Democratic Disfunction

Interest group leadership

Democrats are messing up.  

They are held hostage by their own interest groups so they are losing touch with the voters. 

Warning to Democratic readers:  Thad Guyer has a long comment.   It is bleak. It is something we need to consider.

Democrats defined themselves as a coalition of their own interest groups, and it is the nature of interests groups to be clear, narrow, and focused.  Organized labor.  Environmentalists. Blacks. Feminists. Those groups are on the vanguard of change.   They lead.  They say things that would be unthinkable until they are said.  They push boundaries.

They don't seek compromise.  They have a vision to pursue. 

Push the edges

Example:  Saturday, at the internationally renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I heard an extraordinary young woman with a big job discuss how the Festival was embracing diversity in all aspects of the theater's work.  She said she was pushing the proposal that in some upcoming year that every single one of the twelve plays they produce might be written by people of color, thus exempting the namesake of the theater, William Shakespeare, a white guy, from having a play produced.   Will it happen?  Well, it could not happen until it was thinkable, and it was not thinkable until someone on the vanguard thought it, and uttered it, and began to advocate the idea.   This is a tiny example, but it is how cultural leadership happens.  The leaders push at the margin.

Organized labor leadership are committed to being advocates, not decision makers.  Their job is to advocate for everything they can get for their members and presumably school boards and county commissioners push back.  The decision is made in the overlap of the two sides, not by the labor leaders. The leaders don't compromise, they push.  Compromise is in the result.

A similar thing happens within the other activist portions of the Democratic party.  Hillary led the party to call it impossible--a micro-aggression bit of racism--to say that "all lives matter" instead of "black lives matter" period, full stop.  Expanding the sentiment to "all" was defined as dissing blacks.  The result: Democrats caved to black leadership and indeed did well among blacks, but white people, including white women and Hispanics who Hillary considered to be part of her coalition, got the predictable racial message that Hillary-style Democrats were excluding them.  And white men, excluded by both race and gender, went overwhelmingly for Trump, thus electing him.

Target Democrats, gleefully.

I am witnessing a similar thing happening among politically active environmentalists.   A potential future Democratic candidate for 2nd Congressional District Congress to replace Greg Walden met with me this weekend and told me he voted for Jill Stein.   "Pretty good" is not good; it is bad.  

I watch the extraordinary energy and vitality of local activism in opposition to a natural gas pipeline.  The responses to the above post in an environmental group website--Rogue Climate--were immediate:  "Go Hannah!", "I wanna play.", "Great Leadership Rogue Climate!", "Great news!" "Woot woot!" "Hooray!!!" "Thank you!!!!!!"   One poster repeated the frequent epithet, calling Brown "a traitor." 

The group has focus and they have leverage, not with their opponents, but with their allies among pro-environmental Democrats running for office.  They are sending a message:  being "way better than the Republican" is not good enough.   You need to be right on the issue or they harass and sabotage from the left, electing a Republican.   It is a game of chicken and Democratic officeholders understand their policies and political careers are at risk.  Here is a subsequent post which was immediately "liked."

Soul went on:  "Time to pressure Governor Borwn on taking on LNG Pipeline -- she's really gearing up for re-election campaign (2018 election) and even more responsive to input."

Locally and nationally, Democrats are attempting to find their way.  Can they tolerate a Nebraska congressional candidate who is not consistently pro-choice on abortion?  Maybe not.  Can they figure out whether Wall Street needs to be regulated--or smashed? Chuck Schumer gets harsh criticism.  Can they be environmental enough by wanting to regulate fossil fuel extraction, or do they need a full-throated opposition to the means by which it is extracted and transported?   Red state Democrats are at risk in primaries. 

Democratic activists are hyper aware: is the Democrat a "sellout"?  Is he or she "corporate"?  Is he or she "soft"?  

Democratic interest groups push Democrats into positions that leave a wide open lane for Republicans to win.  Democrats win the support of interest group leaders and lose the election.  There is a harsh message for Democrats to view:  red Ohio, red Pennsylvania, red Michigan, red Wisconsin, and Trump in the White House.   A great many people consider it a disaster for the country but it is not an unmitigated disaster for the interest groups themselves.  They prosper with their supporters when there is a clear, clean, terrible opponent.  I am not saying they welcome the loss to a Republican, but it is not a disaster for them.  It gives them purpose, energized fundraising, and moral clarity.   (People who voted for Jill Stein or stayed home to send a pro-Sanders message have their virtue intact.)  The people most directly hurt are the Democratic professional pros, the incumbent or aspiring officeholders, the ones doing the political calculation of what is possible.  Without support from their left flank they realize the grim truth that they risk loss. They know it and so do the interest group leaders.

