I thought this brief observation by Josh Marshall was worth sharing:
I have deeply ambivalent feelings about these debates about the failures of “the Democratic party.” Most of my commentary over a couple decades has been about trying to push Democrats to take more aggressive and forward-looking strategies for building political power, political.. coalitions, etc. I’m doing that right now. But a huge amount of this debate is advanced by people who see the success of rightwing candidates as prima facie evidence of the failure of Democrats. From one perspective, that’s true. In a binary political system, for one side to win the other has to lose. But at a deeper level a lot of these people don’t want to accept or grapple with the fact that a lot of Americans really want rightist authoritarian government.
It’s not just that the center-left opposition didn’t give them the right and their disappointment in Democrats led them to the right. A lot of them really want rightist authoritarian government.
How you combat that is quite complicated, especially in a country in which those with a consistent/coherent left/liberal politics are usually outnumbered by those with authoritarian/conservative politics. They’re not the majority. But that imbalance makes the center-left political grouping, the Democrats structurally more reliant on more middle of the road/less ideologically consistent voters.
That makes their coalition more unwieldy, less ideologically coherent and consistent. These are all points that anyone deeply immersed in politics knows and ineffective leaders need to stand aside (or in practice be pushed aside) by more effective ones.
Too many people, looking at a bleak political reality want to believe that it was obvious how to avoid it, or it could easily have been avoided because of a thing out there called “the Democrats.” The reality is the Democratic party is a mix of issue organizations outsider demographic/cultural/ethnic groups, labor and various political entrepreneurs most of whom run their own mini-political machines.
At the end of the day the Democratic party is just a conglomeration of the people in the country who have broadly center-left politics. It’s us. And it’s up to our collective ability to organize, strategize, vote, advocate to build a better country.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on July 17, 2022.
Word…
I said earlier that many Republicans delude themselves that most of the country agrees with them. Many Democrats do the same thing. It’s not just a failure of “messaging.” The other side has a completely different worldview that no amount of messaging can smooth over and blaming it all on the party’s leadership as a failure of proper strategy, as if people just need to hear the magic words, is missing the point. Of course Democrats must be held accountable and fresh blood with new ideas must be allowed to flourish. But kidding yourself about the structural impediments and the rigid nature of the opposition won’t get you very far.