The Worst Kind of Victory

Hillary Clinton Was a Bad Choice.

It may have come from a Conservative outlet, but this is exactly what happened. Populism pulled the rug out from under the whole system.

Holly Wood said it. Nomiki Konst said it. Robert Reich said it. Glenn Greenwald said it.

Even I said it on March 18:

Consider that Bernie has wide support from both Independents (who rallied around him at a ratio of 3–1 in New Hampshire) and even Republicans and self-described Libertarians. Bernie Sanders also has among the highest favorability rating of any candidate currently running… nationally. This is electability. Think about voter turnout, which every Democrat knows is what leads to a win for the party. Consider the crowds Bernie draws again and again and again. Consider that Bernie raised 7 million dollars in one day from small contributions. Consider that the DNC failed us in 2012 when we failed to keep the Congress. This is the energy we need to bring to the general. A message that says it does not stop at the presidency, but that every vote in every election — local, state and federal — matters.

On May 1 in a last ditch effort to support Bernie Sanders:

And in July:

Hillary Clinton is a Rough Choice for the General I worry about what a Hillary Clinton nomination means. There’s a litany of reasons I supported Bernie Sanders, but backgrounding my ideological alignment was optics. Bernie simply didn’t carry the baggage that Hillary Clinton did. Fair or not, Mrs. Clinton is followed day in and day out by a barrage of accusations unequaled by anyone (except, perhaps, her opponent). To add to that, she’s a horrible campaigner. Truly awful. She failed to adapt to Barack Obama in 2008. She lost more than 40% of her installed electorate to Bernie Sanders in 2016. She doesn’t know how to fight populism, as evidenced in the latest polls and forecasts. Her idea of taking Donald Drumpf down a peg is a cliché, sardonic tweet. She shoots herself in the foot constantly. She surrounded herself with people like David Brock, immediately alienating swathes of the liberal electorate. And her husband, once a master politician, now seems to be more hindrance than help to her political aspirations. Add to this the very real concerns about the damage the DNC emails have done so far and the fact that Wikileaks isn’t done yet. Julian Assange — a man I rather dislike, despite the truth of the stuff he and his organization have leaked in the past — seems to have made it his personal mission to destroy Hillary Clinton. No one running for office would want him as an enemy. This is the bed the DNC, apparently, made for itself. It is the reality Hillary Clinton primary voters wanted. Despite ample warning, including atrocious favorability ratings and too-close-for-comfort poll numbers in general election match-ups, the electorate decided she was the best option.

In response, we were met with articles fawned that over Clinton’s purported electability. Peep this snippet from a Jay Michaelson article at The Daily Beast:

It’s hideous to read these things now. For those of us who saw it coming, it’s painful and infuriating. For people like Michaelson and his ilk who got it so apocalyptically wrong by scaring us with electability arguments, I would hope it’s beyond embarrassing. You failed marginalized people everywhere. Your shame is warranted.

But progressive Bernie supporters never wanted this. The immense sense of ironic validation I feel re-reading Michaelson’s insipid words isn’t remotely worth it. I voted for Hillary (something I wasn’t sure I’d do). I didn’t want Drumpf to become president, and I did my democratic duty to prevent that reality.

I simultaneously failed, and then my worst fears were proven right. This is the definition of a pyrrhic victory. I don’t feel smug right now — I just feel fury. Fury at older generations who patted us on our heads and told us our ideas were too grand, our candidate too unreliable, our ambition not realistic. We were informed that Clinton was the only rational choice for president, the only one with a real shot at the White House. But I need to let that go.

Failure to Understand Why Hillary Was A Bad Choice Will Doom Us All

Note that I say progressive Bernie supporters didn’t want this outcome. This is an important distinction because Bernie had broad appeal in the primaries. I’m sure there are Conservatives and Independents who would have voted for Bernie given half the chance.

If we’re to believe that the Angry Americans whose only interest was in throwing a rock into the cogs of the elites — the D.C., New York, California grand poobahs who did nothing but ignore and talk down to them for years — then Bernie would have met that goal. Short of that, Drumpf did. Hillary was never going to be that person.

