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The Democratic National Committee leadership and the party’s operatives gambled with the lives of working-class people when they went all in for Hillary Clinton, a wildly unpopular candidate with an out-of-touch strategy. They lost that bet. Donald Trump won the election, and now we’ll be paying for their mistakes for the next four — or, god forbid, eight — years. You might think these elites would be chastened into reflection. That they might take a few weeks off to consider where they went wrong and recognize Bernie Sanders’s success as a sign that millions of people want something different than Clinton-style politics. That they might even get out of the business altogether, having lost to a parodic orange strongman who stumbled into so many scandals that it felt like he was trying to lose the election. But if you think Democratic Party elites have any interest in admitting they made a mistake, you don’t know people like David Brock.

David Brock and the Donors “What better way to spend inaugural weekend than talking about how to kick Donald Trump’s ass?” So asked Brock, a Democratic Party operative, in reference to the Palm Beach retreat he’s planning for the party’s top two hundred donors. Brock, a Clinton stalwart who wasted an estimated $65 million trying to boost her campaign, waited all of two days before firing off a missive announcing the meeting to the same donor networks that funded his failed election season efforts. Brock’s groups — the super PAC American Bridge, the legal watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the media watchdog Media Matters, and a number of other liberal organizations — hitched themselves to Clinton from the earliest stages of her campaign. And what did they do with all their money and power? Well, Correct the Record, a super PAC created to coordinate directly with Clinton, spent $1 million to assemble an army of social media trolls to comment and tweet at Clinton critics online. Not, you know, to canvass in rural Pennsylvania or get out the vote in Milwaukee. But even after their candidate’s historic defeat, Brock and his associates aren’t ready to acknowledge their incompetence — they’re ready to do it all over again. In his message, Brock invited the select donors to join him in Palm Beach in January for a discussion about where the Democratic political machine went astray and what they should do to correct it. And, of course, to pledge the funds necessary to finance a (cosmetic) response. “This will be THE gathering for Democratic donors from across the country to hear from a broad and diverse group of leaders about the next steps for progressives under a Trump administration,” Brock wrote in the email, obtained by Politico. The network, Brock claims, won’t represent “a faction of the Democratic Party” but rather a “cross-section.” “[W]e’re not going to precook things ideologically,” Brock told Politico. On one level — as Politico points out — Brock’s quixotic crusade can be interpreted as a centrist challenge to the supposedly more progressive Democracy Alliance, another group of liberal donors that try to shape Democratic Party strategy. But it’s also easy to overstate the level of discord in the Democrats’ donor class: Democracy Alliance’s funders overlap with those in Brock’s network, and we can be sure that neither is keen on the direction Bernie Sanders has proposed for the party. Brock is a particularly repugnant character. A self-proclaimed “right-wing assassin” who made his name targeting the Clintons in the 1990s, Brock then changed sides and oversaw the creation of a web of institutions aimed at boosting liberal candidates — Hillary Clinton foremost among them. As early as two years before Clinton’s disastrous run, Brock was leveraging his well-funded infrastructure to bolster her candidacy. But however odious he is, Brock should be seen as an outgrowth of the donor class that enables him. And enabled Trump. Carriers of a worldview that regards those to their left as vulgar naïfs, liberal political elites have assiduously tended to the Beltway consensus for years, moving in a social circle entirely isolated from poor and working-class people. Now that consensus has exploded, in no small part because of their own myopic smugness. This much should be clear: they’re the last people we should entrust to steer us out of the morass of Trumpism. Their top-down approach to politics — a service model animated by an unwavering belief in their own superior intelligence — leaves us defenseless in the face of Trump and the right-wing forces he’s empowered. Their existential dread of radical change renders them suspicious of precisely the policies that could unite workers of all races and blunt Trump’s appeal. In short, the rich can’t save us.