The front lines are not inside the Beltway, says David Pepper “The battle for democracy is a long battle,” says David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic chair. It is harder for Democrats to win with election-cycle thinking, I’d argue, and because they always seem to be fighting the last war with the wrong weapons. More on that later. Paul Rosenberg provides a Salon interview with David Pepper following the release of “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American.” (It’s on my to-do list.) Pepper wrote it as a follow-up to “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines” because so many readers (as I did) skipped to the end to look for answers to Pepper’s all-too-familiar diagnosis of where the reactionary right is taking the country. “Team D” and “Team A” are fighting different battles, Pepper argues. Small-d democrats still believe the answer to pushing back on the autocrats is about electoral victories at the federal level. Then they win them they discover “that they weren’t really victories.” Why not? As I wrote in 2016: I live in a state taken over by a T-party legislature that has passed one of the worst voter ID bills in the country, drafted absolutely diabolical redistricting maps, passed HB2 as a get-out-the-vote tool, and launches regular legislative attacks against our cities where the largest block of blue votes are. President Bernie isn’t going to fix that for me. Neither is President Hillary. And not in Michigan or Wisconsin either. We have…