Kos says he wants us to fight. Given some of the comments to his post, I assume that many on this site took that to mean “with each other.” Here’s a different approach.
Trump won for all sorts of reasons:
and on and on. These explain a lot but not the totality of what we saw Tuesday night. However, a Washington Post article by Jeff Guo and an article by David Wong at Cracked speak directly to that.
Trump’s massive, white backlash (or “whitelash” as Van Jones termed it) was born in rural America, and the point of both articles is that rural America is hurting and thinks that no one knows or cares. Trump played them using the politics of resentment. Someone finally was paying attention to their plight despite being far from the cities where power and the media live. At that point, details and even truth didn’t matter.
As Clinton should have known, “it’s the economy, stupid.” It’s always the economy, but the economy is as local as is politics. A healthy GDP and low unemployment mean nothing if your farm is struggling or if your one-factory town is down to zero factories because of some trade agreement. It’s worse when no one in power cares or even notices. The Clinton campaign failed to reach out to these people even as Trump was making them his focus.
There was an exception. Biden reached out to them, and no one can compete with Joe Biden at that. But it was too little, too limited. Biden was right, though: do not ignore these voters. QED, Joe.
This was the fundamental flaw of a campaign that never seemed to find its direction. Trump had a slogan that spoke directly to his target electorate. Hillary’s slogan didn’t seem to say anything in particular. Worse, she decided or was told that she could win with a message of “at least I’m not that guy.” The problem was that that guy was telling a highly motivated block of the electorate exactly what they wanted to hear while she was ignoring that block. Yes, that guy was doing it in racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, misogynistic fashion, but she never tried to find a civilized way to talk to them.
It’s a failing of our Party. I’ve even seen push-back on this site to the idea of reaching out to white, working class men. That tells me that some of their perceptions of being abandoned in favor of the inner cities and immigrants are legitimate – and may have been so as far back as Reagan Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council’s deliberate move away from the FDR coalition and toward Wall Street.
Another failing is to blame all of Trump’s support on racism. Many of us fall into that trap. Trump wrapped up the racist vote during the primaries, and everyone knew it. Yes, his surprise turnout was generated, in part, by his politics of resentment, but these people were different. Get them past blaming someone else for their problems and, instead, start to solve those problems, and I think a lot of them turn out to be stand-up people. People with good jobs and financial security rarely become radicalized.
Instead of ignoring them, rather than branding them as racist, we must show them, and we must ourselves believe, that reaching out to the disadvantaged is not a zero-sum game. Embracing Unions and working men and women, including white men and women, is fundamental to the Democratic party and is not inconsistent with fighting racism and bigotry. We must show them that the natural allies of white, working class men are not white, rich men but working class men and women of all colors.
And here is our foot in the door. These people voted for Trump to call attention to their plight and because he promised them what they think is their fair due. Blankets of red counties throughout the rust belt, the Midwest, and the South are waiting for him to follow through, now.
By the 2018 midterms, it should be clear to them, or we must make it so, that Trump is a fraud, that he does not care about their jobs and that he couldn’t bring the jobs back even if he did care. Their situation will not have improved and may have deteriorated. There will have been no wall, no mass deportations, no monitoring of American Muslims, no crushing of ISIS, but there will have been a TPP.
By the 2018 midterms, it should be clear to them, or we must make it so, that Republicans are frauds. The lip service they have been paid, the cultivation using guns and god, were only to further the Republican economic agenda, which is unmistakably different from the economic agenda of working men and women.
By the 2018 midterms, we should be able to talk to these people. We follow the trail of rural red that Trump blazed and ask whether they are better off for having supported Trump and the Republicans. By then, of course, we’ll have to fight through more and tougher policies designed to steal elections: voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, and so on. We cannot wait. We must cut into the Republican lead in the Senate and the House and the State Houses now – while it’s still legal to do so.
Donald Trump, a pampered playboy to whom everything has been given, with no ethics and fewer scruples, who lies like other people breathe, who drags a cornucopia of dysfunction behind him, and who has absolutely no policy prescriptions, presented himself as the voice of the common man. Democrats, then, should be able to legitimately present themselves as such and without the ugly stuff that was Trump’s signature.
The key is to return economic and jobs policies that are favorable to labor as the heart of what it means to be a Democrat. That means aggressive support for Unions and for working men and women. That means new DNC leadership, and that is doable given that we have none at the moment. First, we must renounce factional labels and come together within the party to choose the appropriate leadership. That is a just matter of how much we want to win. Then we start the search for good candidates while formulating the economic policy and a line of attack to make the fraud of Trump and the Republicans unmistakable.
Or, of course, we can go back to fighting among ourselves.