” If a society cannot help the many who are poor it cannot save the few who are rich.” JFK
Just before winning seats in Britain’s House recently, Labor ran an ad with a message that Democrats should adopt in advance of our Congressional elections next year :
WE DEMAND
We know we live in a land with riches for all.
We know the health worker and firefighter contribute no less than the stock broker and merchant banker.
We know there is no Chief Executive or shareholder value without the worker.
We know that wealth, privilege and power are carved up in obscene fashion.
We. Have. Had. Enough.
We demand, health, work, home, education and care in time of need not subject to grand profiteering but planned, transparent ; executed in efficient fashion under democratic control using our intelligence and imagination.
We demand the full fruits of our labor.
We demand the right to contribute and recognize the obligation to share.
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and never will.
We have one short precious life.
We demand a chance to be all that we can.
After all is said and done it’s still about making the economy work for everyone. No one can save us. We have to save ourselves.
Who can honestly argue with these planks as a solid economic foundation for an economic a modern western democracy?
Republicans and a lot of their working class supporters argue with these planks, as do many Democrats, sadly. They believe that an economic system where a coffee shop clerk making $10 an hour for a corporation where the CEO makes $15 Million is fair. That’s happening in Massachusetts. They believe that a health insurance CEO can pull down $20 Million when patients they serve in mental health facilities are given little to help them and staff members who are paid about $15 an hour. That too is happening in Massachusetts.
These people still believe that the USA is a meritocracy. If one believes that to be true, all the things listed in that plank are simply the fault of lazy, unskilled, uneducated workers.
Agree, not argue.
Argue, not agree….(need coffee…..)
Democrats have managed to convince their supporters “Jobs and the Economy” are all that is needed and if ones job is not providing security, that is a deficiency in the individual, not the economic system if the economy is growing. Democrats tell working class citizens who are not reaping the rewards of a growing economy to simply move to areas and jobs that provide the rewards.
I like what you listed and it really can be summed up in one phrase: The American Working Class Citizen demand work, and security.
FDR said it back in 1932. Democrats need to dust off parts of this speech.
What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security–these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.
I’d really like to know which Democratic Party you belong to! The one I belong to never suggests the individual is at fault in the scenario you describe. We call those people Republicans.
I belong to the Democratic Party that calls for “Educations and Jobs Skill Training” as the remedy for the vast wealth inequality that is getting wider each year. I belong to the Democratic Party that refuses to raise taxes on the rich, refuses to prosecute the criminal bankers, and instead, vacations on Martha’s Vineyard and accepts “speaking fees” from their 1% audience.
Is that not the party that you belong to as well?
I absolutely belong to the Dem Party that believes that education and job training are key components to lifting people up and don’t apologize for that for a second. My Dem Party also believes in making sure the wealthy pay their fair share (even that dreaded “centrist” Bill Clinton believed that), but there’s nothing wrong with either Martha’s Vineyard or speaking fees – that’s just unhelpful class resentment.
Yet another repetition of this lie. I’m sorry, but it’s just a lie. You’ve written it here multiple times, it’s been rebutted multiple times, and you still repeat it.
The Democratic Party calls for education and jobs-skills trading as a necessary ingredient for working-class men, women, and children to thrive and prosper in the current and future world. No more, no less.
I invite you to cite even a single Democrat who describes this as a “remedy for the vast wealth inequality that is getting wider each year”. It is not.
This is a fabrication and/or delusion on your part that has nothing to do with the national platform. There is NO claimed connection between these programs and wealth concentration.
It is worth nothing that GOP, which is the only other national party of significance, consistently opposes these opportunities.
A man, woman or child without education or job skills will almost certainly suffer no matter what we do to address wealth concentration. Even in an America where national policy has been transformed to include single-payer government sponsored health care, a minimum income is guaranteed, and a reasonable (in comparison to our counterparts) GINI coefficient is maintained, people without education and job skills are going to suffer.
That is plain fact, and I for one wish you stop repeating this inflammatory canard.
It’s not a lie and your continued attacks on my character are getting rather boring. You and Trump seem to take the this approach, attacking the person when you are frustrated with your own ignorance…..do you tweet as well?
The following words are from the New Democrat Coalition and their remedy for rebuilding the middle class that was hammered by the wealthy class. NOWHERE in this “remedy” is any mention on higher taxes on the wealthy class, or any suggestion that the wealthy class is behind the hammering. Nope, just the same trickle down explanation that a “global economy” and a lack of job skills are the problems for the American working class.
