Thread: Post-Election '16 DNC and the Democratic Party

The cabbages have changed for everyone except Cold Pizza

Next week's cover? Will the elephant inhale? Are they worth saving?

^ touting the MSM when convenient, eh?

what's next....citing polls?

oh, you've already done that.


hypocrite.

Originally Posted by raycarey

for any number of reasons that's patently ridiculous...not least of which because california has more acres of farmland than iowa.

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/agvision/doc...nservation.pdf
Ag census finds Iowa farms are bigger but fewer in number



damn those pesky facts, eh?

Did I specify Iowa farmers?

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Did I specify Iowa farmers?

Originally Posted by raycarey

california has a massive population and economy.... and its citizens should have more of a say in who becomes president than subsidized farmers in iowa.

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Without those farmers you wouldn't be alive,those farmers are also a large part of the U.S.economy.

The DNC has not only not changed, but has continued down the path of alienating the working class (which includes most Americans who think and say they are "middle-class.").

The leadership of the DNC and the "Better Deal" slogan.

It's a farce.

Will many voters by into it? I doubt it. They are far too cynical and --> realistic.

Originally Posted by Grampa

The DNC has not only not changed, but has continued down the path of alienating the working class (which includes most Americans who think and say they are "middle-class.").

The leadership of the DNC and the "Better Deal" slogan.

It's a farce.

Will many voters by into it? I doubt it. They are far too cynical and --> realistic.

So CP do you think they would be better off coming out with populist slogans and then making loads of ridiculous promises that they can't keep?

Because if that's what's required, America is doomed.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So CP do you think they would be better off coming out with populist slogans and then making loads of ridiculous promises that they can't keep?

Because if that's what's required, America is doomed.

IMO, most voters do not buy into "populist slogans." We've been hearing them for over a hundred years and in the end the elites benefit as well as call the shots.

There are some policies that caused the working class to not show up for the Dems to vote or to vote for T, and Repubs in the state legislatures. Worth noting - and very importantly - is that the Dems had *record* losses in state legislatures this last election.

Below is an article that is 3 months old. worth browsing: there are VERY SPECIFIC POLICIES LISTED.

The Democrats’ ‘Working-Class Problem’

It’s not only with whites. It reaches well into the party’s base.



Stanley Greenberg


June 1, 2017

How She Lost

Stanley Greenberg


Malpractice cost Clinton the election, but her ambivalence on big issues was produced by big structural factors that affect all Democrats.

This article appears in the Summer 2017 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

The road to a sustainable Democratic majority—nationally, locally, and in the states—must include much higher Democratic performance with white working-class voters (those without a four-year degree). Nearly every group in the progressive infrastructure is busy figuring out how Democrats can get back to the level of support they reached with President Obama’s 2012 victory. That is a pretty modest target, however, given the scale of Democratic losses. It underestimates the scope of the problem and, ironically, the opportunity.


The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.


Fortunately, Democrats have the opportunity to consolidate, engage, and perform much better with all of working America. I say “opportunity” advisedly, because better performance requires Democrats to embrace dramatically bolder economic policies and to attack a political economy that works for the rich, big corporations, and the cultural elites, but not for average Americans.


Bernie Sanders’s “revolution” and attack on big money was much closer to hitting the mark than was Hillary Clinton’s message, and he won millennials and white working-class voters in the primary. It is not surprising that white working-class voters then went for Trump, and that some Sanders voters went for the Green Party in the general election, but the Democrats’ working-class problem go way beyond what Sanders broached.

What is the Democrats’ working-class problem?

Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama’s insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially. They also pulled back because of the Democrats’ seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens’. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America’s dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

These are big structural challenges, but we have plenty of evidence that they can be addressed and that Democrats can speak powerfully to these working-class voters about them.


The core problem is President Obama’s handling of the economy. Confronting this problem won’t make me popular. The president and the Democrats heroically rescued America and the global economy, restored the soundness of the financial system and managed the economy back to a full recovery. But incomes for most Americans fell during this period and the top 1 percent took all of the income gains of the recovery—a subject that mainstream Democrats barely mentioned and did not fight to address. The president of the United States was the main messenger for the Democrats, and his consistent economic message to the country—from one year after the crash through last year’s presidential election—was this: The recession has been transformed into a dependable recovery, our economy is creating jobs, and we are on the right track, but the Republicans drove our economy “into the ditch” and are doing everything possible to obstruct our progress. He closed the 2016 election with this appeal: We created 15 million new jobs, incomes are rising, poverty is falling, and you must get out and vote to “build on our progress.”


Closely bound up with the “progress” narrative was the bailout of the Wall Street banks with taxpayer money. Wall Street excess took the country’s economy off a cliff and Democrats rightly came to the nation’s rescue by passing the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But the bailout of the banks was, and remains, a searing event in American consciousness—and one inextricably linked to Democratic governance. While the bailout came at the urging of President Bush and his Treasury secretary, it was embraced by then-candidate Obama and passed with Democratic votes in the House and Senate. It was under President Obama that the government signed off on the executive bonuses for TARP recipients and under Obama that no executive was punished for criminal malfeasance. It should come as no surprise, then, that one year after the Housing and Economic Recovery Act’s passage, the majority of voters thought the big banks, not the middle class, were the main beneficiaries—and they were damn angry about it too.


That mix of heralding “progress” while bailing out those responsible for the crisis and the real crash in incomes for working Americans was a fatal brew for Democrats. It was evident in the double-digit drop in Obama’s approval ratings in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in 2010. (Note this is 2010, not 2016.) His approval rating rebounded to nearly 50 percent in most of those states in 2012, but it fell sharply in 2014 in Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota. Obama’s approval rating the year before the 2016 election hovered between 40 percent and 42 percent in Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, and Ohio.


These are the states that figured in the well-told retreat of white working-class voters from the Democrats. But introspection among progressives—including those at the White House—failed to see the retreat of hard-pressed working-class voters in the new American majority of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials, most of whom do not have a four-year degree. While the president was calling on these base voters to come to the polls to defend the progress we’d presumably made, these voters, too, were angry about the claims of jobs and about Wall Street’s undimmed influence. They knew these jobs paid dramatically less. They saw the government rescue the big banks but do next to nothing about the home foreclosures and lost wealth in their Hispanic and black communities. That is why about 40 percent of the Rising American Electorate disapproved of how the president was doing his job in both 2010 and 2014. Every segment of this progressive base underperformed on vote and turnout in 2010, and their disengagement in 2014 gave us the lowest off-year turnout in any election since World War II and with it, another Republican wave.


The electoral consequences were particularly acute among millennials. Weighed down by student debt and the weak job market, millennials pulled back in 2010 and importantly, did not come back in 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Their vote share was down 2 points from 2008 (from 17 percent to 15 percent), and their level of support for Obama was down 9 points (from 66 percent to 60 percent). Mitt Romney won the white millennials by 7 points.


Democrats’ unified control of government under Obama and the Democratic Congress began losing working-class Americans’ support right from the outset, but progressives never collectively paused to take stock of why.

Trade is a key issue that has separated Democrats from many working-class voters. That separation grew wider with Obama’s battle for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and with Trump making his opposition to it central to his vow to represent “the forgotten Americans.”


In 2015, more than 70 percent of Democrats in the Senate (33 of 46) and 85 percent of Democrats in the House (160 of 188) had voted against giving Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the TPP. The party’s presidential candidates were strongly opposed to corporate lobbyists dominating the drafting of TPP and to major provisions that would have granted foreign corporations the right to sue for damages over U.S. consumer and environmental protections. But working-class Americans clearly associate Democrats with support for multinational trade agreements—even though they are passed with mostly Republican votes in Congress—because Democratic presidents have been their main champions over the last 25 years. NAFTA was enacted under President Bill Clinton (with my support, as I was then the president’s pollster, and over the very strong objections of my wife, Representative Rosa DeLauro). Obama made passage of TPP a consuming priority at the end of his presidency.


Support for trade and trade agreements is greatest on the West and East Coasts, among Hispanics and Asians, and most importantly, among college graduates, particularly in the big cities where Democrats govern. But the white working class, who live amid the remains of the manufacturing sector in the industrial Midwest, strongly oppose these trade agreements with increasing ferocity, particularly the men who were disproportionately employed in manufacturing.


