Delaware Liberal

The November 24, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

Josh Marshall argues that Medicare is ground zero for where we launch the battle over everything — the whole social safety net.

But the politics of Medicare are also highly relevant to this political moment.

It’s not an either/or. The policy and politics are entirely harnessed together. And preserving Medicare will yield political benefits which will allow Democrats to defeat other Trump/GOP initiatives that will do the country grievous harm.

Trump’s election has sprung into overdrive a debate we’ve been having in the world of politics for more than a year: Is Trumpism largely about economic distress tied to globalization and neo-liberal economics or is it mainly driven by a white racial backlash against minorities Trump supporters believe are cutting to the front of the line in the race for economic preferment and cultural centrality? I largely put myself in the second camp. But as I think most people realize, these are not mutually exclusive explanations. And whichever side of the equation you come down on, what the Democrats need are issues that cut across the regional/racial/class divide we saw in the 2016 election.

Medicare does that.

Trumpism is white racial backlash. Not economic distress. The answer to white racial backlash is not to agree with them and abandon minorities and social progress as some idiot privileged white liberal men here suggest. Rather we fight back with more diversity. And yes, we couple that with fighting income inequality and for a living wage so that we have the economic message that Bernie Sanders so desperately wants to the exclusion of all else. It’s both. Not either or.

Tom Hilton writes:

Fortunately, there are signs that the Democrats are planning to step up.

I would just add that the time to start this campaign is immediately. Sometime “in the next couple of weeks” Trump is going to do his victory tour. So let’s say we buy a whole bunch of ad time in the areas he plans to visit. It’s a simple pitch. Medicare. You earned it. You paid into it all your life. And now Paul Ryan wants to take it away from you. Tell your congressman to keep Paul Ryan’s hands off our Medicare. Keep Trump’s name out of it (for now, though that calculation changes later in the campaign) and put it all on Ryan, whom Trump’s people already hate.

We won’t do it.

Matt Yglesias says Democrats neither can nor should ditch “Identity Politics:”

For as long as I can remember, white male left-of-center intellectuals have made opposition to “identity politics” a core part of their identity. When the Democratic Party wins some elections, this opposition usually takes the form of dark warnings that “identity politics” constitutes a form of creeping totalitarianism, whereas when the Democratic Party loses an election, it takes the form of a dark warning that identity-based appeals are the cause of the loss.

Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University, has a very prominent entry in the latter category of essay out this weekend calling for “The End of Identity Liberalism” in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

As always with these essays, there is a profoundly true part, namely that you cannot effectively mobilize a political coalition for economic equality, environmental justice, or anything else unless you are able to secure the votes of a large number of white people. Which means, among other things, that even the cause of defending the rights and interests of ethnic minority groups requires political arguments that touch on other subjects and appeal to other groups of voters.

The reality, however, is that politics is not and will never be a public policy seminar. People have identities, and people are mobilized politically around those identities. There is no other way to do politics than to do identity politics.

But to win a national election, you need to do it well. In particular, to get 270 electoral votes or 51 Senate seats, Democrats are going to need the votes of more Midwestern white people than they got in 2016. But to think that they can do that by somehow eschewing identity is ridiculous — white Midwesterners have identities, too, and nobody votes based off detailed readings of campaigns’ policy PDFs. The challenge is to speak more clearly and more effectively to the identity of people who feel left behind in the 21st century as well as those who experience contemporary problems as part of a longer-term struggle to get a fair shake.

“I’m not asking anyone to support me for what I have done, one thing or another, whether it’s politics or policy or money. I’m asking them to support me on what I will do in the future.” — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by Politico, on House leadership elections next week.

“Struggling to respond to Donald Trump’s victory, a group of shellshocked Democrats moved swiftly to endorse Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, hoping that he would be a fresh face for a party with a depleted bench,” the New York Times reports.

“But after steadily adding endorsements from leading Democrats in his bid to take over the party, Mr. Ellison is encountering resistance from a formidable corner: the White House.”

“In a sign of the discord gripping the party, President Obama’s loyalists, uneasy with the progressive Mr. Ellison, have begun casting about for an alternative.”

A new CNN/ORC poll shows President Obama’s approval rating is at a seven-year high of 57%. It’s his highest mark since September 2009, when his approval rating sat at 58%.

The Economist: “Aghast at the defection of millions who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but for Donald Trump in 2016—notably working-class whites in the Midwest—the left wants the Democratic Party to snatch up the banner of economic populism and declare war on Wall Street, big business and other global elites. At post-election gatherings like the Democracy Alliance conference in Washington, DC, it is an article of faith that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the snowy-haired, finger-jabbing scold who lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, would have trounced Mr Trump in the general election.”

“Such Democrats are making a mistake. It is as if America’s political classes are bent on copying every part of Britain’s current flirtation with who-needs-experts populism. Not content with holding an election that saw voters sharply divided by education, age, geography and attitudes to social change—as happened with the Brexit referendum—American leftists seem ready to follow Britain’s Labour Party down the path of self-righteous irrelevance.”

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