The New Democrat Coalition’s “American Prosperity” Agenda offers a three-part approach: (1) macro-economic fixes to grow the economy, boost innovation and invest in the drivers of job growth, such as infrastructure; (2) solutions to help individuals and families succeed in a changing global economy, such as educational reform and better access to job skills training and quality childcare; and (3) a commitment to smart, cost-effective government, including regulatory reform and such innovative proposals as a “Yelp for Government” to promote better government responsiveness to citizens’ needs.
What I see is an “economic agenda”. I agree with you that there is nothing in your cite that mentions higher taxes on the wealthy or any suggestion that the wealthy class is behind the hammering.
By construction, therefore, the piece you cited is NOT addressing the wealth concentration issue — it doesn’t even mention it!
I also see NO prominent Democrats in the people cited as “Founding Advisors”. What I see instead is a rather long list of investment and hedge fund advisors.
I’m inviting you to cite Democratic leaders — members of the House or Senate, governors, etc.
I am attacking your commentary, not you. You are repeating a canard has simply has no basis in fact.
No, I do not tweet.
Yup….and even though I spent a considerable amount of time researching this organization of “New Democrats”, I found no mention of that. Why?
And it’s not a canard. It’s a fact. I just proved it. If you want to move the goal posts and not limit it to specific members of congress instead of a group of them, as I have, well, that’s not how I play ball.
The only thing you proved is something that was never in question: The “New Democrat Coalition” is not interested in attacking wealth concentration.
Your assertion is that (emphasis mine):
You haven’t proved it, because it doesn’t exist to be proven. The Democratic Party DOES NOT cite education and job skills training as a remedy for wealth concentration.
Nobody is moving any goal posts. The piece you cited has nothing to do with wealth concentration (as you say, they don’t even mention it) and so they can’t be proposing anything as a remedy for wealth concentration.
There is no “there” there. The remedies for wealth concentration are various proposals such as dramatic increases in tax rates for the very wealthy, a UBI, approaches the tie tax policy to a given GINI ceiling, and so on.
ONLY Democrats are talking about those. Such proposals are how the problem will be solved. Those have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with education and job skills training (or with health care policy, for that matter).
Yup……”New Dems” don’t seem to care. Pete Aguilar (CA-31) | Ami Bera (CA-07) | Don Beyer (VA-08)
Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE-AL) | Anthony Brown (MD-04) | Julia Brownley (CA-26)
Cheri Bustos (IL-17) | Salud Carbajal (CA-24) | Tony Cardenas (CA-29)
Andre Carson (IN-07) | Joaquin Castro (TX-20) | Jim Cooper (TN-05)
Lou Correa (CA-46) | Jim Costa (CA-16) | Joe Courtney (CT-02)
Charlie Crist (FL-13) | Henry Cuellar TX-28 | Susan Davis (CA-53)
John Delaney (MD-06) | Val Demings (FL-10) | Eliot Engel (NY-16)
Elizabeth Esty (CT-05) | Bill Foster (IL-11) | Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05)
Colleen Hanabusa (HI-01) | Denny Heck (WA-10) | Bill Keating (MA-09)
Rubin Kihuen (NV-04) | Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL-08)| Ann Kuster (NH-02)
Rick Larsen (WA-02) | Sean Patrick Maloney (NY-18) | Gregory Meeks (NY-05) Seth Moulton (MA-06) | Stephanie Murphy (FL-07) | Donald Norcross (NJ-01)
Tom O’Halleran (AZ-01) | Beto O’Rourke (TX-16) | Ed Perlmutter (CO-07)
Stacey Plaskett (VI-AL) | Mike Quigley (IL-05) | Cedric Richmond (LA-02)
Adam Schiff (CA-28) | Brad Schneider (IL-10) | Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
David Scott (GA-13) | Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09) | Darren Soto (FL-09)
Adam Smith (WA-09) | Norma Torres (CA-35) | Juan Vargas (CA-51)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23)
Please link to statements where the above named have come out against a fairer taxation system in a way that makes them sound Republican.
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply walk back your incorrect “remedy for wealth concentration” assertion?
We are in violent agreement that Democrats can and should be MUCH more assertive about raising taxes on the very wealthy. We will not solve the wealth concentration problem without recapturing the wealth that has already been hoarded by the 1% and 0.1%. The handful of people who possess that wealth are not going to give it back voluntarily. We MUST tax them.
That is the issue I think we should focus on.
