The new symbol of the Democratic Party
Update: So I’m out of the penalty box, and wanted to put in one last word. Thanks to all of you who read and responded to what I wrote. To those who clearly didn’t read or didn’t consider my points, thank you for illustrating my thesis. Too many Democratic party loyalists here seem determined to learn nothing from the election returns. Trying to turn the Electoral College is a fool’s errand. Citing the popular vote is pointless: Hillary lost the damn election, people. Blaming the Russians or James Comey or me for that loss is engaging in the most hopeless form of denial of the real problem: the Democratic party is at its weakest point in almost a century, thanks to the actions of its leadership over the last three decades. And to those here attacking me personally, or Jill Stein voters, or anybody who’s not already on board the Democratic party as you think it should be, congratulations. You are and remain the problem, and you stand in the way of the solution.
I’ve been missing from around these parts since our Dear Leader pronounced that free speech would no longer be tolerated in his joint. (Remind you of anyone?) The Brock-sponsored shills have come and gone, so I thought I’d come back to take a look around. Not a pretty sight. It appears that the Orthodox wing of the party, well represented here, seems determined to learn nothing from last month’s events. Instead it has doubled down on its delusions and its failed approach to politics, and is as hostile as ever to anyone disagreeing with them. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are in charge, assuring that the Wall Street sponsors of the party will maintain their grip on control like Gollum clutching the Ring as he hurtles down to a sea of fire.
Newbies won’t know who I am. Ask around. I had been here since late 2004, and have always been a consistent commenter and staunch advocate of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. But now I’m an independent. I left the party after the Convention, disgusted at the cynicism and overreach of the Clinton campaign. Subsequent revelations from Wikileaks only confirm what I already knew. This is the first time in over 40 years, since I first registered to vote, that I am not a Democrat. But, as so many former Republicans — and a growing number of former Democrats — have said: I didn’t leave the party, the party left me. DLC controllers (starting with the Clintons), Wall Street greedheads, asshole manipulators like David Brock, and sanctimonious know-nothings have all played a part in my departure. I do not contemplate rejoining the Democratic party in the near future, and may never do so again.
I am not alone. From a recent high of 36% of the electorate in 2008, Democratic party share of the electorate has hovered around 26-28% in estimates during the general election. Independents far outnumber Republicans or Democrats, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that they could approach the number of Republicans and Democrats when Gallup gets around to its biennial count in January. The result in electoral failure for the Democratic party since the 2010 midterms is well known around here, and it mirrors the failure of formerly center-left parties in Europe as well. When I was a Democrat and writing around here, I warned against the temptation to blame scapegoats and avoid embracing the need for the party to change. I pointed out that the history of the Clintons’ corruptions was the story of the Democratic party in recent years, and argued for the need for a change. The party stubbornly resisted change or cleaning itself up. It embraced the status quo and its comfortable Establishment identity. It told those demanding better to shut up and cheer, and fall in line. This site was a typical and reliable mouthpiece for the party establishment in these respects. I did not want to abide by the political fictions it embraced in recent months, so for the first time in over a decade I left.
If Democrats want to win again, they need to win me back. Far more importantly, they need to win millions of voters back, and embrace a lot more. What is the party doing wrong, and what can it do differently?
Stop taking voters for granted
I was a vociferous Bernie backer during the primaries, seeing him as the last best chance for the Democratic party to remember its New Deal, working class identity. The Clinton campaign’s cynical, divisive, dishonest politicking during the primaries disgusted me, and Hillary Clinton’s ham-handed and outrageously insulting outreach to Republicans even during the primaries disqualified her for my vote. In November, I voted for Jill Stein for president.
Want to blame me for Donald Trump? Well, go fuck yourself. Hillary Clinton threw away my vote in the general election. She won my state handily without my vote, so I had nothing to do with her losing. In January of this year I warned this community of what would happen if Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump:
The most important lesson the 2016 campaign teaches so far is that people are fed up with the status quo, and are no longer willing to listen to the establishment’s opinion shapers telling them the way things are supposed to be. They are increasingly believing their lying eyes…. People in general are increasingly unwilling to accept the arguments for the status quo, the preemptive capitulation to the power of money, the reality of oligarchy.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders derive much of the power driving their candidacies from this rebellious mood. They speak different languages to different audiences, but the subtext of their appeal is similar in this respect. Throw the Bums Out is a much more potent argument this year than More of the Same. And people are increasingly wise to the game power plays, in which bums are thrown out to be replaced by more bums….
Hillary Clinton’s long record (the downside of “experience” is that it leaves a record) leaves her defenseless against the weapon of the corruption issue. And Republicans know it. Donald Trump has already fired a shot across her bow by mentioning her association with him. It is not unlikely that one of the reasons the Republican establishment has begun cozying up to the Donald is that they see a possibility he can beat Hillary. If they’re right, corruption will no doubt be the main feature of their general election campaign. Another endless round of accusations and scandals surrounding a Clinton, this time with a lot more evidence than was available to those pushing the Vince Foster conspiracy nonsense….
