Democrats Are Not The Problem

There have been a spate of stories and posts over the last few days that have, quite frankly, driven me up the wall. The basic theme is always the same, that we should overlook the cruelty and undemocratic nature of the Republican party and focus on the idea that Democrats don’t have policies that speak to rural voters and that liberal coastal elites need to be less condescending toward the interior of the country. Frankly, I think its a load of claptrap.

I’ll start off with the first story that raised my blood pressure, a story I largely agreed with but the writer somehow felt obliged to blame Democrats for things they haven’t done at the same time. A New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik focusses on the fact the biggest difference between the US and French elections was the moderate and center-right parties and voters banded together to oppose the far-right xenophobic, nationalist populism of Marine Le Pen and the National Front. Here in the US, on the other hand, the institutional Republican party refused to openly condemn Trump, playing footsie with him to stay in power. There is nothing there to disagree with.

But Gopnik continues, “Yet the challenge remains for the left to avoid falling prey to tribal habits, as the right did. You see this risk in the insistence, surprisingly widespread, that there is no real point in resisting Trump, since the Republicans in Congress are complicit in his program…Trump is almost better than Pence because he is more nakedly unfit for the office…Democracies die when they can no longer distinguish between honest opponents of another ideological kind and toxic enemies who come from far outside all normal values. The Republican Party has functioned, by and large, within the constraints of liberal democracy. There are many obvious exceptions—the issue of the legality of government-sponsored torture, during the George W. Bush Administration, is but one key instance from recent years. But it’s a legitimate reproach to liberals that, by maximizing Bush’s violation of the norms, as substantial as they were, they helped make it difficult to distinguish adequately between the Bushes and the Trumps of the world.”

This is just an amazing contortion. First, it is highly disputable that the Republican party has functioned “within the constraints of liberal democracy”. I think the party’s stated goal of obstructing anything and everything Obama wanted to try and accomplish and the refusal to even give Merrick Garland a hearing are just two of many points that put a lie to Gopnik’s thesis. In addition, Gopnik himself notes the multiple exceptions, such as Bush’s torture, but then goes on to blame liberals for making too much of it, so much so that Trump became acceptable. This is just total BS. The Republican party alone has been undermining liberal democratic institutions and norms for decades and it alone is responsible for Donald Trump.

Michael Tomasky, in a similar vein, calls out all those liberal coastal elites for being just too damn condescending and driving voters in the middle of the country to essentially vote against their own interests. According to Tomasky, “All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts”. Gee, who would have known. He notes those “real Americans” go to church, don’t live and breathe politics, and are patriotic. Really. As if the large majority of liberal coastal Democrats don’t do any of those things at all.

Kevin Drum at least tries to make the important point that the gap between Republicans and Democrats has evolved because of what he calls the great sorting out, the different paths for post-war Americans and their families who went to college and those who did not but made a living in blue-collar jobs that actually paid a living wage.

And Drum also rightly highlights the collapse of unions expanding the gap between parties. But, here again, the logic is incredibly convoluted. Says Drum, “But young liberals in the 60s and 70s broke with the unions over the Vietnam War, and the unions broke with them over their counterculture lifestyle. This turned out to be a disaster for both sides, as Democrats lost votes and workers saw their unions decimated by their newfound allies in the Republican Party”. Maybe it’s just me, but I would think if my new allies were destroying my ability to make a living wage, I might realign myself with my old allies who were actually trying to protect the institutions that allowed me to make that living wage in the first place. But, according to Drum, that would be condescending, saying, “lefties are implicitly lecturing them all the time. You are bad for eating factory-farmed meat. You are bad for enjoying football. You are bad for owning a gun. You are bad for driving an SUV. You are bad for not speaking the language of microaggressions and patriarchy and cultural appropriation.”

Please. Give me a break. Most liberals still eat factory-farmed meat and most still watch an inordinate amount of football. Coastal elites like me who live in or near big cities want to restrict the flow of illegal handguns that fuel deadly drug wars, turn smaller crimes into homicides, and increase the chances of accident and suicide. We could care less about the guns people use to actually go hunt. There were around 66 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton and I think it is safe to say that less than 1% of those voters actually think any of the things that Drum mentions.

Finally, I will go to Martin Longman, another person I largely agree with most of the time. His post about Montana rightly points out the problem that Democrats are having in rural America. His focus is on Garfield County, where the Republican assaulter Greg Gianforte got over 90% of the vote, winning by over 600 votes in one of the most sparsely populated counties in the country. Juxtapose that with the more competitive Hill County which Democrat Rob Quist won, but gained only 26 votes. As Longman notes, “Quist would have had to carry 26 Hill Counties to match his losses in Garfield.”

According to Longman, “These folks need an actual left-wing alternative and what we’ve been offering them has been driving them away in droves. For a while, it was thought that it wouldn’t matter” because rural losses would be offset by Democratic gains in suburban America. Longman continues, “So, it won’t do to cast all these folks as deplorables and wait from them to die off. It’s simply not true that none of them were ever going to vote for the Democrats no matter what because a lot of them voted for Barack Obama once if not twice. They have problems in their communities and right now the only party offering them something they’re willing to hear is the Republican Party. They need a left-wing alternative that isn’t complacent about their difficulties.”

Well, Garfield County also went for Donald Trump by a similar amount to Gianforte. Barack Obama only got as high as 9% in 2008. So these are not voters who voted for Obama. These are not voters that Democrats have lost. They were never there to begin with. In addition, the issue in Garfield County is not the typical issue of the rural poor. Garfield has a median income $10,000 higher than Hill County and the rates of WIC eligibility and poverty are 23% and 8% in Garfield versus 45% and 12% in Hill.

Yes, all of these pundits have some valid points to make. It would be great if Democrats could craft a message that resonated with some of these voters. But Barack Obama couldn’t do it, Hillary Clinton couldn’t do it, and Rob Quist, a born and bred Montanan who lives and breathes the state, is certainly not condescending to his fellow Montanans, and largely adopted Bernie Sanders’ message couldn’t do it. And that problem stretches across broad stretches of Republican territory.

But let’s be clear. The Republican party is responsible for Donald Trump. The Republican party is responsible for the undercutting of governmental and democratic norms that are shaking our democracy to its core. The Republican party is putting party over country, favoring a quest for power more than a functioning democracy.

As David Atkins, in a piece entitled “There’s Only So Much We Can Do” where he discusses Oklahomans cutting their taxes so much that they can no longer provide for adequate police forces and schools can only stay open for four days a week, writes, “These people aren’t just hurting others, and they’re not just punishing minorities or some faraway urban elites. They’re not just trying to bring the low-skill jobs back. At a certain point it starts to take on the trappings of a mass ideological cult, little different from the Maoists of the Great Leap Forward or the widest eyed Jacobins of the French Revolution. Many of them are True Believers who will ride the supply-side, anti-government tiger deep into the jungle of no return even if it means the destruction of their communities and the deaths of their loved ones. In the states where these people hold sway, there’s not much that can even be done to save them. If the people in these communities are willing to destroy themselves for the sake of a warped ideological purity, the rest of us can sometimes only try to shield ourselves from the destruction while welcoming those who wish to escape.”

Exactly. Democrats may have things they can do better, but the Republican party, its right wing media echo chamber, and Republicans themselves are the real problem. We should never lose sight of that fact.