The following isn’t necessarily the main point of Michael Tomasky’s piece, but it’s what stuck out to me.
…there are four Democratic senators from deep-red states who are up for reelection in 2018. The pressure on those four—Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester—to support Trump initiatives will be enormous. Another five represent states that Trump won, albeit more narrowly; they too will face such pressures, so [Democratic Senate Minority Leader, Chuck] Schumer is going to have a tough time holding that caucus together.
So what do the Democrats have? Mainly right now, what they have are a lot of pissed off and freaked out people who want to do something.
Since I knew a friend was in from out of town, I attended the Philadelphia chapter of Drinking Liberally last night for the first time in about five years. I was a staple in that organization from 2005 to 2010, when my son was born and parental responsibilities intervened. At its height it was a bit of a salon for antiwar bloggers. Our unofficial leader was Duncan Black (a.k.a., Atrios) of Eschaton. Susie Madrak was a regular, as was Chris Bowers (then of MyDD.com, now with Daily Kos). A long list of other writers, most now inactive, were also members. Beyond the writers were the organizers. I had come into that world as a veteran of the dreaded ACORN. Before long, I was working as a political consultant for Democracy for America. Others worked at MoveOn, Color of Change, the SEIU or became deeply involved in Obama for America (later Organizing for America). We cross-pollinated with local groups like Philly for Change.
None of us got rich and none of us really got anything more than something like sub-famous. But we toiled and worked hard and I think we made a difference, each in our own way.
Last night I saw mostly new, mostly younger faces. They were the faces of people who are “pissed off and freaked out” and “want to do something.” They were looking for leadership.
One thing the left might learn this time around is to value this new generation of folks more than they valued the last one. This isn’t sour grapes; it’s just good, solid advice.
The right has their wingnut welfare and they cultivate half-talented people who we’re all now familiar with because they have syndicated columns and make regular appearances on television and radio. The left, in my experience, has seen their impassioned organizers and thought leaders more as nuisances and unwelcome gadflies. Maybe the election of Donald Trump will finally convince them that (especially in a more populist environment) outsiders have something of value to offer and that talent should be cultivated rather than shunned as an uninvited challenge.
I would have liked to have been able to tell those folks last night that there might be some future in what they’re looking to do and that they’ll find grateful allies in the Democratic establishment. That wasn’t my experience during the last go-round. They’ll go to work anyway because they’re patriotic and altruistic and they need an outlet for their angst. I hope they have a better experience and more success.
We’re all kind of depending on them.
Yup. Been screaming about this for years and years.
The earlier folks did also give rise to Netroots Nation, amazing at the time.
Yep, where we first met!!
CG almost knocked me down trying to hug. Good times.
My hope is that the new generation coming in learns from what was done right and from any and all mistakes made. Netroots Nation was a good idea and is one that can be repurposed for the coming battles ahead. The thing for those of us who have been around is to remember that this new generation are going to be fighting for their future. If the best we can do is to stand out of their way, so be it. But I really hope that more can be done to nurture their talents, their energy, and find ways for them to help build a Democratic Party worth saving. One hint: this is a very diverse generation coming in, so all that talk of dropping “identity politics” should be abandoned. That will turn them off faster than anything else I can think of.
Stuart Eric Kaufman is gone and I’m sad.
Talk about talent!
It’s a terrible loss. Truly gifted.
He’s needed now more than ever.
I’ll miss Oldman Cat. It seems silly with all his contributions, but there it is.
.
I just read a piece on NC by Bill Black. It was a retrospective on Obama from his economic perspective. After reading it I can’t help but think unless the democrats can refrain from collectively freaking out over deficits and debt, they will be limited at best by half measures and always chasing their tails in search of budget surpluses aka austerity. That will not help the working man. I fear the Orange Man may teach how it’s done.
Obsession over deficits has practically suffocated center-left parties throughout the developed world. Their support is collapsing. The last set of midterms and the results of this year’s election should serve as a wakeup call, one that had better be heeded. Deficits will not bring 18-29 year old voters to the polls in 2018 or in 2020. What they want they’ve been expressing loud and clear for some time, and among other things they want to know that they have a future – one that does not include stifling student loan debt, job insecurity, food insecurity, discrimination based on race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation. And they want and deserve action, not just words, but deeds. Been around too many of ’em in my day to day life. At least that is the impression I get. I could be wrong.
It’s not that you are ‘wrong’, it’s that the fixation on Democratic worries about debt are misdirection.
Democrats have been successfully ‘framed’ by republicans as ‘tax and spend wastrels. So Democratic politicians have to react to that.
Once again, which party tried a large stimulus? How was that framed by the opposition?
.
“Democrats have been successfully ‘framed’ by republicans as ‘tax and spend wastrels. So Democratic politicians have to react to that.”
They have to react in some way, true.
That reaction needs to address the problem and not capitulate so that it sounds right. We need a better retort and maybe some education bc it certainly is not true that deficits hurt anyone.
That reaction needs to address the problem and not capitulate so that it sounds right. We need a better retort and maybe some education bc it certainly is not true that deficits hurt anyone.
I know. Have heard the “tax and spend” mantra all my adolescent and adult life, and given my age, that is a long time. There is a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality to the debate at that point. Yeah, a response is needed. A lot of deprogramming seems in order. One metaphor that needs to be taken behind the barn and shot: the federal budget as household budget metaphor. It’s a deceptively easy way for folks to wrap their minds around the complexities of deficits, which is what makes it so toxic. And in a time where immediate gratification is so ingrained, framing deficit spending as an investment in the future doesn’t exactly win hearts and minds. Not sure there’s an easy answer.
Yes, along with the thought that a fiat currency government can go broke. I’d like to ask them how anyone including China, can “foreclose” on a nuclear powered debtor?
Yes, they can refuse to trade with us anymore, but that’s like a bank refusing to extend any credit, not the same as foreclosure. And when the debtor owns a printing press…
What people don’t understand is that unlike private life, excessive debt is dangerous for the creditor not the debtor. Individual states and cities are different because they can’t control their currency.
It is a tough story to debunk. Maybe we just need to remind people that the federal government owns the printing press and we do not. And the states do not own one. So the federal government can never go broke. End of story. It can’t be too long or people won’t listen.
Of course, now the conversation shifts to inflation. And on it goes.
And Obama struggled to deliver – GOP obstruction worked.
If Trump blows up the deficit and gets any kind of real income growth the Democratic Party is fucked.
People are just in denial. The fact Clinton got 20% of the vote among those under 30 was always a huge flashing neon sign.
And now we see 15 and 20 point shifts in ’12 among those under 30.
I’m curious. One-third of the big stimulus was turned into tax cuts to get Republican votes. It did not get a single one and Dems KNEW it wouldn’t. Why did the bill not just get reverted to the original?
Because Democrats wanted those tax cuts for their donors and themselves to the extent that most in Congress are millionaires. How much did that top tax cut benefit Obama personally?
I think he made his tax returns public. Give me a link and I’ll be glad to calculate it.
hat again, leading to defamatory, false insinuations.
I’m pretty sure if you could be bothered to inform yourself of the relevant facts (ideally, before . . . or actually, precluding such defamatory, false insinuations — what a concept, eh?), the answer to your question is: roughly zero.
But since you can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered either to do your homework for you.
Hey asshole? I asked a question. I didn’t make a statement. Why don’t you fuck off and die?
question, whose insinuations (that Obamas personally benefitted from tax cuts in ARRA) are baseless.
Because Obama is a weak negotiator with a fetish for bipartisanship.
Once he put tax cuts on the table, to withdrawn them would have given the GOP a solid rap on him for use in the next election. So, I guess leaving them in was a defensive play and without them the 2010 bloodbath might have been worse.
mino, you’re factually wrong. The Democrats did not have 60 votes in the Senate at that time, so they needed Republican votes. They got 3 GOP Senators on the bill, Collins, Snowe and Specter:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&sessio
n=1&vote=00060
I wish you were more careful with your facts. Getting the facts wrong sometimes leads you to be reckless with your rhetoric, as you are here.