Indeed, “Crooked Hillary” was a constant refrain from Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Blame me for being a Cassandra if you wish, but I’m not the reason 68% of the electorate found Hillary Clinton dishonest and untrustworthy. Yes, yes, 30 years of right-wing attacks blah blah blah, but the point Clinton fans refuse to acknowledge is that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s own actions created that distrust. They were constantly engaged in dodgy and barely-legal (if that) stuff that invited Republican attacks. They created a target-rich environment for these attacks, and Hillary reaped what she sowed. So did all the rest of us, unfortunately.
Clintonian triangulation has become the meat and drink of modern Democratic party politics. The Clintons were all about slicing and dicing the electorate, trying to appeal to this group or that to try to cobble together a bare majority. The Democratic party has followed their lead. DailyKos is a hotbed of this stupidity. Every damn day you read people talking about PoC or women or the WWC or college-educated white people or whatnot. These groups are treated as the indivisible atoms of political tactics. The stereotyping and disregard for the individuality of voters, who have their own concerns and conflicts and histories and ideas, is lost in this triangulating calculus. People don’t fit neatly into little boxes. Nobody likes being treated as a stereotype, and that’s pretty much all today’s Democratic party does come campaign season. The results of this approach can be seen in Washington, in state capitols, and among dog-catchers nationwide.
Democratic politicians act as if they own the votes of “their base,” the contents of the little boxes they feel they’ve collected on their side. “Where else are they going to go?” is the implicit — and sometimes explicit — assumption. The obvious answer, as midterm elections and even last month’s general election showed, is “Away.” For every Stein voter there were scores of “Democratic” “base” voters who stayed home, or even showed up but didn’t vote for president. The Democratic party is entitled to precisely no one’s vote. It has to earn every one. And it has been failing to win enough of them to win elections, very conspicuously and catastrophically in recent years.
It’s the economy, stupid
Arguments have raged around here, as at many other social media sites and Democratic-leaning media outlets, about an alleged battle between economic populist issues, as represented by Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and social justice issues, as purportedly represented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. These are often portrayed as being in opposition, a binary choice. The argument is often framed as which is more important. Let me be clear: this is stupid and is bullshit. Economic and social justice issues are not opposed to each other. They are like your right and left hand. You need both to be fully functional and operate at peak efficiency. They are not identical, but they are matched. They proceed from the same set of values and moral imperatives. They are the political embodiment of the Golden Rule. They are why most of us became Democrats in the first place.
Those pitting one set of issues against the other refuse to see this obvious truth. There is always a reason for this, though people’s reasons differ. But the end result of these arguments, like all such arguments pitting people against each other in politics, is the same: The owners of this country win. Divide and Conquer is ruling class politics 101: it’s as basic a technique as there is for keeping a country’s people under the thumb of its ownership class. Those who foment such arguments are doing the bidding of the oligarchs, whether they choose to see it that way or not.
The New Deal Democratic party found its way out of the political wilderness and built an enduring majority party that lasted for decades by essentially standing up for the 99% against the 1%, as we would put it today. Of course there were aspects of racism and injustice it committed, as it was a creation of its time and place. But it generally did not worsen these social ills while it pursued the goals of economic justice. (Yes, Manzanar was one glaring exception, and you could name others.) Did it do enough to fight racism and sexism and other forms of inequality? Of course not. But the New Deal Democratic party convinced African-Americans to become Democrats rather than Republicans pretty overwhelmingly, so in the context of the time they must have done something right.
Today we have economic inequality rivaling the worst of the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties, and it shows no sign of abating its rapidly worsening trend. Poor, working class and middle class Americans are hurting. Most are worried and pessimistic about the future. Median household income hasn’t come close to recovering from the level it reached at the end of the 1990’s, as a bubble-fueled economic boom was about to pop. US life expectancy has begun to fall, a surefire sign of a sick society. The suicide rate in this country is at a 30 year high, with women and middle-aged Americans killing themselves at much higher rates than in the past. Our national infrastructure is getting worse all the time. All these big-picture statistics paint a nation in decline, offering the mass of its citizens little or no reason for optimism.
Today’s Democratic party offers little hope for the vast majority of Americans worried about their economic security today and in the future. Obamacare is its main recent achievement, but increasing numbers of Americans are finding their mandated insurance unaffordable to use if they need it, and rising premiums for insurance they can’t afford to use only deepens their stress. Hillary Clinton’s campaign offered little to address these concerns: Jobs only rated fifth among her campaign’s issues-based ads, and economic issues didn’t hit the top five in her allied super-PAC’s advertising. But for decades, the Democratic party has moved away from lunchbucket economic issues and constituencies. It’s no accident that Card Check never came up in the 2009-10 Congress, or that Barack Obama never put on his comfortable shoes to walk a picket line. Everybody could see Barack Obama’s quest for the TPP, just like they could see his previous quest for a Grand Bargain to cut Social Security. He was Captain Ahab on these issues, for Chrissakes. And nobody believed Hillary Clinton’s campaign conversion on the TPP. Nobody trusts her, remember?
