By Krystal Ball
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we
offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any
wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces.
The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the
towns are decimated and everywhere you look depression, despair, fear. In the
face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that
he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well,
those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a
fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that
these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final
insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug
overdoses about their white privilege. Can you blame them for calling bullshit?
All Trump could offer was white nationalism as protection against competing
with black and brown people. It wasn’t a very compelling case, but it was
vastly superior to a candidate who enthusiastically backed NAFTA, seems most at
ease in a room of Goldman Sachs bankers and was almost certain to do nothing
for these towns other than maybe setting up a local chapter of Rednecks Who
Code. We bet that Trump’s manifest awfulness would be enough to let us eke out
a win. We were dead wrong. Here’s my version of the Democratic Party autopsy
because, make no mistake, the old ways of the Democratic party must die.
It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming. Last
year, in my new home state of Kentucky, Democrats were high on their chances of
holding onto the governorship. Our candidate was thoughtful, reasoned,
disciplined. Theirs was a brash ideological businessman. We were up in the
public polls and both campaign’s internal polls by 5 points on election day. We
ended up losing by 10. The party wrote this off as an isolated event. It
wasn’t. Eight years ago, on a promise of sweeping change and optimism, we elected
Barack Obama, took back the House, gained a supermajority in the Senate. We
have been riding the high of this wave ever since as Republicans took back the
House (2010), took back the Senate (2014) and absolutely decimated Democrats in
governor’s mansions and state legislatures across the country. 24 states are
fully controlled by Republicans at the House, Senate and gubernatorial levels.
Amid the carnage last night, Kentucky’s state house, which was the last
legislative body in a state won by Romney still holding for the Dems, was
unceremoniously handed over to Republicans in a rout. But we didn’t seem to
care much about these losses in the vast middle and South and Midwest of the
country, so long as we kept our lock on the presidency. The arrogance of thinking
that somehow we could ignore most of the country and still hold a claim on the
nation’s highest office is breathtaking. Demographics are not destiny.
Candidates do matter. And it is still the economy, stupid.
Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings were obvious from the
beginning to anyone who bothered to open their eyes. I wasn’t the only one who
saw before she ever entered the race that a card-carrying member of the global
elite who helped usher in this era of record-breaking inequality was hardly the
best fit for the moment. It’s hard not to feel let down by people like Vice
President Biden and Senator Warren who clearly saw the problems with Hillary
but didn’t step up for their nation when they were called. Bernie did his level
best but couldn’t compete against a party terrified of the modest radicalism
that made him so appealing. I do believe that a different candidate would have
led to a different outcome. But Hillary’s coronation is also proof that the
problems in the Democratic Party run much deeper than just one candidate.
There’s a reason why nearly the entire party rose up to stomp out the promise
of Bernie Sanders candidacy.
The slow drift in the Democratic Party was long in the
making. It’s been many years since the Democratic Party decided to throw their
lot in with the shiny world of corporate professionals, Wall Street financiers,
and Silicon Valley gurus. We accepted the decline of unions as inevitable (it
wasn’t), didn’t bother even trying to come up with an alternative source of
worker power and embraced the new politics of money even as we talked out the
other side of our mouths about oh how terrible all this flood of cash in
politics is. If you just send in one more donation we’ll be able to get the
money out! There was an incredibly revealing moment at the DNC. In an effort to
rev up the crowd one of the speakers called out: “Who in this room works with
their hands?” Silence. It was a lot more than one candidate who led us to this
place.
I don’t want to downplay the role of racism and sexism in
all of this, ugly diseases that erupt and fester in times of fear. There is no
doubt that Donald Trump has surfaced an ugliness and tribalism that denies our
common humanity. The idea once argued that we live in a post-racial America is
clearly laughable. But in spite of all of this, I don’t feel despair for our
nation. Am I afraid? Of course. I don’t
think anyone, including Donald Trump knows what a Donald Trump presidency will
actually look like. But we did not in eight years time turn from the country
that proudly elected its first African American president to a bunch of angry
Klansmen. Voters were offered a choice between a possibility of catastrophe in
Trump and a guarantee of mediocrity in Clinton. Clearly, they picked the
high-risk bet that they felt at least gave them some chance to escape the
certain economic doom that they feel in their current lives. I know in my heart
though that we can do better than Trumpism. And I see an opening now to push
forward with the bold ideas that the Democratic party would have rejected out
of hand last week.
Let me tell you something, if the economic reckoning has
not come to your town yet, it is on its way. Go to East Liverpool, Ohio where I
lived and still have a home. Where the jobs left in the ‘50s and again in the
‘80s. East Liverpool used to be known as the Pottery Capitol of the World and
now it’s best known for a viral post by the police department showing two
overdosed adults passed out in a car with a toddler in the back. Democrats and
Republicans in DC have been looking at town’s like East Liverpool as the past,
a dead relic to look down on with pity. East Liverpool is not the past though,
it is our future if we don’t deal with the onslaught of economic changes
knocking at our door. Consider this: in 29 states, truck driving is the number
one job and it is one of the few jobs left that can provide a middle class
living for high school grads. What will happen to the 1.5 million families who
get their daily bread from a truck driver when all of those jobs are eliminated
by driverless trucks? It’s not a matter of if but when. Are we going to teach
all those drivers to code or retrofit windows or whatever other pathetic
nonsense we’ve held up as a solution? This new reality is upon us. The markets
are not going to magically fix it. Trumpism is nothing but a con by a charlatan
who’s spent his life figuring out how to screw people. So it is up to us to figure out what a
radically new social compact looks like that keeps America from devolving into
a broken zero-sum game. Radical thought is required. Ground-breaking
coalition-building between working class whites and people of color is the only
path forward. It’s time to throw down for the future of our country. In Trump’s
words, what the hell have we got to lose?
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