We’re awash in post-mortems. The pundits admonishing the Democrats to appeal more to the “working class” are like the family chorus in a marital satire telling a recently divorced woman all the things she should have done to keep her husband. “If you’d only done X, Y, and Z, he never would have run off with that tramp.” It was the pot roast, mom.
Maybe it’s simply this: Faced with a choice between the rather quiet, unexceptional woman having a rational conversation by the wine and cheese tray and the loud, orange-wigged prancing clown gesturing obscenely in the middle of the room to the hoots and whistles of his white supremacist friends, America went with the clown.
I get it. Biden’s grim resistance to stepping aside placed the party and Harris in a very difficult position obscured by her early bump in popularity. Harris herself ran a tepid campaign. She didn’t define her policies or herself enough, in other words, where’s the beef? The Democratic National Committee, so timid and misguided, so beholden to its own inner circle of consultants and donors, and so absolutely incompetent, left its spore all over this campaign. Harris’s failure to renounce Biden’s support of Israel’s Gaza slaughter appalled millions of us and damaged her, not just in lost votes, but by a failure of courage that left her half-hidden in Biden’s shadow. Still, I voted for her because I’d rather get a thin hamburger made of real, but tasteless beef than a sh*t sandwich slathered in gutter-sauce.
BUT—all that obscures the viscerally awful reality. This election is a coup in the making since the 1950s. The Republican Party, as part of a broad-based strategy, has been playing the racism card ever since Lyndon Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell drove the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through Congress in 1964 and 1965. This turned the so-called “New South” away from the segregationist southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) and into a solid wall of Republican Red. The long-term plan to take over the judiciary, a goal since the Supreme Court’s 1954’s Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision in favor of school desegregation, became a crusade after Roe vs. Wade in 1973. No surprise—racism and male control, the two old reliables in the fascist stable.
Let’s give credit, too, to Rupert Murdoch’s multi-media propaganda machine and its imitators. Joseph Goebbels would have been proud. The hirelings, Limbaugh and company, made liberal a dirty word; then turned government, evolution, homosexuality, science, and truth itself into Pavlovian triggers for rage. Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter and chat, finished the job, offering every nut-job instant gratification and reinforcement via an algorithm directed chorus of yeas. Meanwhile the “gatekeepers” of the Web conveniently found it impossible to filter out the trolls who threatened virtually every outspoken woman with death threats and various forms of torture and assaults, as well as the bots that flooded social media with so many lies about candidates that those addicted to their screens gave up on discerning truth or ideas entirely. Politics became a trance-inducing stroboscopic barrage of sound bites and lurid images. The medium is the message and the medium became a darkly magical realm of bots, trolls, pixels, and a Disney World of wild rides through garish fantasies.
“They’re everywhere, because they’ve always been here. They’re just waiting for a leader…it’s not political…It’s a state of mind. They’re like fascists. There’s no mystery to them. At the core they’re bullies and they’re cruel.” from “Clete”, a novel by James Lee Burke, 2024.
Nowhere was the Republican-Trump hate machine on clearer display than when it targeted illegal immigrants, itself a pejorative term because it ignores the political maneuvering that makes them illegal. This is the issue that arguably won the election for Trump. Much of Trump’s rhetoric is right out of the Nazi playbook: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now…13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now living happily in the United States…they’re poisoning the blood of our country.” According to the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, a group of law enforcement leaders—sheriffs and police chiefs—dedicated to protecting immigrant rights, Trump drastically expanded the guidelines for deportation from those used by Obama (whose guidelines were restored by Biden). “These broad categories could be extended to cover those with minor offenses like speeding, or those who committed immigration offenses, like unlawful entry, even if they never were charged with those offenses.”
The facts are that immigrants, including illegals, are doing millions of jobs that established American citizens don’t, won’t, or can’t do. They are a major source of grass roots economic growth and small business development. They’ve established many close-knit communities. Their kids are among the most driven in a public school system that has been corroding for decades. Illegal immigration itself has fluctuated over the past 15 years and the image of floods of parasitic criminals swarming our borders is not borne out by statistics. As for crime, statistical studies have shown that immigrants in the U.S., including illegals, have not driven up crime rates.
Such is the extremism we’ve chosen. There are no easy fixes, no strategy sessions, no recasting of images that will save the future from environmental collapse, a corrupt judiciary, disintegration of infrastructure, a dangerously fraying food chain, and politics based on percolating white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and, basically, phobia itself. Million man marches and nationwide women’s marches feel real good but like a weekend binge, the effect quickly wears off.
All the post-mortems about Democrats having abandoned the working class for identity politics are valid when applied to how they conduct campaigns. Their big mistake is allowing themselves to be depicted as out of touch. But for all their faults, they have in fact defended the social safety net, the environment, unions, affordable medical care, and basic human rights to a degree no one bothers to notice or acknowledge. Their approach to the economy is far more worker-friendly than the Republicans and during Democratic administrations, far more successful.
Republicans have been thoroughly and continuously soaking the poor, working, and middle classes since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. It is middle America that elects the corporate elitist, anti-labor, big finance-pharma-energy-defense consortium that gives tax cuts to the hyper-wealthy; are closing rural hospitals; gutting medical care, housing, infrastructure, and schools; and cutting food stamps and lunch programs. Give Republican voters that much credit at least: they’re adept at screwing themselves. To some extent, the Democrats’ fumbled messaging is a result of many voters simply tuning out boring policy details for rabid sound bites. Back in 1980 people were wearing “Nuke Iran” t-shirts and voting for Ronald Reagan while his campaign made a deal with the Iranians not to release the embassy hostages until after the election in order to help Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Now, 44 years later, the methods are that much smoother and more effective.
Going forward, we need to confront reality. That means analyzing how and by what procedures the extremists who run this country plan to tighten their hold over government. Understand the mechanisms of power and lay it out in terms that grip folks. Spell out alternatives. Blaming Trump is tempting but he’s the open sore of the disease, not the disease itself. The Republicans’ goal, as Trump has said and the Supreme Court made clear, is to remain in control of a theocratic, single-party state where the military can break up protests after it is purged of officers who won’t pledge allegiance to their leader, already a specter haunting the Pentagon and the generals who warned America that Trump is a fascist.
So forget the DNC-style tweaks to how Democrats present themselves. We’ve got to fight back with passion. The next post will consider what this means.
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