(Thanks to USAFprof ret for the thoughtful additions, copy-edit,and corrections.)
I almost always enjoy your diaries (except the “censorBernies” fiasco). But the one you posted the other day is so far from what we need to be doing that I am moved to address its essential stupidity and moranity.
Let me start with how we come across to them (Trump voters) when we call the Trump voters morons:
“You hip and cool city slickers think you’re hot shit. But you don’t know fuck all about the real America. You hide behind your city walls like medieval priests, drinking lattes and yacking on your mobiles, te deuming the dirty proles, and sprinkling your intellectual incense to protect yourselves from the smell.
“You progressives talk about your ‘measured responses’ and your ‘don’t do stupid shit’ as though you had a fucking clue about war. As if combating micro-aggression in your ivory tower was a tough as killing ragheads and watching your buddies blown to hell by IEDs. Just maybe there’s a reason the troops and the vets voted to Trump the bitch. And you thought you’d clinch this election by letting more islamofascists in the USA.
Now that I’ve characterized your essential bullshitty pussiness, let me persuade you to my point of view.”
How does that work for you, Kos? Ready to listen up now? Sure thing...
Now that you’ve reviewed the other end of insult, ask yourself: How has this worked over the last decade? While we digitally innovated, we lost almost all the elections in the localities, the counties, the states, and now the national political apparatus. As we congratulated ourselves on our technical and moral superiority, the morons took it all away from us.
They even out-social mediated us this cycle: They own the Network Nation, folks. They may be morons indeed. But we’d better learn this lesson: The morons outsmarted us and outworked us, over and over and over again. We democrats can’t elect a dogcatcher to office in most places, aside from the 1,000,000+ pop locales and coastal California.
Okay, yeah, we own the cities. How long do you think our “ownership” of these bastions will last without the power of the purse? Trust me, people follow the money.
So if they are morons, what are we? And, assuming we don’t want to concede everything to the alt-right, billionaires, and the gigantic corporate persons - what do we do now?
First, we drop the insults and recognize how ineffective and (yes) ignorant we ourselves have been.
Second, learning starts with the admission of ignorance, not the assertion of grievance. It’s: “I may be smart, but I don’t know and I need to find out.”
Here’s what it’s not: “The bad school, stupid teacher, nasty students, and corrupt learning theories, are all wrong and they need to listen to me because I’m right and they are morons.”
Try F**king Thinking -- Before F**king Fighting
Right after the election, you wrote we should be fucking fighting. Of course we’re going to fight. We’ve been fighting for a long time (and some of us had to fight you too, this election cycle). Now we’re mostly fighting each other, as I read the diaries attributing this electoral disaster to this and that and those and them and all the who’s and whatsis in litanies of shame and blame.
Of course, as always, there will be plenty of blame to go around. Shame too. And there’s the list of woulda, shoulda, couldas...
But really, Kos, we need to start thinking. And listening. And learning. And then organizing and teaching. And recognizing that, right now, we’re the morons.
We blindly embraced two leaders who could not win (Face it, Bernie supporters of which I was one; he could never, never, never have won.) That is a delusional fantasy…in that sense, Kos was right.) However, with her mistakes prior to the campaign putting her on the endless defensive, neither could Hillary. We needed to be smart. We weren’t.
We rested on our laurels and it turned out to be sweet garden, surrounded by a field of poison ivy. There was more poison than sweetness and that carried the day.
Start by saying Cheese.
Aviation safety experts have a model of how tragic accidents happen. It’s called the “cheese model.” Even after long periods of safe operation - especially after long periods of safe operation - accident post-mortems typically show that, one slice at a time, various forces have taken away the protective measures and processes previously introduced to prevent such catastrophic accidents.
Before we reengage in our intramural samurai attacks, in less than 5 minutes or so, I’d like to point to many slices of the Democratic victory cheese that we lost or squandered one slice at a time.
The Big Slices of our Democratic Screw-up
Here’s the biggie: We needed to attend to Howard Dean’s message in 2004. Remember? Repeat it after me: 50-state strategy He meant way more than just states – he meant we had to talk to all of America. Even the morons.
We didn’t do that. So right there, a whole gob of slices of the cheese block gradually peeled off, beginning all those years ago. We let the small cities, towns, and villages slip away into the hands of the Rs. We let the counties go. We let the states go. And we let the R’s redistrict in 2010; hell, we had the presidency.
