The Democrats seem to be caught on flypaper and unable to get out of an infinite loop of debate over whether they should focus on the needs and desires of their progressive base or the needs and desires of the more working class voters they lost in 2016 and which cost them election. You can see them flailing away anywhere you look, on Twitter or Facebook or on cable television and in newspaper columns. Cathleen Decker captures it nicely in her article for the Los Angeles Times:
Democrats essentially remain in the box where Hillary Clinton spent the general election: able to unify Trump opponents, but unable to craft a message for those not motivated by distaste for him.
“The Democrats are closer to where the electorate is headed, but have shown a tin ear and an inability to understand the groups that formed the backbone of the Democratic Party for decades,” said veteran Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart.
The deepest Democratic schisms involve whether to focus on liberal social issues or the economic struggles of blue-collar and middle-class Americans. During the presidential campaign, many voters saw the party as more intent on social issues, an image disputed by Democrats but pushed by Republicans.
“The Democratic Party, especially the presidential campaign, lost its core economic message last year; Trump sort of outmaneuvered us among Democrats and independents,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper, who has spent the last few months in what he calls “kitchen conversations” with voters.
Supporting the civil rights of Democratic voter groups is admirable, he said, “but we can’t let them bait us into getting away from our core message — and I think that does happen.”
The first hint that this is all stinking thinking is that it is basically irresolvable on its own terms. It’s like choosing to squeeze the left or right side of a balloon and thinking it will make any material difference to the outcome. What the Democrats need is a fully inflated balloon, not one that is collapsed on one side.
What is needed is not an answer or a resolution to this question but a paradigm shift that transcends the debate.
But before we even get that far, one thing should be kept in mind. Since this is largely a disagreement about emphasis, it’s important that it will be a long time before the Democrats have a single standard bearer again. The leaders the party has now, whether we’re talking about DNC Chair Tom Perez or congressional minority leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, aren’t really that critical or even influential in setting a national message. Even if they came up with some great talking points and a bunch of brilliant policy proposals, their influence on local, state and even federal elections would be limited. There’s a fight to be had about how resources are divvied up, I suppose, but most of us will have zero influence over that, either. So, a lot of this fighting is really premature and very unproductive.
For the time being, the focus should be on what wins elections in the districts where elections are being held. And that’s going to vary depending on whether it’s a district where Clinton did well or one in which she got her clock cleaned. There are places where a Republican won’t want to talk about Trump’s border wall or his ideas on trade, and there are areas where the Democrat won’t want to talk about transgender bathrooms and whether black football players stand for the national anthem. That doesn’t seem like a crisis for either party unless people are intent on making it a crisis.
In the end, though, the Democrats can’t succeed by choosing to double-down on what proved to be a losing strategy, but nor can they solve their problems by changing their national message to one that is designed to win over areas that they’ll never win. This is especially true if it turns off or sells-out their base.
I think it’s much more true to say that social issues failed to win the election for Clinton than that they cost her the election. The upside to that is that shifting on social issues won’t be the key to success, so it’s unnecessary. And, while I’m not entirely dismissive of Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper’s idea that the Dems were “baited” into getting away from their core messages, I think the real problem was that they didn’t have the right answers.
In other words, they had an economic message but the problem wasn’t so much that they underplayed it as that it had limited to negative appeal. What they need is an economic message that actually meets people where they’re at, not where we think they should be at. But, of course, I tried to cover this in my last piece.
The elephant-sized void in the living room is the decline of labor unions. They were the steel girders connecting working class interests to Democratic politics. And of course the Dems were a long way from doing everything they could have to defend the unions, though I think at best they could have slowed the decline somewhatm
Here in my general area, the loss of unions has been devastating to the Democratic Party. We still have a fair amount of union representation here, but it is a microsopic percentage of what it used to be. The loss of the economic power of blue collar, union jobs has hollowed out many of the local towns and cities around me. And much of the union representation that is left has been so significantly weakened that belonging to one isn’t much more than a way for those who run them to skim funds from lower wage workers. Their power for many of them to do any significant good for workers is barely perceptible.
There are still a few unions around that wield some power and can mobilize a decent number of people, but their numbers are few. Sadly, a goodly number of people in those unions voted for Donald Trump.
I want a government that will stop throwing my tax money away on the military industrial complex and instead spend it on me.
I want a government that will stop the war on terror and close Guantanamo Bay.
I want a government that will roll back the militarization of our local and federal police forces. Get those goddamn spy cameras off of my main street and stop the NSA from infecting my hard drive firmware. Make stingrays completely illegal.
