After Kamala Harris's rather shockingly bad defeat on November 5th, there are calls for a post-mortem. And there should be one. Things obviously went wrong in what should have been a relatively easy win. Now we get to see how far Trump can push us along toward fascism on a permanent basis.
But, typically post-mortem, there are a lot of jackals and vultures gathering to join in the discussion. People whose only real opportunities come at the time of disasters. People who will say Harris's loss is proof that "The system is broken" or "The system is the victim of its own corruption" or, in short, the apocalypse is at hand and everything is allowed. Including their insane, self-destructive ideas.
These are people who won on November 5th. Sometimes both literally and figuratively, sometimes just figuratively. People who significantly outperformed Harris because their brand of apocalypticism, not coincidentally, appeals to many who enjoy Trump's brand of apocalypticism.
And that is the matter at the moment, really. People like apocalyptic narratives. Trump provides them. The middle-of-the-roaders think that ignoring these narratives--not responding when they come from the right and tolerating them when they come from the left--helps in some way.
Both extremes of the political spectrum thrive on the feeling that we've come to the end days. The right-wing version we can do less about: It's based on a hidebound embrace of old prejudices. So a black president with a foreign name, gays ascendant, blacks & weirdos seeming to dominate sports and culture, urban unrest, a pandemic, calls for universal vaccination, the decline of traditional rural work all feed into these narratives quite strongly. Whenever there is progress, there will be reactionism. But Democrats have done little to blunt its force.
In fact, they've played footsie for far too long with the leftist brand of apocalypticism: everything is horrible! racism is rampant! no progress has been made! no progress can be made without [insert extreme, unpopular measure here]!, the system is broken!, everything is rigged!, the food is poison!, the earth is dying! etc.!
Many of these narratives, and the tone of it all, are red meat for the reactionary beast. And that should be no surprise: the game plan for the far-right and far-left is the same: make people believe everything is broken beyond repair and use that conviction as the opportunity to push a strong-sounding, but vague agenda for change ("drain the swamp" "a political revolution is coming"). And, once in power, to push a much more concrete, radical, hitherto partially hidden agenda that in more normal times would never garner 5% support from the electorate.
It's time the Democratic Party did the right thing, so to speak, and got rid of these folks--all the closet and not-so-closet revolutionists, the crypto-Trots, the neo-Luddites, all the folks who despise the party but find it useful as a beard. It's pretty clear that their moment has come and gone, so there isn't really going to be a whole lot of electoral force there anyhow. And their tendency to intentional and unintentional sabotage made them as much trouble as they were help even at their peak.
The Democrats will be better served as the somewhat-less-ambiguous centrist party. The leftists will be better off being honest with themselves and the voters. And the voters will be better off having a clear choice between the somewhat left-of-center reformists and the really left of center "overthrow the system" types.
How and why did the non-MAGA electorate go for Trump? Because they are ill-informed and not very easily changed from that state. Because hate, fear and resentment are very strong drivers of their voting behavior. They are afraid because for quite a long time now, representatives of both the left and right have been bombarding them with messages that tell them they cannot trust "the system." That everything is hopelessly corrupt. That nothing the government does works. That everything is contaminated. That the Earth is dying. That everyone and everything is racist and sexist and evil. That we've always been racist and sexist and evil.
The Democratic Party, if it hopes to win, needs to unambiguously attack those messages of fear and doom. They can't if a bunch of voices in the party see fear and doom as strategic opportunities.
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