I campaigned for Hillary throughout the fall and I was as depressed about the loss as anybody. The point is, it wasn’t progressive’s fault- it was the fault of the corporate centrists who wouldn’t allow the platform so take the ONLY position on the TPP that could have stopped Trump from sweeping the firewall states, and it was the fault of the unbelievably dense Hillary strategists who reduced her ad campaign’s message to nothing but
- Defend choice;
- It’s Time For A Woman;
- Trump is a scumbag.
None of those were bad messages…but we were never going to win reducing the Democratic offer to nothing but those, and we were never going to carry working-class voters in the firewall states by NOT pledging to kill the TPP, which was a purely antiworker trade deal that was about nothing but the meaningless objective of “containing China”.
After Bernie was stopped- in part by the repeated and unjustified use of false accusations that he and his supporters didn’t care about opposing racism or defending choice- accusations Bernie and his supporters did nothing whatsoever to deserve and for which the the Democratic establishment still owes them an apology- A and a lot of other Sanders supporters worked hard to elect her. 80% of Sanders supporters who voted did vote for Hillary- a higher percentage of them than of the Hillary supporters who voted for Obama- and a major reason more of them didn’t turn out in November- as a lot of us begged them to do- was that the party establishment sent them an endless, unrelenting message that their campaign had failed- it hadn’t, it totally changed the primary debate and for nothing but the better- that they had wasted their time even trying to get their candidate nominated, that they had no right to expect anything from the party in exchange for their support, they had no right to even expect that Hillary would work to implement the Sanders items in the platform- the only parts of the platform that were progressive at all- and that they should just shut up and “know their place”.
This is an old, toxic pattern in the party- the largely conservative status quo candidate- Humphrey in 1968, Carter in 1980, Mondale in 1984, Dukakis in 1988, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 were previous examples- in a primary where the establishment types endless treat the insurgency as if it had no right to even exist, then make sure the fall campaign of the status quo nominee never includes any of what the insurgency fought for- and guess what? It doesn’t work.
The only Democrats elected in this century- Obama in 2008 and, yes, Biden in 2020- rejected that approach and did not treat the insurgents as poor relations. Obama won on the energy the insurgents, some of which were in his own campaign- remember the “Obama movement”- and Biden made an effort to work with Bernie on shaping policy ideas.
Obama lost congress in 2010 because, as soon as the votes were in, he ditched the insurgents, made it clear they’d have no say in what his administration would do, and put Rahm Emmanuel- whose entire political career is grounded in irrational hatred of progressive activists and everything they stand for- to make it clear that they wouldn’t be welcome at all.
Biden is on the verge of doing the same, because he’s about to let the infrastructure bill be cut down to nothing- we all know it can’t have anything progressive in it if it ends up getting cut to less than $1 trillion, just as there was nothing progressive left in the ACA after Obama allowed it to be amended down to nothing but the exchanges- useless to anyone who isn’t rich- and the ban on denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions- which made no real difference to more than a tiny trivial handful of people.
If the equivalent happens to BBB- which is now down to being Build Back Barely- Biden will have no right to ask progressive to vote for him if he signs an empty shell of the bill- we both know anything less than a trillion would be too trivial to matter- and then doesn’t use the midterms to campaign hard against GOP obstructionism.
It will never be reasonable again for the Democratic Party to run another campaign on “it’s enough to protect choice and stop Trump”. Just protecting choice is a rich white women’s issue and no one else’s. Just stopping Trump, by itself, isn’t anything at all.
There has to be some minimum standard here- it can’t be the party saying “we didn’t give you anything- but you have to vote for us to STOP THEM!” Politics based on nothing but stopping a monster is a waste of time for everyone. And the results this week prove that kind of campaign can never lead to a Democratic victory again.
Why even try it again? Why should we forever give up our dignity and everything we stand for? That’s what “vote Blue, no matter who!” means. It has never meant anything positive and it never can.