My quarrel with your commentary is your incorrect, misleading, and counterproductive attempt to link our proper focus on education and job skills training to this issue.
We must tax the wealthy. Education and job skills training has nothing whatsoever to do with that.
Amen. How does that change your opinion of the “New Dems” and so many Democrats who won’t come out and say it?
???
I haven’t expressed any opinion about “New Dems”, only you! My objection is to your improper linkage of education and training to efforts to address wealth concentration.
I would like ALL Democrats to be FAR more explicit about raising taxes on the wealthy, I’ve been saying that for the ten+ years I’ve been participating here. There’s nothing to change!
You asked me what Dems are pushing job skills and education to improve the economy instead of taxing the rich. I gave you New Dems as one example. I can give you the Massachusetts House of Representatives as another. I can give you Hillary Clinton as another. I can stand here all day and list one after another.
When it comes to Democrats who point to the truth, it only takes a few minutes. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders…Jamie Eldridge….then I draw a blank.
Sorry, but adorned lists of names are the stuff of Joseph McCarthy. Yes, you offered “New Dems” (you, not me). Nowhere in that cite, or in your commentary about that cite, was there any claim that education and training would address wealth concentration.
What you are unable to do, no matter how many silly lists you offer, is to substantiate your incorrect assertion about a linkage between education and solving the wealth concentration problem. That’s because you made it up out of whole cloth.
Oh, and by the way — free public post-secondary education was a central promise of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Funny how you exclude him from your meaningless lists.
Well, they have a bit to do with each other in the sense that generating more revenue by taxing the wealthy can pay for the education and job training. In fact, I’m pretty sure the proposed Fair Share Amendment is partly earmarked for education.
Of course. The incorrect claim, though, is that education and training will correct the wealth concentration issue.
Can I just point out that the Dems did indeed raise taxes on the rich in 1993 at great political expense, and then again in 2010 with the passage of the ACA — again, at absolutely massive political cost?
Can I also point out the massive political risk taken by the Clintons in trying to get all Americans health insurance? And the historic beating they took for it? They didn’t get killed in 1994 because they somehow weren’t progressive enough. (If you were to say that some of their centrist calculations have not aged well – crime, welfare, etc. — I’d absolutely agree.)
You’re not wrong about everything. But your line of grievance has such gaping holes in it, it’s hard to take you seriously. At the least, please be specific and cite sources so we can have a more fruitful conversation.
Calling the Democratic Party the party of the working class…..has a few gaping holes in it and the result is that working class voters are failing to take it seriously. But hey, we’ve lost the house, the senate, the White House and a majority of state governments so let’s not take people like me seriously, down vote our comments…and continue to lose at the polls! At least we will lose on our principles! (whatever they may be…?)
OK, so let’s talk specifically about those gaping holes and try to fix them. I agree they exist.
But you asserted that the Democratic Party “refuses to raise taxes on the rich”, which I’ve demonstrated is just plain false. I’d appreciate you acknowledging that.
You’re allowed to change your mind. It won’t kill you.
Did Hillary run on a campaign against the 1% and raising taxes on the rich? If she did, I’d change my mind, admit that I was wrong….
Ye;s. See, for example, “We’re going after where the real money is“. Or We’re going after the super wealthy“. Or how about right-wing wailing about her proposal to raise the top estate tax rate to 65%,.
The plain fact is that Ms. Clinton was talking about taxing the 1% and raising taxes on the wealth DURING HER ENTIRE CAMPAIGN.
You just weren’t listening.
It amazes me how little attention many on the left paid to what Hillary was putting on the table. I’m not a Hillary fan. I voted for Bernie in the primary. Yet I did come to appreciate the megaton of offal she was forced to swallow on the campaign trail. And the platform she ran on was by far the most leftist I’ve had the opportunity to vote for in a Presidential final (and I’m 50).
Not only was she looking to go after the super-rich for revenue, she was talking about capping childcare costs at 10% of income, the public option for healthcare and college tuition for the bulk of Americans. The funniest thing in regard to this topic is Hillary wanted to do a Marshall Plan for coal country. Literally, she was the candidate proposing to do the thing that started us down this rabbit hole.
Yet none of that matters for the folks who slap a superficial “devil incarnate” label on her.
It amazed me how little Hillary talked about things on that kitchen table and instead, ran an ad campaign with the basic message that “Trump is a bad man”. She would not embrace the working class values supported by Sanders because in her words, “I got more votes than Sanders”.
