I have my concerns about how Nancy Pelosi is handling her job as Speaker of the House, but the way she’s dealing with unruly freshman progressives is not one of them. I think Nancy LeTourneau ably described the different institutional roles at play, so I don’t need to need to go into that in depth. Simply stated, Pelosi is supposed to keep her caucus on track and do everything she can to protect the party’s House majority. If that means she has to crack the whip on people who are off-message or talking nonsense, then I applaud her for not shying away from her duty.
Right now, the Democratic base is clear-eyed about some things that seem to be in Pelosi’s blind spot, like how to confront Donald Trump, but their agenda is dangerously out of synch on a host of issues. Some of it how they’re handling the topics of the day and some of it is what they’re choosing to emphasize. To be honest, the presidential candidates (who are, after all, catering to the base) are just as guilty on this score.
For starters, the Democrats are managing to actually lose the debate over the border despite the fact that Trump’s positions and strategies are immoral, inept, and virtually indefensible. The American people, writ large, do not want open borders. They don’t think people who cross illegally should be allowed to stay in the country. They basically agree with Trump that people should be deported, disagreeing mainly over what exceptions might be made and how to do it humanely rather than having big qualms about the principles involved. But the Democratic base is seemingly opposed to the very idea that people should be detained at the border or deported under any circumstances other than a history of violent crime. The candidates are tripping over each other to offer subsidized health care to people who are not citizens and are not legally residing in the country. This is not politically popular. I could not walk into most Americans’ living rooms and defend these positions.
This is really irresponsible in my opinion, because it leaves voters a choice between policies they see as nonsensical and the policies of Trump, which amount to crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, this mainly works to make the crimes against humanity look like a comparable option.
What’s legitimate is the desire to offer asylum to people who need it. What’s legitimate is expecting all human beings to be treated humanely. What’s legitimate is to oppose the way Trump uses demagoguery, racial stereotyping and xenophobia as political weapons. His policies are designed to be so cruel as to act as a deterrent against not just illegal entry but legitimate petitions for asylum. This is why he wants to separate people from their children. It’s why he wants the detainment facilities to be as uncomfortable as possible and doesn’t discourage guards from mistreating people. These are winning political arguments against Trump that also happen to be correct on the merits. I can go into people’s homes and argue these points and not have people look at me like I have three heads. In fact, Trump’s actions are so egregious that I can actually use these points to change people’s minds about what kind of immigration and asylum policies we should have.
I can’t do that if the argument is that no one should ever be deported and that the agencies in charge of immigration enforcement should simply stand down. If I go even further and start offering people expensive benefits like health care and college, they want to know what kind of drugs I am taking. They close down and stop listening with a sympathetic and compassionate ear.
The Democrats are currently taking positions on a variety of issues that either pander to a narrow slice of their base or simply have no relationship to the needs of their poorer constituents. A low-income black agricultural worker in Mississippi with no family history of higher education isn’t any more interested in the government spending every free dollar on college loan forgiveness than the average white coal miner or auto worker in the Rust Belt. They might want their kids to have a shot at a college education or they might think that’s a poor investment. But there are other things they’d like to see that money spent on, like better K-12 education, the opioid epidemic, affordable prescription drugs, basic infrastructure, or even crop subsidies.
Few of these people are going to relate to academic debates about gender identity or the patriarchy or neoliberalism or school busing policies in the 1970’s. It’s not that these things are unimportant, but these voters need to hear something else entirely if the Democrats want their enthusiastic support. Successful political campaigns are not seminars. There is a place for hashing out policies and advocating for transformational change, but people in real immediate need rarely have much interest in or patience for such things.
Pelosi may not understand how to deal with President Trump, but she understands branding. There’s an overlap between the seats she needs to hold and the voters the Democrats need to attract to win the presidency, and anything that presents a threat to those goals is going to get her ire up. There are some things, like an impeachment inquiry, that she is reacting to with too much fear, but there are others that are plainly reasonable.
Trump has only one real chance to win reelection, and that’s if he can paint the Democrats as totally out of touch and nearly as radical as he is. If she just lets the loudest voices run roughshod over everyone else, that’s exactly what will happen.
