With the astonishing rapidity typical of all internet-inspired axioms, it became a Democratic meme, even an article of faith, that Americans are now locked into an endless cycle of alternating Republican-dominated midterm routs caused by dismal voter turnout and not-exactly resounding but solid Democratic victories in Presidential election years when ethnic minority and youth turnout are at their highest. The tides of demographics, the story went around the Webz, could not be denied.
It will probably take the first few sets of 2016 polls like this:
Paul Ryan 47% Hillary Clinton 43%
Or this:
Jeb Bush 49% Hillary Clinton 44%
Or this:
Rand Paul 50% Hillary Clinton 45%
to dispel this happy mythology prevalent among Democrats and bring home
the reality that we're all one gaffe from a gaffe-prone, 67-year-old woman with finite political skills away from Tea-Party-inspired Republican jackboots pressed into our face at all levels of government for the next twenty years and beyond. One major gaffe away from a Supreme Court bereft of
this naive soul who thought she could rely on her
long collegial walks with her friend Antonin to sustain her for a few more years until the Democrats could primly sort out this unpleasantness with a proper replacement as devoted to the rights of women and civil liberties she had grown up with since her 60's and 70's activism. One gaffe from her monstrous replacement in a Third Bush or First Cruz regime, who finally drives the stake through the heart of
Roe v Wade, cements
Citizens United in stone and pushes African-Americans to the back of the same 1950's bus where they started from.
In the interim Kevin Baker succinctly shoots down the fantasy that demographics, Latino, Hispanic, Millennial or otherwise, are going to "cinch" an electoral Democratic victory in 2016. The essential point he makes, roughly translated, is that there aren't enough people who care about gay marriage to win an election. There aren't enough people who care about Ferguson, Missouri, to win an election. And there aren't enough people who care about climate change to win an election.
In fact there are a fair number of people who will smile and nod, thinking it's just peachy that gays can now enjoy the blessings of holy matrimony, react with horror and revulsion at police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, and still drive their Prius up to the local high school where they'll happily pull the R lever and re-elect a generation of people who by their words and deeds want nothing to do with these issues, or in fact are virulently against them. Or they may just decide not to vote at all.
Because that is what happened two weeks ago:
The future failed to arrive on time again this fall. Democrats lost all over America, and they lost big, by much wider margins than predicted. They lost statewide races in the Midwest where Democrats have won repeatedly in presidential elections for more than 20 years. They lost in races against radical right-wing Republicans they might have been expected to defeat, like Sam Brownback in Kansas and Paul R. LePage in Maine.
Nor was this month’s election an anomaly. It was the third disastrous midterm for Democrats in the past 20 years. The party suffered similar or even worse losses at all levels of government in 1994 and 2010, along with a lesser catastrophe in 2002. It now holds fewer elected offices at both the federal and state level than it has at any time since the 1920s.
It seems that no matter how happy Bob and Delores are that Lisa and Louise down the street are now a married couple, no matter how concerned Jim and Donna are about their shore house being inundated by rising seas over the next fifty years, no matter how disgusted Bill is with the racist cops who gunned down that black kid in whatever-ville Missouri, the fact that Bob and Delores' son can't get a job that pays enough for him to move out, despite $75,000 in ever-increasing college debt, the fact that Jim and Donna are probably going to sell the house at a loss anyway to try to survive in retirement, and the fact that Bill is unemployed with only credit card debt keeping he and his family in food and shelter so he can keep his 86-year old mother with dementia out of the only home across town that still accepts Medicare, are the
main things on their mind right now. So when the pollsters who ID'd them as "likely voters" came a-calling, they lied. They said they'd vote but they had no intention of doing so. That's why so many of us were under the fantasy that Democrats might somehow keep the Senate.
I may have forgotten to mention that Bob and Delores may just as well be really Roberto and Yesenia. That Jim and Donna are really Jim and Jeff; and that Bill is a unionized electrician making $60,000 per year.
Suffering a series of historic defeats is not a sign that you’re winning. The Democrats no longer please anyone much, neither their depressed base nor the less committed. Meanwhile, Republicans still manage to portray them as wild-eyed socialists. The party does take the White House more often now, but at the state level, and in the midterms, when a third of the senators and all representatives are up for election, the party has been hollowed out.
The trouble was that the Clinton-Obama strategy got things upside down from the start. Why try to cast yourselves as economic moderates and cultural progressives when the disparate elements of your coalition have little in common culturally, but are all struggling with the same wretched economy?