Gosh, guess it was optimistic of me to assume that the readership of this blog might know my words referred to the dealings in the House, where ALL spending bills have to originate. After all, it was 7 yrs ago…
And only 15 yrs ago, the GOP-controlled Senate used reconciliation to pass President Bush’s tax cuts.
I think we are fixin to learn just how unnecessary 60 Senators reeeeealy are.
It would have been worse than useless for the House to drive through a maximalist stimulus bill which would not gain any needed votes from Senate Republicans. Here’s a summary of the negotiations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009
“Senate Republicans forced a near unprecedented level of changes (near $150 billion) in the House bill, which had more closely followed the Obama plan. The biggest losers were states (severely restricted Stabilization Fund) and the low income workers (reduced tax credit) with major gains for the elderly (largely left out of the Obama plan) and high income tax-payers. A comparison of the $827 billion economic recovery plan drafted by Senate Democrats with an $820 billion version passed by the House and the final $787 billion conference version shows huge shifts within these similar totals. Additional debt costs would add about $350 billion or more over 10 years. Many provisions were set to expire in two years.”
We were losing 750,000 jobs a month in the first few months of 2009; the President and Congress didn’t have months to try to browbeat Senate Republicans into voting for the perfect stimulus package.
Regarding whether the Senate should have tried to shove such a controversial bill through reconciliation, that’s debatable; doing that a month into the new Congress would have come with its own, different political costs. But I read the rhetoric in this section of the thread about the stimulus, and it’s so extraordinarily hostile and makes such poorly supported bad faith presumptions about Congressional Democrats that it fails to persuade me.
The Congressional Caucuses which acted in the poorest faith during this time, and during the rest of Obama’s Presidency, are the Republican Caucuses. The historical interpretations offered here demand that we ignore that fact.
I understand why Dems were rolled twice…
OK, that was flip.
But where they should have held the line was in the House. You don’t hand over freebies to one set, then walk into the next room and not expect to find your opponent emboldened. If they had been hardnosed in the House negotiations, there might have been a credible threat of reconcilliation in the Senate ones.
Plus, the Republicans were the agents(to the public, at least) of the falling sky that the stimulus was supposed to brace. We had a multi-trillion dollar hole blown in our economy and a stimulus of about 500B in infrastructure.
And what would have happened to our country and our people if the stimulus bill had taken more months of negotiation? Which Americans would have suffered even more than they have in recent years?
Reconcilliation does not slow anything down. It is designed as a fast-track for legislation that involves finance.
A lovely little essay that frames the issue well. Particularly apt to the earlier discussion of the allergy to inflation in our owner class.
“How does government debt affect long-run economic growth (and how does fiscal stimulus affect government indebtedness)? Economists had incredibly intense and occasionally nasty debates about these questions. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the crucial question regarding whether or not to use fiscal stimulus was a completely different one–which is more corrosive to the legitimacy of the institutions which make the prosperity of a liberal, global economy possible: a long economic slump, or a short-term stimulus so large that it inevitably leads to spending on low-return projects or lines the pockets of government-friendly firms? We were all tying ourselves in knots working out whether the multiplier on infrastructure spending was 0.7 or 1.2 or 2.5, when what we ought to have been asking was: what course of action is most likely to avert a crisis of institutional legitimacy that will leave everyone much worse off.”
The consent of the governed. The hole at the heart of economics.
I highly recommend the entire piece.
You have just explained why this was a disaster.
They should have used reconciliation. They would not have needed GOP votes.
And you repeat their mistake. The risk was in a too small stimulus that might result in a mid-term wipe out. Compared with that risk the political risk to which you refer was minimal.
Something we all learned in November of 2010.
Deficits are a key to moving forward to full employment and a robust economy, almost whatever else you do. The left has fallen victim to the story of the debt, a false one. It is most likely due to not understanding how money works. So the response has been weak and we go to a corner and sulk. It is time we reversed that. If Trump puts us on a credit card and spends a trillion or more on infrastructure and cuts taxes he will heat up the economy. It could trigger inflation but it is hard to say how much and inflation just is not all bad. The West has been trying for at least a decade to do that with no success. Real unemployment (last I looked) was around 10%, the U 6 rate. Lots of slack in the economy. Put people on real full time employment and you might just get more white votes. Maybe even money for education.
“It is most likely due to not understanding how money works.”
Well, they might not, but their donor class does. Fiscal tightening and ultra-easy monetary policy is great for the asset owners. Not so much for the rest of us.
True. But I doubt all our elected and their staffs understand it. If they do, then we really need to fire them all.
I’m reminded of Obamas remarks about how we had to tighten our belts and reduce the deficit. Maybe some sort of grand bargain was needed. Our Presisdent seems to have been completely ignorant of it all. And he persisted even agreeing to a sequester and searching for way to reduce the deficit and was proud when it went down. That sort of thing is austerity and it will seldom help a working person.
The infrastructure bill being cooked up by Trump/Ryan/McConnell won’t do much for the economy if Congressional Democrats don’t improve it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-big-infrastructure-plan-its-a-trap/2016/11/18/5b1d109
c-adae-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html
The vast majority of the proposal is massive tax breaks and bonds to benefit rich private companies which will not be required to establish new construction projects in exchange for the money. With all the deregulatory demands in the proposal, any projects the bill may create will also have terrible labor and environmental standards.
Oh, and the infrastructure package won’t bring deficit spending, according to Trump. He claims his proposal is revenue neutral. I don’t believe that would be the true outcome if his proposal became law, but that’s his claim.
True. If the infrastructure bill turns out to be a scam to benefit corporations and private investors then it has to be rejected. But you know they will claim it will add just tons of jobs. So the dems will have to fight it – hard.
Oaths to “lock her up”, repeal Obamacare, rescind Paris Climate Accords (with many, many more oath-breakings still to come)?
He lied and lied and lied and lied to incite deplorable bigots and dupe Reality-Denying and Reality-Oblivious gullible fools (of which he’s one).
This is now a viable path to the presidency in this country.
Met many impressive young people on the Sanders campaign.
To bad the bloggers you reference were so indifferent to that campaign.
When you take a step and realize what has been thrown away – and that is right phrase – thrown away – you just shake your head.
Right now it is obvious some Clinton bloggers are trying to hold on to power by bringing up this absurd identify versus class debate.
I hope the young are able to see through it. The Sanders people I know certainly can.
When you take a step and realize what has been thrown away – and that is right phrase – thrown away – you just shake your head.
I don’t think those that did the tossing fully appreciated how special and rare the moment was. Likening it to 2006-08 when Democrats won and could carry on from a centrist position and win another presidential election gave them a distorted view of the core strength and energy of what had been accomplished in the 2006-08 elections which wasn’t much more than disgust with the Bush administration and a retreat to what Democrats had been offering for over a decade.
Not that some of us didn’t try to tell them.
I remain hopeful that those on the that energized the election more clearly saw through Sanders. Not a hero, just a hardworking public official, embodying for a moment something larger and deeper than him that can and must extend beyond his campaign. How remains the big question.
I guess I want to say special for whom?
The period from 2003 to 2008 included people who would not normally be allies. Armando is a WalMart lawyer IIRC. Markos is hardly left of anything on economics – to the extent he understands it.
We looked like allies because of the War. And gay rights. It united people who wouldn’t be together otherwise.
That unity was nice.
It is worth remembering that Obama won not on economics, but on the War.
But through an accident the long running chronic crisis became acute. The people who wrote on blogs mostly had not a clue. And Obama missed the moment – though you can really ask whether the system itself was capable of addressing the problem anyway.
And so the focus shifted. People wanted to read people who knew something, and the blogs mostly didn’t.
During the Iraq War the blogs were indispensable – a source of information outside of the War Caucus.
But economics – that is different. Economics is hard. And harder still to make interesting.
So the blogs are mere shadows now. I talk politics on them because I like to talk about politics. But long gone are the days I read anything on the front page of DKOS or TPM and learn something knew.
It is as if we are in the Movie Remains of the Day and the American gets up and says you are all amateurs and toasts to the professionals.
The time of the amateurs has passed.
Which is too bad, because the professionals are pretty stupid.
