The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party Wants To Pick The Next Democratic Nominee

Last week David Atkins, writing for the Washington Monthly pushed back on some of the lame ideas ritually asserted by the Republican wing of the Democratic Party upon which they claim their right to dominate a party they are so obviously out of touch with. "Probably the most annoying frequently repeated shibboleth," he wrote, referring to another in a series of anti-AOC screeds pushed by corporate media, "is the notion that centrists make for more effective legislators than progressives. This is not the case by any quantifiable metric. In fact, centrist involvement has historically proved catastrophic for Democratic priorities. The most recent notable case was when Max Baucus was allowed to dither with the Affordable Care Act for months. That dilatory measure was not only counterproductive, it cost Senator Ted Kennedy his chance to vote on the landmark legislation. Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman (who, it must be noted, was endorsed by almost the entire Democratic establishment in his own primary battle against Ned Lamont) singlehandedly killed the initiative to allow the Medicare age to be reduced to the age of 50. It was not the progressives who harmed the Affordable Care Act in its march to passage; it was the centrists. Time and time again, the Third Way wing pretends that by being conciliatory enough with Republicans, Democrats can get votes from across the aisle to pass necessary legislation. This is a fantasy, a pipe dream far more far fetched than any progressive wish list. Progressives start with the understanding that Republicans will automatically blockade anything decent, then figure out what will be legislatively required to accomplish the necessary goals. It is worse than useless to start by trying to figure out what kind of compromise a bipartisan majority will accept. In fact, weakened platforms and confused messaging, which result from such an approach, end up doing more harm than good."

Historically, the anti-progressive faction of politics-- whether Federalists, Whigs, Democrats or Republicans in their day-- opposed ideas like the Declaration of Independence and the break with Britain, the Bill of Rights, public education, emancipation of the slaves, unions, government regulatory initiatives, the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, expanding suffrage to include non-property owners, women, former slaves, young people... That's what conservatives do; that's what conservatives are... defenders of the status quo, whether we're talking about Trump or McTurtle or Status Quo Joe, the Republican Party, the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, Third Way, No Labels, Problem Solvers... they are all essentially the same-- corrupted men and women willing to take money from the wealthy to act on the public stage as their agents.

"What progressives are doing," continued Atkins, "is laying down the marker that if this system won’t allow the Green New Deal to be enacted, they will change the system until it does-- whatever it takes. If that means eliminating the filibuster? So be it. Need to add states to the union? Go for it. Term limits for justices or packing courts? Sign them up. This might seem like fantastical thinking, but it actually carries a greater dose of realism about both the current political situation and about the opposition in the Republican Party… Any 'solution' that would realistically get the vote of even a single Republican senator wouldn’t come close to doing what the moment actually requires. Which means that progressives don’t care what the center-left thinks it might be able to pass, because that’s ultimately irrelevant. Progressives are saying what is necessary, and then determining just how far they’ll need to go to get there. And not just to deal with climate change, but also radical inequality, the destruction of the middle class, and much more besides."

Joel Bleifuss is the editor and publisher of In These Times. A short, right to the point essay last week, How Third Way Democrats Could Get Trump Re-elected isn't referring to creepy, crawly fake Democrats like Mark Penn, Nancy Jacobson and Andrew Stein going to work to reelect Trump-- as I did Saturday-- but today's versions of the DLC leading the Democratic Party down the path of ruin. He notes that former DLC president, a conservative Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton managed to snatch the Democratic nomination, win the presidency and wreck the bond between the Democratic Party and the working class. But the DLC's death in 2011 wasn't the good news it should have been. "[T]his creature of the Third Way," he wrote, "did not slither into the sunset. Rather, it shed its skin and emerged in 2017 as New Democracy, a political action committee. New Democracy is coiled to strike in 2020. Its advisory board includes declared presidential candidate John Delaney, a former Maryland congressman and millionaire businessman, along with two other possible presidential contenders: Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who said in January that he is 'probably' in the race, and former New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, a self-proclaimed 'radical centrist.' Third Way Democrats love the word 'radical.' The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the DLC-affiliated think tank, brags that it deploys 'its trademark philosophy of radical pragmatism' as part of 'the vanguard' working 'to design a distinctly American hybrid of publicprivate action'-- in other words, privatization of government services."

