As more candidates declare for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, keep an eye out for those who are positioning themselves as "across- the- aisle problem solvers." These are the candidates who (to give them every benefit of the doubt) know better, but are playing to a part of the electorate that may not be there anymore. In part, they're also assuming (again, giving them every benefit of the doubt) that there are some people who voted for demagogue dolt Donald "Rump" Trump who can be persuaded to vote for a "moderate" Democrat, i.e., them.
Of course, this completely ignores the reality of the past quarter century, both in terms of the nature of the Republican Party and the nature of the people who support that party. Paul Waldman puts his finger on the former:
Here’s the problem for a Democratic president: Today’s Republican Party isn’t just committed to a particular set of policy preferences, it’s also committed to a style of politics in which 1) any compromise with Democrats on a controversial issue is an unconscionable betrayal, and 2) literally any tactics, no matter how morally reprehensible, are justified in the pursuit of their goals. [snip]
...[I]f you don’t have a plan for overcoming Republican opposition that takes that opposition as a given — not as something you can make disappear, but as something you must find a way to defeat or circumvent — you don’t have a plan for governing. And that’s something any Democrat who wants to be president ought to have.No one -- No. One. -- at any level in the Republican Party is going to cooperate with a Democratic President. It's a disingenuous fantasy for any serious Democratic candidate to tell people that somehow they can overcome 40- plus years of Republicans and their media painting the "Democrat" Party as the party of baby- killers, communists, moral degenerates, betrayers of the white race, etc. (Doubters should spend time revisiting the recent "D-bag" CPAC conference lunacy and Rump's 2- hour, cheerfully- received mental breakdown there -- or simply talk to Barack Obama.)
This fantasy also ignores the particular psychological phenomena exhibited by Rump- or Rump- curious voters, who would never be attracted to a liberal/ progressive candidate. What James Wolcott wrote last September is as true today as it was in 2016, or will be in 2020:
... [T]he hate, bigotry, and cackling cruelty of the circus maximus that is Trump’s first term carries too loud a primal yowl to be ascribed to stagnant wages and factory closings. Something far more septic and serrated is going on. Deep data mining, as opposed to anecdotal fishing at the diner, has unearthed a more plausible driver for the Trump victory: not “economic anxiety” but racial animosity. A roundup of post-election studies and surveys by German Lopez at Vox cited a paper by a trio of social scientists that found “that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.” The headline for a long, exhaustively detailed article in The Nation by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel slammed home the point with a two-by-four: “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.”Everyone reading this doubtless has or had relatives who are/ were Republicans. A generation ago, our family had one whole branch consisting of Goldwater Republicans. We loved them and didn't consider them our enemies, nor did they. That generation's gone, and their children are now Democrats. What the Republican Party is now has been honed down over recent decades into a cult of racial resentment and entitlement, mixed with bizarre "deep state" theories, and a complete denial of what it means to be an American and how democracy and the rule of law are supposed to function in this country. As has been said, these cultists are not worth the time or energy to chase; they checked out of the real world a long time ago. As far as their party "leadership," they're brimming with bad faith and mendacity; they seek power only to maintain power regardless of the damage done to our country in the process.
I’d like to toss something else into the mix when it comes to diagnosing what’s eating at the craw of the Typical Trump Voter: a raging hatred of liberals. Liberals, especially the “liberal media,” have become the all-purpose blame bucket for everything, and “owning the libs” the primary directive of the Steve Bannon brigade. It reveals its snarling face at the Trump rallies that the cable networks insist on covering, putting their reporters in jeopardy as Trump lashes up a hate storm over “fake news” and incites his supporters to get their freak on against the liberal media, which some of them do with gusto: hectoring, spitting, bellowing f-words from their hippo mouths, and flipping the middle finger, a terrible way for Grandpa and Grandma to behave. With each Trump rally drawing a larger faction of conspiracy nuts, the threat of violence gains velocity, as reporters from some of the very outlets paying such nuanced attention to Typical Trump Voters—The New York Times, CNN, and so on—are reviled as enemies of the people. Time to drop a cloth over this parrot cage. I think we’ve heard more than enough verbal static from the Trump base. There’s nothing more to learn from them, and it’s time the doting stopped.
If a Democratic candidate can't cope with this reality, as Waldman says, they don't have a plan for governing (one test of this is if said candidate opposes ditching the Senate filibuster). Democratic voters should judge accordingly.
