I’m grieving along with everyone else in this joint, but at some point we need to put away the urn filled with the ashes of this year’s electoral disaster and figure out where to go next. This diary is a tentative (and perhaps too-early?) step toward that “figuring out.”
Please understand that none of this diary is meant to be pejorative to any candidate or faction in any way: my purpose here is to describe reality as I see it, as objectively as I can manage.
Taking inspiration from Alcoholics Anonymous, I think step one is admitting that we have a problem.
The scoreboard on Tuesday November 9th established beyond reasonable doubt that we do, in fact, have a problem — but not just that result: the crushing defeats — not just reasonably-to-be-expected-in-mid-terms modest losses, but crushing defeats — we suffered in the mid-term elections in 2010 and 2014, and the fact that we didn’t take back both houses of Congress in the 2012 presidential election, point to deeper problems for the Democratic Party.
The clear (to me, at least) implication of the failures of the last 6 years is the first lesson of 2016:
1. Even when we win, we don’t win enough. We don’t have a big enough coalition of voters to reliably give us a governing majority (i.e., Democratic president and Congress), and I don’t see this changing for the foreseeable future unless we act to expand our coalition.
The “Coalition of the Ascendant” that is the current target demographic of the Democratic Party is composed of highly-educated voters, particularly in the bigger, more cosmopolitan “Alpha” and near-alpha cities (New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) plus racial and cultural minorities (POC, LGBTQQA, et al.)
Added together, that is roughly 50% of the country. What that means is that in “wave” years (e.g., 2006, 2008), we may get a governing majority, but the more usual, typical case will be that the presidency and/or at least one house of Congress will be in Republican hands, which the last 6 years have amply shown is enough to make any significant progress on issues Democrats care about extremely unlikely, at best.
We need more people to be reliable, loyal democratic voters, so that the worst case is we have 50% plus a smidge, and the usual case is we have a governing majority. That is the only way to make progressive change that won’t be repealed the next time a Republican takes the White House (and for that matter, will make it unlikely for a Republican to gain the White House to begin with).
Where are our opportunities for expansion? That’s the second lesson of this year’s disaster:
2. The Democratic Party is not doing nearly enough for working class voters.
Notice I didn’t say, white working class. I said working class, period. Of every ethnicity. Let me define what I mean by working class: “people living the usual situation of the 70% of the country that does not have a college degree.”
If you use any reasonable proxy for the wildly-theoretical, absolute maximum percentage of Americans that can possibly get a college degree — making unicorns-farting-rainbows-level optimistic assumptions about uniformly well-funded and excellent public schools, pervasive, no-cost tutoring, universal and free SAT prep, already-complete solutions to all other social problems that interfere with educational excellence, and so on — the number is not much above 50%, and the more realistic (but still highly-ambitious, way-long-term-project) number is somewhere around 35%. (Again, the current number is 30%.)
So even under the reasonably-achievable, best-case scenario, the vast majority of Americans are:
A.People who will never get a college degree, and;
B. The people who’ve been losing ground the last 30-40 years.
Again, this is 70% of the country. This is the only source of enough votes to be decisive.
Notice that I said, “the usual situation”. You might point out that there are people who don’t have college degrees who are doing just fine (e.g., Bill Gates) and you’d be right. The thing is, people like Bill Gates, and for that matter the more typical example like, say, a guy who went from being a carpenter to a successful contractor, are not the typical case, most of the time. The vast, VAST bulk of people who do not have college degrees have been either running in place or slipping backwards the last 30-40 years.
That “vast majority of Americans who will never get a college degree” includes millions of ex-manufacturing workers who used to make a good living by making things here in the U.S. For decades, the economy offered them a way to use their skills and gifts and afford the basics of life, plus a little fun. It is increasingly the case that our economic system has no real place for them. Those with less than a college degree have precious few ways to support a family in anything approaching comfort. And even these avenues are vanishing.
Donald Trump won enough of those voters (particularly midwestern former Obama voters) to win the election by saying explicitly that he was going to bring those jobs back. Or, as the invaluable Atrios paraphrased Trump’s message:
Show me a problem, and I'll fix it. Not set up a plan to adjust the framework to tweak the incentives to modestly change the market outcomes. Just fix it.
I saw Hillary Clinton, more than once, say (in a “can-you-believe-these-people??” tone) that “those jobs are never coming back!” When it came time to talk about HER plan to replace the missing jobs that have devastated whole communities in the industrial north, it sounded an awful lot like “...set up a plan to adjust the framework to tweak the incentives to modestly change the market outcomes...” rather than a practical, creative way to solve the problem. I think that, more than anything else, cost her the election.
I said at the beginning that none of this diary is meant to be pejorative to any candidate or faction in any way: my purpose here is to describe reality as I see it, as objectively as I can manage. This link is a Cracked article, and so is written in a click-baity, punchy and slightly glib tone — but is was written by a liberal blue-stater who grew up in a deep red part of Illinois. I am honest enough about my own faults, and read enough comments here on Daily Kos, to be able to confirm the general substance of his comments:
In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town -- aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.
[...]
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination.
[...]
So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who'd be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.
It was a vote of desperation.
I say this as someone with family in both red and blue America. My father was urban (lace-curtain Irish in Chicago) and urbane, and my mother grew up on a farm. The suffering the author describes is real, and it needs alleviation. I’ve road-tripped through 47 states, and I can confirm the basic outlines of the author’s description.
As both a moral matter, and as a matter of pragmatic politics, we need to offer something to the working class besides platitudes and condescension.
This is becoming a novel, so I’ll continue in part 2.