In Part one, I attempted to analyze the source of the decline of the Democratic Party — and not just Hillary Clinton’s defeat last month, but the the broader and more comprehensive decline experienced by the Democratic Party that began in 2010 and has gotten steadily worse since then.
There is no getting around it: the situation faced by the Democratic Party is dire. In a few weeks, Republicans will control the presidency, both houses of Congress (and thus, soon, the Supreme Court), they will have both houses of the legislature in 32 states, and have “complete dominance” (Republican Governor plus Republican legislature) in 25 states. The Democrats, by contrast, control both houses of the legislature in just 14 states, and have complete dominance in only 6.
This is a big problem. The last 6 years have demonstrated conclusively that:
1. The Democratic Party’s agenda will, to a first approximation, not get done unless we have the presidency and both houses of Congress.
When it looked like Hillary was going to win, the Republicans were already promising to shoot down — by various means — all of her Supreme Court nominees. She could have expected nothing but Republican obstruction if she had tried to fix Obamacare, done any infrastructure spending, or anything else that would tangibly help make the Democratic Party’s agenda look attractive to voters. We can hate the Republicans for this behavior, we can say that they are cynical and nihilistic for doing these things — and we’d be inarguably correct — but that would not affect the results in the slightest. This is how they roll, and we need to recognize that and plan accordingly.
2. The Democratic Party’s voters are too geographically concentrated to give it a governing majority — i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress.
Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote (by almost 3 million votes) but that edge came mostly from the 6 states where we have complete dominance — she won California by a little over 4.2 million votes, New York state by 1.7 million, Massachusetts by almost a million, Illinois by just under a million, and so on.
A similar situation obtains in the U.S. Senate: while Democrats won a majority of the popular vote, a lot of that was due to the fact that two democrats were running against each other in deep-blue California, and by democrats running up the score in other deep blue states.
The (geographically more diverse) House tells the more accurate story of the Democrats’ predicament: there, the Republicans won the nationwide, aggregate popular vote by just under 1.4 million votes. Again: to accomplish Democratic policy objectives, we need both houses of Congress and the presidency.
3. If it wants to achieve a governing majority in the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party needs to become both more geographically expansive and more class-diverse.
The Democratic Party is, at the moment and roughly speaking, the party of big-city elites plus ethnic and cultural minorities, and the last six years of decline and Republican obstruction have definitively shown that that is not enough of a coalition to give it the electoral margins needed to make it a politically effective party.
One response might be that we don’t need to expand our base, but just get the base we have to actually turn out and vote — if we turn out, we win, as the proprietor of this joint has said many times.
Markos isn’t actually wrong, strictly speaking, but the unavoidable fact is, they haven’t been turning out. Basing your strategy on people who haven’t been turning out to vote — even when a villain from Central Casting like Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — is part of the reason why the current situation of the Democratic Party is so dire. We need a big enough base of reliable voters that unreliable voters might (in an “extra icing” sort of way) be nice to get, but not structurally necessary to our strategy. We need to build an enduring and reliable majority without them. As I said in part 1:
We need more people to be reliable, loyal democratic voters, so that the worst case is we have 50% plus a smidge, and the usual case is we have a governing majority. That is the only way to make progressive change that won’t be repealed the next time a Republican takes the White House (and for that matter, will make it unlikely for a Republican to gain the White House to begin with).
4. What this all points to is, the Democratic Party needs to pay far more effort to winning working class and rural people.
Notice I didn’t say, “white” working people, and I also didn’t say rural “whites.” I really mean working class and rural people of every race. In part one I defined working class as:
(P)eople living the usual situation of the 70% of the country that does not have a college degree.
I’m defining “rural” in part 2 in a similar way: the people of every ethnic background living the typical, normative situation of rural people across the country. “Typical” means what it says: I’m not talking about, say, hedge fund managers with Montana hobby ranches and that sort of thing, but the sort of people one would typically encounter in rural Iowa or Nebraska (or — worth mentioning — rural California, Illinois or New York state. It’s worth remembering that the territorial majority of almost every state is rural, so we’re not just talking about The Big Square Flyover States.)
I can already hear the objection: “So, what you’re saying is, borrow some racists from the Republicans, right?”
Firstly: no that’s not what I’m saying. I didn’t mention race, because if we go after working class rather than just white working class voters, that’s way more people (70% of the country), meaning a greater chance of building that unbeatable coalition.
Secondly: Let’s be a little clearer on what we mean when we say “racist.” Do we make any distinction at all between Klan/White Nationalist types, and the vast majority of people of every race and educational level who have subtler but still socially corrosive racial biases in their heart of hearts?
If you’re a well-educated, white professional person who lives in a nicer neighborhood, let me ask you something: was at least part of the reason you bought a house where you did the fact that the neighborhood was advertised as “exclusive?”
Who or what was being “excluded,” and why?
If we demand that all political parties purge themselves of all racists, the remaining voters in both parties wouldn’t fill Yankee Stadium, and the United States will cease to be a participatory democracy in any meaningful sense.
“So, what you’re saying is let’s just ignore racism — just more or less dismiss it by saying that it’s always going to be a “Thing” — and then just wash our hands of it?”
Nope — in fact, quite the opposite.
Racism — the kind of racism I mentioned previously that pervades American life and crosses ideological boundaries — depends for its vitality on ignorance. I don’t just mean “ignorant hicks in red states” but ignorant app developers in San Francisco, ignorant college professors in New York, ignorant organic produce buyers in Chicago, ignorant artists in Boulder, Colorado, and ignorant everybody else, emphatically including me.
What we ignorant people don’t know, or at least haven’t fully, deeply realized, is that people of every race are intrinsically just like us, in every respect. “They” love their children just as much as “we” do, they suffer and bleed and ponder the abyss and love and strive and feel joy in exactly the same way as “we” do. (This, by the way, is the entire point of the Black Lives Matter movement.) All of us suffer because of this ignorance, and I want to alleviate that suffering.
The only thing that will decisively undermine the ignorance I’m talking about is knowledge. By that I don’t mean “education” in the formal sense, I mean acquiring knowledge in a deeper and more experiential sense — not just “learning about” people of different races, but having them integrated into the structure of your life.
For example, during the Second World War, there were chronic and serious labor shortages throughout the economy, and particularly for blue-collar type jobs — welders, machinists, pipe-fitters, production line workers, and so on. Early in the war, necessity dealt a serious blow to the pervasive employment discrimination of the day — if you showed up at the factory gates and had two arms, two legs and could see straight, you were immediately hired, trained and put to work, regardless of your ancestry.
While there were sometimes serious racial tensions in the production facilities, they actually lessened through time, because blacks (say) were transformed from an alien and threatening “them,” to a guy named Jake who worked at the work station before yours on the production line , and whose yells of “C’mon, Dave — you’re slowin’ me down!” had become a running joke that you both enjoy, and your supervisor appreciates you both for your hard work.
Now, we are (for the moment, at least) not embroiled in a world war, but if we want to decisively undermine racism, the best way to do so would be to do everything we can to bring about a situation where people of every ethnicity work together as familiar and valued team members.
The problem is, the economy has been doing the opposite for the last 40 years or so.
I posted this graph in part one:
The graph stops in 2005, but since then, the wages of working class people (again, the 70% of the country that does not have a 4-year degree or above) have resumed their long-term slide, and that slide has even accelerated.
There is a crying need for jobs for the 70% of the country I mentioned previously that do not have college degrees. And not just any old job, but jobs that:
- Do not require a college degree;
- Pay middle-class wages;
- Are plentiful enough that employers have a hard time filling them.
More on that in part 3.