What’s really tripping people up is that the white working class Obama/Trump voters and the less advantaged people in the black community are both arriving near the same place when it comes to Joe Biden. These groups are supposed to be about as antagonistic as any two groupings in America, but they have a meeting of the minds over what kind of nominee they’d like to see. They want a lunch-bucket type of guy who talks in plain understandable English and isn’t just advocating policies that appeal first and foremost to the professional class or the academic mindset.
Like it or not, this is a class-based consensus, and the lower classes simply have a different definition of progressivism than the college-educated do. They are practical minded because they don’t have the luxury of being anything else, and they see a Democratic Party that seems to look out for the neediest less and less and more and more caters itself to dreamers and idealists.
No, the lower classes are not the only people who matter. Everyone matters in their own way, and we need professionals and venture capitalists and inventors and scientists just as much as we need people to work retail, build our cars and tend to our crops. But what we need as a society does not always line up neatly with what we need to do to win an election.
The Democrats are supposed to be the worker’s party but their coalition has shifted on them. They are now a party based more on identity than class and more on a urban/suburban alliance and a farmer/labor one. They’ve got the intelligentsia locked up.
But they still need more of the farmer/labor vote than they got in 2016 if they want to win in 2020. They have to know how to talk to these folks and, just as important, how not to talk to them.
What Pelosi is really trying to do is keep the party in the mainstream because Trump left the middle for the taking. Much of the left has no use for the mainstream, and often for very good reason. The left wouldn’t be doing it’s job if it were satisfied with the status quo or with a return to a less than satisfying past. In some areas, Trump’s abandonment of the center offers a real chance to move things meaningfully in a more progressive direction.
But someone has to try to hold the line. That job has fallen on Pelosi, and she’s not apologetic about it. If she holds her majority and a Democrat is elected president, she’ll be ready to push a lot harder, but not before then.
To me, her main mistake, and it’s a big one, is not allowing an impeachment inquiry to formally begin. She should use the same standard that was used during Watergate, the investigation of which, you may remember, began almost immediately after Nixon was reelected in an historic landslide. If those Democrats were not afraid of a public backlash, I really don’t understand why she is today.
It’s not _just_ a class-based consensus, though, is it? “They want a lunch-bucket type of guy who talks in plain understandable English and isn’t just advocating policies that appeal first and foremost to the professional class or the academic mindset.”
That guy is a _guy_. And he’s almost certainly white.
I agree that we need more of the farmer/labor vote than we got in 2016. And that we need to know how to talk to these folks and, just as important, how not to talk to them. I agree! But I think you need to describe exactly what that means to you. To my mind, _how_ we talk matters far, far more than what we say. I simply don’t believe that voters–at least not party-switching voters– make a choice between policies. They make a choice between performances.
Further, I think it’s wildly naive to deny that WHATEVER THE DEMOCRATS ACTUALLY SAY, the Republicans, and most of the media, will claim that Dems are for open borders and violent brown gangs in your town. What we say doesn’t matter. Planting a flag–any flag–and fighting like honey badgers to defend it is all that matters.
The interesting thing is that I say that the party has become more about identity than class, and we you respond by saying that Biden has support from the lower classes because of his identity.
South Carolina blacks are overwhelmingly supporting Biden right now over Kamala Harris (and Cory Booker) and this seems to confuse some folks. It’s less confusing when you realize that South Carolina blacks are a poor community and place relatively little importance on identity (race or gender).
In other words, they’re not supporting Biden because he’s white or a guy. They’re supporting him first because he served Obama very capably and second because he speaks and talks about things in a way that is immediately accessible to them and that reflects their concerns.
As for white working class folks, we place too much emphasis on their identity concerns, too. There are many who are uncomfortable with a non-white president or a woman president, but they also have trouble relating to people who talk in strange academic language about subjects that have little immediate and obvious bearing on their lives.
They have tended to reject the academic track candidates (Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley) in favor of people who talk like they do. That’s why there is a class confluence on Biden. The whites don’t see him as pandering only to people from other communities and the blacks don’t see him as some champion of the white working class.
The academics are looking at a scorecard and saying Biden isn’t a progressive and the lower classes should run fleeing from him. But the lower classes, regardless of race, have a totally different scorecard.
If people want to beat Biden, they need a candidate who can challenge him for these votes, because especially the black vote is going to win it for him if no one understands the source of his appeal.
Adding: I suspect that Booker and Harris, in particular, will need to demonstrate strong support from white voters in IA and/or NH before they’ll win SC black voters away from Biden. (What level of support constitutes “strong support”? I don’t know.)
