Quo Vadis, Democrats?

[garbon]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

Maybe we need to reinforce maintaining larger familial networks? Like there is a wide range of different experiences within my extended family.

[crazy canuck]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

That is a very good summary of what has occurred.

[DGuller]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

Maybe we need to reinforce maintaining larger familial networks? Like there is a wide range of different experiences within my extended family.

My strong gut feeling is that the alienation is a matter of cultural exclusion much more so than economics.  That's one reason why I think that people touting Biden's accomplishments or Harris's proposals are not getting at the core of it.  People may say that they care about economics, but whether they realize it or not, most people really value feeling included above most everything else.

[Valmy]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

Well maybe. That is all very vague and theoretical though. I am not sure what to do with that.

And since we have two big tent parties, if the Democrats ever become solely a leftwing party they are going to lose anyway. Presuming there currently exists something called the center.

[Valmy]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

Maybe we need to reinforce maintaining larger familial networks? Like there is a wide range of different experiences within my extended family.

My strong gut feeling is that the alienation is a matter of cultural exclusion much more so than economics.  That's one reason why I think that people touting Biden's accomplishments or Harris's proposals are not getting at the core of it.  People may say that they care about economics, but whether they realize it or not, most people really value feeling included above most everything else.

I don't know man. This kind of "hope! joy! togetherness!" stuff seems to be losing out to "THE BAD PEOPLE ARE COMING FOR YOU!" message the Republicans are using. I mean we are in a country where a scary amount of people are cheering on the murder of a health care CEO.

But again, what do I know? I guess it worked for Obama. But last I checked Harris tried to do this. But maybe she just didn't go far enough. I thought she should have gone on Joe Rogan for example.

[Grey Fox]

I think it still works, Valmy. The right has recognize early that the traditional media & marketing strategies don't work anymore.

Going on Rogan for Trump was a masterstroke. His endorsement delivered for Trump millions of vote.

[Admiral Yi]

Well I thought I knew why, that they abandoned the working class to cozy up to big business.

How did they abandon the working class?

[Barrister]

I think it's hard for professional class to identify with the working class.  The more the left became identified with the professional class, the more the working class became alienated, and the more the left became incapable of perceiving that the working class is alienated from them.

Maybe we need to reinforce maintaining larger familial networks? Like there is a wide range of different experiences within my extended family.

My strong gut feeling is that the alienation is a matter of cultural exclusion much more so than economics.  That's one reason why I think that people touting Biden's accomplishments or Harris's proposals are not getting at the core of it.  People may say that they care about economics, but whether they realize it or not, most people really value feeling included above most everything else.

That's right up there with Musa al gharbi's "cultural capitalists" - it describes people who have cultural capital, if not monetary capital.  They're people who know the right words, go to the right schools, have the right experiences, to be able to succeed.

YOu can imagine a blue collar family.  Maybe they're doing well financially, or maybe they're not - it kindof doesn't matter.  But while they personally like the Honduran family next door they're against so many immigrants coming in, they don't understand how men can become women, and don't like how their kid got suspended for just saying some rap lyrics the other kids were using.  They just don't have the cultural capital, and that can make all the difference.

[Iormlund]

I think it still works, Valmy. The right has recognize early that the traditional media & marketing strategies don't work anymore.

Going on Rogan for Trump was a masterstroke. His endorsement delivered for Trump millions of vote.

The ability to manipulate social networks is now essential.

I'm quite frankly amazed at how easily people around me start parroting the shit they are fed. And I'm not talking about blue-collar workers. The folks I discuss politics with - family, friends and colleagues - are college educated.

[Valmy]

Well I thought I knew why, that they abandoned the working class to cozy up to big business.

How did they abandon the working class?

Ok now I am not a working class person so I don't pretend to claim to know the answer.

But that has been the claim for a long time. My understanding of it was that it was a result of the Democrats adopting right wing economic policies in the 1990s and 2000s. Free trade and all that. Seeking the support of corporations and big business instead of relying on Union support. Though the idea today that one can rely on Union support or small donors when Corporations, or even certain individuals, can donate hundreds of millions is perhaps cute.

But Biden going out there and being more protectionist and supporting Unions more didn't seem to make him popular among those working class groups. Though I did notice that the Republicans did not really criticize him for that either, at least not publicly. They very much focused on inflation, culture war stuff, border panic, and so forth not that he was anti-business.

So I don't know, maybe Biden had the right idea but it is too little too late to have a real impact but the Democrats need to keep going in that direction. Or maybe this whole idea that it is economic policies at all is nonsense and the Democrats need to do things differently in some other way.

Again, what the fuck do I know? There is about a zero percent chance I vote for the Republicans in the near future so I am clearly not the demographic giving them issues.

[Valmy]

I think it still works, Valmy. The right has recognize early that the traditional media & marketing strategies don't work anymore.