That period could be thought of as something of an equivalent to a popular front. There were definitely some uneasy alliances that fell apart after 2008, but they were alliances nonetheless. The tricky part was sorting out who was sane during that era and the conspiracy mongers were. There were quite a few antiwar bloggers – some who had some minor prominence – who had an unhealthy focus on 9/11 conspiracy theories and other, darker theories that crossed the line into being antisemitic.
Some individual bloggers pretty much closed shop after that election – on the belief that their work was done. That was a mistake. The turn to economics was always going to be a difficult one. It was always something of an undercurrent, even before 2008 – some of us had notice something very amiss well before the housing bubble burst and were sending out distress signals. Explaining that austerity was not going to cut it in a major recessionary period never really caught on. There was an opportunity to try to at least explain the basics, but that was lost. I too am at best an amateur, and probably have a knowledge base in theory that is less than popular in these parts.
The Occupy movement never really seemed to have much of a blogging presence. Always seemed more a Facebook and Twitter thing. Their fairly simple metaphor of the 1% vs the 99% was pretty catchy – beat the worn out Marxist lingo by a mile, while essentially making a similar point. The Occupy folks never seemed particularly organized – at least not for the long haul. An opportunity was lost there as well.
Maybe the time for amateurs has passed. Maybe not. We’ll see. What role blogs play? Who knows. Guessing some mishmash of blogging and social media platforms til we figure it out. I did see the value in reforming some of those old alliances to stave off the rise of Trump. Got the impression that was not a particularly popular perspective. But that may change in time, especially once the ugly reality sinks in. We haven’t even begun yet. Hell, I’m making a day trip to spend with family having a normal Thanksgiving as if nothing has happened, even though what is happening around us is far from normal. Maybe the prospect of fascism becoming entrenched will unite enough of us? If not, we’re up a creek.
I have learnt a lot about economics from blogs, but it is true that it is mainly smaller blogs in terms of audience and participation.
Bill Mitchell at bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/
Varoufakis at yanisvaroufakis.eu (he was a blogger before and after he became finance minister of Greece)
And though both of those are pretty dense when you first approach them, they try their hardest to make it accessible.
But, since it is pretty dense, discussion is needed. Which I have found mainly at European Tribune.
I can recommend Economist’s View for its commentariat. Several individual economic bloggers discuss the day’s online posts on their subject and you get a spectrum of opinions. Snipy and heated sometimes, too. lol
Bondadd’s blog is very good. I read calculatedrisk as well. I will check the others out. Mark Thoma as well. Bradley Delong is also worth reading.
I read Krugman of course.
It is not all that infrequent that I read something actually ignorant on a larger blog.
The democrats lost their way. Sanders had a message that worked, not only with POC or other identity groups but across them. Our Brexit also lives in the shire it seems.
When it’s not working for ordinary people, something almost always beats nothing. Even when the something has obvious and large nasty bits attached to it.
This election was a mash-up of 1968 and 1972, only Nixon lost and Wallace won.
Good analogy!
It did NOT work with POC! Multiple polls show they rejected it and embraced Hillary’s centrism.
Only goes to show you can’t show up one fine day and say here I am. I’m here to help you.
I am not convinced that that embrace was anything but an embrace of the familiar over the unfamiliar.
This is good to hear
Who/what is this “left” that you speak of?
Seems to me that a number of voices that emerged during the dark days 2001-2005 have done all right for themselves. Mostly by getting as close as they could to the preexisting Democratic Party power bases while spouting far more left-wing sympathies.
Older lefties experienced these voices as an awakening of what they’d long since given up on hearing again. Thanks to the arrogance and incompetence of the Bush Admin, Democrats had a new opportunity. Lefties were perfectly able to compromise with the party fielding DINOs in the first round to get back some power and in recognition of a decimated more liberal bench that rode in with the DLC. However, we weren’t silent about the fact that DINOs couldn’t hold up a leftwing for any length of time because Republican-lite inhabits a no-man’s land like the Vichy government.
You many view the forewarnings from “the left” as “the left” not being nice to the new talent, but if the new talent is getting it wrong in analytical, strategic, and tactical ways, loses sight of stated principles, and succumbs to emotion over reason, then they aren’t any better than what came before.
Within months of the 2009 inauguration, liberals (for lack of another word) began attacking lefties (for lack of a better word) because lefties quickly perceived that Obama was dispensing the same old wine out of a new bottle and the results would be similar. We saw the 2010 midterms coming by the summer of ’09 and were told to STFU. 2014 definitely didn’t look promising but even some lefties failed to imagine how bad it could turn out.
The abuse of lefties got so bad in this election cycle that long-time, leftie contributors were kicked out by some hosts (fortunately not this one; so, you get one prop), others drifted away, others still found or made new homes. And some began refrained from jumping into threads where we knew that to do so would result in more abusive bullying. So, I would say that maybe the new talent should also respect the elders that don’t go on pontificating flights of fantasy that are dead wrong. On all levels.
White House loyalists have their own ideas about who should follow Kaine and DWS.
Odd that Perez is a favorite since his signature accomplishment is now a dumpster fire. No overtime for yous!!!
After waiting 8 yrs.
And that right there is the problem. Waiting should earn you shit.
Once one surrenders to a cult, there’s no quick and easy retreat. For some there’s no exit at all permanently stuck in one cult or another.
“And some began refrained from jumping into threads where we knew that to do so would result in more abusive bullying.”
Marie3, I want to be clear about something.
I’ve refrained from jumping into threads in recent weeks for the exact reason you claim for yourself here. I hope this is food for thought.
I’m also going through some soul-searching and self-examination. We could all use a little humility and perspective at this time, what with the incredible abuses of power that the new Executive and Legislative branches are planning.
There may be a thin line between “what just happened” and “I told you so!” — but that’s always the risk in dialogue. Nevertheless, now is not the time for silence. We need to learn what just happened.
I’m not silent and will not be, personally or professionally. What it’s come to is whether I find this community trustworthy enough to speak up here.
At this point, I’ve become convinced that the most prolific community members here will continue to post extremely bitter Hillary- and DNC-trashing comments while Trump and the GOP raid the treasury, engage in incredibly large-scale corruption in service of highly regressive policies, and successfully oppress their many, many political opponents. This serves Trump/Ryan/McConnell et al. I can’t imagine why a sincere progressive would want to do such a damaging thing. So, I am made mistrustful.
And when I attempt to engage in dialogue in response to the most counterfactual and bad faith interpretations offered, I’m personally insulted and rejected by long time community members.
I had engaged in personal attacks in the past, but have dumped that recently. My retreat hasn’t made the threads any better; they’re even more fetid than before, as those who have been unsuccessful or unwilling to try to organize effectively for more power in the progressive movement have been feeling their oats here in the wake of Trump’s victory. Mistrust grows.
I wish more Frog Ponders would figure out how to successfully bring progressive change in their local and State Democratic Party organizations, but that’s unlikely to happen with the sort of rhetoric many employ here. I’m interested in reading and engaging productive critique of the Clinton campaign and the DNC; there’s great need for that. However, people who forward the sort of bullshit posted here about the Presidential candidate with the most progressive platform in the history of our country are people I don’t trust to organize effectively for progressive change.
The electoral outcome for the Stein campaign is among the best evidences for my mistrust. Americans are ready to rally behind a movement which is more populist and pluralistic, but they’re not interested in outlandish rhetoric and policy proposals which have no Congressional support. Even though there was little Stein vote organizing happening here in the fall, outlandish rhetoric and poorly supported policy proposals remain on frequent offer here.
As an example, we have seen reams of attacks here on the Affordable Care Act by so-called progressives. These attacks are frequently associated with claims made with maximal personal animus that the only thing in the way of single payer health care is Congressional corruption and poor ideology by Democratic Party leaders. These community members are entirely unwilling to deal with the fact that Americans do not want single payer health care and will vote overwhelmingly against it whenever given the opportunity. Colorado voters just provided the latest example of this. The Democratic Party is not the problem here.
