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Elect a better president than Obama next time. I don't think there's any historical precedent for how many down-ticket races, governors' offices and statehouses the Democrats have managed to lose while Obama's been in office, and those races are key to the redistricting process that will determine who can win Congress. Some of those losses were going to happen no matter what but many of them are from the White House's self inflicted wounds. The real problem for the Democrats, though, is that there's a lot less unity between what large parts of their base want and what their big money donors want, and that makes them vulnerable to the demographically weaker but more ideologically coherent Republicans.
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Feb 5, 2016 06:41
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My modest proposal: make it so penis enlargement surgery and infinite viagra prescriptions are covered under Obamacare and Americans will stop being so obsessed with their guns.
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Feb 7, 2016 20:24
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LeJackal posted:
*Resigns in disgrace from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee*
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Feb 7, 2016 20:36
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The best way to get Republicans on board with gun control would be to have large groups of visible minorities walking the streets while openly brandishing their legal weapons. That's how gun control got started last time.
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Feb 7, 2016 20:45
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The way gun chat took over this thread is really indicative of why the Democrats are in trouble, but not for the reason most people think. Contrary to what some would have you believe gun control isn't an overwhelmingly unpopular stance:  The real problem is guns are very divisive. When guns come up it tends to suck up al the oxygen in the room. Any other kind of discussion gets sidelined. People bicker back and forth and nobody ends up looking particularly good. A lot of people get turned off by politics like that and the people who stick around join up along tribal lines and don't really entertain much rational debate. Republicans tend to do better in that kind of environment than Democrats. But you know that's all hypothetical anyway because even if the Democrats could focus squarely on economic issues they'd still be stuck with the fact that their record is mediocre at best and the party is internally divided.
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Feb 9, 2016 01:58
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NNick posted:Guns really aren't the issue. There is no 'issue' Democrats can drop that would be a political gain. It would simply move people to vote the other side or not vote at all. Gun control is a policy tent that naturally aligns with Democrats because they have compassion. Democrats receive more money and support for supporting the issue than if they were to abandon it. That's exactly my point though. Guns aren't an issue in and of themselves but they happen to be one of those areas of contention that tend to distort any argument they become a part of. The rabid obsession that many people have regarding guns makes it a high profile issue that sucks energy and attention away from other debates. One of the side effects of this is that it turns a lot of people off of politics and helps drive down turnout, which in turn tends to favour Republicans. Of course, while the impact of gun politics on national political debates is probably mostly favorable to Republicans, it's plain to see the Democratic establishment isn't afraid to use it as a wedge in their own primary. And much like the Republicans, the Democrats here use guns as a way to avoid talking about economic issues where they fear they may be out of step with the party's base. quote:I think there is a much larger portion of potential voters who are turned off at a youngish age by how corporate both parties are. Democrats are seen as weak - because they capitulate on their values to 'win' elections - most recently on people running away from Obamacare. The Democratic party cannot be realistically expected to lead the charge on this. Political parties, even powerful ones like the Democrats, don't have the capacity to engineer widespread social change. I think the real test for movements like Black Lives Matter, the Sanderistas and various other groups is to actually lay the foundations of a social movements that won't simply wither away after they fail to achieve their immediate political goals. People tend to act as though the New Deal and FDR's other policies were nothing more than a pragmatic response to the persistence of the Great Depression. But this overlooks the huge amount of popular organizing and struggle -- some of it stretching back, in one way or another, to the 19th century -- that laid the foundations for the New Deal. There was a huge amount of organizing and struggle that created the intellectual and organizational foundations upon which people could organize their demands for government relief and intervention. Something similar happened with the Regan "revolution" in the 1980s. Conservatives had been organizing since hte 1950s to take over the Republican Party. Conservative intellectuals had been founding magazines and peddling their arguments in the academy. A huge mass of blue collar whites who were against the civil rights amendments and other social changes had been shaken loose from the Democratic coalition. The point of these canned history lessons is that organizers outside the Democratic party will need to lay the foundations for the kind of change in party strategy you're advocating. If the Democrats just abandon their alliance with corporate donors and billionaires and they don't have a strong and active grassroots base to support them then they're just going to get slaughtered. This is why I think the real test of Sanders will be whether the coalition of activists he's helped to build will actually remain intact after he loses. Because the kind of changes they envision are going to take decades of struggle to even be plausible, not a single cathartic and exciting presidential campaign.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:09
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The optimistic leftist read on the Sanders campaign is that it's really just the latest manifestation of an underground current of activism that links the Seattle Protests against globalization in 1999, the Dean campaign from 2003-2004, the grassroots surge of enthusiasm for Obama in 2007-2008 and the Occupy protests in 2011. Under this optimistic reading of recent history the Sanders people are building upon these past experiences and successes. I put this interpretation forward without endorsing it because I don't have any way of knowing if it's plausible or not, it's merely something I've seen other people argue. It will be interesting to see if some academic comes forward and gives us a detailed analysis and investigation of the Sanders campaign, much in the way that Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson have given us a fairly in depth study of the Tea Party.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:43
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One of the main selling points of D&D these days is the amount of  it generates on the rest of the forums.
