Winning in politics consists of 1. Activating the persuaded; 2. Persuading the persuadable; 3. Discouraging and softening the opposition. Not converting, not even “defeating”, per se. Ideologically-committed people don’t really change their minds, except perhaps over years and decades. But they — we — are susceptible to divide-and-conquer, and the sowing of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). We might keep this in mind as we process the outcome of the election, thinking about what-might-have-worked and what-will-work in the future.
George Monbiot lays out what we’re up against:
Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies …
As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do.
Well, for a while at least, we were fighting them to a draw. Look at the number of votes for President, for Senate, and Congress: The center+left is indeed a majority coalition at this point, and as such it is unruly and fractious. There are real differences, sometimes on the technical/policy side, and sometimes on ethical/first principles.
But there is much that unites us, particularly a democratic, logical, liberal, inclusive and collaborative way of working on problems. We believe in making life easier, and that government should do what it can within reason to help.
The Trump agenda, as represented in his Cabinet picks, is in no way a majority agenda. By and large, people want to keep Medicare; they want to protect the environment; they’re not Bannon/Sessions-style racists. They do not wish to hand over more wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful just because. If you ask them, they’ll tell you so themselves.
We the majority have been cheated — partly by the undemocratic peculiarities of our Constitution, and partly by a breakdown of respect for norms and Constitutional duties. Any of these things may be lawful, but they are surely unjust: The 2000 and 2016 elections cheated us out of Democratic presidents. The Senate cheated us out of a balance-tilting Supreme Court justice — do elections only have consequences if a Republican president is elected? And in general, we’ve been cheated out of a minimally functional legislative process that responds to the needs of the public in reasonable order. The entire American system presupposes a heavy dose of compromise; we have been deprived of even that.
We should have the hard talks. We should strategize and shore up weaknesses. But we should remember we’re up against massive machines of propaganda, дезинформация (disinformation), and obfuscation. They want us to be frustrated and blame each other, and not them. Don’t take the bait. We need each other.
(I should have written this months ago.)
Christopher says
…because in many ways we ARE. We also know full well that if the shoe were on the other foot the GOP would not be just nibbling around the edges. They would treat POTUS as illegitimate from day one – which in fact they did with Clinton even though he got a plurality twice and Obama even though he got a majority twice. Where we can do the GOP one better is to not just obstruct, but offer alternatives, and when we want to filibuster actually filibuster. By putting alternatives forward we can at least drive the conversation even they don’t get very far procedurally. I’ve read Dems got more aggregate votes for both Senate and House as well and we should remind people of that constantly if that is in fact the case. We know ~2.2M more people actually wanted HRC to be President so let’s dial back the loserdom and talk of what went wrong.
jconway says
Figuring out why we lost matters since we ultimately did not take the Presidency despite winning a majority of votes. We go to the polls with the voters we have and the system we have.
That said, I absolutely reject the talk that Trump or Ryan have a mandate. They do not. Not only because they lost the popular vote, in both races, but because their policy prescriptions are broadly opposed by a majority of Americans. Give them no quarter and give them no space to govern. But be specific as to why.
I might add times like these are why Christopher and I were reluctant to gut the filibuster. There is really little we can do to stop him from stacking his cabinet with the deplorables he has chosen.
johntmay says
All this talk about “We know ~2.2M more people actually wanted HRC to be President” and “they lost the popular vote” reminds me of a friend of mine who was involved in a bad bicycle crash (he survived and is okay). He got hit by a car and he kept on telling everyone that he did not have to move out of his position because “I had the right of way!”. Yeah, but that 3,000 pound car had….3,000 pounds.
We lost a lot of states, a ton of electoral votes and we lost a lot of voters who voted for Obama twice but this time, they either voted for Trump or stayed home.
We can lose the same way in four years if we keep telling ourselves that we won the popular vote……and so have no reason to change.
petr says
A numerical majority of differing views isn’t, I daresay, what you were thinking of… The GOP have it easy since, after all, there is really only one way to be racist whereas non-racists come in a… ahem… a diverse array of flavors: there’s the color-blind and the color-positive as well as the anti-racist not to mention the truly agnostic…
And, sometimes these differing views clash: we are, in fact, the party who doesn’t want the country to be run by a racist buffoon like Donald Trump but, nevertheless, will bend over backwards to be deferential to those who do… denying the consequences of their irrationality by denying their irrationality in the vain and naive hope that the failure of our mechanistic viewpoint is merely because we weren’t mechanistic enough.