New Democracy founder Will Marshall expands on this point in a recent article for The Daily Beast, “Hey, Democratic Socialists: More Big Government Won’t Fix What Ails Us.” He writes that, “rather than emulate European-style statism” as advocated by “Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new socialist idol,” progressives should “offer voters an indigenous and decentralized vision for effecting radical change.”

Marshall is also a founder of both the late DLC and the PPI, which shares an office with New Democracy. PPI funders have included the weapons manufacturer Raytheon, Dow Chemical and General Electric, along with the right-wing Bradley Foundation, which funds the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC].

Just as there is nothing “progressive” about PPI, there is nothing “new” about the ideas advanced by New Democracy. Like the Republican Party, New Democracy is death on single-payer healthcare, which the group’s website explains “would force working Americans to give up their doctors, and raise the threat of rationing care.” Back in 2010, PPI wonks ensured that the White House not push for a “public option”-- a government-run nonprofit insurance option-- in Obamacare.

New Democracy’s stated goal in 2020 is to expand “the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats competitive.” Pragmatic radicals like Marshall advocate doing so not by “tear[ing] up existing trade agreements” but by building a “knowledge economy” that is “shaped largely by American ingenuity and technological prowess”—a vision crafted for corporate America under the guise of aiding downwardly mobile white working people who, according to the New Democracy fairy tale, were abandoned by Democrats in 2016. Not so. The abandonment dates to the 1990s, when the DLC, PPI and Bill Clinton championed free trade policies that destroyed the livelihoods of working people of all races, including many of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.”

Hillary’s speechifying may have opened the purses of Goldman Sachs bankers, but she failed to woo white non-college-educated voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012, and she lost the critical states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. According to the calculations of Ruy Teixeira at the Center for American Progress, Clinton would be president had she had won over just 25 percent of these former Obama voters.

Indeed, if Clinton had campaigned, as Bernie Sanders did, against trade agreements like NAFTA that benefit the rich and the powerful, it is a good bet that Donald Trump would not be president. If New Democracy steers Democratic strategy in 2020, it is a good bet he will remain president.

The New Democracy PAC-- a Super PAC-- hasn't spent any money on elections so far and has raised relatively modest amounts from just 8 key contributors (with the help of Harry Reid):

• Netjets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots- $15,000
• Ernst & Young- $10,000
• DTE Energy- $5,000
• National Electrical Contractors Association- $5,000
• Fresenius Medical Care North America- $5,000
• Genentech Inc- $5,000
• American Apparel & Footwear Association- $5,000
• National Auto Dealers Association- $5,000

Marshall's odious PAC, is likely to jump in with both feet behind Biden (or Hickenlooper or Delaney). Remember, Marshall, a neocon, was a key figure in persuading right-of-center Democrats to back the Iraq war and he has been on the wrong side of every policy issue in the last several decades-- perfect for Status Quo Joe (or Hickenlooper or Delaney). The thermometer on the right will take you to an ActBlue page for Bernie and congressional candidates who are running on the progressive platform that Bernie helped develop. It is crucial that when Bernie is in the White House, he have as many progressive members of Congress as possible. That's something we have to work on now, not when Blue Dogs and New Dems are working with Republicans in Congress to sabotage all of Bernie's initiatives like Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, free public colleges and, of course, the Green New Deal. Please give what you can to Bernie-- and to the congressional candidates who support him.

The Debate Over Tactics In the Modern Left: Radical Opposition or Strategic Inclusive Engagement?

World CO2 emissions are growing, not falling. What will the children say? (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Modern America is a tense place these days. By that I mean, there are a number of tensions in American social and political life that are, this year, coming to a frothy head.

First, consider the tension in center and leftish circles around class war and the 2020 election. Many argue that the right way for to Democrats to win this election is by embracing "identity politics" — that racial justice, justice for women, for gay, lesbian and trans individuals, for indigenous peoples and all other victimized groups must come first, must be placed front and center. And not just for presentation and marketing purposes (though many do argue that vote-getting starts with making the identity case), but because fighting the old white patriarchy is a necessary precursor to fighting the class war — that if the old white patriarchy is in place, the class war can't be won.

