There is sound cause to think that way, as an electorate could irrationally react that way, while the counterargument is Ellison is correct to stand his ground it having a purpose, and that the party should change, not Ellison, and in a unified voice publicly stand that Wardlow is a threat and that Ellison stands between the threat and it happening, and that the aim of good people of conscience should be to elevate the electorate's understanding. Loudly. In the context of an enlightening Atlantic item noted online by an independent mind we in Minnesota should value, the Atlantic, here, saying in small part:
The end of the Reconstruction era was not an inevitable outcome. It was a political choice. Republicans might have committed themselves to arming and organizing black citizens to resist the campaign of terrorism that ended Reconstruction. But the Republican Party was not as committed to pluralism as the Democrats were to white supremacy. White Republicans such as Louisiana Governor Henry Clay Warmoth saw their role as not just resisting the violence and despotism of the Democratic Party but also preventing the newly emancipated from attempting to, in Warmoth’s words, “Africanize the state.”
Or, as Ted Tunnell writes, “Reconstruction failed on the lower Mississippi mainly because Louisiana whites believed more devoutly in white supremacy than the Radicals believed in the rights of man.” It is hard to look at the leaders of today’s Democratic Party and avoid a similar conclusion: that the intensity of their commitment to fighting the president’s agenda is not equal to the passion of those who carry the banner of Trumpism.
After Trump intimidated the NFL into banning protests against police brutality during the national anthem, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi could not even muster a defense of the players’ right to protest the murder of their countrymen by agents of the state. “I love the national anthem. I love the flag, and I love the First Amendment, and I'll just leave it at that,” Pelosi said at a CNN town hall in May. During a month in which the Trump administration’s horrifying policy of shattering undocumented families and placing children in cages was revealed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the floor to denounce Representative Maxine Waters for calling on Americans to protest Cabinet officials when they see them in public. Steny Hoyer, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House, condemned as “inappropriate” his Latino colleagues’ protest of the president when he visited Congress. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leader of the party’s left flank, rebuked a restaurateur in Virginia for refusing to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The leadership of the opposition party is moved to shock, embarrassment, and even anger when its lower-ranking members are mildly intemperate in their opposition.
While the leaders of the Democratic Party do not share the Trump-era Republican enthusiasm for a white man’s government, their unwillingness to fight fiercely for the constituencies threatened by Trumpism suggests a reluctance to take the necessary measures to win the political battle ahead of them, because unlike those constituencies, the stakes for them are not existential.
There is hope for the Democratic Party in its base. The black and brown workers intimately acquainted with the two-faced nature of American liberty, the rebellious teachers whose surprise strikes brought red-state politicians to heel, the young leftists whose cold-eyed understanding of power mirrors that of their Republican opponents, and the feminists who flooded the streets after Trump’s inauguration forced the nation to reckon with the ascension of predatory men to the highest levels of culture, clergy, and state. But they will have to contend with a party establishment that is so divorced from the lives of those the Trump administration has put in peril that it cannot comprehend what will be required to defeat Trumpism. Democracy is a fight, and the Democratic Party’s leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.
“Punishment is not how this place works,” Schumer told The Washington Post in late July, explaining his reasons for not pressuring red-state Democrats to oppose Kavanaugh. The Democratic leadership is allowing Trump to solidify his hold on the federal judiciary and offering token opposition to the Supreme Court nominee of a president under at least two federal investigations whom half the country wants impeached, while castigating its own lower-ranking party members for protesting Trump officials.
Americans have an unfortunate tendency to see U.S. history as an epic, sweeping narrative with a Hollywood-style happy ending. That false promise of the final triumph of the forces of good is one reason why America’s struggles with racism remain so persistent, and why Americans seem so surprised when what they see as a distant, shameful history emerges in the present.
That false promise has also manifested in an unfortunate tendency to imagine the Trump administration in retrospect from some hypothetical future in which its worst excesses—its corruption, discriminatory agenda, and reckless policies—are held to account.
[italics added] Ellison wants the fight to upgrade the outlook of an electorate, not to make a peace that would comfort some who are not as much under the bootheel as others, and the question of easing the bootheel and discrediting it has no easy answer. Is the answer to sacrifice the Boundary Waters to risk of five hundred years of devastation because to oppose mining interests might result in an election loss, with a consequent loss of the ability to do some good in other ways? Or is there a stand that is right, compromise aside, which should be taken?
Read the entire Atlantic item because it is about much more than is excerpted, but saying that, please do not fail to take the excerpt to heart. It defines an impediment toward positive action in judgment, among those knowing better.