This quote from Thomas Frank, in arguably the most salient post-mortem on this election, illustrates the point:

Hillary Clinton was exactly the wrong candidate: a technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine

Perfection.

But this isn’t about who could have run and who might have won. That’s unknowable. This is a referendum on the Democratic party. Until the Democrats can take ownership of the fact that they chose the wrong kind of candidate and the wrong kind of politics, we’re never going to move forward.

But What If Democrats Do Introspect?

If the Democrats are serious about reforming their party, about a seismic shift along the lines of their hard dive Right in the 90s, then we might stand a chance. But this will require a major strategy shift from the DNC. And to know how to shift that strategy, we must first assess what went wrong.

1) We Underestimated White Supremacy

Democrats failed to acknowledge the reality of white supremacy. They relied on gender as the dominant identity. And yet, white women saw more in common with a racist demagogue than a female technocrat.

Further, the working class didn’t rebel. This wasn’t an uprising of the poor. These were rich white folks who voted Trump in, a demo that went for Obama in ‘08 and ‘12. These were people who saw, unfortunately, a system of power and privilege eroding out from underneath them and exercised their voting rights to change it.

America has ignored its part in maintaining systems of privilege for far too long. The America that at least coddles and enables (if not full on embraces) racism/xenophobia/etc. has always been there. It’s not new. We just pretended it didn’t exist.

We saw the fruits of this on November 8. If we don’t sit down (or rather rise up) and acknowledge that Trump’s America is the America we’ve always lived in, we have absolutely no hope of moving forward.

2) The Media Are Engorged Protectors of the Bourgeoisie And We Should Stop Indulging Them

Critique of the media falls into the obvious and the not-so obvious. Most apparently, we fell prey to a 24-hour news cycle that has been poisoning our airwaves for years now. We were fed nonsense by media conglomerates who cared more about ratings and clicks than facts and real sources. The result was Donald Trump: a man who barely had to spend any money on advertising because the media provided him billions in free coverage.

But deeper and more sinister than chasing ratings is the beltway media’s warm embrace of the bourgeoisie. Sarah Smarsh’s beautiful Guardian article says it better than I ever could:

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread.

Journalists, safe attending champagne receptions and hobnobbing with sources all over the capital, painted a particular picture of the sort of person who would support Donald Trump. Not only was it shallow, not only it was wrong — it was destructive. It offered no insight on how to speak to this community. It reduced poll-driving anger to troglodytism and pulled the wool over the eyes of every analyst in the country and guffawed at the idea that anyone might take issue with the revolving doors in D.C.

One of the most brilliant articles I’ve ever read comes from Thomas Frank. In it, he discusses mainstream dismissal of Bernie Sanders’ rather moderate revolutionary ideas. But beyond the lament for a candidate who never made it to the general election, Frank offers a searing and well-deserved indictment of a beltway journalist class who have utterly failed the American people. They never challenged the system, and in fact did everything they could to enable it.

In his closing paragraph, he speaks of their ultimate demise:

Until the day, that is, when you wake up and learn that the tycoon behind your media concern has changed his mind and everyone is laid off and that it was never really about you in the first place. Gone, the private office or award-winning column or cable-news show. The checks start bouncing. The booker at MSNBC stops calling. And suddenly you find that you are a middle-aged maker of paragraphs — of useless things — dumped out into a billionaire’s world that has no need for you, and doesn’t really give a damn about your degree in comparative literature from Brown. You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late now. Too late for all of us.

3) Turnout Was Abysmal

Millennials dropped the ball. You may have seen that map floating around that suggested we voted much bluer than other generations. We did, but not in the overwhelming manner we’d like to believe. Worse still, we didn’t turn out to vote. The largest, most powerful generation chose to stay home (not without some coaxing from a fearful DNC, mind.)

But Clinton voters didn’t turn up in key states, either, leading to the demise of Zephyr Teachout, Russ Feingold and plenty of other desperately-needed effectors of revolutionary change.

