I have looked at the various prognostications about why the Democratic Party and the social movement that it represents, the Center-Left, have been left without a single lever of power. While there are glimmerings of wisdom in many of them, there has not been a unified theory about what happened and what should be done in the future. This addresses that problem. I realize under the current set of rules of social media, I am not able to bolt this into the stream of discussion, but I must hope that at least some consideration will surround this.
Starting out over on Blue Sky with a series of posts that underlined several key things that must change with the Democratic Party and the Center-Left in America. They are in the notes for this post.1
As to who I am, a long time ago in the blogging universe, I was a minor figure who managed to secure things on the radar in Bopnews, and occasionally was featured on a few of the left-wing blogs such as Daily Kos, Truthout, and others. Which is not a great contribution to the scribblings of an era, but it is also more than most. I was reading Emptywheel, Atrios, Taegan Goddard, and occasionally Matthew Yglesias. And was friends with Matt Stoller, whose grasp of how blogging worked was far superior to my own.
Since then I have made the controversial statement that history is a science, and I can prove that, so I am someone who is on the fringes of academia. That is to say, I am a gadfly who many people will admit they know but will not admit me to the club of the true members of the Scriptareate. Which does not matter much to me. The words are more important than the person writing them.
The first thing to recognize is that the most recent presidential election was of the Republican Party which was committed to the idea that truth does not have any place in political speech while the Democratic party was only halfway committed to a vision of the future which they could not even communicate what it would look like. this is because the Republican Party does not really care about the truth, and has not cared since the days of Richard Milhouse Nixon.2 That does not mean that the Democratic Party has not prevaricated and even lied when it suited them nor have they always put up candidates who did not commit crimes, such as Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey - however in the modern history of the Democratic Party it has always looked towards the future whereas the Republican Party looks to an imagined past.3 “People look forward with nostalgia.”
There were two bumps along the way for the Donks: the first one was that their President decided to run for a second term, but it became clear as the convention was close at hand that Joe Biden was having happenstances that were too difficult to mask. The problem is that the Donks are loyal to a fault. Instead of realizing before the primary season had begun that Biden was not going to be acceptable even against Trump, there was the agreement that while they would hide Biden’s problems, they would not revolt until it was too late. This means that they had not selected the best person to run for the office. Instead, their Vice President, Kamala Harris, was appointed rather than grueling out the long process of primaries. Harris, it should be noted, did a better job than almost anyone thought was possible, and on an objective basis, she did better at every turn than Donald Trump. However, her problem was that half of her voters looked backwards and half looked forwards, and she could not upset the backwards-looking voters and so could only give half-promises to her forward-looking voters. And I will say this again: “Half a victory is a defeat.”
A good example is the solution she came up with for the housing crisis, offering a small reduction in mortgage payments for a very limited class of people. If this were a small problem then such a solution might have been acceptable, but the problem is that for a long time, the stock of available housing has been on the decline as seen on the chart. This is good for the person selling the economically productive home and moving to someplace which they will retire to, but is economically disastrous for anyone who is buying in. That would be New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Madison, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Boston. This means that the people in those areas, and especially in the far-flung reaches of those areas, would just stay home. And they did.
What this meant is that there were two kinds of losses for the Donks: one was the increase in supporters of Trump and the other one was the loss of supporters for the Democratic candidate. It was both of these together which ensured a Phant victory. and since Donald Trump was running on a corporate democracy rather than a political democracy, 50% plus one is all that Trump needed. And this points to an other problem of the Center-Left: they want the rules to be as they would like them to be rather than what they are. This means that Trump’s 312-226 win was the second smallest win, but under the rules that were set for the beginning, that gave him all of the power. It also means that they wanted to run on the old-line media which has at least the semblance of fact-checking rather than on the new media which largely does not. Joe Rogan does not need fact-checking. Remember the Democrats presented themselves as the sane alternative, and if the sane alternative is not good enough they will take a chance, however risky, for a tiny probability of a large payout. It may not be rational but then that is also the way that lottery tickets work: the person buying a lottery ticket knows that saving the money is not hopeful and therefore takes a small chance that they will be rich.
However, the fact was that there needed to be a clear message as to what had to happen to the country. However, her hands were tied by the messaging: she ran as a conservative hyping the fact that Rep. Liz Cheney was also persona non grata with Trump. As the line from Pink Floyd goes: “This will not do.”
So, even a particularly run campaign by a conservative Democrat with small giveaways to a few affected people was not going to work, as we can see from the results because not only did the Phants win the presidency but they also one both of the houses of Congress and hold a 6 to 3 majority on the Supreme Court. That is to say, they have all of the cards.
To list the problems:
The Donks are right now in a conservative mode, this is not the first time this has happened.
