Democratic Party = Morons Inc.

The most depressing aspect of watching the slow-motion self-pwning of the Democratic Party is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s plenty of data out there to show that all those gut feelings about running to the center is a strategy that no longer works. The most convincing, if the hardest to understand, is the argument laid out by French political economist Thomas Piketty To quote from Keith Spencer’s article in Salon:

Piketty’s basic thesis is that poorer and less educated voters were historically the kind of voters who voted for left and left-liberal parties. These voters understood that their class interests did not align with the right-wing parties of the rich; thus, historically, the “high-income, high education” voters picked the right-wing parties.

This shifted in the past 70 years: “high-education elites now vote for the ‘left’, while high- income/high-wealth elites still vote for the ‘right’ (though less and less so),” Piketty notes. Note the scare quotes around “left”: part of Piketty’s point is that the so-called left parties, like the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Socialists in France and Labour in the U.K., have in the past two decades not really been that left, at least on economic issues. With the exception of Jeremy Corbyn’s contemporary Labour Party, the aforementioned are aligned with the same kind of neoliberal economic policies that rich elites favor.

Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, [Piketty writes], it is difficult to unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins within the same coalition and to deliver a reduction in inequality.

Nominating centrist Democrats who don’t speak to class issues will result in a great swathe of voters simply not voting. Conversely, right-wing candidates who speak to class issues, but who do so by harnessing a false consciousness — e.g. blaming immigrants and minorities for capitalism’s ills, rather than capitalists — will win back those same voters who would have voted for a more class-conscious left candidate. Piketty calls this a “bifurcated” voting situation, e.g. many voters will connect either with far-right xenophobic nationalists or left-egalitarian internationalists, but perhaps nothing in between.

That probably exceeds fair use and it still oversimplifies the argument, so read the whole thing. The upshot is simple: Democrats who eschew popular programs because of “pragmatism” will probably lose because they will leave too many voters unmotivated.

You’d think Democrats would understand that by now, but no, there was former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a well-off entrepreneur, telling California Democrats last night that “socialism is not the answer.” To their great credit, the crowd booed him heavily, which the nation’s clutch of white, well-off pundits will chalk up to Californians not representing “real America.”

You know who said almost exactly the same thing at the same time? Former Tennessee Rep. and multimillionaire Diane Black. Discussing the Hickelooper incident on CNN this morning she said “this whole thing about sharing and making sure everybody has the same thing. It’s not what we were founded upon.”

That’s whose side Joe Biden, John Hickenlooper and, yes, Mayor Pete are on. Vote for any of them? Not on your life. I will only vote for someone who understands that compromise with these people is not only impossible, it’s not desirable. If someone wants to kill 10 people, and you want to kill none, killing five is not an acceptable compromise. Yet that’s the option Democrats choose every time.