In fact, Democratic voters didn’t really turn out at all compared with previous cycles.

Enthusiasm was at an impressive low this cycle for both parties. Could it be that we had two of the most unlikable nominees in history to choose between? No one knows. Except we do.

What we needed was a movement. We needed inspiration. No matter how you slice it, Clinton didn’t come close to providing that.*

4) Any Strategy That Doesn’t Consider the Ramifications of Ignoring Half The Country Will Lose

I’m Jewish, though my height and name don’t give that away immediately. I recently learned I have American slave ancestry, though I don’t present as black. I’m not entirely straight, though you’d never know it unless I told you.

So I don’t walk about in day-to-day fear. But my friends do.

The lower class may have voted Clinton, and the middle class may have voted for Drumpf. But to the beltway, to the multi-millionaires and billionaires who run Washington and Wall Street, those differences are negligible: a termite to an ant versus both to a human foot.

The ants decided to fight back, however wrongheaded it may have seemed to the urban bubble so many of us live in. They’re angry. Is it fear of diversity? The steady erosion of and spotlight on white privilege? Maybe. Another thought: maybe we should ask them.

Maybe we should have asked them. Not indulged them, but asked.

Van Jones made headlines just by visiting a Drumpf household and having a conversation. Bernie went to Liberty University and engaged friendly debate. And Drumpf, perhaps accidentally, earned some of the black vote (scoring more than Romney did in 2012) by at least pretending to be interested in what that community had to say. Hell, even Glenn Beck has decided “We have to start listening to people.”

Instead, we got snark. We relied on John Oliver and Samantha Bee to smack some sense into the American public with high-minded liberal rhetoric. Perhaps most infamously, we got “basket of deplorables” — a misstep in the Clinton campaign that is as bad as if not worse than Romney’s 47% line.

But it went beyond mere snark. It was pure condescension that wasn’t just dismissive, but patronizing. The beltway decided they knew what was best for the electorate. They also believed they had the inside scoop on middle America. They saw the polls (produced by urban elite analysts), read the op-eds (written by urban elite journalists), consulted their sources (urban elite politicians, consultants, donors) and talked to their friends (consumers of urban elite media). And then, with this arcane (perhaps occult is a better word) knowledge in hand, they divined for the American people how to think.

There were, as you might imagine, a few reasons this was a bad idea. First, and take it from a Bernie supporter, the people who vote mostly aren’t on the internet. They’re certainly not on Facebook and Twitter. These are older folks, people who consume information entirely from television news: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC. You know, those media organizations who utterly failed to report anything of substance for 16 months and were positively gleeful about it. Speaking into the echo chamber of the internet and getting confirmation of your bias tells you nothing, but the media reported it as if it validated everything.

Relying on liberal pundits and comedians to communicate to a population who never interfaced with them was likewise an absurd mistake. I know you shared the hell out of that awesome Daily Show clip you just saw on Youtube. You know how never saw it? Most of America. And for those who did, how far do you think high horse moralizing got us with Robert McAdams, 78, of Peru, Nebraska?

“It’s never talked about in much depth or detail because the guy is such a joke. We can’t fathom it and therefore are not planning for it.” ~ Texas Rep. Marc Veasey

And finally, while we should have known that the middle of the country wasn’t reading Paul Krugman, we should ask ourselves why anyone was reading Krugman. He produced vapid commentary composed of Bernie Sanders in takedowns in the primary, and then Drumpf mockery in the general. But it goes beyond just one person: it’s the entire urban elite. Those who listened to them never should have. They never had their finger on the pulse of America, and thus they missed the heart attack.

So let’s not do that again.

Moving Forward

Now comes the hard part, and I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of answers. First and foremost, we must strike out to protect those most vulnerable among us. Trans suicidality, Islamophobic attacks, assault survivor fear, anti-semitic hate speech, racist attacks and even a mass shooting have already begun to afflict these communities.