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Feb 10, 2016 02:37
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Sanders may, against the odds, manage to secure the nomination. He will still inevitably "lose" a bunch of political battles after he is elected. How well he losses these battles will be the key test. Sometimes a movement is defeated and grows stronger off the defeat, and sometimes a movement is defeated and grows weaker. quote:Bad at Losing As to your more general comments I would suggest that the Democratic party is unlikely to take the lead on the issues you value unless there's a demonstrated benefit in doing so. You need some social movement organizing to clear the way for the risk averse political class to follow, or, alternatively, you need to kick out those risk averse types and replace them with folks who are closer to your own worldview. Based on history, political parties in liberal capitalist societies like the USA do not tend to take dramatic leadership roles in enacting social change. Whether it was the passage of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, or the Reganite move to deregulation and tax cuts, a similar pattern has tended to assert itself: some mixture of intellectual mobilization and grassroots organizing, spread over several years, and only able to seize power after some series of crises ruptures the traditional political system and creates a space for some new social forces to assert themselves. Recent generations of leftists have seemingly wanted to skip the hard part and just have that magical cathartic moment where Obama gets elected, Wall Street gets occupied, etc. and then everything is fixed and everyone goes home happy. But realistically that's not going to happen. Long periods of struggle will be necessary to change things and expecting the Democratic party to be your ally in that struggle is extremely naive. The Democratic party may be a tool you can utilize but it's controlled by elites who have very little interest in seeing your desired goals enacted. Indeed I suspect many of them would rather wreck the party than let people like you take control of it.
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Feb 10, 2016 06:39
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If I were thinking of reasons the Democrats should be worried about next year then I'd suggest that another recession hitting and pushing unemployment up again or all those stories about people forced to buy insurance with deductibles so high they can't afford to see the doctor ought to be larger concerns. That and the fact that the primary front runner is currently flailing around and potentially burning important bridges in her increasingly desperate attempts to secure the nomination. I certainly wouldn't put support or opposition to gun control very high on a list of key election issues in 2016.
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Feb 10, 2016 22:41
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Kinda striking how thoroughly stale and boring all these arguments are anyway. As I was saying above I think the sheer repetitiveness, viciousness and gridlock of the gun debate is more of a turnoff than the gun issue itself. There are a few people here who, whatever they might claim, are clearly happy to talk endlessly about guns. Doesn't really seem like they're trying to change anyone's mind or get a better understanding of their own thoughts either -- they just talk hearing themselves talk about their favorite pet issue, and will happily turn any political discussion into a de facto discussion on guns.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:04
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It's kind of endearing that gun owners in this thread are so convinced that they represent the crucial swing vote that delivers power in American elections. I guess it would be too modest to just admit that your particular hobby and interests make you more likely to vote Republican. Instead there has to be this entire elaborate explanation of why the vote of people exactly like you is the key to winning national elections or overcoming structural problems like jerrymandering and vote suppression. It really comes of like an unsubtle but probably unconscious attempt by people to assert that they are important. "Don't you see, if only the Democrats would cater more to me then they would win elections." It's also a way to attacking your equally irrelevant enemy on the other side of the debate, because now you can tell this person "the Democrats lose because of people like you!" As though someone who is demographically most likely to be an under employed college grad represents the source of Democratic campaign strategy misfires. Beneath all the pretend debating it just comes down to this: people like me are super important and the world would be better if we were listened to more. People who annoy me on the internet, meanwhile, are the direct cause of bad things. My place in the universe is consequential and my likes and dislikes closely align with the outcome of issues of national importance! The world revolves around whether people support or oppose my hobby of choice. Guns are hardly irrelevant to elections but if you listened to some of the posters in this thread you'd think they were the only issue that actually swayed any voters when really, anyone who has been watching politics for the last decade should know gun control is likely to be only a minor issue in this year's contest.