The Obama presidency produced a partisan realignment on trade, reinforcing the class and gender bases of the two parties that will disrupt the politics of both, if it hasn’t already. Before 2008, Republicans were more supportive of NAFTA than Democrats, but at the end of Obama’s presidency, GOP support for NAFTA collapsed, pushed off the cliff by Trump. Democrats, on the other hand, became more favorably disposed to NAFTA.

With Trump centering his campaign on bringing back American jobs by withdrawing from and renegotiating trade agreements, the Republican base voters emerged as those most opposed to multinational trade agreements.


Despite Obama’s efforts, Democratic voters also shifted against trade in principle and the TPP specifically over the course of the campaign—including big shifts among millennials (a 22-point shift in margin), white unmarried women (21-point margin shift), all unmarried women (15 points), and minority voters (9 points). Yet Hillary Clinton went silent on TPP in the closing weeks of her campaign, even as Obama and his administration stumped publicly for its enactment, though there was virtually no chance a lame-duck Congress would pass it. That magnified the Democrats’ working America problem, and perhaps decisively so in the Rust Belt.


Immigration is the next critical element of the Democrats’ working-class challenge. Since 1990, the world has watched a massive increase in global migration, and, remarkably, one in five of these migrants lives in the United States. The number of immigrants in the United States doubled from 23 million to 46 million during this time, and our largest metropolitan areas are being shaped by accelerating migration and increasing numbers of foreign-born people living there. More than three million, roughly 37 percent, of New York City residents were born outside of the United States; 60 percent of Miami’s residents and almost 30 percent of Houston’s residents are foreign-born.


Despite Trump’s ascendance, America remains one of the few places in the world that views immigration as positive, but Americans’ reactions have a strong class and race component that reinforce the conclusion that there is a working-class challenge cutting across partisan lines. In Democracy Corps’ election night survey, it was white college-educated women who embraced immigration most strongly, and not surprisingly, white working-class men who were most cautious. But do not assume that African Americans do not share some of those concerns; many in our focus groups raise anxieties about competition from new immigrants.


But reactions to legalization for the undocumented reveal some of the emotional and economic dynamics at play. Americans are fairly positive about the economic effects of legalization and see many of these immigrants as hard-working, but they do worry about the costs. More than 60 percent believe granting legal status would lead to greater competition for public services and more than half believe it would take jobs from American citizens. Those numbers are not driven entirely by Republicans. Indeed, 41 percent of Democrats think those immigrants would “take jobs from U.S. citizens,” and more important, half of Democrats believe granting legal status “would be a drain on government services.”


Obama, who led the battle for immigration reform, was fairly trusted on this issue, as he always began by defining “real reform.” It meant “stronger border security,” and his administration did in fact put “more boots on the Southern border than at any time in our history.” “Real reform” also meant “establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship” that included “paying taxes and a meaningful penalty” and “going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.”


Pro-immigration advocates won majority support for comprehensive immigration reform only after the public became confident that leaders wanted to manage immigration and that they took borders and citizenship seriously. The reform that passed the U.S. Senate increased enforcement at the border, introduced new technology to ensure lawful employment, expelled those with criminal records, and allowed a path to citizenship for those who paid a fine and back taxes and learned English. That combination allowed progressives to proudly advocate a new law that would greatly expand the number of legal immigrants and make America more culturally and economically dynamic.


By the time Hillary Clinton was running in 2016, however, the path to citizenship moved to the center of her offer, as did concern for immigrant rights in the face of Trump’s promised Muslim ban and Mexican border wall.

A month into Trump’s presidency, Democracy Corps and the Roosevelt Institute conducted focus groups with white working-class Trump voters who had previously supported Obama in Macomb County, Michigan. It was clear how central concerns about immigration, borders, foreignness, and Islam were to their receptivity to his call to take back America. Many thought Clinton, on the other hand, wanted “open borders.”


I am confident Democrats will once again lead a multicultural America in the same way America has forged unity from such diversity in the past. We build on a unique framework for immigration and a unique history. Even this ugly interlude will not keep America from its exceptional path.


The final dynamic distancing Democrats from working-class America is the party’s alignment with the economically and culturally ascendant in America’s metropolitan centers, where Democrats win office and govern. As Clinton’s winning popular vote margin grew to nearly three million, concentrated in an ever-smaller number of urban counties, the Brookings Institution revealed that fewer than 500 Clinton-won counties produced two-thirds of the nation’s GDP in 2015.


Perhaps that is why President Obama and Secretary Clinton sounded so satisfied with the state of America and its future. In nearly every speech for most of his presidency, including in his 2014 State of the Union address, Obama rightly declared that America “is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth.” When he and Clinton closed the 2016 campaign in Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami, Chicago, Raleigh, Cleveland, and Columbus with their upbeat take on America’s future, they symbolically aligned the Democrats nationally with the economically and ascendant cities—and they barely noticed anything amiss in smaller cities and towns and rural America.


They were also aligning the national Democrats with a liberal narrative and moral frame that values equality, equal rights, and fairness. They are more empathetic and worry more about harm to the vulnerable. They are more open to diversity and celebrate differences and outside cultures. They value a kind of individualism that emphasizes personal autonomy, self-expression, and sexual freedom for men and women. They welcome the emerging pluralism of family types and reject the traditional family and gender roles. Education is the path to individual fulfillment and opportunity, and science and technology are the keys to learning discoverable truths. They consciously do not turn to traditional authority for moral absolutes, and they devalue those who depend on faith-based conclusions.


Those who hold to a conservative moral frame, by contrast, accept faith-based moral absolutes and respect traditional authority. They honor an individualism that is grounded in personal responsibility, industriousness, strong work ethic, self-reliance, self-restraint, and self-discipline, which guard against idleness and dependence. They honor the traditional family and the male breadwinner role. They value patriotism, love of country, and those who defend it from our enemies, and they believe American citizens come first.


What the national Democrats’ embrace of the liberal moral frame and America’s economic ascendance misses is not just the plight of nonmetropolitan America, but also the reality on the ground in the big cities, which are ground zero for our country’s greatest challenges. Any Democrat running for mayor in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles knows this, which is why Mayor Bill de Blasio’s critique of “two New Yorks” was so resonant. It is in these cities where large numbers of residents are struggling economically, with low-wage jobs and sky-high costs of living, where poverty and segregation stubbornly persist, where millions of children are raised by single parents, and where inequality is most stark. At the same time, the increasingly diverse ethnic and racial mix in the cities is full of working-class communities where both liberal and conservative moral frames matter. For example, like the more conservative working-class whites, African American women place a high premium on faith in God and the need to put American citizens before immigrants. That is why the simple embrace of metropolitan America’s liberal values and economic elite hurt Democrats with working-class voters in both the big cities and in rural America.



Fixing the Democrats’ working-class problem

The rift between Democrats and working-class Americans was painfully widened by how Democrats governed and campaigned nationally. The party was not up to the great challenge of leading an America that is more culturally diverse and racially conflicted, more urban and younger, more economically and socially unequal, and more corrupt. All of those challenges, however, are also a call to action.


After the 2014 debacle and in advance of the 2016 presidential cycle, the Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund, with which Democracy Corps partners, produced a frank report on disappointing results in our base. They highlighted the unmarried women whose vote for Democrats dropped 7 points from 2012, and the fact that Democrats lost white unmarried women by 2 points. That is when we made the connection between white unmarried women and the white working-class women who are now a majority of the white working class.

Both groups see only a precarious path to the middle class. Both believe jobs don’t pay enough to live on and that the middle class pays a lot of taxes. Both groups, more than other voters in the Rising American Electorate (RAE), expressed concern about welfare-spending and getting control of the border. When we tested a bold Democratic economic agenda against the Republican agenda, white unmarried women embraced the Democratic offer with great enthusiasm, and this agenda trailed the Republican offer by only 8 points among all white working-class women. The results were so promising, we proposed at the outset of the 2016 cycle that progressives adopt an “RAE+” strategy to reach the working class more broadly.


Given how disastrously Clinton performed with white working-class voters in the end, it is important to recall with data that she was poised to over-perform with the white working-class women compared with Obama in 2012, when Mitt Romney won white working-class women by 20 points. During the presidential debates, Clinton closed Trump’s margin with white working-class women to just 4 points in NBC/Wall Street Journal’s national polling—and those voters did not break away from her until the last week, after Clinton went silent on the economy and change. These white working-class women, who form a majority of today’s white working class, were open to voting for Clinton, perhaps in historic numbers.