Concern for working class welfare is not racist. PoC are disproportionately represented in this class, as are women, and their concerns for a job with a living wage, a chance to put some savings away and buy a home, and see their kids have a better life are not substantially different than working class white men. Participating in the Divide and Conquer game, just like the Republicans, only gives people scapegoats to blame for their troubles. The false dichotomy between economic and social issues has in practice allowed the Democratic party to continue to pursue its economic agenda favoring the wealthy while pretending to be “progressive” or “liberal” or “left.” In doing so, they have robbed these labels of much of their historic meaning. These words are signifiers that signify less and less. Looking back to January, I observed this as well:
Today we are functionally an oligarchy, with the Democratic and Republican parties acting as divisions in the Governmental Affairs Department of America, Inc…. [T]he New Deal Democratic party is as dead as the Whigs. Our latter-day version is one more vehicle of corporate influence: the Goldman Division, as it were. We are locked in phony battle with the Koch Division for spectacles of Potemkin democracy, which offer choices that cost the owners of this country nothing and usually improve their quarterly numbers. Nothing can be done anymore that doesn't pay off billionaire sponsors first and last. Social wedge issues are used by both parties to keep their partisans cheering, but these issues have negligible cost to the sponsors of the contest.
You catch more voters with honey than with vinegar
When I bowed out of participation here, Bernie Sanders supporters were being run off in fairly vile and hateful ways. It was made clear that we were not welcome, and the Clinton campaign didn’t need us. We would be tolerated, barely, if we behaved ourselves and didn’t bring up inconvenient facts. Even these days, with the Clinton campaign reduced to a smoking crater in the ground, this sentiment is common — it seems to be the prevailing sentiment still, in my brief visits lately. How did that exclusionary vision work out for you Clinton fans?
It wasn’t just DailyKos. The Clinton campaign was just as bad at the convention, muzzling and evicting Sanders delegates from the floor. Clinton made plays for suburban Republican voters, and her campaign explicitly believed that they’d pick up more country-club Republican voters than they’d lose pissed off working class folks. The entire campaign was the apotheosis of Clintonian triangulation, and perfectly reflected Thomas Frank’s thesis in his recent book "Listen, Liberal." Accusations of Racism and Sexism and Privilege were liberally (!) hurled at those who didn’t toe the party line, in a transparent effort to silence dissent. These accusations were usually wrong, and always truculent. The economic left of the party — what remained of it — was shown the door of the not-so-big tent.
Candidates and parties win when more voters vote for them than the other side. Exclusionary rhetoric and intolerant gaslighting does not win support, it actively repels it. After years of criticizing the Democratic party from the inside in an effort to improve it, I gave up on it this year. I voted for some Democrats, but not for Hillary Clinton. Again, my single vote didn’t make a difference, as Democrats won up and down my ballot. But I offer myself as a cautionary tale to the purity police on DailyKos and around the Democratic party, for whom any deviation from party orthodoxy is cause for burning at the stake. You party purists are not always right, and you’re almost always wrong when it comes to attacking anyone who doesn’t agree with you or vote the way you want them to all the time.
Here are some suggestions, from a former Democrat many of you know:
- If you want more votes, you need to do more listening and less accusing. Ask questions of people, and listen to what they tell you. Efforts to “improve your messaging,” so popular around here, only amount to finding more ways to tell people what you think they should believe. This is rarely convincing or productive.
- You need to find some humility, and admit that once in a while, perhaps, you might be wrong about something. Especially those of you who were comprehensively wrong during the late campaign season. Dog knows the Democratic party has had enough lessons in humility lately, and it will have plenty more until it starts to learn what those lessons are trying to teach.
- Don’t set yourself up in opposition to the large majority of voters, white people. You don’t have to pander to racists to find a common agenda that appeals to a wide swath of white voters, while maintaining a strong social justice agenda. The Democratic party did just this for decades, with far more success than it currently claims.
- Address the economic fears and pain so many of your countrymen and women face, even if their lives are not like yours. Develop a forward-looking vision for what this country can do to reinvent its middle class, and rescue itself from the clutches of rapacious billionaires. Even if they are big Clinton donors.
- Apologize to the voters. Admit that what you’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Listen to other ideas for what might work better. And admit, Goddammit, that what has happened to the Democratic party is its own damn fault. Stop the scapegoat hunt, and place the blame on the people who’ve actually been making the decisions and calling the shots that led to this catastrophe.
If you ever want to win elections again, stop telling me and millions of other people like me that we’re traitors or selfish dicks, and start figuring out how to give us a party we might want to vote for again. If you don’t stop doing this, you’re doing it wrong. If you can manage that, I’m willing to come back. If not, have the decency to clear the rotting carcass of your party off the road so something better can get around it.
[Crossposted from caucus99percent. If you want to badmouth that place, you haven’t learned a damn thing.]