Adolph Reed Jr. has written much about this tension on the left (his latest is here), and proponents of the Sanders candidacy stand almost alone in believing the solution lies in winning the class struggle.

So that's one tension. Another is the tension around radical, oppositional action versus a more considered, careful, inclusive approach. Visitors to DWT recently read about Rep. Pramila Jayapal and her "balancing act" — her attempt to keep real progressives, not-so-real progressives and Party leaders all aligned with genuinely progressive legislation like Medicare for All. Time will determine if that strategy succeeds; everyone I know hope it does.

Radical opposition, however, has its proponents, and no subject inspires them more than the coming climate catastrophe, which the world is doing less than nothing to head off (see graph at top).

Will the politics of accommodation work in this sphere, or will radical action be required? Must the current system be broken and rebuilt before a climate solution can be enacted?

As writer David Atkins explains it in the following twitter thread, the choices left to us are really one choice. First, the Right will not let — is not letting — the current system survive in any case; they're breaking norms with everything they touch. Second, the current system cannot provide a climate solution. Thus breaking that system the way the Left wants to break it provides the only hope "for those of us who want to live to 2050."

Radical thoughts for a radical time. Here's that thread. See what you think after you read it.

Short thread here on climate change, the norms of democracy, and the battle between the right, center left and progressive left. Ready? Here goes... /1

The Right has always depended for its success on the implicit or explicit threat that it would be willing to subvert all the norms of democracy to achieve its goals, whether it be "2nd amendment remedies" or the Federalist Society's changing all the rules in the courts.../2

This is how the Right works the refs: they let everyone know that they're willing to pull out ALL the stops if white male patriarchy and racism don't stay centered in society, and if rich people don't get to keep all the loot. /3

The center left has long depended on being the "responsible" party. The cogent ones, the level headed ones. The perpetual Real Mothers in the Justice of Solomon [story] willing to sacrifice almost anything to salvage the system. /4

The problem is that this dynamic between right and center left is codependent and convenient to the status quo. The far right gets to keep the angry old racists happy, the center left keeps the concerned vaguely cosmopolitan educated crowd happy. And the donors always win. /5

The progressive left [is] saying "enough of this game. We, too, are willing to break the norms of American democracy because these issues are life and death emergencies." We're not going to play the responsible straight man to the GOP's destructive clown. /6

Yes, we KNOW the Green New Deal can't pass through the Senate under the current system. We're not stupid. We're [putting] down the marker that if this system won't let the GND pass, we will change the system until it does--eliminate the filibuster, add states, pack courts, etc. /7

So when the center left says "but I can pass this weaker version", the answer is twofold:
1) no, you can't. The GOP is a destructive clown that won't give you the time of day, either. But also,
2) we don't care what you think [you] can pass. We're telling you what we need. /8

And if that means changing the system? So be it. If it means breaking the system? So be it. The norms of 20th century American democracy are worthless compared to the threat of climate change. Also, radical inequality. Also, the declining middle class. /9

The right has been very effective playing this game. They are signaling loud and clear they would rather have a Putin-backed dictatorship under a corrupt idiot than give up old white male privilege or [plutocratic] control. What is the left willing to do? How far will we go? /10

The center left's answer? Nowhere. We'll do whatever we can with the system we have, and whatever happens happens...as long as nobody's stock portfolio takes a hit. That is completely, totally unacceptable to those of us who want to live to 2050. Or have [kids] who do. /11

If the system won't budge with us, we'll budge the system. We are dealing with catastrophic threats, and econ/tech challenges well beyond the capacity of our current politics. Your experience within the system means nothing now. Your commitment to the goal is everything. /12

In short, the current system WILL NOT SURVIVE. The right sees an existential threat from a browning, more progressive population. They cannot afford for democracy to survive, and they will kill it if given half the chance. /13

But the current system also won't let us deal with our environmental, technological and economic challenges in anything like the timeframe we need to solve them. Which means the defenders of that system are just as dangerous in their own way as the right wing is. /14

The future belongs to the side that changes the system to accomplish their goals. Will it be young progressives? Or will it rich old racists? There is no middle ground. There is no responsible defense of the status quo. It's going to be one side or the other. /fin

His conclusion is striking, but not surprising. We've heard it from others as well. As Atkins says:

• The defenders of the present system are as dangerous in their way as the right wing is.
• The future belongs to the side that changes the system to accomplish their goals. 

