It’s the day after Doug Jones, a Democrat, scored a historic upset in Alabama.
Steve Bannon and the party he belongs to better start to realize one thing: people in the heartland of this country don’t like outsiders telling them what to do. Certainly not the ones in Alabama.
They’re tired of being seen as fly-over country. They’re tired of being portrayed as ignorant rubes in the media (and hey, Bannon sure represents the media, having worked in the media practice for Goldman Sachs, and all that is wrong with it). They feel they don’t get any respect from inside the Beltway, and that they are not listened to. They resent those coastal elites parachuting in, making a few robocalls, with no real sense of the way Alabamians themselves see the issues.
Alabamians are perfectly capable of seeing their own home-grown candidates for what they are, and who they are, from many points of view. They’re sick of the condescension from Harvard graduates, assuming they will just follow along with whatever they are told.
After Alabama, Bannon’s party needs to see it can’t ever win on identity politics and needs to get back to the bread and butter issues that used to be the stuff of politics back in the day. They are hard-working, right-thinking people, who value the sense of community they feel in their hometown and countryside. Not an internationalist agenda.
Alabamians chose Doug Jones over Trump and Bannon’s candidate. They made up their minds, thank you very much.
[Spoiler alert: This is, of course, satire. I hope the language and wording carries some echoes for those familiar with post-mortems by Dems themselves, especially centrist ones, after Nov.9, 2016, just with Dem names plugged in. I hope the GOP does not ever see this angle or figure out what they did wrong here. And I hope the blue people in red states do find their voice nationally: it is needed.]