Booman wrote a piece titled Diagnosing the Real Problem recently. It was a both complaint about what has become of the Republican Party and a sort of paean to the Democratic Party.
He wrote:
…virtually every asshole in the country is now a Republican.
—snip—
One party has absorbed nearly 100% of the greedhead, religious wacko, and racist vote.
—snip—
…they do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle.
He also wrote:
…all the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia.
I guess half-right is better than all wrong.
Read on for more if you so desire.
…[Republicans] do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle?
Yes they do. Nothing new there. It’s almost a universal tendency on the right. William Butler Yeats pinned this syndrome rather more completely…and much more elegantly…way back in 1919.
From The Second Coming:
…and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And there it is.
Y’see Booman, the problem lies at least as much with the makeup of your beloved Democratic Party as it does with the Republicans.
You say:
…the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia.
Do you know who I see in the Democratic Party today?
“The best, lacking all convictions” just about sums it up. Well meaning, middle class, weak people. Marx’s useless bourgeoisie, in a nutshell. The same class that Hitler thoroughly chewed up and then spat out during his rise to power in Germany.
“Union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia?”
I didn’t see precisely that makeup at the last eight or so Dem conventions. I saw mostly middle class and upper middle class city dwellers and suburbanites. The gentrifiers.
Union workers? Hell no!!! Real, walking-the-street members of many working unions are at least as likely to favor Tea Party memes as anything else these days. Think your average Teamster member for all you need to know regarding that idea. It’s still worth a black person’s mortal ass to walk the streets of white working class neighborhoods past about 9PM in the megalopolis that stretches from Washington DC to Boston. Bet on it. Southie? Bay Ridge? Fuggedaboudit!
Minorities? Dem conventions have looked like a sea of white faces to me for decades. White faces predominating, for sure. Not as white as the Ratpub conventions, but certainly not accurately reflecting the real racial makeup of the U.S. Where are the Central and Caribbean Americans in the Democratic Party? No fucking where, to be blunt, but they are doing the lion’s share of “working class” labor in this country. And where are the African, Indian, Pacific Rim, Central European and Muslim immigrants? They’re working too, aren’t they? Working their asses off.
The so-called intelligentsia? How many votes do they hold? A drop in the bucket. A pretty weak-kneed drop at that with very few exceptions.
Jews? I dunno. I suppose. But actively working for equality across the board in America? For freedom from the Israeli lobby’s immense power in DC? I don’t see it. Most “Jews” in the Democratic Party now seem to me to more part of an upper middle class caucus than anything else. The classic Jewish working class leftists? They seem to have pretty much disappeared to me. Many of my friends in high school and college during the ’60s were the sons and daughters of old-line Jewish lefties, and I loved their parents’ whole act. I only know two or three people now who are real left-wing Jews in that classic mold. The rest? They either got old or…in the case of the next generations…one way or another copped out. Emma Goldman and Bella Abzug they are not.
Your view of the Democratic Party is suspect to me, Booman. Sorry. It seems to me to be mostly a product of the same sort of “magical thinking” that you ascribe to the RatPubs.
Magical nostalgia.
The good old days of FDR’s coalition, not today’s wimpy Dem party.
Sorry, Booman. The “Dems” are now the party of lacked convictions and no effective working class coalitions while the Rats are certainly the worst of us but equally certainly full of passionate intensity. The lambent insanity shining out of the eyes of Michelle Bachmann and (especially) Rick Santorum in that Ames farce last week is all we need to know on the latter account, while the total Reid/Pelosi/Obama collapse in the debt debacle was the essence of lacked convictions.
Sorry, Booman.
That good ol’ Dem bubble done popped long ago.
Sorry.
WTFU.
It’s almost 2012.
Not 1938.
AG
Please?
AG
A real, working class party would win in America. It would win big. A party that offered a truly inclusive big tent…one that welcomed all of the workers of this country with the same enthusiasm that the current DemRat Party welcomes the middle and upper middle classes…would sweep the Tea Party-dominated Republicans right off of their feet.
Not just the college-misedumacated classes and the remnants of the several times over co-opted union movements. The workers, Booman! The restaurant workers, the dirty jobs workers, the hotel maids and janitors and construction workers, the bus drivers and fry cooks, the waiters and waitresses. The people who maintain this country’s working infrastructure at a barely survivable wage.
By the numbers.
By the numbers a vote from these people would bring a tsunami of change.
But…it ain’t gonna happen in 2012. Bet on it. Most of them aren’t even going to go to the polls because they know damned well that both parties really don’t give a shit what happens to them. They know this on the evidence, Booman. On the evidence of decades of bullshit talking the talk but not walking the walk from both parties. It’s probably going to be Obama vs. Romney or Perry in 2012 unless Obama opts out/is pushed out or some kind of 3rd party/4th party movement erupts. It’s going to be close, and no matter whether Obama wins or loses the Rats will still control Congress.