We let the schools and universities go too — ex-prez Clinton, Congressional Dems lavishing GI Bill money, and even members of the Black Caucus signed on to the empty promises of the for-profit degree factories. Other pols crumped under the heavy-handed billionaires to put Common Core and other elaborate failures in place.
At the state level, public universities entered the race to luxury with new Student Union Buildings, workout spaces, expensive dorms, football factories — and raised tuition year after year. Older tenured faculty cruised with their one or two lecture courses or graduate seminars; younger faculty and adjuncts were swamped with big 100-level courses — for far less money than their leisure-class colleagues.
We delivered for our elite campaign donors and the poorest of the poor. But we didn’t deliver much for anybody else...
We delivered on health care, but we surely screwed-up the rollout and then let the R’s (with help from the media) distort the message of the real cost relief the ACA brought. We dramatically lowered the medical care cost curve, but the election headlines were about a few large but atypical premium increases.
And we didn’t deliver on non-urban jobs. We didn’t deliver on trade-related job retraining. We didn’t deliver on immigration reform and deported more people than ever. Hell, we didn’t even deliver affordable cable and Internet to rural areas. FDR electrified the Tennessee Valley and they voted Democratic for a generation. But we couldn’t be bothered; just leave it to private corporations.
We thought we could just flyover those chubby uncool people, Uber around the big cities, sip our lattes in wi-fied air, check out our up-to-the-nanosecond online sites on our mobile devices, thinking great thoughts and dreaming great dreams about how to make the world a better place. Nothing wrong with that — but it’s a luxury most people in our country don’t have. Especially the blue-collar working men in non-union “red” states that we already ceded because our 50-state strategy was just too tough to do.
But we wouldn’t know what really went wrong, because we aren’t there. For the most part, we aren’t where the misery lives. At least the non-urban misery. (And truth be told, most of us don’t spend all that much time in the urban misery.) So that means, as political actors, we aren’t there to listen, to hear, and to help. Nor do we listen much to the people who are there. All this pooled ignorance means we don’t really know what is going on outside of the urban bubble.
We didn’t really know that the country folks were fed up. Neither did the pollsters and statisticians, who asked questions written by people with relatively high-paying jobs in the Information and Gig Economy. We got mad at the people, like Michael Moore, who told us. Those angry people picked up their pitchforks and aimed them right at us. And...ouch!
Cities are the Democratic strongholds. Well, they aren’t going to be enough. A lot of us D’s (ourselves included) don’t know a lot about rural and ex-urban America. Most places are not all that cool and we sure don’t want to spend a lot of time there except for passing through. (There’s only so much “nature” that will make up for the casual xenophobia, sexism, and racism, to say nothing of the shitload of suffering there. The film, “Hell or High Water,” is wonderfully instructive in that it captures so much of the depression, desperation, and outrage that impacts those non-urban areas beyond our ken.)
Towards the Rx for our current situation
So we need to conduct a real post-mortem and face up to our own shortcomings. To the extent that we are still alive and kicking, it will probably hurt. But try to think of it as a good hurt — because we’ve got to get up tomorrow. Assuming the miracle of a Clinton win isn’t going to happen, we’re going to have to learn to listen, hear, and respond.
And until we capture at least 33 states and their legislatures, we ain’t gonna dump the Electoral College. So perhaps instead of signing petitions for Constitutional change, we might take honest looks at why we failed to persuade most voters to actually vote in their own self-interest.
So maybe, just maybe, it’s time to imagine what sets of policies might advance the public interest. Across this nation – urban, rural, from coast to coast. Across demographic categories. But we gotta ask them first.
And we gotta listen to their fears and anger.
One of the great ironies of this election is that so many of the Trump voters are rightly pissed off at the consequences of the Republican policies that favor corporate interests over human needs and the uber wealthy over the lower and middle classes. And yet they voted Republican, not Democratic. From City Council to President.
But that might be our great opportunity…if we can avail ourselves of it. Because if we get our shit together after principled listening, when the Republicans do what they do and screw “their” voters, we can start the hard work of making America work for all of us.
In that process, I believe we will learn how we can help and how we can win. And I think it’s our only hope for being able to lead.