I want a government that will stop kissing billionaire asses and for once represent me.
I want a government that guarantees medical, housing, food, jobs, and education without making us jump through dehumanizing hoops to get scraps.
I want a court system that won’t by default throw the book at everyone. I want a prison system that at least tries to rehabilitate.
What party will do this? No way in a million years I’d vote R, but I can kind of see why some did this time, if only holding out slim hope of shaking things up a tiny bit. D’s are the stasis party at this point, I voted for her enthusiastically but couldn’t see any of the above changing substantially under Hillary. Even Obama was directing drone strikes FFS, depressing.
Maybe things were only better for a little while after the WWII boom, but I think we have become accustomed and so forget how bad our current world really is. We could instead be living in relative splendor, and relatively easily. I mean, why hasn’t the mechanized disappearance of many jobs led to more leisure time? I was told in my youth that this was going to happen and that it would be a good thing for mankind.
In the discussions I have had with people in the Party over the last 4 months, I have heard virtually no disagreement that the Party needs to significantly improve it’s economic messaging.
Most of the identity vs. economics argument is in the the blogs.
Maybe I misunderstand what you say they are saying. The Democratic Party does not need better economic messaging. The Democratic Party needs better economic policies. They need to find ways to reverse the inequality of wealth that started growing rapidly under Carter. What changed under him and Clinton and was reinforced under Obama that allowed corporations to start giving their increased profits to CEOS and not to workers? Look seriously. It’s quite clear that’s when the great shift became obvious.
How much of this is tone? I hate Chris Christie, but if Democrats defended accessible bathrooms or sportsball players the way Christie defends Muslim judges and drug treatment centers, who much of this problem would go away?
Not all, clearly. Not even most. But enough?
I gotcher paradigm right he-ar: ACCOUNTABILITY.
The Republican Party has been, for living memory, the party of unaccountability. Unaccountability for business, unaccountability for police/prosecutors, unaccountability for churches, eventually even unaccountability for individuals with the right tribal badges.
The Democrats must be the party of accountability. Not only is the the only available space to stand on, it is also (like they say about the oatmeal) the right thing to do.
Everything else flows from this — or is unattainable.
Speaking of paradigms, this is an interesting one:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/qotd-bizarroworld-edition-by-digby.html
What the Democratic Party really needs is a heart transplant.
AG
I think this is a very difficult question. One message Democrats have to send is that government is not the problem, and that government can solve problems when the free market fails. Every time a Republican says that the answer in healthcare is to unleash the free market, somebody should point out that the free market fails miserably at health care. In other words, Democrats have to fight and win a basic ideological battle against “freedum” and the “free market is always best.”
That said, one also has to understand these people and I don’t understand them even though I live in a small isolated Canadian town that represents a microcosm of the rust belt. In 1970, the town was wealthy with a mill offering union jobs to 10% of the population. Automation slowly destroyed 90% of those jobs over the past 50 years. The population is slowly in decline.
There is no future here. Everybody knows it.
The smart kids go away to school. Some of them return as teachers, nurses, mechanics or even in one case, a vet, but for the most part they are gone forever. The kids who do not go away to school (or even go away to an area where good blue collar work is still available) end up working for Walmart while living with Mom and Dad.
The town is not poor because Mom and Dad still have money and a good pension earned during the good old days. But we are aging rapidly as so many of the young move away and we are growing stupider because the best and the brightest of our young people are the movers away. And there is no future here. Everybody knows it.
In the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s I was working as a labour market analyst for the Canadian government. We were consumed by this problem. We watched the high paying blue collar jobs disappear. We saw the reasons. We saw pretty much everything the government tried to do for a town like mine – and the Canadian government tried – turn into an expensive failure.
Our town has no future. Everybody knows it and we have known it for forty years. People in town are sad about it, but we are not angry. The kids who stuck around in dead end jobs can’t say they were not warned.
The big difference between my town and Desolation City, Ohio is no one has ever blamed trade or immigrants for the problem. If somebody came to my town and pretended he could bring back the good old days – where a man without real skill could make an excellent living – we’d call him a liar and run him out of town.
If Democrats are going to try to craft a positive economic message for communities like mine, they had better figure out how to be better liars than the Republicans.
And in spite of clear and present danger my Twitter timeline remains full of endless accusations, debates, re-litigation and recriminations of the Clinton vs Sanders variety.
Unless those two publicly reconcile it would be better the Earth swallow them up along with their most militant and unrepentant cohorts; seriously way past time to get over every little bit of it.
