Dems: Can the Compromise and Contrition and be Bold Leftists
The purportedly realistic and professional opinion, that Dems must moderate their flaming liberalism, is a lie designed to make us lose.
By
David Gottfried
During this campaign season, we have heard a perennial message from Political “experts” (windbags) and “realists” ( cynical conservatives who try to asphyxiate aspirations for better times).
The weary, tiresome message: Democrats need to be more moderate or else all good and responsible people will consign them to electoral oblivion.
Yesterday, The New York Times published an article, from Ross Douthat, entitled “It’s Obvious Why Harris Lost in 2024. But Can Democrats Accept It?” Ross Douthat was hired by the Times, despite his stodgy conservative views, because he was, allegedly, a deep-thinking and profound thinker who would, supposedly, give the Times more gravitas.
However, Douthat’s aforementioned article was big on shallow-thinking, and it had all the philosophical depth of a public relations pro who will tell his client that she needs a new hairstyle.
What masquerades as Hard Nosed, Realistic Explanations for Liberal Losses are Deft and Duplicitous Denials of Unrealized Liberal Democratic Strength
Essentially, Douthat said that Kamala Harris, and most Democrats, have lost and will continue to lose because they supposedly serve up the same far left political hash that they’ve always offered and that the voters, heaving with indigestion, want a different type of chow. Douthat said that the Democrats, to be successful, simply had to shed their liberal ideas, which he summarized as a lot of malarky, and “reposition” themselves as a whole lot more conservative.
Douthat’s advice was tantamount to contending that FDR, on the eve of the 1940 election, should have said nice things about Hitler and should have shut up about freedom and Democracy because the polls showed that most Americans wanted to avoid another war no matter what the cost. Likewise, Douthat is alleging that Winston Churchill should have yielded to the reigning, pro-Hitlerite politics of his fellow conservatives and aristocrats who saw Hitler in a positive light: They saw Hitler as the consummate anti-Bolshevik and they did not want their half-starved masses raising Marxist Leninist banners and barricades in the Proletarian precincts of London, Manchester and Liverpool.
Douthat was supposed to be a good addition to the Times because his hard-assed conservative rants would be tempered with philosophical insights. However, he is a real loser as a philosopher as his study of the tomes of Western wisdom is bereft of the greatest treasure the West has to offer: A love of independent thought, individuality, and a steadfast allegiance to the true, the good and the beautiful even if one’s loyalty to the nobler angels of our nature results in our banishment from the company of “respectable” society.
Also, Douthat’s “analysis” (collection of snide Archie Bunker witticisms, dressed up with 10-dollar words to create the illusion of erudition) seems downright certain that Dems are losing because they adhere to unpopular left-wing positions.
However, a closer analysis demonstrates that Republican positions are largely much more unpopular than Democratic positions. For example, from 1980 until 1992 (And before and after that time frame as well) polls showed that most Americans were in favor of increasing social security checks, making Medicare more widely available, and increasing unemployment insurance; nevertheless, during this time, conservatives had a clear electoral lock on the country as those were the 12 years when America was under the thumb of Reagan and Bush.
The conservatives won the nation not because they were in sync with the nation on the issues; rather they were in sync with the nation on the most combustible issue: RACE.
During this period, most white people who had enlightened views on economic issues made a hard right turn whenever race came on the radar screen. Indeed, although Dukakis had a double-digit lead over Bush in the Summer of 1988, he lost 40 out of 50 states in November. Why ? The Willie Horton ad which showed images of allegedly menacing black men while the narrator alleged that Dukakis let a black prisoner see his folks and that while on his prison furlough he raped and killed a white woman.
Recent political History Proves that “Repositioning” or Renouncing one’s liberal views will not give one the votes of conservatives. Similarly, conservatives will fall flat on their asses when they pretend to be somewhat liberal.
A) In 1936, The Republican Presidential nominee, Alf Landon, toned down Republican reactionary nonsense to the effect that government intervention in the economy, to help those afflicted by the great depression, would be cowardly socialism which should be avoided. Given the severe deprivations of the time, the GOP thought it might be wise to pretend that they were a little bit like Roosevelt. They thought their strategy was paying off when “The American Literary Digest” rose to the rooftops to announce that it had a new, “scientific” tool, in common parlance, a poll, which revealed that Alf Landon would win in November. In fact, Franklyn Roosevelt won in a landslide, winning every state in the nation save Maine and Vermont.
When Landon pretended that he was not as conservative as Louis the Fourteenth, and might actually entertain liberal views, voters decided that they would vote for the man who supported FDR all along, FDR.
B) When Truman ran for President in 1948, the press had been so successful in disseminating a spirit of dejection and defeat among Democrats that even some of the delegates at the Democratic convention carried signs ridiculing Harry Truman, such as “I’m just mild about Harry” and “To err is Truman.”
The media elites were so certain that Truman would lose that at least one paper published a headline announcing that Truman’s GOP opponent had won. Although most Americans today have fond thoughts of Roosevelt and Truman and their progressive programs to fight for working people, at the time, the overwhelming majority of the owners of newspapers and other media outlets were adamantly, stubbornly Republican. To these Neanderthal gluttons of privilege, social security was a socialist scandal, and they did everything they could to return America to the control of the high-hatted Tzars of Wall Street and their reign of Republican recalcitrance and unremitting cruelty to the poor.
Of course, many media elites argued that Truman should distance himself from FDR’s liberalism and inch back toward the center and the right.
Truman was too smart to listen to the talking heads of his day. He realized that in all four of FDR’s successful runs for the presidency, FDR boomed with a message of unmitigated, solid, full-throated leftist populism. Truman realized that if he muffled Rooseveltian liberalism, Democratic voters would not come out and vote. Therefore, Truman took to the stump and let it rip.
Truman called rich republicans “blood suckers” and “gluttons of privilege.” With thoughts of breadlines and evictions still searing in their memories, Truman beat the Republicans with a clear and convincing margin.
C) In 1980, when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Presidential nomination, he appeared, at first, to be poised to demolish Carter as large sections of the Democratic Party venerated the Kennedy family name. Kennedy’s advisors said that he had one problem: He might be seen as too liberal.
Kennedy therefore muted his liberalism. He became unbearably bland. His implicit renunciation of his once stirring liberal stance suggested cowardice or contrition for the adamantine liberalism of his storied past.
The voters despised the new, more conservative Kennedy, and he bombed in the early primaries. However, when he competed in the New York primary, the state that had been represented in the Senate by Bobby Kennedy, everybody remembered Bobby, liberalism swept over us like an irresistible force, and the NY Times reported, on the Saturday immediately before the NY primary, that Kennedy had returned to a platform of “undiluted liberalism.” Kennedy trounced Carter 59 percent to 41 percent, and every primary after New York was the site of a glorious Kennedy victory.
Finally, Democrats should speak loudly, fiercely and honestly about and against Republicans or Democrats will appear to be running away from the Rancid Reality of our Sorry Time.
We Democrats realize that today’s republicans are not mere country club conservatives. They are not our Father’s republicans. They are more like Prussian Junkers dreaming of Valhalla and the Teutonic Warrior G-ds of Pagan, Germanic history. Trump and his wooden, wind up soldiers lie, they are proud to lie, and they will grab all the power they can grab even if the vote doesn’t go their way.
Therefore, if Democrats don’t speak decisively, and derisively, we will appear to be afraid to speak the truth. We have called him out for being a fascist. There is no turning back. Now we must wreck and smash his edifice of tyranny until his bombastic ballroom is blitzed into thousands of crystal slivers that pierce the skin of hundreds of MAGA cretins writhing on the White House grounds.