The Alarm Signal Sounded. Will Democrats Notice?

Democrats and progressives need to re-think what it means to be a good Democrat and a good progressive.

John Ossoff lost in Georgia.

Gloating Email blast by Trump this morning

He spent some $25 million dollars doing so.   I received and deleted some ten emails a day soliciting money for Ossoff, getting urgent pleas from Nancy Pelosi, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Tom Perez, the DNC generally, Hollywood actors, and Ossoff himself.  The began with headlines like "I am absolutely begging you."  Never, in 40 years of getting campaign solicitations have I ever experienced greater intensity of campaign urgency.  This wasn't a failure of lack of trying.  No one can console him or her self thinking, "Well, if Hillary had only campaigned in Wisconsin. . . ."   

Ossoff did everything he could do in a campaign sense.  Ossoff lost anyway.   

Therefore, this campaign is useful for Democrats if they will listen.  The problem wasn't the campaign.  It was the message that Democrats carry.

For over a year this blog has attempted to warn Democrats that the current thinking of "approved, reasonable, progressive, liberal, Democratic thinking" was a false and dangerous direction, one that betrayed even our own actual values.   But Democrats and progressives walked themselves into their own tar pit of group-think it is unacceptable to dissent from, and therefore they find themselves trapped into saying and thinking what they don't really believe, and, worse, saying and thinking what most Americans don't believe, which is why so many of them voted for Trump, not Hillary.  Even in a now-swing district like the Georgia 6th, they rejected Ossoff in the proxy war referendum on Trump, they voted for the unpopular president rather than vote Democratic.

Democrats lost their blue wall base

Democrats need to wake up and smell the coffee--or see which way the wind blows--or read the tea leaves--or notice the obvious.

This blog has said Democrats and progressives lost their way when they:

   ---abandoned insisting that immigration be legal and controlled.

  ---were reluctant to criticize "team members", i.e. blacks, Muslims, students when they were lawless.

  ---were reluctant to criticize students for hyper squeamishness that abridged free speech.

  ---were reluctant to recognize that praise for diversity needed to be balanced with open expression of pride and the value of American-ness.

  ---accepted the right-wing premise that support for police and the military and the other symbols of order were Republican ideas and not Democratic ones.

  ---failed to to accept that needs-based benefits needed to be conditioned on some sort of work or other buy-in, lest they be considered to be enabling sloth.

  ---failed to recognize that open support for empowerment of minorities would create backlash from whites if it were not balanced by acknowledgement that whites, too, had grievances.

  ---failed to communicate that they would marshall government power to check the power of banks and Wall Street and Big Pharma.

  

Martin Luther King's great message was non-discriminaiton, not black separation, and Obama's most popular and unifying message was that there were no red states and blue states but rather a single great nation that unified all people.

Democrats did not simply slip away from that notion.  They began opposing that notion, saying that Black Lives Matter, Period--implying to many white Americans that Democrats were playing to special interests and not a greater patriotic unifying interest.   Democrats were implying that their team was a majority of special interests and it was their turn to power against the interests of the whole.  Trump--with all of his divisiveness--was the one with the more unifying message, make America great again.

This blog normally gets some 300 to 500 readers a day, and sometimes a great deal more, but mostly in that range.  I have hoped there would be a credible, persuasive version of my message expressed in the national press.  Happily, it has just happened, in The Atlantic Monthly, yesterday:

Article by Peter Beinart

Click Here: Atlantic Monthly

The article here, and my message in this blog will get resistance from Democrats and progressives because it advocates ideas which have become forbidden to say.   Trump made expression of concerns over the frictions caused by  immigration to be considered a sign of racism and xenophobia rather than a sign of open concern for black and white Americans who compete with low skilled jobs in agriculture, construction, and hospitality. Trump made it shameful for a Democrat to express concern over terror attacks, lest the Democrat be considered a religious bigot.    I assert that Democrats will not re-gain popular majorities until they openly return to positions advocated comfortably by Bill Clinton in the 1990s on immigration (that it needed to be legal and that American workers had genuine concerns and interests to protect), on respect for patriotic symbols, on the value of work, on control of needs-based benefits, and so on.

Thad Guyer makes the same point, here in the midst of Trump gloating over yet another big win.  Democrats need to make a choice.  Either suffer through 4 or 8 years of Trump stories like the one here, or have the courage to re-think what it really means to be a progressive Democrat.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:

“The Gloomy Message of Ossoff Special Election”

Guyer

In the special election in Georgia, John Ossoff was ridiculed for having fudged that he actually resides at his girlfriend’s house outside the district.  He demurred “but only by three blocks.”  Hence, this quip when he lost last night: 

Ossoff grimly to his girlfriend: “Oh my God, they went for the Republican!” His girlfriend comfortingly: “The hell with ‘em, we don’t live in their stupid district anyway”. 

Neither did 80% of the donors who gave him over $20 million, the bulk of it from California and New York.  As Peter emphasized in his blog a month ago, the Ossoff Democratic cause célèbre had been chosen by both parties as the big showdown over Trump’s staying power vs. progressive momentum going into the 2018 midyear Congressional elections.   Peter wrote:

It is all about sending a message.  Two votes in the House of Representatives will not change the balance on anything, but election of Democrats in either seat will demonstrate that Trump is weak and Democrats are energized.   More important, it would imply that the Republican agenda is toxic and that it is career ending for GOP officeholders to pursue it.

See, UpClose, “Proxy Wars: Congressional races in Georgia and Montana”, May 25, 2017, http://peterwsage.blogspot.sk/search?q=ossoff.  Georgia and Montana were two of the 25 “swing districts” Democrats must win to regain the House.  The FiveThirtyEight poll index that Ossoff was up by 2 points was thus off +6.5%, the “Trump polling error”—again. It looks bleak.

            But that we lost by about 5 points is not the bleakest part.  It’s that we would have been crushed had Ossoff run like, well, like Hillary Clinton, on a platform of Trump is deplorable, near-open borders and few deportations, and more redistribution of wealth. Instead, Ossoff ran as a centrist denounced by progressives, and given only a “it could be worse” Sanders endorsement.  As described in an UpClose comment on April 9, 2017 entitled “Quiz: Whose campaign website says this?” (https://goo.gl/28gsds):

John Ossoff, the great Democratic hope says Rachel Maddow, ... may be teaching us three lessons. First, democrats can't win light blue and light red states by ideological attacks on popular Trump policies. Second, progressive funders, at least, are thinking its better to win with less principled positions than to lose altogether. And third, to win, progressive policies must be stated in watered-down generalizations.

Ossoff’s campaign avoided almost any trashing of Trump, Russiagate, obstruction of justice, immigration or the Muslim ban. He certainly endorsed none of Sanders’ progressivism like free college tuition, evil corporations, and “dark money” in politics. 

Post Election Remorse

So here’s the question:  If a soft on Trump non-progressive centrist like Ossoff, armed with all the money in the world, can’t win a swing district, who are our Democrats that can take back the House in 2018, or win Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. in the 2020 presidential race?  The answer is only centrists like Bill Clinton who effectively adopt Trump’s positions on not letting the white working class sink, vigorous border control, preventing Obamacare from becoming just another Medicaid entitlement program, and America-first rather than globalism.

For candidates like that to win, they will first have to win the coming civil war within the Democratic Party. It’s going to be bloody.