Democratic Division

Democratic messages: "opportunity" vs. "inequality."  Hillary vs. Bernie.

In card games and in political struggles, at some point people lay down their cards. Someone wins. Someone knows they lost.

Articulate. Forceful. Socialist, without apology.

Currently there is pundit buzz that suggests a potential direction for Democrats. Some politicians are talking the language of "opportunity." Such messaging is now defined as "centrist."  Talk of "opportunity" means progressive reform--which is understood to mean keeping the current social and economic structure in place--but becoming more progressive. 

The electoral goal of opportunity-Democrats is to regain the trust of those moderate Americans who were put off by Hillary, and therefore didn't vote or took a chance on Trump. They want to maintain her policies but change her message. Talk opportunity and jobs. And no one is deplorable. 

Electorally, they want to re-establish the 2008 and 2012 Obama coalition.

Remember, that coalition won the upper midwest. Obama had saved the auto industry in 2009 while headlines noted Romney had said "Drop Dead" to GM. Democratic messaging was to protect American jobs, philosophy and ideology and "discipline of the marketplace jungle" be damned. Republican messaging was that the GM bailout helped those terrible unions, not the bondholders. The bailout was wrong. GM should have gone broke.  Chrysler, too. 

Democratic victory in 2012.

Democratic centrists understand an opportunity message to be a bridge that can re-connect the coasts and the manufacturing states. Opportunity--with its implication of variable results due to individual talent and work ethic--takes some of the punch out of the racial resentment issue that works in the opposite direction on behalf of Republicans. The resentment is there to be mined. People naturally resent free riders--"takers," as Mitt Romney called them. The US is a multi-ethnic mix, and it is easy--perhaps inevitable--that people profile and project. We are the good guys, they are the bums.  We are provident and hard working; they are lazy, drunk, and criminal. We deserve; they are undeserving.

Opportunity-Democrats think they learned the lesson of 2016. 

Click: NBC News, with video clip.

Meanwhile, the activist left learned a very different message from the 2016.  They learned the lesson that Democrats--the kind of elected Democrats who served as super delegates and who supported Hillary rather than Bernie, and who are associated with the DCC--are corrupt sellouts. They get PAC donations, both from businesses and "good guy" groups. Leftist Bernie supporters perceive "opportunity" as simply another shuffle of a still-stacked deck.  People with privilege and power will arrange to assist their children get onto a fast track, to the disadvantage of the working poor who lack that access. Businesses will arrange to preserve their own wealth and power, with Democratic help. Opportunity means working hard for less and getting nowhere because the system is rigged to keep them in debt paying student loans and health care costs. Opportunity in the status quo means continuation of jobs that pit the American worker against the worker in Mexico and China.

It is fake reform. It keeps the rich in place, still rich, and the working people still working for peanuts.

Bernie--and now with the charismatic young voice of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speak of a very different electoral success, and a division of the country between "working people" versus the "millionaires and billionaires" that Bernie Sanders condemned in his 2016 campaign. They perceive a division between the poor and middle class versus the comfortable and rich. 

Ocasio-Cortez: "Wherever there are working class people there is hope for the progressive movement."   She, like Bernie Sanders, openly uses the words "class." The enemy is the system, the stacked deck. Theirs is the progressive version of the Trump message, but with a different target. Trump punched down at the immigrants and blacks and people of color. Bernie punches up, at the beneficiaries of the current economic system.

Facebook post  in progressive group.

This blog, and a fundraiser I described, briefly became a source document, revealing the division in the Democratic party. The blog gave a field report on a Kate Brown fundraiser I helped "host." I included an invitation that had been widely circulated, one which suggested various donation levels, including $2,500. 

The campaign asked me to remove the post. 

Progressive Facebook groups were full of disapproving comments about the Fundraiser, learned from the brief time it was up. Look at the privilege; people who donate to Kate Brown get to talk and eat cheese with her. Leftist Facebook writers did not consider the event an occasion for good, clean, disinterested, good-government money, providing a fighting chance for the underfunded progressive Democrat struggling against the millions being raised by the Republican opponent. 

No. It was perceived as affirmation of Kate Brown's connection to people who could and would write $1,000 checks on behalf of her campaign.The bad guys. The people who are the apparent sufficient winners in the economic struggle to write those checks. The oppressor class.

1972.  There may simply need to be a cleansing showdown and a general election vote. A Democratic candidate who brings anything less than a social class based policy analysis may simply lose the left and re-elect Republicans. The left may need Bernie Sanders to run. Lay down the cards, see who wins.  

Democrats did this in 1972, picking George McGovern, not Hubert Humphrey, then lost big. The 1972 election results moved the country to the right, but it pushed re-set in the Democratic Party. It led to electoral win in 1976 with a Democratic Party that would chose a pious, moderate southern governor as its nominee. A 2020 election will be different. Nixon in 1972 was the establishment in the midst of liberal anti-war and racial turmoil. In 2020 a Sanders presidency would be seeking "leftist populist turmoil" as an alternative to "Trump-style ethno-nationalist turmoil."  Turmoil vs. turmoil. Pick your favorite.

Trump stirs up anger. He doesn't make the political activists long for quiet or "normalcy." He makes people want to hit back. The people who are put off by the turmoil don't vote. So voters are divided into three groups, all people who are engaged and in some form of turmoil.  There is the Trump 40%. Then there are two bodies of Democrats whose numbers have not yet settled out. Some of those are opportunity-Democrats. The others are Bernie class war Democrats. 

I don't currently see a common denominator between the two Democratic groups.