That’s not what I said. What I said is that ‘a lunch-bucket type of guy’ is by definition male and almost by definition white.
(However, I don’t know why you’re suggesting that Biden’s race and gender isn’t important to nonwhites. It certainly might add to his support, as markers of establishmentarian authority. Cuomo won this demographic by massive margins, didn’t he? Is that a good thing?)
But all I’m saying is, your own definition excludes women and largely excludes non-whites. Many, many people are fine with that! However, I don’t think you are, and I’d be interested to hear you square that circle. Could a female or POC candidate be seen primarily as a lunch-bucket type?
If not, then what does that say about how we win these votes?
I absolutely agree with you about the ‘academic language’ thing. Biden comes across as ‘authentic.’ That’s the key. So does Sanders, which I think accounts for much of his continued support, though he presents as so ethnically Jewish he’s pretty much doomed, I’d think, in most primaries in the south. Warren is started to feel authentic just by virtue of sticking to her message and Harris had that moment in the debate. (Which is why I think it’s gonna be her, in the end. Thank god. She knows how to play authentic.)
I disagree with you on some parts. Bernie took MI in the last primaries. And did well with the Black vote there. You’ve worked and went to school there. And I grew up and went to school there. So you know as well as I do that it wasn’t remotely a surprise that Bernie won.
Point being leftist policies can work to take the rust belt. Leftist policies can carry the Black vote. Biden has support among the Black community but it’s a mile wide and an inch thick. Black people have a lot to lose under a two-term tRump administration. He is threatening. And we all know it. The fear of that drives Black voters to who is perceived as the best candidate to unseat him. That is Biden at the moment. Policy be damned.
However, that perception is false. He’s in the lead because he’s in the lead. Joe will continue to fumble and look old weak; because he is. I believe he lost up to ten points poll-wise after the last debate. And that wasn’t even that deep a cut. His support will dry up once other candidates make it clear that Biden is too old to counterpunch AND that they will get tough enough with tRump to win.
Obama looked like he wasn’t going to win the Black vote either. Because many of us thought he couldn’t win. The moment he started drawing blood on Hillary, her Black support vanished.
Many (not all) republicans really don’t like Black people. And Blacks know it, so they really don’t like republicans. Thus the calculation is always “Who can beat the republican” first. Then “do I agree with their policies”. This is anecdotal, but it is very rare when I hear a Black person say a candidate’s policies are “too liberal” or “not liberal enough”. It’s about beating the republican, then, about support for an individual plan.
Also known as avoiding the Adlai Stevenson trap. As the story goes, Stevenson was campaigning and a supporter told him, “You have the vote of every thinking person in America.” Stevenson replied, “That’s very nice, but unfortunately I need a majority to win.”
Point being, eggheaded university grads (it me) are an important piece of the electorate, and an even more important piece of the Democratic coalition…but not enough to win elections. I detect the hard-earned wisdom of Booman’s years on the ground as a community organizer in the following paragraph:
Any wide-open primary fight is going to have its odd issues and “defining moments” that will end up having little or nothing to do with how a candidate governs (see: the 1992 that yielded the Clinton administration). What’s important is ending up with a candidate who can translate the party’s platform into language, images, stories and symbols that resonate with voters (esp., 1) to inspire the party’s base, and 2) to persuade undecideds).
This is true.
I tend to listen to the Democrats talk through certain lenses from people I’ve known in my life.
1. the people who came to ACORN seeking help with predatory loans or basic community needs, like a traffic light or a lack of policing in their neighborhood.
2. the white working class folks from western Michigan and Metro Detroit who were staunch Dukakis Democrats and now are convinced that the party despises them.
3. white working professionals in the cities and suburbs who are liberal minded but not immune from tax-aversion and racial scaremongering.
The Democrats need these votes and yet much of what they say has no appeal to these folks or is seen as somewhere between hostile and delusional. If they don’t feel that way instinctively, the Republicans (and the Russians) will do their best to see that they get the point.
The ACORN group is concerned about racial profiling and the industrial prison system, but also looking for a greater police presence and more school choice. They want job opportunities, mass transit, infrastructure, help with health care. They don’t know or care what cis-gendered means and they don’t have outstanding college loans. They don’t want to pay taxes for college loan forgiveness or health care for people they believe should be deported.
