Democratic (Party) Direction

I have a State Dept Security guy for an in-law, he loved working for both Dr. Rice and Hillz and was a big Obama booster (also a career military guy w multiple tours in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan)

former student who listed me as a contact

I knew things were going awry when he said, "Oh, Twitter. The president's on that a lot. He's amazing, isn't he?" I realized in 10 seconds he wasn't sarcastic.

Mordy that's a reductive view that doesn't take into account a lot of other factors

my only point is that probably the reason communities with most sacrifices voted trump is similar to the reasons military families + military voters voted trump period. they'd have to do more careful work (like separating out casualty rates by community vs. rate of service + seeing if isolating that particular variable made a difference) bc afaict from reading the summaries they're missing the major correlation here.

^great article.

America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice. This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat. Increasingly, a divide is emerging between communities whose young people are dying to defend the country, and those communities whose young people are not.

this ties into the rural/urban divide. this is a realm where the elitism of city dwellers is very real. they can afford to send their kids to college while their poorer rural cousins send their kids off to war. Democrats need to seriously reconsider their hawkishness and win that anti-war vote.

You think the military vote is anti-war?

that's what the story is implying but i think that's probably a misreading of the data

this is a realm where the elitism of city dwellers is very real. they can afford to send their kids to college

America, where there are no poor people in our cities.

no. just that the continual avoidance of the anti-war vote has led Democrats to ignore the very real costs of lives lost to military intervention. this is part of why they lost, they refused to look at Clinton's war stance, to even address it. instead they were considered "deplorables", unreachable racists that we should ignore.

usually the cities are where homeless veterans end up i wonder if they are anti war or pro war

you seem confused on p much every point there

do you really think Democrats aren't doing well enough in cities because they are losing the homeless vet anti-war vote, for ex.

or that the "deplorables" (an insult that was specifically linked to identity politics and not military policy) were all really concerned with Hillary's pro-war votes? I mean wtf

how so? rural citizens sacrifice themselves to US military campaigns more than city dwellers. this is a fact. you guys believe in facts right?

yet the official Democratic position, as stated by their presidential candidate, is that these people are unreachable deplorables. maybe let's rethink that?

the left goes on and on about being unable to reach rural voters. here is a real issue where they can easily use it to both differ from Republicans and appeal to rural voters. but no. let's attack Adam for saying some things he never said. i am not saying people that live in the city have no problems ever. christ.

do republicans win military families bc they're more anti-war than democrats and military families are sensitive to the costs of war, or because they're normally more hawkish, have conservative values and religious etc than democrats and those resonate with those voters? like there's a policy prescription being made in this study - if hillary were more anti-war maybe she would've won more military votes and won the election. i think it's reasonable to ask if that has it exactly backwards about reality.

that was not an "official Democratic position", you are drawing a bunch of scattershot connections that are not necessarily related

xp

thx Mordy

^^^^^

Not that I want pro-war candidates, but being anti-war wouldn't have won Clinton a single rural vote, because being anti-war is DISRESPECTIN' OUR TROOPS.

rural US military families not generally anti-war, kinda a key thing to remember

playing to generalizations just seems like a losing stategy. going with that over and over again is dumb. are you arguing against appealing to rural veterans? because of what, because you have already decided how they think and believe and they won't vote for you anyways or for any good policies because of the boogeyman because they are scary unknowable monsters because all these fake fucking tired cliches you should be working AGAINST. we are fucking doomed.

I feel like the strategy of trying to win back groups of middle aged people who are now republicans (by shifting/moderating the dems' message) is futile.

this is why identity politics is shit. they are on the path to lose again.

afaict the biggest problem w/ identity politics is you can argue all you want that "it's ok for me to support my identity group but it's wrong for you to support yours" but ppl see it as hypocritical and there are ppl who we don't want identifying hard w/ the interests of their racial/gender groups.

appealing to "swing voters" in general is a losing strategy, the focus should be on broadening the electorate to encompass and empower groups whose interests are aligned with Democratic goals. that's it.

AB doesn't seem to actually read others' posts so not gonna bother w a point by point refutation

Clinton specifically said some were deplorables, some not, btw.

When I lived in San Diego my roommates were former marines, who stuck around to go to college afterwards. As it was a mid-term year, we talked quite a bit about politics. They didn't strike me as being particularly anti-war. And neither did the homeless veterans I sometimes met in the bus to the university hospital, btw.