The Donks are loyal rather than being geared to win at any cost. This was in 2000 as well, which eventually led to the Great Recession, because one of the tents of George W. Bush was to make homeownership affordable even if the targets were not able to actually afford the home.
The Donks has leadership team did not understand the difference between saving money or buying a lottery ticket.
Unfortunately, we are at an unusual point where there needs to be a change in direction because the era is changing, not by some small amount but by a large amount comparable to the great depression: because that was the last time that energy would convert forms, in the 1930s case from coal to oil.
This does not mean that the Phant have no problems, but they are able to cover those problems with buckets of cash invested in all the right places.
So what do we do?
In part two, I will lay out a program for getting a Democrat back in two the White House.
The original run is starting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
With slight editing:
It is clear that there is a division on the center-left about which way to go.
That is because the old center-left was happy being in the opposition much of the time even though they had the majority of votes, but not the states.
The new center-left was given no more than a whisper of a chance and no more than a half-ghostly turn of the engine as to what it should do. Harris was doomed from the start even though she may be as good a version of this as was possible.
Half a victory is a defeat.
It is now time for the new center-left to come out of the woodwork and explain why the future is overwhelmingly different from the past.
But first, we must explain why the past of this present election was going to go down to defeat because it was fought on the old standard, which was never what the Democratic Party has been good at winning, except after the Second World War.
The reason that the Democratic party, and in a larger sense the center-left was losing, is because the postmodern world is fighting to hold on to a world that is already in the past, which wants to reduce the tax burden even though it is pouring money out of the future to pay for it.
The future will run on a different sort of energy.
The future must run on a different sort of economics.
The future must have a vision where the working class, the middle class, the academic, and the industrial, must all be aligned towards the vision of a different ideology.
Because the fossil fuel economy, which was the old vision of how the world had to work, is broken.
Because the "social networking" - which was the old version of the population - is broken.
Because the framework of the elections, is broken.
This means that the center-left must admit it’s own the mistakes, and also show that it has learned the deeper lesson, whereas the right has not.
And it must lay out a vision for the new future which we are all going to be living in with every passing second, every minute, and every hour.
We must realize that while everyone has an opinion, of the scientific facts must be the basis for discussion.
We must realize that each territory must make a choice whether to leave or stay as a state.
We must realize that every person must make a choice, whether or not others may want them to be silent.
We must realize that the new vision of transportation, working, and energizing the world must be taken, because climate change is coming.
This means that we must electrify the economy in a way never before seen.
This means that money cannot be the way of determining health care.
This means that science not politics must determine the way we eat, the way we think, and the way we determine how things should be settled.
That means that the suburban sprawl must end to be replaced by a new urbanism and a new way of drawing resources from the countryside.
That means a change in the way that the consumer relates to the electrical power grid.s
That means that Washington DC, Guam, and Puerto Rico must either be states or in the case of Puerto Rico and Guam left to declare independence.
That means that the House of Representatives must be expanded because of the current number. of representatives was not set in the Constitution but by mere Fiat along time just barely in the 20th century.
That means that women must make the choices about pregnancy because it is a woman's choice what is to be done with her body.
These problems will not be solved in one term or one presidential period but over the course of at least a generation.
And therefore, there must be an epoch in the way the people relate to the government because as we see that is certainly going to happen.
This was part of my political coming of age, where I would watch the Watergate hearings and then watch the Flintstones and Kimba.
As is my want, I shall refer to the Democratic party as “the Donks” and the Republican party as “the Phants” for donkeys and elephants respectively. The cartoons of Thomas Nast carry-on, carryforward, but seem not to harikari, which is, of course, a variant from the 1970s sitcom M*A*S*H*.
As seen here: https://ourwhitehouse.org/the-donkey-and-the-elephant/
I realized something fundamental about US politics in the past several weeks.
Most of the states are "Red" or "Blue", which is to say they have one-party rule. All have state legislatures and governors. Maybe 1/3 of the states are "Purple", meaning they have real multi-party politics.
The state-level politicians in the Red & Blue states generally do not need to "reach across the aisle" to achieve goals their voters want. "What are you smoking? This is the only aisle that matters!" would be the answer to any junior politician. All politics in these states devolves to "climbing the greasy flagpole" to the top. The politicians in these states do not know how to do multi-party politics. They do not know how to appeal to voters; they only know how to stab each other in the back, strategically. They only know how to do machine politics, not retail politics.
More generally, the majority of our state-level politicians are unprepared to "go national". We have just had a lovely example of the result: Kamala Harris climbed the greasy flagpole almost to the tippy-top, first in California then at the national level, only to freeze up and fail when she actually had to appeal to "Red" voters. She blew the retail sale.
This is very bad for the country, because the "bench" is not competent.