Democrats Missed the Target and Some Words from Bernie Sanders and Maureen Dowd
Listening to and reading what the ‘experts’ have been describing as the reasons for Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I come back to one question. If all the winning arguments were on the side of the Democratic losers, how then did they manage to lose?
Could it be because they directed their ‘wisdom’ to one another when they should have been addressing it the American public? Most voters don’t read the New York Times or the New Yorker or Atlantic magazines, or follow Heather Richardson’s or Timothy Snyder’s blogs. Typical is a very lengthy article in the Nov. 4 New Yorker (distributed a week earlier) explaining the unheralded successes of ‘Bidenomics’ most of which had zero impact on the election.
These are not the best media choices to reach voters who go to work every day, raise families, pay bills and don’t have the time to think deeply about matters political … but who do have time for kitchen table and cultural issues they can see as personally involving them and their families. Somehow, the Democrats missed that target, at least until very late in the game, by which time it was too late. Misinformation and lies derived from Donald Trump’s ‘Truth Central’ platform had gotten there first, even to Black and Latino voters, supposedly Democratic strengths.
Bernie Sanders, a former Democrat, now an Independent who caucuses with Senate (he won re-election) Democrats, said what had to be said.
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| Not a Happy Camper |
Here’s an article about that from USA Today. (Underlining is mine.)
Democrats Abandoned Their Base - Party’s Failure Shouldn’t Be a Big Surprise, Sanders Says
Anthony Robledo – from USA Today
“U. S. Senator Bernie Sanders is blaming the Democratic Party after Vice President Kamala Harris lost to now President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans gained control of the Senate.
In a statement shared on social media Wednesday, the senator from Vermont said party leadership must have 'serious political discussions' about Latino and Black workers voting for Republican candidates.
'It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,'
Sanders wrote.
'While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. Sanders, 83, highlighted several issues he believes the nation has failed to address under the Biden administration.
Though he is an Independent, Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party, and has long championed policies like Medicare for All and a higher federal minimum wage.
Sanders’ statement came a day after he won a fourth Senate term on Election Day, defeating Republican challenger Gerald Malloy, 62, and securing another six years in Washington. (The article continued with the following. (The Underlining is mine.)
Excerpts from Sanders’ statement:
• It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is the Latino and Black workers as well.
• While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
• Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
• Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents.
• Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
• Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party ... understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
Sanders makes a lot of good points. Should Democrats stop trying to simultaneously appeal to ‘the center’ and to their sometimes overly progressive left … and concentrate on working families as the Republicans have learned to do? You bet they should !
Should they again become the party of America’s workers, (and retired workers) as they were in the days of FDR’s New Deal, a true Labor Party? (and take the risk of being accused of being Marxist socialists.)
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Sanders is on the right track. Well-meaning Joe and Kamala were not.
Their track was like that of those old Lionel electric trains running in a circle around a Christmas Tree, going nowhere. Democrats must not ignore Sanders’ words which were at least on a track that leads somewhere, hopefully to constructive changes benefitting working people and retirees. The problem is that we don’t know where that ‘somewhere’ might be, but at least it won’t be the same place as where the changes that will be made by a Republican administration will take the nation.
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And if Bernie Sanders is a bit too far to the left for some of you, check out Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of Nov. 9, where she traversed the same territory with her biting sarcasm.
Copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-identity-politics.html on your browser line or just CLICK HERE. It is well worth reading!
JL
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About Democracy (#1)
The word democracy comes from the Greek demos, meaning people and kratos, meaning rule. Democracy is ‘rule by the people.’ It can function directly or be via elected representatives.
In ancient Greece and Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages, of course, the ‘people’ didn’t mean everybody. It excluded slaves, menial workers, those who were not landowners, many craftsmen and merchants, as well as those ethnically different. Serfs, peons, or whatever one might call them were not generally thought of as part of the ‘people’ when it came to democracy. They worked their butts off but were not part of the class that ruled.