What the Pelosis, the Wasserman-Schultz's, the Reids and the Schumers, what everyone in a position of leadership within the Party doesn't seem to grasp, is that the cost of achieving what used to be called a "middle class" life in this country has gone--
in record time-- from $50,000-$60,000 a year to $100,000 a year for a family of four who want to retire with any degree of security or expect to help their kids go to college. The problem is that
almost no one's wages have gone up to any appreciable degree during that same period. In fact, Americans have had their pay
cut instead, as their employer switched to something called "high-deductible" health insurance plans, even while their premiums continued to rise. This amounts to a $2000-4000 pay cut for any working American who has the misfortune of getting sick.
Another pay cut is child care. Without dependable, trustworthy, child care, most women with children cannot work. Yet the cost of such care amounts to a massive pay cut --up to 10-15000 per year, that perversely acts as a disincentive to work at all. You need to make a certain threshold to even make employment worthwhile.
It has now become accepted wisdom that a college education is essential not just for young people to get ahead but to survive at all. The insanely high cost of college tuition has all but guaranteed new graduates will be shackled to a stone of debt for the first ten years of their working lives. That is another huge "pay cut."
Then there is the cost of rent, housing, and food, all of which have gone through the roof over the past fifteen years. And forget about travel or entertainment. Try to book a flight these days and you'll find out how costly it is.
And while this all was happening, Americans are routinely subjected to a myriad of new "fees" and "penalties" foisted on them by everything from financial institutions to cable companies, all draining hundreds of dollars per month out of the same bank accounts they've been encouraged to convert online supposedly for their "convenience."
And that is the crux of Baker's point, which he proceeds to break down and analyze in the context of the New Deal programs in the 1930's and the Great Society programs of the 1960's, when Democrats actually stood for something more universal and appealing than tax credits and incremental increases to a paltry "minimum wage." The fact is that the only thing that binds all the disparate elements that make up the current Democratic "coalition" are a rough sense of justice and the fact that all are equally suffering in this dismal economy. Women may fight for reproductive freedom, African Americans and gays against discrimination, but one thing unites them all--the future looks bleak not only for them, but for their children. And until the Democratic Party moves to address these issues in an aggressive way it will continue to bleed support, not only from the public at large, but from its core constituents, including these same demographics who are supposed to "carry" us to victory in 2016. Hispanics care about their own families more than they care about generalized "immigration" rights. Most Latinos and Hispanics are already in the country quite legally, thank you, and even though they know people who aren't, and those may be cousins or brothers or sisters, the main thing they are concerned about is putting food on their own tables and making a life out of this shit sandwich dealt to them called the Great Recession.
What will the Democrats offer them in 2016? The "minimum wage?" Legal marijuana? A guaranteed earned income tax credit? Please.
Today’s Democratic Party, with its finely calibrated, top-down fixes, does not offer anything so transformative. It seems scared of its own shadow, which is probably why it keeps reassuring itself that its triumph is inevitable. It needs instead to fully acknowledge just how devastating the recession was for working people everywhere in America, and what a generation of largely flat wages did to their aspirations even before that. It needs to take on hard fights, even against powerful forces, like pharmaceutical and insurance companies that presume to tell us the limits of what our health care can be or energy companies that would tell us what the world’s climate can endure. It means carving out a place of respect for working men and women in our globalized, finance-driven world.
Invite us to dream a little. You don’t build an enduring coalition out of who Americans are. You do it out of what we can be.
Unless Democrats are willing to
radically take on the financial institutions and the corporate-friendly ethos that brought us to where we are today, Americans will no longer pay attention. That means challenging the status quo at every turn, boldly and loudly. It doesn't mean "elevating" an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders to a "leadership position." It means transforming the entire Democratic caucus into two hundred virulent Elizabeth Warrens and Bernie Sanders. It means criminally prosecuting corporations, boycotting them, taxing them, breaking up their monopolies, or revoking their right to exist at all. It means guaranteeing educational prospects to young people without crippling loans. It means vilifying a corporate-hugging Supreme Court loudly so Americans understand what has been done to them. It means holding a corrupted
media establishment accountable and not mincing words about who they are and what they do.
In short, it means a radical and unprecedented transformation of everything the Party currently stands for in a way that causes Americans to sit up and take notice, and not caring what the other side says about us.
Otherwise, in 2016 we can look forward to losing 40 states.
(Also covered in the Mark Sumner's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup from yesterday, here).