Hey, it's me. The GDI. I know, this is like an ex-boyfriend showing up at a Thanksgiving dinner that's supposed to be for family only, although for a long time most of you were real welcoming and seemed to like the stuff I said. But we need to talk about a few things.
The tragedy we're all facing now was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen.
Last December, I was fiddling around with fivethirtyeight.com’s Swing the Vote, and I nudged the non-college-educated white voter slider up 10 percent, then also nudged the Latino voter slider up 10 percent (because what major demographic group had the greatest reason to fear Donald Trump back then?). And what I saw alarmed me.
It showed the Republican nominee winning Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
I shared my alarm with others. They pooh-poohed it.
I worried that the country's mood was much too anti-establishment to elect such a quintessentially establishment candidate. I worried that the complacency of the Clinton campaign and the DNC would make the election close enough to steal, just as in 2000. (Turns out, close enough to steal is also close enough to lose.) I worried that the way they battled for the party's nomination, using every means at their disposal, foul as well as fair, would alienate Sanders supporters beyond redemption. Did they really think that Sanders supporters would forget the disrespect and disdain they were shown, the blatant de-leveling of the playing field, the downplaying of the issues they felt most strongly about?
I left here when kos made it clear that this was a site for Democrats and Democrats alone, not for independents, no matter how often they'd voted Democratic before. But I didn’t go to Reddit or to Caucus99percent, because I didn’t see any point in nursing a grudge. I just stepped away, recognizing that I no longer had a political home.
And despite all the times I swore I’d never vote for Hillary Clinton, no matter what, in the end, I did. Trump's nomination turned something I swore I’d never do into something morally mandatory. But that was me, voting my feelings. Because, in the end, we all vote our feelings. Others voted their feelings as well . . . and they felt differently.
Honestly, I wish my various predictions hadn't been right. But since they were, I want to talk about now.
Last December, I wrote a diary titled “The Seventh Party System: Trump Could Be the Catalyst.” In it, I noted that we were long overdue for a party realignment. Well, it turns out, that realignment had already started, and none of us realized it until now. We thought it was just about liberals vs. conservatives, as we’ve understood those terms since the mid-1960s, but it turns out, it was about prosperous metropolitan cities vs. struggling hinterlands, pluralism vs. nationalism, technocracy vs. populism, the Global Consensus vs. the divinely ordained Way of Things.
The shift was disguised, partly because Clinton and Trump were such larger-than-life figures that they drew all the attention to themselves as personalities, partly because journalism failed us, partly because for many years now the Democratic Party has been very good at talking about who it stood for but inexplicably reticent and incoherent when talking about what it stood for. And when Bernie Sanders challenged the party to take such a stand, he got smacked down. So there never was a moment, not even during the party convention, when Democrats across the nation got together and said with one voice, “These are our guiding principles.” They spoke of policies, as if the policies spoke for themselves. They spoke of legislative accomplishments, as if the impact of those accomplishments was palpable to everyone. We can see now that this wasn't enough.
So now we face three problems.
The first problem is how to defend ourselves and all our fellow Americans whose lives are either directly or indirectly endangered by the loud and hateful backlash that Trump has fostered — and also by the quiet agenda that you know the Republican Party didn't give up simply because Trump became its standard bearer. For instance, Trump never said word one about Social Security, but the Dick Cheney/Koch Brothers/ALEC wing of the party rules both houses of Congress now, and it's been itching to privatize Social Security for two decades or more. There will be an attempt to privatize Social Security now. It will probably succeed, because who's left in a position to stop it? Paul Ryan is already talking openly about doing the same to Medicare. And while Trump (and those who voted for him) may think he’s the boss, as soon as he slips his leash, Republican majorities in Congress can impeach, convict and remove him. And then Mike Pence is president.
The second problem is how to reaffirm the paramount importance of equal justice, human rights and dignity in straightforward, heartfelt moral language — not in activist jargon and academese. There were a lot of folks here who took umbrage at the idea that we should bother addressing our message to racists, misogynists, homophobes and other deplorables, or allow them to be part of any winning coalition. Well, as it turns out, we didn’t have a winning coalition. Somehow, we managed to alienate a lot of people whose participation we might actually have welcomed. We have to talk to them in the language they use, not in the language we use among ourselves. If I walk into my neighborhood hardware store, and I start speaking to everyone I encounter in German, they’re going to think I’m a weirdo and want nothing more than for me to go away. And when I say, “Ich würde gerne eine neue Bohrmaschine kaufen,” I’m just saying I want to buy a new drill, which is the most reasonable thing in the world to be asking for in a hardware store, and yet not a single word of it is going to get through to the store clerk. He may even think I’m mocking him. I don’t get what I need, and neither does he, if I can’t establish communication between us.
And the third problem is the Democratic Party itself — a top-down organization with a terrible grasp of strategy, without a coherent moral message, adhering rigidly to the conservative values of loyalty and obedience at the expense of the liberal values of justice and compassion. If the Democratic Party is to be preserved as something worth supporting at the polls once again, we have to clear away those who led it astray — not just the technocrats and patricians at the DNC, but also the old urban machines that sideline reformists and outsiders — and build a new Democratic Party from the ground up within the framework of the old. But I worry that those technocrats, patricians and machine hacks may have finally tarnished the Democratic Party brand beyond recovery. And if that’s the case, then we need to accept and accelerate the demise of the Democratic Party and get to work building its successor. We need to be the Sewards and Lincolns, sweeping away the remnants of the Whig Party, bringing its leading lights into a new political body and speaking to the nation with a rediscovered moral clarity.
That’s going to require a lot of good Democrats to overcome that old, conservative impulse toward loyalty and jump ship. But we can’t afford further failure. We can’t. Our vulnerable brothers and sisters can’t. Democracy can’t. The world can’t.
So I’m here today to ask, where does Daily Kos stand on this? Will this avowed “Democratic website” be part of the solutions to these problems? I will say, if the Democratic Party does renew itself in the manner I’ve just described, as an uncompromising, uncompromised force for justice, compassion and equality, I’ll be proud to call myself a Democrat. If it can’t or won’t, I’ll be equally proud to take my place in its replacement. (Which, incidentally, is a role I don’t believe any existing party can fulfill — least of all the Greens. They all have their own baggage; we need to begin completely afresh.) This isn't about building support for a third party. It’s about having a second party that’s up to the tasks at hand.
That’s all I came to say. I’ve got my own work to do now. What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does. Whether we’re riding a donkey or a phoenix.