Not surprisingly, white working-class women form a big portion (40 percent) of the independents and Democrats who voted for Trump in the end. While Republican Trump voters think of themselves as middle-class, and two-thirds say they would have no problem handling an unexpected $500 expense, these non-GOP Trump voters think of themselves as working-class and would struggle to handle the sudden expense. They are also, in contrast to the Trump Republicans, pro-union.


But, in what may border on campaign malpractice, the Clinton campaign chose in the closing battle to ignore the economic stress not just of the working-class women who were still in play, but also of those within the Democrats’ own base, particularly among the minorities, millennials, and unmarried women. It likely diminished turnout in the cities and Clinton’s vote across the base.


Obama’s final campaign speeches spoke of an economy that moved from recession to recovery and created 15 million jobs with rising incomes and reduced poverty. But if you look at people’s view of the economy on the night of the election, three in five scorned that rosy economic outlook—led by nearly every group in the Democrats’ base. “Jobs don’t pay enough to live on and it is a struggle to save anything,” said 70 percent of minorities and 65 percent of unmarried women in our postelection survey. A majority of unmarried women said they could not handle an unexpected $500 expense, putting them most on the edge. That is the heart of the Rising American Electorate, and their judgment on the economy was very close to white working-class women’s.

The failure to see that the problems of working America run right through the new American majority cost the campaign a chance to produce a very different result in this election.


As I have written in The Guardian and Democracy Journal, Clinton’s strong performance in the debates produced big gains for her regarding which candidate was better suited to handle the economy and taxes, and to stand up for the middle class and against special interests. After the debates, she was near parity with Trump on handling the economy—closing an 11-point pre-convention gap.


Democracy Corps’ national survey conducted after the debates and shared with the Clinton campaign showed that more attacks on Trump’s temperament and his treatment of people and women barely moved voters. In contrast, a compelling economic message demanding “an economy for everyone, not just the rich and well-connected,” attacking trickle-down tax cuts “for the richest and special breaks for corporations,” and promising an agenda to “rebuild the middle class” moved unmarried women (including white unmarried women), millennials, and white working-class women.


This experiment showed—retrospectively, alas—that Democrats can reach working-class Americans both in our base and well into the swing electorate, including the white working class. It is time to make that challenge task number one.

The Democrats? ?Working-Class Problem?

Well a fucking shitload of them fell for "We're gonna build a wall and Mexico is gonna pay for it", etc.

Oh, and of course the immortal "Drain the Swamp" which orange cunto has polluted even more than it was with a succession of corporate gangsters in cabinet and other positions.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Well a fucking shitload of them fell for "We're gonna build a wall and Mexico is gonna pay for it", etc.

I have not seen the data, but I doubt many people fell for the wall proposal.

In 2006, Obama and Hillary not only voted to build a 700 mile wall but they voted to fund it.

The "wall" proposals have been going on for decades.

Originally Posted by Grampa

I'm breaking my pledge not to post outside of sports

Because you consider a story important?

Are there any other circumstances in which you plan to go back on a promise that has given so many TD members so much to look forward to?

It has been almost a year since the catastrophic election of Donald Trump. In his first year in office, the president has governed as cruelly and ineptly as his critics predicted. But while anti-Trump sentiment has never been more fierce and widespread, his political opponents are more divided than ever. And this faultline – which has parallels in Britain with divisions among the Labour party – could, if left unaddressed, compromise efforts to resist and defeat Trumpism.

Roughly speaking, these two sides could be characterised as the “populist wing” and the “establishment wing” of the Democratic party, but even this terminology is a point of controversy between the feuding sides. The party’s left wing, for example, wants to call the conflict the “left-liberal divide”. Loyalist Democrats want to play down the divide, calling for unity by insisting that Democrats are all members of “the left” (if those calling for unity are younger, millennial types), or that they are all “liberals” (if they are older, Clinton-era types). The right, meanwhile, does not understand the divide, continuing to believe in a monolithic “radical left” filled with “radical liberals”. This leads to the funny situation, as one commentator noted, in which members of both the left and the right reach for the same “I made it through college without becoming a liberal” T-shirt.

The present conflict surfaced, as many intra-party feuds do, during a presidential primary. But unlike past internal conflicts, this one is sticking around. Centrist John Kerry supporters, for example, did not take potshots at insurgent Howard Dean supporters deep into 2005. This year, however, a full ecosystem – replete with duelling podcasts, magazines and candidates – has kept the divide alive. Skirmishes are popping up, like clockwork, every few weeks; from February’s bitterly contested election of a new Democratic National Committee chair, to leftist scepticism about potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; from the launching of the Clinton-fawning website Verrit to the latest harangue from the liberal-bashing podcast Chapo Trap House.

Discussing a resolution to this conflict is difficult, because even calls for “resolution” can be interpreted as ideological statements. Wanting the Democratic party to survive and unify can be taken as an endorsement of the establishment, because the quickest path to intra-party peace is for the conflict’s leftwing instigators to get in line. Meanwhile, treating the intraparty divide as substantive – arguing that there is, in fact, a significant difference between, say, “Medicare for All” and “Obamacare” – can annoy liberals who believe that the so-called “divide” has been manufactured by a few disgruntled purists.

To resolve our intra-party conflict, we must first understand it. I believe the two sides’ concerns can be grouped into three divides: the first over party loyalty, the second over how to win elections, and the third over the gap between Democrats and Republicans. Each divide may not be relevant to every partisan in the conflict, but most partisans have divided over at least one of these three.

The divide over party loyalty

Liberals accuse leftwingers of not being loyal to the party in general elections. This began with the vilification of leftwing third-party voters, such as Ralph Nader voters in 2000 and Jill Stein voters in 2016. What made this past election special is that accusations of disloyalty were launched at a Democratic primary challenger. Hillary Clinton supporters feel that Bernie Sanders attacked Clinton excessively during the primary, stayed in the primary too long, and did not do enough to support her in the general election. Many loyal Democrats around the country have analogous feelings about leftwing rebels in the party generally: they think criticisms should be kept inside the family, and that it is important to be a “team player” in order to win elections and pass legislation. Some may call these loyal Democrats boring conformists, but from their perspective, it is party loyalists, not insurgent critics, who staff the party booth at the county fair and knock on doors every year to help get Democrats elected.

Leftists, on the other hand, believe this “disloyalty” accusation is bunk. First, they think establishment-wing leaders follow what the political blogger Jonathan Schwartz has called “the iron law of institutions”, which says that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself”. If party leaders were loyal to the party, leftwingers believe, then they would have learned from recent electoral losses and shaken the party up, even if it meant stepping aside themselves to make room for fresh faces and new ideas.

Second, insurgent leftwingers care less about catering to the dwindling group of grassroots party loyalists around the country, and more about activating the masses of non-voters and independents who are not yet loyal to any party. That is why they are less concerned about candidates, like Sanders, who are not technically Democrats. They see them not as selfish traitors, but rather as opportunities to build the party’s base.

Loyalty to the party generally is often bound up in loyalty to party leaders. The party’s liberal wing tends to get excited about party leaders’ personalities, and is more likely to share, say, Obama or Hillary memes, watch West Wing fantasies about party staffers and follow the path of rising stars. This loyalty extends to the wider network tied to the party, too, such as liberal-leaning news anchors and commentators, and party-aligned Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep.


Leftwingers think this level of loyalty is bizarre, especially when it comes to politicians they believe do not deserve it. Leftwingers are generally less likely to express loyalty to leaders, and more likely to pledge themselves to issue campaigns that bubble up from extra-party institutions, such as labour unions or racial justice and environmental groups. They respond to liberal attacks of “Why aren’t you knocking on doors in the general election?” with “Why aren’t you joining the Fight for $15?” (a national grassroots campaign for fairer wages led by fast-food workers). Leftwingers believe liberals cannot think for themselves on issues – that they wait to get the go-ahead from the party establishment before they offer any support. To leftwingers, the liberals’ shorter-term issues, such as the Russia investigation, are just distractions unless they are embedded in more fundamental issue campaigns.

