DH

I think the destructive thing would be to continue on the same course of raising lots of money from rich people and Wall Street. Hillary did that. She spent the month of August talking to billionaires instead of going to Wisconsin. It’s very funny to watch Obama trolling her now about what a miserable campaign she ran.

But what they would have to do — and I doubt that they would do this, given the structure of American politics and the Democratic Party, specifically — is wean themselves from elite funding and adopt a Sanders model of small contributions. He raised a ton of money in a short amount of time. He came out of nowhere and ended up running a very credible campaign based on grassroots funding because he was very appealing. He was saying things that people wanted to hear. So, that’s one thing. You need to break away from the elite funders and recast the funding — something like a membership organization — a real political party in the sense that it is in other parts of the world.

Then you have to have a message that appeals to people. Some very basic social-democratic things that will make people’s lives better. A single-payer health-care system. Free college tuition. All the kinds of things that Sanders harped on. I think simplicity of that message is really important too. Sanders had four or five points he’d make over and over again. Some people made fun of him for it, but that is really how you win in politics. Most people are not intellectuals. They don’t follow political campaigns that carefully, or political issues that carefully. But, if you hammer away at several things that you’re convinced will make their lives better, and excite them emotionally, then you can win elections.

I think that very simple social democratic platform — higher minimum wage, better labor law, anti-discrimination measures — is a winner, but it’s also really important to emphasize the universal. We’re all in this together.

Then there’s what a lot of people criticize as identitarian politics. Some of it is about ending discrimination and bigotry, and that’s a very good thing. But some of it comes out of marketing. We’re micro-targeting certain populations and certain demographics. That’s not really what we need in politics. We need some sense that we’re all in this together and that an injury to one is an injury to all. All of these classical ideas that came out of the labor movement and left-wing politics seem very relevant to the present. A lot of people say “all that old stuff just doesn’t fit this world.” I don’t really understand that at all. We need it more than ever.

People are frightened. We have a climate crisis. We have all kinds of things that should make us want to huddle together and fight together instead of fighting each other. The agenda and financing model that Sanders was so successful with is precisely what we need on a large scale. From city council races in every city of the country, all the way up to the office of the president. It just seems absolutely imperative to shift to that kind of model, and away from the consultant-driven, money-driven politics that the Hillary campaign embodied.

And, although she lost the election, we should remember that she did win the popular vote. There is no mandate for Trumpism. But because of our electoral college, because of the idiocy of the American political system, she didn’t take the oath of office.