Maybe it’s because they don’t want to
it is hard to watch the aging leadership of the Democratic Party urge more of the same as a solution to the 2024 loss. Most recently, it was Barack Obama who called on the party to continue along the road that has led it into the wilderness. He urged an increasing focus on the idea of pluralism. If the 2024 results teach us anything, it is that the approach, from Clinton on, to the Balkanization of the electorate is a major loser at the national level.
What is astounding is that many in the party continue to take these people seriously – to allow them to suck all the oxygen out of the room and keep a younger generation, with new ideas, off the stage. The brutal fact is that, despite their last-minute attempts, the Clintons, Obamas, Kennedys, and their galaxy of celebrities failed to move the needle – in fact, there is a good argument, that they pushed it in the wrong direction.
It is clear that the strategy of dividing the country into various fractions by race, by sex, by income, by education level, and by anything and everything else and then attempting to weld them together into a coalition is a kamikaze raid on a vacant lot.
The fundamental blindness within the leadership of the Democratic Party comes from the fact that they’ve completely lost touch with ordinary Americans – their pain points, their rage, and their disappointment at being scammed by the so-called party of the working class. A party, whose leadership is not willing to admit, let alone understand why, they are seen as disconnected globalists who have more interest in international relations than what the average American family is going through.
I recently watched one of the talking heads on MSNBC gush effusively about the oratorical prowess of Obama. She layered complement upon complement in what seemed an effort to avoid the obvious – that dog didn’t hunt. Both Clintons receive the same kind of adoration. They are held up as thought leaders for the party. They, and the talking heads, may be in love with what they are saying, but the voters have increasingly decided that they are just talking trash.
It doesn’t get any better if you move down the pecking order to the sub-tribe leadership. That same strategy of dividing the electorate into categories is evident every time you hear one talk about African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Gay Americans, or any of the expanding list of sub-identities. These earnest warriors of the small rooms are not willing to consider that, by fighting for their sub-tribe, they are weakening the bonds across tribal boundaries and communicating a sense of priority and entitlement of their tribe over the others. By relegating the identity of being an American to second status, they are widening distances among groups.
When pressed, these faction leaders will admit that their sub- tribes are not homogeneous. Much like the union leadership which discovered that, even though they uniformly supported Democrats, their members were walking a different path, these leaders don’t represent their tribal members, but their own proclivities. As the 2024 election demonstrated, many of their so-called followers are walking a different path.
What the leadership of the Democratic Party is not willing to consider is that their strategy, since Clinton, of attempting to weld together a coalition from disparate factions is no longer working. In my mind, that’s single failure lies at the foundation of the loss of 2024.
The contrast between the Harris campaign and the opposition could not be starker. The Republicans realized that there was a large, rapidly growing, and organically evolving coalition that crossed all the boundaries and distinctions that the Democrats were so intent on recognizing. I have called it the coalition of the screwed. They are the 60% plus, and growing, percentage of the American population which has been ground down by a system increasingly owned by the wealthy and politically powerful. They are the Americans who have little left after decades of stagnant wages and rising prices – who are living so close to the edge that a bit of inflation threatens their future. They are the victims of a raptor capitalism that has accelerated the widening income and wealth inequality that has almost destroyed the middle class and drained the working class dry. They have been reduced to the level of prey, and no longer find the platitudes and exhortations of silk stocking, smoked salmon liberals edifying.
And now we come to the reason why the leadership of the Democratic Party has no interest in recognizing the basis for their failure. They are part of that wealthy and politically powerful class. They are the well-heeled, carefully groomed, members of the uber-class which has systematically oppressed the working class – mortgaging their futures and those of their children, draining their bank accounts in return for hollow promises, killing the American Dream for pieces of silver. The legacy of this leadership will be, “we got ours, sorry that you didn’t get yours, but that’s life!”
© Earl Smith