Hell, maybe they’d even
This is one take, but it leaves a lot out.
In the expectations game, the Democratic Party whiffed and whiffed badly. The Biden campaign and its allies managed to drive up turnout — but so did Trump. Republicans put up a hell of a fight, and not just, or even mainly, in the battle for the White House. Democrats have almost certainly failed to win a Senate majority, and so far they have lost some ground in the House as well (while still on track to maintain control of the lower chamber of Congress).
This is one reason it’s so infuriating to me that we ended up with Biden. A less inspiring candidate it’s hard to imagine. The Democratic party is terrified of the left, while the Republican party passionately embraces the right. Why is that?
So much for the Democratic fantasy — the one that seemingly never dies — of unobstructed rule. Democrats didn’t just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation’s fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College.
Hey. Wait just a damn minute. Getting rid of the Electoral College is not some wild lefty power trip – the Electoral College is a bad and undemocratic way to elect presidents. It also gives Republicans a massive advantage out of all proportion to their demography (hence the undemocratic part). There’s no reason for presidential elections to be state by state; the UK doesn’t count Somerset then Yorkshire then Norfolk, it counts the country as a whole.
Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation’s history, with white supremacy and racism placed “at the very center.” Ensure “equity” not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they’d even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.
But is any of that part of Biden’s campaign?
No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.
Because of the imaginary Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn’t enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.
In other words there are people who are more lefty than Joe Biden is. Well no shit, but I don’t see why we should assume everyone thought they would be telling Biden what to do.
And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of “democracy” has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.
What talk? Where is this talk happening? I haven’t seen it. And to repeat: currently the Republicans lock the Democrats out of power, thanks to the Electoral College and gerrymandering and a whole lot of voter suppression, made possible by the Supreme Court’s ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. I think that has a hell of a lot more to do with Dem failures than the existence of people to the left of Biden.
So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.
He says, blithely ignoring the Shelby ruling and the weird shape of the Ohio district that sends Jim Jordan to Congress and a thousand other little details like that.
The things he’s claiming are democratic desires are actually the republican desires. The republican voters are effectively suffering dementia and dragging the rest of the country off a cliff, and all for the benefit for the republican elite. Covid might be the only way we will survive as they deny it’s virulence and play chicken with a virus that never swerves away. That might actually save us.
The Dems look set for a weak victory. But will they learn anything from it?
“Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes.” Nathan Robinson
“Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable.”
A very good article, IMHO, by a Bernie Sanders supporter.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/trump-should-have-lost-in-a-landslide-the-fact-that-he-didnt-speaks-volumes
So do Republicans. Perhaps it’s time for someone to explain to the Republicans that they are not the only ones in the country, and they should exercise a little humility.
Not totally, no, but one big problem is that no one will blame the voters. Hillary got blamed at every turn for her loss, but the big fact remains: the voters are the ones who actually vote. If they want to vote for celebrity, glitz, and glamour (not that I think Trump has glamour) over expertise and substance, then they will. And the Democrats adopting that style will not lead to anything other than the (possible, but doubtful) swinging of elections. It will not lead to a better country, it will not lead to a better world. It will bring the Democrats down to the level of the Republicans, and then we are even more fucked than we are now.
So, yes, we must blame voters who are uninformed, ignorant, and full of their own sense of superiority, refusing to realize that they are uninformed and inform themselves, refusing to consider the possibility that they might be wrong (something Democrats agonize over to their detriment, believing they must be absolutely right in all things), refusing to consider the fact that people who do not look like them are still Americans, entitled to all the rights of Americans.
I am so sick of this “don’t blame the voters” crap.The voters are the ones who vote. If we must play Sesame Street level games, or be schoolyard bullies to win their vote, we have lost.
So, yes, the leadership could look at what they’re doing, and there are things they can change. The media MUST look at what they are doing – I hardly saw anything of Biden, his campaign tours catching me by surprise when they were nearly over because the news wasn’t interested, while there was 24/7 non-stop Trump for the past 5 years. The voters absolutely must stand in for their share of blame, because, well, frankly, the voters are to blame, as well. Hatred, contempt for skill and learning, racism, sexism, imperialism, white supremacy – if those things were not part of the make up of the voters, a Trump would not be able to succeed, would not be able to get votes.