The terms of this debate apply to a number of policy fields, and we'll be hearing some form of this discussion, of this tension, throughout the 2020 campaign. For example, the Medicare For All debate has already been characterized (accurately in my view) as a battle to replace capitalism (see Ed Walker's "The Green New Deal Challenges the Domination of Capital").

But the argument above applies no more directly than it does in the climate debate, where the clock is running, the end (if it comes) is near and total, and there's no turning back to anything that went before, no matter how much we wish it were not so.
 

What Happened With Those Special Elections Down South Yesterday?

The Democrats will never win with this running the show

The Democratic candidates in 2 deep red, Deep South Republican districts lost, albeit very narrowly, to Republicans. One way to look at it is that they lost. Another way is that they did incredibly well in those districts. Karen Handel won the GA-06 seat 134,595 (52.6%) to 124,893 (47.4%) and Ralph Norman won the DSC-05 seat by a narrower spread-- 44,889 (51%) to 42,053 (48%). Both Democrats ran centrist campaigns, although Ossoff started out as a progressive until the DCCC got their hands on him and turned him away from Medicare-for-All and away from a fairer tax system in their unending quest to force Democrats to sound more like moderate Republicans.

A few days earlier, Franklin Foer, writing for The Atlantic, talked about how the conflicted elite centrists in control of the Democratic Party have turned it into a stinking pile of shit. The Democratic Party has gone from the proud vehicle for the legitimate voices of the working class to some kind of values-free Republican-lite amalgam that barely knows what it is. Not even Trump or the Ryan-McConnell overreach can change the a dried up turd into the vibrant and unstoppable winning machine it should be.

The careerists who have wrecked the Democratic Party would rather keep their grasp on power within the shrinking party than see it expand in a progressive direction foreign to their own tastes… and agenda. Foer wrote that “Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place. But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generations-- the Clintons, Barack Obama-- have receded. Defeat discredited the party’s foundational strategy—or, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.”

By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising-- she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa. Trump compounded her challenge. From the moment he announced his candidacy, he aimed his message at the white working class. He pursued that group with steadfastness. The threat that he might capture an unusually large chunk of it persuaded Clinton to pursue professionals with even greater intensity in an attempt to offset Trump’s potential gains.

With hindsight, it’s possible to see the risks of her strategy. Her campaign theorized that dentists, accountants, and middle managers needed to fully understand how Donald Trump surrounded himself with bigots and anti-Semites. “From the start,” she argued in a sharply worded speech in August, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.” Her campaign ads against Trump emphasized his misogyny. The attacks highlighted Trump’s greatest weakness, but also played to his greatest strength. Trump had spent the entirety of his campaign trying to foment a culture war, and Clinton zealously joined it. He talked endlessly about political correctness—trying to convince his voters that they weren’t just losing the debates over gay marriage or immigration, but that the elite wanted to banish them as bigots if they even dared to question the prevailing liberal view. Clinton boosted that cause when she told donors in September, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’” It was meant to be a sotto voce comment, but that’s never how it works, as Mitt Romney could confirm.

The current politics of the Democratic Party make it less likely than usual that the nominee will be a centrist in the traditional mold. During the Democrats’ long losing streaks in the late 20th century, the party ritualistically engaged in postmortems that propelled it toward the center. That was the natural cycle of politics: Getting repeatedly clubbed by conservatives suggested trekking in a more conservative direction. But as a candidate, Trump placed little priority on traditional conservative positions, and often flouted them. His victory suggests a very different set of lessons, lessons in tune with the mood of the Democratic Party’s base.

Since 2008, energies have been building on the left—fueled by growing inequality, mass incarceration, and the inevitable frustration with a party that held the White House for eight years but couldn’t deliver everything activists wanted. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter arose. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist captured 43 percent of the primary vote. Then Trump was elected, an event that was received by the party as a catastrophe and that has extended the activist spirit to a far broader audience.