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Feb 15, 2016 17:19
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LeJackal posted:Its funny that you don't disparage the posters in this thread claiming that supporting gun control is one of the most important issues for the Democratic party. Its almost as if your insistence on ideological purity trump any other logic or reasoning. As if you have different standards based on identity politics. That's because the arguments aren't really symmetrical in the way you're implying. I don't see any Democratic posters claiming that if the party would just introduce even harsher and more sweeping gun control legislation then they would somehow get more votes. Instead they're making the fairly reasonable point that a lot of Democratic voters and donors support gun control, meaning that de-emphasizing it as a policy might cost as many or more votes and donations as it would win. I hope you can see how this is a relatively modest and conventional argument: de-emphasizing policy that the party base has long championed may cost the party as much as it benefits. Contrast that with the argument several gun advocates have made: "adopting radically new policy that alienates the base and which is premised on attracting swing voters who haven't actually been proven to exist will be the key to victory". Those gun control arguments may or may not be wrong, but they aren't really comparable to the multiple gun owners who have actually argued that gun control is a bigger issue than economics or gerrymandering in explaining why Democrats lose. One side here is making an argument that may or may not be wrong, the other side is basically talking gibberish. Since I'm not an American I can't say I'm hugely invested in how much you guys restrict guns. I don't tend to think gun ownership should be illegal but when I observe Americans debating gun control I find the policy details are less striking than the amount of raw tribalism on display. So far as I can tell there aren't any other liberal democracies that have anything resembling what passing mainstream discourse on guns in America. Anyway, as I said repeatedly upthread I think the best reason to de-emphasize gun control as an issue is that it is unlikely to gain traction and the entire spectacle of the gun debate makes it harder for the Dems to focus on positive areas where they could make actual progress and attain new votes. But the idea being pushed in this thread that gun control is a super consequential issue in its own right is, as I said above, a very transparent attempt for a couple of posters here to try and assert that their personal priorities somehow provide the key for how national elections are fought and won.
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Feb 15, 2016 17:47
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Jarmak posted:Yes you're right, tying elected officials election results to the actions they took as elected officials during their term immediately preceding the election is totally a post hoc on it's face, that's not hand-wavey at all. It kind of is when there were so many other unusual factors playing into the 94 election including a failed attempt to implement universal healthcare. The preceding period had also seen a Democratic President going against a large part of his voter base, including key constituents like labor unions, to push for the implementation of NAFTA, something many Democratic representatives in the House were against. Tom Foley, Speaker of the House at the time, famously went against his own colleagues and sided with Clinton, which probably contributed to his unprecedented defeat the next year when he became the first House Leader to be defeated in a re-election campaign since 1862. There are less spurious ways to support your case. A few Democrats like Bill Clinton have actually mused about whether gun control cost them that election. I think the reason Clinton would argue that is really because it helps cover up the damage he and the DLC did to the party by largely abandoning key Democratic voter groups like African Americans and trade unionists. But at least if you were bringing up Clinton's statements then at least we'd be having a debate with some kind of evidence attached to it instead of some very tenuous grasping at straws. I'll add to this that it's very interesting how DLC New Democrats and Gun Owners can find a common cause in this particular area: they might be on different sides of the issue, but both groups really want to make the 1994 election somehow have an explanation other than Bill Clinton's realignment of the party toward the right. quote:Also for the loving millionth time the argument has never been "gun control doesn't have support". It has been "support for gun control doesn't drive people to the polls the way opposition to gun control does". So responding "but but look, I told you there was support for gun control" is not only utterly worthless data, but betrays the fact that after pages of this poo poo you still doesn't even grasp the basic core of what we're even arguing about. Yeah but the counter argument is that since perception massively trumps reality here the idea that gun nuts will be less motivated to vote based on something the Democrats say or do in the real world is dubious at best. There are already huge numbers of people convinced, contrary to any evidence, that the government is on the verge of outlawing and confiscating guns. The idea that the Democrats could put out a press release saying "we're not going to touch guns" and that this would somehow help them electorally just doesn't have much support whatever way you want to slice it. If you want to just argue that you should be allowed to have your guns go ahead. I do not understand this stubborn and almost farcical conviction so many of ya'll have that this particular issue is super important for deciding national elections. Seems more like an existential cry asserting your importance than an actual reasoned political position.