All that is say, simply, that the title of this diary is incorrect: we. did. not. get. played. They did. And the problem won’t be solved until they realize it as much as we do. Then we win, and so do they.
dasox1 says
You can add Gerrymandering to the list of ways that we have been cheated by the cabal.
Peter Porcupine says
Gerrymandering was INVENTED here. And it is used here to this day to cut up any rightward leaning districts. Per an argument on another thread, there is a reason Revere is lumped in with Arlington and it isn’t because of common interests.
It is a function of power, rather than party. Now, if you WANT to blame it on your own impotence, that’s fine – but Democrats in supermajorities do and have always done the same.
dasox1 says
that Republicans have Gerrymandered the shit out of Congress? Just want to make sure that we’re on the same page.
merrimackguy says
The majority party draws those lines to favor candidates of that party.
Some states draw lines by other methods.
Is that “gerrymandering the shit out of Congress”?
Peter Porcupine says
It reflects the will of the voters in those states. You didn’t kvetch until it went against you, which is understandable, but you like to be reality based here.
dasox1 says
Yes, it is Gerrymandering the shit out of Congress, and it is not politics as usual. CD’s have been redrawn over the past number of years to favor Rs over Ds approximately 55% to 10% (rest don’t favor a party). Courts have found, including recently in WI, that the districts have been drawn illegally without compelling state interests underlying the redrawn districts. This type of illegal conduct has resulted in elections where many more votes are cast for Democratic Congressional candidates but Republicans have a huge majority in Congress. States like PA have had Congressional elections in which many more votes were cast for Ds than Rs in Congressional races, and many more R members of Congress from that state are elected. That’s the reality and it’s not politics as usual, it’s illegal.
merrimackguy says
You might not be happy with the results of gerrymandering, but I’ve made a true statement.
I agree some line drawing might be nefarious, and if it’s truly illegal “courts have found” then those districts one would assume would be changed by courts.
Your problem is in the math, and the fact that Dems are disproportionately concentrated.
Roughly 700K people per district. PA has 18.
Two R’s and one D ran uncontested races.
In the remaining 15, The R’s won at rates ranging from 65:35 to 55:45. In three D winning races the tallies were 90:10, 80:20, and 75:25.
In the aggregate “States like PA have had Congressional elections in which many more votes were cast for Ds than Rs in Congressional races” is true, but we have a system with districts and that’s just how it works.
dasox1 says
Thanks for admitting that the line drawing is nefarious though. That’s a good start. Republicans have made Gerrymandering an art form. But, it’s not math, it’s how the districts are drawn, illegally. BTW, you were wrong the first time for suggesting that Rs hadn’t gerrymandered the shit out of Congress, disenfranchising voters. During the time BHO has been President, Rs have had approx. 25+ districts more than they should have had based on vote totals. This isn’t (only) an effort state-by-state, it’s a concerted national effort by Rs to illegally disenfranchise millions of people in order to perpetuate policies that favor the rich and powerful over the middle and lower-middle class. Efforts lead by people like Karl Rove and the Kochs. Illegally Gerrymandering Congress is but one of the ways in which Rs have illegally disenfranchised Americans. The PA example proves the point. All the Ds are crammed into the fewest number of districts possible, and win by huge margins. That kind of concentration doesn’t happen by accident, it’s done intentionally to give Democrats the fewest number of seats possible. The Rs, give themselves more seats that they can win comfortably (but not by as huge margins), and Democrats fewer seats.
merrimackguy says
But of course you are entitled to your opinion. It’s just not fact.
dasox1 says
that you don’t know the difference between fact and opinion.
petr says
…it was circa 1812, when the only voters in any (and all) districts were white, property owning, males. So the power, then, was more or less betwixt and between a homogeneous group of white men trying to include or exclude other white men not the, now, clear identity based distinctions fostered by the Right. It is the long history of attempted disenfranchisement by the right (even when the right was Democrat) –that is to say, a dasox put it, cheating — that led to attempts (I think misguided) by the Left to follow suit, if only to protect and preserve what power they could.
