The worst part of the week after the presidential election has been the bombardment of “What the Democrats Must Do Now” messages from people who certainly do not know the answer to that question. “Regular Folks, my Students at Yale Tell Me, Are Tired of the Elites,” by David Brooks. “Some Friendly and Helpful Suggestions to My Friends on the Left,” by Bret Stephens. “Guhhh… Woke! Buhhh” by Pamela Paul. … The zombie opinion-creation industry does not even require a reflection period to trot out an entire set of prescriptions. They just changed the date on the label on the old prescriptions.
You can divide the post-election reactions of people in power into two groups: Genuine Attempts to Grapple With Reality, and then the larger group of Soothing Rationalizations of What Just Happened Which Will Allow People in Power to Continue on in Their Nice Lives. The danger is that the first group gets seduced by the second group and as a result we get the next four years of the same people doing the same things to the same effect. (You may notice that straightforward ideas like “fire everyone in Democratic Party leadership positions automatically after a national election loss” do not appear to be on the table.) This sort of conversation, in which many participants are concerned with covering their own asses, and all theses are unverifiable, is always in peril of puttering out into a grand conclusion of “Change nothing,” despite that being the one plan that has already been proven to be bad.
The “veneer of ‘nonpartisanship’ in mainstream media … causes them to focus on horse race analytics rather than on interrogating the morality of policy questions has seeped into the mind of the general public and now causes a great deal of election analysis to be amateur message analysis rather than substantive discussions of what humans need from politicians. If you find yourself thinking, “How should we change our messaging to win the next campaign?” I suggest you hit yourself hard on the head with a hammer a few times.
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(Not to grind old axes, but this is the “Defund the Police” problem: a good policy addressing a substantive issue that the public found themselves completely unable to discuss substantively because all anyone would talk about was the slogan itself…. )
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What the Democrats should do substantively going forward is: Fix people’s problems. Attack the crisis of economic inequality. Tax the rich and send the money to the poor and working class and create universal public health care and child care and free education and strengthen the labor movement and restrict the power of capital and watch the nation’s deepest problems shrink, because the nation’s deepest problems stem from the fact that America allows capitalism to arrange everything for the benefit of capital, which results in an array of awful consequences for humanity.
Addressing economic unfairness will be hard because it requires Democrats to go against the interests of their wealthy donors. Much easier to hope to win over Trump voters by being more racist and “tough on the border” and join in the persecution of trans people, Nolan says. Instead, Democrats must do it all: Fight persecution of all types.
Coal miners who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain–members of the white working class circa 1921– resisted racism and focused on going to war with evil rich people. I believe we can too.