And now there’s the Putin people who have been explicitly poisoning our dialogue in recent months. Even long time community members here are in furious denial of the Russian government’s successful, ongoing propagandizing of the American electorate. And those who don’t think that Sanders’ campaign would have been successfully undermined by hacking and propaganda if he had been the Dem Party nominee are incredibly stubborn in their denial. Putin and his government wanted Trump to become President and had a part in making it so. Those issuing denials of that fact make me terribly mistrustful.
I don’t know that you’ve taken any more licks here than a lot of other people, and that’s totally w/o reference to what side they are on.
I don’t think many Frog-Ponders would disagree with you about Jill Stein. I can’t think of any. I don’t recall any attacks on the ACA, just criticisms. Surely it’s far from perfect. No one here wants to do away with it.
I think we all find posters with whom we may deeply disagree on a few issues but agree with them on a lot more.
I also think there are a few posters who tend to get personally abusive — the vast majority do not, even when they disagree with you.
As for the Putin business, we hashed that out, I haven’t seen it come up in months.
I agree with most of your points, in fact. I disagree with your estimation of Bernie Sanders. As do Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Reich, Keith Ellison, and many other leaders of the Democratic Party. These are the people, not Hillary Clinton, who are going to be in the front lines against Trump and the GOP. I have nothing against the DNC if these are the people running it, because they understand that we need to take a new direction.
To be honest, I not only disagree with your position on this, but I find it very difficult to understand at this point how you can place your faith in the future of progressive politics with a regime that has so utterly discredited itself.
Also, you need to bear in mind that in the campaign, it was Bernie that was the underdog, not Hillary. The election was Hillary’s to lose, and she lost it. I bet all, or nearly all, the Bernie people here voted for her.
I find it ironic that what you correctly call “the most progressive platform in the history of our country” was so thanks largely to the efforts of people you “don’t trust to organize effectively for progressive change”.
Sorry you feel so bad about your experiences here, but sometimes one just has to agree to disagree. The fact is, we all feel terrible about what just happened with the election. We just have different ideas about where to go from here.
Sure, Bernie and his supporters pushed Hillary to the left, and I was pleased with the accomplishment. Many in the movement then utterly wasted that accomplishment by refusing to lend their efforts to get Hillary elected, even when faced with the binary choice of Clinton and Trump.
I am left with the unavoidable conclusion that many here are perfectly pleased with the electoral result. I see no concern, no sorrow from at least a half dozen frequent participants here who are joyfully indulging their distaste for Clinton and attacking all alternative premises of discussion. Many of these people are, for one of many examples, keeping the Putin dispute alive today in multiple threads. This is what is happening.
Meanwhile, the fact that the FBI directly and successfully intervened in the election on Trump’s behalf, in clear violation of past precedent and DOJ policy, gets no mention at all around here these days.
NOBODY here is pleased with the election result.
On the other hand, to make the best of a bad thing, many people here do want a new start for the party, extrapolating from the reasons we lost, not just to continue on the same futile track. we’re only at the start of figuring this out, and that’s what the present dialogue is about. It’s not easy.
I wish it was dialogue that some of our community members are offering. That’s not what some are offering. And I’m not talking metaphorically.
Example: some of the most frequent commenters have demanded that other frequent commenters stop offering responses to their posts. They’ve used extraordinarily harsh language in issuing these demands, and more viciousness has come to those who disobey these commandments.
This, and more, has happened and is happening here. It’s no way to build a coalition, and it fails to put political rhetoric to the test.
It utterly goes against what a community is supposed to be. And acquiescing to such demands in order to avoid threads consumed by flame wars has had the unfortunate effect of rewarding hostile, dissent-crushing behavior. And many of these people have grown to dominate the diaries and comments threads, so enjoying the community has become increasingly difficult.
I could choose to post copiously in response and ignore their anti-community demands, but I’ve got piles of my own work to do, and lately I haven’t found it worthwhile to fight for a place in conversations here.
Among the many campaigns I’ve helped lead during my time in politics is the one which led to the best State minimum wage law in the United States by far. Nevertheless, here I’m treated like some oligarchist. It’s totally fucking delusional of the community to treat me this way, but it’s what’s happening. I’ve got knowledge and experience to contribute here, but my feelings are hurt and I’m sick of the bullshit.
I’m not aware of the Putin discussion.
The Putin thing and the FBI thing are both outrageous. However, neither of them explain the loss. The reasons for the loss lie much deeper. In my view the party lost its way a long time ago, and that’s why I, for one, am continually dredging up the past. That may be painful, but it’s the only way we’re going to understand how we got here.
You have to realize, speaking for myself, that I came to the conclusion something was seriously wrong round about 2003. I was a big fan of Howard Dean. He was saying exactly what I was thinking, and explaining it, and doing something about it. I know there are other people that traveled the same or similar paths. We’re not children, most of us have been around quite a while, seen a lot, thought a lot. And we remember a lot. These conclusions, while you may disagree, are not just some adolescent lark.
I agree the conversations to be had about the future of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party’s place as a vessel for our movement are very serious.
However, it is unacceptable to so easily dismiss electoral propagandizing by the FBI, the Russian government and a non-state actor with a personal axe to grind, propagandizing that can be statistically shown to have influenced the American public and may have been decisive in the outcome of our Presidential election.
For example, if progressives, in their desire to bury Clintonism, continue to dismiss the FBI’s electoral mischief, it portends extremely poorly for the future of the progressive movement. You and I might successfully fight for more and better leaders of our movement, but if those leaders gain the attention of a clearly regressive Justice Department, and that Justice Department can slap our better leaders down by their variety of methods, frustration and suspicion will grow and little will be accomplished.
And if you think leaders more progressive than Hillary won’t gain a Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions-led DOJ’s attention and become even easier targets for the FBI to knock off, then you’re not thinking things through. Bernie and his ideological followers could be handed the keys to the Democratic Party, and we could get electorally routed in 2018 and 2020 with a corporate media and Justice Department sandbagging us all the way. Where would we be then?
“And if you think leaders more progressive than Hillary won’t gain a Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions-led DOJ’s attention and become even easier targets for the FBI to knock off, then you’re not thinking things through.”
Of course you are right. I confess to being one who wants to bury Clintonism, but yes, I absolutely do think it is extremely important to investigate the FBI, and that has to happen before January, because it’s not going to happen afterward. And the same for the Russian hacking, though I am positive that is being investigated by American intelligence whether we hear about it or not.
Incidentally, the name you usually hear in connection with the FBI provocation is Comey, but my understanding is that Comey was pretty much forced into doing what he did, the real culprits being a faction loyal to Giuliani and Kallstrom, two partners in crime who go back a long way. They are enemies of Comey, not his friends.
Al Franken has called for hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on “Comey”. But I haven’t heard anything since the election. Fill in the dots.
I also have to say, you make me realize that I don’t catch everything on this board, because I remain blissfully unaware of the conversations you’re referring to. I’m not making light of it, I just haven’t seen them.
Another thing happened: the blogs consolidated.
Now I wrote for Openleft which closed so you may think this is sour grapes – but there was more diversity in blogs then.
There was also the idea of a more collaborative politics.
The latter lived on in the Obama campaign’s commitment to GOTV and field organizing, but the closure of alternatives to you know who crowded out some voices.
Funny thing: I am not much of a leftist. Culturally I am anything but. I play golf and ski, make money, and don’t really apologize for any of that.
OK so I have radical left wing Jew for a wife. But she spent most of our marriage yelling at me.
In the early days of Dkos I was absolutely on the right of opinion there. I certainly was to the right of Chris and Matt at Openleft.
But the times are forcing me left – something the Sanders campaign revealed is happening to many.
The silence that the Sanders campaign received on blogs really stunned me.
They had moved right. I had moved left.
At least my marriage is quieter.
Yeah, there used to be a TV show about that …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98qw86DsdZ0
OT, but sad news, too.
No one had a dream of Diane Ravitch, but Betsy DeVos is some kind of nightmare.
Will they make refusing to take the test a felony?
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/11/23/trump-devos-education/94344918/
Did not see this one coming – DeVos is seriously bad news. She is part of the Amway clan, and has boatloads of money. She’s been pushing the voucher thing for years.
Most money is at the state level. She can do a lot of damage. I don’t know the education system well enough to know how much.
