An argument constructed after the last election says that our problem is turnout. Get the base out, and we’ll be fine. Well, let’s see. The Republican Party controls
- the presidency,
- the Senate,
- the House,
- 34 governorships,
- 32 state legislatures,
- 68% of state legislative chambers, and
- the Supreme Court.
It also is making inroads into local government and is nearing its goal of rewriting the constitution.
I have trouble seeing that as a “turnout” problem. That looks more like a “we’ve been doing something fundamental wrong for a long time” problem.
Yes, Democrats tend to be AWOL during mid-term elections. Still, are we really on the verge of oligarchy because of a bloc of voters that are on our side but not so you could tell? If the current level of Republican dominance is due to a failure of turnout, it is a failure so pervasive and so persistent as to suggest, well … something fundamental being done wrong over a long time.
After Richard Nixon’s resignation, the 1974 mid-terms brought a new generation of Democrats to power, the “Watergate Babies”. They would be our undoing. Libertarian economists were busy deciding that monopolies are our friends, and the Watergate Babies, prodded by some of our own economists, bought that silliness whole hog. They would move Democratic economic thought so far right as to be unrecognizable.
A doctrine of The New Deal — a doctrine of the Founders — said that that the concentration of wealth and of corporate power leads to despotism. By the end of the 1970s, much of the Democratic establishment had rejected that doctrine. They rejected forty years of liberal economic thought. They rejected economic policies that had created the world’s largest, most stable middle class. And they did so in favor of libertarian speculation that disparaged regulation and anti-monopoly safeguards.
Our two-party system became, in economics at least, a one-plus-change-party system. But the apostasy of the Watergate Babies did not elevate the Democratic Party. It elevated finance and business over labor and unions. It elevated wealth over any sense of proportion or decency. It elevated Donald Trump by creating the void that he would stumble into.
Trump filled that void with more than economic lies, and to win, we must counter the rest of his lies, his fear-and-loathing lies. Even that won’t be enough, though. We never will reverse the Republican grip on government unless we embrace a once defining trait of the Party – policies that unite rural, working-class, and middle-class voters of all races against corporate power and inequality.
Therein lies the problem with the turnout argument. Turnout always is an issue, but the current argument is used to absolve us from rethinking our policies and to prop up the self-indulgent notion that we can tell entire blocs of voters, many of whom used to be ours, to go to hell.
That is not a strategy. That is how not to regain the House or the state houses. And if we lose a few more state houses, conservatives will get themselves a brand new constitutional convention. We will lose our rights, our liberties, everything. The concentration of wealth and of corporate power leads to despotism. Q.E.D.
Reaching out to people you do not like is not the issue. The Founders’ doctrine is. Economic and social policies that make the lives of all Americans better and our democracy safer are the response. They also are the outreach: the outreach to non-voters and to swing voters, the outreach to the base, and the outreach, the motivation to turnout, for those voters we seem always to be waiting for.
I cannot get past that opening list of Republican domination. Read it again. Then, explain how a turnout plan will increase our votes by enough and in the all districts necessary to reverse that. Explain how invective against working-class and rural voters will reverse all that.
The Founders held concentrations of corporate power and of wealth to be the enemy. Democrats did so, once, and must do so again. They are the enemy of democracy, and they are the common enemy of rural, working-class, and middle-class voters of all races as well as the rightful target for their resentment and grievances.
Democrats need to make this clear: inequality and the concentration of corporate power lead to despotism. Label the enemy. Show them as the enemy. Unite voters of all races and all classes in a last-ditch effort to take back our country while we still have the Founders’ Constitution behind us.