It doesn't matter how great your marketing campaign is. You can't sell your dog food if the dogs won't eat it.
---Old Madison Avenue proverb
So here we are once more. Another electoral drubbing at the hands of the most cartoonishly evil, corrupt, inept gang of thugs politics has served up since the days of Mark Hanna. And we're all shocked. How could this have happened? How can we possibly have lost to these freakshow escapees yet again?
It must be the fault of the voters, for being stupid. Or the non-voters, for being too lazy and stupid to show up. Or the media, for always being in the tank for the Republicans. Or the purist progressives, because they said bad things about Obama. Or Ralph Nader, for who the fuck knows anymore. Yeah, those guys are to blame.
Ahem. Sorry, Democrats. It's a basic truth in life that when everybody you meet is an asshole, it's time to look in the mirror. Stop looking for people or groups or institutions to blame, and start looking at yourselves. We here are Democrats, and we love to pour scorn all over the Republicans, because it's easy. It's time to pour scorn on the Democrats, because we are Democrats and it is our responsibility to do so. Who the hell is going to fix this party if we don't?
Scapegoat hunters in our ranks are the Democratic party's worst enemies. We'll never fix a comprehensively broken party until we acknowledge that it's broken, and start figuring out what's wrong and what we can do about it. Ralph Nader didn't get us in this mess. Faithful Democrats, supporting the lies and the empty promises and the bait-and-switchery of our party, bear the greatest responsibility for the mess. If you follow the leadership off a cliff, don't be surprised to find yourself falling. We need to form up our own parade and march in a different direction. If the "leaders" want to lead, make them scramble to the front of our parade.
There is no educational value in the second kick from a mule.
--- Attributed to Mark Twain
Progressives and liberals have long hitched their wagon to the Democratic party, maintaining the delusion that it's still the party of the New Deal and the Great Society at heart. I've done this too. But the New Deal was eight decades ago. Our view of the party is almost as outdated as that of old African Americans in the 1960s, who stuck with the Republican party because it was the party of Lincoln. Actually, they had better contemporary justification than we do, at least until Nixon's Southern Strategy. The New Deal Democratic party is as dead as the Whigs. Our latter-day version is one more vehicle of corporate influence: the Goldman Division of America, Inc. We are locked in phony battle with the Koch Division for spectacles of Potemkin democracy, which offer changes and choices that cost the owners of this country nothing and usually improve their quarterly numbers. Nothing can be done anymore that doesn't pay off billionaire sponsors first and last.
Our political system is comprehensively corrupt, and it is almost impossible to participate in it, certainly not as an officeholder, without wallowing in that corruption. In Washington those who have held themselves apart can be counted on your fingers. Both parties are creatures of this corruption, and their bases know it. Ask any average American if they think politics is corrupt, and you'll get a resounding "No shit!" nine times out of ten. Conservatives know this as well as liberals. It's only devout party followers who seem blind to the obvious.
Corrupt parties have to find ways to get their voters out, despite most of those voters knowing how corrupt they are. It is almost impossible to make a positive, affirmative case for oneself when everybody knows your pockets are stuffed with cash. Therefore, you have to point over there at how terrible the other guy is. Hence we have almost exclusively negative campaigning. Republicans are awfully good at this, and are bounded by neither truth, shame, nor basic human decency. Democrats suck at it, despite having a lot more material to work with. The problem for Democrats is that too many of the things they can truthfully say about the Republicans are just as true of them. Want to point out how beholden Republicans are to the Kochs? Yeah, just try it, when you're getting so much "support" from Goldman Sachs or BP or Lockheed Martin. Voters aren't as stupid as most professional pols think they are.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
--- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii.
What do we do now? Well, as the old Betty Rollins book advised us, "First You Cry." Then what? Do we pick up our placards and phonebank for Hillary, send our $3 to whatever generic Democrat mouths the same disingenous sales line into our inboxes, sign another petition and push that thermometer up on DKos? Or do we try something different?
I don't think anybody knows the answer to that. But doing what we've been doing all along is the stupidest possible choice. The Democratic brand is completely fucked. Midterms are a contest of party brands, while Presidential election years are mainly a personality contest. Democrats can eke out victories sometimes in the personality contest, but they've been losing the brand wars pretty comprehensively for a while now. The exception was 2006, when the Republicans had so poisoned their own well that the country recoiled. What does it say that the country is recoiling from the Democrats just as hard now?
The Democratic party will not change until it has absolutely no other choice. The leadership has proven over and over again that it would rather lose to a Republican than permit a progressive Democratic insurgent to win a primary. Losing to a Republican doesn't threaten the leadership's perks and position, for some unfathomable reason. Seeing the Warren wing gain power within the party is a much more direct threat to most of their jobs, on the other hand. The chimera of fighting the battle in the primaries is a lost cause: they'll make sure we lose. When was the last time we won one?
Progressives have to learn to play both the inside and the outside game. We need our Elizabeth Warrens and our Jeff Merkleys and our Alan Graysons inside the party standing up to the Morgan cocksuckers running it. We need our Kshama Sawants and Bernie Sanders' and Bill McKibbens and Rev. William Barbers to put pressure on the party from the outside, too. The only way we're ever going to take over the Democratic party is if enough catastrophic losses weaken the hold of the FIRE puppetmasters enough for a progressive movement to swoop in. We need to build that movement, outside the party veal pen, where it won't be co-opted from the start. Progressives haven't built their Tea Party. We're behind the Republicans, whom we deride as stupid. They're smarter than we are in knowing how hopeless their party leaders are, even though they're dumb enough to not recognize the billionaires co-opting their anger. We don't have billionaires on our side to fund an outside insurrection. That's a curse, but also a blessing. We have to do it for ourselves.