All she had to do was agree to bend a bit to the left and take on the Sanders movement, release her transcripts at Goldman Sachs, completely remove herself and her family from the “Clinton Foundation” and spend a few weekends in rural Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and she would have won this thing.
Is there evidence to suggest that the physical presence of a candidate moves a lot of votes in this information age? As someone who lives just down the road from the NH line I’ll admit it’s cool to have access to candidates during the primary, but I can’t imagine them coming to either NH or MA having much impact on my vote.
@ drikeo: Exactly. They’ve already made up their minds, and don’t want to be confused with the facts.
Gee, I did not see that in ANY of the thousands of TV ads I saw that her campaign ran. I was listening, All I heard was a soundtrack of Trump doing what Trump does and her campaign worried that the children are listening….
I agree with you 100% that she had a lot of good things to run on, but “I will be the first woman president” “I am the most qualified” and “Donald Trump is a bad man” were at the forefront of her campaign and in the statements of her supporters.
If only she ran on the values of economic justice for the working class and actually spent more time with working class people instead of wealthy donors, she’d be the president.
I don’t know if that would have worked or not, though she definitely should have pushed harder on making the positive case for her agenda via ads. Dems in particular have to be for something. Yet a lot of why it didn’t seem that she was talking about it at all was the media furiously ignoring her daily attempts to do so.
As for the working class, what they responded to with Trump was xenophobia and racism. He put nothing on the table for them. Hillary did. It’s an open question whether those voters are motivated by policies and programs that could directly benefit them or if they just want someone to tell them “You’re the good people and those other folks are the bad people.”
The popular word in politics today is “optics” and when I saw Mrs. Clinton, I saw a very wealthy woman who was most comfortable associating with wealthy friends and associates.
And sure, xenophobia and racism were motivations for those who voted for Trump this time and Romney and McCain the last time, but it fails to explain the voters who voted for Obama twice and then switched to Trump. He put lots on the table for them. All lies, as it turns out, but by now they are getting used to lies.
@johntmay: It appears to me that you saw only what you wanted and expected to see.
I grant you, and agree with drikeo, that the mainstream media has a major culpability in this disaster by steadfastly ignoring her attempts to do just what we’re talking about so that they could instead focus on “optics”.
“Optics” is just a euphemism for “anything but the boring facts”.
There is no explanation for such a voter cohort because such a cohort does not, in any number measurable, exist. This is canard wholly manufactured to justify a priori distaste for Clinton and a club used to (further0 bash her when down.
1) She was told by many that she didn’t milk her gender enough in 2008 thus conceding the historical significance card to the would-be first black President.
2) Most qualified probably was the best thing she had going for her, and I know I’m hardly the only one who supported her for that reason.
3) Trump really was/is a bad man, and I was one pushing for her to let the ads write themselves with soundbites of him. Yes, we all misjudged how tolerant it turned out this country was for a Dangerous Unqualified Misogynistic Bigot, or as we say in school – BULLY!
I have been a reader and commenter on this site since late 2004, but for various reasons visit far less often than I once did. It does seem to me that, checking in once per week or so, the comments and posts from last week have not rolled off the front page. At one time, if you missed a day, you missed a dozen interesting posts and many interesting replies. Perhaps it is just the new format, but it does seem that traffic is down, by quite a bit.
If so, the endless repetition of this very argument for the last 17 months, with neither progress nor resolution, might have something to do with that declining traffic.
Also too, no one that I know of is saying that job training is a sufficient remedy for wealth inequality. I’ll certainly say it’s desirable — but not sufficient.
Please be specific in pointing out how that is a normative position in the Democratic Party.
The solution for wealth inequality is to identity the foe, the cause, the people behind it but because as you have said, the Money HAS to come from somewhere, the party’s hand are tied as it cannot (more like will not) bit the hands that feed it. No, we identify the foes as racists, misogynists, bigots, and ignorant people of the working class.
How’s that been working out for us?
I’d agree that money is the problem. But it is less so the $ that the Dems raise (though agreed — it is and has been problematic) and more the $ that nakedly owns the GOP — and the media industry that serves its interests.
This is my objection with the criticisms of Dems from the left: They make it seem as if the cause of electoral losses is insufficient fealty to progressive principles (maybe); without mentioning the absolute tidal wave of money and propaganda that would swap moderates and progressives alike. They say “you’re losing!” — which is true! But it’s a false choice to say that therefore they’d win. An ugly possibility is that either would lose.