It would help if those two could reconcile. But I don’t think they come from the same place, and it may not be possible. Bernie is an economic populist, Hillary seems more the pragmatist and into identity politics.
Is ‘identity politics’ more or less devoid of content and more or less useless as a term than ‘neoliberal’?
It’s a tough call…
I don’t think I ever heard her say vote for me because I’m a woman or anything to that effect.
Is that what we are defining as identity politics?
I think Bernie and Hillary get along about as well as necessary. I think I see two groups, the BerniBros and the HillBots, who are the problem. Most Bernie supporters and most Clinton supporters are already willing to work together, but the hard core Democratic Party Establishment is unwilling to allow any deviation from their fanatically held position that they lost because an overwhelming number of Russians voted Republican.
With the utmost respect to BooMan — who’s established over and over again that he’s a great strategist and prognosticator — I just have to strongly disagree with the entire premise here.
First, it’s been demonstrated that the demographics of Trump support isn’t the mythical “working-class” types driven by “economic anxiety” (most of them are comfortably set up, etc.) — but never mind that. The Republican voters who are concerned about jobs, wages, vanishing businesses etc. are doubly insulated from our influence: first, because they’ve been systematically lied to over decades about the causes of their distress; and second, because — as we discussed on the previous BooMan thread — they’ve been fiendishly manipulated into rejecting both expertise-based solutions and advice (“condescending,” “elite”) and the data that would fix this problem (“fake news”).
And we can run around in circles ignoring this, and believing there’s some other pathway to unity with them — that we don’t need to fix it; that we can somehow get them to vote the way we want (the way they should) without toppling or disturbing this enormous misleading wall between them and the truth — but there just really isn’t. And if we start moving the goal posts around and re-define our politicians’ “economic message” according to the distorted, deliberately misleading Republican template, we’re going to lose the game.
Because base Republican genuinely think — have been led to believe — that their own economic problems can be solved by 1) forcibly ejecting non-white labor; 2) tax cuts for “job creators”; 3) crushing unions; 4) de-funding social programs; 5) deregulating businesses (by removing environmental and workforce-related constraints); 6) decreasing international trade interdependence; and 7) reducing federal deficit spending. They hate Obama because he was “a socialist” who “wrecked the country,” when in reality he saved us from ruin after the Wall Street crash, increased job growth, and decreased dependence of social programs, by pursuing the opposite of those seven policies.
And until the Republican voters are made to understand this, they won’t vote the right way. It means telling them they’re wrong (which means overcoming their aversion to “condescension” and their dependence on dubious sources like Fox News), but there’s just no valid shortcut to storming that beachhead and establishing a presence.
Debates are lost when one side accepts the terms the other side’s using. There’s no way to get people who can’t see clearly — whose understanding of what they’re seeing has been maliciously turned upside down — to agree with the rest of us, until the corrosive lies are expunged.
[I agree that talking about “identity politics” is a non-starter — Hillary’s acquiecence to being sold as “a woman” and therefore someone who should be President — was a bad idea. But even here, the underlying hostility to progressive ideas can’t be cleverly maneuvered around; it must be confronted and overcome.]
I think this assumes we’re trying to win over a majority, I don’t think we are. I think we’re looking for ways that we don’t get killed in these areas. We need to get 40% of the vote but in 2016 got close to 20% in a lot of these areas
Respectfully, I’m not arguing for tactics that will win a majority. I’m trying to remove the biggest obstacle to progressive progress.
It’s basic stimulus/response: you vote, see the results, and vote again based on your evaluation of what happened; of the performance by the politicians, programs and philosophies. “That didn’t work; let’s try something else” vs. “More of this, please.”
But if that feedback loop is distorted or interrupted — if voters are actively deceived about what the results are (Obama’s job growth numbers are “a lie”; the Clinton-era boom was “because of Reagan’s deregulation and tax cuts”; the Bush-era crash was Clinton’s fault, etc. etc.) — then the basic apparatus of democracy breaks down.
that’s true too
I don’t know if you’ve read Al From’s book, The New Democrats and the Return to Power. He explains why the people who now control the Party organization made the conscious decision to turn away from Labor and Civil Rights and protecting the social safety net. As long as people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, Patrick Murphy, the people who would join the Democratic Leadership Council if it were revived, control the Party, we’re going to lose. We started losing nationwide when Obama put them in position in 2009. Their strategic and political decisions have been uniformly disastrous. The underlying ideas that coalesced into the New Deal are the winning ideas.