Mordy, Shakey and dare i say it Fred seem closer to the mark than Adam regarding the nuances of American politics on this one imho. AB, there is a pretty big leap buried in your argument as i read it - even if non-urban dwellers do bear the bulk of the hardships brought by war, can we conclude from that they are politically more inclined to vote for anti-war candidates? the last many decades of US political history suggests otherwise. you could explain that any number of ways but just assuming that the heartland yearns for a candidate who will come out swinging against all war is really dubious, and is also "playing to generalizations."

in addition to all the reasons of emotional and ideological identification with the military that might lead some communities to identify with hawkish candidates (e.g.: the world is dangerous, and/or the world is full of dangerous people that don't look like me, we need tough protection, we are proud of making tough sacrifices, military service made me a better person) we should also consider the economics at various levels. campaigning on, say, slashing military budgets won't just be read as being "weak" against the dangerous world of terrorists and the ~teeming masses that want our american freedoms~ - it also might mean shuttering the one big employment opportunity around, whether that means going into the service, or steady work at a pork-barrel defense plant. there are a lot of reasons why the military and war are popular even if the deaths brought by individual wars are, obviously, not. it's worth treating that as a very complex problem, and not as a gordian knot that the democrats could easily solve if they only looked at it without past baggage or whatever.

America, where there are no poor people in our cities.

It's official. Here are some actual words from the second stanza of 'America the Beautiful':

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."

i believe its from the America Is Already Great theme song

appealing to "swing voters" in general is a losing strategy

not appealiing to them is a losing strategy. we know this because this lost the election.

don't give me "technically she won". after being condescended to all last year by Clintonites that they understand how government really works, it's pathetic.

i grew up in rural Georgia. i had a lot of anti war friends. there were plenty of standard rednecks too. but whenever a democrat says people like me don't exist or don't count, it's another vote they had they are losing. they are shooting themselves in the foot.

Not appealing to them is A losing strategy, but could be a winning strategy if coupled with something else.

xp

If only Hillary hadn't chosen 'Adam Bruneau Doesn't Exist' as her campaign slogan.

I still think we need a variant on a 50-state strategy to broaden the Democrats' base, but it won't (and can't) include those swing voters with whom Adam is so besotted. As the link Tombot has posted, and like so many postmortems, these people who swung from Obama to Trump ain't coming back. Besides, the Democratic Party is at this moment more liberal-leaning than in 2006.

I mean, there may be anti war Dems in rural Georgia, but I find it hard to believe a vote for Trump is a vote against war.

yup yup

the only Trump policy Trump voters liked was anti-immigration, the rest was was an incomprehensible mishmash of nonsense

Well sounds like you guys have this whole thing sorted out, should be smooth sailing from here

it's ridiculous to act like no-information voters have considered policy opinions. they don't. they have identity politics, and that's it.

xp

Trump was the only one who used anti-Iraq-war language iirc

not saying he was credible but I think you're mistaken if you assume people didn't notice

The direction this party needs to move is forward, upward. Fuck this party into space

Trump's anti-Iraq-war language and people's response to it is 100% worth looking at - it was genuinely ear-catching when he said things, more during the primaries, like "we've been at war in Iraq for ten years and spent a trillion dollars and we haven't won AN-Y-THING!" But then he would also talk about how we should "get the oil" and "knock the hell out of them" and so on, so it's not as simple as him appealing to an anti-war sensibility that was waiting for a candidate. The core of his emotional appeal was grievance against Washington, against Clinton, against immigrants, against Muslims, etc., and sifting an anti-war appeal out of that while doing election postmortems is going to lead to missing the forest for the trees IMHO.

anti war yet waterboard, torture, you name it

even if non-urban dwellers do bear the bulk of the hardships brought by war, can we conclude from that they are politically more inclined to vote for anti-war candidates?

this wasn't the point i was trying to make. sorry if i am confusing. the anti-war thing was mostly my personal bias. i think the Dems ignores the war as a phenomenon in itself, as something that has real costs. they further make this clear by not visiting those states and not even reconsidering the war stance.

this isn't something that just affects anti-war voters or veterans or families of veterans. if you reach out, the rest of us will see. also i don't think the electorate can be so easily and conveniently quantified and people are still stuck in the mode of mistaking the model for the real thing.

personally I find this stuff interesting only as trivia, I'd like to see them adopt a broad anti-interventionist policy principally because it's the right thing to do

are you arguing against appealing to rural veterans?

Adam, how many people do you think this applies to and do you think it's enough to swing any districts? In states that are competitive?

Oh hey look here's a story from last month, so you're completely off base anyway re: Democratic strategy

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dems-view-vets-as-strong-candidates-in-bid-to-retake-house/

Adam has a point: a candidate who voted for the Iraq War and is as supportive of Israel as Hillary Clinton would look suspicious. Stay home then! I don't understand thinking, "Hillary voted for Iraq, but Trump wants to bring back torture and bomb the shit out of ISIS, brb gonna vote for him."

the relationship that combat veterans have with war is really complicated, so again, assuming this imaginary huge bloc of war vets that don't vote Dem because Dems have been too hawkish, or not hawkish enough, or whatever, is just as dumb of a stereotype as any other you'd care to think of