Anger and activism are an opportunity for Democrats to grow their nucleus of supporters motivated to vote in midterm elections. The main question is whether those energies will be channeled in a way that reinforces the long-building demographic divide in American politics or in a way that—at least to some extent—blurs it. Or to put it another way: whether the Democrats accept the continued outflow of the white working class into the arms of the GOP as a fait accompli, or whether they try to stanch it.

There are in fact two different lefts in bloom today, with differing understandings of American politics. One strain practices what its detractors call identity politics-- it exists to combat the bias and discrimination that it believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

The cultural left was on the rise for much of the Obama era (and arguably, with the notable exception of Bill Clinton’s presidency, for much longer). It squares, for the most part, with the worldview of socially liberal whites, and is given wind by the idea that demography is destiny. It has a theory of the electorate that suits its interests: It wants the party to focus its attentions on Texas and Arizona-- states that have growing percentages of Latinos and large pockets of suburban professionals. (These states are also said to represent an opportunity because the party has failed to maximize nonwhite turnout there.) It celebrates the openness and interdependence embodied in both globalization and multiculturalism.

While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the post–Cold War years. As the financial crash of 2008 worked its way through the Democratic Party’s intellectual system, the economic left migrated from the fringe protests of Occupy Wall Street to just outside the mainstream. While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters-- clustered in the upper Midwest-- whom Greenberg deemed persuadable.

Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform. But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given time-- and the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology. The Republican Party’s pursuit of the South shaped its view of race; the Democratic Party’s wooing of professionals led it to embrace globalization.

The tensions between the cultural left and the economic left were evident in the last Democratic primary, and they have persisted. In a November talk after the election, Bernie Sanders railed against identity politics with an abandon that would have been foolish on the campaign trail. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he complained. In a way, this squabbling is a prelude to the next presidential primary, a contest that will be packed with candidates, each attempting to show him- or herself as the truest champion of minorities or women or the working and middle classes. Seeking victory, candidates will accuse their competitors of not authentically believing in the cause they themselves elevate most highly.

…[Elizabeth] Warren is most focused on the concept of fairness. A course she taught early in her career as a law professor, on contracts, got her thinking about the subject. (Fairness, after all, is a contract’s fundamental purpose.) A raw, moralistic conception of fairness—that people shouldn’t get screwed-- would become the basis for her crusading. Although she shares Bernie Sanders’s contempt for Wall Street, she doesn’t share his democratic socialism. “I love markets-- I believe in markets!” she told me. What drives her to rage is when bankers conspire with government regulators to subvert markets and rig the game. Over the years, she has claimed that it was a romantic view of capitalism that drew her to the Republican Party-- and then the party’s infidelity to market principles drove her from it.

Trump managed to exploit populist anger in part because he could go places ideologically that no Democrat would ever travel. As a matter of politics and policy, Democrats will never be the party of economic nationalism. Its voters are, on balance, more globalist than the Republican base. They tend to live in places that have prospered from trade and technology. They typically support immigration. But Warren has begun to outline the possibilities of a new center-left populism—one that gets beyond wealth redistribution alone.

At the core of Warren’s populism is a phobia of concentrated economic power, an anger over how big banks and big businesses exploit Washington to further their own interests at the expense of ordinary people. This fear of gigantism is a storied American tradition, descended from Thomas Jefferson, even if it hasn’t recently gotten much airtime within the Democratic Party. It justifies itself in the language of individualism—rights, liberty, freedom—not communal obligation.

There’s a growing consensus among center-left economists that the dominance of entire industries by a few enormous companies is one of the defining economic problems of the era. The issue has gravitated toward the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking partly due to the work of Barack Obama’s in-house economist, Jason Furman, a protégé of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Furman revolted against the behavior of business leaders who came to call at the White House. Many of them didn’t seem especially committed to capitalism. With their privileged access, they groveled for favors that would further their dominance. “They were like the Chinese,” he told me recently. “They craved certainty. They wanted everything planned.”

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors-- the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. What’s more, a small set of institutional investors-- BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard-- holds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft.