What I have been thinking for some time is to start a Public Schools Only organization. This would seek to get people to sign a pledge to vote for levy increases ONLY when NO charter and NO vouchers are in place.
yes, I hope you start that org
Do it already.
I’ll support it. I have three kids in public school right now.
Every nominee is worse than the next. If I had to pick the worst people for each position, I doubt I could do a better job. Next we’re gonna see Kobach for Homeland Security or some shit.
What Michelle Rhee wasn’t odious enough for him? Or maybe she wasn’t white enough.
DeVos are BIG bucks.
Yeah, another billionaire for the people. Oh, wait see married into the nutso billionaire family. Her brother-in-law is Erik Prince — the Blackwater guy.
I knew forty years ago that that Amway crap was bad news.
All of a sudden this seems particularly appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc
OT. but interesting.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/307404-jill-stein-to-file-for-recount-in-three-stat
es
Election Integrity depends on YOU! – Jill Stein 2016
GOAL: $4,500,000.00
$2,671,506.00 raised
Seems there are a lot of people who wants a recount.
The Democrats are just a bunch of wimps; and, refuse to FIGHT to win. I just plain don’t care any more. The Dems have won the popular vote twice now and still lost the Presidency. And, they just shrug their shoulders. How can any one respect a group of people who roll over and play dead?!
Because Yellow Dogs have done so well with this tactic over the last decade. (Hint: it doesn’t work.) As Jim Hightower used to say, “The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
That’s funny!
Time was a democrat was your friend and worked to help you. Times have changed.
OT Clinton now leads Trump by two million votes. WTF is going on?
what’s going on is that winning California by 5 million votes can’t make up for losing several states by 100K each.
Maybe we should fix that problem. I know. Let’s say we only count say three votes for every five the democrats get in say California and New York. Seriously. A few conservative friends of mine said it is unfair to count all the democratic votes in places like Ny and Los Angeles. Everyone knows those vote democratic and it is unfair.
Compromise”, eh?
Brilliant!
Amazing it never occurred to anyone before now!
She got the votes, but not in the right states.
Even in the crucial states of WI, MI, and PA, Trump’s margins in the first two are razor thin. Breaking news is that these states are going to be recounted, on the premise of anomalies suggesting computer hacking. If that can be shown, all bets are off, otherwise I don’t think a recount alone would change the results.
What’s interesting is that the recount requests are being filed by the Green Party, and apparently Hillary had nothing to do with it.
http://www.alternet.org/its-starting-green-party-launches-fundraising-drive-presidential-recounts-wi
-pa-and-mi
I’m doubting anomalies will be found. But if it does at least convince those who need convincing that the process itself was still sound, it can’t hurt. Beats having the very voters we might want to show up in 2018 and 2020 conclude the vote is all rigged anyway, so why bother.
One way to read that is where the race was engaged – where ads ran and where candidates visited Trump blew Clinton away.
Remember, Clinton badly outspent Trump.
This ad started running in New Hampshire in late October.
It was, I thought, the most effective ad from either side in the cycle.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/nra-ad-clinton-liar-230012
Bernie won the primaries in both Michigan and Wisconsin. As I recall, he beat HIllary in almost all the counties in both states. Unlike Hillary, he visited the smaller cities and towns. She parachuted into Flint. This should have been a wake up call for the Clinton campaign.
Yup, Bernie won in both WI and MI.
(I inadvertently posted this on the “Casual Observation” thread, but I meant to put it here.)
WRT the future of the Democratic Party, the looming fight over the DNC chairmanship will provide a litmus test for what the party has learned, if anything, from the recent debacle.
Keith Ellison has garnered an amazingly diverse and influential group of supporters: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the list goes on and on.
His chief rival for the post is Tom Perez, backed by .. wait for it, the Clintons and … Pres. Obama.
Since the election, I’ve been puzzling over the role of the president in bringing about the Hillary Clinton nomination. I have been very reluctant to blame him, but I’m afraid his support for Perez is a clear sign that he is and has long been (presumably since 2009) in the Clinton tank.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/democrats-leadership-fight-pits-west-wing-against-left
-wing.html?_r=0
We can debate Perez’s good points, but we can’t ignore the fact that he is a proxy for the Old Guard that has failed us so egregiously.
the looming fight over the DNC chairmanship will provide a litmus test for what the party has learned,
Yes. Mentioned that a few days ago that it will be an important signal. We all should have paid far more attention to that in 2000, 20008, and 2011.
Obama deserves some of the blame for Hillary becoming the nominee. Maybe a lot of the blame. I can see the deal in 2008 to give her SoS in order to secure support for his campaign. But he did way, way more than that. He handed over the Democratic Party to the Clintons. He failed to provide adequate support for Democrats in 2010 and 2014. He and we paid a steep price for that. His energies went into his two presidential campaigns and not into building the party. The Clintons made damned sure that no viable contender emerged. Until the non-Democrat Democrat, Bernie Sanders, took her on and without any resources (compared to hers) gave her a run for her money.
I think it’s misleading to say “He handed over the Democratic Party to the Clintons.” They already had it! A more accurate statement would be, “He left the party to the Clintons.” I don’t know whether it would even have been possible to get it out of their hands, but in hindsight I doubt he even tried. I say “in hindsight” because at the time I, and no doubt millions of others, assumed he had done so by beating Hillary Clinton. But no.
Remember, it was the 2008 financial meltdown. Let me ask you, if Hillary had won the 2008 election, would she have done anything different?
When you say Obama’s “energies went … not into building the party,” that’s exactly how I would characterize what Bill Clinton did when he was president. And I think that’s pretty much what continued through the Obama years. Because nobody could rebuild it as long as the Clintons controlled it.
In my mind, you and I are not disagreeing very much. We’re describing the same situation. Maybe Obama should have tried to rebuild the party. But obviously that would have created civil war within it, at a time when the Republicans were doing everything they could to block Obama’s agenda. Just a horrible situation all around, and one which I am only beginning to understand.
You can tell the story perfectly well without even mentioning Obama’s name … like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5UEfiTcWX8
And then you can read this terrific post-mortem by Jim Newell at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_democratic_party_establishment_
is_finished_after_trump.html
“if Hillary had won the 2008 election, would she have done anything different? “
I meant, done anyhting different about the financial meltdown. Thinking about it, probably she would have handled it worse than he did. But what I really was thinking of is the team he chose: Bob rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner.
Thanks to a revealing document from John Podesta’s email in 2008, we can understand a lot more about this, and also about how this same Wall Street domination o fthe Dmeocratic PArty would have continued, and is even now trying to continue in the candidacy of Tom Perz for DNC chair.
https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton
They already had it!
Actually, by 2007 they only had half of it. Had they had all of it, she would have won the ’08 nomination. They’d lost the other half in the 2000-2005 period. Not all Democratic officials were so blinded and dazzled by the Clintons that they couldn’t see the major shortcomings of the Clintons or failed to note the power they had appropriated for themselves after the 2000 election by installing McAuliffe as DNC chair.
In fairness Democrats, voters and officials, had no living memory of how power in the party is retained or shifted after two terms in the WH. It also seemed as mixed up on the GOP side. Kennedy and to a lesser extent Carter retained appeared to have retained some after the 1980 election, but the vacuum seemed larger than their combined power and there was no love lost between the two. BC successfully worked both of those guys in the years leading up to 1992.
In 1992 I read/heard the “Eight years for Bill and then eight for Hill.” I thought it was a joke. A FLOTUS that had never held public office as the successor to a hubby-POTUS? Like some sort of banana republic? Even if some had been serious about that, her tenure as FLOTUS would seemed to have put the kibosh on it. Then came 1999 and Hill moving to NY when I said, “OMG — not a joke; they are dead serious.” But still…
As luck (?) would have it, GWB being selected opened the possibility of making that POTUS run in 2004. (Replicating 1992.) But by mid-2003, the latest possible decision point on that (absent a ‘black swan’), she wasn’t looking strong and GWB wasn’t looking weak enough. And her IWR vote would have dogged her. That monkey was seemingly taken off her back by Kerry’s nomination. (Although they didn’t have a hand in that selection. Edwards, a lightweight one-term, Southern Dem as the designated ’04 loser would have served to blunt the IWR and the CW that only a southern Dem could win the general. Wes Clark was their creature to take out the improbable candidacy of Dean and that did work. Faux lefty bloggers thought Clark was swell — pitched him as a Dem IKE. As if the Balkans’ wars and Clark had the same stature in the minds. I thought those guys (who arrived at dKos in a whoosh) were ignorant and naive, but I was slow to come around to considering that they were paid operatives.) A bit of a scare that the hapless Kerry only came up a bit short.