Eighteenth Century English political philosopher John Locke is considered by many as the father of modern liberal thought. He wrote about the principles of ‘life, liberty, and property’ as being natural rights inherent to all people, meaning that individuals have these rights simply by virtue of being human and that governments are obligated to protect them, regardless of the opinion of a king.
But while life and liberty might be interpreted variously, the inclusion of the right of property drastically reduced the number of people thusly to be protected by government. When it came to being included among the people who ruled, those without property were thus excluded from Locke’s liberalism. Without property, they could not be part of the ruling class.
With the settlement of the English colonies in North America by many who were outside of those who Locke considered to be among the ‘people,’ by this definition, it became awkwardly obsolete. Thomas Jefferson, in writing the Declaration of Independence for those colonies, separating them from England, changed Locke’s language by substituting the words ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the place of ‘property.’
That ‘pursuit of happiness’ of course still encompassed Locke’s ‘property’ but also generously added whatever else anyone wanted to be included among those ‘certain inalienable rights among which were life, liberty’ and all of a sudden, ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ One had the right, in pursuing happiness, to own factories and plantations, and own slaves, as well as whatever else tickled their fancy, if that provided happiness.
Which brings us to the question of who really ruled in a democracy, specifically ours, now that the property qualification was thusly modified.
It was in the interest of the wealthy and the property-owning classes to continue to be the ones that ruled, and that’s what they managed to do in the United States until Andrew Jackson came along in the 1820s and 1830s.
Up until then a broadening of the electorate was considered a good ‘democratic’ practice except by the property-owning class who wanted to maintain control of the government. They felt that the fewer the voters, the better it was for them.
But General Andrew Jackson thought otherwise.
Recognizing that the early Nineteenth Century was an era during which many States were removing property ownership from voter qualifications, Jackson allied himself with those who recognized that the votes of those without property would count just as much as those who owned property, and there were many, many, more of them!
(In 1824, 350,000 voted in the presidential election, of which 153,000 voted for Jackson. Four years later in 1828, 1,155,000 voted in the presidential election, of which 647,000 voted for Jackson. In 1832, 1,317,000 voted in the presidential election, of which 687,000 voted for Jackson.)
Forgetting the fact that he was a slave-owner who considered other human beings to be ‘property’ and that it was acceptable to persecute and steal land from Indians, Jackson became our first ‘populist’ president with great support among common working people. And with him, the ‘demos’ of our democracy changed.
Although it appeared that the government would be controlled by Jackson’s pro-slavery ‘common man’ supporters, the democratic broadening of the electorate also became a tool that could be used through skillful political campaigning to keep a measure of control of our government in the hands of the property-owning and business classes, particularly in the industrialized Northern States.
In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln redefined our government as being ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ It took the Civil War, with great loss of life, for this definition of democracy to prevail.
Since then, those who preferred a racist populist democracy, as fashioned by Andrew Jackson, have been dedicated to regaining rule of the nation. These were the ‘robber barons’ who built the railroads and great industries of America in the late Nineteenth Century. And using whatever techniques they could master, including stressing class distinctions and bias, they have successfully allied themselves with the populism first awakened by Andrew Jackson in order to try to regain power. (Try to guess what President’s portrait hangs in the Oval Office during Donald Trump’s presidency?)
That is the kind of democracy we have mostly had since the 1870s (except during the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and possibly Barack Obama, all of whom recognized the role of government as functioning in the best interests of the people.)
If this is where such a flawed ‘democracy’ has taken us, do we want it to continue to be our chosen form of government? That’s something to think about, but we really don’t have any simple alternatives; Theocracy, socialism, dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, or even anarchy, are unacceptable to Americans.
No, we must learn how to make our ‘democracy’ work more effectively.
And this will be the subject of future postings on Jackspotpourri, under the same heading that this one carries, ‘About Democracy.’
JL
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JL
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