Furman argues that such business concentration is a leading cause of inequality and wage stagnation. Warren has come to believe in this same idea. As a senator, she can see how the ills of finance-- the industry’s concentration, its abuse of political power-- have been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies-- oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. “When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.” In making a Jeffersonian argument, she has begun to deploy Jeffersonian rhetorical trappings. “As a people, we understood that concentrated power anywhere was a threat to liberty everywhere,” she argued. “Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.”

Warren has not committed to running for president, either publicly or, according to close associates of hers, privately. But if she does run, she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. It’s not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the rent-seeking exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

The approach exudes a Trumplike hostility to Washington elites, but not necessarily to government. And nearly the entire Democratic agenda can be justified through its prism: Obamacare preserves freedom and loosens corporations’ grip on their employees, by allowing workers to switch jobs without fear of losing health insurance. Criminal-justice reform is an effort to secure liberty and equality from an abusive apparatus of the state.

A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. But Warren’s brand of populism could help cool white-working-class hostility toward the Democrats and persuade the likes of Greenberg’s focus-group members to switch allegiance again. Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo. And liberal populism would take the party beyond ineffectual arguments about Trump’s temperament. A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy.

…To win again, the Democrats don’t need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country’s bastions of gloom. The party has been crushed-- not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections-- by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism. Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich-- 42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trump’s agenda.

The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering. (On page 60 in this issue, Peter Beinart describes how Democrats might alter their language and policies regarding immigration to broaden appeal without sacrificing their principles.) A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldn’t struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

Victories in the culture wars of the past decade seemed to come so easily to liberals that they created a measure of complacency, as if those wars had been won with little cost. In actuality, the losers seethed. If the Democrats intend to win elections in 2018, 2020, and beyond, they require a hardheaded realism about the country that they have recently lacked-- about the perils of income stagnation, the difficulties of moving the country to a multicultural future, the prevalence of unreason and ire. For a Democratic majority to ultimately emerge, the party needs to come to terms with the fact that it hasn’t yet arrived.

This is how Democratic consultants get rich-- selling meaningless pap to frightened, easily manipulated candidates. This TV buy was never going to sway a single vote.

Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine yesterday offered one path: an iron worker with a great mustache coming for Paul Ryan’s seat. “Bruce Springsteen’s discography,” he wrote, “has taken on human form-- and now it’s trying to kick Paul Ryan out of Congress.” David Atkins, at the Washington Monthly, was right out of the gate within minutes of yesterday’s losses with the lesson the DCCC will never learn, at least not while Pelosi and Hoyer control it: the path forward lies in winning back Trump voters, not in courting Romney voters.

In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day.

That same strategy may well have cost Democrats a House seat in last night’s special elections, where Democrat Jon Ossoff underperformed expectations in a loss in Georgia’s 6th district, while the more ideologically aggressive Democrat Archie Parnell dramatically overperformed expectations in a loss in South Carolina’s 5th.

The two districts in play last night that could not have better mirrored the dilemma facing Democrats over whether to pursue Trump-averse Republican suburban voters, or working class whites and Obama-Trump switchers. Georgia’s 6th District is full of the former: a traditionally heavy Republican district, it veered away from Donald Trump because its residents are less attuned to Trump’s economic populism and—it was believed—his appeals to bigotry. These are the very voters Clinton and Schumer salivated over, and the national Democratic Party pushed very hard for the seat, spending upwards of $5 million.

South Carolina’s 5th district is much more rural and hardscrabble, and was much more favorable to Trump. Establishment Democrats mostly ignored the race, spending no money there.

In GA-06, Jon Ossoff ran a deliberately anti-ideological campaign. Centrist think tank Third Way bragged that Ossoff used a “centrist message aimed at attracting disillusioned Republican voters.” South Carolina’s Parnell, despite his Goldman Sachs background, ran a much more hard-charging campaign of Democratic values.

…The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers-- perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

Do you agree? So do we. Tap that thermometer and contribute what you can to candidates like Randy Bryce, Matt Coffay, Jenny Marshall, David Gill-- men and women who are values-driven and aren't likely to be swayed by DCCC centrism and cowardice, not now, not ever.