The state of the democratic party

today's Students for Socialism at Arizona State are tomorrow's Democratic Socialists of Arizona

 

three words:

AOC

 

again what “pops into your head” is irrelevant

 

doesn't change the fact that calling Jonathan Turley a hack is an ad hominem as opposed to discussing the actual essay itself. don't take this the wrong way, but slinging ad hominems around is kind of a hack move. just saying.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/democrats-rural-america-midterms.html

I Was the Governor of Montana. My Fellow Democrats, You Need to Get Out of the City More.
Dec. 3, 2021
By Steve Bullock
Mr. Bullock, a Democrat, was the attorney general of Montana from 2009 to 2013, was the governor of Montana from 2013 to 2021 and ran for the U.S. Senate in 2020. He is a co-chair of American Bridge 21st Century.

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.

The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.

I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.

To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be.

Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems.

We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids.

For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind.

These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond.

It’s in the void of inaction and failure to solve problems real people face that racially tinged cultural fights, like we saw in Virginia, take hold. My children are in high school and have never heard of critical race theory — nor have their teachers. What voters want to know is that Democrats will fight for racial justice and to improve the lives of rural Americans, no matter the color of their skin. After all, that’s what we’ve always done.

In the parts of America that are completely rural, there are nine infants and toddlers for every day care slot, one in eight lacks health insurance, and for one in four, over half of income goes to rent. High-speed internet has eluded many parts of our country. Voters in my state may have grown cynical about the legislative process, infighting and eye-popping price tags in Washington, but enacting the Build Back Better bill, along with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, gives Democrats something to run on: proof that we have voters’ backs, including those who live in rural America.

It’s time for Democrats to get uncomfortable and go beyond friendly urban and suburban settings to hear directly from folks in small towns who are trying to run a business, pay the bills, and maintain access to health care. They have stories to tell and ideas to share, and we should listen. When then-candidate Barack Obama spent the Fourth of July 2008 in Butte, Mont., he didn’t go there because Butte was suddenly key to winning in November, but showing up there sent a loud and clear message to places like Butte all across our country that he gives a damn about us.

Butte and Scranton may be a long way from each other geographically, but they’re not that far apart in terms of working-class roots, values and attitudes. President Biden can help rural Americans know and believe Democrats are tackling the challenges they face. Democrats need to get off the polling and consultant calls, get into the community and engage voters directly: Do you have a decent job that covers the bills and leaves a little left over? Can you afford your home and pay for health care? Do you feel safe? Do you believe we are doing right for your kids, educationally, environmentally and economically? Do you see a path forward toward a better life for you and your family?

Fighting for every American means that, whether you live in Manhattan, N.Y. or Manhattan, Mont., you have an opportunity to climb the economic ladder and a temporary safety net to catch you if you stumble. Too often the Democratic Party comes off as a buffet line of policies, each prepared for a different group of voters. If we talk about — and work to address — the issues that people discuss around their kitchen table or at the fence line, the issues that fill endless hours of cable television become a hell of a lot less relevant. Our kitchen tables might look and feel different, but we need to learn to talk in a way that makes sense around everyone’s table.

Voters are facing real challenges — and so is our country. They need to know that Democrats are listening, working, and fighting for them. The voters deserve that level of respect and need to know we have their back.

Steve Bullock is a co-chair of American Bridge 21st Century. He was the governor of Montana from 2013 to 2021.


​

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-latinx-highlights-broader-problem-democrats/

Opinion: The debate over ‘Latinx’ highlights a broader problem for Democrats
By Megan McArdle
Columnist
Yesterday at 6:14 p.m. EST

Monday saw the release of yet another poll showing that the term “Latinx” is unpopular among Hispanic voters — only 2 percent preferred to use it, while 40 percent found it off-putting and 30 percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a politician who deployed it. Naturally, the rest of the week was spent arguing over how much this mattered.

The term has been growing in popularity lately, often used by White politicians or columnists like myself who want to politely defer to another group’s preferences. But it appears that Latinx is not, in fact, what that group wants to be called; a majority of them say they prefer the already gender-neutral “Hispanic.”

This seems particularly relevant as Hispanics have begun deserting Democrats for the GOP (a Wall Street Journal poll out this week showed them evenly split between the parties). One potential culprit is the kind of progressivism that Latinx represents — hyperfocused on language policing and divisive identity issues rather than bread-and-butter policy. But one can also argue, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie did, that the critics are the ones displaying a professional wordsmith’s fixation on minor word choices, rather than the substantive issues that actually decide elections.

Yet this in turn invites an obvious retort: If word choice is such a minor matter, why does this graceless and unbeloved neologism keep showing up in newspaper headlines and stump speeches? And the obvious answer — to keep peace with other parts of the progressive coalition — in fact points us toward a growing problem for Democrats and the left.

Over the years, elite American institutions have grown more and more scrupulous about achieving certain kinds of demographic representation — particularly those that lean left. That’s something for which they should be applauded because America’s elites need to look like America.

But whatever rainbow hues of race and sexual orientation are visible in the group photos, American elites across the political spectrum are actually becoming less representative in one way: Most of them hold college degrees, and many also have advanced degrees, often from highly selective institutions.The college-educated are only about a third of the population, so they cannot build a durable majority without wooing other voters into the fold. With educational polarization rising — and older dividing lines like race beginning to fade — the left cannot afford to forget just how different educated people are from whatever demographic group they are supposed to represent.

On average, the interests, values and concerns of college-educated women differ significantly from those who aren’t — and the more exclusive their education, the bigger the gap. The same is likely to be true of basically any major demographic category you’d care to name: race, immigration status, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Of course there are commonalities that the college-educated can still speak to — women with doctorate degrees worry about unwanted pregnancies and sexual assault, as do working-class women. But that doesn’t mean women with college degrees can effectively represent the broader voices of “women” when issues arise in the boardroom, editorial meeting or campaign strategy session.

Educated voices often focus on aspects of common problems that are unique to themselves — witness how much coverage of sexual assault focuses on college campuses, even though college women do not appear to be at higher risk than their non-college peers. Or consider how much pro-choice rhetoric concentrates on disruptions to education or career, which may not be the top concerns of a high school dropout.

Consider, too, that the dropout is actually less likely to support liberal abortion laws than the graduate — something you wouldn’t necessarily glean from listening to her educated counterparts talking about what “women” think.

And so too with “Latinx.” College-educated people of any ethnicity are noticeably further left on social issues, better able to keep abreast of constantly shifting language norms, and more likely to work and socialize with the professionals who use such language. So college-educated Hispanics are probably quite a bit more comfortable with “Latinx” than working-class Hispanics are. They’re also the ones likely to be sitting at the table when an institution or a politician decides to use it.

By itself, that’s relatively harmless. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll showed that fewer than 1 in 4 Hispanics had even heard the term, so I doubt it’s moving many votes today. But these sorts of problems also show up in policy — which might be how both political parties decided that ultraliberal immigration policy was the key to the Hispanic vote.

Turns out Hispanics’ views on immigration are complicated, and relatively few of them rank the issue as their biggest worry. That might have been clear had the educated people consulted working-class Hispanic voters rather than their college-educated peers or their imaginations. While it may not matter what bespoke terms the left invents to please this or that constituency, it matters a great deal to whom they are talking — and to whom they listen before they start to speak.
​

and in case anyone missed it, this was an OPINION PIECE

 

more Democrats eating their own

National progressive group labels six lawmakers 'progressive in name only' in new report

https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...els-lawmakers-progressive-in-name-only-in-new