Democratic Pulse?

I’m a non-college, working class white male who had to create his own new job after the Great Recession ended a 30 year career as a skilled laborer. My retirement is in no way tied to the DOW, because I don’t have one. I will work until I am unable to continue. My “orange savings money”, if there is any, will come from selling oranges on the freeway.
The same forces that created the Trump voter created me.
Just as responsibility for the undocumented worker lies not with the people who are doing what they can for their families, but with the documented Americans who undercut their neighbors to save a few bucks, the shift to a service economy of lower paying jobs is due to efforts in both parties to globalize the labor force.
How did the Democrats lose the election?
A combination of arrogant self-righteousness and the momentum of an outdated and hidebound ideology all echoing in a chamber. Quite similar to what the Republicans went through with Mitt.
Fiscal Conservatism with Social Liberalism sounded sexy as Hell in the 90’s, but now we’ve had time to see the results. Hillary missed her window in 2008. She was undone by Obama’s two terms. The 8 years he was in office were 8 more years of the results of Bill’s presidency taking effect and the internet spreading the knowledge of what caused them.
Fiscal Conservatism with Social Liberalism gives away half the store without a fight, and it’s the half that pays for the other half, which we like to call civilization. Before you know it, there is no more fiscal support for your social agenda, and you are a full-blown (sorry/not sorry, Bill) Conservative. The 3rd Way has brought the Democratic Party to the point at which the Republican candidate successfully attacked the Democrat on unfair trade, wars of choice, and Wall St. coercion. Hopefully it has made it’s final capitulation to the Conservative agenda. Enough is enough.
Populism won this election, but it wasn’t sponsored by “The Party of the People”.
We need to remove the quotation marks from that designation, and earn back the Democrat Party’s “ic”.
This is on those who ignored the populist sentiment that won the election. During the primaries I had a few mantras. One was:
“Bernie will not lose a single Hillary supporter, will garner much more of the Independent vote than Trump, and add to that all the new voters he brought in.
Hillary will cede most Independents to Trump, not motivate Democrats nearly as much as Republicans, and not keep the newly minted.
This is a no-brainer.”
I won’t be using the term “no-brainer” anymore, as it has now lost all meaning. I was ridiculed and vilified, accused of misogyny and treason, and never adequately answered.
Even with presidential level surrogates, the entire party machinery behind her, mega spending, decades of name recognition, major assists from the media, spamming porn onto the Bernie groups, lying about his support for arms manufacturers over aggrieved parents, and voter roll purges, among other assorted shenanigans, she barely won the nomination, and lost the election. Jill’s 1% didn’t have anything to do with any of that.
I’m not one who claims the primary election was stolen, and never have been. That die was cast early on. From the debate schedule onward, of course the party favored it’s favorite. The most frequent complaint I heard during the primaries was about Bernie not being a Democrat. I usually responded by asking what it is that makes one a Democrat, generally to a chorus of crickets. Time served seemed to be the governing criterion if any was offered. There was a lot of resentment there, and still is, mostly because of discomfort in the dawning realization of what it is that does makes one a Democrat.
Hillary chose to hire David Brock, who was most known for referring to Anita Hill as “…a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty.”, resulting in Justice Thomas. His “Correct The Record” group is responsible not only for distorting the record, but for spamming porn onto the Bernie groups the night before the NY primary and then reporting them to FB, which then shut them all down. Hundreds of thousands of voices were shut down along with them. Small “d” Democracy in the Democratic Party died that night. Feminism doesn’t seem like something that should succumb to political expediency, but I can’t say for sure without being accused of mansplaining.
Brock found a higher bidder for his soul, I guess. Not that easy in a buyer’s market.
Then there was the “artful smear” that was the “qualified” flap. Completely set-up by the Clinton campaign with a major assist from the Media. I won’t go into it here, but I can supply step-by-step documentation of this valuable lesson in national politics taught to Bernie and his staff.
This is nothing but politics-as-usual, but to a brand new delegate who is having their sign confiscated at the convention, seeing how the sausage is made for the very first time resulted in a lot of PTSD. I’m not being flippant; people were in shock.