Stupid to say in a democracy that the voters are not to blame.
To clarify a point, the UK doesn’t count the country as a whole (aside from referendums), but votes in 650 MPs via Parliamentary constituencies.
However Parliamentary constituencies are a good comparator with the Electoral College. The independent Boundary Commission reviews constituencies every 5 years or so, and can recommend boundary changes to ensure that constituencies contain a roughly equal amount of voters. In England and NI constituencies are around 70,000 voters, in Scotland 67,000 and in Wales 56,000. These relatively minor disparities are allowed because of the geographical size of constituencies – for example an inner London constituency is a few square km (Islington North is just over 7 sq km) a mid-Wales one thousands of square km.
The injustice of the Electoral College cannot happen as the constituency boundaries change when the population changes.
Let me guess, Omar, that article says that, in order to win elections, Democrats should adopt policies and strategies that Nathan Robinson already favored all along. (I’m not registered with the Guardian, and am tired of signing up for every goddamn web site.)
So many people seem to assume that the Great and Good American People secretly agree with them, or can be convinced to agree with them, if only the correct candidate and message were selected.
Not me. I assume that a majority of Americans disagree with me on pretty much every issue. I don’t even mean that in a haughty, that’s-because-I’m-smart-and-they’re-dumb kind of way. (Well, maybe a little bit.)
Also, why does a Biden WIN mean “Democrats must re-examine their policies and arguments,” but a Bernie LOSS in the fucking PRIMARY never seems to mean “the Left must re-examine its policies and arguments, since it can’t even persuade the left-leaning half of the electorate”? If I want advice on how to win a Congressional seat in Brooklyn, I’ll solicit the Left’s opinion. They’re good at that, I’ll admit.
Also, everything iknklast just said @3. Voters are fucking stupid. I recognize that we’ve got to figure out ways to win their support — which, I might add, JUST FUCKING HAPPENED — but doesn’t mean I have to like it, or that, for those of us who aren’t political candidates or operatives, that we can’t express our fucking contempt for the voters.
And yeah, after an election where the GOP lost the popular vote nationwide, is going to lose the fucked-up Electoral College count, failed to win a majority in the House, and will only (probably) win a bare majority in the antidemocratically elected Senate, the topic being discussed is why the DEMOCRATS need to re-think their approach.
I’m reminded of the Simpsons scene where, returning from the Harvard-Yale football game, Monty Burns remarks to Smithers, “Honestly, Smithers, I don’t know why Harvard even bothers to show up for this game. Why, they barely won!”
The problem I have with most “Bernie woulda won” takes is that Bernie didn’t even to manage to win over the Democrats, let alone disaffected voters. And the sorts of voters who put Trump in office weren’t looking for functional government and a working welfare state – they just wanted to own the libs.
Vila Restal @ 4 – Oh, duh, of course they do – I knew that. *smacks self upside the head*
ARC,
Exactly. This is like an NFL team that missed the playoffs bragging that they totally would have beaten the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. I mean, it’s possible, matchups matter, maybe you had some super duper game plan that would have worked against the best team in the league but not against enough of the other teams, but… pardon some of us for being skeptical.
I mean, what is the actual argument being made here? “Dear Democratic primary voters, you should totally let us nominate AOC* in 2024 just to run a fun little experiment. If it fails and we get 4-8 years of Tom Cotton (or Donald Trump Jr. or Tucker Carlson or a Russian twitter bot in android form), we’ll totally admit we were wrong!” Yeah, no thanks. Go win a fucking Senate seat in a purple state with a socialist candidate first and we’ll talk. (Incidentally, the left’s record in Congressional races outside of solid blue areas is… not so good.)
*– To be clear, I like AOC just fine. It’s good to have people like her in Congress. But I’m not even entirely sure I’d want her as the candidate for NY Senate, as it wasn’t that long ago that NY elected GOP senators. Nationwide she would get crushed, because you can pile the racism and misogyny on top of the “fear of socialism.”
iknklast & SM @#3 & 5:
What you appear to me to be saying is that leadership does not matter. I think that history is against that idea.
If you click on that web address, you should arrive at that article paywall-free. Give it a go.