Establishment Democrats often see leftwingers’ enthusiasm for disjointed issue campaigns over the party platform as further evidence that they do not understand “how real politics works”. As Slate writer Stephen Metcalf describes: “I see a social movement left that protests then goes home; and a Democratic party that stays on and does the hard, boring work.” Loyal Democrats see their friends forming phone-banks to urge members of Congress to oppose Republican attacks on Obamacare, and wonder why there are not more leftwingers pitching in. To loyal Democrats, either you call yourself a Democrat, be a team player and move issues forward as part of a concerted, directed party strategy … or you believe in the power of, to use one common liberal phrase, “Bernie’s magic elves”, who will mysteriously and effortlessly accomplish all the hidden work that it takes to make policy goals a reality.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, believe liberals have delusions of their own: namely that party politicians will naturally push important issues forward without any prodding. Party loyalists, they believe, fail to see that without popular agitation, party priorities are set by powerful interests. Leftwingers, they insist, are team players, but their teams are outside groups and issues, and they put in the work earlier in the policy process than establishment Democrats.

This divide over party loyalty played out earlier this year in a skirmish over Jon Ossoff’s candidacy in a special congressional election in Georgia. Ossoff did not come out strongly for any issues that weren’t dictated by party leadership, but he was a loyal Democrat and would have been a reliable Democratic vote in Congress. His campaign was powered in large part by teams of suburban Atlanta moms – grassroots party loyalists who earnestly cared about resisting Trump. Liberals poured passion into the campaign while leftwingers criticised his bland message. When Ossoff lost, many loyalists viewed it as another example of the left not getting on board for a critical team project. Leftwingers, meanwhile, saw it as evidence that the party was still failing to understand the issues that really mattered to voters.

The divide over strategy

The divide over what we are trying to win is coupled with a divide over how we win. The first part of this strategic divide is over what policies a losing party should adopt to win back power. Liberals’ go-to strategy is often thus: if you are losing, tack your policies to the centre to win; once you win back power, you can enact what you want.

Liberals believe that the left too often chooses ideological purity over victory. They think leftwingers are not serious about power: if populist leaders, they argue, ever had to actually lead the party – if they had to win elections and pass legislation – they too would be forced to be more pragmatic. Many establishment Democrats buy into the Republican talking point that the US is a centre-right country, and that Democrats need to adjust their strategy to that reality.

Leftwingers have the inverse policy strategy: if you are losing, you need a more differentiated, passionate policy vision to win. The writer Adam Johnson points to how Jeremy Corbyn succeeded with this strategy: “Corbyn’s campaign caught fire because he offered a clear moral vision of justice … they call it ‘ideology’ … But ideology is simply pragmatism over a longer timetable.”

Leftwingers like Johnson believe liberals have been conned by the right into playing on their rhetorical turf. When Democrats couch their proposals in Republican rhetoric – such as when they refer to Russian interference as “communist infiltration” or pitch social welfare programs as “helping entrepreneurs” – they, in the left’s mind, commit the double error of appearing like inauthentic Diet Republicans and diluting the power of the Democrats’ own potentially inspiring ideals. At their most sceptical, leftwingers wonder whether Democratic leaders are tacking to the centre not simply as an electoral strategy, but because they do not believe in leftwing ideas in the first place. These leftwingers point to examples of times when Democrats had power and still did not advance their stated ideals in what leftwingers considered to be a sufficiently ambitious manner.

In short, the party’s liberal wing believes winning leads to idealism, whereas the party’s left wing believes idealism leads to winning.

The divide over the gap between Democrats and Republicans

Perhaps the root of these first two divides is a third divide: how much difference leftwingers and liberals believe there is between Democrats and Republicans.

Party loyalists believe the gap between the two parties is huge. The Republican party is so egregiously horrible, they argue, that it is imperative to remain loyal to our only hope of stopping them: the Democratic party. This viewpoint is captured in a recent Democratic Campaign Coordinating Committee sign reading “Democrats 2018: I mean, have you seen the other guys?” This belief explains why liberals tend to focus on the outrages of the “other guys” and downplay the left-liberal divide: given the constant threat of Republican power, any internal differences are miniscule. What’s more, the threat of Republican power, liberals point out, is especially acute to marginalised communities: whereas privileged idealists can afford to say “it has to get worse before it gets better,” immigrants at risk of deportation, black people at risk of police brutality and gay couples at risk of having their rights rolled back do not have the same luxury.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, see the gap between Democrats and Republicans as smaller. They like to point out examples of silent bipartisanship: the complicity of Democrats in the disastrous war in Iraq and the racist war on drugs, for example, or the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era, corporate-driven education reform. They criticise party loyalists for letting Democratic leaders steer them towards formerly Republican positions, such as when some Democratic loyalists began criticising administration leakers such as Chelsea Manning – a figure they would have lionised if she had committed her leaks while Bush was president.

Behind this divide is a failure to see eye-to-eye over certain larger narratives – narratives that leftwingers talk about more than liberals do. The left often situates both parties within broader conceptual frameworks, such as neoliberalism, corporate power and imperialism. To defeat these larger, nefarious societal structures and historical trends, leftwingers argue, we must identify them and prepare a plan to conquer them – a task more difficult than just defeating the Republicans at the ballot box.

Many liberals, meanwhile, either have not thought about, do not believe in, or do not prioritise addressing these forces. Some have even made fun of leftwingers for talking too much about “neoliberalism” – a phrase many centrists believe has no meaning, but that leftwingers insist is analytically useful. (Ironically, this is the same dynamic at play as when conservatives snarkily dismiss phrases such as “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” as being meaningless, despite the insistence by both leftists and liberals that you could fill an entire library with books explaining each phrase’s depth of meaning.)

From divides to tribes

These divisions may have started the left-liberal conflict, but it has been sustained by the fact that both sides are developing into integrated political tribes. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, political tribalism begins with shared intuitions: we first feel what is politically right, then later muster arguments to support our intuitions. When people who share some intuitions about politics find each other and discover they share other intuitions, they begin to form political communities to collaborate on mustering arguments for their bundles of shared intuitions. Out of these political communities emerge leaders and institutions. The tribal formation is complete when these communities establish a unified tribal narrative – complete with stories of the past, present and future; heroes and villains; and direction for what members should be doing.

Today’s left wing of the party emerged as a bundle of intuitions about the Democratic establishment: scepticism of the Clintons; concern about the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis and wars in the Middle East; and curiosity as to why working-class issues have been less trumpeted by the party in recent decades than they might have been in the past. In recent years, leaders and institutions emerged to articulate these intuitions: media ventures such as Jacobin, the Intercept and Chapo Trap House; politicians such as Keith Ellison, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; and organisations fighting for causes such as a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All and a ban on fracking. A narrative has coalesced of a party that has been corrupted by corporate campaign donations; that is complicit in conservatism’s rise, through its capitulation to Reaganomics and Bush-era militarism; that has displaced its working-class base to make room for a professional, managerial class; and, most damningly, has replaced its democracy-enhancing New Deal ambitions with a minimalist grab-bag of meritocracy-enhancing, technocratic band-aids.

The loyalist wing of the party has had a tribe-building process, too – one likely accelerated by the party rebels’ rise. They started out with a different bundle of political intuitions: more trust for leaders like Obama and Clinton; more credit given to what Democrats were able to accomplish in the age of conservative ascendance; more inspiration taken from the racial and gender diversity of party leadership; and more appreciation for the progressive causes the party has begun to articulate over the past decades. A network of party-friendly institutions, journalists and leaders, old and new, has emerged to articulate and defend these liberal intuitions: media entities such as MSNBC and Slate; the DNC itself; the leaders and staffers of the Obama administration and Clinton campaigns; mainstream liberal thinktanks; and writers such as the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones magazine. A narrative has emerged to unify this wing as well: a story that casts the Democratic party as the entity that has overcome unprecedented Republican attacks to give voice to and fight for the interests of marginalised people in American politics.


These political tribes build a network of trust between their individual members and the complexities of national politics. As individuals, we cannot know everything about national politics, but we can collect trustworthy people who do know about different areas of politics. Take Elizabeth Warren, for example: leftwingers believe she shares their deep politics regarding Wall Street, so they look to her when they want to know, say, if a recent regulation is effective or toothless. Or take Barack Obama’s foreign policy: many liberals are less critical of it than leftwingers are, because they trust that Obama is similar, deep down, to them, and therefore believe his decisions would be similar to the decisions they would make if they were privy to his information. Trust explains why each side is preoccupied with showing how different surface-level moves by national figures are windows into some alien – or familiar – deep politics: it validates their trust or distrust in each side’s establishment or counter-establishment.

