Yes, better Dem messaging and genuine candidates matter, but so does a vision that reforms broken systems
Veteran Rahm Emanuel is no progressive ideal, indeed an acerbic critic, but Dems need to hear his current analysis. Emanuel, former Chicago mayor, is rightly skewered for controversial, belligerent actions, weakness on police violence, and no friend of unions when trying to privatize public education. As Obama’s chief of staff, he supported the neoliberal ‘08 bank bailout, initially pushed a more limited ACA, and backed NAFTA, which Sherrod Brown makes clear has not only devastated working people but spurred the midwest states’ hard rightward lurch this century.
Yet Emanuel rightly argues Dems must frame Trump as a rank plutocrat, shredding his slew of hypocritical populist lies while pushing fat cat tax giveaways and fawning over Big Oil and Big Pharma. He correctly identifies that Harris’ “happiness campaign” misread the electorate: “Campaigns of joy in an era of rage don’t win elections.” Did the Harris thinktank deem legacy minorities immune from “raging against the system”?
In a Wash Post essay, Emanuel displays his celebrated assumption, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste . . . [it’s] an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Only a week ago, during a NYTimes interview, Emanuel repeated this winning-is-all model, “I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.”
Perhaps Dem bigwigs will hear this centrist party veteran. Of course, most progressives resolve that morality and winning elections must be connected, otherwise the elected are overly “pragmatic,” if not ruthless career technocrats, even immoral transactionalists like Trump. Too bad the tradition-bound Biden, shying away from talking major systemic reforms, ignored another Emanuel quip, “My attitude is govern as if you’ve run your last race. That’s not to say I’ve run my last race, but govern with a liberation and a freedom; change your mind frame to operate that way.”
A missed groundswell of resentment
In “The road back to power for Democrats,” Emanuel urges “messengers and messages that meet the moment.” Unlike Trump’s channeling of a seething, populist anger, the “Democratic Party has been blind to the rising sea of disillusionment. In today’s America, aspiration and ambition have been supplanted by anger and animosity. . . This groundswell of resentment had been simmering for years. Trump just seized on it.”
From 2020 to 2024, Trump doubled his share of the Black vote to 16 percent, while the Latino vote rose from 35 percent to 43 percent . . . [because] “for the first time in American history, there is a generation of voters who believe that their children won’t be better off than them.” Disenchantment begin with the Iraq War (called by JD Vance a “disaster”), then the Obama blunder that failed to protect homeowners and, as bad, let bankers off the hook, here termed “a mistake,” — not “to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.”
In the same light, later came the Covid pandemic when Democrats “enthusiastically morphed into the establishment” and by “following the science” shuttered schools and the economy. Fulfilling the “aloof elite” stereotype, Dems complacently had their own “hermetically sealed conversation.” While inflation soared and academic scores plummeted, Democrats got stuck debating “pronouns, bathroom access and renaming schools.”
Trump, on the other hand, “captured the underlying zeitgeist.” Thus, Dems should no longer “tiptoe” around explosive issues like crime, immigration, homelessness and drug overdoses, even carjacking. Critically, Democrats must recruit “candidates whose biographies conveyed authenticity,” as in war veterans, sheriffs, small business owners and former football players – not career politicians. In short, Emanuel concludes that Democrats must seriously alter “their message and messengers, abandon failed orthodoxies and embrace strategies with a record of delivering seats, success and real prosperity.”
That’s all well and good, but abandoning failed orthodoxies must for progressives mean talking about serious systemic reforms of seriously broken systems that litter the American wasteland. Horrendous gerrymandering (mostly by the right but also the left) has distorted the democratic equality ideal of one person, one vote. The Electoral College, by incorporating senate seats, is the poster child for outdated inequality at the center of national elections. The Senate filibuster, as progressive senators argue, only delivers leverage to minority, billionaire money. Oligarchs already have ready ways to get richer (tax avoidance) while establishing “aristocratic” family legacies that can corrupt politics for generations. Older inheritance taxation, anyone?
Start with the backward Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is a disgrace, with the highest public disapproval ever. Who but rank partisans can defend an entire justice system so disgracefully deficient it cannot bring to trial a career criminal with countless indictments? That courts are imprisoned by unworkable procedures is bad enough, but to allow Trump, swimming in criminality, to escape federal liability on core democratic issues – that demands fundamental, systemic reform. If this criminal gets off scott free, why not smarter, even more predatory outlaws?
The list goes on: immigration is the rightwing “problem” it never wants to repair, being core fodder for Trump’s cynical, nativist hustle. Health care remains badly broken until an inhumane, greedy profit-system gives way to decency and universal access. Militarism at the heart of foreign policy defeats our security interests, and no president escapes massive defense spending – then decisions to use armaments that then need replacement and more technology. The highly-concentrated mass media, ever more rightwing and oligarchic, is part of this march towards know-nothing suicide. Whether the press or the social network sites, what aspects of technology, whether secretive crypto and artificial intelligence, move us in a progressive direction that increase opportunity, if not tolerance for the less privileged or darker skinned.
No doubt readers will identify other badly broken systems. The last election, decided IMO by the misinformed. the under-informed and the suckered, testifies not only to profound media failures but an entire education system that’s not teaching history, science, law and culture, how to value genuine knowledge, nor think analytically enough to overcome the endless swamp of celebrity, deception and corruption.
Of course, no positive, democratic systemic reforms will happen as long as Trumpthink (with or without Trump) dominates. Musk is rife with his own autocratic “reforms” that will empower the least enlightened oligarchs to rule with an iron fist and dictatorial dollar. So what Emanuel misses isn’t the practical aspects of finding better candidates real to the moving mass of centrist voters, but not insisting on a vision by which income and assets are more equitably divided and which expands opportunity, even justice, to more, not fewer people. Emanuel gets the operational party challenges but not the big picture moral and intellectual dilemmas.
For a larger context, let’s end with former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann’s relevant conclusions when discussing how his old cable channel must update its voice: “You may now be the last line of defense for the free press and thus the future of representative government in this country. The bullies don’t stop hitting you because you’re nice to them. They stop hitting you when you knock them out.” Systemic reform begins with a new, unabashed vision and support narratives – then finds electoral support for what would be nothing less than the Second Progressive Era. I am not holding my breath. Winning is still easier to sell than arcs of justice.
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