Get used to it. The Democratic Party no longer represents the majority of the working people of this country. It may represent the majority of the wages earned by working people if you use the definition of “working” as anyone who earns money by doing some sort of work, but the salaries of the Dem rank and file are at an average much, much higher than the salaries of literally millions of poential working class voters who belong to neither party. Bet on that as well.
Those riots in Britain? If the “Labor” party truly represented real “laborers”…people who do the kind of real work that maintains and sustains a society… instead of riots they would have been votes.
Ditto here.
Watch.
S.
First of all, let’s forget about how Obama has governed just for a moment and focus on what he accomplished during his campaign.
For eons progressives had been making the argument that we could win by growing the electorate rather than pandering to the middle. But the party never seriously attempted it. Obama managed to do both at once. A true virtuoso performance.
As he pulled hotel workers and fruit pickers and idle youth out of the woodwork to win in bright red states like Nevada, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina, he also won over moderate Republicans like Hagel and Gates and Powell and the descendants of DDE. Need more evidence? Every prairie and Mountain West Democratic officeholder endorsed Obama over Clinton. Obama created a big coalition. He had unprecedented numbers of small donors and unprecedented money from Wall Street.
It was never going to be easy to serve both ends of that coalition, especially when his first responsibility in office was to resuscitate the most-unworthy banking system in this country.
But, here’s where it went wrong. The GOP decided on 100% obstruction, all the time. And because of the anti-majoritarian rules of Congress, as well as the media advantage of the GOP, as well as the money advantage of the GOP, the president had to govern right in the middle where Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe snuggle up together.
That might make the beltway happy, but it ain’t gonna please anyone else.
But he did a hell of a lot even with that constraint.
Bullshit, Booman. Sheer bullshit. The turnout of the voting-age population was 55.3% in 2004 and 56.8% in 2008. His candidacy “grew the electorate” 1.5%.
Big deal.
You have swallowed yet another mainstream newsmeme as “fact.” It ain’t fact, Booman, it’s just another newsfiction.
“Obama” didn’t do this, Booman. The corporate media did this because he was their chosen candidate. The fact that he got “unprecedented money from Wall Street” should have been your clue here. And look how he has handled “Wall Street”…the real set of villains in this debt-related debacle that has gone on since the real-estate bust. He has handled them with kid gloves. He was bought and sold. Bought by corporate America and sold to the American people by the hypnomedia. Sold to you, too. And you are still buying it despite vast information to the contrary.
He was’t forced to govern “right in the middle where Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe snuggle up together,” Booman. It was a willing ménage à trois.
No.
Here is where it went wrong.
It went wrong when Obama sold his ass down the river in order to get the nomination and the support of corporate America. Were his intentions good? Yes, I believe that they were. That old saw about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? Here we are on the outskirts of real hell four years later.
Can he turn things around in this country if he is re-elected? Not with a divided Congress he can’t, even if he knew how to do so. And he is not going to get a Dem majority in the House and possibly not in the Senate either. So there we jolly well are, aren’t we? Faced with a Scylla and Charybdis situation once again. A lame duck Dem president or a RatPublican tool of the right.
Time to reassess the Democratic Party in general, Booman. Win, lose or draw. It’s not working this way. Either appeal to the 48% of potential voters who usually sit out presidential elections or start a new party that does do that and let the Dems and Ratpubs split the other 52% percent.
That’s how I see it, anyway.
Your results may differ, as they say in car ads about miles per gallon.
But…”your” results…the results of the last election…have been very, very bad.
It is often said that one definition of insanity is the act of repeating a certain action over and over and over again even though that action does not bring the desired results.
By that definition “the left” in the U.S. is batshit insane and has been so since the ’60s if not before.
Sorry, but there it is.
As I have said elsewhere here…deal wid it.
AG
130 million people voted in the 2008 election. If you look at 1.5% of that, it’s about 2 million people. That’s enough to flip the popular vote outcome of elections 2000, 1976, 1968, 1960, and 1948.
How often has a Democrat won more than Obama won as a percentage? We have to go back to 1964. And then we have to go back to 1944. At the height of World War Two, with our troops pressing onto the Rhine and Okinawa, FDR outperformed Obama by less than a single percentage point.
Obviously flipping the popular vote count from 2000 wouldn’t change who was elected.
How often has a hypnomedia system been this powerful, Booman?
Never.
Ever.
I repeat…it was not Obama, it was the way that Obama was presented on the national media. Admittedly he was an ideal subject…young, well spoken, new, relatively clean in terms of scandals, a break from the past racially…a great story. Plus he speaks well when not lecturing.
