Our primary, unlike the mudball fight over on Team Red, has been an important exercise of ideas in our party. The Obama coalition made of the segment of the white population with a more liberal or socially open-minded bent and minority groups has seen its tensions over priorities brought to the surface. Bernie Bros keep stepping on social land mines while Hillary supporters keep finding themselves defending some of the uglier parts of our pay-to-play system. But the unifying factor, moderates and liberals alike, is dignity.
The moderate wing of the party sees a more meritocratic road to dignity: work hard, play by the rules, and you should be respected and allowed to live your life. A big part of the Democratic coalition sees that even merit does not bring comfort to large swaths of our population due to evangelical and Jim Crow ethics. The evangelical ethic requires you to fit into a certain social profile to be worthy of grace, or in some cases, survival. The Jim Crow ethic negates merit in favor of a "natural order" that those blessed pheno-typically can enjoy a respected standing in life at the cost of everyone else. These systems are able to turn even great material success into the taste of ashes. This is what we hear when calls to punish oligarchs come to deaf ears - these dignity-robbing mechanisms are unfortunately all too democratic.
On our more left wing, we have two major complaints. One is of course that those of great wealth and power often gathered it by coerced extraction from a huge number of power, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality, and drove many into degraded and desperate situations. When those people get rich and want power, they then use that power to impoverish even further for their own gain. I think there is a related one, and forgive me if I characterize it in a way that sounds too precious, that even "success" on corporate, production-oriented terms is degrading to various human spirits and robs us of what could be a greater dignity and freedom.
But I think our theme is common and simple regardless of candidate. The Democratic platform should be one of positive dignity. Moreover, the thrust should be to declare that the power of the public will, the government, should be used to safeguard dignity. It should be a basic principle that those that would degrade dignity, by forcing their standards of how much they think a given person deserves upon them, shall become foes of the state and democracy. If you are a Klansman, a serial harasser, a builder of economic machines that immiserate, or an abuser of state power in vulnerable communities, you shall come under the full scrutiny of the law. On the other side, the public sector will work to lift up human dignity through all the methods we know how: education, a safe place to live, comfort that one's friends and family have some security, and promotion of the best ideals on our common humanity. Ideally, these principles should apply not only at home but abroad. Especially during the sale of the latest regime change, we must use great skepticism to evaluate whether the misery caused by bombardment will truly be offset by the elevation that results from the liberation.
We obviously want to maximize dignity, and our primary is a strong debate on how to do that, and any bit we can get should be welcomed. And this is where the candidates differ. The Clintonian approach has long been to co-opt and disarm while grinding forward. This explains the coziness with Wall Street, the social feel-goodery the Clinton Initiative bestows upon elites. The Sanders style is much more about confrontation and demanding one’s due, and a concrete recognition that many of the wealthiest among us are brutally opposed to letting any dignity be restored. I personally am drawn much more toward the latter but have seen the latter. Chris Rock put forward a very blunt description of people being disarmed in part by confrontation but in part by a segment of the population simply growing up.
Our contrast can be with the Republicans, for whom dignity is obviously conditional in some way. Again, for the Religious Right, dignity comes with submission to the right god. For the racists, you are either born with it or not — although you can emulate certain behavior to be accepted in a limited role. For the economic royalists, you earn it through being useful. But by default you are a lazy, shiftless, stupid creature that must be driven by fire or damnation to make something of yourself. That last part is the true Trump ideology by the way. I’ve heard variations on that theme from B-school kids all my college career without a hint of understanding of the privilege that gave their mediocre intellects and frankly mediocre work ethics that vaunted positioning.
Democrats of all stripes are at their best fighting for dignity. They are at their worst when they fail to do so. Dignity gives us the moral language to use to combat the John Wayne ethic of everyone knowing their place and just getting on with it to form a community.
I think that focusing on the parts of the winning candidate's approach that have this dignity goal can help us avoid or at least reduce the "holding of noses" when going up against the Republicans for whom dignity is far too cheap and far too conditional.