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Feb 15, 2016 21:53
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Jarmak posted:Except that the democratic party actually did better with minorities in 1994 then 1990, gently caress the difference was with white males. The 1994 election was where the term "angry white males" to describe a voting block comes from. Gun control wasn't the sole driving issue but it was a major contributor to the culture war bullshit that drove that election. It's also kind of amusing you say "union members" since union members are the primary gun owning demographic in the Democratic party. You're just restating the argument I already anticipated you making and responded to. Yes of course DLC Democrats like Clinton and Gore want to claim that culture war poo poo like gun control happened in a total vacuum because it makes their defeat seem like the result of a principled but misguided stand rather than a self inflicted wound. You are completely ignoring the abandonment of traditional Democratic constituencies, not just blacks but, perhaps more importantly from an institutional perspective, organized labour. You're ignoring the huge significance of NAFTA, which was a much more visible and prominent issue in public debates at this time than gun control. And you're ignoring the extent to which Gingrich benefited from recent developments like the rise of right wing media, or the ways in which Republicans innovated by campaigning collectively around a few signature issues, embodied in the contract with America. What you're doing is grasping at a lot of straws to defend what was very clearly on it's face a post hoc fallacy. You pointed to an incredibly complicated and historically significant election that had all kinds of different factors going into it and tried to reduce it to gun control. I suspect that on some level you're perfectly aware of the fact that at most gun control was one of numerous important factors explaining the outcome of the 94 midterms but I think you've committed to your position at this point and don't want to back down and are thus doubling down on your initial statements that gun control was the defining issue of that election.
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Feb 16, 2016 20:10
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Also as contentious as the last page has been at least the debate about gun control and Democratic electoral strategy is currently somehow connected to data and history at the moment instead of people lazily sniping at each other. Someone reading this thread could refer to the different arguments, read up on the events mentioned or the articles being cited, and draw their own conclusions in a way that is hard to imagine happening a few pages back when essentially nothing of substance was being said by anyone.
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Feb 16, 2016 20:18
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Hal_2005 posted:They statistically can't. Democrats have passed through the 'generational window' which is a fancy way of saying millennial median age has passed from generationally a socialist leaning ideology, generated while in state education to a 'family' set of values upon entering the workforce. We saw the same swing in the mid-70's onwards to the mid 90's where even core DNC policies became for all practical intentions RNC policies under Clinton (mid first term to back half second term). Good job ignoring all the evidence that millenials are delaying household formation because they cannot find decent jobs and are overloaded with debt. Or for that matter ignoring the generational divide that literally every observer of the democratic primary has commented on. The actual danger of basing an election strategyvob millenials is that it's not clear how many of them will turn out to vote. The idea you're proposing -- that they have apparently settled down economically and have become supportive of the economic status quo -- is such a bizzate and out of touch analysis that if I didn't know better I would assume this was a jokr post. Anyway, this is exactly the kind of analysis I would expect from someone who claimed mere months beforehand that Alberta would never elect the NDP. As u recall you had a similarly asinine just-so story in that case as well about how Alberta was the province of hard working salt of the earth types who had fled the big government east and who would never ever vote for a leftist party.
