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What The Party ‘Strategists’ Say Is Not What The Voters Want
Q: Why did the Democrats lose the Senate, House and presidency as well as more than a thousand state government positions?
A: They listened to their 'strategists', not to their voters.
Here is what the strategists currently say:
Staying out of the single-payer debate, party strategists say, could help Democrats in the general election, when they’ll have to appeal to moderates skeptical of government-run health care. Earlier this year, the DCCC warned candidates about embracing single payer, hoping to avoid Republican attacks on “socialized” medicine.
Why is "socialized" medicine supposed to be a bad thing? Why not defend it? It is what the voters want:
Reuters/Ipsos poll – June/July 2018 – bigger
The 'strategists' say the voters can not have the nice stuff they want. Their arguments lost the elections. If the Democrats want to win again their must tell their voters to demand more nice stuff. Some people get that:
Progressive insurgents believe Clinton’s defeat, on top of losing control of Congress and most state governments, proved them right. They aspire to overthrow conventional wisdom that Democrats must stay safely in the middle to compete.
“Democrats have been fixated for 20 years on this elusive, independent, mythical middle of the road voter that did not exist,” said Crystal Rhoades, head of the Democratic Party in Nebraska’s Douglas County, where a progressive candidate, Kara Eastman, is trying to wrest a competitive congressional district from a Republican.
“We’re going to try bold ideas.”
Most social-democratic parties in Europe have the same problem the U.S. Democrats have. The party establishments angle for the ever elusive 'liberal' center. They move the parties further to the right and lose their natural constituencies, the working class. This gives rise to (sometimes fascist) 'populists' (see Trump) and to an ever growing share of people who reject the established system and do not vote at all.
This phenomenon is the micro version of a much larger trend. Liberal globalization, as promoted by the party 'elites', promises but does not deliver what the real people need and want. Liberal globalization turned out to be a class war in which only the rich can win. A revolt, locally on the level of voters, and globally on the level of nations, is underway to regain a different view.
Alastair Crooke recently outlined the larger trend within a global, 'metaphysical' perspective.
The progressive Democrats who are pushing for single payer healthcare still miss out on other issues. They also support higher wages, but are, at the same time, against restrictions on immigration. Wages rise when companies have to compete for workers. Immigration increases the available work force. A political program that supports both does not compute.
Working people understand this and in 2016 many of them voted for Trump. Neither LGBTXYZ identity policies nor other aloof 'liberal values' will increase the income of the poor. To win back the necessary masses the Democrats and social-democrats in Europe will have to shun, or at least de-emphasize such parts of their program.
It's a class war. The rich are winning. Fight.
Great metaphor in the crofters story, Debsisdead. I’d heard the vague outlines in the past but not the full story:
There is no easy way about this; resistance is tough and some will get hurt by the violence which greedies always mete out to those who stand up to them, in the long run however the casualties are far fewer than what occurs if we let greedies stomp us into the sh1t.
The truth. New Zealand’s Maoris got a better deal than most indigenous people as they fought for it. It took almost a century for Brit whitey to get them all at one another’s throats. And that’s when they lost 80% of the island in a single generation.
@Paul
You wrote: “B,please keep your nasty homophobia in check.” There’s no homophobia here, it’s just that sticking your genital parts into the genital parts of someone of the same sex, does not make anyone special or deserving of extra protection, care or privilege. Do whatever you like behind closed doors, kiss in the streets, no one cares. Just stop whining about your hard life of two income, no kids, no responsibilities hedonistic lives. I don’t expect special privileges for my sexual preferences. I don’t know why you do.
Women who whine about the days where women did not have the vote fall into the same category. Sadly it’s mostly the same ninnies who are defending women wandering around in the niqab and burka in Western society. No one should be allowed to wander around with their face covered. Facial covering is not even a religious issue at the core. The right to masks gives the criminals an advantage over us and law enforcement, whether they are anarchist rioters (Antifa), Al Queda or moped thieves in London.
Frankly I’d like us to all think about putting a stop to ever expanding economic production (expansion is the life blood of capitalism) and the destruction of Planet Earth.
