What Happens After an Election Loss

I urge you to read Damon Linker’s essay at The Week on the ongoing Democratic meltdown. I agree with just about everything in it. Here’s a snippet:

For the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, legions of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton and hated her opponent attended protests at which they got to demonstrate publicly that they now hated Trump even more. That worked well as therapy and catharsis, but it did nothing to advance the Democrat Party’s electoral prospects.

Then Democrats spent much of the spring and summer fixated on Russian interference in the election, which conveniently allowed them to defer an honest reckoning with the misjudgments that had left Trump and Clinton close enough in the final weeks of the campaign that outside interference was able to make a meaningful difference to the outcome on Nov. 8.

Since then, efforts at a broader analysis have tended to emphasize racism as by far the most important factor in Republican victories — which ensures that Democrats won’t even try to win over voters from the other party, who are presumed to reside on the other side of a moral chasm that is both impossible and undesirable to bridge. It also ensures that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since people usually avoid voting for a party when its members regularly hurl insults at them.

And that brings us to where we are today, with large numbers of elite Democrats preferring to rant impotently on Twitter about the president and the GOP agenda instead of doing the hard and at times painful work of overcoming that impotence at the ballot box.

As I’ve pointed out every so often over the period of the last 15 years here at The Glittering Eye this is what political parties do after particularly bitter defeats. They struggle for power within the party. There is presently a struggle going on between members of the erstwhile DLC and the progressive wing of the party. The latter is absolutely, positively convinced that appealing more strongly to the 10% of the country that they represent is a sure path to victory.

The reality of politics in the U. S. today is that where each party is strong it is very strong and where it’s weak it’s virtually powerless. Consolidating the California and New York vote will do practically nothing to help the Democrats any more than gaining a bigger Texas vote will help Republicans.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue the futile task of pointing out that there is no substitute for good governance. Illinois’s terrible, awful, corrupt Democratic Party casts the entire party into disrepute. Its feckless supine Republican Party doesn’t even make a pretext of challenging it. For reasons that elude me this is seen as a formula for success.