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Feb 17, 2016 20:06
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RasperFat posted:Holy poo poo this gunchat is ridiculous. Makes it pretty obvious that pro-gun people are babies that ignore evidence. A plethora of polls and statistics showing gun control is a WINNING issue for democrats is responded to with nitpicking and misinterpretation of math. Essentially being willfully dense. The legitimate point being made, beneath many layers of special pleading and willful obtuseness, is that polls don't reveal the intensity of voter feelings, meaning that it's actually safer to be on the side of the minority who love guns and feel passionately about them rather than on the side of the larger number of people who are mildly in favour of gun control but who probably don't make it their only issue. Of course what gun control opponents in this thread can't really respond to is the fact that there's very little reward in chasing gun votes when so much of the gun owning community might as well live on Mars for all their political awareness. American politics is so disconnected from reality that huge numbers of people genuinely fear that the Muslim president is on the verge of sending swat teams door to door confiscating fire arms. Anyway, the issue with the Democrats being more "progressive" has already been identified: it's not what the people running the party actually want. The Democrats are funded by the same billionaires as the Republican party, and the major Democratic policy wonks and political operatives all eat from the same trough as the Republican policy wonks and political operatives. They have strong vested interests in the current billionaire funded private welfare system that exists in Washington. Remember that the purpose of winning in American politics is, for many people, to invest in your future by gaining exclusive access to the halls of power. You do your time in government or within the apparatus of a major political party and then you parlay that access and experience into real money after you retire. Even if the Democrats could theoretically gain more votes by eschewing this system they'd be risking their ladder to easy riches. It's a hell of a lot easier for a young, educated and connected person to go and make their fortune in Washington than it would be to actually work your way up through the ranks of a real business or to profit off of genuinely entrepreneurialism. This is without evening getting into the problems with winning an election in America without the support of the billionaries. The only person who looks plausibly positioned to do that right now is Trump and he's doing it by utilizing strategies that aren't available to the Democrats. This is why lurking behind any kind of progressive / conservative conflict is a more basic issue with systemic corruption. The Democrats aren't stupid. They understand that support for the status quo has waned significantly (perhaps they under estimate how rapidly that support has dissipated, as evidence by Hilary's campaign, but they understand it well enough to try and exploit it). But they have no real opportunity to chase that anti-establishment vibe without abandoning the corporate welfare that is the lifeblood of the party and its activists. Basically you need to stop thinking of the Democrats as an ineffective progressive party and recognize that it's mostly a vehicle for enriching its senior members. It just happens, due to historical accidents, that contained within the party is a contingent of progressives who are occasionally harvested by a cynical party elite when the time comes to rebrand.
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Mar 1, 2016 02:01
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rudatron posted:I disagree that Trump's tactics can't be used progressives, his simple showmanship and ability to grab the media cycle isn't tied to his racism or whatever, it's simply turning the outrage-cycle on its head, by using it to suffocate coverage of your political opponents. That, combined with the loss of faith in the main political institutions (which includes the media) means that they end up doing free advertising, under the misconception that it will finally sink him or whatever. It's actually fairly ingenious. Trump's strategy is intimately tied up with Trump's public persona and his access to an unlimited warchest of his own money. I'm sure there are lessons to be learned from his campaign but the idea that you could just appropriate his tactics and slap a progressive coat of paint on them strikes me as hollow. Can you name a single political figure within the Democratic party over the last 30 years who you could plausibly imagine running something analogous to Trump's campaign? For one thing, his appeal is so tied up with racial politics right now. For another, the Democratic establishment is no more supportive of