The white working class voters are concerned about illegal immigration and job competition and feel like the Democrats prioritize spending on their urban base over spending on their communities. They don’t want to pay taxes for college loan forgiveness or health care for people they believe should be deported.
The white professionals want to know why the party has suddenly decided that capitalism is a bad system, that people who work in financial services are the devil, and that all our country’s problems can be solved if we can just get our revenge on them.
This doesn’t make sense exactly. How can the party be too far to the left on economics for the suburbs and not get any credit for it from the lower classes?
But the Democrats are accomplished losers, and this is precisely how they’re going about 2020.
This analysis upsets me, because it implies that even Democratic voters are coming from a fundamentally Conservative/GOP mindset: “Having to hear about other people’s issues turns me off, and so does the idea of paying taxes for other people’s benefits.”
I’m not saying it’s wrong, but if that is really where we are, then I don’t see how we haven’t already lost.
that’s the problem with trying to fit the entire sane political spectrum into one party.
try talking to prosperous suburban Democrats about helping homeless people, you won’t hear much compassion.
I disagree (about what it implies).
I think what it implies is that key factions of the Democratic governing coalition come from different mind (and heart and sweat) sets than secular-oriented, college-educated liberals/leftists/progressives.
An underrated (imho) part of Warren’s rise in recent weeks—and an essential part of her campaign if she’s to win the nomination and defeat Trump—is her increased fluency at weaving together her Oklahoma upbringing (“on the ragged edge of the middle class”) with her college professor skills (“and I’ve got a plan for that”) *and* linking it to the concerns and experiences of the 1) urban working people of color, 2) rural and suburban white working class voters, and 3) suburban white professionals.
(SIDENOTE: Her former colleague at Harvard, legendary organizer Marshall Ganz, has spent a lot of the last two decades researching and teaching the art of public narrative. I’d be surprised if Warren hasn’t picked his brain on the subject at some time in the past few years.)
If Warren’s campaign falls short, a major reason (I suspect) will be that she can’t get herself out of that East Coast academic box.
I may have a dark view of the mindset of the public, but I’m not totally pessimistic. We have to accept that most people look at politics first and foremost for what’s in it for them. The less financially secure people are, the more this is true. Everyone is at least a little like this. We’re more likely to hand a stranger a quarter if we just won on the slot machines than if we didn’t.
Politics 101 is convincing people that you’re on their side. Convincing them that you’re a generous person to other people and other communities won’t get you very far. This might be a depressing thought, but the Democrats actually have a natural majority when it comes to which side they’re on. They need to explain this. They lose when they don’t.
That’s not true. The most right wing and susceptible to fascist impulses are the rich and the petite bourgeoisie, the rich funding and making deals with the fascists and the bourgeois classes seeking to hoard what they have because they feel their status (financial and/or cultural) is threatened by the Others.
I wasn’t assigning susceptibility to fascism a place in this conversation. I wouldn’t describe fascism as inherently the same thing as self-interestedness. Fascism is more of a panic reaction to stress than a constant in politics.
The context is beating Trump and that coalition. You think people value self-interest over values, particularly those people who don’t have much. I don’t agree in the current context that this is true.
I think more people than not (i.e., a majority of voters) look at political speech first through the lens of what it would mean for them. If we’re talking higher taxes, then rich people are more impacted. If we’re talking health care, people who don’t have it are more impacted. If we’re talking race relations with the police, that doesn’t have much impact in all-white communities. If we’re talking education, people with unsatisfactory schools look at things differently from people who have good schools or use private schools or homeschooling. Getting people to care about the crack epidemic was harder than getting them to care about the opioid crisis because the crack problem was primarily urban and the opioid crisis is reaching every nook and cranny. People react most to issues that impact them personally, so talking about things that they don’t experience can be somewhere between boring to alienating, and it’s a lift to get people to support investment in things that won’t benefit them or their communities except in abstract or secondary ways. Even something as simple as foreign aid is never going to be super popular for this reason. Having said that, people can be led to being more generous and broad-minded or they can be led in the opposite direction. The Republicans prosper by talking about what other people are getting while the Democrats prosper by explaining to people what THEY will get. When the Democrats forget to tell people what is in it for them, they get slaughtered.
