Why I left the Democratic Party

The chances of passing meaningful gun reform with Trump in the White House looked to be roughly 0 percent; meanwhile, for Democrats to keep their red-state senators — and reclaim purple-state governorships — in 2018, they would need to over-perform in rural America, where NRA members disproportionately live. So why start a losing fight on guns, the logic goes, when you could keep the focus on health care and Donald Trump’s myriad affronts to common decency?

But the survivors of the Parkland massacre don’t take their talking points from the DCCC. And they wasted no time before politicizing their (inherently political) tragedy. The theater kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas didn’t lace their appeals for gun reform with pieties about the Second Amendment, but with diatribes against the NRA’s blood money. They didn’t stick to poll-tested prescriptions like universal background checks (with no enforcement mechanism); they heartily applauded a ban on all semiautomatic weapons. In short: They did exactly what the DCCC begged its candidates not to do.

And they’re winning.

A Southern GOP governor is warning his party that Republicans are on the wrong side of the gun issue. This is what it sounds like when the tectonic plates beneath American politics shift.

Over the past two weeks, polls have registered a significant, leftward swing in public opinion on gun control — one that has almost certainly been engineered by the Parkland students’ activism. But the concern among (some) Republican candidates and operatives isn’t exclusively a reaction to the shift in public opinion — universal background checks have boasted upwards of 90 percent support for years, and the GOP has blithely opposed them nonetheless.

The other critical factor, as Haslam suggests, is the centrality of the suburbs to the 2018 midterms. Once a reliable bastion of Republican politics, suburban areas have been moving leftward for decades — and the Trump-Clinton race accelerated that long-term trend. Now, the Democratic Party’s path back to a House majority runs through historically Republican suburban districts that split their tickets in 2016.

To be sure, Democrats still face some risks in elevating the salience of gun policy, especially in a few of the Senate’s key battlegrounds. But all things considered, Team Blue has rarely had more to gain — and less to lose — by bringing progressive values to a gun fight.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwH8f5TS_Cw[/youtube]

They didn’t stick to poll-tested prescriptions like universal background checks (with no enforcement mechanism); they heartily applauded a ban on all semiautomatic weapons. In short: They did exactly what the DCCC begged its candidates not to do.
And they’re winning.

In his new book Listen, Liberal, the social critic Thomas Frank poses another possibility: that liberals in general — and the Democratic Party in particular — should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. Too busy attending TED talks and vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, Frank argues, the Democratic elite has abandoned the party’s traditional commitments to the working class. In the process, they have helped to create the political despair and anger at the heart of today’s right-wing insurgencies. [...]

Frank has been delivering some version of this message for the past two decades as a political essayist and a founding editor of The Baffler magazine. [...]

Behind all of this nasty fun is a serious political critique. Echoing the historian Lily Geismer, Frank argues that the Democratic Party — once “the Party of the People” — now caters to the interests of a “professional-managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. In the book, Frank points to the Democrats’ neglect of organized labor and support for Nafta as examples of this sensibility, in which “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.” In more recent columns, he has linked this neglect to the rise of a figure like Sanders, who says forthrightly what the party leadership might prefer to obscure: Current approaches aren’t working — and unless something dramatic happens, Americans are heading for a society in which a tiny elite controls most of the wealth, ­resources and decision-making power.

The problem, in Frank’s view, is not simply that mainstream Democrats have failed to address growing inequality. Instead, he suggests something more sinister: Today’s leading Democrats actually don’t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things. As proof, he points to the famously impolitic Larry Summers, whose background as a former president of Harvard, former Treasury secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank embodies all that Frank abhors about modern Democrats. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated,” Summers commented early in the Obama administration.

“Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this,” Frank writes. [...]

These denials of reality won't get NRA members anywhere.

Mr Trump encouraged lawmakers to start with a bipartisan bill first put forward in 2013 that would expand background check requirements to include gun purchases online and at gun shows. It was brought down by the Republican opposition months after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The president also appeared to back the idea of allowing police to temporarily seize guns from people reported to be dangerous, even without a court order.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said.

Usually Oralloy speaks from his ass