Democrats are Surrounded by Low Hanging Fruit: Get To It
Democrats are Surrounded by Low Hanging Fruit: Get To It
Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling...
Hahaha this writer actually believes that Democrats really care about our country, instead of just being the party of controlled opposition.
Or they're doing the same thing to the Democrats they're counseling that they do to Republicans. They're not going to change because people say "Democrats and Republicans are just play fighting so don't bother", they do it when they're being attacked for inaction.
The low-hanging fruit was declining to shit the bed in the election and not letting the fascists win. They failed to do that. Twice.
I have absolutely zero faith in the Democratic Party to accomplish anything meaningful and long term at this point. The party - and specifically its leadership - are demonstrably feckless and, frankly, worse than useless at this point. I’d joke that they should be barred from politics, but Trump is probably actually gonna do that, and probably try to get the DoJ to gin up some charges for all his political opponents, so it’s actually not something I even want to joke about.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/12/great-moments-murcs-law
Murc’s law, for the uninitiated, is the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
The Democratic Party has become the Washington Generals of politics. If you want to accomplish anything, don't involve the Democrats.
Great reference.
Guess I'll go to Congress myself can't be that hard
This made me laugh, thanks, I needed that.
They are paid not to do anything controversial.
I mean, it's inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but Americans have been asking to get rid of changing the clocks every year and nobody's just.... DONE IT. It's an act of goodwill if nothing else.
Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling into: in an effort to court Republican defectors they temper their criticism of the various Trump nominees. But since there are and will be no defectors they lose on both sides of the equation, gaining no defectors and making their critiques tepid and forgettable. This is unquestionably true. But we can go a step further still. Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them.
If trying to court Republican defectors is a futile effort, who should the Democrats be trying to court? This article seems deliberately vague on that point. The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason? Seemingly, it's to court people other than Republican defectors, but who would that be? Relatively moderate, neoliberal technocrats? Do any still exist?
who should the Democrats be trying to court?
Solid Democrat voters who are disappointed with the DNC and therefore don't vote. The Democrats' noncommittality makes them unappealing to everyone.
People who want change, but see no chance of that coming from the Democrats. The biggest pool of votes that can be harvested are discouraged voters. But they'll need to see something besides empty talk.
Billionaire fascists and allied fanatics have seized power by illegitimate means. Tinkering around the margins isn't going to stop them. We need to break the power of the billionaires, which will probably mean capping maximum wealth and forcing them to sell off assets until nobody has more than 5% market share in anything. We need to get influence-peddiling out of politics, and to purge the courts of corrupt stooge judges. And we need to re-establish the rule of law for all people in this country, regardless of their wealth, connections or what office they hold. The people need to see that nobody is above the law.
I think you're targeting people that have become apathetic and disengaged from the political process because they don't see anyone actually fighting for them. Someone willing to attack the existing power structure on your behalf is a very appealing proposition to most people in our political climate.
They should be courting the public by making it really clear how awful Trump's nominees and policies are.
The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason?
Because they are objectively awful choices, several of which are severe national security threats in and of themselves?
The defectors the article is talking about are Republican senators. The author links to the piece about the trap:
When I followed up, asking whether Republican senators had voiced any qualms about Patel, he said they had “at first” but that he hadn’t followed up because he’s being “very careful” in a “delicate period of time.”
This is the trap Democrats keep falling into. They don’t want to come out against a Trump nominee too aggressively, out of fear of alienating Republican fence-sitters. But in the same breath, they’ll tell you that Republicans aren’t actually open to listening to what they say, as they’re determined to pass Trump’s fealty tests. So Democrats land in a place where they can neither mount an aggressive campaign, perhaps at least incurring some cost to the Republicans senators and the Trump administration, nor have any hope of swaying their GOP colleagues to their side.
Instead of worrying about the sensitivities of their colleagues, go all out against the nominee so they think confirming the nominee is an electoral risk. It's a play to their voters.
who should the Democrats be trying to court?
Discouraged voters who didn't vote in the last election. Getting 10% of them to vote Dem would swing a lot of races, and that's far more likely to be achievable than swinging part of the Republican vote like the Dems tried to do last time. Voters want decisiveness, not feel-good policy-free vote-grubbing.
who should the Democrats be trying to court?
If they bothered to have a platform at all anymore itd be pretty obvious who to court. But they dont stand for issues anymore-- they stand for a smug low performing sort of centrism as if that was in itself a goal.
The Democratic Party has demonstrated that they can't and wont do anything their masters don't approve of. The same masters pulling the strings in the Republican party.
So were voters.
The fuck good is low hanging fruit if their rhetoric doesn't have any teeth?
They don't have the votes in either house of Congress to actually stop anything. Rhetoric is all they've got; what they can do is to make it super-clear how awful Trump's decision-making is, so that there's a chance voters will turn out and give them the power to act in the future.
That's the Republican testes....we should all kick in unison!