With all of the focus on Trump, we must not forget that in many ways, it’s Mitch McConnell (and to an only slightly lesser extent the Republican House leadership) who is the most evil force in play.
He’s the one who declared at the outset of Obama’s Presidency that Obama must fail. He has led the mission of not just stopping Democratic progress but of the larger project of essentially re-fighting the Civil War by other means, including rolling back the New Deal, Civil Rights, and Great Society programs that literally millions of men and women fought for for generations. He engineered the legislative blockade of just about everything Obama wanted to do, starting with sufficient stimulus following the housing collapse, and ensured the slow recovery that cost so many people their livelihoods and helped to create the depression-like circumstances in much of middle America and the resulting bitter climate that got Trump elected. He prevented the filling of a supreme court vacancy that is vital to his plan to ensure that federal and constitutional law continue to enable these plans.
And he is just getting started.
He is using the incredible windfall of complete partisan domination now, regardless (or perhaps under cover) of Trump’s carnival-creating capabilities/liabilities, to do exactly what he has always wanted: dismantle the “welfare” state and go back to some imagined naked form of pure capitalism — the amoral marketplace that happily rewards the nefarious as well as the good. And then let the bricks of modern social institutions fall where they may.
This is why we must not simply fight Trump. We must fight this entire reactionary moment — and with everything we’ve got.
Last night’s vote on the Klobuchar-Sanders amendment (re: importing drugs from Canada) was a great early test of how the Democrats will respond. They failed.
The ONLY reason to vote No is corporate influence. These are the 12 Democrats that did:
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Cory Booker (D-NJ)
Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Bob Casey (D-PA)
Chris Coons (D-DE)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
Mark Warner (D-VA)
13 Democrats.
(12 Republicans joined the bulk of Democrats in voting for the amendment.)
Cory Booker was the leading Democratic senator recipient of Big Pharma in 2014. I am not looking at 2016 as it was a presidential year. At least our Ed Markey did not turn on us.
The die is cast. This is going to happen. We can’t stop it.
I do not think that Mitch McConnell, nor Paul Ryan nor, indeed, Donald Trump are evil. I think they are deeply misguided and fundamentally mistaken in their outlook and their actions. I do not think they are evil.
The question is not whether to fight, but how. We lack any strength with which to coerce. “With everything we’ve got,” will not move the forces array’d against us even the smallest little bit. ( Even if we gained the strength, would we want to? I do not. ) Since we cannot coerce, we must convert and that will require one or two of the least favored in the “everything we’ve got” toolbox: patience and a willingness to suffer.
by not wanting to . . . coerce, is it? We have plenty of strength and many potential and actual allies who are willing and able to fight on many fronts. See my subsequent post.
that the kill Obamacare bill will pass both houses of Congress in the next few weeks, and will be signed, and that you just don’t have the votes to prevent it.
Maybe the circumstances will be better to oppose the bill that will “reform” Medicare by ending it.
this ongoing debacle lies with those Democrats in the battleground states, in particular, who sat home and thereby let Trump win. All because Hillary Clinton wasn’t politically pure enough for them and their candidate didn’t win the nomination.
As evil as McConnell and Ryan and Trump are, we all knew what they were going to do. They made no secret of the fact that they were going to dismantle Obamacare and roll back the New Deal etc. That so many Democrats sat back and knowingly let this happen is something I can never forgive them for.
There is no evidence for this occurring. Blacks and Latinos stayed home in far greater numbers than projected in those states and white working class voters defected from Obama to Trump. There was no groundswell of Sanders supporters staying home or casting third party ballots. That is simply not substantiated by the data.
There is no evidence for this occurring. Blacks and Latinos stayed home in far greater numbers than projected in those states and white working class voters defected from Obama to Trump. There was no groundswell of Sanders supporters staying home or casting third party ballots. That is simply not substantiated by the data. He and his supporters worked incredibly hard to elect her and are just as disappointed as you are. Comments like this are not helpful.
that shows the “I don’t like either of them” broke:
49% Trump
29% Clinton
15% Johnson
3% Stein
and that group was a big enough chunk to make a difference.
You are 100% correct about your other points. Trump flipped 200 counties that went Obama in 2012. You’re talking vote changers, not voters staying home. Turnout in urban areas was lower.
That’s the numbers story.
And that is at the core of the problem….and the key to it.
…as is always the case it seems, Republicans get elected by Dems who stayed home, whether it was the purists or the minorities. Do we have evidence that lots of individual voters (not counties or districts) actually cast votes for Obama, then Trump? My understanding is that the counties that flipped were because of turnout differentials. Just like how Scott Brown was elected in MA. He only got about the same number of raw votes as McCain did in MA in 2008, but McCain of course was soundly defeated here.
and there’ s been a number of in depth articles. They spoke with people who always voted Dem (because that’s how they always voted), but this election flipped. I can post links if you’re interested.
supporters who refused to vote for Clinton. I’m really not only talking about the people who sat home, but those who voted for Jill Stein. As this piece notes, Clinton:
That’s just the “young disaffected leftists” who who voted for Stein. On top of that are the members of that same group that sat home and didn’t vote.
