Advice for Democrats

Are Democrats doomed by their own group think and close ties to the liberal media elite?   

I think not.

In a guest post below, frequent commenter Thad Guyer describes Democratic policies on sanctuary cities, a political problem for them in his view.  He writes that Democrats risk becoming exhausted by 4 and perhaps more years of losing.  

I will introduce Guyer's comment by noting that fully two years ago, watching the very earliest of Trump rallies, this blog began describing the heavy hand of racial anxiety and race consciousness apparent in Trump's appeal to audiences.  One does not need to be consciously a white racist to support Trump.  Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Trump voters in my observation do not consider themselves racist and resent the implication they are such.  But  Trump voiced something that motivated crowds, anxiety over immigration: too many, too fast, too dark, too dangerous, getting too many unearned privileges.  This coincided with black protests over policing and the perceived giveaway of benefits to the lazy, the drugged out, the undeserving, the people who game the system.  The image of those people, nurtured for 4 decades by Republican rhetoric, was black Americans in multi-generational dependency: the Welfare Queen with a Cadillac as Reagan described it, and today the single mother on welfare with an Obama-phone. 

In my own case,, I point the primary problem--and solution--at Democratic party leadership. They weren't alert to the problems they were creating and they were unwilling to disturb members of their own base, and they failed to speak frankly about problems within their own rainbow coalition.  They did exactly what Republicans accuse them of doing: politically coddling and enabling their own, being the permissive mommy.

Barrack Obama, as a mixed race black president, had the position and credibility to call out black misbehavior, name it ,and declare it wrong.  He could have had his own "Sister Souljia" moment when looking at black protests of unfair policing which turned violent. There were images of black youth throwing rocks at police.  There were opportunities to demonstrate that he believed in justice and fairness, and that members of his rainbow coalition sometimes fell short, and to criticize the illegal, violent behavior, sharply.  He failed here.

Click Here: Clinton on Sister Souljia. Tough love.

I urge readers to take two minutes to watch Bill Clinton here in this clip.  He did not condone white racism, indeed quite the opposite.  But he clearly criticized black racial prejudice and violence and likened it to David Duke's white racism.  This talk helped reassure white voters.  

Listen to it and consider what effect it might have on the Democratic brand, were a candidate to voice these words.  These words are not a "move to the right."  I do not consider them "centrist".  I consider them a return to actual liberal, progressive values.  Democrats will sabotage their effort to refine an acceptable, electable message if they insist on thinking of it as a retreat or an accommodation of the right.  It is not that.  It is an expression of liberalism, racial unity, inclusion.  This is the standard for liberalism.  This is the standard from which Democrats have strayed.   Take the two minutes and watch Clinton.  

Hillary had moments when she could have done it, with Black Lives Matter protests that transformed into looting, or Chicago shootings, or on some instance of benefit fraud.  On immigration she could have made clear that she distinguished between legal and illegal entry, made clear that illegal entry by adults was unacceptable, in some way communicated that there were boundaries in law she would not tolerate being violated.   Instead, Hillary blamed Trump for racism.  That wasn't enough. Yes, Trump was racist, but what did she stand for?  A great many Americans do, in fact, want some sort of boundary, physical or legal or psychological, on the pace of immigration, and the only clear boundary-voicer on the table was Trump, with his wall.  The wrong thing is better than no thing.  People knew where Trump stood.

My own view is optimistic for Democrats.  I believe the problem is actually easily fixed. We do not need to change the media.  We most certainly do not need to "move right."   We need to return to real liberalism, the liberalism of Martin Luther King, a liberalism of inclusion, of justice, of non violence.  It will take a Democratic nominee for president who voices the general progressive, liberal positions generally taken by Democrats, but who combines it with patriotic signaling and tough love signaling.   He or she needs to show overt public respect for the flag, for the national anthem, for Scouting, for the military, for church-going, for faith, and most important, respect for the people who care deeply about those things.  

This signaling is easy.  Indeed, too easy, which is why a person like Trump can get away with seizing those symbols as his own weapons.  