From the linked Slate article:
How many times was that repeated on lefty blogs by HillFans? One of the stupidest arguments ever because she’d never been held accountable for all her known “lapses” and known and looming before the campaigns began were her private/pricey speeches, private server when she was SoS, and the CF that looked dicey. But I heard here “she’s been vetted and survived every “fake” scandal thrown at her.” “She’s the only Democrat that can stand up to a GOP pummeling and beat them at their game.” Stunning.
“Actually, by 2007 they only had half of it.”
You’re right, I had forgotten to factor in Howard Dean. (Such lapses can occur in the wee hours when I was writing that comment.) In my normal state of consciousness I would never leave him out, because from 2004 for several years after I regarded him as the saviour of the Democratic Party.
But just as you say, “Had they had all [the control of the party], she would have won the ’08 nomination”, one could also say, had they not still had a lot of control of it, she wouldn’t have bothered running in 208 — and let’s not forget the particularly aggressive nature of her campaign. It helps us understand how, even after her defeat, the Clintons could still have been in a position in a position to extract concessions from Obama, and even how they were able to claw back that power during the 8 years of his presidency. (Something I did not understand at the time.) Evidently Obama could not or would not mount an effective resistance. And how did Dean’s feud with Emanuel and Obama fit into that? What really happened, or didn’t happen, with the 2010 mid terms? Lots of questions. Surely this subplot of the Obama presidency is certainly of utmost importance and may even be the key to the disaster we’re looking at now.
As for the “20-year vetting” meme, thanks for bringing that up. I always had exactly the same reaction — are they serious? All it really meant was that, as far as she and Bill were concerned, 20 years of pounding wasn’t going to stop HER. She was no quitter! But what it completely ignored was that this “vetting” never resolved anything, but for the GOP was and would ever remain “the gift that keeps on giving”.
There can be no doubt Hillary totally believed this “vetting” meme herself. Was she worried? Not Hillary! “Power of positive thinking” and all that sort of thing. Private, e-mail server? What’s the difference, it’s just a bunch of nonsense!
It wasn’t just the “fake” scandals that did her in. It was her strange illusion of invulnerability. After all, she was going to be the first woman president!
Thanks for this very substantial comment, which really brings out the ironies and ambiguities of Obama’s 2008 victory.
And how did Dean’s feud with Emanuel and Obama fit into that?
Emanuel was the emissary from Clinton and Obama and assigned to take the heat for dissing Dean. Goes back to who the Clintons blamed for her ’08 loss. (Recall that Emanuel was more a Clinton guy, but opportunism always overrides affiliation for him.) Dean was supported from the left as DNC chair and he fulfilled that role by being even-handed and inclusive of all candidates. Thus, Ms. Inevitable had to win the nomination and not have it handed to her. That meant that when MI and FL chose not to honor the primary schedule and move up in the order, Dean correctly said that their results can’t count. Whereas, Clinton, and also probably correctly, deprived her of bragging rights to the first two large state primaries which would have given her the momentum lost in IA and SC.
Dean really expected an administrative position regardless of who won the nomination because it was clear enough that the Dem nominee would win the general election. My guess is that Obama was told that appointing Dean would look like Dean had favored him (in his heart and mind, he may have but officially he didn’t) and therefore, that would be unacceptable. If Obama was to get the Clinton endorsement.
And Dean fell for the ruse that Obama had sent him to the wasteland. Not that there was any way for him to get within the good graces of Obama because Obama doesn’t welsh on private deals. So, became a shill for Clinton in ’16 with some notion that she/he would look favorably on him when she won. Not likely. But personal desires often blind us.
How the Clintons and Clintonism destroyed the Democratic Party:
Jim Naureckas:
http://fair.org/home/bill-clinton-brought-democrats-back-to-life-a-zombie-idea-that-wont-die/
Paul Rosenberg:
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic
_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/2/1479017/-The-Clintons-Destroyed-the-Democratic-Party
Rainer Shea:
http://seeyouin2020.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-cultural-dynamics-behind-rise-of.html
A deal in 2008 to give her SoS in order to secure support for her campaign? I’m shocked anyone would draw such a conclusion! Seriously, I had the temerity to bring this up on a related site during the primaries this year and was roundly chastised by Clinton supporters. Their responses were so naive I left and haven’t returned.
“..support for his campaign.” The idea that Obama was somehow above political calculation and didn’t select her based solely on the merits insulted many there.
The “old guard that failed us so egregiously” turns out to be James Madison.
Unless you mean ‘failed so egregiously to agree with me across the board on various policy points’.
Happy Thanksgiving, all.
You still don’t get it. Sure more people voted for her. I voted for her. Because I, unlike too many of my fellow Americans, could easily see that Trump was even worse. That’s not a high bar, my friend.
A lot of people vote for her for no other reason.
Oh, and by the way, a lot of people voted for Trump for no other reason than that they thought at least he was better than Hillary. How bad a candidate do you have to be for that?
Who won these counties in Michigan and Wisconsin? Sanders or Trump?
If you guessed both, that’s close enough.
There’s a great deal of energized, socialized, lefty, Democratic talent in them there beige and green-colored counties. It’s largely dissed here on Martin’s site, as it has been since moveon started the ball rolling for the amateur left way back in 1998 (or so). Dismissed, and discarded, just like the Clinton campaign did, again, this year.
I don’t think this needs analysis. It’s right there. It was there all along. Clinton was a terrible choice this cycle. There were a lot of people in Wisconsin and Michigan that were happy to vote for Sanders rather than the scandal-ridden, same-old-bullshit wife of a former, impeached president. For perfectly sound, principled, democratic reasons that don’t need analysis either.
(And, slightly OT = Were voting machines in these mostly rural areas on these maps hacked on November 8th. Of course they were. The Sanders wins in upstate counties showed Trump hackers just where to go to get the votes. This is not rocket science. Just look at the colors and the shapes and even non-technical folks here can figure it out. No way did Trump win so many of these Sanders counties two weeks ago.)
The statistical maps here suffer from a logical flaw.
The counties for Bernie are based on a Democratic primary totals, which most places are a small fraction of the general election vote.
The counties for Trump are based on the general election vote.
It is a mistake to think that Bernie of necessity would have won all of these counties in the general election. Or that his map in the general election would look like his map in the primary.
Time to stop rehashing what is now history.
We never will know what a Trump v. Sanders contest would look like.
Too dismissive. But a drill down on all those counties in the past three election cycles — both primaries and general election — would better answer the question.
Turnout in the ’08 and ’16 Dem primaries and turnout in ’08-’16 in the GOP primaries. Then the splits for the candidates. Then the general election results for ’04 through ’12, again including turnout. The size of the swing in many states was so large that it was nearly inconceivable from presidential to presidential election cycle. As I’m not into spontaneous generation or the hairball and his campaign being exceptional, whatever accounts for these swings was preexisting.
Technically you’re right, but in close contests those extra Dems could have turned the corner. Trump’s margins in WI and MI are thin. Michigan is so close that it isn’t yet officially determined who won.
MI Results as of 11/23 :
http://miboecfr.nictusa.com/election/results/2016GEN_CENR.html
The point was NOT to try to know what a Trump v. Sanders contest would look like, but to figure out how Trump won WI and MI. Consensus seems to be, because enough Dems didn’t vote, and because enough former Obama voters actually preferred Trump to Clinton. That makes the primary results relevant information.
This is an article of faith unless you have actual statistics about lefty networks like MoveOn.org.
And the amount of lefty Democratic talent does not equate to “they should’ve won”. My argument (example, Cimmaron County, OK) has always been that there are at least 100 voters in every county who have voted Democratic in the worst (2014, 2016) election. Those people are available to be persuaded to be activists in their counties, given the right training and coordination.
