The 2016 Election – Part 3 - Where do we go from here – NOT!

We shouldn’t be surprised that the elite liberal establishment (we definitely need a good acronym for it – EEL would work if we just shifted the words around) has come out with their analysis of what happened and why. In the last couple of days, I have been made aware of two examples that merit response because they represent a misreading of the historical context of this election and therefore fail to provide guidance to how progressives can move forward.

The first, and most pernicious, is an article by Paul Krugman, Useful Idiots Galore, that appeared in the NYT. Krugman argues that a swing of 1% in the election sent Sec. Clinton down to defeat. That swing, he states was due to “dirty tricks” (my name, not his), namely the actions of Russia and James Comey in the days leading up to Nov. 8^th which produced the shift and threw the election to Trump. And he may well be right, but …

The conclusion implied from this analysis is dead wrong. It proceeds from the failure to locate this election in the historical context of American politics for the last 40 years. The question he doesn’t address is why was this election so close to begin with. And he fails to even mention the fact that this election marks the continuation of a trend that has seen the Democratic Party become a permanent minority party in most parts of the US. Congress is now solidly in the hands of the Republicans. The Senate races in 2 years will be a disaster for Democrats as they must defend a large majority of the seats that will be up for election, and the House – well’ we can forget about that since only about 10% of the seats are even contestable. Most state governments are controlled by Republicans. Fewer and fewer young people are registering as Democrats. And so on.

What has been the anomaly is that, prior to 2016, Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential elections (counting Gore’s win in 2000). Now, even that critical office has fallen to the most reactionary forces. Arguing that this election was stolen keeps us from analyzing the fundamental problems of the Democratic Party that led to this loss. To quote Thomas Frank, “What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”

I would posit that Krugman doesn’t know because he is part of the problem. Democrats need to stop moaning about what the Repugs (a wonderful bastardization of their party’s name that my wife has been using for a while) are doing and own up to what they did wrong. We don’t need to double down on what we have always done, nor do we need to “wait” for changing demographics to give us victory. What the Democratic Party needs is something to motivate voters. It needs to become the vehicle for a real political revolution.

In that light, the widely-circulated article “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda” does hit on a couple of important points. The Congressional staffers who drew it up stress the need to organize locally and call for resistance to every part of the Republican’s agenda. They caution against “buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions”.  Yes and Yes! These are critical to any strategy to reverse the losses that Democrats have sustained.

But their prescription to follow the strategy and tactics of the Tea Party are based on both a misunderstanding of the history of that reactionary movement and of the objective conditions we face today.

First, the Tea Party did not arise in an ideological vacuum. Over forty years ago, reactionaries (please don’t call them conservatives, because they are not trying to “conserve” anything) began an ideological assault on the politics of the New Deal, particularly targeting the idea that government should have any role outside of power to protect private property (basically the military and the police). This assault was carried out by a large array of think tanks, media outlets, etc. and by 1980 had successfully altered the political debate so as to lay the groundwork for the extreme reactionaries of the Tea Party (much to the chagrin of many of the old-line Republicans). The rules of the game were stacked in their favor.

No such game-changing ideological work has been done to date for the progressive movement. Despite some beginnings by progressive think tanks and institutions and the popularization of some progressive ideas by mass movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, the reactionaries still dominate the conversation. Without breaking this strangle hold on framing the questions which we address, the left will not be able to build a mass movement. The beginnings of any political revolution are in ideology, translated into program and put into place by organization. You don’t start with organization.

Second, we need to remember that the goal of the Tea Party was stop government from functioning, thereby proving that government was incapable of solving problems. Success for the party of “no” did not involve mobilizing support for programs designed to meet the needs of ordinary people. Given our historical structure of checks and balances, it is a lot easier to prevent things from happening than to make them happen. Keeping the government from functioning, becoming the new party of “no” cannot be the strategy for Democrats, it simply plays into the hands of the reactionaries. We need a positive, not a negative, blueprint.

Third, the successes of the Tea Party came at a time when the Republicans were the majority party in both the House and Senate. The Tea Party activist tactics revolved around making sure that moderate Republicans (the few that are left) towed their line. Right now Democrats are not in control of either house in Congress and only in a few states do they have much influence in the state legislatures; they are hardly in a position to block reactionary legislation.

Thus, trying to influence (or annoy) Republicans in Congress is a poor strategy.  Neither Trump nor the Congressional Republicans are about to back away from what they see as a chance to implement their reactionary policies on a grand scale. While it may be possible to sway a few moderate Republicans in battleground districts on a few issues (and we must pursue that whenever we can) as a general strategy it will fail. To recapture the hearts and minds, Democrats must become the party of “Yes, We Can”.

Another problem with the proposed strategy (I’m not sure it even qualifies as a strategy) is its piecemeal approach to policy. The Democrats have played “small ball” for much of the last 40 years, trying to build a coalition here and another one there to make limited gains. An excellent example is the Affordable Care Act. What is needed to mobilize Democratic voters, Independents and even some Republicans. is to merge the populist upsurge we are witnessing with the “big-tent” strategy to create a broad “new deal”.  

For the Democratic Party, it’s time to “tell no lies and claim no easy victories”.

Note: Part 4 will deal with the tasks ahead.