Democrats will tolerate--and some will thrill--at a Democratic candidate who expresses overt patriotism and who uses religious language to justify compassion for the hungry and sick.  A Democratic candidate needs to show that his or her highest loyalty is to the fairness and justice, not to the constituents of the rainbow.  It is a value, not a constituency.  It will mean saying a loud, clear, public "NO" to somebody.  It will show a belief in moral boundaries.   

The right candidate can do this.  Indeed Hillary could have done it.  Biden can do it.  Any number of people on the bench can do it.   What needs to change is whether Democrats believe what they do because it is right and just, or do they believe what they do because they are puppets of their constituency groups.

It is time to let Thad Guyer speak for himself:

Guest Post by Thad Guyer   

By now, it’s apparent to most voters that the Democratic Party is in a downward spiral. What happened?  Two things.  First, the liberal media elite has taken control of the party’s messaging and narratives, just as it did with the 2016 election that gave us Donald Trump.  Second, escalating sanctuary cities rhetoric is alienating the controlling white electorate. The basic problem is simple:  72% of Americans self-identify as white, and almost 70% of registered voters are white.  Moreover, white voters wield disproportionate electoral power because (1) they turn-out to vote at substantially higher rates than minority voters, and (2) decades of gerrymandering have diluted the electoral power of Democrats generally, and of minority voters in particular.  

The liberal media has hijacked our party.  In a prior era, the media reported on political policy primarily by interviewing politicians, that is, giving the microphone to elected leaders and candidates.  Not so much anymore.  From cable news to the exploding world of political podcasts, the predominant interviewees are now journalists and pundits—they interview each other. Their predominant messages are pro illegal immigrant, anti-Trump and anti-GOP, anti-patriotisms and anti-cop, and ultimately anti-white. 

The rhetoric of sanctuary cities, particularly now that deep blue California has become the first “sanctuary state”, is powerful symbolism.  It subsumes not just a free-for-all at the border, but globalist job loss, stagnant working class wages, cultural turmoil, and impaired law and order.  Chicago with its staggering murder rate is the poster sanctuary city, a Democratic stronghold that forbids cooperation with ICE in order to protect criminals from deportation upon release from jail.  But the messaging is understood broadly to mean that the Democratic Party exempts itself from legal rules in order to nurture its Hispanic political base, and increase the party base via a demographic shift by importing immigrant voters.  Nativist resistance to this party agenda is instantly met with accusations of xenophobia and racism, thus redoubling white resentment.  

Unsurprisingly, the media’s anti-white messaging and the Democratic Party’s pro-sanctuary cities positions are an almost guaranteed recipe for electoral defeat in a nation whose electorate in almost 70% white.  Trump has already proven that in real time. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan understood that reality.  But so did Bill Clinton, who stole the 1992 nomination from a slate of liberal candidates reflecting Democratic rage following 12 years of Reagan-Bush rule.  It was an uphill battle, as Clinton lost Iowa and then New Hampshire.  But he persisted driving home his warnings that white voters in middle America, no matter how sick of Reagan-Bush they might be, were not going to elect liberals like California Governor Jerry Brown, Senators Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey, and former senators Eugene McCarthy and Paul Tsongas.  Clinton rejected calls by those candidates for expanding welfare and enhancing the rights of criminal suspects and prisoners.  Instead, he advocated “workfare” to break a culture of “welfare dependency”.  He conceded that Republicans were right that American cities were crime ridden, and called for “100,000 new police” to be deployed. Democratic voters finally got Clinton’s message, and agreed that pushing our feel-good liberal ideology was not worth suffering 16 straight years of Reagan-Bush—and their Supreme Court.  

Clinton went on to beat his far more liberal rivals, including Governor Brown decisively in his home state of California, and then denied Bush I a second term.  It took a centrist, a pragmatist to save Democrats from themselves and end the Reagan-Bush juggernaut.  It’s going to take exactly that kind of pragmatism to get rid of Trump in 2020, or at least to begin reversing his two term legacy in 2024.