I cannot believe this diary has gotten recommended. This has always been a Democratic blog, with the primary purpose of electing Democrats. This has always been a big tent for people of all walks of life who believe in the dignity of all humanity, the continuation of the New Deal, and a strong social safety net.
1. Self-fulfilling prophecy:
This diarist ignores a critical human factor at play. I worked for a college sports team once, and I learned that if you predict that your team will lose, and if enough people predict that, then it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The teams I have been around have always done better when I found a way to believe in them. If you’d rather be a political pundit, anyone can start their own site. I might even drop by if you know what you’re talking about. The term “Neoliberal” has been bandied around a lot, but it is one of those vaguely subjective terms that can be used to disparage any politician you don’t like. I have seen certain purity police disparage Jill Stein as a sellout now that she has started pushing for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Your role on a partisan site like this is to create the conditions for your candidate to win, not to play armchair pundit and dream up ways that your candidate will lose.
2. The willingness to believe right-wing talking points about Hillary:
I wanted Bernie to win. It didn’t happen. I wanted Elizabeth Warren to become Hillary Clinton’s VP choice. It didn’t happen. But being a team player in party politics means that when all is said and done, you get behind the winner. Tim Kaine is a fundamentally decent man who has dedicated his life to making life better for all of us. But what I observed during the course of the campaign was too many people who started off with the conclusion that Hillary was somehow a pathological liar. That is the same sort of intellectual stupidity that characterizes the right. Donald Trump’s election is a reflection on us as a society, and when we engage in that sort of stupidity, we enable Trump. Certain people would pat themselves on the back for being too pure for Hillary, and then link to Daily Caller, Breitbart, and other right-wing sites. And they would form a cult of personality around suspected rapist Julian Assange. Rape is a symbol of power, and when they did that, they showed me that they were more interested in power than in preserving our Constitutional system of government. Again, Trump’s election is a symbol of this.
I’m not going to sit here and second-guess what Hillary should have or shouldn’t have done. It’s over, and again, Trump’s election is a reflection on who we are as a society. The diarist’s claim that there was somehow a cult of personality around Hillary is a straw man. I don’t mind constructive criticism of Hillary, but the kind of criticism that I frequently saw (such as Wikileaks crap) told me that the people involved had already made up their minds not to vote for her and nothing anyone said would change their minds.
3. Jill Stein:
I have mixed feelings about her. I am closer to her on a lot of issues than I am to Hillary. She has an important role to play in our political system. I may be in the minority here, but I think that she, Gary Johnson, Darrell Castle, and Evan McMullin all should have been included in the debates. But again, a lot of support for her that I saw was based on low-information stupidity. I heard constant excuses for why Nader was not responsible for 2000. The fact that Gore failed to win over a substantial fraction of Democrats in Florida, or failed to carry Tennessee, or cut and run from Bill Clinton’s record does not absolve Ralph Nader of moral responsibility for what he did in Florida. People who choose not to heed the lessons of history show the same sort of low-information stupidity that they say they’re against.
4. Nate Silver:
My problem with him was that he was too reliant on junk polls (there was one which consistently showed Hillary winning places like Kansas and Indiana) and Republican polls. A lot of times, his probabilities would go up or down for no reason that I could figure out. But he was right to say that there was a lot of uncertainty about this election. We need to look in the mirror. There are more of us than there are of them. We need to figure out how to turn more people out. More on this later.
5. Non-Democrats:
I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or not. But the people who didn’t vote for Hillary because she is not pure enough generally don’t care about basic human rights. They don’t care that Trump could return us to Jim Crow, that he would create forced pregnancy, and that he would form massive deportation squads to deport millions of “illegals” and even their children. It’s ironic that our biggest hope now is that Trump is playing his base like he has with people all his life. But if your primary purpose is to attack Hillary Clinton (even after she has lost and has conceded the race) and you ignore the fact that Trump is much, much worse and that he could sell out our sovereignty to Moscow, and you don’t care about civil rights, a woman’s right to choose, and the protection of gay marriage, then I, quite frankly, don’t care about you. Especially when you would rather relitigate the primary rather than propose a positive way forward.
The question is asked, who better reflects Democratic ideals, Bernie Sanders or Joe Manchin? My answer — both. I would rather have someone in Washington that represents me 50% or 75% of the time than someone who represents me 0-10% of the time. If Gary Johnson had run as a Democrat and won, I would have gotten behind him, because he represents me about 62% of the time, compared to 5% for Trump. Same with Jill Stein. I agree that we should expand our tents. But hurling charges of “neoliberalism” and lying at our standard-bearer and creating self-fulfilling prophecies and relitigating the primary election is not the way to go about winning the next election.
I’m giving this long evaluation of that diary, because the purity patrol needs to look in the mirror. There are a lot of people who truly have the potential to become team players. But that means working with people who think differently than you on a lot of issues. I am to the left of Bernie Sanders ($30,000 Basic Income, anyone?), but if I were to make it an article of faith, I would be more likely to sulk in my tent than I am to be of any use. These people have a lot of potential to change the party for good. But it involves putting aside all purity tests and all visceral hatred for Hillary (most of it generated by the right-wing hate industry), because the well-being of this country is more important than any purity contest. That goes for people who think Bernie Sanders is not really a Democrat too, by the way. The fact, as detailed in this morning’s New York Times, that Donald Trump has business interests in 20 different countries is much more alarming than any of your purity tests.
So ask yourself — what did you let your purity patrol turn into? Is it more important to go on a power trip than it is to do what’s best for the country? Even if Donald Trump dismantles all of our civil liberties that we fought so hard for after the Civil War? You have a right to free speech in this country; I have a right to say that your position is not credible. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from dissent. Again, Trump’s election is a reflection of our society. But I’m sincerely petitioning you: Look in the mirror and never engage in purity contests again if you want us to win in 2018 and 2020.
So why did we lose the election? We have failed the people who are our base, who make less than $50,000 a year. There are more of us than there are of them. Yet only 36% of the vote share this time came from people making $50,000 a year or less. Yet 73% of Americans make less than $50,000 and 53% make less than $30,000. I talked to a real-life friend a week or two ago who used to be Republican growing up, but is a lot more middle of the road now and who is against Trump. He told me, and I agree with him, that we can’t make it about Trump personally. Talk about the issues. If he brags about his sexual fantasies or conquests, so what? Donald Trump was a lot more politically savvy than his detractors gave him credit for. He understood that any kind of attention is good attention. So, what do we do? Don’t give it to him. Treat him like any other candidate. Come up with policies that will lift people out of poverty and into the middle class. That is something that people of all parties can agree on.
When an organization goes off the rails, especially when it doesn’t meet expectations, all of us have to look in the mirror and figure out how to make the organization better. Perhaps we can run for office, or focus on different issues. There is never going to be such a thing as a perfect candidate; people like Roosevelt and the Kennedys come once in a blue moon. This election never should have been this close to begin with, regardless of whether it was hacked or whether vote suppression kept enough people away from the polls to affect the outcome. The main question each of us have to ask ourselves is, what can we personally do to ensure that this never happens again?