The 2016 Election (Part 2) – Why Did It Happen and Why Didn’t We See It Coming?

The election of Donald Trump caught a lot of people by surprise – and I’m certainly one of them. Clinton had every advantage – her approval ratings, although terrible, were better than his; she raised more money; she had the support of almost every major media outlet; she had a ground game and he did not; she had the strong support of the entire Democratic Party political establishment, his support from the Republican Party establishment was tepid at best. I could go on.

Yet, as the night of November 8^th went on, battleground state after battleground state in the Midwest and South fell to Trump in what was an endless cascade of unimaginable defeats. It seemed like a bad dream (read, nightmare) and it still does. How could the polls and the pols have been so wrong?

While there are other factors that need to be considered (see below), one clue to the Democratic defeat can be found, not so much in “how” people voted, as in “who” voted. We know that the turnout in general and among African-Americans and young voters was down. On the other hand, it appears that significant numbers of what has been described as the “missing white vote”, may have tipped the balance in Trump’s favor – particularly in rural areas and small towns. What distinguishes these areas is that they have not benefitted from the policies of the liberal establishment – especially those associated with trade. Little wonder that in those areas, there was no enthusiasm and much distrust for the Democratic Party standard bearer, Sec. Clinton, who was seen as the embodiment of liberal establishment politics.

Further, if we look at which areas of the country gave strong support to the Democratic ticket, we see areas that have not experienced the economic decline to the extent middle America has. Although income inequality is very high in these areas, economic growth has, for the most part, been concentrated there. As a result, there is not the same level of anti-establishment sentiment and less support for a loose cannon, who promises to “overthrow” much of the system.

This may also account for the fact that the liberal establishment (leadership of the Democratic Party and the main stream media) never saw this coming. They have little awareness of, and much distain for, this part of American society. They live, both physically and intellectually, in a different world, and have written these folks off, assuming that the support from women, minorities, the LBGT community and young people, generated by the Democrats’ liberal social policies, would provide them with a new majority. Thus, the same “identity” politics that promised a victory for Sec. Clinton blinded the campaign to the danger from rural America.

The reliance on the Democratic constituencies might have elected Clinton, except that significant sectors of these constituencies are no longer motivated by the “more of the same” approach of the Democratic Party, as they too have failed to benefit from the economic growth over the past 40 years (see American Dream Collapses for Young, StarNews, Wilmington, NC). Fear of what Trump could do if elected, particularly since it seemed that he had no real chance of winning, was not enough for them to get out and vote. Perhaps they would have come out to vote had the Democratic candidate offered an alternative to “politics as usual” (yes, I’m talking about Bernie) but we will never know.

Trump won the enthusiastic support of many whites (and a significant number of Hispanics) by scapegoating the “other”. But scapegoating doesn’t go very far unless people are dissatisfied with what is going on in their lives. It allows someone to look at their problems as caused by terrorists or immigrants or anyone who is different, particularly if they are not given a clear and credible alternative explanation.

To summarize, I would argue that the main factor leading to Trump’s election was the failure of the Democratic Party to offer a hard-hitting and genuine alternative to economic policies of both Democrat and Republican administrations over the last 40 years. These policies have left large part of American society behind and have provided fertile ground for the rise of reaction – first the tea-party and now Trump. This is not an American phenomenon alone; we are seeing it from Brexit to the resurgence of right-wing, nationalist parties in Europe.

These developments seem to share one thing in common; they result from the extreme (and rising) inequality in these countries and the growth of a class, which has been appropriately named the precariat by Guy Standing, of individuals who live on the edge of poverty and who have little or no stability in their lives. Their lack of stability, in contrast to the traditional working class, makes them more susceptible to demagogues like Trump.

Two other factors in Trump's “win” merit attention, because they show how great a danger our democracy faces in the years ahead. The first is the “ignorance factor”. A poll recently released to MSNBC shows that 2 in 5 Trump voters are so misinformed that they believe the stock market actually went down during the 7+ years that Obama was President and 2/3rds think that unemployment went up during the same time. No wonder “fake news” had such a significant effect during the election.

I would argue that the ignorance factor is the result of two interrelated components: first, the transformation of the media and its decline as a source of news and other information and second, the rise of the internet. Today the mainstream media (particularly the broadcast media - who reads newspapers any more?) is focused on entertaining, rather than informing, the public. Trump’s antics were much more entertaining than dealing with the issues in the election, so he “merited” more coverage. For many, their main source of information, besides radio talk shows, was the internet. The problem here is that anyone can post on the internet (even me) without one shred of support, and “fake news” can spread like wildfire.

The second factor is voter suppression. While we don’t know exactly how great an effect the successful acts of voter suppression were in places like Wisconsin, just the widespread information about voter IDs may have kept millions from attempting to vote. A personal note: I spent over 100 hours as a poll greeter (in New Hanover County, NC) and had countless individuals who came to vote ask what kind of ID they needed, even though the voter ID law in North Carolina had been thrown out over 3 months before the election. How many more simply decided not to try to vote because they were unsure if they had the “right” ID? Voter suppression, I would argue, works even if there is no legal barrier but only a perception that one exists.

Why is all this important? Because, unless we understand what happened and why, we will continue down the rabbit hole and the forces of reaction will lead our country in a direction to scary to even contemplate.