These political tribes have their benefits. They help draw people into politics, bring people together and give members purpose. But political tribalism can also be hazardous. At its worst, it creates enemies out of neighbours, turning complex people into “sell-outs” or “purists”. Tribes trick us into thinking that political participation is about being well-versed in tribal rhetoric – say, being able to list the correct takes on past inter-tribal skirmishes – rather than about pursuing tangible goals. They encourage confirmatory, self-validating thought, rather than the exploratory thought that helps our politics stay aligned with reality.

The focus that comes with tribalism can lapse into myopia, such as when some liberals can see Trump’s wickedness regarding immigration so clearly, but were unable to support immigration activists protesting Obama; or when some leftwingers can see the corporate corruption of Democrats so clearly, but fail to articulate the massive gap in corruption between the two parties.

A final danger of political tribalism – one specific to the intra-party divide – is that it is a danger to the coalition-building required to gain power through electoral politics. If a party coalition is divided against itself come election day, it may not stand. And if the coalition loses, both tribes lose. And with each passing of month of Trump’s presidency, the stakes get higher.

Resolving the conflict

So, who is right? Fortunately, a peace process need not declare one side’s narrative as supreme. However, it does require each side to come to terms, at least a bit, with the best insights of the other side.

The liberals’ best insight is that today’s Republican party is an exceptionally dangerous political organisation. It denies catastrophic climate change, is an almost-pure vessel for the corporate takeover of public power, has based its electoral coalition on aligning with white ethnic nationalism and authoritarian theocracy, and has instigated disastrous decision after disastrous decision over the past decades.

Democratic party leaders over the past decades may have been cowardly in the face of Republican cruelty but they were, for the most part, not the instigators of the most callous developments in modern American politics. Winning general elections against the Republican party matters – and putting in the work to defeat them at the ballot box is a responsibility of all progressives.

The leftwingers’ best insight is that the end-goal of electoral politics is not winning; it is the advancement of certain programmes and policies. As anyone who has watched the conservative ascendancy within the Republican party knows, internal criticism of party leaders is what makes leaders listen. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

A productive peace process for the intraparty war would merge these insights, advancing a practice that would help defeat the Republican party while keeping Democratic leaders on their toes. You could call this practice “vigorous critical loyalty”. Vigorous critical loyalty would work by separating the times for vigorous party loyalty and the times for vigorous internal criticism. A Democrat practising vigorous critical loyalty would, near the general election or a critical vote in Congress, demonstrate vigorous loyalty to the party, mustering support for the Democratic candidate or bill while holding criticism for later. But during a primary campaign, and during ordinary legislative time, a vigorous critical loyalist would fight vigorously for her ideals, unafraid of criticising party leaders, supporting primary challengers, and advancing outside issue campaigns.

For this to work, both sides need to give a little. Liberals need to accept that primary challenges to beloved party leaders are not only legitimate, but desirable, in order to keep the party aligned with its people. Liberals also need to accept that outside issue campaigns are legitimate. If an important issue – such as immigrant rights and universal health care – is having a difficult time breaking through to the party, interrupting speeches and writing harsh critiques of party stars becomes necessary. Liberals should balance their loyalty to party figures with respect for this difficult, messy and effective work of pushing peripheral issues on to the national stage.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, first need to bring their passion into mainstream party projects – especially general election campaigns. They should supplement their respect for the ideological activists pushing important issues into the mainstream with respect for the loyal, grassroots Democrats who make sure there are enough Democratic votes in Congress to make any policy matter. If leftwingers are asking liberals to respect the distinction between leftwingers and liberals, they should return the favour by respecting the distinction between liberals and their Republican adversaries – and act on that distinction by taking seriously the role the Democratic party has played as a bulwark against the extremes of Republican power.


Second, leftwingers need to understand that the way to gain the respect of the other half of the party is to not just say they “would have won”, but rather to actually win. The biggest problem with the Sanders campaign is the same problem that the Clinton campaign had: it lost. In turn, the biggest asset of the Sanders campaign is that it almost won. Obama was able to change the party because he won. The Fight for $15 was able to change the party because it has won in cities and states across the country. A rebellious vision gains followers when it shows it can win.

In sum, an ideal Democratic party would arbitrate internal divides through a flurry of vigorous issue campaigns and primary challenges during ordinary time and then, during general election time and critical Congressional votes, rapidly unify to win.

This would move our conflicts away from neverending shadow-boxing and toward resolution in the court of public opinion. Primaries, for example, will help resolve the strategy divide, by showing whether “pragmatism” or “idealism” wins in general elections, as candidates of different persuasions win primaries and test their pragmatist/idealist orientation in general elections. Issue campaigns, meanwhile, will show the extent to which the party has been corrupted by nefarious structural forces. One need not endlessly discuss whether this or that politician is a “neoliberal shill” if you can resolve the question by launching issue campaigns that dramatise these larger forces at play and see whether said politician supports the campaign. If they do, they may be worthy of more trust. If they do not, they may be worthy of a primary challenge.

And finally, by agreeing from the start that everyone, no matter their level of criticism during ordinary time, is fully on board to support the party when general election time comes, concerns about party loyalty are reduced. All intraparty fights are tolerated – and even encouraged – because everyone can trust that we will be unified when it counts.
Vigorous critical loyalty presumes that people can change, and that there is a potential to re-integrate the left and liberal tribes. As issue campaigns gain support from current party leaders and improbable primary challengers become party leaders, party sceptics become more loyal, while party loyalists start showing loyalty to leaders and issues formerly seen as heretical.

Most importantly, vigorous critical loyalty could help rebuild trust. Primary challengers that win become closer to the people they represent. To have an issue emerge from a trusted outside group and then have that issue enter the mainstream of the party is to build loyalists’ trust in that outside group while building populists’ trust in the party.

This is how two tribes could eventually merge into one without either side compromising on their ideals and loyalties. It may seem like a longshot. But I take hope from a point that Washington Post assistant editor Elizabeth Bruenig raised at a talk earlier this year: “You don’t argue with people who are nothing like you … you argue with people who are almost like you … [Arguing] is a pretty good sign of the possibility of coalition.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...rican-politics

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

It has been almost a year since the catastrophic election of Donald Trump. In his first year in office, the president has governed as cruelly and ineptly as his critics predicted. But while anti-Trump sentiment has never been more fierce and widespread, his political opponents are more divided than ever. And this faultline – which has parallels in Britain with divisions among the Labour party – could, if left unaddressed, compromise efforts to resist and defeat Trumpism.

Roughly speaking, these two sides could be characterised as the “populist wing” and the “establishment wing” of the Democratic party, but even this terminology is a point of controversy between the feuding sides. The party’s left wing, for example, wants to call the conflict the “left-liberal divide”. Loyalist Democrats want to play down the divide, calling for unity by insisting that Democrats are all members of “the left” (if those calling for unity are younger, millennial types), or that they are all “liberals” (if they are older, Clinton-era types). The right, meanwhile, does not understand the divide, continuing to believe in a monolithic “radical left” filled with “radical liberals”. This leads to the funny situation, as one commentator noted, in which members of both the left and the right reach for the same “I made it through college without becoming a liberal” T-shirt.

The present conflict surfaced, as many intra-party feuds do, during a presidential primary. But unlike past internal conflicts, this one is sticking around. Centrist John Kerry supporters, for example, did not take potshots at insurgent Howard Dean supporters deep into 2005. This year, however, a full ecosystem – replete with duelling podcasts, magazines and candidates – has kept the divide alive. Skirmishes are popping up, like clockwork, every few weeks; from February’s bitterly contested election of a new Democratic National Committee chair, to leftist scepticism about potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; from the launching of the Clinton-fawning website Verrit to the latest harangue from the liberal-bashing podcast Chapo Trap House.

Discussing a resolution to this conflict is difficult, because even calls for “resolution” can be interpreted as ideological statements. Wanting the Democratic party to survive and unify can be taken as an endorsement of the establishment, because the quickest path to intra-party peace is for the conflict’s leftwing instigators to get in line. Meanwhile, treating the intraparty divide as substantive – arguing that there is, in fact, a significant difference between, say, “Medicare for All” and “Obamacare” – can annoy liberals who believe that the so-called “divide” has been manufactured by a few disgruntled purists.

