What strikes me about how the Democrats have evolved over the last six years, is just how cowardly, how easy to disillusion, how easy to discourage we've become, and just how little will we have to treat Republicans like the Bullies they are, instead of trying to reason with everybody else to reject them. The truth of the matter is, there is no secret logic out there we could use to get Republicans off our backs, to give ourselves the opportunity to reason with Americans. Their tactics were built on social engineering and social dominance, not some competing mode of logic. In that lies their strength. In that lies their weakness.
Our weakness? We run from cognitive dissonance. We expect purity from our people, but instead of waging political wars to clear out the impure, we stay home and stew in our juices. I believe when we look at this, we'll find abysmal turnout numbers for our side.
What, you weren't inspired? I guess it's not your fault that Republicans turned out, nor that the candidates weren't necessarily that good... what is your fault is that you expect perfect candidates and perfect choices to be presented to you on the ballot. Rarely is the choice as clear as it was in 2006 and 2008. We might just get such a clear choice in 2016, but quite frankly, we have to get out of the habit of expecting that if we don't show up to the polls, and the Republicans win big, that we're going to get the leaders we want.
My observation of what happens every time Republicans win big in an election is that Democratic Party politicians will veer to the right, veer back towards the center, in order to appeal to those voters. But this is an instinct developed during the time of Reagan, when white voters still dominated, when folks really were getting more conservative, at least on economic issues.
That's not what's happening here. I agree if you're telling me that Democrats shouldn't be running away from Obama, from the left. all they do is reward those who bash us in order to dominate us socially. At the same time, though, there are other Democrats, other people who have learned to run from our party in the other direction, in the vain hope that if we stay home, that the Democratic Party as an institution will take that as a punishment from the base.
We're trying to act like the Republicans, who took their defeats in 2006, 2008, and 2012 as signs of this punishment. Thing is, though, consultants in the GOP tell their people that they need to activate their base. Many consultants in our party tell them to triangulate to the center. It's rare when we're the base they need to please.
This asymmetry is at the heart of why we lost.
The left in America has got to stop kidding itself that if it leaves the field of political battle, that the party as an institution will fight to keep them. Remember, the leadership of this day and age are Democrats who came to greater power during the time of Reagan, during the time of the Clinton-era Republican Congress. Their default strategy is to triangulate to the Right and Center. They will only do otherwise when they think it's safe.
Let me speak to something else: stop making false equivalences. My experience of the last twenty years is that the end result of saying that Democrats are no better than Republican, no different, is that Republicans get elected, and then show us exactly HOW different they really are. Yes, it's disappointing and frustrating to see Democrats triangulate towards the center and the right. But that is what's going to happen with this generation of Democrats as long as Republicans make these giant advances.
And why do the Republicans make these giant advances? It's simple. Because they can scare and anger their voters on a consistent basis into showing up. We don't show up when we get angry, we sulk at home, wondering why our candidates can't be more ideal. Well, sorry, this is the real world. They accept their shit sandwich candidates, even defend them furiously, because they believe the alternative is apocalyptically worse. These people are scared as hell of our people getting elected.
Do we apply fear and hatred and all that other good stuff in the opposite direction?
No. They've pushed a model pretty far, and I'm confident they're going to pay the price during the next two years. You can't elect idiots like this forever without something going wrong. I weep for what will result, but we're about to get a good idea of why Republicans are not just the same as Democrats.
But we do need to realize something: We will not get consistently liberal, consistently attentive Democratic Party Leaders until our power has been consolidated. We need to stop focusing so hard and so early on cleaning house, because quite frankly, we haven't eliminated the forces, or passed the generation that would default towards doing that when stressed.
We need to occupy Washington, so to speak, for a long-term majority. Only when folks feel safe to act like Democrats, will we be able to push the needle back the other way, both in the party and outside of it.
As for the social dominance part? Look, it's good to be logical. It's good to reason with voters. However, we can't just reason. People are not just rational. They have fears, they have internalized social protocols that will lead them to do nutty things like raise the minimum wage and elect a Senator who would just as soon lower them. People don't always think the sum totality of their actions completely through, and the right hand will often not know what the left hand is doing, philosophically speaking.
It's not about thinking people are stupid, it's understanding that folks have to really sit down and think things through when it comes to clearing house, rationally speaking.
It also means something else, though. If people have been primed with enough of our principles, we can go in and we can say, look, you like this, you like that, you believe this, why not become a Democrat? The Republicans over there are rejecting anybody who isn't pure, we can respect differences.
Ah, but then you get to the bullying aspect of this. Republicans have become very good at knocking people down, putting their boot on your head.
Truth is, though, there are ways to fight it. But reasoning against the Republicans isn't the way. We have to figure out our own set of tools, our own set of rhetorical weapons for putting them in their place, for signaling our mastery over them, as they have done towards us. We have to stop being ashamed of who we are, whether we're to the left or the right of our party center. We have to stop saying "both sides are the same" or that "it won't make any difference." There is a difference between compromised Democratic Party governance, and uncompromised Republican Party governance, and the Bush Administration shows us what that difference is. If you're asking, what do I tell people when I can't promise them the ideal? Then my response is to say, "fuck ideals" Fuck ideals. We're not getting ideals. We'll never get ideals. It's chasing after ideals that is bankrupting the Republican Party, and ruining it without much help from us.
We are a party of moderation, as much as anything else. We're a party that builds our policy on more solid, more scientifically reliable grounds. We're not building our power on conspiracy theory, or any of that other junk. We're building it on the foundation of reality.
Republicans are flakes. They're radicals. They call themselves conservatives, but they consistently destroy the institutions they mean to protect. They are the well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve, overly trusting, overly dogmatic party of incompetence and wishful thinking. We can't attack them the same way they attack us. We have to identify the failings of that party, and target our attacks to that. The biggest fault of the Republican Party is that it's not here on planet Earth. It's off in Na-na land. It's off chasing the Philadelphia Experiment with Agenda 21, off chasing the Bilderbergers through Obama's FEMA camps. We got to ask people, why believe this crazy stuff? Why buy into this conspiracy theory? They're selling people the Brooklyn Bridge, repeatedly distracting them from reality.
Long story short, these people are vulnerable. We can choose to snipe at each other, or we can aim a considerable barrage of criticism and ostracism, and other social tactics their way, to isolate and remove Conservative influence from the mainstream.
But this won't happen overnight. We must be patient and persistent, because no system as big, as complex, as fraught with special interests like ours is will change easily, even in the face of public distrust and disgust.
We can just show up every four years, elect a President, and expect things to turn out right. We got to show up, we got to be there, and we have to dominate.