Yves here. It’s easy to get whiplash trying to keep one’s eye on the many fallout fronts after Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday. One evolving spectacle is the much-needed Democratic party recriminations and hopefully the purging of the too many who hitched their fates to elites and failed even to credibly pretend that they cared about ordinary people. Indeed, as I have had some members of the PMC tell me before the election, they were repelled by the mainstream Democrat hostility towards whole swathes of Americans and the offensive insistence that they were superior and therefore solely entitled to rule.
If the party is to sufficiently reform itself, it needs to expel its architects of failure, starting with the DNC. Naturally, the guilty are instead loudly trying to shift blame. The latest, revealing spectacle comes in Common Dreams. It features the head of the DNC getting ugly over Sanders’ correct and long-standing critique that the party has abandoned its roots (he of all people should know, given how badly he was treated).
In an interesting bit of synchronicity, the Hill has just published a story that indicates that many party operatives understand what a disaster the election was and that a big course correction is necessary. But will enough of the old guard close ranks to keep them largely on their current bad course? The Hill’s Trump win leaves Democrats talking about how to start over suggests that at least some insiders have reached the 12-step bottom-hitting phase:
Democrats say they need a fresh start after President-elect Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Harris, which saw him sweep the swing states, narrow Democratic margins in various blue states and win over key parts of the electorate….
“We have to burn the house down and begin anew,” said one prominent Democratic strategist who has worked on recent presidential campaigns.
“We had a warning in 2016 that this wasn’t working, we had another chance in 2020 to realize Trump wasn’t going away and was only growing his base, and we ignored it and pretended this was a midterm election.”
As Democrats perform the autopsy of Harris’s campaign and piecing together what went wrong, they are quickly concluding that their party apparatus and strategies are dated or nonfunctional….
Democrats in recent years have lost their way, the strategist added, appealing to “New York Times elites” while snubbing working-class voters who traditionally supported Democrats.
Contrast this perspective with the DNC blather below, which repeats blatantly bogus defenses, like Biden was the best labor president evah when most unions members thought otherwise.
Nevertheless, despite the breath of fresh air from the Hill account, at least in my media ganders, I see way too much desperate clutching at the story lines that led to the Democrat loss (and divert attention from voter concerns about their standard of living and immigration) such as Trump is a fascist and his voters are misogynists.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
After U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders offered his perspective on why Vice President Kamala Harris lost both the popular vote and Electoral College to President-elect Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election—repeating his consistent warning that the Democratic Party must center economic justice—top official Jaime Harrison signaled once again that the party is unlikely to hear Sanders’ call.
Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a former lobbyist for clients including Bank of Americaand BP, called Sanders’ statement “straight up BS” and touted pro-worker policies embraced by the Biden-Harris administration, suggesting that the party has sufficiently worked for economic justice—and appearing to ignore all evidence that working-class voters gravitated toward Trump and the Republican Party.
“[President Joe] Biden was the most-pro worker president of my lifetime—saved union pensions, created millions of good-paying jobs, and even marched in a picket line,” said Harrison.
This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial… https://t.co/6s4iR5Xtdq
— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) November 7, 2024
Biden has been praised by progressives and labor unions for establishing pro-worker rules on overtime pay and noncompete agreements, urging Amazon workers in Alabama to unionize, presiding over a National Labor Relations Board that investigated numerous unfair labor practices by large corporations and sided with workers, and becoming the first U.S. president to walk on a picket line with striking workers.
He also worked closely with Sanders on one of his signature pieces of legislation, the Build Back Better Act, which would have invested in expanded child tax credits, public education, and free community college, among other provisions—but the bill was torpedoed by right-wing U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), then a Democrat, and the Republican Party.
In his statement on Thursday, Sanders said “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
He asked whether the “well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” would “learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?”
“Probably not,” he added.
While Harris included in her platform plans to end price-gouging in the food industry, expand the child tax credit, and extend Medicare coverage to home healthcare, dental, and vision care, she alarmed progressive advocates by proposinga smaller capital gains tax for wealthy Americans.
As Common Dreamsreported on Thursday, Biden advisers have also posited this week that Harris muddied her early message that Trump was a “stooge of corporate interests” by elevating billionaire businessman Mark Cuban as one of her top surrogates.
Whether Democratic leaders including Harrison will listen to those concerns from Biden’s inner circle remains to be seen, but he expressed hostility when the message came from Sanders.
“There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one,” said Harrison.
Journalist Mitchell Northam noted that the Democratic Party has studiously ignored and expressed hostility toward Sanders’ call for centering economic justice and cutting ties with Wall Street since the 2016 election, when the senator ran for president as a Democrat.
Bernie had a pulse on where all of this was heading back in 2015/16. He had a coalition. He was speaking to voters. And the Democratic party shoved him out of the way.
Also, as chair of the DNC, this result has to land on Jaime Harrison’s shoulders too. Just take your L, man. https://t.co/ZMv4hdnuZt
— Mitchell Northam (@primetimeMitch) November 7, 2024
Sanders’ message this week got an unlikely boost from conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2020 dismissed the veteran, consistently popular senator as “useless” and “marginal.”
“I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center,” wrote Brooks. “But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch applauded Brooks’ “striking moment of self-awareness.”
Progressive Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid expressed hope that Democratic leaders such as Harrison will do the same.
“Typically, after a major electoral defeat,” he said, “party leaders step aside to create opportunities for fresh perspectives and voices that haven’t yet had a chance to lead.”