There remains a fundamental disconnect within the democratic party (and here) on how people review the election results that placed a bigoted fascist in power at arguably the worst point in human history. Some people, like this new user are committed to seeing the democratic party wither and die. How? By ignoring informative data like the chart above that illustrates the decline in the number of democrats since the election of President Barack Obama.
The autopsy of our party should not be predicated on selected quotes strung together to paint a false narrative that depicts moderate leftist voices as the reason Donald Trump gained power.
Context matters.
Jimmy Dore, Progressive Commentator
If Donald Trump became president he would actually be a positive for the progressives. (10/29/2016)
Let’s examine this quote for a moment as it is provided as evidence that unfaithful leftists need to be put on lists of those not sufficiently loyal to the democratic party.
On the face of it, it sounds awful. Oh no! If Donald Trump is elected it might actually reawaken a massive leftist movement against the republicans and their overreach! Has that happened since the election? Yes. Empirically the Women's March was the largest day of protest in human history, surpassing the protests world wide against the Iraq invasion. So, Jimmy Dore was correct? Biggest protests in history? Check. Huge interest in the DNC race? Check. People getting involved on the local level and being inspired to run for office? Check.
The election has been a positive for progressives. In terms of amplifying our message and uniting people against a common foe. At JFK, right after the announcement of the Muslim ban, I didn’t stand there at the protest and ask people if they had voted for Trump or for Clinton.
This comment was more predicted of the environment that would exist in a post Trump world than advocating that Trump should win the presidency. Apparently, even discussing hypothetical outcomes is tantamount to betraying the democratic party. Golly.
Let’s unpack this a little more beyond those silly strung together quotes that may have had a 0.000001% impact on the election. Third party voters will gasp vote for their third party candidate in the near numbers that they traditionally have gotten. Acting like that is some great betrayal of the United State is silly. You can clump together a few charts showing that if those evil third parties hadn’t had the unmitigated gall to attempt to run for president in our party party oligarchy and it will get you exactly what its worth. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
The real answer is why during the primary campaign independents who would have made all the difference in the election were told to fuck off. In every presidential campaign in my mind that I’ve lived through I remember hearing that the parties have to reach the independent voter. They gotta get those willy people engaged. Often, the meaning implicit of that was that the democratic party had to lurch rightwards in an attempt to cater to bigots and expanding the neoliberal tent of rightward economic thought.
The truth is that there are many within the democratic party who are sick of torture, domestic warrantless wiretapping, student loan peonage, charter schools, the war on drugs, and a host of issues that democrats have continually embraced on their own. Arne Duncan and Betsey Devos? Two sides of the same coin only one was mildly neoliberal while the other one is an insane privileged, wealthy neoliberal.
Yet, the democratic party decided that those people aren’t who should be pursued. Nope, let’s go after those republican voters. You know, the ones who had 25 years of continual propaganda against Clinton from the rightwing. Apparently, behavior isn’t something that can be predicted and no one EVER saw that republicans would crawl under broken glass and that running a candidate with historically high unfavorable against a political outsider in an outsider election was a bad idea.
So let’s get to lists. You like em right?
Tim Kaine:
The vice presidential candidate told The Associated Press on Saturday that he and Hillary Clinton have already spoken about how to heal the nation if they should win. He said tackling economic anxieties, finding common policy ground with the GOP and perhaps bringing Republicans into the administration would be elements of unity, though he added that he and Clinton did not discuss Cabinet positions.
"We have not run this campaign as a campaign against the GOP with the big broad brush — we've run it against Donald Trump," Kaine said. He predicted: "We're going to get a lot of Republican votes and that will also be part of, right out of the gate, the way to bring folks back together."
Yes, that’s a super smart strategy. Inspire people on the left to turn out by telling them just how they are going to work with republicans to get things done. If anyone remembers, anything from the last 8 years is that it was exactly this sentiment that led to the schism between Barack Obama and the progressive wing of his party. Finding compromise is great. I expect it in a functional republic to be part of how big things get done. However, soft negotiation and signalling concession before votes are cast or elections are won will not bring people out to vote. This is a single quote. Tim Kaine repeated this sentiment multiple times, including the night before the election on national TV. I’d put that guy on the top of any list that was going to speak to the reason why democrats aren’t currently enjoying power.
Then you know, you have our own candidate praising Nancy Regan with one of her many unforced errors:
“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
Deep wounds were reopenen needlessly.
Let’s not pretend that quotes determine the entire outcome of the election where millions of different pieces are in play. Clinton could have spent more time in the rust belt, the place, I’d point out that Bernie Sanders did better than Clinton with the demographics that stayed home in those key states we lost.
Easier though to blame third party voters and independents that stayed home instead of the party that has lurched rightaward economically. Could Clinton have come out against the TPP authentically? Maybe. Had she had the political acuity to not have the language blocked for inclusion in the democratic party platform. That sent a very strong message to labor. Why is Donald Trump getting standing ovations from unions when he claimed he was walking away from the TPP? Gosh. You think THAT would mean more than a few pessimistic out of context quotes?
Right?
The democratic party is at its lowest point of power since the Great Depression. That is a fact. We, as a party have lost over 900 elected seats in state legislatures, school board, governorship’s, and on every level in government except the judiciary. Our country has the largest wealth gap between the rich and the poor since the Gilded Age of the late 1880s. There is real anger out there that Donald Trump was able to claim as his own. He should not have been able to claim a populist mantle. Humanity faces a mass extinction on this planet if Climate Change remains unaddressed.
I could put a whole lot of people on this list who have actively worked against the democratic party (DWS refusing to challenge republicans in her own state as DNC chair) — and in turn assisted Donald Trump in being elected over the person I voted for, Hillary Clinton. Yet, I won’t do that. I don’t like lists of people. I’ve made one or two here and then decided, what the hell am I doing? Is this productive? Is this the type of behavior I want to engage in going forward?
No. It’s not. You know who has historically liked lists a whole lot? Authoritarians and those who wish to stifle speech. If you want the democratic party to grow, the first step would be to making it more democratic with open primaries, same day registration, online registration, a uniform countrywide voting system, restoring voting rights to felons, and finding creative ways to restore the Voting Rights Act.
Until the concerns of the 99% are addressed we will continue to lose at the ballot box. No real path forward can be achieved until the economic corporatism, regulatory capture, and rightward march of our party is addressed.
You can blame the messengers or fix the fucking problem.