To resolve our intra-party conflict, we must first understand it. I believe the two sides’ concerns can be grouped into three divides: the first over party loyalty, the second over how to win elections, and the third over the gap between Democrats and Republicans. Each divide may not be relevant to every partisan in the conflict, but most partisans have divided over at least one of these three.

The divide over party loyalty

Liberals accuse leftwingers of not being loyal to the party in general elections. This began with the vilification of leftwing third-party voters, such as Ralph Nader voters in 2000 and Jill Stein voters in 2016. What made this past election special is that accusations of disloyalty were launched at a Democratic primary challenger. Hillary Clinton supporters feel that Bernie Sanders attacked Clinton excessively during the primary, stayed in the primary too long, and did not do enough to support her in the general election. Many loyal Democrats around the country have analogous feelings about leftwing rebels in the party generally: they think criticisms should be kept inside the family, and that it is important to be a “team player” in order to win elections and pass legislation. Some may call these loyal Democrats boring conformists, but from their perspective, it is party loyalists, not insurgent critics, who staff the party booth at the county fair and knock on doors every year to help get Democrats elected.

Leftists, on the other hand, believe this “disloyalty” accusation is bunk. First, they think establishment-wing leaders follow what the political blogger Jonathan Schwartz has called “the iron law of institutions”, which says that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself”. If party leaders were loyal to the party, leftwingers believe, then they would have learned from recent electoral losses and shaken the party up, even if it meant stepping aside themselves to make room for fresh faces and new ideas.

Second, insurgent leftwingers care less about catering to the dwindling group of grassroots party loyalists around the country, and more about activating the masses of non-voters and independents who are not yet loyal to any party. That is why they are less concerned about candidates, like Sanders, who are not technically Democrats. They see them not as selfish traitors, but rather as opportunities to build the party’s base.

Loyalty to the party generally is often bound up in loyalty to party leaders. The party’s liberal wing tends to get excited about party leaders’ personalities, and is more likely to share, say, Obama or Hillary memes, watch West Wing fantasies about party staffers and follow the path of rising stars. This loyalty extends to the wider network tied to the party, too, such as liberal-leaning news anchors and commentators, and party-aligned Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep.


Leftwingers think this level of loyalty is bizarre, especially when it comes to politicians they believe do not deserve it. Leftwingers are generally less likely to express loyalty to leaders, and more likely to pledge themselves to issue campaigns that bubble up from extra-party institutions, such as labour unions or racial justice and environmental groups. They respond to liberal attacks of “Why aren’t you knocking on doors in the general election?” with “Why aren’t you joining the Fight for $15?” (a national grassroots campaign for fairer wages led by fast-food workers). Leftwingers believe liberals cannot think for themselves on issues – that they wait to get the go-ahead from the party establishment before they offer any support. To leftwingers, the liberals’ shorter-term issues, such as the Russia investigation, are just distractions unless they are embedded in more fundamental issue campaigns.

Establishment Democrats often see leftwingers’ enthusiasm for disjointed issue campaigns over the party platform as further evidence that they do not understand “how real politics works”. As Slate writer Stephen Metcalf describes: “I see a social movement left that protests then goes home; and a Democratic party that stays on and does the hard, boring work.” Loyal Democrats see their friends forming phone-banks to urge members of Congress to oppose Republican attacks on Obamacare, and wonder why there are not more leftwingers pitching in. To loyal Democrats, either you call yourself a Democrat, be a team player and move issues forward as part of a concerted, directed party strategy … or you believe in the power of, to use one common liberal phrase, “Bernie’s magic elves”, who will mysteriously and effortlessly accomplish all the hidden work that it takes to make policy goals a reality.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, believe liberals have delusions of their own: namely that party politicians will naturally push important issues forward without any prodding. Party loyalists, they believe, fail to see that without popular agitation, party priorities are set by powerful interests. Leftwingers, they insist, are team players, but their teams are outside groups and issues, and they put in the work earlier in the policy process than establishment Democrats.

This divide over party loyalty played out earlier this year in a skirmish over Jon Ossoff’s candidacy in a special congressional election in Georgia. Ossoff did not come out strongly for any issues that weren’t dictated by party leadership, but he was a loyal Democrat and would have been a reliable Democratic vote in Congress. His campaign was powered in large part by teams of suburban Atlanta moms – grassroots party loyalists who earnestly cared about resisting Trump. Liberals poured passion into the campaign while leftwingers criticised his bland message. When Ossoff lost, many loyalists viewed it as another example of the left not getting on board for a critical team project. Leftwingers, meanwhile, saw it as evidence that the party was still failing to understand the issues that really mattered to voters.

The divide over strategy

The divide over what we are trying to win is coupled with a divide over how we win. The first part of this strategic divide is over what policies a losing party should adopt to win back power. Liberals’ go-to strategy is often thus: if you are losing, tack your policies to the centre to win; once you win back power, you can enact what you want.

Liberals believe that the left too often chooses ideological purity over victory. They think leftwingers are not serious about power: if populist leaders, they argue, ever had to actually lead the party – if they had to win elections and pass legislation – they too would be forced to be more pragmatic. Many establishment Democrats buy into the Republican talking point that the US is a centre-right country, and that Democrats need to adjust their strategy to that reality.

Leftwingers have the inverse policy strategy: if you are losing, you need a more differentiated, passionate policy vision to win. The writer Adam Johnson points to how Jeremy Corbyn succeeded with this strategy: “Corbyn’s campaign caught fire because he offered a clear moral vision of justice … they call it ‘ideology’ … But ideology is simply pragmatism over a longer timetable.”

Leftwingers like Johnson believe liberals have been conned by the right into playing on their rhetorical turf. When Democrats couch their proposals in Republican rhetoric – such as when they refer to Russian interference as “communist infiltration” or pitch social welfare programs as “helping entrepreneurs” – they, in the left’s mind, commit the double error of appearing like inauthentic Diet Republicans and diluting the power of the Democrats’ own potentially inspiring ideals. At their most sceptical, leftwingers wonder whether Democratic leaders are tacking to the centre not simply as an electoral strategy, but because they do not believe in leftwing ideas in the first place. These leftwingers point to examples of times when Democrats had power and still did not advance their stated ideals in what leftwingers considered to be a sufficiently ambitious manner.

In short, the party’s liberal wing believes winning leads to idealism, whereas the party’s left wing believes idealism leads to winning.

The divide over the gap between Democrats and Republicans

Perhaps the root of these first two divides is a third divide: how much difference leftwingers and liberals believe there is between Democrats and Republicans.

Party loyalists believe the gap between the two parties is huge. The Republican party is so egregiously horrible, they argue, that it is imperative to remain loyal to our only hope of stopping them: the Democratic party. This viewpoint is captured in a recent Democratic Campaign Coordinating Committee sign reading “Democrats 2018: I mean, have you seen the other guys?” This belief explains why liberals tend to focus on the outrages of the “other guys” and downplay the left-liberal divide: given the constant threat of Republican power, any internal differences are miniscule. What’s more, the threat of Republican power, liberals point out, is especially acute to marginalised communities: whereas privileged idealists can afford to say “it has to get worse before it gets better,” immigrants at risk of deportation, black people at risk of police brutality and gay couples at risk of having their rights rolled back do not have the same luxury.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, see the gap between Democrats and Republicans as smaller. They like to point out examples of silent bipartisanship: the complicity of Democrats in the disastrous war in Iraq and the racist war on drugs, for example, or the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era, corporate-driven education reform. They criticise party loyalists for letting Democratic leaders steer them towards formerly Republican positions, such as when some Democratic loyalists began criticising administration leakers such as Chelsea Manning – a figure they would have lionised if she had committed her leaks while Bush was president.

Behind this divide is a failure to see eye-to-eye over certain larger narratives – narratives that leftwingers talk about more than liberals do. The left often situates both parties within broader conceptual frameworks, such as neoliberalism, corporate power and imperialism. To defeat these larger, nefarious societal structures and historical trends, leftwingers argue, we must identify them and prepare a plan to conquer them – a task more difficult than just defeating the Republicans at the ballot box.

Many liberals, meanwhile, either have not thought about, do not believe in, or do not prioritise addressing these forces. Some have even made fun of leftwingers for talking too much about “neoliberalism” – a phrase many centrists believe has no meaning, but that leftwingers insist is analytically useful. (Ironically, this is the same dynamic at play as when conservatives snarkily dismiss phrases such as “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” as being meaningless, despite the insistence by both leftists and liberals that you could fill an entire library with books explaining each phrase’s depth of meaning.)