The Clinton campaign apparently did not think that organizing those people either in Cimmaron County OK or in WI and MI was a priority because “they were not swing states” or some such logic.
I’m still not seeing how Sanders carrying these counties in a Democratic primary that polls anywhere from 30% to 50% of the voter of that county — at most — is relevant to the argument that Clinton was a bad candidate.
I’m sorry I wasn’t more clear.
To try to prove this statistically is beyond my pay grade. Rather than call it an “article of faith”, I hope we can attribute some reason to it and call it a hypothesis. The simplest way to state this hypothesis is that there were plenty of voters in rural WI and MI that didn’t want Trump, at least not as a first choice. That includes those primary voters who went for Hillary, those who went for Sanders, those who did not turn out for the primaries but would have come out for Sanders in November. And remember that the primaries in both MI and WI are open: again, I don’t have the statistics, but a lot of Bernie’s vote in the primary came from people who were not registered Democrats.
So how is this relevant to the argument that Hillary was a bad candidate? Because “normally”, the winner of the primaries does, in the general, get the vote of people who voted for their opponents in the general. And I think Hillary did poorly in that respect, and even more so with the non-Democrats who voted for Sanders.
Other than her core voters, a lot of the above either did not vote, or voted for Trump. We do know that her vote was down compared to Obama 2012, and that significant numbers of Obama voters from 2008 and 2012 went for Trump.
This is what it looks like to me. Prove me wrong.
I think the points you make in the first three paragraphs are all very important. I strongly support the idea of training local activists for rural areas.
I would add that it was Hillary’s “swing state” thinking that led Clinton not to bother campaigning in WI and MI. That was a fatal error and it was fatal particularly because it affected the turnouts in her areas of greatest strength, not just rural.
(You’re right about the logical flaw; didn’t see it before I posted, glaring as it is. Still, Wisconsin at least, has a long-held, statewide socialist ‘bent’ that Sanders tapped here. It’s partly heritage, and, maybe largely, the weather, that requires us to survive together or die off going it alone.)
Disagree about the notion that it’s ‘time to stop rehashing what is now history.’ I understand that ‘moving forward’ rather than ‘rehashing the past’ is meant as a pragmatic. What I, what we, millions of us I’d guess, don’t understand is how did she lose to that guy. Every explanation I’ve read is either just self-serving (Nate Silver) or wishful (like me). When we adjust for education and race, says Silver, we know why she lost; but all we learn from Silver is that he’s got a method (math) and a model (statistical) and it’s his bread and butter, so of course he’s sticking with it. But the data he relies on is so clearly, so badly flawed, what difference does it make what his statistical analysis says about it? I’m sure it’s all got a great beat in his head, but have you seen him dance?
We needed to figure this out in 2000, and failed to. We needed to figure it out again in 2004, and failed to, until it lead to a war and economic crash that led to the fluke of Obama’s election. And now, 2016, and we’re supposed to elide it all again.
Is American politics so dynamic, so vastly and ever-changing that what we might learn from the past is irrelevant? Of course not, or there’s no context, nothing to analyse ever, and it’s impossible to draw any conclusions that are sound, much less useful “moving forward.”
There are key variables that are never accounted for because of this ‘let it go’ mindset (e.g. the effect of ‘frothy-edge of consciousness’ technologies beyond the understanding of not just stupid racists, but otherwise held to be smart analysts, like Silver, and maybe you as well). So, we fail to apply common sense first and admit the obvious: something is very wrong here. And in that ignorance, repeat the past. It’s fatalistic; the opposite, I think, of what so many of you, of us, say so often, that we rely on evidence over easy answers. If you want to rely on evidence, you’ve got to be willing to look at it. And evidence is always a matter of history.
There is a fundamental contradiction in progressive politics. The establishment Democrats who brought the party to this current condition still control the agenda of the Democratic Party and will fight like hell to ensure that no progressive agendas move forward.
That is because of who pays for campaigns.
Moreover, as the media legitimizes the far right, it further delegitimizes and marginalizes the left, treating it as the far left (whatever that is in America anymore). What is the left equivalent of Breitbart or the Ku Klux Klan or any of the neo-Nazi organizations that have glommed on to Trump’s victory as validation for white supremacy and white nationalism?
The Republicans do not run away from their extreme right.
The Democrats always run away from their nearest left.
And no one ever says that not having a real big tent causes Democrats to fail. But it has been true since 1968 at least, and probably since the drubbing of 1946 and the Red Scare.
For all their brave talk of standing up for principles, progressives have avoided moving to the South and so-called red states because they are afraid of the conflict, possible threats to their careers, and intimidation they will receive if they are not “conservative”. The same for the cities and towns within states. These reputations have been half-truths, but with encouragement of a small group of white nationalists still seething from the cultural prohibition on bigotry that they call “political correctness”, they will demand political correctness of the conservative sort with threats.
This new generation of activists have a much tougher situation thatn the false spring of 2003-2009. The Democratic establishment, not the naivete or impracticality of the activists is responsible for the coming winter of politics in the US. The white working class is about to be crushed in ways not seen for over a hundred years, and they will say “Yes, sir” because they at least have the privilege of being white and being able to have “their vote matter”.
In many states, as Republicans become divided the Republican primary will be tantamount to election. The Republican long game is for that to happen in the national election as well–by hook or crook.
Have these imbibing activists come to the harsh truth that they might very soon have no political levers to affect national, state, or local policies because of the sell-out by Democratic elected officials? Can they quickly figure out how to win some surprising races that can be spun as a backlash to Trumpism?
The old war stories from 2003 and the Iraq anti-war movement are not sufficient. But what was found then and what remains is that there are progressives who have been networked together across the country. And they are in every state, regardless of whether there is a Democratic majority or not. Indeed, a Democratic majority might actually matter less depending on how many “Democrats” in the state are really not on board with what must be done to preserve the Constitution and its promise in this country. And many progressives have just given up and are waiting, some more eagerly than others, for the collapse of whatever you want to label it – neoliberalism, capitalism, the United States empire, the United States of America. It is not a sought for result, but now considered as inevitable as a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.
The skills that we need now is a way of talking convincingly to those who are not progressive about what progressive principles are, what they mean in terms of protecting and defending the Constitution, what they mean in terms of practical effects in society, and how we get to equal protection of the law in fact. Because fee-fees have become so tied up in politics, it requires understanding the feelings that must be associated with this conversation in order to win over support. Fuck Bernays, but people now expect to be marketed to with emotion, passion, and manipulation. How does one manipulate someone into not being so easily manipulated?
This means a lot of hard, well-thought-out, face-to-face interactions with our primary networks (friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors) first. And that in an environment of forced and often voluntary isolation and withdrawal. (We no longer really talk to each other like our parents or grandparents did.) And to speak the truth, not a skill set of a lot of progressives, including myself. Those sorts tend toward adapting and being incorporated into the establishment. Those sorts are who our culture selects for. The Bernaysians who are affable and good at manipulating feelings to gain the results employers want to see are the golden boys and girls in our society. And that is our second contradiction; progressives are not good by ideology and temperament at communicating with feelings instead of logic no matter how much you hector them/us about it being necessary to political success. Can these new activists overcome this inclination? And can they talk the attacks that are intended to trigger feelings of loss that the right-wing loves as a strategy. (That’s why they love slinging around the word “LOSER” in caps.)
Tangent: Regnery is reported as publishing in Fall 2017 a book with the title Cuck Dynasty: The Bush Family and the Global Decline of America.EndTangent
The left needs to cultivate its practical skills in organizing in the movemental, the community, and the electoral politics areas. The entire spectrum. Political movements in the US used to do this and succeeded. When did movemental become “too dirty”, community become “too impossible”, and electoral become “too co-opted” to figure out how to engage? And they need to interchange with each other in coalitions to build and, more importantly, institutionalize power and well-thought-out change. (Progressives long ago lost the innocence that any change at all is progress or that there are not things that need preserving from “progress”.)
