[*Be warned, he swears.]
Anyway, for a week I have simply been trying to make sense of what happened, but now it is time to get into a mindset of carrying on, and trying to be effective in a political way. For various reasons, I have ways of not getting very angry when things go horribly wrong, e.g. after the election of 2010. Garrison Keillor sang the weekend after, on his Prairie Home Companion show: “Democracy is fine for me, but I don’t know about you!”
Go ahead and listen to what Jonathan Pie has to say. He basically says, in more colorful language, that The Left sabotaged itself. Listening more closely, there are really two points he makes. The first is that The Left has lost sight of reality so much that it thinks Hillary Clinton is progressive. The second is that The Left keeps spouting precisely the sorts of things that horrifies “The Plebs,” as he calls them: the common people. And it was the common people, obviously (aided by the conservative leaders, ever eager to win the White House at almost any cost) that gave Trump the election. The same thing happened in Britain, with BREXIT, their referendum to leave the European Union. It appears that The Left in both countries is unable to take a lesson from what happens.
Where was Bernie Sanders, Pie asks. This is the same question Michael “Fahrenheit 911” Moore asks. Unfortunately, the strategists behind the Democratic Party (and it’s time to distinguish between the various components of the Democratic Party: the so-called brains of the operation, which however seems to have lost its right to be called that, and the people on the left) have decided that we need a centrist, someone who could compromise with the Right. Bernie would not compromise, but Clinton has, and would; that’s what they thought would appeal to voters. This sort of makes sense, because it has been the absence of compromise that has characterized how the politics of the last decade has gone. Everybody was calculating their strategies based on the elite on both sides (if that word can be used for idiots like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie, and so on). Suddenly, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and the “disenfranchised” Greater White Working Class showed up. These are people of a wide range of income levels, but who are not college educated, by and large, or at least effectively not college educated, and hostile to professionals and those who they perceive to be intellectuals. These are the people, the White Working Class** who tend to think that the nerds and the geeks make things way too complicated. And, it appears, that they feel that the hated lawyers, and economists, and scientists, and teachers, and atheists and foreigners, and uppity women and minorities have had it their way for far too long.
[** And those who have started out working class, but are now business owners, fairly well off.]
The difference between people like, say, Mit Romney and Carly Fiorina on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other hand, is that the first two are college-educated nerds and intellectuals, while Trump is just a regular idiot who says anything that pops into his head. Now, you and I know that Trump is not just a regular idiot: he is a very affluent man who has terrible taste. But he won. Half the reason is that many voters wanted to screw up Washington, for having being screwed by Washington for so long. The other half of the reason is that they have bought into the axiom that a businessman can handle government far more efficiently. This is something that the Greater White Working Class truly believes in, because (as I blogged yesterday) some of these people in the GWWC are not working class. They are self-made rich folks, who own their own businesses, and perceive that there is a lot of waste of money in Washington. They believe that someone who has had to be careful with money in his business will be careful with tax money, like Trump, for instance. Not.
Jonathan Pie fumes that The Left got its message wrong. It just so happens that Bernie Sanders’s message was a little more on point, and Hillary Clinton’s message, which resonated with the Party Faithful, did not resonate with everyone outside of the Democrat Convention hall.
The question I struggle with is: how much can you dilute the message to make it palatable to people who want all the wrong things? We have to realize that a lot of the time, it is campaign bullshit that wins the election, and then the winning side can stop pretending, and has two short years in which to deliver whatever goods they’re going to deliver, in time to get another two years in which to build on it. (Recall how the Democrats were mowed down in 2010.) But is it worth the bad taste in the mouth to promise all sorts of things that you had absolutely no intention of doing? Should the Democrats pander to the GWWC the next time around, promising lower taxes, no agreements with Iran, bombing the heck out of the Middle East, no support of Planned Parenthood, lower gasoline prices, and higher wages for coal miners, if we just can’t, and won’t, deliver on those promises, just because they would be totally wrong?
That’s the choice when the next election rolls round, and we can be sure that more pressing issues will raise their ugly heads before campaign season begins.