(I am a ‘contributor’ at the Groan, but as far as I am aware, it is an open site.)
I don’t understand the argument that a more left candidate would have done better. Biden is on track to win a higher percentage of the population than anyone since Nixon in 1972. Do people really think that a large segment of the voting population thought “If only the Dems had elected someone further to the left, I wouldn’t have voted for Trump”?
Also what iknklast said. Nearly half of the electorate doesn’t think that being a racist, misogynist, incompetent, criminal moron responsible for the shockingly callous and inadequate response to a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 people in this country disqualifies a candidate for presidency.
Omar, I am not saying that leadership doesn’t matter; I did devote part of my post to acknowledging that leadership matters…and the media, which is a really big issue.
But the voters cannot be dismissed as causing this. If it is a democracy, and you cannot blame the voters for the leadership, then it isn’t a democracy. And while people contest (and legitimately) the strength of our democracy, the reality is that enough people voted for Trump to put him in the presidency. They were not misled by Trump, they were not lied to by Trump, they were not fooled by Trump. They voted for Trump because Trump is Trump. They like him that way.
I walk among the voters in Trump country. Superficially, at least half, probably more, of them are nice people. They will help you mow your lawn, fix your tire, wave at you to go first at the stop sign. They are pleasant, nice to children, and own dogs. Just don’t get them started on the topic of black people, women, Mexicans, sensible gun controls, single payer healthcare, welfare, food stamps…the list is long. And they will turn on you quickly if you disagree, and they will impose their religion on the government any chance they get. They love their wives and daughters, but would not vote for a woman even for mayor (we’ve never had a woman mayor, though we had a great candidate four years ago). They call on the Mexican-Americans for home repairs or house cleaning, but voted for a dead man for City Council because his opponent was hispanic. And they drive monster trucks which they leave running while they are in the store because they know global warming is a hoax.
This is the Trump voters. There is literally no way the Democratic leadership could appeal to them with any candidate.
On the left, we have a diverse group ranging from Eisenhower Republican-like Democrats to socialists to…well, the woke. A huge tent, with diverse, divergent interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. We have Bernie voters who shifted and voted for Trump in 2016 because all they really want is to break things. We have woke telling us that transgender rights must be centered in every issue, every movement, every conversation, and that using the pronoun that matches a person’s biological sex is as bad as…worse than…putting 6 million Jews into furnaces, or keeping millions of African-Americans in slavery. They will not likely vote for anyone who does not sing their song and chant their mantras in a 100% perfect tonality. Meanwhile, anyone who did do that is unlikely to win the support of the rest of the left, which often looks on with horror at the likes of the Jessica Yanivs or Rachel McKinnons (yes, I know they may not be Americans, but I don’t know the names of their American equivalents; they are just an example). Speak out for abortion rights, and you anger the anti-abortion left who think we should pander to their interests. Speak out for gun control, and you anger that portion of the left that believes gun rights are absolute and any control is unconstitutional. Speak out for single payer healthcare, and you anger the pro-business Democrats who really just want to see a few regulations on business so they are nicer, but do not want their taxes to go up. In short, there is no way to appeal to “the left”, because there is no “the left”. There is “the lefts”…maybe as many lefts as there are Christianities. Complicated, messy, human.
So, yeah, the leadership of the left is in a bind. The right can just shout “no new taxes”, “law and order”, and “lock her up”, and they’ve got cheering and chanting…and votes. The left is walking a precarious tightrope. Some people thought Joe Biden was the best positioned to walk that tightrope; others were not so sure. We won’t know until the dust settles.
But please, do not suggest that the voters have no blame for their votes. They do. Of course they do. And I will not, will not listen anymore when someone tells me I need to consider those poor, disempowered, disenfranchised white men who only want their rights, and are tired of not being listened to. They are listened to. They wield a lot of power. They are angry because others are starting to help run the country, and may not always believe it should be run to benefit the white-supremacist male-supremacist Christian. I blame them, and I continue to blame them.
Trump did not cause this, nor did Biden. Trump is the result of a system that has been broken for a long time, and voters that want celebrity. Biden is the imperfect answer that was offered up by voters scared of both Trump and Sanders. He could not rally the big tent of the left under his banner; no one could. That’s just reality.
