Harris did what she could under extremely difficult circumstances. And of course trump is horrific.
But our party has been doing something wrong for a long time. You don’t lose your base for nothing. For 60 years the working class was the Democratic party’s base, and we’ve lost them. Reagan declared war on unions — a direct assault on the very foundation of the Party — and our response was Clinton and the so-called “third way”. We exported jobs and imported cheap goods. The working class suffered. NAFTA and similar trade deals were great for corporations and white collar workers, and a catastrophe for the working class.
And while we were touting these trade deals, which we knew would be hard on labor, Clinton simultaneously informed labor that “the era of big government is over”, i.e., don’t count on that safety net when your job goes overseas. Real wages continued to stagnate, while the tech boom created the first centibillionaires.
The whole party seemed to buy into the “third way” strategy. Except Bernie, of course. I still believe that the DNC’s decision to stack the deck against Bernie in 2016 sent an unambiguous message to many working class members of the party.
We cannot win without the working class. The entirety of party leadership must go. It just won’t do to have Wall Street Chuck Schumer as minority leader. I love Nancy, but she has to gracefully slide into retirement. We have to be ruthless about this, and so Hakeem has to go, too, even though he bears little of the blame for this catastrophe. Finally, we need a new, younger, charismatic Bernie to champion the working class in our party.
In the boardrooms and on the ball fields, a loss like this is met with wholesale changes, and a clear acknowledgment that leadership screwed up. We’ve been let down by our leadership. It is simply unacceptable that in 2020 we couldn’t rally the party in the face of Trump’s disaster, and defaulted to Biden when all the other candidates were deemed too liberal. It may have seemed the only option at the time, but how in hell did we get to the point where the Kennedys and Obamas were nowhere to be found in the party, and the gerontocracy in the party simply chose one of their own?
I was very dismayed when we lost in 2016 — to fucking trump! — and the party leadership closed ranks, retained the same leadership team, and refused to acknowledge in any way that trump’s populist message demanded that we, as a party, refocus our agenda on the economic plight of the working class, even if that meant backburnering other laudable social and cultural issues.
I don’t expect everyone will agree with my analysis, but I would hope that we could all agree that ANY institution that fails to clean house in leadership after a cataclysm like this is fundamentally unwell. Every day that passes without any change in leadership is not only a lost opportunity, but a signal to our lost base that we don’t care; we see no need to change.
P.S. There are a lot of stories and comments here at Kos that focus rage on the millions who were formerly democrats and now support trump. This is not helpful. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remains the only major institution in the nation that suffers shattering defeats and keeps the same leadership. We need to start there before we can even begin the arduous process of refining our message and refocusing our efforts.
