The War for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Political Science
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“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”
-Voltaire

This is the sound of today’s Democratic Party.

The new left, unconnected to big money and industry PACs, has as its new icon AOC, who last year was a bartender. The sound you hear is the echo of her wooden clogs on the stairs to power.

The iconic democrats, Pelosi, Biden et al, are fading away. We hear the soft padding of their silk slippers as they descend the stairs soon to fade away or, given their ages, pass away.

Pelosi really blew-it in her NYT interview a week or so ago.

Pelosi said: "All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world… But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

And this week in Philly, at the net-roots convention this week, the “Squad” were venerated as heroes and Pelosi was disparaged and her name was received with boos.

https://web.archive.org/save/https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d29ee90e4b0bd7d1e1d0aba

As Bob Dylan penned: "Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?

Jesus, Pelosi is eating chocolate with Maureen Dowd and insulting the next generation. Millions in the next generation hear 1/20 of the Pelosi interview and are tweeting and instagraming and facebooking and having conversations orders of magnitude larger than the ones old media can create.

In the long term the Democrats will go where Sanders has been pointing for a long time.

But in the short term, in the interregnum, we have a big problem…

The schism between old and new in the party is no joke. The under 45 set wants a more socialist country: universal health care, free state universities, more aggressive control of polluters, subsidies of green energy, legal weed, much less military, publicly funded elections…

The old guard wants to be moderate. Not so fast on universal health care, affordable–not free–public universities, easy on the green stuff, we love our troops…

Worse, the old guard disparages the new and rising left. Pelosi laughed at the Green New Deal. When she did she forever lost the respect of millions, especially millennials.

The “establishment” democrats better wake-up and smell the coffee. The kids could very well do what they did in 2000: many decided that Gore and Bush were not really different and so voted for Nader. Or what happened in 2016 could happen again: the rust belt, who saw no friend in HRC, could stay home again. Wanna see this happen? Nominate Biden.

My big worry is that the party could split. This would neuter the left.

If Pelosi et al keep-up their current approach the Russians will find and push a 3rd party candidate that appeals to the young.

Think this is crazy? Most who are mad about 2016 still don’t know that the Russians created the Bernie Bros.

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Bernie Bros were real, a fact that can’t reasonably be disputed. What we know is that they were targeted by Russians to spread disinformation that was harmful to Hillary Clinton and helpful to Trump. Some did so. We also know that they were perhaps exaggerated in number and certainly exaggerated in influence. We saw no small amount of the mindless parroting of anti-Clinton propaganda poured into this forum by a Bernie Sanders fan, but he did not appear to change any minds. And contrary to the above, Bernie Sanders’ supporters did not sit out the last election, pouting and licking their wounds over Bernie’s loss in the primaries – they voted.

As for AOC, she has proved to be good at drawing attention to herself. But, as should not be surprising under the circumstances, she has no legislative accomplishments. So while she may turn out to be a rising star, it’s more than a bit premature to declare her the future of the party. I’ll grant that there’s a faction on the left that seems to view the accomplishment of nothing as the highest form of virtue, but truly it’s not a way to impress the rest of the party or the country.

Oh, sure, some people are offended that Pelosi is dismissive of a left-wing faction that is comprised of roughly four votes in the House and which shows no present ability to attract greater support, when it demands that the rest of the party do things its way, when it demands that the party achieve the unachievable with little apparent awareness that the Democrats don’t control either the Senate or the White House. That’s in no small part because Pelosi is an experienced politician, and sees no great benefit in grandstanding over issues where she cannot deliver results, or in suggesting that sweeping, dramatic, immediate change is possible when it should be blindingly obvious that it is not.

If AOC’s followers want to work themselves up into a tizzy because Pelosi is dismissive of AOC, that’s certainly their right. But what’s the point? Pelosi isn’t going to be around much longer. Perhaps AOC’s followers should be more focused on Pelosi’s successor, or even working to generate the support necessary to lead to the choice of a successor who will be more to their liking. Sure, it’s easier to threaten to stay home if they don’t get their way, but I don’t hear them actually making that threat. Perhaps those who are supposedly on the side of those young voters should be less swift to tarnish them with such an unkind and unflattering caricature.

If AOC’s followers prefer to split the left and let the nation be governed by Trump and a series of Trump-like successors, then you know what would be doing? They would be proving AOC’s harshest critics correct in relation to her lack of demonstrated leadership, because if she in fact has any influence over such a faction of voters she should be educating them not to deepen our nation’s problems in a truly imbecilic and self-destructive pursuit of purity.

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Personally I think destroying both the progressive movement and the Democratic Party is necessary in order to return or replace it with something that is more center left than far left. Until that happens the Democratic Party will continue to cannabinol itself into extinction because there is no such thing as a Democrat whose purpose is for the people, in a brand that only seeks power and like rabid dogs fight over the lazy scraps of meat!

The Democratic Party is dying and that could be both bad and good, depending on what replaces it!

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There are more registered democrats than republicans. But with growing numbers registering as independents, perhaps when they learn to vote accordingly, both can be marginalized.

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That doesn’t mean anything, as a lot of registered Democrats are leaving the party and joining or identifying as independents. The last poll conducted was in 2017 by Gallop when measuring this statistic and doesn’t account for broader movements of #walkaway and woke that began in larger numbers after Trump was inaugurated!

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AOC is not the future of any party. I like a lot of things she says and does, but I’m really furious about the GND fraud. She also needs to stop attacking Pelosi. Imagine AOC were actually the Dem nominee. Isn’t it obvious that Trump would crush her by historic margins?

People need to stop believing that Twitter is life.