This is an old joke that summarizes our current political climate:
‘An immigrant, a worker and a banker are sitting at the table with 10 cookies. The banker takes 9 and then tells the worker “watch out, the immigrant is going to steal your cookie”.
The post-Trump corollary is now the left seems to be focusing on why that worker is so racist and evil instead of fighting the damn banker!
Every candidate from top to bottom in our party should be committed to taking on the powerful and protecting the vulnerable. We have to be vigilant and do both at all times.
Please share widely!
When the worker is calling the immigrant a “wetback” and threatening to put him or her into a WWII-style interment camp, you’re damn right I’m going to calling that worker “racist” and “evil”. We absolutely have to take on the powerful. We also have to stop beating on the vulnerable.
When those “workers” you keep talking about stop whaling on women, blacks, and anyone else who dares challenge their biases, I’ll quiet down.
In order for those workers to join my fight, they need stop channeling Spiro Agnew and Rush Limbaugh. Until they do, they’re on their own — I want them nowhere near the apparatus of my Democratic Party.
s’tom, I often feel the same way you do. It’s hard not to.
But I just encourage you to separate the policy from the person. I don’t want racist policy anywhere near my Democratic Party, but I’m happy if my Democratic Party can make that racist man’s life better, along with his wife and the gay neighbor living next door on one side and the immigrant family living on the other side.
I think you win hearts and minds with embracing, not shunning. Consider
the black musician who befriended the KKK.
Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them.
I agree with you about separating the person from the policy. I enthusiastically agree with you that Democratic Party policy should make life better for ALL workers, racist or not.
Still, “policy” does not blog here demanding outreach or whine about being “left behind” because we in Massachusetts belatedly passed legislation forcing employers to pay equal pay for equal work.
I hear you about winning hearts and minds. I’m glad that Daryl Davis can do what he does. I can’t, so far, get that far.
The best I can do is be empathetic and receptive when a Donald Trump defender reaches out to me — at least, until that defender starts attacking me, my family and my loved ones.
The father of “The Prodigal Son” reaches out after the protagonist returns home — the father does not send an outreach committee saying “please come home, we need your vote”.
We will always lose the votes of the truly deplorable, and I am glad we will. But I do think there are voters who are currently hurting and easy swayed by charlatans who can be uplifted as part of a positive program and vision articulated by a real movement that is bottom up, not top down. A truly grassroots, 50 state strategy is our best chance going forward. Unfortunately, time is on the side of the enemy and we are starting at a significant disadvantage.
Clinton, Edwards, Richardson,Biden,Dodd,and Kucinich got the racist vote.
Joke alert for the obtuse
He took the state by 9 points. So there’s that.
If the ‘the father does not send an outreach committee saying “please come home, we need your vote”’, he absolutely deserves to lose the election.
John’s issue, in my opinion, is that working people are getting screwed, both in the Commonwealth and nationally.
He’s right. In the days when Democratic politics were national outgrowths from neighborhoods to national campaigns, elected officials had better sense than to separate policy from politics (the former is an outgrowth of the latter, not independent of it). As a result there was more accountability to working class voters.
That is hardly the case now, and frankly your “Prodigal Son” metaphor misses the point the the organized Democratic Party abandoned the working class (of all races and genders), not the other way around.
For those reasons John’s concerns should be noted and addressed.
Tactically, I think this means recruiting more candidates, and urging our top-ticket leaders (our Senators and governors) to fundraise more at down-ticket levels.
.. avoiding the problem altogether.
The problem isn’t that the damned banker is a lying pickpocket on the make. Shifty bankers are a dime-a-dozen. The problem is that the worker either believes the lie or finds the lies a convenient place to hang their prejudices. The 9 cookies wouldn’t disappear if the misdirection didn’t work.
We go after the banker telling lies about cookies and win, then what? I’ll tell you: We get the big businessman telling lies about taxes or the jobs they moved overseas. Ok. So we go after them, also, and then what? Then we get the libertarians who tell lies about what the government is going to do to your property. Or the gun nuts telling lies about the government coming after your weaponry. Or an FBI director selling lies about a specific candidate… and so on. Any and all lies are a problem only so far as there are people who willingly believe them.
