their so-called “anointed candidates.” Once their names are safely on the ballot, the General Election becomes essentially a gigantic fraud on the voters, an empty gesture, just as Vladimir Putin was essentially the only choice in Russia recently.

7) Finally, this desperate and extreme Republican inferiority complex has led to that fatal “echo chamber effect” in which Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes’ Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Shawn Hannity, Ann Coulter, and many other extreme propagandists, as well as a whole network of Russian media bots conspired together to create an alternative fantasy universe in which a psychopathic Narcissist, an empty-headed  pathological liar with the personal morals of a Caligula can become President of the United States, and a sitting senior US Senator from Utah can proclaim him “the greatest president ever!” (At least that’s what Trump claimed Hatch said: this is a universe which exists only down the rabbit hole of one-party delusional extremism...)

The key word in all this is extremism. In a well-balanced two-party system, as the LDS Church has officially argued, for example expressly through President Gordon B. Hinckley and Elder Marlin K. Jensen, there is a powerful incentive for both parties to compete for and appeal to more voters in the middle, rather than at the fringes.

In a well-balanced two-party system, moderate Republicans could be freed of their historical nemesis: unbridled right wing extremism, and Democrats would continue to be safe from that kind of 60's radicalism which some of us painfully recall from the Vietnam era. Moderates on both sides of the aisle would form – defacto –  something like a benign super majority of the middle, competing for votes not with more extreme and destructive ideas, but with ever better and constructive ideas about funding the best education system in the world, creating a world-class infrastructure, attracting reputable industries providing excellent jobs, overcoming gross fiscal inequities in tax structures, providing respectable and wholesome housing for every family, effectively combating deadly air pollution, making available cutting edge and affordable health-care for each child of god, ..., and lovingly welcoming all good people, our brothers and sisters, into our midst.

We cannot expect extreme anti-Lincoln Republicans, blinded and brainwashed by their own ideologies, to immediately abandon their downward death spiral, but a new large-tent majority consisting entirely of moderates: Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike, can resolve to right the badly listing ship of state. I believe the numbers of all these moderates add up to a majority. But we must end gerrymandering, we must allow and encourage all qualified voters to cast their votes, we must allow candidates to get their names on the ballots and compete in primary elections with the “anointed ones,” we must eliminate straight ticket voting, and generally strengthen the hand of moderation and good will in myriad ways in all aspects of the political arena. The impending and inevitable implosion of the Trump fraud will, it is expected and hoped, drive many Republicans back from the lunatic fringe to the reasonable middle of the political spectrum. I, for one, anticipate welcoming them with open arms.