Deciding to Win: A Common Sense Renewal of the Democratic Party
decidingtowin.org
decidingtowin.org
The very first words in the very first sentence illustrate the problem. Since ~2016, the Democratic party has (mostly) defined itself as anti-Trump party, with some gender/identity issues mixed in.
Trump firmly believes there is no such thing as bad press. Giving him endless attention is playing into his hand. Choosing to play his game.
This piece makes some good points on how the Democratic party should shift policy to start talking about things voters actually care about, but first they need to tone down the anti-Trump rhetoric and stop feeding his hype machine.
The republicans tried that for a while before trump and had little success.
The Democrats had big successes earlier this month by doing exactly the opposite: pandering to the left. That's anathema to the Clinton-era Democrats who created this proposal, but at this point it may be the best hope they have. They just demonstrated that they do have the ability to win, and they offer a much more exciting platform than moderate center-right.
I myself am more ideologically in line with the authors of this site than with the left. If the Democratic party does shift that direction there will be a lot of conflict. But that conflict gets me at least some of what I want, while continuing to lose to a highly-energized far right leaves me unequivocally worse off.
It is more that if somebody says "X is common sense" it is not really a statement about X but rather a statement that "(not X) is not common sense".
If you look at the names endorsing that document the first one is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville
who was associated with Clinton's winning 1992 campaign and the losing campaigns of Kerry in 2004 and the other Clinton in 2008 and other people to the right of the Democratic party. It's true that this contingent can point to a few presidential wins but both Clinton and Obama were accompanied with a long-term erosion of the Democratic presence in congress and especially in state houses -- a time when Democrats have been winning at fundraising and losing at everything else.
Jurgen Habermas points out that a viable political system has to have public participation but also expert guidance on many issues. For instance, AI, advanced manufacturing, and climate change all require more than "common sense" to get on top of.
It would be good for the Democratic party to agree that cis lives matter, stop using words like "LatinX", etc. That document is not saying though that the Democrats should make a break with long-term trends that have eroded people's trust in institutions.
The "expert guidance" thing is an interesting point, our american system seems to make the existence of this dependent on the whims of the executive who is elected for completely unrelated issues.
I suspect that if you presented a simple poll question: "should donald trump have (more?) expert guidance available", the vast majority of people would say yes.
Of course, donald trump is famously not someone who would ever try to get access to or listen to expert guidance and everyone voting for him knew this and he was still elected.
There are so many failings of the Democratic party leadership, but I'd put near the top the failure to message and to let the opposition define the language and terms of concern.
My hopes are tempered that they can figure things out, and more importantly, deliver the goods. The good old "both sides are the same" only holds true in the fact that party leadership is beholden to the economic elites.