Further…we need to literally end the power of the Republican Party over our politics. 2 million votes were not enough. We need a great president with a willing congress if we are to survive the coming decade in our present form.
6 million.
8 million.
More.
A landslide.
In your linked voter turnout chart it says that in 2008 there were roughly 230 million people in the U.S. of voting age. Of that number, only about 130 million bothered to vote. That leaves 100 million people who didn’t think that their vote counted. If as you say 2 millon voters would have been enough to flip many previous elections, what effect would 10% of those 100 million 2008 non-voters produce? How about 20%? If a candidate really reached just 2 out of every 10 people who have given up on influencing this system in any positive way by voting, the word “landslide” would be inadequate to the outcome. “Revolution” might be closer to the truth.
This ain’t gonna happen with the present weak, bourgeois-laden Democratic Party, Booman. It simply is not going to happen.
Back to Scylla and Charybdis.
Back to 1996, at best.
At worst?
Back to 2000.
Watch.
AG
AG, on one level, we’re certainly fucked. The earliest we can possibly have sixty seats in the Senate is probably 2016, which corresponds with Obama leaving office. Maybe President Biden can git er dun. Until then, we’re just trying to hold the pit bulls at bay.
Biden?
He’s worse than Gore. Unsellable.
AG
Untrue.
He’s adorable.
Gore was robotic.
Biden is unelectable on the presidential level. A nice man, by all accounts, but no charisma. Charisma sells. It can be manufactured to some degree, but he just doesn’t look to me like he can be remade.
AG
i disagree with most of what you say here, Booman, and mostly agree with Arthur.
But on Biden, you are correct. he has the human touch, and I’ve always found him appealing (relatively speaking that it: all politicians are lying greasy weasels, Biden just seems less so).
.
Born in Sranton, PA on November 20, 1942. In 2016 he will be 74 years old!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Here’s a different source on turnout. Now, when thinking about turnout remember that the voting age dropped to 18 in 1972. This caused a big dip in the % of the eligible voters who actually bothered to vote. So, you see a big dip from 61% in 1968 to 55% in 1972. Obama easily beat the turnout of all post-1968 elections, and probably beat 1968, too, if you exclude people 20 years-old or younger. In fact, you might have to go back to 1908 to find a high percentage turnout.
2008 National Exit Polls:
What does this poll have to do with my post, Booman?
First of all…”exit polls” have been proven wrong before.
Second, they only poll those who voted. My point was that a vast majority of the eligible voters who did not vote would indeed vote if they truly felt that it was not a totally useless task to do so.
Third…that was in 2008, before Obama failed. And he has failed, Booman. He has failed miserably. He is all talk and not enough walk. A perfect picture of the Democratic establishment as it stands today. His “talk” may get him re-elected. He’s pretty good at it. But it won’t get a Dem majority in both houses of Congress and it will not bring out the people who did not vote.
The turnout of voting-age population in presidential election years has hovered at just above the 50% mark since 1960, Booman. What do you think would happen if a true “big tent” Democratic Party was able to convince the non-voting working classes (and want-to-be-working-but-can’t-find-work classes as well) of this country that it really had their interests paramount in its mind?
The word “landslide” comes to mind.
But NOOOOOooo…Dems like you trot out useless polls to prove the unprovable, that “workers” vote Democratic. I call bullshit. You use the words “union members” in your post about the Republicans and Democrats. Lissen up. Well represented “union members” in my experience comprise about 20%-30% of the real working population of the United States today. Probably even less. The rest? Getting by any and every way that they can. Bet on it. Mobilize the not so well represented and you have a chance for real change. Do not do so and the rotten status quo will remain.
That’s where it sits today.
Deal wid it.
AG
well, it proves that the Democratic Party can win 53% of the national vote and 68% of the nation’s Electoral Votes while only pulling in 41% of white men, 46% of white women, and 45% of Protestants (many of whom are black). It proves that unionized workers vote Democratic. It proves that Jews vote Democratic.
I didn’t cite it, but the Exit polls showed that 58% of people with doctorate/advanced degrees voted Democratic. In other words, it confirmed my characterization of the makeup of the Democratic coalition.
The McCain/Palin coalition won among whites. They broke even among people who make over $50,000/year.
Obama won by mobilizing the exact kinds of people you’re talking about. And he will do it again. I don’t know that he’ll be quite as successful, but that’s not all on him. The Republicans get to play, too.
Yes, Bachmann stares intensely, with toothpicks in her eyes, as if she’s stoned, hysterical or just plain mad. Maybe she’s on meds for real physical problems. Who knows? Take your pick. Her look is very queer.
I’ve been using that Yeats poem to describe the current troubles since at least 2006.