These people didn’t vote for Obama either, because they think he is a war criminal who drones children for fun. They think vaccines are a greater threat to the planet than climate change. My friends parents in Cambridge only vote for the Trotskyist socialist since the other socialist is a bourgeois traitor to the class war. We will always have fringey leftists that will never vote for any Democrat. It’s frankly a waste of time to engage with them or blame them. Better to ignore them.
Better to focus on the union households that defected to Trump in double digits, the 20,000 blacks in Milwaukee County alone that stayed home this time and voted for Obama twice (easily enough to bring WI back), and the fact that she lost White women as a demographic by 3 points that Obama carried by ten points. That she lost working class whites by 40 points while Obama lost then by only 20. That she underperformed Kerry and Gore in traditionally Democratic areas like Youngstown and Scranton let alone Obama, this is despite overperforming Gore and Kerry in the popular vote substantially.
Please stop equating young leftists with Stein voters or Sanders voters. We are not all the same.
and Clinton won by 2,736. If NH had gone Trump and it made a difference (as it did in 2000, when Bush won it), then I’d be blaming Sanders supporters as well.
According to the numbers, write-ins were not a factor in the Midwest though.
…In Pennsylvania, to take but one example, well more than one half million more people voted in the election in 2016 than did in 2012. Jill Stein more than doubled her vote count and Gary Johnson nearly tripled his count. I think, in fact, it was the people who stayed home, and didn’t vote for Romney, in 2012, who came out in droves for Trump. At first glance Florida numbers looks similar with a similar bounce for Stein and another for Johnson.
Turnout was actually DOWN in Ohio but Stein did even better, as expressed by percentage, tripling her 2012 totals and Gary Johnson, 2016, more than tripled his totals from 2012.
More people voted, over the entire country in 2016 than did in 2012. I don’t think very many people stayed home at all.
Still and all, in the end, I blame each and every one who voted for Trump. Ultimately they voted for a clearly lying, bombastic huckster and demonstrated sexual predator with a worryingly opaque relationship to Vladimir Putin. It should not even have been close, certainly not close enough that we should split hairs about who stayed home and who defected to whom.
I thought I heard that nationwide turnout was in the neighborhood of 51%.
But I’m not making the argument on, nor caring much about, absolute numbers. I’m talking relative numbers: the difference between the votes in 2012 and the votes in 2016….
The original assertions were that some people who voted for Obama in 2012 either stayed home or defected to Trump in 2016. The (relative) numbers don’t support either of those assertions.
It means a more leftist agenda is a more electorally viable one. There is no argument that absolves the neoliberal wing of the party. When Cory Booker votes with Republicans to defend big pharma, he isn’t expanding our coalition but narrowing it. He isn’t moving to the “electable center”, always a fiction if attino doesn’t prove it, but ceding the rich ground of populism to the far right.
It’s truly time for the Democratic party to return to its roots as a workers party. And that’s not on the left or right spectrum. It’s in the fair/unfair spectrum. Ordinary voters just want politicians who care about them and who will help them with the rising cost of living and the crushing income inequality we are dealing with.
This may mean embracing a leftist agenda on economics like single payer, basic income, fair trade, restoring Glass Steagall, ending corporate welfare and ending too big to jail while de-emphasizing the culture war issues voters are tired of hearing. It doesn’t mean retreating on any of them, but it does mean recognizing the economic fight is more critical and more relevant to nore voters.
young Bernie Sanders supporters. And its possible that the Sanders supporters alone were a small portion of the young (and many not-so-young) leftists that either stayed home on election day or voted for Stein. It also may not be particularly useful to dwell on them as a group in trying to find a way forward.
I will say,though, that some of the most vitriolic rhetoric against Clinton during the campaign came from those same Sanders supporters, many of whom argued that she was no different than Trump because she had gotten money for speaking engagements from Goldman Sachs etc. It angered me at the time, and continues to anger me, that so many of those people refused to recognize the stakes involved in the election, and now they are so shocked that Trump and co. are dismantling the ACA etc.
There was a huge difference, as they well knew, between Trump and Clinton, and they could have stopped Trump by coming out to vote, yet they didn’t.
I definitely agree that anyone saying there wasn’t a dimes worth of difference between the candidates is part of the problem. And it’s critical we all come together and focus on creating the post-Trump future.
Looking at numbers, etc.,it seems likely that Trump will get what Obama didn’t – one party for 4 years, perhaps with the ability to pass more than one law, rather than relying on easily changed executive actions.