Going on Rogan for Trump was a masterstroke. His endorsement delivered for Trump millions of vote.

The ability to manipulate social networks is now essential.

I'm quite frankly amazed at how easily people around me start parroting the shit they are fed. And I'm not talking about blue-collar workers. The folks I discuss politics with - family, friends and colleagues - are college educated.

Maybe the Democrats need to be like the Russian government and just employ a propaganda troll army somewhere. Probably be a better use of all the hundreds of millions they raise currently.

[Razgovory]

Meanwhile,



The Democrats Show Why They Lost
At a meeting of the DNC, the party seemed to be at pains to demonstrate that it learned nothing from its 2024 defeat.
By Jonathan Chait

Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. "The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced," Harrison announced.

As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison's elucidation grew more labored. "To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules," he added. "To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent."

The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC's meetings included a land acknowledgement, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.

The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party's message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate.

The bad news is that the official party's influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They've done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes. Climate groups, for instance, define what good climate policy means, and then they judge candidates based on how well they affirm those positions. The same holds true for abortion, racial justice, and other issues that many Democrats deem important. The groups are particularly effective at spreading their ideas through the media, especially (but not exclusively) through the work of progressive-leaning journalists, who lean on both the expertise that groups provide and their ability to drive news (by, say, scolding Democratic candidates who fall short of their standards of ideological purity).

The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups' influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsing decriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign's most effective ad against her.

The ongoing influence of the groups can be seen in a new New York Times poll. Asked to list their top priorities, respondents cited, in order, the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime. Asked what they believed Democrats' priorities were, they cited abortion, LGBTQ policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That perception of the party's priorities may not be an accurate description of the views of its elected officials. But it is absolutely an accurate description of the priorities of progressive activist groups.

The poll is a testament to how well the groups have done their job. They have set out to raise public awareness of a series of issues their donors care about, and to commit the party to prioritizing them, and they have done so. Democrats in public office may be mostly engaged in fighting about the economy, health care, and other issues, but they lack the communications apparatus controlled by the groups, which have blotted out their poll-tested messages in favor of donor-approved ones.

Over the past year or so, and especially since Harris's defeat, some centrist commentators have begun to question the groups' influence. But the DNC meetings offered no evidence that their thinking has gone out of style.

If Democrats learned from Harris's campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. "Rather than rebuff the interruptions," observed the Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, "those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand."

Neither Harrison nor his successor, Ken Martin, has questioned Joe Biden's decision to run for a second term, nor any of the messaging or policy that contributed to his dismal approval ratings. When MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart asked one panel of candidates if they believed racism and misogyny contributed to Harris's defeat, every panelist agreed. "That's good, you all pass," he said. (Note that this diagnosis of the election result has no actionable takeaway other than that perhaps the party should refrain from nominating a woman or person of color.)


The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years. After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigning a few months later.

Hogg's takeaway from the 2024 presidential race is that Democrats lost because they failed to rally the youth vote with a rousing message on guns, climate, and other issues favored by progressive activists. Polling, in fact, showed that young voters had similar issue priorities as older voters, but Hogg's elevation was a tribute to the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Some Democrats observed the events of the weekend with wry fatalism. At one point, a protester in a Sunrise Movement T-shirt interrupted by shouting, "I am terrified!"

She was not alone.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-meeting/681548/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=true-anthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawIM9ItleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcRsMR5BdgpAtRuvcbXeUPuYlmfToGO18A9eZ5xPwkir9T_S4fPkdAidxw_aem_hah_we1yCp8Ce7WiXm3HxA

[HVC]

Maybe Dguller is right

[Valmy]

Ok but the Democrats actually increased police funding, and did nothing about abolishing ICE, and didn't really do much to help secure rights for trans people. At least not via any legislation. They did pass the gay marriage law so that was a thing, but they did it with some bipartisan support.

So I don't know. On these issues they didn't do much.

But it's the other issues that aren't mentioned here that baffle me. These are supposedly progressive people but nothing to reform immigration? Nothing about the minimum wage? Nothing about trade? Nothing about labor unions? Affordable housing? Addressing homelessness? Or those were addressed but not mentioned in the article.

I mean it isn't that I don't want LGBT issues addressed or whatever. But unlike most of those issues, which the Democrats either did the opposite or just ignored, the Democrats did actually come very close to raising the minimum wage a few years ago. Weird nobody was talking about that.

Kind of makes it seem like these activists are placated but don't actually get much legislation put out there.

But I guess we will see if this Hogg person does anything.

[DGuller]

A few months back I've been listening to a podcast about intelligence agencies, and the guest claimed that Russian intelligence has always punched above its weight.  Their specialty has often been agent provocateurs, who infiltrated enemy organizations and derailed them.  Ever since then I've always wondered how many agent provocateurs there are on the left, because surely this kind of effective sabotage can't be purely organic.