kos: Policy is useless right now. We don’t need any message beyond “NO!”

The NY Times says the Dems are The New Party of No.

It's certainly a convenient strategy if your objective is not to change and reform.

If your objective is to have a phony McResistance based completely on empty symbolism, then "No" is just as good as any other word.

Economist Mark Blyth sums up what is wrong with this strategy in the video below better than I ever could.

Basically, everything is wrong with the strategy of just saying no and leaving policy for another time.

Markos and the rest of the Democratic Party establishment have forgotten the purpose of politics isn't about "your team". Politics is about your values, and those values are reflected in your policies, not your words. In case the lessons of the 2016 election was lost on anyone, no one believes the platitudes of politicians anymore.

It means Democrats are defending a status quo that most of the American public, both Democrats and Republicans, have been in agreement for years that it needs to change. However, only Republicans have offered a vision of change. It's a terrible vision, but it's the only alternative to an intolerable status quo.



The election of such an unpopular and unqualified leader is a symptom of something even more dangerous than Trump: a systemic rot at the heart of our national politics. Trump was elected because a record number of eligible voters stayed home, including some 2 million African Americans who voted for Obama in 2012.

Ordinary Americans understand what the pundits and political operatives living in the D.C. bubble fail to comprehend: The system is rigged. Our national politics is controlled by a duopoly of corporate-owned Republicans and Democrats. To be sure, with the Democrats you get more reasonable rhetoric, the occasional grilling of a Wall Street villain on C-SPAN, and even a few votes of conscience by lawmakers in safe seats. But in the end, both national parties make sure that the interests of corporations will be advanced while the interests of the poor and working class are brushed aside. Business owners win over workers; creditors win over debtors; war profiteers win over the safety and security of everyone on the planet.

The first thing that establishment Democrats did after the election debacle is call for unity. But unity for what? Partisan politics?

Hillary Clinton and Paul Krugman were quick to compare a modern progressive agenda to magical unicorns.

The Democratic Party spends a lot of time and effort dividing and atomizing it's various identity groups, a critical function of identity politics, so any call for actual solidarity should be taken with a grain of salt.



Establishment figureheads are calling for Democrats to unify behind a common agenda, but it’s an old agenda with amorphous values, one that is more focused on defeating the right than on creating an economy and society that lifts up all people...

Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, is open about his intent to steer the party away from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and back toward an uninspiring, Republican-lite, status quo agenda (which makes sense given that a major component of Third Way’s budget comes from donors on Wall Street).

Many establishment Democrats have tried to paint Sanders-style progressive populism as some sort of white privilege. The reality is that economics is a big reason why 2 million African Americans who voted for Obama didn't vote for Hillary.



if you consider the fates of ordinary people, we did have a depression. According to a Federal Reserve study, African Americans and Latinos who graduated from four-year colleges lost 60 percent and 72 percent of their wealth, respectively, after the 2008 financial crisis.

It's ironic that while the Democratic Party has bent over backwards to deny the reality of the working-class' economic hardship, the nearly hopelessly corrupt political system, and the inability of neoliberal capitalism to fix any of this, the strongest calls for change in the capitalist's status quo are coming from the right.

Trump may be an unrepentant liar, but his right-wing fans responded to the insults he hurled at Wall Street. What level of deep intellectual poverty has the center-left sunk to that Trump managed to seize populist economics from them?



There was a time, not so very long ago, when it was widely accepted that the job of the left was to explain how free-market capitalism is bad for the poor and bad for social cohesion more generally.... Markets and money should exist to serve people, not the other way round. The importance of democratic socialism is that it uses the power of the ballot box to assert the will of people over the will of capital.

Jeremy Corbyn aside, one of the tragedies of the leftwing abandonment of its traditional suspicion of capitalism is that the far right has now filled the vacuum....What a topsy-turvy political world we now inhabit. Squint your eyes and it almost looks as though the left has become the right, and the right has become the left.

On one level this is a golden opportunity the left is missing. Any anti-capitalist message coming from the left that could be used to create solidarity with hard-pressed workers on the right, gets filtered and blocked by the neoliberal political establishment.

That leaves frustrated workers on right to find their own answers to the obvious failures of capitalism, usually through scapegoats.

On another level, this is a terrible tragedy for the left.

As Mark Blyth explained, if you don't offer a vision of the future, people will look to the past. And who "owns" the past? The right-wing.

The right "owns" the glory days before globalism and foreigners.

The left, unless it can offer a bright future, is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. It's a punching bag.

For the left to offer that brighter future, it must comes to grips with the failures of the present. To do that the left must confront the causes of those failures, the causes of which just happen to be large campaign contributors to the Democratic Party.