You know … if more Bernie-crats get nominated, they’re next. They’ll face the same dark money groups, the same media/propaganda landscape, the same mass hysteria — if not more. You and I might prefer them, but to assert that they’d perform better is, again, unproven.
Maybe they’ll draw dormant left-voters to the polls; For example, my friend Nathaniel started the Environmental Voter Project (fundraiser at Ned Devine’s tomorrow evening!) based on the analysis that many enviros don’t actually vote. So maybe a real enviro candidate brings them out.
Trump spent about half of what Clinton spent. …but he had twice the message.
That’s what bothers me about Dems on the right. They think that all they need is the liberal women’s vote, the minority vote, and the liberal professional class voters along with dedicated true believers to “get the vote out” all with a ton of money spent, and the election is in the bag.
I’d like to see a real enviro come out. Hell, I’d like to see a real “anything” come out. Voters want to vote for someone who believes in something other than their own personal ambition for the office. Voters want a candidate with an attractive cover letter and screw the resume. Voters want a candidate who tells them what he or she wants to DO, now what he or she wants to BE.
Actually class resentment is an electorally potent force we absolutely have to harness if we want to win. If you’re running as the candidate who will soak the rich to help the middle class, as Hillary Clinton was, than it’s hypocritical to take speaking fees and spend more time hobnobbing with the blue state elite than with union members in the purple midwest. Make no mistake wide swaths of Americans are angry that they are in the middle class and are getting screwed on both sides of the income ladder. They pay taxes, the poor and the wealthy do not. They don’t get benefits, the poor and the wealthy do.
Read the Greenberg memo. Trump was able to replay the Nixon strategy and channel middle class anger toward the bottom 20%.. But if we channel that anger toward the top 20%, who Richard Reeves and others are citing as the real cause of the breakdown in our meritocracy than we can win these voters back. Greenberg, Edsall, and other observers have consistently articulated this.
Our biggest problem electorally is that the top 20% is increasingly our core base of supporters, cloistered in creative capital clusters. They will don pink hats and go to a pride parade, but the second you democratize zoning laws to solve housing, the second you divorce education funding from property taxes, the second you end upper middle class entitlements like the MID, Pell, and tax free college savings plans you are stepping on their toes. These are the NIMBY Liberals written about in Don’t Blame Us, the best primer on MA politics I’ve ever read.
So I think when prominent political scientists, sociologists, longtime Clinton pollsters, and historians are saying we have a massive divide between the have’s and the have not’s and our single biggest policy problem is wealth inequality and broken social mobility than we have to make our party about fighting wealthy inequality and saving social mobility. John’s details are often wrong, but I find the insistence on so many progressives here who are Warren, Patrick, and Obama supporters that the politics of class is somehow beneath our movement to be astounding. That is the Democratic Party, or at least it was back when it routinely won elections and dominated Congress.
Donald Trump pandered to voters who didn’t care about facts, didn’t care about rationality, didn’t care about the truth. Like all snake-oil salesmen, he made empty promises based on lies — and his “base” ate it up.
What you call “twice the message” I call a flagrant disregard for honesty and simple human decency. Surely we see that playing out already.
His administration is only months old, and he’s already completely reversed or ignored nearly all of his promises.
I think that emulating Mr. Trump is a prescription for utter and complete failure and catastrophe for America.
Voters need to grow up. Voters need to admit that votes have consequences, that voting is a responsibility, and that when they put an incompetent thug in the Oval Office, EVERYBODY — including those voters — suffers.
The people who will suffer the MOST from the few things Mr. Trump has been able to accomplish are the very people who voted for him.
I think that might not be such a bad thing.
Yes, people ate it up. Tell me why? Could it be that both parties have delivered 40+ years of stagnant wages and a continued transfer of wealth to the 1%?
Yes, he lied.
If only we Democrats had a real track record of helping the working class AND ran a candidate who was truly comfortable sitting among the working class.
Maybe the people who ate up the lies would have put something else on their plate.
Trump spending half of what Clinton did is absolutely meaningless with the media giving him all the free publicity.
It’s only meaningless if you think it is. Why did the media give him free publicity? Trump had twice the message “Make America Great Again”, a foe that many voters could identify “non-white people” while Clinton had “I’m with her!” and the foe was “Donald Trump”.