economic nationalism than the Republicans, perhaps even less in some cases. Also you still have to address the fact that the Democratic party, as opposed to Democratic voters, has displayed zero interest in any kind of populism that would be genuine enough to threaten their access to Plutocrat Welfare. I think many of them would probably prefer that a genuine populist candidate lose than risk upsetting the system that reliably delivers so many benefits to them. Both parties know that the system inevitably puts them back into power after a few cycles, so why upset the apple cart with a risky anti-establishment candidate when you're going to win anyway eventually, and when your personal well being is guaranteed either way? The problem is the structure of the Democratic party. They aren't stupid, they just have no incentive to pursue the kind of progressive agenda that a lot of people want. It's not for nothing that Benrie Sanders campaign has relied so much on support from people who previously didn't participate in the party or who only got involved in 2008 onward. If you look at how the GOP ended up being a vehicle for conservative ideologues, one of the clear factors was that conservatives in the 1960s (really in the 1940s and 50s but things didn't properly get underway till the 60s) decided to seize control of the party. That was a battle that raged continuously into the 1980s. By contrast the Democrats went through a similar takeover in the 1960s by progressive activists but unlike the GOP the Democratic establishment rallied itself, kicked those people out and then rewrote the party rules so they'd never win again. Then they spun an entire mythology around why McGovern had lost so they'd have a neat little cautionary tale to point to for future elections. To fix the Democratic party you'd need to actually start taking control of the party apparatus and changing the party's culture, much in the way that the Goldwaterites and their fellow travelers were able, through decades of trench warfare, to take over the Republicans.
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Mar 1, 2016 02:39
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rudatron posted:His warchest isn't unlimited, and compared to his opponents, he's spent a negligible amount of his own money. He was also not a member of the Republican party establishment, nor even a Republican until very recently, so your challenge to find someone 'within the party' doesn't compare well. And it's not as if the GOP is any less in the Plutocratic Welfare trough, possibly more so. There's definitely lessons to be learnt there, whether you acknowledge that or not. Personally, I think the Democratic party's stranglehold is must stronger the GOPs, but that doesn't mean it will end well for them, it just means the crisis point will come a little later & be more intense. Looking forward to the eventual riot, it'll be a real fireworks display. He loaned his campaign millions of dollars that someone else would have had to fundraise for and that money makes him inherently threatening to his opponents since they know if he wanted to he could start spending more at any time. It also gives him credibility among his followers. And never mind finding someone currently within the Democratic party, point to any figure in the political establishment right now who could plausibly be a left wing or progressive Donald Trump. The closest equivalent right now is arguably Sanders and while there are similarities between him and Trump in terms of how both of them are exploiting the divergence between what donors want and what regular voters want, there are also some pretty dramatic differences in terms of both style and substance. The lessons to be learned from Donald Trump mostly relate to how weak the political centre is right now and how the economy is doing vastly worse than anyone in the pundit or political classes can appreciate (exhibit A would be Paul Krugman crowing about the successes of the ACA). But beyond the fact that the political establishment is weakening it's not clear to me what specific lessons you think the Democrats can learn from Trump right now. A lot of his success seems to be coming from exploiting the particular dynamics of where the Republican party is right now. The Democrats have their own set of issues that would seem to call for its own unique solution. Arguably that should have been Sanders but its unlikely he'll get the nomination.
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Mar 1, 2016 03:24
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RasperFat posted:I know that our system is broken and run by big money on both sides, that's not the issue.  Do you really not see how the role of money in the system is placing limits on what the Democrats are willing to say and do? These aren't unrelated or only tangentially connected issues, they are two expressions of the same underlying problem.