[Added Later:]
I've got to get away from these endless post-mortems, and this ceaseless vituperation against the WWC. They still piss me off, they still stand against all the progress that we have made, they still either fail to understand our values, either willfully, or because they do not have the factual or scientific background to come on board. However, I have to grant that they are not all equally depraved, and some of them are on board, but believe that the Left is a bunch of cry-babies complaining about things that might go wrong so far in the future that the present, urgent problems of the common people, which are far more urgent than the problems of arctic polar bears, are neglected. For instance (they might say) The Progressive Left would rather protect the environment of polar bears, than facilitate inexpensive gasoline, which small businesses desperately depend on.
It is a tough job, but we have to prioritize. We must steel ourselves to explain things to anyone who will listen without being patronizing, which is a tough assignment for a professional patronizer such as myself. But some things that we fight for are not as urgent as other things. We have educated our children about the importance of saving the whales, and the wild cheetahs, and recycling, and saving energy, but now they must learn how important, in the scheme of things, each of these issues are. It is difficult to weigh marriage equality versus renewable energy. We're just a little too accustomed to saying WE NEED BOTH! But if we were pressed, we would choose. If you don't want to choose, fine: fight for everything at once. What is in the balance is losing our audience.
Some things we want to fight for have implications for other things: for example, getting money out of politics is a fundamental first step towards making it possible for legislation to take place which is not in the interest of Big Money; almost all the legislation that we're interested in will be opposed by Big Business; we just have to make sure that they don't have the inside track to getting the ear of Congressmen. We need to get a progressive elected to Congress, with absolutely no ties to Big Money, who can get into a Congressional Committee, and call out for particular members to recuse themselves from particular decisions because they have been too heavily helped by particular lobbyists.
Education policy is an important long-term issue. It is, in a sense, the lack of a particular sort of education that results in resistance to progressive initiatives. Privatizing Public Education should never be allowed; I think education is as much a right as a living wage, but we cannot expect that every Education initiative will go over well with the majority of voters. The conservative WWC senses that a liberal education works in the favor of the hated nerds and geeks and intellectuals, which is why they actively disparage a college education (though their womenfolk probably encourage Junior, behind Daddy's back, to go to college).
Some things are time sensitive: for instance global warning is something at which we should hurl all our resources, just so that our fragile oceans are not completely destroyed within a year. It may be too late to have the Federal Government to back our objectives, but there's nothing to prevent liberals of all kinds from organizing a private effort to minimize the impact of our much-vaunted "way of life" on the oceans. We're a little too accustomed to getting Washington to do our ecological chores for us; private pressure has to be applied. It is no wonder that coal-fired power plants are still viable; there really is little support from private individuals for renewable energy. We now have a culture where we will not do anything that isn't made easy for us. We now have single-stream recycling, which is good, but sorting out our recyclables results is more usable materials. That should still be an option, especially for homes with younger kids, who can help with the sorting. We're doing OK, but we may have to do fantastic. I remember a time where recycling was a passion in elementary and middle schools. But we blinked, and not a lot of that enthusiasm is left. The phrase "our way of life" has become code for "trash the planet without let or hindrance." This has got to stop.
Some things have to be approached a little more subtly. Elementary teachers have a lot of influence on their students. Rather than influence them politically, which is mildly contemptible, we should convey the essence of our liberal thinking, especially our attitudes towards landfills and nature, things which are hard to persuade adults about, and scientific facts which must be pieced together to provide a basis for a particular course of action, such as recycling. No one can quarrel with a teacher who is willing to stand up against polluting the environment. A decade ago, I would encourage my student teachers to use their influence wisely, but I felt that the problem had taken care of itself. But it might be time to start up again. We need our best and brightest in the classroom, not the least confident young people who feel unable to take on any job other than elementary teaching.
The obstructionism that Michael Moore advocated is, I believe, wrong-headed. Tit-for-tat tactics ultimately work in the disfavor of anyone who is proposing something complex and sophisticated, as we are. But selective obstructionism makes sense. We can certainly be relentless in our obstruction of initiative that are regressive, such as abandoning the Paris Accords, etc., even if we're fairly sure that the Paris Accords will be history.
[More to come.]
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