(And I really don’t know to dispute the ‘here’ part either, Elbridge Gerry being just a governor who signed a law he didn’t particularly like validating a process he didn’t particularly invent…)
Peter Porcupine says
.
petr says
… again.
I’m suggesting that the redistricting plan he signed into law may, or may not, have been the first of its kind. So I don’t know from ‘invented here.’ That’s all.
To get back to the point: the terms under which ‘gerrymandering’ was invented, whether here or there, were different than those terms under… *cough*… color of which ‘gerrymandering’ is employed now.
dasox1 says
Are you suggesting that because Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a redistricting law in the 1800s that no Mass. Democrat can ever complain about Republicans illegally disenfranchising millions of voters? Because that seems to be where you’re headed.
Christopher says
…just because the name came from MA doesn’t mean the practice did.
Peter Porcupine says
…but if you can find an EARLIER citation, you can make a fortune correcting history textbooks.
Did that Lakota Sioux maybe not include the tribe over by the shell midden when determining allocation of hunting territory?
Christopher says
…but Patrick Henry tried it in Virginia earlier, in an unsuccessful attempt to keep James Monroe out of Congress.
Christopher says
…can be divided just about any way you can think of and yield a solid and possibly unanimous Democratic federal delegation. My home district had actually been drawn to help a Republican, but that did not work out. I think you will find that MA districts make a lot more sense than those of many states.
jconway says
Every state should have independent redistricting commissions. Illinois is just as unfair as Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, or Virginia. It’s just that it’s one of maybe three or four states out of 30 that fucked over the Republicans instead of the Democrats. I voted for that ballot question and it lost, so don’t blame me. I wanted a fairer Illinois even if it dilutes the Democratic (and even more corrupt and unresponsive) supermajority. So I would support that here, but I agree with Christopher that it wouldn’t give you a more Republican seat.
Tisei woulda had it had Moulton not come along, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tsongas replacement battle gives the GOP a good opening. And the Cape is obviously trending Republican. Just run more moderate candidates and you might see them win, just ask Governor Baker.
Peter Porcupine says
.
jconway says
Blue states should adopt it and it should be the #1 priority and campaign issue for red state Democrats trying to regain their seats. I think a key lesson from this election is that the people are hungry for real reforms and are tired of window dressing, and the party willing to give up tactical advantages for the a clean and fair playing field will have the peoples support.
scott12mass says
The first major party that adopts a platform which includes term limits will win in a landslide, even though the people who get elected will only get to feed at the public trough for a couple of terms. It is one of the most universal complaints I hear from all the people I talk to.
Christopher says
I tend to value experience and come from the school of we have term limits – they’re called elections. If someone is doing that poorly, no amount of money, name recognition, or constituent service will save them. Plus, what’s wrong with “feeding at the public trough” if that is their job? I get so tired of the implication that public service is somehow morally inferior to private sector employment.
Mark L. Bail says
equivalence. Gerrymandering a matter of norms and how far things are taken. For example, all opposition parties oppose the party in power. It was the GOP that decided to oppose EVERYTHING Obama did. Compromise? They did away with that. As in all cases, the GOP broke a norm. The same with gerrymandering.
The GOP made it into a science. The project was REDMAP:
johntmay says
This guy is always on target. Follow the money.
johntmay says
The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975 when Thatcher and Reagan pick up neoliberalism courtesy of book by Frederick Hayek : The Constitution of Liberty.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than developing a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a “third way”.
Hayek’s triumph could be witnessed everywhere from Blair’s expansion of the private finance initiative to Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act..
Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the yabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics, in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.
Charley on the MTA says
I thought that she could escape that, at least to the extent necessary to win the Presidency. I was wrong. There is no question that NAFTA and China’s becoming the world’s factory figured very prominently in this result. That … and hackers and Comey.
johntmay says
really could not afford to give a hoot about hackers and servers anymore then they could afford to give a hoot about Trump’s pandering to the Fox News bigots.
Honestly, I doubt they even knew that Bill Clinton was behind NAFTA. All they knew was that after four years of George H Bush, eight of Clinton, eight of George w Bush and eight of Obama, nothing much had changed for the good. Trickle down still ain’t trickling and “education and job training” is just a different delay tactic by a different party.
They went for the one choice that seemed different, and why not? How much worse can it get when you were pulling down $85K a year at the plant with overtime and now you’re an assistant manager at Tractor Supply making $40K and a health insurance plan that does not kick in until after you go through $4,000?
