I’ve listening for months now to all the various
pundits/partisans/prophets and fools giving their weighty opinions about why the
Democrats lost the 2016 election.
It’s all self-deluded bullshit.
There are two main reasons the Democrats lost and until they
fix those reasons they will continue to lose.
1st: They didn’t do the work.
2nd: They forgot who their base was, and is.
When I (or any rational observer) look out over the last
forty years in the political arena, there is a glaring discrepancy. On the one
side you have the Republicans: marching in lockstep down their road to hell,
completely governed by their party leaders and speaking from an approved
script. They have assiduously gathered together to overwhelm school board
meetings, attack town councils, raise candidates for state legislatures – over
and over and over again – until they win and win and win again. Where has there
been opposition? Where are the Democratic candidates supported by ground
pounding cadres ceaselessly turning out the vote? Answer: [crickets]
And we’re surprised to find out that the south and the
middle of the country are solidly Republican?
Let’s face it: the Democrats blew it simply by being
disorganized and feckless. They blew it in 1968 when they let Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman run wild in the streets of Chicago. Anyone who saw that had an
instant reaction; “There’s no way I want those morons in charge of the
country.” And so we got Nixon. The original Mad King.
Notice that every so-called Democratic candidate thereafter
was deemed an irrelevant sideshow.
And they were because the Democrats never woke up to the
fact that they had to DO THE WORK of building a base that was respected and feared
in the political world, they needed to fight for every school board seat, every
town council member, every state legislator in order to prevent what happened:
Republican control of the state houses and therefor control of drawing the congressional
district maps after the census, i.e., gerrymandering, which gave them control
of the House.
Yes, the Republicans were aided by very smart people who
crafted and plotted this insurrection and developed the propaganda and
misinformation that guided the victory they achieved. It’s all true but it’s
irrelevant The Republicans only won because the Democrats didn’t enter the
field.
The crux of the situation is that the Republicans knew they
were in a war and the Democrats never figured it out… stupid.
Stupid, which is also an apt word for the second reason the
Democrats lost (and will continue to lose until they figure it out).
Who are (and were) the Democratic base?
Well nobody really knows do they? Let’s see: there are the
Blacks and the Hispanics and the Women and the Indians and the LGBTQ people and
the… whatever…
Notice anything odd about this list? No? Well I’ll tell you
this one time: there are no white people. Sounds racist doesn’t it? It does
sound racist until you go back and look at the history of the Democrats: from
its founding the bedrock of the Democratic party has always been the unions:
which have been almost exclusively poor blue collar white folks. The Democratic
party’s bulwark has been the cadres of union members who could be reliably
turned out for rallies, demonstrations… and voting.
But not after Chicago 1968, then the party was more and more
given over to interest groups and not to party unity. In part the Democrats
were victims: the Mafia had so completely taken over the unions that no
self-respecting pol wanted anything to do with them fearing, rightly, that they
would soon be compromised and used as tools for mob enrichment.
Nevertheless, unions continued to dwindle and the Democrats
continued to suffer the consequences.
So the Democratic party became, more and more, a collection
of special interest groups. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but special interest groups in
general have an agenda: the welfare and benefit of their particular group.
There’s nothing in their lexicon about ‘cooperation’. In the old days, the
democrats could fall back on the unions to be the organizing drivers for the
party and they would drag all the disparate factions along for the ride but
that doesn’t work anymore.
This time around we had the so-called ‘progressives’
(yet another faction) who, imo, knew they would lose and just did as much
damage as they could (turned out to be quite a bit). And of course there was
the hilariously boneheaded Black Lives Matter who apparently could only think
of one target for their ire and showed up to hijack one of their own
candidate’s rallies, instead of confronting a Republican rally - I guess that was too hard.
So every little splinter group had their own agenda and none
of them was prepared to even listen to any of the others… the results were
predictable.
If the Democrats ever want to have political power again
they need to remedy the two areas mentioned above. It won’t be quick and it
won’t be easy, indeed. It may already be too late. But going along the way they
doing now will only lead to more losing.