This nails the Dem problem precisely. Since we’ve apparently decided to run the prez campaign about a year early (which smothers media coverage of any Pelosi actions vis-a-vis our political criminal) , some Dem prez hopeful(s) needs to step up with a big speech on “the Border” and Immigration reform.
With an electorate whose default position is spite and reaction, Der Trumper’s Kiddie Koncentration Kamps are actually winning the day….
I would love to hear a defensible immigration reform policy from someone. Warren? She’s the one with a plan for everything. But the big problem IMO is that people who consider immigration an important issue are nearly all in the “build the wall” camp, they aren’t going to move off Trump.
But even with a good policy, whatever that might look like, it’s like Steggles says above, the Repubs will lie about Democratic policy and the media will report the lies as facts.
Look at Martin’s own post! Or Kevin Drum’s recent pile of shit comparing Warren’s plan to “open borders” (it is decidedly not). People are deported under civil law all of the time!
Voters want leadership on this issue, they don’t like Trump’s approach. The Democrats in the Senate are introducing reforms to the asylum system so that it can handle more people in a humane way. What I don’t see is “yes you can come and apply for citizenship/work visa” like actual open borders would entail. They still need to prove their asylum case, so what if we want to give them lawyers to exercise their rights. Do we want to demagogue the issue or propose real, actual solutions that are humane and respect international law?
We can win. The public is with us, we just need to persuade them that we have solutions to fix it. Or we can succumb to racist demagoguery. Fact is, climate change is going to force this issue. We need to hit it head on, not shy away.
Here’s what I mean by “open borders.” Advocating a complete end to deportations combined with a complete defunding or abolition of the ICE and/or the border patrol. This is a distortion of actual (presidential) candidates’ positions but it’s not a distortion of what is being openly advocated at protests and by *some* politicians. Julian Castro endorsed the abolition of ICE today at the Netroots Nation forum. His position involved a lot more than that, including ideas of what do for a replacement, but this isn’t something I am making up. The bottom line is that if you can’t force anyone to leave and you aren’t even going to try, then that’s effectively an open borders policy by most people’s thinking. It’s not going to win easily in an argument against Trump’s approach because people favor maintaining an orderly immigration system over not maintaining one at all. The answer involves coming up with sensible solutions for what amounts to a massive refugee crisis rather than simply giving up on border enforcement entirely.
But it’s not giving up border enforcement and you are accepting racist right wing framing for no reason. I just said people are still deported through a civil border enforcement system, they’re just not guilty of felony border crossings. They can and are still deported all of the time under this system. So what are you talking about that people aren’t being sent home just because we want to abolish ICE? The system needs entire revamping to deal with what’s actually causing stresses. We need to prepare for what’s actually coming. We can’t run away and embrace right wing bullshit. It will not save us.
Immigration is popular. Increase the ability of the system to handle the influx. Make the argument for why this is something that’s good.
I guess you are not reading carefully or looking at the pictures I provided. “No more deportations” is not an ambiguous political position. It is not “people are still deported all the time” or “deported through a civil border enforcement system.” It’s actually the exact opposite of that.
I think immigration is an issue that needs to be up front. So this paragraph says it.
We live in an era of severe climate change. Some areas of the earth may be difficult for humans to survive in in years ahead, and as crops fail and violence spreads, people will move. The wall and ICE are not enough to keep them out, let alone our own conscience and the association to fascism it entails, especially those innocents fleeing violence in Central America. So the choice is accepting hate and violence in our own country or recognizing we need to accommodate a reality with sane policies and admit those seeking asylum from those conditions.
And those policies can enhance our own nation with an improved standard of living. That’s simple math.
Universal health care is a necessary addition to our polices. People worry about increased taxes or giving it away to immigrants. It can’t be stopped anymore than immigration and climate change. And we should all understand that we already pay for health care, every damned nickel. What we need to do is to make it fair and do away with utter inefficiency like insurance companies and medical monopolies. We pay half again what many industrialized nations pay. And we have worse outcomes.
And when, in heavens name, will we address the driving force behind it all: climate change. AOC and her friends make a lot of noise and much of it resembles rabble rousing, but……
I don’t know how one appeals to this group or that, but I very much believe we need to talk about our futures and how we will address it , and that won’t come from what we did in the past. That world is gone, gone. It is all too expensive and inefficient and inequality continues to bedevil us. But I digress.