Omar,
I have no idea how you got “leadership doesn’t matter” out of what I posted.
Seriously, in no way is that a plausible reading of what I wrote. I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply misinterpreted me and aren’t engaging in bad faith.
And I clicked on your link, and the site would not give me access to the full article without registering. But I notice that you don’t tell me that I’m wrong in my summary.
iknklast,
Antony Beevor in The Battle for Spain makes the point that the two sides of the Spanish civil war were divided along three axes: left vs. right, regionalist vs. centralist, and authoritarian vs. civil libertarian. The nationalists were more unified because they were for the most part right wing, centralist authoritarians, while the Republicans were a mish-mash of different combinations along those axes (e.g., Basque separatists were conservative regionalists; the anarchist/communist civil war in Barcelona pitted left libertarian regionalists vs. left authoritarian centralists).
Splitters. Always splitters.
Of course the voters are to blame. They’re the ones marking the ballot. No one — *no one* — sees who you vote for, once you’re in that little cubicle. You can (and people did, as we saw in 2016 and on this past Tuesday) lie about your preference. Clinton was right. Trump voters are the deplorables.
And, Sanders would have been eaten alive as the presidential candidate. The video of him standing next to Sandanistas shouting “Death to Yankees!” would have been running on Fox News 24/7.
“Raucous crowds of Trump supporters staged protests outside vote-counting centres in Phoenix in Arizona, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and Detroit in Michigan, riled by unfounded claims from Trump and some of his loyalists of widespread irregularities and the insistence that the reversal of the president’s early leads in the counts meant the election was being ‘stolen’.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/05/biden-trump-us-election-2020-votes-count
.
Germany by 1932 had large numbers of people outraged over their country’s failed post-1918 imperial project. I would say that the US has just come within a hair’s breadth of a replay of Germany 1932, with Trump supporters, some of them gun-toting, shouting “make America great again”, and with T shirts and regalia saying likewise.
The Chinese leadership are the villains, it appears, not because of Tien-An-Men and post Tien-An-Men repression and massacres, but because they stand in the way of a resumption of American ‘greatness’; such as the US knew in the years 1945-1975: from its defeat of Japan to its own defeat in Vietnam. That is what motivates all the Trumpism. In the last analysis. IMHO.
Trumpism is entry-level fascism, with crowds of angry supporters to prove it. Frustrated entry-level fascism. Dangerously frustrated entry-level fascism.
A friend of mine chose, for reasons I’m sure made sense to her at the time, to move to a very red state years ago, and is now more or less stuck there alone. I was zooming with her the other day, and she was talking about how she’s made a great effort to be friends with her neighbours and people she interacts with, and as iknklast says they’re all perfectly nice friendly people (presumably it helps that she’s a well-off middle aged white lady) who don’t seem, on the surface, to be hell-bent on self-destruction. But she said it’s only a matter of time in any conversation with them before they say a lie. I’m sure their worldviews and behaviours would make perfect sense if what they believed about Black people, Hispanic people, women, Muslims, Trump, etc. were true–but it isn’t. Not matters of opinion, or uncertainty, or ambiguity, or even information that it might be difficult to obtain or verify…but just flat-out lies. This seems to be the fundamental issue.
As an outsider, looking in, this election has proven Hilary Clinton was almost right. Half Trump’s supporters are not “a basket of deplorables”, the whole lot of them are.
Roj,
Yeah, the worst you can say about Hilary’s “deplorables” comment is that it was a Kinsley Gaffe — where a politician screws up by telling the truth.
I don’t get these two bits.
1) “a less inspiring candidate it’s hard to imagine. The Democratic party is terrified of the left, while the Republican party passionately embraces the right. Why is that?”
Because voters in the centre are terrified of the left, and the Dems need those voters to even attempt to win the electoral college. But therefore a centrist candidate is bad according to you. So let’s try this:
2) (list of leftist issues) “But is any of that part of Biden’s campaign?”
So a lefty candidate, as argued above, is good because they support the issues that matter to the left, and thery should be embraced.