In response, we have a few options. We can protest, as tens of thousands are already doing. I would advise guiding anger not only at oppressors but at the DNC, as well. Now is the time to effect change: the Democrats are on the heels after a crushing defeat. Let’s knock them over, then rebuild from the ruins.

We can start antifa organizations to protest the government if Trump follows through on a fascist agenda. Get together with friends and like-minded individuals. Protect the vulnerable among you. Fight. There is strength in numbers. Keep each other safe, organize together and seek out productive solutions. If possible, try plug in to active political movements (like the Democratic Socialists of America) so we can successfully reshape the Left. And do it now.

And finally, I want every marginalized person to pack a bag. Being politically active is great, protesting is swell. Genocide still happens. Be ready to get your family to safety if need be.

Take it from a Jew. We’ve been down this road a few times before.

The Democratic Party Needs Complete Ideological Reform

This has less to do with the people than the politicians, although this should background our push for new faces in the 2018 mid-terms.

Before anything else, Democrats need to let go of Hillary Clinton and everything she represented. Do it fast. As Naomi Klein outlines in his blistering Guardian article, “It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Drumpf”. And in complete ignorance of the temperature of America, we forced the consummate neoliberal through the primary into the general election: a prime target for populist rage.

The longer we linger on the scorched remains of the Clinton empire, the further into purgatory we push the progressive (and, yes, liberal) agenda. It failed in 2010. It (partially) failed in 2012. It failed in 2014. It failed spectacularly in 2016.

We Need New Leaders — And They’re Ready to Go

To complement a new mission statement, we need someone to carry the banner. But we need to think carefully about who we want to lead the party moving forward. Already we are seeing division: some are pushing for Michelle Obama to run for office (whether she wants to or not). Others are going for Corey Booker (D-NJ).

I like these people on the surface. I do. But they’re not what we need right now. They are not the challenge to the status quo that the country needs. Corey Booker is smart and charming, but takes more money than any other Democrat in the Senate. And Michelle Obama, as brilliant as she is, carries with her the baggage of Barack Obama’s neoliberal policy and presidency. These are not the “change” candidates America will get behind, at least need in earnest.

What we need is a return to our populist roots as a party. What we need is someone to lead a movement. We need our Lisa Simpson.

We’re already seeing hints of a populist ascension. Elizabeth Warren came out with a strong rebuke of the Democratic party’s focus on fundraisers instead of infrastructure. Pramila Jayapal won her primary and is ready to fight. Nina Turner, a former state senator (in Ohio, where Obama won and Clinton roundly lost), remains a powerful voice in progressive circles. Bernie Sanders has announced plans to run for a senate leadership position. He’s also backing Keith Ellison (D-Min), one of his best surrogates in the primaries, to become the head of the DNC.

(This is a good plan. Another good plan is “Fire Donna Brazile Because She Is Awful.”)

The demand for change is perhaps one of the few (or only) good outcomes of Trump’s victory. It may foment the seeds of revolution we needed no matter who was elected. Something had to whip us out of our complacency with the status quo. Based on the massive protests going on around the country, I’d say we have a decent shot at this being our moment.

Use it wisely.

*UPDATE: November 21, 2016

Now that I’ve had some time to think and process, I want to slightly narrow my perspective on DNC strategy moving forward. There’s a lot of talk about whether Dems should reach out to Trump voters — lots of strong opinions, and I understand the arguments. But actual Trump voters seem like the wrong focus.

I think what we need to do instead is reach out to the Bernie voters (or would-be Bernie voters) who stayed home. Folks who were never going to vote for Clinton, but who also saw no way to vote for Trump. Remember, turnout was absolutely, shockingly abysmal. Instead of looking at who voted, we should look at who didn’t, and dialogue with them.

As an example, Michael Moore makes the claim that Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes, while 90,000 Michigan Democrats voted for down ballot candidates but left “president” blank. Who knows how many more stayed home.

I think that’s where the key to future victory lies. Populists should put their energy into engaging and activating that population: the poor who saw no hope in a Hillary, no salvation in Trump. Let’s give them something to fight for.