We don’t need more immigrants, we need less people on this earth. Only the capitalists need more people, to “guarantee a return on their investment”. The only investment we are collectively making right now is in the poisoning of our planet and the sixth great extinction event. We are already in the middle of it, btw. More genus of flora and fauna have disappeared in the last fifty years than the previous two thousand. Human beings are accelerating extinction one thousand times.
Of course there are different ways to get fewer humans on earth. Prince Philip recommends viral extinction:
I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus to contribute something to solving overpopulation.
It’s pretty clear what they elite have planned for us and lower wages are the least of our problems.
If we don’t collectively put our heads together to minimise destructive consumption (going out to eat at the neighbourhood pub if they source sustainable local food which doesn’t have to be transported 3000km to the table is non-destructive consumption, so is hiring someone to iron your shirts depending on how much energy s/he burns doing it), there will be no one alive to argue about left or right or orangoutangs, whether presidents or former secretaries of state. This destruction of the biosphere (including both the oceans and the two arctics at this point) is so obvious an issue and such an urgent and important a problem, I cannot believe it’s not our number one priority as a society.
Extinction events are very late to be perceived and very hard to stop once started (something like a car accident: by the time you know you are in it, it’s nearly impossible to stop, images of your life flash before your eyes and split seconds go into incredible slow motion). We’re in the middle of one. After a brief moment of sanity during the protest movements in the seventies where we collectively decided to try to improve our environment, both the Americans and the Chinese have said damn the torpedoes, we’re putting increased economic activity at any cost our priority.
Perhaps rats are stupid, low, cunning creatures. At this point, they’ve got nothing on human beings. Our collective intelligence spent on instruments of war and biosphere destruction. Swine take better care of their pens (ironically the Netherlands is collapsing under a sea of “economically viable” pig shit).
Posted by: Uncoy | Aug 24 2018 20:55 utc | 107
Posted by: Pft |@115
“Maybe someone has some examples of peaceful revolutions that have been driven from the bottom without one faction of the elites driving it.”
My favorite example of an almost entirely non-violent revolution led by the 99% was Costa Rica.
Costa Rica was, of course, a classic “banana republic” with a puppet dictator installed by the US. But while everybody was busy dealing with the impacts of WW II, the people of Costa Rica kicked out the fascists and developed a vibrant democratic republic.
The major “battle’ of the revolution was when the leader of the revolution (a school teacher) and some of his buddies walked into the main radio/tv station, sat down in front of the mic, and broadcast to the country that the puppet regime was being replaced.
Pretty much, everyone in the country said, “Oh good,” and went on with their lives. Even most of the police and military said, “well, I heard it on the radio, so it must be true,” and so stopped trying to put down the protests, and swore their alligiance to the revolution.
So, the revolutionaries appointed their leader as the first president of the newly free state of Costa Rica. The President did two things.
1. He disbanded the miltiary (and Costa Rica has not had an army ever since).
2. He resigned. He said, first, I’m a school teacher, not a politician, and am unsuited to lead a government. And two, Presidents are elected, not appointed, so we need to hold elections.
Another has been the Iranian Revolution of 1978/79, which was carried out almost entirely by industrial workers, students and teachers. Through an escalating series of mass strikes and targeted boycotts, along with street protest across the country, the revolutionaries were able to show the great majority of Iranians that ousting the brutal, CIA/MI6 installed dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was vulnerable to toppling. They could restore the secular, socialist republic which had been growing under PM Mossadegh. prior to the Ayatollah Kashani turning on him, and aligning with the Western powers, leading to the famous 1953 coup.
But, in 1979, eventually, a large enough number of the ‘enforcers” (ie. police and military) refused orders to massacre or at least imprison the protesters, and the Shah and many of the 0.1% elitists scooped up their ill-gotten wealth and fled Iran.
Some argue that the South African Revolution that toppled Apartheid was also a non-violent one, though branches did engage in genuinely brutal, and even terroristic violence. I will say that it became a non-violent revolution (at least unilaterally) once Nelson Mandela (who had been an avowed terrorist) foreswore violence.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that revolutions have a far better chance of succeeding in attaining their goals if they are led by the 99%, and remain nonviolent.
Posted by: Daniel | Aug 25 2018 18:03 utc | 134
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