Democrats are at a loss on immigration and The Mexican Border Wall.  Activist Democrats are focused on "resistance" to Trump and Trump supports a wall and he built a coalition around fear and dislike for immigrants. (The bad ones rape us, steal from us, sponge our benefits, and do terror on us, while the good ones take our jobs.)   The hate-everything-Trump activists prevent Democrats from picking up on cues that there is in fact public demand for immigration order and control, and that it is OK to voice it.  Therefore, they have ceded the wide political lane for Republicans to win on this issue as well.

This blog wrote yesterday that there is a positive, pro-immigrant/pro-control affirmative and compassionate which acknowledge and embraced the very predictable citizen un-ease with high immigration numbers.  We have been here before.  High immigration numbers create tensions which create nativist sentiment and nativist political parties.   Trump heard this.  Democrats, too, need to hear it.   Democrats don't need to succumb to nativism, but they need to address it and shape an ethical, realistic, affirmative response to it.  It is do-able.  Democrats are the party of affirmative government action, and that is what the situation requires.

 Instead, their own base has locked them into denial and avoidance of their own base.  The problem is not that Hillary used the word "deplorable".  The problem is that she--and other Democrats--framed the immigration issue as deplorable vs. virtue, racism vs. anti-racism. The issue could have been--and still could be--defined as chaos versus reasonable control, as illegal versus legal, as unassimilated versus good American citizens.   Everyone agrees the current situation is bad ,so Democrats need not defend the status quo.  They can be a voice a change.

But since Democrats are failing in this task Thad Guyer's bleak description seems very credible:

Thad Guyer Guest Comment: "Au revoir politique traditionnelle"

For over 50 years, two traditional parties have controlled French politics, and articulated the entire policy agenda for implementing the core values of "liberté, égalité, fraternité". The Socialists and the Republicans were those two parties, and it has been "difficult for parties outside these two major coalitions to make significant inroads" (See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_France). As with our Libertarian and Green parties, all other French parties remained outsiders, fringe, far left and far right. From living in Europe in 1996 to frequent trips to Paris since (including twice last year), the French left and right mainstream seemed like old friends, popping out at me from ubiquitous newspaper stands to subway walls. My French colleagues belonged always to one of those two parties.

In recent years I saw the fractures beginning, the concern over immigrant men clustered thickly around the train stations, the warnings about pickpockets, the blankets and tarps starting to appear in streets around the city, the fears of terrorism at all transportation hubs. Then urbanites I knew started relocating to the suburbs or moving away from Paris altogether. "Uncontrolled" was the key word used to describe immigration, spoken not as xenophobia but as something terribly broken; a feeling that government didn't have a handle on it, that there was a free for all at the borders underway that would only grow more uncontrolled unless somebody did something.

That disaffection laid low both traditional parties this weekend, supplanted by two extremes on immigration: The National Front wants to end most immigration and globalism, led by Marine Le Penn; and an amorphous sounding so-called "centrist", Emmanuel Macron, who says the answer is to embrace "inevitable" and "unstoppable mass migration" and globalism. Macron does not even represent a political party, he quit the Socialist party to found a “movement” called “The March”. Neither candidate could get even a quarter of the vote, combined they got 45%, leaving 55% of the electorate who voted for neither of them dismayed. The two major parties of late had talked tough on controlling the borders, but by now lacked credibility. They will still wield most of the power in a fractured parliament, but the new president will not be from their ranks. By contrast, the establishment parties in power in the US (Trump for the Republicans), Australia (Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal Party) and the UK (Theresa May for the Conservative Party), and even the shaky Dutch coalition (led by Mark Rutte), hold power now with one thing in common: resolute, clearly articulated controlled immigration and border policies.

Pollsters say that Macron, who is viewed by most voters as a "vapid" and "hollow" ex-banker huckster, will defeat Le Pen, who is viewed by most voters as a reckless xenophobic nationalist. Leaders of both major parties are urging their members to hold their noses and vote for Macron not as support for him, but to avert the "dangerous nationalist". Today Paris is not the city of lights, but the city of despair. The one thing that most voters agree on is that the traditional French body politque has been wrecked by the establishment's lack of ability or resolve to control runaway immigration and globalism.

Heretofore in the US, UK, Australia and France, a political party that failed to demonstrate that ability and resolve has faced electoral defeat, hopefully to have one of their own at the top another day. But what happened in France this weekend shows it can get even worse—parties lacking that resolve can lose their “major” party status altogether, and be supplanted by a fringe party, or a newly invented “movement”.

Democrats should take heed.