The Democrats Will Also Shit Themselves.

[Mongrel]

Not really anything worth speaking about in the long run (I hope), but lol

[nosimpleway]

We all trusted Nancy Pelosi to open Kingdom Hearts

[Thad]

Perry Bacon's got a pretty good piece in the Washington Post, Have Democrats reached the limits of White appeasement politics?

Democrats are now trying to get money to children in households where the parents don’t have jobs, make the criminal justice system less punitive and deport fewer undocumented immigrants, correctives that are a clear sign that past White appeasement in these areas went too far.

They are also in danger of making the same mistakes again. Trying to rebut the charge from Republicans that they are anti-police (and thereby in effect anti-White) that emerged from last year’s protests, Democrats in some cities and states are opposing aggressive efforts to reform law-enforcement practices. This is a mistake. Democrats could end up stopping police reform before it gets going, perpetuating corrosive and abusive practices and potentially resulting in more horrible police killings like those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last year.

Second, even if an act of White appeasement isn’t going to have a clear negative policy impact, Democrats need to stop trashing people of color, their leaders and their causes as part of their strategy. Party officials may not be able to say publicly, “We are making Decision X to appeal to White voters with conservative views on racial issues.” But they shouldn’t lose sight of the actual problem, either — that many White people aren’t comfortable with vocal people of color and civil rights causes. Instead, Democrats often go beyond giving White people a pass for their racism; they frequently seek out opportunities to criticize people of color. It’s morally abhorrent to punch down at less powerful groups while sparing the dominant one.

[...]

Third, the Democrats should just do less White appeasement because the electoral benefits of the strategy are much smaller now than they were in previous eras.

[Friday]

yeah but Thad what about those disenfranchised Pennsylvania coal miners? We gotta get em and if we have to sacrifice every single black vote in America to get them then that's what we are going to do and by god when we win it will because we got them

[Thad]

And Bacon's actually making an extremely moderate and pragmatic argument here -- he's suggesting that maybe you do need to win over some of those racist coal miners to win the presidency (or, depending on where you're located, various other offices), but the time where you could get away with actively throwing minorities and progressives under the bus to do it is at an end.

Ultimately, of course, I think what Democrats should be doing is the same thing I've been saying all along -- passing popular progressive legislation that helps people of all races. (This is not the same thing as saying that they should focus on economic issues instead of so-called identity politics, which is a popular argument I've seen from white people across the political spectrum. If you don't confront bigotry, you're enabling it at best.) That's part of why stuff like stonewalling Build Back Better is such a spectacularly wrongheaded move, even from the purely cynical framework of trying to get reelected (I think it's too early to count Sinema out but I'd say there's a very good chance at this point that she loses reelection and has burned so many bridges she can't even mount a successful career as a lobbyist afterward). Things like paid family leave, child credits, and cheaper healthcare affect everybody. You're never going to win all the racist coal farmers and should fucking-well stop trying, but if you want to win some of them, the best way to do that is to pass popular legislation and then say "Hey, look at all that popular legislation we just passed."

[Friday]

Do you think the better strategy is to energize the base, or do you think going after moderates/swing voters is still better?

[Brantly B.]

I mean, do one of them.

As much as I hate adversarial politics, it's what we've got at the moment so the winning strategy for the last 13 or so years - which one side or the other somehow keeps fucking up somehow - is to neither fire up your own base or swing the moderates, it's simply to not feed into their base. Don't be an existential threat to them, don't set their cities on fire, don't frontman the most unlikeable person in your party, don't collude with insurance and financials in broad daylight, don't tell the world you don't care about them, don't call them cavemen and don't pick Sarah fucking Palin as your running mate. The American voter is sedentary by nature and won't normally even bother going to the polls unless you give them a overriding reason to.

Is Biden's Democratic Party feeding the Republican base right now? Motherfucker they are loading a god damned firehose with prime rib and spraying them with it. I understand the desire to hit those people right back after the last four years, but you really have to consider how embarrassing it's going to be to lose to those irrelevant Sarah Palin cavemen again.

[Thad]

Do you think the better strategy is to energize the base, or do you think going after moderates/swing voters is still better?

I think framing it as a simple binary choice is the problem.

It's a series of hundreds of complex interacting issues, across different races in different regions with different priorities.

Broadly, the answer is they should pass legislation that's popular and good for the majority of people, but also shouldn't back down from supporting women and minority groups against bigotry.

What that actually means specifically, on a case-by-case basis, will vary.

I mean, do one of them.

