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From a raving left-wing rag to your ears
We received a message from the future this week, directed to the outraged liberals of the so-called anti-Trump resistance. It was delivered by an unlikely intermediary, Greg Gianforte, the Republican who won a special election on Thursday and will soon take his seat in Congress as Montana’s lone representative.
It’s almost hilarious — in the vein of that long-running “Peanuts” gag about Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football — that anyone managed to convince themselves that purportedly decking a representative of the “liberal media” would damage Gianforte. It probably didn’t make much difference; about 70 percent of the votes had already been cast before the Jacobs incident. But I think it’s safe to say that likely Republican voters in Montana, and damn near everywhere else, can be divided into two groups: those who didn’t much care or were inclined to look the other way, and those who were absolutely thrilled.
Gianforte’s decisive victory over Democrat Rob Quist on Thursday has provoked a fresh round of soul-searching from the same people who made too damn much of the Montana election in the first place. We have been told that Democrats must field stronger candidates and commit more resources, that Bernie Sanders does not possess some magic elixir that attracts disgruntled white people and that Donald Trump remains popular in places where people really like him. If that’s not quite enough Captain Obvious, Washington Post columnist Greg Hohmann devoted an impressive amount of research and reporting to the Montana aftermath before arriving at the diagnosis that there is “a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.” You don’t say!
If you don’t want to believe me now, I get it. But take a good hard look at Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte, and go through all the excuses you have made to yourself about how and why that happened, and we’ll talk.
As for the Senate — well, Democratic campaign strategists will mumble and look away if you bring that up, because the Senate majority is completely out of reach. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election next year, 25 are currently held by Democrats — and 10 of those are in states carried by Donald Trump last year. It’s far more likely that Republicans will gain seats in the Senate, perhaps by knocking off Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, than lose any at all.
Democrats have been virtually wiped out at the state and local level in non-coastal, non-metropolitan areas of the country: They had full control of 27 state legislatures in 2010, and partial control in five more; today they control 14 (with three splits). There was plenty of bad faith and unfair recrimination on both sides of the Bernie-Hillary split of 2016, which there’s no need to rehearse here. But the bitterness has lingered not just because each side blames the other for the election of Donald Trump (and they both could be right) but because it represents a profound underlying identity crisis that ultimately has little to do with Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
I have previously argued that the Democratic Party’s civil war was unavoidable and has been a long time coming. Like most people, I assumed it would play out under President Hillary Clinton, not with the party reeling in defeat and at a historic low ebb. In the face of a national emergency, maybe Democrats will find some medium-term way to bridge the gulf between pro-business liberal coalition politics and a social-democratic vision of major structural reform and economic justice. Whoever the hell they nominate for president in 2020 will have to pretend to do that, at any rate.
Right now the Democratic Party has no clear sense of mission and no coherent national message, except that it is not the party of Donald Trump. What we learned in Montana this week — and will likely learn in Georgia, and learn again in the 2018 midterms — is that that’s not enough.
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/27/wak...ve-no-democratic-majority-and-no-impeachment/
We received a message from the future this week, directed to the outraged liberals of the so-called anti-Trump resistance. It was delivered by an unlikely intermediary, Greg Gianforte, the Republican who won a special election on Thursday and will soon take his seat in Congress as Montana’s lone representative.
It’s almost hilarious — in the vein of that long-running “Peanuts” gag about Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football — that anyone managed to convince themselves that purportedly decking a representative of the “liberal media” would damage Gianforte. It probably didn’t make much difference; about 70 percent of the votes had already been cast before the Jacobs incident. But I think it’s safe to say that likely Republican voters in Montana, and damn near everywhere else, can be divided into two groups: those who didn’t much care or were inclined to look the other way, and those who were absolutely thrilled.
Gianforte’s decisive victory over Democrat Rob Quist on Thursday has provoked a fresh round of soul-searching from the same people who made too damn much of the Montana election in the first place. We have been told that Democrats must field stronger candidates and commit more resources, that Bernie Sanders does not possess some magic elixir that attracts disgruntled white people and that Donald Trump remains popular in places where people really like him. If that’s not quite enough Captain Obvious, Washington Post columnist Greg Hohmann devoted an impressive amount of research and reporting to the Montana aftermath before arriving at the diagnosis that there is “a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.” You don’t say!
If you don’t want to believe me now, I get it. But take a good hard look at Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte, and go through all the excuses you have made to yourself about how and why that happened, and we’ll talk.
As for the Senate — well, Democratic campaign strategists will mumble and look away if you bring that up, because the Senate majority is completely out of reach. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election next year, 25 are currently held by Democrats — and 10 of those are in states carried by Donald Trump last year. It’s far more likely that Republicans will gain seats in the Senate, perhaps by knocking off Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, than lose any at all.
Democrats have been virtually wiped out at the state and local level in non-coastal, non-metropolitan areas of the country: They had full control of 27 state legislatures in 2010, and partial control in five more; today they control 14 (with three splits). There was plenty of bad faith and unfair recrimination on both sides of the Bernie-Hillary split of 2016, which there’s no need to rehearse here. But the bitterness has lingered not just because each side blames the other for the election of Donald Trump (and they both could be right) but because it represents a profound underlying identity crisis that ultimately has little to do with Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
I have previously argued that the Democratic Party’s civil war was unavoidable and has been a long time coming. Like most people, I assumed it would play out under President Hillary Clinton, not with the party reeling in defeat and at a historic low ebb. In the face of a national emergency, maybe Democrats will find some medium-term way to bridge the gulf between pro-business liberal coalition politics and a social-democratic vision of major structural reform and economic justice. Whoever the hell they nominate for president in 2020 will have to pretend to do that, at any rate.
Right now the Democratic Party has no clear sense of mission and no coherent national message, except that it is not the party of Donald Trump. What we learned in Montana this week — and will likely learn in Georgia, and learn again in the 2018 midterms — is that that’s not enough.
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/27/wak...ve-no-democratic-majority-and-no-impeachment/