Peter Porcupine says
..was, “Waddaya got to lose?”
It resonated beyond the black voters it was originally addressed to.
petr says
…ah… dignity…?
johntmay says
…..
petr says
…The question was “what do you have to lose?” The question was not “what does, or does not, put food on the table?”
And, while true that dignity does not put food on the table, some measure of self-respect and dignity will better enable one to get through those times when it is difficult to put food on the table.
johntmay says
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
It’s easy to sit at your desk in Cambridge or Somerville or Franklin and shout out “RACISM…SEXISM….XENOPHOBES….MISOGYNISTS”…and so one regarding the shellacking that our neoliberal candidate received on election day.
But tell the people in Flint or any small Michigan town to hold on just a bit longer…..and things will trickle down soon, at least they will have their dignity?
JimC says
We’re Americans.
SomervilleTom says
While it was apparently intended as a rhetorical question, I suggest that America — and in particular those foolish enough to vote for Mr. Trump — will learn a great deal about what we have to lose.
Too many of us are so busy nursing our grievances that we have forgotten how to count our many blessings.
Mr. Trump and his followers will teach us a great deal about what we have to lose.
Christopher says
…when hate and presidential tantrums are the new normal. Some things are just out of bounds and I remain shocked and disappointed that more people don’t see it that way.
JimC says
HRC had no less than 16 years, two terms in the Senate, two runs for President, and four years as Secretary of State. PLENTY of time to separate her policies from Bill’s.
She didn’t; in fact she repeatedly evoked them. She ran on them, sometimes adding her own hawkish flair. She moved on gay marriage and virtually nothing else.
Sure, Bill became a liability, and she was stuck. But it’s hardly his fault, and I think it’s a disservice to her to say so.
Christopher says
There was nothing to escape. Sure, there were opportunities and reasons to update positions to fit both political and issue circumstances, which I think she actually did more than she’s credited for. Even Bill himself would understand that. However, can we PLEASE stop treating Bill’s presidency like an embarrassment?! On the political side he brought us back to the WH after twelve years, the first Dem to win twice since the WWII. On issues, while he worked in the political environment he was given he DID stop some of the bleeding of the Reagan Revolution. He defended entitlements and other programs threatened by the GOP, even willing to shut down the government over it. The results are the lowest inflation AND unemployment (which conventional wisdom once said could not be simultaneously true), 20M new jobs, trade deals that recognize the global economy in which we are on the inside (and yes, I still believe trade deals generally pass the greatest good for greatest number test). The stock market soared leading to the longest sustained period of growth in our history. He also submitted the first balanced budget in a generation while adhering to our values and we were generally at peace. My lifetime thus far is still a bit on the short side, but I think Clinton and his tenure remain among the best I have lived through.
johntmay says
was his legacy and that went POP in 2007.
Christopher says
If Clinton had still been President he almost certainly would have done a better job preventing the collapse.
jconway says
Really happy they kept the White House and passed some good policies in their eight years, so did Jimmy Carter in his four. None of them should have any influence on how we move forward in the future. Their ideology and electoral methodology was discredited this year.
And that is as much the voters in the states where Hillary lost rejecting the Clintons and their legacy of deindustrialization in the heartland as it is them embracing Trump and his lies. We have to absolutely move in the direction of the grassroots energy and passion and that is where Sanders and Warren are.
And where astute heartland populists like Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, and Tim Ryan are. Time to embrace populism again and embrace an agenda that punishes Wall Street and empowers Main Street. That’s not racism, that’s our senior Senator!
God bless them and I sincerely thank them for their service to their country and their party, but their day is done.
Christopher says
…but we can do it without blaming Bill.
Peter Porcupine says
He was also one of only two Democratic presidents to RUN for a second term since WWII. That still gives you 50/50.
And I am interested that you praise his willingness to shut down the government over his policies. When the GOP does that on the opposite end of the spectrum, it is derided as inappropriate.
jconway says
And your party got the blame it deserved for that one. It also shut it down under Obama.
Christopher says
Yes, I’m glad Clinton was willing to defend important programs to the point of shutting down the government, but not so much when the GOP does it over what’s usually routine stuff like the debt ceiling. In both cases Dems were staying within bounds and the GOP was being obnoxiously reactionary.