So you’re defending the media shilling for him for ratings?! I try so hard to not call someone obtuse, but I have no other word for what you are doing. The media weren’t promoting him because he had such a great message we could all rally around. They were hoping he’d say something outrageous and he usually did not disappoint. It is IMO almost entirely THEIR FAULT that he was the GOP nominee, and by the time they finally got around to scrutinizing him like a serious candidate it was too late.
The media just did its job and followed an interesting and compelling story. Are you trying to tell us that the media was behind him and wanted him to be elected? He was the GOP nominee beating out favorite son Jeb Bush for the same reasons he won over Hillary Clinton: many working class people felt ignored by politics as usual and either voted for Trump, or stayed home.
Fred’s productive contribution to a new policy we can all support has descended into the same post-primary discussion. This thread has now become remarkably similar to nearly every other post-mortem thread we have engaged in. The righteous Sanders supporter still incensed their man was denied the nomination (albeit forgetting that a majority of Democratic primary voters choose someone else) and the righteous Clinton supporter still incensed that the unwashed pleebs in the Midwest through sheer ignorance, bigotry, and racism selected the other party’s nominee. Etc. Time to move on.
There are serious deficits to either approach. Middle America wants a fighter, not an experienced but sheltered insider. Middle America wants a fighter, not a seminar on Eugene Debs. Let’s think about who in our party has fought for the middle class and has yet to be a national leader. Let’s look to leaders like Northam and Periello in Virginia, Stacey Adams in Georgia, Nina Turner and Nan Whaley in Ohio, Steve Bullock in Montana, Al Franken, Mark Dayton, and Amy Klobuchar in Minnesotta. Surely our next nominee can be under 70, not from the Northeast, and not a well known Washington figure. Carter, Clinton, and Obama all fit that mold. Our next nominee has to as well.
I suggest you’re being too even-handed.
Our resident troll has derailed yet another thread, presenting the same egregious distortions. It is not possible to have a fair discussion of Fred’s very positive contribution while leaving those egregious distortions un-commented on.
These were not just sour-grapes complaints about Mr. Sanders. These were outrageously false attacks and distortions on the entire Democratic Party, as offensive as any of the equally false Swift Boat attacks against Mr. Kerry. The author may claim to be a Democrat, but his commentary has far more in common with Rush Limbaugh lies than any sort of reasoned criticism.
I suggest that when such diatribes are attached to well-intended and reasonable comments such as those in the thread-starter, then such diatribes must be forcefully rejected.
Sanders supporters…..Clinton supporters….. you seem to be missing the point. I supported Sanders and not Clinton not because of who they were, not their celebrity, my support and the majority of people I was familiar with who supported Sanders supported his positions, his values. These are in most every case, the same positions and values held by Elizabeth Warren and a few other Democrats. To try to write us off as “Sanders Supporters” is a huge mistake.
We are working class, blue collar for the most part, Democrats and independents whom the Republican and Democratic parties have ignored or dismissed for decades. We’re not looking for Bernie Sanders to run in 2020, we’re looking for another Democrat to take up that fight and disconnect the party from the umbilical cord is has developed with Wall Street, Big Business, and the 1%.
I was a Sanders supporter. As he is no longer running, I am no longer supporting him. I am, however and most importantly, not giving up my blue collar working class values.
@ johntmay 3p comment:
I don’t care what color your collar is.
You frequently repeat several clearly discredited distortions:
1. “Democrats” offer education and training as a “remedy” to wealth concentration. We don’t.
2. “Democrats” refuse to advocate increased taxes on the wealthy. We do.
3. Hillary Clinton refused to advocate increased taxes on the wealthy. She did.
Whatever color your collar is, if your values do not include telling the truth, facing facts even when they are uncomfortable, accurately representing the statements of others, and similar manifestations of simple courtesy, then I dismiss your commentary.
The universe of “alternate facts”, denial, misquoting, and such stuff is the universe of Rush Limbaugh and the GOP.
It is not what we Democrats do, even if not doing means that we lose an election or two.
You live in a fantasy world. Here in the real world, Democrats have lost the house, the senate, the White House and a majority of state governments because they refuse to attack the 1%, refuse to point to the 1% as their foe and the cause of wealth disparity. Why? To quote Somerville Tom “The money HAS to come from somewhere!”
Yeah yeah yeah. More ditto-head junk..
So now you’re back to recycling a lame “insult” that was pointless and irrelevant the first time you attempted it.
The attacks I see you making here in your commentary are against me (I’m not wealthy and I’m certainly not in the 1%), women, and pretty much anybody who challenges your delusions.
