@Kolyo,
Naaah, scrap that. Let's do absolutely nothing and hope for the best....
The Democrats have a built-in problem — or perhaps I should say that the Republicans have a built-in advantage; the GOP is admittedly, and unashamedly, the party of the rich. Not only does this provide them with a ready source of money and influence, the truth is, many of those who comprise the US underclass also admire the wealthy and pretty much swallow the whole "God, guns, and Amurca" line (while happily accepting food stamps and Medicaid).
Following the cultural fallout from the Vietnam era, the decline of unions, and the emergence of regional power in the conservative Sun Belt, New Democrats under Mr. Clinton tried to use Wall Street as a cash cow. Trouble is, they could never secure consecutive administrations and follow through on their promises to the voters. The closely divided electorate could no longer provide a reliable majority to pass legislation. The message from the professed "enemies of government" struck a real chord among the restless and resentful and Democrats were left holding the bag of failed, underfunded programs. For instance, the ACA — instead of returning Dems to office to fix it, the electorate bought the GOP line and sent them to Washington to repeal it.
Both the Obama and Sanders campaigns showed the power of "grass roots" organizing and small donations but illustrate the party's problems as well. Mr. Obama, basically trying to keep the New Democratic coalition in tact while moving it incrementally to the left, lost his majority after the reactionary rise of the Tea Party and was unable to pass progressive legislation despite his reelection. He served basically as a buffer, preventing the worst of the Republican plans from being enacted while hobbled by the military obligations handed to him by his predecessor. Mr. Sanders was able to appeal to a portion of the electorate but I don't know how big this faction really is — I fear it's a lot smaller than progressive believe it to be. I don't really like the anti-globalist (nationalist) tone and in a head-to-head against a real nationalist, with the support of the evangelicals and the plutocrats, I don't think the progressives have a chance. Getting half of the party activist vote in the primaries is a lot easier than getting half the total vote in the election.
6 of 10 people who haven't left the Democrat party yet are considering voting for a third party candidate in 2020.
That's more than I thought.
https://ivn.us/2017/06/21/new-survey-6-10-democrats-considering-third-party-option/
@Kolyo,
Maybe if they were democratic, they'd have been called Democratic. They lost the right to that descriptor years ago. The rest of the country just caught on.
Somebody sent me a link to this, and although I don't subscribe to the nutty jungle if YouTube channels, this guy is telling it like it is.
Jimmy Dore uses a Guardian article to explain why the Dems refuse to demote Pelosi. $$
https://youtu.be/u2fd-kj-5-M
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/democrats-consider-ousting-nancy-pelosi/index.html
Knives unsheathed at lunch... Is Pelosi on the menu?
(You owe me for deleting all my analogies about leathery meat)
@hightor,
You don't need half the votes in a US general election. All you need is more votes than any other candidate, and that's easier to achieve.
I like your class analysis. Seems to me that the poor and the middle class badly
need some political representation in order to fight back against the 1% and their near total control of Washington. Either the Dems want to represent those groups, and then they will have to reform their "brand" quite a lot and take their distance from Wall Street, or they don't want to represent those groups, and then some other party will enter the void.
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Maybe if they were democratic, they'd have been called Democratic. They lost the right to that descriptor years ago. The rest of the country just caught on.
That's like someone refusing to call
you by your actual first name on the grounds that you aren't "wise enough" to justify having it as a name.
If Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants me call his party the "Liberal Democratic Party" I don't have a problem with it. If Trump starts calling his faction of the GOP "The Prime Movers" I have no problem calling them that.
@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:
You don't need half the votes in a US general election. All you need is more votes than any other candidate, and that's easier to achieve.
Not when you have two left-leaning parties and a single right-leaning party.
The Republicans can almost certainly count on 40% of the vote, which, optimistically, gives the two left-leaning parties 60% to chase. That means your new party will have to take 2/3 of the remaining vote, at the expense of the Democrats, to get more than 40% of the total vote and thus beat the Republicans.
In American history there has only been one third party (Lincoln's) which has replaced an existing party, although many have tried. In England, Labour has been pretty much it, I think. In France it happens all the time, not because of some national character trait on your part, but because candidates need to win a majority of the vote in a run-off.
It's better to vote third party than with establishment Dems, assuming said Dems refuse to adopt liberal policies, if that is the only choice we are going to be afforded. The party has already lost the entire country anyway, so they shouldn't be able to count on our votes.
@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:
Naaah, scrap that. Let's do absolutely nothing and hope for the best....
Actually, if we did that, Democrats would eventually come to power, because the GOP is going to self-destruct.
However, there is other stuff you can do for the progressive cause besides starting a new party. You can do what the Tea Party did in the Republican Party. Tea Party candidates took out moderate incumbents in primaries and replaced moderates in Congress. After this went on awhile, the GOP's House caucus became so right-wing that they kicked John Boehner out of his leadership position and are now threatening to do the same to Paul Ryan. They have radicalized their party.
The Progressive caucus has a chance to do the same to the Democrats. A couple years ago their caucus had fifty or so members. Now it has over 70. If they add half as many again, they will represent a majority of Democrats in the House, and they can take over their party like the Tea Party caucus took over the GOP.
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
It's better to vote third party than with establishment Dems, assuming said Dems refuse to adopt liberal policies, if that is the only choice we are going to be afforded. The party has already lost the entire country anyway, so they shouldn't be able to count on our votes.