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Mar 1, 2016 03:27
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gohmak posted:Alan Grayson Other than a propensity for bombastic rhetoric I don't really see the similarity between him and Trump. I feel like you're focusing on the more superficial (though still important) elements of Trump's appeal, like his bombastic rhetoric and bullying nature. I think what you're over looking is that Trump also had a very effective strategy: one I don't see any equivalent of on the Democratic side. Trump was able to identify a specific and dramatic divergence between the GOP leadership and the GOP rank and file, specifically immigration and globalization, and Trump has exploited that weakness. So many liberals are acting like Trump is commanding rabid support through some kind of dark rhetorical sorcery that has no connection to any actual policy or factual reality. What this view overlooks is that Trump is actually playing masterfully into a real division within the GOP to leverage his own advantages. His bombastic rhetoric helps him but his rhetoric wouldn't be so powerful if the division didn't already exist to be exploited. What's the Democratic equivalent of that? Is there a democratic equivalent of that? Because that's more important than the rhetoric. RasperFat posted:No I see the connection and I personally think campaign finance is probably the biggest single issue problem right now. Honestly this post kinda approximates how I imagine Hilary Clinton and a lot of her advisers have viewed American politics. I want to highlight one statement you made that I think is particularly telling: RasperFat posted:That's exactly what Obama did and cue to having massive turnout. I don't mean to pick on you or to read too deeply into what you said but this to me is a really fallacious way to view things. You're basically treating the voting population as an inert mass upon which different political parties enact their strategies. You model implicitly suggests that when Obama has the right combination of promises he gets high turn out and wins. It calls to my mind Hilary's many frustrated attempts to "introduce herself" to voters, which invariably push her negatives higher. You can almost hear the grinding of teeth over at Hilary HQ each time they try to deploy these supposedly reliable media strategies only to have their candidates unfavorables remain dizzyingly high. What you're ignoring, I think, is that politics unfolds in the real world. Obama's high turn out can't just be viewed as a byproduct of a clever strategy. It was part of a larger historical moment involving the middle east wars going sour and the George W. Bush economy collapsing. People's material living standards were under threat and every indication was that the future would be worse. Obama may have capitalized on these circumstances but he didn't create them. He was, if anything, lucky to be a blank slate upon which millions of people could project their own hopes (or fears, as we discovered). I also think this misunderstanding shows up in your description of the Obama years. His policies utterly failed to actually improve the lives of ordinary Americans, which have arguably gotten worse during his time in office. The ACA might look better on paper, and no doubt some people are glad to have insurance, but basically the law sucks and is forcing people to buy expensive insurance with co-pays and deductibles that make the insurance largely unusable. I would suggest that these failures, plus the general weakness of the Democrats in any midterm, are a better explanation of the Democrats electoral defeats in the house. Sure Obama's surprisingly conservative approach to governance probably didn't help and his administration badly mishandled some important individual races such as the Scott Brown fiasco, but the real lesson of the Obama administration seems to be that soaring rhetoric can cover up a fundamentally lovely economy. And again, this all comes back to money. Actually enacting policies that significantly improve the lives of regular voters and give them an incentive to continue voting Democratic would be contrary to the monied interests who have bankrolled the party for decades. Such a shift would also threaten the privileged position of Democratic leaning policy wonks like Jonathan Chait or Ezra Klein. It would potentially shift the balance of power within major unions, whose leadership are mostly invested in supporting the Democratic party's status quo. In other words: a more aggressively populist and left leaning Democratic party would be opposed by much of its own core leadership and functionaries. So my suggestion would be that while the rhetoric or strategy of individual politicians can make some difference one way or the other, your focus should be the facts on the ground. What's the state of the economy, whats the orientation of major institutions like businesses, unions, the media, etc. Whats the attitude of party insiders, what's on the minds of voters. It's dangerous to get too focused on individual campaign strategy when ultimately it's the big picture that sets the conditions upon which political struggles play out. Obama won in 2008 because of the failures of the Bush years, and he proceeded to lose congress and various state governments in large part because he utterly failed to do what was expected of him and fix the economy mess his predecessors had left behind. Crowsbeak posted:While I would say that the tale of Mcgovern is more then a myth. Mcgovern really did get utterly hosed by Nixon. At the same time Democrats returning to power requires that the left takes back the party from the donor class and forces our own Rockefellers to get in line or get out. I say its a myth because all that is remembered today is that McGovern was very liberal. It's actually very much an example of what I am talking about above: the material situation is ignored and only McGovern's campaign strategy is looked at. So never mind that the Democratic party was in the midst of a bloody rupture as the Dixiecrats were forced out. Never mind that the civil rights legislation passed in 64 was still a major and controversial issue. Never mind that the cultural gap between unionized blue collar workers and the New Left was much more intense back then than it is now. All of these important historical factors are ignored because its more convenient for the DLC and its successors to spin the election as a clear rebuke of liberalism.
