I’ve seen a lot of really excellent points made in the last two weeks, even when they made me spitting mad. Still...Today’s post from Markos pins us all down...and yet, I don’t think most of us “get” the real issue.
I live in a lovely section of the Left Coast and yet half—maybe more—of my neighbors were Trumpsters. As an example, there's a smart software engineer down the street with two sweet dogs, plays in a bluegrass band, really lovely person—who backed Trump, because of blah blah blah emails blah crooked Hillary. Did he know about Trump’s lies and mental illness? Yeah, he did, but he didn’t want that Hillary in the White House, bottom line. (By the way, in case you’re keeping score at home, he thought Sanders was an even crazier idea.)
So here’s the thing that drives me crazy about DK these days: nobody seems to grasp the core problem: it’s not that the policies promoted by Clinton weren’t progressive enough. It’s not that she was seen as ‘untrustworthy’ (whatever the fuck that means these days). And it wasn’t because she didn’t espouse a progressive populist economic vision.
1) It’s because White conservative America had eight years with a black family in their precious White House, and Hillary was a demon hell-bent on putting MORE women and people of color and gays and people of some sort of gender identification they can’t understand, into leadership positions...and here was a guy who dared to say all the dog whistles out-loud, in a simple phrase: Make America Great Again.
2) The majority of White Americans didn’t think that kicking all the Mexicans out of the country was right, but they agreed anyway because there really is a taco truck on every corner and while they love the food, those Mexican-American kids are not only in school with the White kids, they’re doing really well. Jesus scored a higher math score than little Debby, and damn it, that ain’t right. They didn’t agree that all Muslims should be rounded up and sent to Gitmo, but Christ, somebody has to do something. And so on. Simple answers appeal to simple minds.
3) Finally, it’s easier to believe the simple lies you can see on Fox—and most new shows—than it is to accept The Complexity Of Real Life. Policy is HARD. Balancing needs and political reality is difficult—as we know all too well over here on the Left, as we fight about if Obama’s successes were enough for our approval. And it’s all that much harder when you factor in that more than half of Americans are pretty much conservative. We over here on this side live in a bubble. We think that all those people need to do is hear our rational, cognitively-reasoned and evidenced-based messages and The People will wake up and back our progressive candidate. Nope. That progressive shit is way too complicated. Policy is hard to understand, and harder still to implement.
Simple messages sell to frightened people, and America is scared shitless.
So, for all our policy arguments and I’m-more-pure-than-you-are fights and well-written political practicalities, I haven’t heard *anyone* come up with a working proposal to capture and hold the majority of Americans so that we can (yes, incrementally) implement a progressive Democratic agenda.
I’m watching Kamala Harris. She’s got potential. But we all need to figure out how to join together in that legendary Big Tent, make a big pot of coffee, and work as one team; or the Wingers will eat our lunch and destroy the country I swore so long ago to serve and protect.
Thanks.