Democratic (Party) Direction

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

idk what "anti-war" even means in a practical sense. does that mean no new wars? does that mean immediately pulling out of every country where there are US troops? I have a hard time believing that would help anything more than our own consciences. unless you really think that any military involvement by the US in a foreign country is always worse than non-involvement, and I don't know if that would be borne out in reality if we pursued that stance.

I mean, this is one of the phrases I truly hate but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube in a lot of these places.

Well, for one it seems Saudi Arabia would invade Qatar in a heartbeat.

I guess if there's anything you could find that almost all veterans, combat or just plain vanilla "they also serve who only stand and wait" types, would agree on, it's that isolationism is not a respectable or honest position

(I am allowed to stereotype my own group)

personally I would settle for no more dumb and bad new wars sold on phony premises

yes a lot of vets would agree with this too but hey man my buddy gave all in that war you think is dumb and bad are you saying he was dumb and bad?

no

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

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, July 6, 2017 9:08 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo go to hell adam

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.

― ﴿→ ☺ (Doctor Casino), Thursday, July 6, 2017 12:41 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fact that trump was able to trash the iraq war and still win the GOP primary suggests to me that there is some room for the democrats to move to the left on foreign policy. not to mention it's also just good policy

I missed that. Adam, go fuck yourself. Bet you liked Mark Penn's column today too. It never occurs to guys like him that "working class' includes women, blacks, gays, and the transgender. In an economy where no one who isn't working for Goldman Sachs can afford to live in Chicago or New York, we're all working class, baby.

i think re the iraq war + trump it was more like it was universally acknowledged as a failure in this particular instance and so trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war. he criticized it on grounds of incompetence (particularly in its failure to earn money for the US), not on ethical or moral grounds.

xp to Simon - I was just trying to illustrate the problems of communicating anti-war positions to vets
I am fortunate enough to not know anyone who went over and got hurt or worse

remember the democrats? lol. miss u, bb!

"fuck identity politics" is not a tenable position. "convincingly and simply draw connections between economic, social, and environmental justice" is.

yeah agreed w/ Mordy - plus trump's big strongman pitch was that he was better at things, whatever the things are. so asserting that iraq was fought dumbly/incompetently was just another version of how he built a great company and is great at running stuff, these bozos in office are bad at everything! helped that there is a lively fiction on the right that iraq somehow only turned bad after obama took office (and clinton became SOS) - they didn't let the surge work, we were just about to win, etc. this is obviously nonsense but the chronology of a long war is a VERY easy thing for people to get fuzzy in their minds, so if you were already with trump it'd be easy to just adopt this garbled narrative along with the strongman smarts, and none of it requires you to be (or think of yourself as) against war or even against this particular war.

trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war.

otm

plus he's not a chick

some good stuff in here for Democrats to think about

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n14/william-davies/reasons-for-corbyn

Amid all the noise, slogans and smears of the campaign, it seems that Labour’s simple, eye-catching policies (free university tuition, more bank holidays, free school meals for all, more NHS funding, no tax rises for 95 per cent of earners) had the ability to cut through. These policies were crafted to produce a left-populist platform, with the idea in mind that policies can influence voters, but only if they are sufficiently straightforward to be able to hold their shape as they travel around an increasingly complex, chaotic public sphere. New Labour had two sets of experts: one to run its technocratic policy-making machine, the other to handle the media, which it believed could be tamed. But once editorial bottlenecks no longer determine the flow of news, and neurotic control of image is no longer realistic, policies must be designed to spread of their own accord, like internet memes. Trump’s ‘Build a wall!’ did this. Less propitiously, once the phrase ‘dementia tax’ had attached itself to the Tory campaign, it couldn’t be dislodged.

always thought that the absurd abundance of right wing echo chamber outlets and "think" tanks was just a bald-faced grift operation designed to take money from swiss cheese-brained trust fund racists, but shit maybe Bartlett has a point.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/bruce-bartlett/what-progressives-could-learn-from-conservatives/10154956380912832/