From divides to tribes

These divisions may have started the left-liberal conflict, but it has been sustained by the fact that both sides are developing into integrated political tribes. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, political tribalism begins with shared intuitions: we first feel what is politically right, then later muster arguments to support our intuitions. When people who share some intuitions about politics find each other and discover they share other intuitions, they begin to form political communities to collaborate on mustering arguments for their bundles of shared intuitions. Out of these political communities emerge leaders and institutions. The tribal formation is complete when these communities establish a unified tribal narrative – complete with stories of the past, present and future; heroes and villains; and direction for what members should be doing.

Today’s left wing of the party emerged as a bundle of intuitions about the Democratic establishment: scepticism of the Clintons; concern about the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis and wars in the Middle East; and curiosity as to why working-class issues have been less trumpeted by the party in recent decades than they might have been in the past. In recent years, leaders and institutions emerged to articulate these intuitions: media ventures such as Jacobin, the Intercept and Chapo Trap House; politicians such as Keith Ellison, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; and organisations fighting for causes such as a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All and a ban on fracking. A narrative has coalesced of a party that has been corrupted by corporate campaign donations; that is complicit in conservatism’s rise, through its capitulation to Reaganomics and Bush-era militarism; that has displaced its working-class base to make room for a professional, managerial class; and, most damningly, has replaced its democracy-enhancing New Deal ambitions with a minimalist grab-bag of meritocracy-enhancing, technocratic band-aids.

The loyalist wing of the party has had a tribe-building process, too – one likely accelerated by the party rebels’ rise. They started out with a different bundle of political intuitions: more trust for leaders like Obama and Clinton; more credit given to what Democrats were able to accomplish in the age of conservative ascendance; more inspiration taken from the racial and gender diversity of party leadership; and more appreciation for the progressive causes the party has begun to articulate over the past decades. A network of party-friendly institutions, journalists and leaders, old and new, has emerged to articulate and defend these liberal intuitions: media entities such as MSNBC and Slate; the DNC itself; the leaders and staffers of the Obama administration and Clinton campaigns; mainstream liberal thinktanks; and writers such as the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones magazine. A narrative has emerged to unify this wing as well: a story that casts the Democratic party as the entity that has overcome unprecedented Republican attacks to give voice to and fight for the interests of marginalised people in American politics.


These political tribes build a network of trust between their individual members and the complexities of national politics. As individuals, we cannot know everything about national politics, but we can collect trustworthy people who do know about different areas of politics. Take Elizabeth Warren, for example: leftwingers believe she shares their deep politics regarding Wall Street, so they look to her when they want to know, say, if a recent regulation is effective or toothless. Or take Barack Obama’s foreign policy: many liberals are less critical of it than leftwingers are, because they trust that Obama is similar, deep down, to them, and therefore believe his decisions would be similar to the decisions they would make if they were privy to his information. Trust explains why each side is preoccupied with showing how different surface-level moves by national figures are windows into some alien – or familiar – deep politics: it validates their trust or distrust in each side’s establishment or counter-establishment.

These political tribes have their benefits. They help draw people into politics, bring people together and give members purpose. But political tribalism can also be hazardous. At its worst, it creates enemies out of neighbours, turning complex people into “sell-outs” or “purists”. Tribes trick us into thinking that political participation is about being well-versed in tribal rhetoric – say, being able to list the correct takes on past inter-tribal skirmishes – rather than about pursuing tangible goals. They encourage confirmatory, self-validating thought, rather than the exploratory thought that helps our politics stay aligned with reality.

The focus that comes with tribalism can lapse into myopia, such as when some liberals can see Trump’s wickedness regarding immigration so clearly, but were unable to support immigration activists protesting Obama; or when some leftwingers can see the corporate corruption of Democrats so clearly, but fail to articulate the massive gap in corruption between the two parties.

A final danger of political tribalism – one specific to the intra-party divide – is that it is a danger to the coalition-building required to gain power through electoral politics. If a party coalition is divided against itself come election day, it may not stand. And if the coalition loses, both tribes lose. And with each passing of month of Trump’s presidency, the stakes get higher.

Resolving the conflict

So, who is right? Fortunately, a peace process need not declare one side’s narrative as supreme. However, it does require each side to come to terms, at least a bit, with the best insights of the other side.

The liberals’ best insight is that today’s Republican party is an exceptionally dangerous political organisation. It denies catastrophic climate change, is an almost-pure vessel for the corporate takeover of public power, has based its electoral coalition on aligning with white ethnic nationalism and authoritarian theocracy, and has instigated disastrous decision after disastrous decision over the past decades.

Democratic party leaders over the past decades may have been cowardly in the face of Republican cruelty but they were, for the most part, not the instigators of the most callous developments in modern American politics. Winning general elections against the Republican party matters – and putting in the work to defeat them at the ballot box is a responsibility of all progressives.

The leftwingers’ best insight is that the end-goal of electoral politics is not winning; it is the advancement of certain programmes and policies. As anyone who has watched the conservative ascendancy within the Republican party knows, internal criticism of party leaders is what makes leaders listen. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

A productive peace process for the intraparty war would merge these insights, advancing a practice that would help defeat the Republican party while keeping Democratic leaders on their toes. You could call this practice “vigorous critical loyalty”. Vigorous critical loyalty would work by separating the times for vigorous party loyalty and the times for vigorous internal criticism. A Democrat practising vigorous critical loyalty would, near the general election or a critical vote in Congress, demonstrate vigorous loyalty to the party, mustering support for the Democratic candidate or bill while holding criticism for later. But during a primary campaign, and during ordinary legislative time, a vigorous critical loyalist would fight vigorously for her ideals, unafraid of criticising party leaders, supporting primary challengers, and advancing outside issue campaigns.

For this to work, both sides need to give a little. Liberals need to accept that primary challenges to beloved party leaders are not only legitimate, but desirable, in order to keep the party aligned with its people. Liberals also need to accept that outside issue campaigns are legitimate. If an important issue – such as immigrant rights and universal health care – is having a difficult time breaking through to the party, interrupting speeches and writing harsh critiques of party stars becomes necessary. Liberals should balance their loyalty to party figures with respect for this difficult, messy and effective work of pushing peripheral issues on to the national stage.

Leftwingers, on the other hand, first need to bring their passion into mainstream party projects – especially general election campaigns. They should supplement their respect for the ideological activists pushing important issues into the mainstream with respect for the loyal, grassroots Democrats who make sure there are enough Democratic votes in Congress to make any policy matter. If leftwingers are asking liberals to respect the distinction between leftwingers and liberals, they should return the favour by respecting the distinction between liberals and their Republican adversaries – and act on that distinction by taking seriously the role the Democratic party has played as a bulwark against the extremes of Republican power.


Second, leftwingers need to understand that the way to gain the respect of the other half of the party is to not just say they “would have won”, but rather to actually win. The biggest problem with the Sanders campaign is the same problem that the Clinton campaign had: it lost. In turn, the biggest asset of the Sanders campaign is that it almost won. Obama was able to change the party because he won. The Fight for $15 was able to change the party because it has won in cities and states across the country. A rebellious vision gains followers when it shows it can win.

In sum, an ideal Democratic party would arbitrate internal divides through a flurry of vigorous issue campaigns and primary challenges during ordinary time and then, during general election time and critical Congressional votes, rapidly unify to win.

This would move our conflicts away from neverending shadow-boxing and toward resolution in the court of public opinion. Primaries, for example, will help resolve the strategy divide, by showing whether “pragmatism” or “idealism” wins in general elections, as candidates of different persuasions win primaries and test their pragmatist/idealist orientation in general elections. Issue campaigns, meanwhile, will show the extent to which the party has been corrupted by nefarious structural forces. One need not endlessly discuss whether this or that politician is a “neoliberal shill” if you can resolve the question by launching issue campaigns that dramatise these larger forces at play and see whether said politician supports the campaign. If they do, they may be worthy of more trust. If they do not, they may be worthy of a primary challenge.

