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Democrats: Stop Whining [1]

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Date: 2023-11-14

The 2020 and 2022 elections are over, and we have, at least for the moment – if you discount the clown show in the House - maintained a semblance of democracy. One cannot understate the role of the myriad people who knocked on doors, wrote op-eds, and then went out and voted despite the obstacles placed by Republican administrations all over the country. And we should thank Trump, too. Had Trump been less Trumpian, a bit less narcissistic, a touch less stupid, we could have lost. And that would have been the end of the American experiment. Only he can fix it. Sure.

And then there were the requests for money. The daily barrage of pleas, humble requests, faux surveys, etc., etc. Requests made necessary, I suppose, by Citizens United, that case in which our inferior Supreme Court decided to put democracy up for sale. But why did the Democrats decide to take fund-raising lessons from NPR? I love NPR, but I’ve never sent them a nickel because their fund raising is so irritating.

How do these endless requests for money advance the cause of preserving American democracy? It’s not money; it’s language.

For years it has seemed that Republicans have hijacked the language and left the Democrats to come up with explanations instead of compelling slogans. Reagan says, “There he goes again!” But when Dukakis is accused of being a member of the ACLU, he looks like a kid caught with his hand in the candy jar rather than a man of principle supporting an organization that stands for the best this country has to offer. Hillary Clinton comes up with a zinger - “basket of deplorables” - but then tries to roll it back rather than calling bullshit on the right wing suggestion she hates Americans.

Goebbels apparently said that a lie repeated often enough will be believed; the corollary of that should be that the truth stated clearly and often will overcome those lies. One can hope. But one thing is clear: politics lives in the gut, not the brain. If the Democrats insist on responding to ridiculous right wing talking points with complicated, wonky explanations, they are not speaking to the gut. That means there is a substantial minority of this country which, due to its alimentary approach to politics, is only getting one story. And on the basis of that misinformation, that minority will vote against its own interests.

But there’s more.

The pay-to-play political system created by Citizens United continues: more humble requests for money, more hysterical assertions that make a sentient person shake his head. There are no Supreme Court “miracles”; whether McCarthy hates something is irrelevant; Liz

Cheney is not crying. And when someone sends me unsolicited congratulatory emails telling me I’ve been selected to do this, that, and the other thing because I’ve had such a great record of support. . . . Well, I delete it.

A few days ago I received an email entitled “Clarence Thomas is SOBBING.” The email went on to solicit contributions: “drop EVERYTHING you’re doing. Don’t ignore this email. Don’t check Facebook. Don’t do ANYTHING until you chip in to pass The Supreme Court Ethics Act and PUNISH Clarence Thomas before he DESTROYS everything we hold dear. Rush $5 now, then read why below.” First, Clarence Thomas isn’t sobbing. He is plotting how to disassemble American democracy for the benefit of his billionaire handlers. To clarify, we are not pushing to preserve democracy to PUNISH anyone. And, my $5.00 contribution is not going to do anything to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act. For those who have forgotten (or never learned), legislation starts in the House, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Finally, pardon me for wondering how giving money to a political action committee can have any effect on the balance of power in the halls of Congress.

The stakes are high. We are in a battle for the soul of this country, but it extends far beyond our shores. Despite myriad missteps, the US is the template for functional democracy. When the US fails to live up to its promise, there is a ripple effect all over the world. One can question whether the upsurge of fascist strongmen in the world would have been so dramatic had our own tin pan want-to-be dictator not made it evident that during his reign of incompetency that America was no longer in the business of democracy. Had the US not appeared so compromised, it is doubtful Putin would have initiated his war of aggression against Ukraine. If we do not push back on the right wing nationalists – fascists by any definition – this country and the world will enter a very dark period.

What are we up against? Maybe our own fecklessness.

There is a recurrent theme in the emails I receive. “Donald Trump has taken the stage in his ginormous rally in Podunk, Texas!!!!” This is, of course, irrelevant to anything substantive. Psychopaths gonna psychopath. Donnie’s been seeking the limelight ever since he unseated his older brother in his father’s approval. There is only one way that a fat old man’s getting on a stage in front of drooling acolytes has any substantive meaning: If Donald Trump has some enormous power that should cause us fear.

That is, of course, exactly what the MAGAts want us to think. It’s an aspect of the

Ubermensch, “Only I can fix it.” It is, of course, ludicrous. The man’s a moron. Like the Tea Party, he is a fabrication of the corporatists looking for a way to beguile a large segment of our society into jettisoning any sense of personal or national interest. The only way Trump has power is if the corporatists believe he is continuing to ensure they will not have to pay their share and if the actual conservatives in the Republican Party shut their mouths and line up behind him.

The Ubermensch is a strong man, the linchpin of fascism. How do the Democrats marshal their efforts against totalitarianism by conceding the point? That Trump is merely the Pillsbury Doughboy of cardboard characters does not change the analysis. If the Democrat text presents Trump as that all-powerful figure, it supports the MAGAt message.

There is another aspect of Democratic messaging that is more pervasive and equally pernicious. This is what I call the “I fall upon the thorns of life/I bleed” approach to politics. Given the Republicans want to characterize us as “snowflakes” or “woke,” that kind of whining helps them, not us.

I collected a number of Democratic fund raising emails. I’m not certain if it was to amuse myself or to piss me off. Someone writes, “We begged ... We pleaded ... We failed. Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene is LAUGHING at us.” Alternatively, “the GOP is LAUGHING at us.”