And yet… your position on Trump voters is that they are first, revanchist in the extreme and second, reductivist in the purest sense: the one-two punch of “fuck you for ignoring me” and “what’s in it for me?” of a venomous electorate. That’s the distilled essence of your argument. You further contend that the only way to win is for Democrats to get in on that yummy animosity.
That doesn’t quite fit with your professed support for either the purported positions/values of Sen Sanders. It does, however, fit with Sen McSocialist ill-considered choice of rhetoric like ‘revolution.’
What happened to competence and level-headedness as a ‘value’? Knowing what you are doing? If you are going to approvingly cite Elizabeth Warren let me point out to you that nowhere has she once stepped so much as one toe out of her area of expertise. This is competence and self awareness. You should learn from her before trying to teach others by her.
I do not agree with your distorted assessment of my position, but hey, if you need that straw man in your corner, please feel free to do so. Thanks for not mentioning Rush Limbaugh, in any case.
Please, let’s not play into the idea that someone from the Northeast is somehow not as real an American as someone from the Midwest. We DID kick off the Revolution after all! I CANNOT just move on from the realization you allude to toward the end of your first paragraph.
You don’t have to. The party does if it wants to win presidential elections again.
I’m not sure I want my party to ever accept that either.
@jconway “You don’t have to…”
I disagree. Your strategy risks trading the values and soul of the Democratic Party for short-term electoral gain that, as a result of the choice, will prove meaningless. If anything, we’ve already done too much of that already.
In my view, we need to be prepared to lose presidential elections at least twice while we reshape America and American culture.
We cannot afford to lose two more presidential elections-one more is another to bury the Supreme Court for another generation.
I don’t like it any more than you. I just don’t see any alternative.
The culture of America is a red as it’s ever been, especially at the most local levels of government. So long as that remains the case, the only candidates who will win presidential elections are candidates who appeal to that ruby-red culture.
Worse, that ruby-red culture has brainwashed for decades now by right-wing mass media outlets like Fox and now Breitbart to the extent that they are literally unable to comprehend the myriad ways they are being deceived and exploited.
The sad truth is that 2016 really WAS the election we had to win, and we lost.
I think the challenge for we Democrats now is to do our best to ensure that the United States that we now have still exists at the time when a Democratic Party presidency might actually mean something.
In my view, the Jon Ossoff loss in GA shows us the magnitude of our challenge. Surprise surprise — another strong woman (Nancy Pelosi) is being demonized by the GOP and by the “progressive” wing of the Democrats.
Once again, some are calling for us to throw Ms. Pelosi under the bus — “high negatives” and all the familiar excuses why yet another woman is under attack from our own party.
I suggest that we need to focus a LOT less on winning elections and LOT more on first rediscovering our core values, and then on making those core values the center of a decades-long effort to recapture America.
We need to turn America from red to blue, starting in our villages, towns, cities, and states.
I don’t disagree that we have to start locally. Massachusetts should be the left wing version of Sam Brownback’s Kansas and you and I have lamented that it’s not for quite sometime. Basic stuff like criminal justice reform and progressive taxation-taken for granted by bipartisan policy experts elsewhere-are a steep climb here. Ditto setting up a marijuana market or functional public transit system. Ditto leading on climate mitigation and public health policy.
And when our local government continues to fail, it will drive the death spiral and expand the support for anti-government candidates as we are already seeing in Central MA and the Cape which have grown redder even as the state seems bluest on paper as it’s ever been.
I think part of the culture shift is on our end. We long ago ceased to speak unifying languages and adopted the Rove strategy of playing to our sides cultural wedge issues. We surrendered moral language, patriotism, and civil religion to the right. I still think a Democrat can run on faith, family, and freedom as a motto and support all of the values we stand for. Faith in our country, it’s people, it’s ability to attract the best and brightest from all over and it’s ability to lift everyone up and take care of them. The biggest issue in my cohort is cost to raise a family and focusing on how we bring down those costs is a family value. And freedom-the freedom to be who you are, freedom from fear, and freedom from oppression abroad and at home.
Recognize that politics is a question of priorities and helping the middle class get it’s dignity and security back is by far the most important thing we need to do right now. When the middle class feels it’s security and mobility threatened it turns to demogogues and against liberal democracy. We see this in Europe and we are seeing it here. Time to be One Nation Progressives and focus on how we help all Americans do better by doing better. For the many, not the few.
We won’t have to. We just need to turn out enough voters to crush the deplorables. THAT’s where we need to focus our energy.
