If Trump Were Never Elected People Would Still Need Dems To Get It, and Act
Would you keep going to a doctor who at each visit just told you the latest guess about why you have your sickness but never said what to do about it? Or only advised with guesses of the vaguest kind? “Maybe you would do a tiny bit better with a Mediterranean diet. Or maybe the opposite. Go more Keto diet. But neither is going to make a really big difference.” Wouldn’t that be a maddening waste, especially when, who cares about all that, because it’s obvious the problem is the giant tumor consuming your leg and what’s needed is bold action with a scalpel?
Isn’t that exactly what Democrats have been doing, endlessly trying to parse the details of what’s wrong when, who cares, just tackle the tumor? Isn’t the endless criticizing of Trump a waste when, correct as the criticism is, it’s like the doctor endlessly describing and bemoaning your disease but never getting to the cure?
The suggestions seem to come down to, move a little left or right. Or it comes down to Trump bad, get someone else. Fine, but if that’s all you have then you’re not the one to lead great changes to really make people’s lives better and win their votes.
Imagine if Trump had never succeeded at getting elected. People would still feel squeezed and thwarted and frustrated and looking for big, helpful changes. Many of them frustrated to the breaking point of voting for any plan that seems different. If that were the case then there couldn’t be just endless complaining about Trump. There wouldn’t be some big failure to look back on and waste time diagnosing to death. There would just be one question. What are you going to DO, capital D, capital O, DO about the problems?
There is endless trying to figure out just exactly why the middle of the country voters were lost, why the blue-collar were lost, why so many Hispanic and women’s votes were lost. Why bother analyzing? So that the next campaign can be crafted to carefully press the buttons that are supposed to appeal to all of them? That would be a campaign built on, “Here’s what we think you want to hear” and the bullshit sensors would be going off for all the voters approached that way.
Don’t focus on what surveys say people want to hear. Know what is obvious. That they are hurting and that anyone who can make a convincing case that they will go for big, bold changes that make a real difference in everyone’s lives will win their vote. And if they’re convinced a candidate will do a lot for them they’ll give a lot of leeway on waiting to see about other issues. They will be hoping that someone who really seems to get what they need will do well enough on all the other issues, like what the trans-gender policy should be, and what is the right balance of immigration reform, and the thousand other issues that campaign-advisers claim are litmus tests. Convince people they will be significantly helped and they’ll give a lot of leeway on seeing how the rest plays out. No need to tune the campaign to what the surveys say. No need to even know what they say. Just the opposite. Ignore the surveys. Do what is obvious, the things that will help people.
Democratic leadership seems to be baffled by the success of Zohran Mamdani but isn’t he an example of exactly this same thing? I don’t agree with some of his social-program proposed fixes because where will the money come from, but he’s giving people hope for significant change, more so that others there, so that’s who voters will go to.
A handful of big changes that are not so social-program based that people could believe are big are not hard to come up with. Vastly increase collective bargaining so a much greater portion of the working people can negotiate to be treated well and to be paid much more. Much more because it needs to be in line with the true value of the wealth their work creates for the country and for the wealthy. Another is considerable breaking up, and serious reining in of monopolies and near monopolies that force consumers to accept take-it-or-leave-it conditions. And reverse a hundred other ways that rules have been warped to favor the top.
None of this is something radical like socialism it’s just doing things in ways America has done them before but doing them right. Doing them like people matter. Something that we’ve done a little better at sometimes in the past, like during the New Deal.
It’s not about what surveys say, and not about what some think people want to hear, not about endlessly criticizing how bad things are. It’s about taking a hold of what is obvious, then doing something big and bold about it. Stop analyzing to death, stop worrying about it. Take the path of what’s obvious that needs to be done and get on with it in a big way.
