I like Eric Levitz at New York Magazine. I think, though, in this column, he is thinking too conventionally about the weak prospects for the Democrats in the US Senate for 2020. The article is worth reading through before coming back here. Don't worry, I'll wait. I will listen to some music on YouTube while you read.
Okay? Read it? Depressed? Again, okay. Now, for an alternative...
I appreciate Mr. Levitz's point that the Dems are only likely to gain three or four seats in the current predictions for 2020, but even there, we are seeing once again how little policy figures into the arguments Mr. Levitz is making. If, for example, the DNC promoted and supported economic populists in various Republican leaning States, they could win in those places through candidates speaking to rural area Americans' best values. But let's not start there, shall we? Let's start with Mr. Levitz's assumption that Republicans serve rural America's interests. Not once does Levitz tell us what it is precisely Republican politicians are giving people in rural areas. Rural areas continue to fall behind economically, are lacking medical facilities and doctors, are lacking teachers for schools, and lacking most things people in urban areas expect, starting with restaurants of good quality. Rural areas lack transportation to other towns or cities, unless their pick ups are in good enough shape to travel distances, and they can afford to pay for the gas, and then have money to spend somewhere else. So, again, what are Republican politicians giving these people? Well, hate for one. And they give them an extremist gun position that tells them, You can be the hero to stop the Mulsim-Mexican-Jewish-gay hordes ruining your life, all while pushing for Jesus and the Apocalyptic visions that go along with this. And, of course, saving the unborn, and punishing those harlots who want an abortion, makes it all "moral." It has been an effective recipe over the decades, as the Democrats lost the ability to speak in New Deal language, and, with the Democrats offering mostly the language and policies which make a wealthy person in La Jolla in Southern California feel safe that nothing Democrats propose will cost them money. And strategists are really surprised rural, mostly white Americans in the various States Mr. Levitz discusses vote for the Republicans?
So, please, corporate Democrats. If you want to avoid making Mr. Levitz's prognostication a reality, you will find the type of politician who speaks to these folks is a home grown Bernie Frickin Sanders. I've seen it in footage in West Virginia and Nebraska, where Sanders causes more than enough of those folks, when added to the 40% who vote Democrat, and who the Electoral College type of prognostications tell us to ignore as we speak of "Blue" or "Red" States as if completely "Red" or "Blue," to support a Democrat or a person who is, egads, a New York Jew by birth and raising. To tell me this won't work is to act like what is being done now is working. No, that strategy of the Clintons and the Neo-liberals has utterly failed in those States. So, this proposal I make is at least worth the try. Wine and cheese corporate Democrats, who finesse with language in a way that really has fooled largely white people over 50 who watch cable news, too often tell us what is not going to be accomplished, tell us to accept the globalization that has occurred, as if this type of globalization is the only globalization, and pop champagne bottles at the current economic indicators. Rural America needs the type of policies that speak to the heartache, and then propose hope through policies that will benefit them directly and their children.
For me, I have long been concerned with rural America, as much as urban America, where poor Hispanics and blacks have lived since the 1950s. I loved, for example, Tom Harkin, now retired US Senator from Iowa, and endorsed his presidential candidacies in 1988 and 1992. For those who believe so deeply in the Country Mice/City Mice meme, explain how someone like me, a suburban-urban professional guy, a Jew, a "liberal," did that. Tom was a great person who cared about his state of Iowa and what Iowa represented in the history of, and life and culture in, the United States. Cue Field of Dreams. Harkin stalwartly opposed the NAFTA and the WTO for the correct reasons. He understood why there was a New Deal and why we needed one again. But, living in Orange County and Southern California from the 1980s through 2017, I so often found myself out of step with those Democrats (far more economically well off than me, more often than not) who fell for Gary Hart, Dukakis, Clintons, Gore, Bradley, and eventually Obama. These candidates were nice bankers. All of them. They wouldn't know a union if it fell on them. They had no idea how to help rural America and never cared enough to find out--or if they knew, they realized it would cost the rich people in the suburbs and urban areas money.
Meanwhile, people in rural America know bankers are not nice when you need the bankers. They know bankers will never come through in the hard times. They know when the bankers pay a visit to your home, it is to take your home and cut up and sell your farm. The rural people, when nobody is appealing to their best values, turn to those who tell them who to hate--and Republican strategists and politicians are right there waiting. I have marveled all these years how working class white people and rural white people never notice the bankers standing next to Republican Congressman Steve King, to take another Iowa politician example. But, with the structure of the discourse on television and radio, there has been an effective obscuring of the differences in the two parties because Democrats are always happy to have some banker stand with them--to prove the Democrat is a solid, respectable business person!--and are content when the liberalism the banker shows are about things that don't directly cost the bankers money. Being for abortion doesn't cost bankers money or power. Being for same sex marriage may actually make money as gays and lesbians feel more empowered to open joint bank accounts, and gays and lesbians, to the extent they do not take on children, have lots more money to invest if they are in the professional class. So bankers love LGBT movements and promote them. Plus, bankers really don't want too many Americans to own guns, do they?
If one constructed a novel about the coalitions in our politics for the past nearly 45 years, people would say it is crazy and would not be able to exist over any length of time. It is too far fetched, they would say. Well, it is, and has been, the reality--and it is now also killing our planet. Mr. Levitz's article is important and he could well be correct. And right now, the Democratic Party's national committees, leading "official" political strategists, talking heads on television, and donor classes, are still highly clueless, arrogant, and refusing to accept, strategically, we are in an economic populist moment--and that social media doesn't have to be the enemy, but instead can also be our friend. If the DCCC and DSCC, for example, promoted, embraced and supported economic populist progressives, they would find more victories in the Senate races in 2020 than Mr. Levitz believes is possible. The worst that happens, if the Democratic Party committees change course, is a closer loss, and a possible downturn in rich donor class money. However, there would be more money flowing to those candidates from the grass roots, and more excitement. If there is a victory, and there well could be, then that could be part of the potential salvation of our nation's (and planet's) fortunes, and, maybe it will begin to heal the rifts which corporate media and strategists currently in power are vastly overstating between rural and urban America. We have more in common with each other, as Americans, than we think. We have more in common with each other as a species on this planet, too, but we need to tell people in places where they have been taught to hate that are we are on their side before we can hold hands in communion and say there are others who suffer, and we must work together to help them, too.