Finally, the left needs to figure out how to support those people who are doing full-time political work (please don’t professionalize them) in getting done the job that needs doing. For a group that is will likely have declining means as the Trump regimes defunds public positions and business defund progressive non-profits, that will be a difficult issue to deal with. Private employment likely will be more demanding of time and more restrictive about “outside involvements”. And political campaign funding will suffer from the general state of the economy, which if Trump is serious about his economic policy, will be a disaster. Unless, that is, employers decide to bribe the workers to be silent, that is.
What this generation needs to understand about the Boomers who were activists in the 1960s is that the media hyped the size of the movement, just as it is doing the “Alt-Right” at the moment. We lost the chance to participate in electoral politics on our own terms with the institutionalization of conservatism in the Nixon administration. And that institutionalization overwhelmed us as we started families and struggled to make ends meet. There are still lots of Boomers who are local activists doing lots of small things that add up to some pretty amazing changes in America that are often taken for granted and likely will endure.
We missed the big ones: we did not end war; we did not end bigotry and racism and ensure equal rights for all; we did not end poverty, economic inequality, economic discrimination, of economic exploitation. But more worked on trying than is apparent in the polling statistics for elections. And a lot of folks are still working.
You put your finger on the fundamental question: what is to be done?
Let me make a specific response to one of your specific points:
One of the groups here is trying out the solution of crowd-funding organizers. It takes minimum 200 people chipping in $20/month to hire a full-time organizer and pay her enough to keep her happy at the job, long enough for the training and the development of the skills she learns to pay off (this isn’t really that different from hiring an organizer for a union or any other job in a modern corporation for that matter). So she’s a professional. Nothing less will do. The 200 people who pay in elect a leadership group who are charged, among other things, with coming up with a long-term political strategy and supervising her work. The explicit assumption is that all 200 of these people are working on the same strategy; a big part of the organizer’s job is helping them to be effective.
This all began here in May 2015. We just hired our third organizer. This summer we started expanding bandwidth out to the rest of the state, outside Milwaukee.
With a moment’s consideration, you can guess the contradictions inherent in this model. On the other hand it does get away from the non-profit funding trap you refer to. It’s still early days, we don’t know yet how this will all shake out, but early results are promising.
As long as the organizers you’re hiring actually have their heart in what they are doing, then all you’re doing is giving them the wherewithall to do it. I don’t see any contradiction in that.
Seems like these days a lot of big organizations (like foundations) are hiring professional administrators, etc., who have technical skills but no particular knowledge of or interest in the organization or field. Many of these people would work for the highest bidder, whoever it was. I would stay away from that approach.
Valid point. But if they didn’t have their heart in what they’re doing they’d be fired pretty fast. We don’t hire just anybody for these jobs and in fact their first responsibility coming in is to organize a group of 200 people to chip in to support them. That’s not a small hurdle.
The contradiction I spoke of is the following: the people who have been willing to step up to commit to being a part-time political activist plus chip in $20/month to crowdsource an organizer have predominantly been late career to early retirement, well-to-do working-class or professional or small-business, predominantly white people. And that’s completely OK, this seems to be a sector of the population that’s very much in motion politically at the moment; and any time someone wants to join up and commit to being an activist that’s a great thing in my opinion. We need more of all kinds of people so welcome on board but issues of class and race are sooner or later going to present themselves. In other words this is only a partial solution to the organizing question that THD originally posed.
” … as the media legitimizes the far right, it further delegitimizes and marginalizes the left … “
Yes, except that it also validates and mainstreams the left. That’s what Bernie Sanders is about. Not that many people really care what “the media” thinks any more. There’s Faux News, etc., but they already have their audience.
Remember, more people voted for Hillary than for Trump, and a lot of people (esp. young and minorities) who would have voted for Bernie didn’t vote at all.
I understand it’s bad where you are. Cooper seems to have won the governorship but there’s a lot of fighting. May justice prevail.
I fully understand that Clinton won by 2 million votes. That means that changing the system at the grassroots is more necessary in every state. How do you organize for that?
There is Fox News and it audience and all of the conservative radio and TV syndication networks, not to mention outfits like Sinclair, CBN, and other narrowcasting devoted to disempowering “the left”. It is a huge propaganda effort than cannot be dismissed.
“The left” has not counterpart for reaching and holding an audience. It is debatable whether there should be such a Bernaysian left propaganda effort. That tends to corrupt honest political arguments everywhere it has occurred. The media has effects on people whether those effects are conscious or regardless of whether people care what the media thinks. It is the corruption in the framing of news stories and outright dishonest reporting that have their effects–even on people who try to be careful about finding the truth.
The very fact that the 2 million margin doesn’t matter and the feel of the country is that Trump has already taken office is the effect of the media and how that gets unconsciously reflected through progressive blogs.
Hoe do you cultivate the talent of the left. That was what I was addressing. Those are my best shots. I see most folks are still relitigating either the primary or the quality of the Clinto campaign. Unless Jill Stein’s challenge results in the flipping of 37 electoral votes, that’s water over the dam by this point. I was addressing what next.
If Cooper does become governor, we will have lost more of our democracy in NC. A legislature will have nullified an election through caging voters.
” It is debatable whether there should be such a Bernaysian left propaganda effort.”
I have some experience in advocacy communication, which falls into the category of propaganda in the broadest sense. The word “propaganda” has (for understandable reasons) taken on a pejorative meaning, but the fact is, the originally meaning of the word is simply “what must be propagated”.
When I did this work, I was certainly partisan. I advocated for a cause, and believed in it. But my guiding principle, which I never knowingly violated, was, build your arguments on facts and reasonable inferences from those facts.
An incident occurred with another organization. They were “on our side”, but independent. They placed a full page ad in the NY Times — we did not see it beforehand. It contained a few (fairly minor) factual inaccuracies.
Our opponents tore into this ad very strongly. Being able to embarrass that organization (which was internationally known) was a big prize for them. It set back our cause significantly, and created a bit of a panic. Eventually it died down and we achieved our goal despite that.
Our much smaller organization (actually a coalition) also did a full page ad in the Times, and it was very effective.
My point is, Bernays is only one approach to propaganda, and it’s an approach I reject as you do. I reject it on principle, but even on purely practical grounds, when you’re in a fight with a powerful opponent it’s more of a liability than an advantage.
But it’s FAR from the only approach. You can make the truth comprehensible, interesting and persuasive to your audience. In the areas of the country saturated with Republican bullshit, THAT is what’s needed. Not Bernays. Tell the unvarnished truth and they are still going to accuse you of lying, twist everything they can, but you can win if you have the truth behind you and show that the are the ones that are full of shit. It’s existential.
Right now it’s so bad, we don’t even have access to the airwaves. Oddly enough, in this barrage of ideological propaganda from the right, I still believe that most Americans are not very ideological, nor should we think of this in terms of ideology. Americans respond to common sense — if they ever get to hear it. Again, look at Bernie Sanders.
I believe we need to get away from “identity politics”. We have not appreciated how divisive it can be. White nationalism is a form of identity politics.
Yet in 2012, non-Hispanic whites were 60% of Democrats. If the figure turns out to be lower in 2016, was that good for our side? I don’t think so.
The Democratic Party should not be the “minorities party,” it should be the party of all the people. Rev. King totally believed this, and so does Bernie Sanders. The fact is, we have far more uniting us than dividing us. Especially when it’s the 99.9% vs the .1 % . The differences need to be understood and respected, but not pandered to. Let’s use the language of inclusivity, even when we’re tailoring our message to particular audiences. If that seems difficult, it’s only because we’ve forgotten how to do something we used to do.
We cannot hope to get anywhere without very high-level communication skills. The Democratic Party, as a whole, has shown itself exceptionally poor at commmunication, above all this year. However, Bernie Sanders is an example of someone who knows how to communicate to a wide audience.
I don’t know if you saw this article which I linked to a couple of days ago, but it’s on this topic:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clinton-campaign-politics_us_5833866de4b030997bc10520
Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale has the following tips. (h/t digby)
A good list:
What to read?
“The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel,
1984 by George Orwell,
The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz,
The Rebel by Albert Camus,
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt,
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
This is REALLY good advice. Needs to go viral.