Yeah, because starting a third party to split the conservative vote is what ultra-conservative Republicans did to take power.[/sarcasm]
Despite the conservative rhetoric against the Democratic Party as being leftist, and their vitriol against Barack Obama as having been that party's radical Muslim/Christian Liberation theologist, socialist, foreigner leader, in the end the party is merely center-rightist. It's Republican lite.
What the country needs is a truly leftist social democratic party with candidates that espouse the ideas and positions of Barry Sanders--who is a
social democrat and not, as he's described himself, a
democratic socialist.
Normally I don't like Joe Scarborough, but in the following piece, he is right, the democrats need to focus our efforts locally to win nationally. He list just how bad we've been losing and then he explains what he means.
Joe Scarborough: Democrats will keep losing, unless they do this (WP)
I am not saying I agree with him, I don't think we should change our values. But I do think we could be more flexible in the southern states and the "rust belt."
@Kolyo,
There's slow poison and there's fast poison. That's Democrats and Republicans. It doesn't matter if the Democrats manage to regain the White House and even the Senate, as they are right now. They have lost the entire rest of the nation to right wing extremism. No way they are going to buck the money men and change any of that without first changing themselves.
Looks like Schumer and Pelosi are trying to shift message from Marsha! Marsha! Marsha! (Russia! Russia! Russia!) to something that might actually get them votes.
Pelosi is trying to keep her leadership position. Away from Trump bashing and toward something relevant for people. Let's see how that goes. How progressive will they go?
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/339248-dems-push-leaders-to-talk-less-about-russia
While I agree democrats need to quit obsessing over Russia, I don't agree the whole subject needs to ignored. The more we know, the more we find out just how much Putin interfered with the past election. The question of whether it changed anything in my opinion irrelevant.
There are a lot of folks who have been neglected when left leaning folks talk about economic disparities. We talk about the more urban cities but not the southern poor which like urban cities effects blacks more than whites. During the primaries, Bernie did not really reach those in the southern states at all much less the minorities in those states. How does the progressives plan to reach them? I also noticed during the general election a lot of the black votes who voted Hillary during the primary, stayed home. So, what gives?
The following is about the difference between blacks and white in Mississippi. The whole piece is interesting, but I'll post the part about the economic differences.
Quote:Two economies
Economics play a big role in rural America’s racial divide. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 1 in 4 rural black Americans lives in poverty; for whites, it’s just more than 1 in 10. Small towns and farming communities that residents describe as “close-knit” can be starkly split.
“In order for an African American to get an opportunity, someone has to give them an opportunity,” said Yulanda Haddix, 54, who recently moved from Philadelphia back to Starkville, Miss., where she was raised. “We don’t get jobs based on credentials alone, not in Mississippi.”
In St. Martinville, an old plantation town set amid the sugar cane fields and bayous of southern Louisiana, the disparity is palpable.
The town is 63 percent black and about 35 percent white, and more than 1 in 5 households rely on food stamps, according to census data. But the poverty rate among black residents is more than double what it is among whites. And while many of the white residents said in interviews that they view poverty as deriving from an unwillingness to work, many of the black residents said the area’s declining economy made them feel as if the deck was irreversibly stacked against them.
“Our town used to be lively. There used to be places to work, and now it’s dying,” said Franca Francis, 52, who makes $7 an hour working at a day-care center and runs a carryout restaurant at night. “Now you have to have two jobs to make a living.”
It’s been years since the local Fruit of the Loom factory and two of the nearby sugar mills shut down; the Walmart folded up and left. Only a few of the town’s smaller businesses remain, including the rickety trailer where Francis sells hot links po’ boys.
WP[/[url]
The Democrat Party has been, to some degree captive to the prospect of a Hillary Clinton Presidency ever since Obama's initial election to that office iun 2008. The term of his presidency was notable, among other things, for the lack of rising Democrat leaders who might provide any alternative to either Obama or Hillary's "inevitable" candidacy. One result was they were left with an obscure Socialist Senator from Vermont whose whole working life has been in elective office, as the only rival contender for the Party nomination, Indeed, without Sanders there was a somewhat embarrassing lack of visible alternatives. The surprising effectiveness of Bernie's strident calls for increased government social subsidies during the campaign created a contest that appears to have been quite unexpected by party elites, and excited the lasting hopes of the farther left "progressives" in the party.
Hillary Clinton was notably without an identifiable political program or position, apart from the supposed "war on women" and the incidental far left rhetoric she picked up late in the campaign as a reaction to Sander's successes. He husband Bill was also notably vague and agile in his political positions, as he famously decreed after losing control of the Congress that "the era of big government is over". Theirs was the politics of winning elections as opposed to identifiable political aspirations.
Now the loosing candidate, clearly in denial over her loss. is leading major segments of the Party in various conspiracy searches to explain or rationalize her failure. The reckless reactions of the Trump Administration and continuing leaks from as yet unidentified sources within the government bureaucracies also make this a plausible political strategy for the opposition party with an eye on the next round of Congressional elections. However the polarization of the country and the unexpected reactions of voters in the Presidential election and more recent special elections for vacant seats in the Congress, reminds us this is a risky strategy at best.
Meanwhile time passes and the Democrat party has yet to face the political consequences of its defeat in the Presidential and Congressional elections, and in many state governments across the country. Resistance to Trump is a useful political tactic to be sure, but it is not a strategy for winning an election. They badly need a serious internal debate and a new generation of leaders with some fresh ideas. Little of that appears to be happening now, though the pressures for it are rising. What direction it might take is very hard to foresee right now.