But alternatively, as you are arguing here, a leftist candidate is bad, because the valid criticisms of a leftist candidate that would have been death in the midwest and rust belt don’t apply to Biden. Which is a strength, and one which will likely make him the president.
So what you want is a democrat who doesn’t agree with any centrist OR any leftist policies? That the furthest left and the most centrist voters will either equally love, or equally hate? That candidate does not exist.
I get this is frustrating, but you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. This is an incoherent mess of an argument.
I’m sure it is; I’m not feeling very coherent at the moment.
But I’m not really making an argument in this post, I’m taking issue with various things Damon Linker said, each one separately. Serial mini-arguments maybe, but not one over-arching argument. The one about Democrats being terrified of the left while Republicans just love the right – I just wonder why that is. In general, not just at this moment. I wonder why there is no extreme too extreme for Republicans while Democrats turn pale with fear at the mildest reformist suggestion. I suppose it goes back to the Cold War and McCarthyism, but I don’t really know.
I’m not arguing that it’s good that none of Linker’s list is on Biden’s agenda, I’m just saying he has his facts wrong. I also don’t like Linker’s rather snotty way of describing that list. That too is not an argument; I just don’t like it.
On the larger point…yes. It absolutely is a huge contradiction, or at least a dilemma, and I’m well aware of it. I would love to see a candidate with a genuinely left-wing platform, and I also would love to see Republicans not win. I’m very much torn between the pragmatic and the whatever-it-is – the authentic left-of-Clinton candidate.
It’s a very common dilemma, isn’t it? I’m not the only one who is irritated that genuinely progressive options just aren’t permissible here, I’m pretty sure. We seem as a country to be stubbornly allergic to social policies that have done well by people on the other side of the Atlantic and north of the border.
Oh, I dunno, if Trump’s economic populism hadn’t been a smokescreen it might’ve made him quite popular…
We probably *could* have progressive policies provided you threw a sufficient number of “others” under the bus.
I hate living in shithole country.
Ophelia,
No, you’re not the only one. That pretty much sums up how I feel. Fortunately I had the foresight to marry a woman from Spain, where you don’t go broke from getting sick, so we’ll probably end up retiring there (or somewhere in the EU).
Yeah, that dilemma is a bad one. I really wanted a woman on the ticket again this year. I also suspected a woman would have a tougher time beating Trump. I didn’t want Biden, because I thought he wouldn’t be the best choice (he wasn’t even my 10th top choice), and I didn’t think he had a prayer of beating Trump. But then, I didn’t think any of them did, at least not at the time of the primaries. I had no idea the uproar COVID was going to cause. I don’t know any Trump voters who would change their vote because of children in cages, or the fact that we have temperatures in the 80s in November in Nebraska; I hoped the damn virus might shift a few, but our numbers are pretty much what they were last time, even as many Trump voters mask up and socially distance (the older ones; the younger ones, under 50 especially, remain unmasked, and I presume in both parties, because I almost never see a mask on anyone over 20 and under 50).
So I struggled with what I want vs what I want – Trump gone, woman president, progressive policies – it was obvious I could not get them all. I decided to start with Trump gone, but still voted Warren in the primary.
@iknklast
As least you get a chance to choose in the primaries, as a PA resident I’ve never had a realistic choice, it’s always a done deal by the time we vote. It’s annoying as hell and needs to change. This year I voted for Gabbard just because she wasn’t Biden* and she was the only other choice still on the ballot. Way back in my first POTUS primary I voted for John Glenn (because astronaut, frankly).
* He was last on my list from the start so really anybody else would have received my vote.
Actually, Mike, it was a done deal for me, too. Nebraska has a late primary; Biden was already presumptive candidate, Warren was out. But they printed the ballots a few days before she dropped out, so I was able to mark her name, even knowing she was no longer in the race. So my chance to choose was only an illusion, but I did appreciate it. I needed the catharsis.
I get it Ophelia. And I love your commentary because it normally cuts through the bullshit, and is clear and concise. But I would like to remind you of the oft quoted phrase ‘politics is the art of the possible’. You have to start with where we are, not where you wish we were. I have learned this from bitter experience. Your issue is with American voters in swing states, not Biden or Harris.
Anyway, the most important thing to note is: #bidenharris2020 I think we can all agree on that.