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Mar 1, 2016 19:30
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Crowsbeak posted:Winning I would argue requires focusing on elctions on the ground and terrorizing the DLC types. Lets be honest outside of HIlalry their a bunch of cowards who will fall in line if the fire below them is hot enough. Push against the Charter school assholes. Push for more minimum wage laws in states and in local elections and when you can primary sociopaths like Schulz. Yeah but "terrorizing the DLC types" is really the issue. They currently have a stranglehold on the party. We'll have to see how the primary elections shake out today but it really looks as though the remnants of the DLC are about to coronate another hardcore DLCer over the objections of a much more energetic grassroots campaign that numerous polls suggest would actually be more electable. And meanwhile its a Democratic president pushing one of the worst trade bills in history over the objection of some of his party's core constituencies: Politico posted:Labor seeks revenge on free-trade Dems What's the point of talking about "terrorizing the DLC types" when the entire party establishment is controlled by those same types. There's an old military saying that goes like this. "Amateurs worry about strategy, experts worry about logistics." Most people in this thread want to talk about strategy: they want to discuss the killer campaign rhetoric or decisive issue that the Democrats can use to smash the Republicans in elections. These are people who seemingly think that all it took to get the New Deal was FDR calling rich people "malefactors of great wealth". But the real issue for any progressive or left liberal or social democratic person in the USA seems to be more logistical than strategic. You guys don't have your own political party. The Democrats actively work against your interests. You lack the institutional weight to enforce your political will. I don't claim to have any easy solution. It seems like a two front war may be necessary, in which progressives are both fighting the Democratic party's leadership and trying to win elections against Republicans. Whether that is actually doable is questionable at best but that seems to be what the situation calls for. But the point stands that its somewhat premature to talk about the Democrats retaking the house by enacting progressive policies when really the Democrats have shown almost zero interest in deviating from the Clinton-Bush-Obama economic paradigm that the entire leadership of the party is solidly committed to. Sanders, to his credit, at least has a theoretical explanation for how to break this impasse. It's a big vague in the particulars but it amounts to using mass mobilization and grassroots pressure to break the deadlock in Congress, and he'd try to rely on grassroots fundraising to replace big money donors. Whether any of that is feasible at the national level is questionable, but at least it's a somewhat coherent plan for weaning the Democrats off billionaire welfare. The real problem, though, is that Sanders won't win. So where does that leave his supporters, and the Democrats more generally? Do the Bernouts launch another bid to seize control of the presidency in 4 or 8 years? Do they focus on taking control of state partys or down ticket races and nominations? I honestly don't know, but that to me seems like the more relevant conversation to be having. Instead of vesting too much hope in individual candidacies or campaigns I'd suggest that the progressive left in America should be focusing on actually creating an institutional basis that could plausibly take control of the Democratic party rather than merely being co-opted by it. How exactly that is done is impossible to predict in advance, but there are numerous 20th century examples of how particular demographics or interest groups have seized control of political parties and re-purposed them to new ends. So perhaps looking to some of those examples, such as Goldwater and McGovern, would be a good first step.
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Mar 1, 2016 20:05
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I agree with you that seeking control of party institutions, especially at the state (and also county) level would be key. My concern, as an outside observer, is that while the Sanderistas at least have a theory about how some kind of huge grassroots mobilization will be necessary to break the current gridlock I'm not sure they fully understand what that entails. I hope that after Sanders losses the nomination that his followers are able to actually set up some kind of enduring movement that carries forward the same goals. If the Sanders followers lose heart or just fold back into the larger mass of the Democratic party then all their efforts will have been for nothing. It will be interesting to watch it all play out. If the American left, such as it is, can start to focus on more concrete organizational capacity building rather than just investing in the cult of personality of this or that leader then there may be some hope for them to leave an actual mark on American politics. Otherwise I suspect in a decade or two this moment in history will be looked back on as a small blip in the steady rightward trajectory of American society post 1970.
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Mar 1, 2016 20:28
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