Maybe this is my personal limitation, but I find it hard to figure out the political effectiveness of reacting to the national political scene as if it were an elementary school playground. On other occasions, I am told the GOP, or MTG, or DeSantis, or Trump should be “ashamed.” Again, the political significance of this eludes me. Though, to be clear, I don’t think fascism is susceptible to shame. Is Trump ashamed of lying whenever he opens his mouth? Pardon me while I laugh my coffee out my nose.

The misses keep on coming. I received an email from e.stoprepublicans.com telling me the following: “We’re conducting a standard review of our voter records and your profile was flagged. Currently, your profile shows that you voted for George W. Bush. Because you’re a top 95404 Democrat we want to confirm that our data is correct. Please take 30 seconds to confirm your voting history.” What in the hell is this? They sure as hell don’t have any records about my voting because it’s none of their fucking business. I have received myriad such emails over the last months, in particular emails that proclaim a “DATA ERROR,” because stupidity is so much more convincing when it’s all in caps. I have wondered whether this nonsense is actually being promulgated by dirty tricks Republicans, but the idiocy is so consistent with Democratic campaigning I’ve decided that’s what it must be.

There are two wars going on. One is real – what is good for the country – and the Democrats should win that one hands down. Then there’s the rhetorical battle, in which in which the Republicans have controlled the narrative since Reagan. It is not clear to me why the fictions propagated by the Republicans have gained such prominence in our political society. On the other hand, it is clear that if the Democrats do not learn to speak to the people they represent, the absurdities of the Potemkin President will continue to erode our government.

Steve Earle, the bad-boy country singer from Texas, nailed it. In a 2020 interview with The Rolling Stone, Earle argued that the American political left has lost touch with the working class, a fact that helped facilitate the election of Donald Trump as president. Regarding his album Ghosts of West Virginia, which addressed the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in 2010, he wrote, “One of the dangers that we’re in is if people like me keep thinking that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist or an asshole, then we’re fucked, because it’s simply not true. So this [album] is one move toward something that might take a generation to change. I wanted to do something where that dialogue could begin. I said I wanted to speak to people that didn’t necessarily vote the way that I did, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have anything in common. We need to learn how to communicate with each other. My involvement in this project is my little contribution to that effort. And the way to do that — and to do it impeccably — is simply to honor those guys who died at Upper Big Branch.” (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ musiccountry/steve-earle-ghosts-of-west-virginia-album-1002948/)

I have only one dispute with Earle: There is a segment of Trump’s supporters who are actual fascists, and I am not sure that rotten-to-the-core-racism is reparable. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Americans of all political persuasions are not deplorables; we have more in common than things that separate us.

The non-fascist Trump voter is likely to be a blue collar worker who is busting his hump to feed his family – he is, in fact, the traditional Democratic voter. The Republican Party has done nothing for working people since Eisenhower, yet there is a large portion of workingclass Americans who think the guy with the gold toilet is their standard bearer. What happened?

Probably Reagan, who not only perfected the one-liner political argument but also demonstrated that with the right constituency, politics could be richly remunerative. When the Republicans began disassembling the safety net, the Democrats were asleep at the switch or, worse, complicit. It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and cut welfare benefits. Did the Republicans hate Bill Clinton because he was so much better at being a Republican? Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall a mainline Democratic pushback on the myth of trickle-down economics despite the absence of a scintilla of evidence that working people are benefited by giving billions of dollars to the one percent. When viewed through the lens of the Democratic Party’s washing its hands of the working poor, Hillary Clinton’s failure to campaign in the Rust Belt was logical if extraordinarily short sighted and fatal to her campaign.

If we are going to save this country from the fascism that has infected it, the Democrats are going to have to re-learn how to talk to Joe the Plumber. He is a natural constituent of the Democratic Party, and he and his fellows are, in fact, victims of the lies that currently animate the Republicans.

How does one speak to Joe the Plumber? Let’s dispense with the sobbing and statements about who’s wielding the hammer. Second, as a novel proposition, let’s talk about how the Democrats have worked to improve the life of Joe the Plumber. Not wonkish explanations of economic theory, but clear statements of what Joe the President has managed to pull off. Every Democratic explanation that uses more than 10 words is a mistake. Are we so bereft of an understanding of our fellow countrymen that we can’t pull off a Reagonistic one liner?

And, for God’s sake, let’s stop clutching our pearls. We have nothing to be afraid of; the Republicans humiliate themselves on a daily basis; they have no agenda to deal with the problems facing the majority of Americans; their behavior is cruel and stupid, and it’s contrary to the values of the majority of Americans. Why are we so weepy? It gives our fascist counterparts a validity they cannot find on their own.

I believe the Democrats, by sitting on their asses during the Reagan revolution, facilitated our trip to the brink. But they can bring us back. That will require that they revisit their messaging, find their voices. Instead of apologizing, the Democrats need to come out fighting. When Trump started talking about making America great again, wasn’t the simple response that it already is? The Republican platform, insofar as they have one, is based on simple lies; the response should be a simple truth, aggressively stated. Beto and Newsom understand that, but it needs to be the message of the entire party. The Republicans roll out a series of silly epithets – the Democrats are now fascist communists, according to Trump – the response should not be, “See, the Republicans are being mean.” Beto knew how to respond to a guy mocking the carnage at Ulvalde: “You may think it’s funny, motherfucker, but I don’t.”

There are some things that are clear. Given the current state of our government, if the Democrats fail to gain control of the government in the next election cycle, our country will not recover during our lifetimes. Unless the Democrats’ message gets to the voting public and drives them to the polls, we will not win. Unless the Democrats learn to speak to their base, the base has no incentive to go to the polls.

Is it that hard? You have a message. Speak.

And stop fucking whining.

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