That is literally what the Clinton campaign did and it failed spectacularly. Sorry. You had your chance your way, time to let the populists take the driver seat for a spin.
The nesting has stopped so I can’t tell if that was for me, but we only had about 50% turnout so there are plenty more potential voters out there who could be ours. Besides, who isn’t being populist here? I don’t buy your implication that HRC wasn’t populist enough.
I think the media gravely misjudged how seriously to take him and ended up helping him until it was too late. In the end I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of endorsements he got.
I wish you would have included the word “security” in your Marshall Plan. There was a time when working class citizens had security. It was a brief time, existing roughly between the years of 1940-1975, but it existed. There was a time when the job you got right out of school was the job you had up until retirement and in that. there was no problem that your retirement pension and health insurance came with the package. Those days are gone. The new normal: 4 job changes by the time you’re 32 and if you’re like me, terminated at 60. But our Congressional leaders and they rest still see health care and retirement tied to employment as “how it’s supposed to be”.
When 63% of Americans say that workers have less security now than they did 20 to 30 years ago it is a good idea for Democrats to promote security as a value shared by all working class Americans, regardless of any other demographic description.
Security is inferred by ‘care in time of need’. That’s the English version of safety net security.
Okay, but Americans need a more direct word. FDR knew that, but so did Trump.
Please don’t compare Trump in any way to my hero and champion, FDR. It offends me deeply.
Yeah. Those were good times. ..
… if you were white, straight and male.
So rather than expand the good times to the rest by going after the source, you’re approach (along with my nemesis) is to blame the “straight white males”, alienate them from the Democratic Party as the villains….and not attack the wealthy class as the true opposition. How’s that working out for us?
There are none so blind as those who will not see…
Any and all efforts to “expand the good times to the rest” have been interpreted by the straight white males as a lessening of America’s greatness and resisted with all the ardor a true hegemony can muster, which is considerable.
How’s that approach working out in the senate, house, White House, and a majority of sate governments, attacking “straight white males” as the enemy?
So you think that attempts to “expand the good times to the rest” is to be equated with “attacking straight white males..” If you agree with that, and most everything you’ve written suggests you do, then you agree with straight white males… since that’s what straight white males think also.
It doesn’t matter if I attack them or not, anything less then comprehensive, full and outright obeisance is seen as attack and responded to accordingly, as you have proven again and again.
You ought to read what you wrote earlier. Looks like an attack to me.
And there is this:
A common mistake by those who believe in identity politics, assuming uniformity across the demographic categories.
Pro Tip: Not all straight white males think alike.
If that were true then the Congress of these here United States would not be predominantly comprised of straight white males and it wouldn’t have been so comprised for a long long long time…
Straight white males do think alike, as you yourself demonstrate time and again that’s what’s called ‘culture’
The fact that straight white males have been able, by suasion or coercion, or oppression, get others to buy into their culture is called ‘hegemony’.
And any resistance to not thinking alike is termed ‘political correctness”
And that makes you jump to the conclusion that all straight white males think alike….
Tell me this: If straight white males all think alike and straight white males are in control of things, why have the wages of straight white males been stagnant for 40 +years and why are many straight white males experiencing shorter life expediencies?
All the terrorists on 9/11 were Muslims….guess you would agree with Trump’s travel ban, as all that proves that a;; Muslims think alike and we need to ban them from the USA>…
Because I’m a straight white male. I’ve lived in this culture for 50 years and the majority of people I interact with are white and straight and male.
Because I used to think just like you.
I’ve seen many an attempt to change, or just free-think, rebuffed in exactly the way you’re attempting to do it.
Of course it looks like an attack to you. That’s exactly my point.
Anything not straightforwardly genuflecting to the straight white male is deemed an attack on the straight white male. That’s how straight white males think and that’s how you think.
QED.
Wow, gender stereotyping and the accompanying bigotry is strong in you.
As a straight, white, male, I can assure you that nobody seems to be making me out to be the enemy as far as I can tell.
So, if you were to describe the foe of the Democratic Party and assemble a police lineup, what would I see?
Maybe nobody, since this isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about making enemies. If I had to answer the questions maybe I would say oligarchs (not to be confused with everyone who happens to be wealthy) or the religious right (not to be confused with all people of faith), but certainly not any group which can only be defined by their naturally occurring demographic characteristics.
You would see ignorance. You would see bigotry.
You would see unthinking regard for anger over both honor and dignity.
You would see yourself.