What was missing in the general election was what Bernie tried to bring to the process when he said he was going to try something different; telling the American people the truth. Sticking to the issues that matter. The Media, of course, are the major culprits in this by means of their quest for ratings and their more minor role (to them) as manipulators of public opinion. The very last thing they want to see is campaign finance reform.
Everyone over at CNN was shocked, (shocked, I tell you!) that there seems to be an anti-establishment sentiment in the electorate this year.
What’s more they were as dumbfounded that Hillary somehow lost as Fox was when Mitt did.
“The polls! the polls!”
What polls were they looking at? Pollsters that rely on averages of unreliable or outlier polls mixed in with accurate ones, then flavored by pundit statements?
MSM has devolved considerably. Watch what you’re watching, folks. Although I do admit that I may have enjoyed just a bit too much watching Wolf Blitzer have a nervous breakdown when the realization hit him.
If they wanted to cover something important, they could talk about the experiment that has been going on in the laboratories of democracy known as the states.
If you want to draw a sharp contrast between democratic and republican ideologies and their practical results, just point out the contrasts of those results that are being laid out for the entire nation to see, if they would only raise their eyes and look.
Compare Minnesota and California to Kansas and Oklahoma. You are comparing states that have budget surpluses to states that can’t keep their schools open or pave their roads.
That might have made the news in Cronkite’s day, and it might have created the landslide that Democrats were predicting if it had made an appearance during a nationally televised debate, say.
How did Trump do so unexpectedly well with women? He paid attention to their pain. He won among women who couldn’t afford the luxury of being offended by him. Women whose children were hungry or drinking lead from the sink. Economic repression is the most powerful weapon chauvinism possesses, and has led to the squandering of fully half of human potential for no better reason than men’s insecurities. But I digress.
So where do we go from here?
Bernie is now the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, even though he is serving out his term as the Independent that Vermonters voted into office.
If not he, then who is? When the Media look for statements in opposition to the new government, where do you think they will go?
The Clintons are disgraced. Losing to the likes of Trump, even with all their advantages, has finished them, and they will drag Obama down with them, if only for a while. He is, after all, a 3rd Way Democrat. Just be glad he wasn’t a neocon like Hillary.
Democrats have no choice but to regroup under the auspices of the real Democratic Gold Standard; FDR, and leave behind the gold-plated standard of nostalgia for the 90’s and the bait-and-switch populism of the Clinton Era. That vision has failed, and is on the verge of taking the party down with it. Establishment Democrats thought Bernie was an insurgent, but they were just as wrong about that as their nominee. He’s The Exorcist, and we should be glad he makes house calls. How perfectly Hillary’s election night refusal to comfort her supporters in their time of grief illustrates what Clintonism has done to “The People’s Party”.
If the Democratic Party has a way forward, it is to out-populist the Republicans, who have appropriated what used to be our base. If Trump manages to get an infrastructure bill with any kind of juice passed, he will get a second term and the Democrats will wander in the desert for the next forty years.
It’s widely agreed that WW2 pulled us out of the Great Depression, but we stop before mentioning that it was government spending on the war effort that jump started the economy. An infrastructure bill would do the same thing, but instead of manufacturing things that will be shipped overseas and are designed to blow up, we will build things that stay here and continue to benefit the entire nation.
If Republicans get to do that while running the government by themselves, they will enjoy the kind of long term ascendancy in all 3 Branches that Democrats once had.
If Bernie Sanders had been our nominee, he could have sharply distinguished his brand of populism from the fear and ignorance-based Trump version. Democrats could have stepped right into a new Golden Age. Colin Powell’s recently revealed assessment of Hillary’s biggest problem was spot on. Her hubris and that of her myopic supporters have brought the party to this desperate dilemma. The first thing we need them to do is recognize that, and their culpability for it. I’m not looking for anything even resembling an apology; I’m looking for acknowledgement of the problem and a willingness to work with the Progressive Wing and correct it.
We have a ton of work to do, my friends, and it begins with Our Revolution. Electing Keith Ellison to head the DNC is our first step. He is on the board at Our Revolution and is the party’s future personified.
The task is daunting, but by 2018 we should be able to make some inroads. At times like this, I go back to my anchor, my rock; Lisa Simpson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY-P3D63Z18