And when those people who believe the lies, willingly tell lies themselves (“I’m voting for proven liar Donald Trump because I think Hillary Clinton is a liar.”) they must be confronted with the lies they’ve told and the lies they’ve believed. And why. We do this not for me or for you, but for them. Those who are lied to are the ones screwed first and most.
And that begins by telling the worker that it’s the banker stealing his money, jobs, and livelihood and not the Mexican. It’s pretty hard to credibly take on the banks when you’re cashing their checks, and that’s not meant as a dig against Clinton. Obama and even Warren have taken money from the financial industry as well. That’s our modern political reality and it was just rejected at the polls.
I think it’s time we create a real movement outside of the corporate binary. The GOP establishment and Democratic establishments were rejected and toppled this election and replaced by something far more sinister and abnormal. I have never wavered grom denouncing Trump or skirting from confronting him.
But I do think we can make an explicit agenda on broad based middle income prosperity and security and run on just that agenda and do much better. The opposition party has to oppose, but if it wants to govern again, it has to oppose in a manner that allows it to regain a majority. That’s all I’ve been saying. The voters in the states lost made a poor decision, even a morally bankrupt one, but understanding why is how we help them make a better decision two and four years from now.
From MTV News of all places.
I am not calling for watering down anything, in fact, I am calling for an even bolder and more authentically progressive and populist message going forward.
.. I weep for you. I really do.
Neither the GOP establishment nor anything to do with the Democrats were ‘rejected and toppled.’ That which was ‘rejected and toppled’ were simpleminded, broadly-drawn strawman caricatures of the establishment the construction of which was derived from an insensate rage and wholly illegitimate bigotry . That which was rejected, in fact, was truth itself.
You can’t really admit the vote was based on deliberate, unceasing and vicious lies (both in the affirmative case for Donald Trump and in the case against Hillary Clinton( and then turn around saying the outcome of the vote is a legitimate political problem to be solved. That’s a mistake likely to make the problem much much worse…
People believed lies. Or, they used lies as a convenient fig leaf for their bigotry. Those are the choices available. You would rather examine the lies, trying to tinker with the details of the lies, and call yourself a fixer and call the problem fixed. It doesn’t work like that. You’re actually going to make the problem worse because you’re going to, against all rationality, legitimate the anger and bigotry behind the lies and and you’re trying to fix what ain’t broke.
The anger is not legitimate. It is the anger of a child on the playground who is told to share the ball. He finds the world monstrously unfair in its requirement that he be fair. Confront the anger and you confront the problem. Treat the lie as a legitimate truth and you will only compound the problem.
Well, yeah, but it’s hard to fight the damn banker when he and his pals are providing significant financial support to your campaign. Trump supporters I know were suspicious about the emails and private servers, but it was the Goldman Sachs speeches that really gave them a bone to chew on.
Democrats need to send a message to prospective candidates that is does matter where the money comes from and if a candidate cannot raise significant funds with small donations and a broad base, well guess what? That candidate will most likely lose.
Again this is a battle between the classes. Call them the 1%, the .01%, the wealthy class, the rentier class, the rent seekers, it’s all the same. The rest of us, from cardiologists to part time grocery clerks are all the same with no divisions needed between us. We are labor and as Bernie Sanders said, enough is enough.
If the Democrats put up someone who won’t accept largish donations from the wealthy — regardless of those persons’ motives — how do they win? And don’t tell me millions of small donations unless you can give me examples of people who won that way.
There is also Warren who won despite the outside spending limits of the People’s Pledge and largely small donors. Russ Finegold won every election where he limited himself to small donors in Wisconsin and lost every election where he took money from Democratic super PACs. Paul Wellstone and Al Franken. Another guy named Barack Obama won his primary due to small donors against the candidate with the big donors.
Dave Brat beat then Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 VA 07 Republican Primary, despite being outspent $4.7 million to $207 thousand.
Same year the Rollback the Gas Tax people won, here in Massachusetts, despite being outspent 34 -1.
1. Sanders lost.
2. Warren raised big money in Mass., and that was enough due to the People’s Pledge.
3. Finegold lost in 2016.
4. Wellstone last ran in 2002.
I’m not as familiar with Franken’s or Obama’s financing. I’ll grant you 1/3 of your hand-selected examples. I think Dave Brat is a good example too.
So there are exceptions. What makes them exceptional?