Clive Crook makes the common complaint that progressives tend to excuse their political failures by insulting the intelligence of the electorate. I agree that this is a frequent and often disagreeable tendency, but I’d ask for one substantial caveat. There’s a distinction between those who go vote and vote for candidates who are looking to screw them over and those who don’t vote because they incorrectly think that elections don’t matter. These are two different kinds of stupid, in other words, and both contributed mightily to the drubbing that the Democrats took at the polls. By far, the worse problem was the latter one, as voter participation was the lowest we’ve seen since half our sons were deployed overseas during World War Two.
Progressives have a lot more faith in a full, participating electorate than they do in a small electorate made up mainly of hyper-partisans. This isn’t just because the left does better with a fuller electorate, but because progressives are primarily concerned with helping precisely the kind of people who tend not to vote in low-participation elections. The kids who stayed home last Tuesday are being crushed by unaffordable college, poverty-level wages, and lack of investment in their future. Their opinions matter, and we can’t help them if they won’t band together to give us the power to help them. I think the vast majority of these kids would be totally onboard with a transformative politics that looks to change our society in dramatic ways because the society we have is stifling them and leaving them without hope. That’s why I don’t buy the following:
The constant emphasis on social injustice, economic inequality, class struggle and the existential perils of climate change advertises a far-reaching transformative ambition. Here’s the problem: Even putting aside the question of competence, U.S. voters aren’t sold on the idea of having their society transformed. They just want it made better. To be popular, the progressive agenda therefore needs to be plausibly delimited. The Democrats need to make clear what they won’t do as much as what they will. Without a clear program, that’s difficult.
It won’t do to say, “Trust us to dismantle this fundamentally broken society and build something new. You can leave the details to us.” That’s what Democrats were offering the country last week. The voters said, “No, thanks.” I wouldn’t call that stupid.
What the voters “said” was distorted because old people had a lot more to say than young people. Old people said “No thanks” to the left, and that wound up being the answer of the electorate. In 2012, a much fuller electorate expressed its opinion and it came up with a much different, less stupid answer.
Still the economy, stupid?
As the economy, as experienced on the ground by ordinary people, during the first two years of a new administration is mostly the result of the prior administration and Congress, it’s not until the fifth and sixth years of an administration that its policies kick in. Unlike the mushy middle that swings between Republicans and Democrats, the non-voters don’t seem inclined to vote for the GOP crazies. However, they don’t want this either:
And this is exactly what was easily predictable from team Obama’s economic policies.
That’s what a lot of us are seeing – we’re working harder with less to show for it. It’s hard not to be pissed off. It’s even harder to avoid disgust with both parties that we’re allowed to vote for.
They’re partially right. We focus too much on what’s wrong and not what’s right. Too much on the problem and not on the solutions or even the path to getting there.
The negativity on the left is just as bad as the fear mongering on the right. It depresses turnout, if both sides say everything sucks then why even vote?
We need to focus more on what we would do, we don’t need a ton of specifics but we need to sound competent to get to where we’re going and right now we as a group sound like a bunch of whiners who just think everything is bad. Unfortunately that message isn’t different enough from the right, the only difference is they clearly know who to blame us and government.
with a transformative agenda unless people think Government can work.
Non-voters think government is always wasteful by 54-43. Voters views were even worse.
The starting place has to be to show government can work. This is why the f’ing website mattered – if the government can’t bring up a website how can it manage health care?
Obama’s approval ratings never recovered from the website debacle. IT MATTERED. IT SHOULD HAVE MATTERED. It is all well and good to want a more transformative agenda, but no one is going to buy it if they think government always sucks.
You have to start with successes – examples where government worked. Vermont is going to implement single payer. If it can be shown to work, it holds out the promise other states will adopt it. This is the path Canada followed to its Health Care System.
We need concrete examples of things working. That is the place to start.
Without them the transformative agenda will get nowhere.
I am not so sure that a cleaner roll-out would have made much difference. By and large, conservatives had been trolling and priming the media for years with every imaginable worst case scenario. And when it came time to hit the START button, they dutifully reported on every real or imagined glitch as if it was something completely irreparable and meant that the entire program was doomed for failure. Well, here we are a little over a year out, things are continuing to be debugged and improved, yet the media has gone strangely silent on exactly how things are working and what the future portends if we continue to work on the program.
Yes, the roll-out of the website had problems. But you had to search far and wide to find anyone who might be properly reporting the context of the problems and the fact that most everything was a short-term issue that simply needed to a addressed and resolved. But the lies and misinformation are still being repeated today as if they are fact. Almost no one is attempting to aggressively correct this narrative. Not even most Democrats.
Well, you can talk about insulting people’s intelligence, but it remains the case that there is a fundamental knowledge problem here. I mean, the reality of climate change doesn’t depend on how many people believe it’s happening, and our society is already in the process of being transformed whether we’re sold on the idea or not.
Of course, there are ways to sell people on ideas without insulting their intelligence, and I do think it’s good to keep that in mind. I encountered a guy in a thread one time who said he would have considered my argument if I hadn’t said something disparaging about Fox viewers. This is a bizarre approach to critical thinking, of course, and I’m not sure that he would have accepted my argument anyway, but it also wasn’t necessary for me to say disparaging things about Fox viewers. I can leave those out.
I encountered a guy in a thread one time who said he would have considered my argument if I hadn’t said something disparaging about Fox viewers.
Somehow I doubt that guy’s mind was at all fertile for the seeding of your argument.
Agree. It was just an excuse to reject the logical and rational in favor of whatever the hell it is that Fox sells.
Listen, pal.
Now that you mention it, it does feel like there’s a mote in my eye, but why did you have to be an asshole and tell me about it?
Now I’m just gonna leave it in there. That should learn you real well.
Blaming the “old people” really misses how close even 2-1 margins are with various mixtures of demographics. And the geographic distribution of old people. And it gives the impression that age cohorts all vote one way.
Just like the PVI excuses, demographics is fundamentally another excuse for strategic failure to engage in politics in this election. Every political consultant in DC who was part of a losing Democratic campaign should henceforward find another career. The same for Democratic consultants located in state capitals.
The background financial and media environment is not going to change in the next two years and might not for decades. That’s the environment in which Democratic candidates have to win. And the voters caught on to the ideological triangulation of the DLC. Voters want easy choices not fog.
I’m an old person and I voted for Democrats in every category. And, only about one, possibly two, out of a group of us (about 30) from college who stay in touch voted for Democrats. In fact, the only person in my circle of friends and acquaintances who voted for the Republicans is my sister who is a Mormon and totally incapable of thinking for herself.