And finally, by agreeing from the start that everyone, no matter their level of criticism during ordinary time, is fully on board to support the party when general election time comes, concerns about party loyalty are reduced. All intraparty fights are tolerated – and even encouraged – because everyone can trust that we will be unified when it counts.
Vigorous critical loyalty presumes that people can change, and that there is a potential to re-integrate the left and liberal tribes. As issue campaigns gain support from current party leaders and improbable primary challengers become party leaders, party sceptics become more loyal, while party loyalists start showing loyalty to leaders and issues formerly seen as heretical.

Most importantly, vigorous critical loyalty could help rebuild trust. Primary challengers that win become closer to the people they represent. To have an issue emerge from a trusted outside group and then have that issue enter the mainstream of the party is to build loyalists’ trust in that outside group while building populists’ trust in the party.

This is how two tribes could eventually merge into one without either side compromising on their ideals and loyalties. It may seem like a longshot. But I take hope from a point that Washington Post assistant editor Elizabeth Bruenig raised at a talk earlier this year: “You don’t argue with people who are nothing like you … you argue with people who are almost like you … [Arguing] is a pretty good sign of the possibility of coalition.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...rican-politics

Possibly the rats are fleeing from their exposure of the Dems. paying for the Russian dossier,in fear of Mueller and his thugs. Oh how quickly the tides can turn.

You did not honestly just quote the whole fucking thing for a two line comment?

You utter fucking moron.

^ He just regurgitated up the daily propaganda dose from breitbart. The right wing propagandists actually have bozo's like him believing that the democrats paid for the Russian dossier and that Mueller is now on their trail.

The useful idiots lap it all up without question.

Originally Posted by bsnub

^ He just regurgitated up the daily propaganda dose from breitbart. The right wing propagandists actually have bozo's like him believing that the democrats paid for the Russian dossier and that Mueller is now on their trail.

The useful idiots lap it all up without question.

Maybe you could post something showing this is not the case?

^ Why don't you go fcuk yourself? I do not need to even bother responding to your fake news bullshit. Show me some credible news sources reporting that BS and we can talk. But you won't because you can't.

Originally Posted by bsnub

^ Why don't you go fcuk yourself? I do not need to even bother responding to your fake news bullshit. Show me some credible news sources reporting that BS and we can talk. But you won't because you can't.

Your usual resonce once when you have nothing,of course the Dems paid 6 million for the Russian dossier and of course Mueller is now looking at this,and of course your Sweet Baby Hillary knew exactly what was going on.

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Your usual resonce once when you have nothing

You clueless bozo I am not the one posting fake news and making false claims.

Originally Posted by RPETER65

the Dems paid 6 million for the Russian dossier and of course Mueller is now looking at this

No they didn't and no he is not and you can't prove otherwise. Fake news.

The Clinton camp and DNC funded what became the Trump-Russia dossier: Here’s what it means

The Washington Post broke the story Tuesday night that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped pay for that now-famous dossier of research on President Trump.

The Post's Adam Entous, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman report that powerful Democratic attorney Marc E. Elias retained the firm Fusion GPS for information, and Fusion GPS later hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who was versed in Russia-related issues.

The dossier, which was published by BuzzFeed News in January, has been partially confirmed, though its most salacious allegations have not been.

There is a lot to sort through here. Below are four key points.

1) Democrats — though not the Clinton campaign itself— were previously reported to fund the dossier

The fact Democrats were behind the funding for the dossier is not totally new. When Mother Jones first reported on the research that led to the dossier back in October 2016, it said the research effort was originally funded by President Trump's GOP opponents and then, when he won the nomination, by Democrats.

As David Corn reported:

This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.)

Until now, though, the dossier had not been tied specifically to the Clinton campaign or the DNC.

2) Yes, the dossier was funded by Democrats

Some of the pushback on the left has focused on the fact that a still-unidentified Republican client retained Fusion GPS to do research on Trump before the Clinton campaign and the DNC did. Thus, they argue, it's wrong to say the dossier was just funded by Democrats.

But the dossier's author, Steele, wasn't brought into the mix until after Democrats retained Fusion GPS. So while both sides paid Fusion GPS, Steele was only funded by Democrats.

3) Trump's allegation of FBI payments is still dubious

After the story posted, some on the right seized upon The Post noting the FBI had agreed to pay Steele for information after the campaign. The argument seemed to be that the FBI was engaged in a witch hunt against Trump using Democrats' sources.
But The Post originally reported on the FBI's agreement back in February. At the time, it also reported it never actually paid for the work after the agent was identified in news reports:

The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.. . .Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Despite there being no proof the FBI actually paid Steele, Trump suggested it might have in a tweet last week — along with “Russia . . . or the Dems (or all)." Of those three groups, only Democrats have been reported to have actually paid Steele. And again, that was already kind-of known.

4) The appearance problems for Democrats

There is, presumably, a reason Democrats haven't copped to funding the dossier — something they still haven't publicly confirmed. Fusion GPS threatening to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination raised eyebrows last week, for instance.

First among those reasons is paying a foreigner for opposition research for an American political campaign. Given Democrats' argument that Russia's interference on Trump's behalf was beyond the pale, the Clinton camp and the DNC paying a Brit for information would seem somewhat problematic.

(The Clinton campaign has also, notably, denied working with the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Trump. Republicans have pushed dubious comparisons between the Ukraine allegation and Russia's alleged Trump advocacy.)

Some on the right even alleged that Democrats paying Steele amounts to "collusion" with foreigners. But Russia-Steele comparisons aren't apples-to-apples. The British after all are, unlike the Russians, America's allies. Also, Steele was not acting as an agent of a foreign government, which is what would likely be required to prove collusion in the case of the Trump campaign and Russia.

Steele's dossier does include information it says was obtained from "a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin." In other words, the Clinton camp and the DNC were essentially paying for information allegedly obtained from inside the Russian government, even as there is no proof they deliberately sought Russia's help.

Separately, the firm that the Clinton camp and the DNC paid also has alleged ties to the Kremlin. In Senate testimony in July, Hermitage Capital Management chief executive William Browder accused Fusion GPS and its head, Glenn Simpson, of running a smear campaign against Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who in 2009 was tortured and killed in a Russian prison after uncovering a $230 million tax theft. Magnitsky worked for Browder, and his name was used for a U.S. law containing sanctions that was passed by Congress and is a sore spot between the U.S. government and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Browder said the smear campaign was run by Fusion GPS with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. You might remember them from the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. that took place in June 2016. Veselnitskaya was the Russian lawyer with alleged Kremlin ties who arranged the meeting.

As The Post reported in July of Browder's accusations:

They were all allegedly working with the law firm Baker Hostetler to defend the Russian company Prevezon from charges it laundered funds stolen in the fraud Magnitsky uncovered.“Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act,” Browder will testify. “He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistleblower and was instead a criminal. They also spread false information that my presentations to lawmakers around the world were untrue.”

Fusion GPS has confirmed it worked on a lawsuit involving Veselnitskaya for two years, The Post's Josh Rogin reported. It denied any involvement in the Trump Jr. meeting.

The firm has worked with both Democrats and Republicans over the years.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly said that CNN was the first to reveal the existence of the dossier and inadvertently implied that The Post was the first to report that the funding for the dossier was exclusively Democratic. In fact, Mother Jones reported in October 2016 on a report and memoranda produced as part of an investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and that Democratic sources funded the research effort. This post has been updated.
Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.a6d90b6f366e

Originally Posted by bsnub

You clueless bozo I am not the one posting fake news and making false claims.



No they didn't and no he is not and you can't prove otherwise. Fake news.

There re is nothing fake about it, read Slicks post.

Originally Posted by RPETER65

There re is nothing fake about it, read Slicks post.

i know it was unintentional, but that was quite funny.


anyway, you would do well to realize that democrats were not only person/entity which funded the steele dossier. all reports indicate that the other source of cash was republican.

was it the RNC? they certainly wanted to stop trump's campaign during the primaries.

was it cruz.....or even better.....was it the mercer's?



and most importantly....no matter who funded the research and resulting dossier, that doesn't inherently make the findings inaccurate.

Originally Posted by raycarey

you would do well to realize that democrats were not only person/entity which funded the steele dossier.

Originally Posted by Slick

But the dossier's author, Steele, wasn't brought into the mix until after Democrats retained Fusion GPS. So while both sides paid Fusion GPS, Steele was only funded by Democrats.

Originally Posted by raycarey

but that was quite funny.

Someone call a waaaaaaabulance! We got a man down over here!