There’s something we need to accept — voters are not, in fact, all that stupid. Most people are wise enough to know bullshit when they see it, and if they’re not rabid cultists, they’re turned off by it. Most people know what their personal interests are, and vote along those lines. It’s rare for voters to come out to the polls to rid ourselves of malignant actors like Trump and company. Such politicians have to be so glaringly evil in our democracy for us to do so.
We won’t see 2020 again, even if Donald Trump runs for office. The voters already did what we had to do to fix that, and now it’s on those who we elected to make sure it can never happen again. If he’s allowed to run in 2024, we won’t be motivated to try and stop him again, not in the numbers we’ll need to do so (if Republican efforts in the states succeed in ending actual elections as we know it, it won’t matter anyway, and nothing is stopping them from doing so right now).
Democratic leaders — predominantly people from previous generations, predominantly white people, predominantly wealthy people — have misread the direction their party and the country is actually going. They have calculated that their future lies in the hearts and minds of Republicans that were perfectly *fine* with Donald Trump’s horror show until he fucked up the pandemic. They imagine that the racist, misogynist, middle class white voter is now a Democrat, and that they have to keep that constituency happy at the expense of all others. Instead of committing to the progressives and demographics that worked hardest for them, they are lurching towards the unwinnable conservatives in suburbia to hold to power, and are presuming upon the passion and devotion of the very people they’ve continually cast off over the last two years legislatively.
Two specific stories stood out to me this week related to this.
First, President Biden, in a patronizing response to a young woman asking about student loan debt forgiveness, made it clear that his campaign promises on this issue were empty. “I won’t do that”. In less than 50 days, 43 million Americans will have to re-start their student loan payments, a situation that was already untenable before COVID hit. The burden and the stress and the pain this will cause to people predominantly drawn from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters is hard to overstate.
Second, Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would oppose efforts to reign in congress member’s ability to trade stocks while serving in congress.
Both of these moves are bad (honestly, terrible, maddeningly foolish, and completely tone deaf) on their face for the base voters that make up the democratic coalition.
Democratic voters are increasingly dissatisfied with “free market” ideology. Our voters are drawn largely from populations and demographics that do not and have not benefited from the gains made under free market systems. Increasingly, we represent people who are exploited by those systems for the gain of those already in higher economic strata.
When members trade stocks, they do so with knowledge aforethought that regular citizens don’t have access to. Time and again, we see members of Congress get more and more wealthy as they work (in theory) for The People. The wealthier they get in congress, the less good they do for their constituents, and the more their constituency changes from the people who vote for them to those who fund their election campaigns.
Progressives in the House and Senate have always been the clear moral voice of the party, and have always represented the party’s heart. As Pelosi and Biden continue to harrumph at the priorities of young voters, and imagine that somehow our voters don’t know what corruption smells like, we slip further and further in the polls, and our control of the levers of power gets ever closer to ending — perhaps permanently.
Old Guard Democrats need to get on board with progressive values. The future of this party is closer to the Sanders/Squad wing than it is the corporate world. The world will continue to self-destruct from threats like COVID and climate change unless we not only devote ourselves to progressive, left-wing policies, but also devote ourselves to good government and a world not dominated by free-market ideology.
We all know the consequences of losing control of government to the fascists on the other side of the aisle. Someone who knows how to deal with old guard Democrats needs to get them to realize that just because we’re afraid of Donald Trump doesn’t mean that Democratic reps are entitled to our vote, our volunteerism, our donations, our time, or our enthusiasm. Those things must be earned, and every time the President and the Speaker of the house patronize us or dismiss the concerns of their base, they do damage to our chances at re-election and real change and reform.
For those of you convinced Biden is just killing it out there for his voters —
What was predicted would happen when we got screwed on infrastructure has happened. BBB is done. Biden’s promise to the head of the Progressive caucus was nothing more than hot air, progressive have been entirely frozen out of legislative priorities, and will almost certainly be blamed when we lose the house and Senate in 2022.