As much as I hate adversarial politics, it's what we've got at the moment so the winning strategy for the last 13 or so years - which one side or the other somehow keeps fucking up somehow - is to neither fire up your own base or swing the moderates, it's simply to not feed into their base. Don't be an existential threat to them, don't set their cities on fire, don't frontman the most unlikeable person in your party, don't collude with insurance and financials in broad daylight, don't tell the world you don't care about them, don't call them cavemen and don't pick Sarah fucking Palin as your running mate. The American voter is sedentary by nature and won't normally even bother going to the polls unless you give them a overriding reason to.

Is Biden's Democratic Party feeding the Republican base right now? Motherfucker they are loading a god damned firehose with prime rib and spraying them with it. I understand the desire to hit those people right back after the last four years, but you really have to consider how embarrassing it's going to be to lose to those irrelevant Sarah Palin cavemen again.

I don't really buy that. There's an entire industry built on feeding the Republican base and it's going to do that no matter what the Democrats do. Obama wears a tan suit, the Seuss company takes some racist books out of print, Big Bird tells kids they should get vaccinated, and Fox News is going to make a meal of that story for a week while Newsmax and OAN find something even more deranged to rant about until they get sued for defamation.

Trying not to give the Republican base something to be angry about is a mug's game. If you're not pissing off the Republicans, you're not governing effectively, and they're just going to make up something to be pissed off about anyway.

Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Biden didn't win because he depressed Republican turnout; he won because everybody else turned out more.

Though you're right that was probably more a result of opposition to Trump than support for Biden.

[pacobird]

Do you think the better strategy is to energize the base, or do you think going after moderates/swing voters is still better?

I mean, it's obviously to go after moderates and swing voters as long as the base keeps moving to Chicago and the coasts.

[Brantly B.]

There's a difference between aggravating somebody and getting them off the couch. Big Bird getting vaccinated will irritate a conservative; firing most of the local post office in December will get them off the couch.

[Mongrel]

Probably just fishing, if not just the usual blabber.

But if they really went with this ticket, lmaooo

[Thad]

Probably just fishing, if not just the usual blabber.

If that's your first reaction, maybe your second one could be "Maybe I don't need to repost this."

[Mongrel]

And maybe sometimes my second reaction is "...but this is funny as fuck."

Regardless of plausibility, this is a serious opinion being offered up by both Columbia University and CNN.

[pacobird]

It's always worth calling attention to how staggeringly useless the Political Science departments of this country's elite universities are in a thread about the Democrats being dithering idiots. Imagine the Heritage Foundation but it doesn't, like, want anything.

[KingRoyal]

Political Science departments spend a lot of time teaching people How the Country Is Supposed to Work without an ounce of looking at what is actually occurring.

[Thad]

It's always worth calling attention to how staggeringly useless the Political Science departments of this country's elite universities are in a thread about the Democrats being dithering idiots. Imagine the Heritage Foundation but it doesn't, like, want anything.

Maybe so, but this is more of a demonstration that public institutions' Twitter accounts largely consist of people who are paid to set up Google News alerts for particular keywords and then link to whatever dumb shit comes up in their inbox.

Which is pretty much how every pop culture website works at this point, really. It's the AV Club's Great Job, Internet "feature", except it's fucking Columbia doing it.

[Friday]

Political Science departments spend a lot of time teaching people How the Country Is Supposed to Work without an ounce of looking at what is actually occurring.

I remember my schooling and it was the same shit. Not a mention of systemic racism, not a mention of corruption, not a mention of money in politics, not a mention of lobbying. I was taught the cleanest version of democracy possible. No wonder so many people suffer from the just-world fallacy. If everything is hunky dory in terms of structure, your problems must be caused by yourself. If you're poor, it's because you're lazy. If you're a criminal who robs a bank, it's because you're a bad person.

[Thad]

I'd caution against anybody reading too much about the '22 midterms into the results of any '21 elections. The media were all over the Virginia results as spelling doom for the Democrats' chances in 2022, but don't seem to be saying a hell of a lot about the Democratic wave in Georgia yesterday.

I do think the Democrats have an uphill battle in the House, partly because the president's party always does in midterms and partly because we're in for a fresh wave of gerrymandering following the census.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, if the Democrats want to win more elections they're going to need to do more shit, and then campaign more effectively on the shit they've done.

Nothing's a foregone conclusion. Still eleven months left, and God only knows what's going to happen in the meantime.

Abrams is running for governor again, so maybe we'll be hearing more good news out of Georgia next year.

[Thad]

Welp, Manchin's gone and fucked us on BBB, which was pretty much inevitable once Pelosi decided hey, let's give up all our leverage and pass BIF without passing BBB first.

I'd have loved to have been wrong about that, but haha nope.

[Mongrel]

Hillary punching herself in the face public bears little in the way of meaningful consequences, mercifully, but that doesn't mean it's any less grimly amusing.