The Democratic Party is the Republican Party and it wants its Elusive Southern White Man back

I read this book 2 years ago written by historian Nancy Cohen called “Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America.” Chapter 2 talks about the 1972 election between Nixon and George McGovern. Obviously McGovern lost cuz I’d never heard of him before this book and we all know Nixon cuz he did Watergate or something. Anyways, lots of Democratic leaders blamed this loss on the young people in the Democratic party, counter-culturalists who Democratic insiders claimed “hijacked the party from its rightful owners” (Cohen, 24). This wasn’t true, what actually happened is that democratic insiders colluded with each other essentially to throw the vote and make McGovern lose because he beat their desired candidate in the primaries and they didn’t like him and would rather have a Nixon presidency than a Democratic president they couldn’t control. But they constructed the narrative that “feminists, gays, and other cultural radicals were to blame for the Democratic Party’s collapse,” (Cohen, 24).

If this sounds familiar, good, it should, it’s happening again. We just saw this in all the DNC emails: Democratic insiders colluded with each other to sabotage Sander’s campaign, the George McGovern of 2016. They wanted Hillary cuz if Bernie were to win he wouldn’t be beholden to their or big money interests.

Also, currently my Facebook feed is full of people (fellow NELPers included) trying to shame every leftist they know into voting for Hillary and prematurely blaming them for a Trump presidency even though the proper people/forces to blame for a Trump presidency would/will be the white supremacists and sincerely ignorant people who vote for him as well as the conditions created by neoliberalism and law and order rhetoric that allowed Trump’s hateful message to gain traction. Progressive people are expected to ‘fall in line’ even though Hillary and the establishment democrats haven’t done anything to demonstrate that Bernie supporters should trust them and vote for them. The party is making a grave mistake in thinking they can shame true progressives into voting for a neoliberal war hawk. They’re relying on a recent historical narrative where Democratic Party voters all set their differences aside and come together after the primaries because that’s tradition. This is problematic and will not be successful. A lot of the people who voted for Bernie are not democrats, they’re independents and young people without party affiliations. Thinking that the same traditional scare tactics will work on this group is not particularly rooted in fact.

This reliance on tradition also demonstrates to us that the Democratic Party is in fact not really progressive at all, it’s actually pretty conservative both in policies and tradition, and in fact the Democratic Party as a whole isn’t even trying to hide that conservatism anymore. Last night milquetoast Tim Kaine came out and did a weird choreographed performance where he pointed at people in the audience and acted weirdly surprised that the Wells Fargo Stadium was so full[1] and then he told us about his time as a missionary (read: neocolonialist) in Honduras and how he has some family members that usually vote republican but have been voting democrat because the republicans are just too radical nowadays so, as the presence of Bloomberg hopefully made obvious to all of us, ‘moderate republicans’ should rest easy knowing that they have a home in the democratic party. We’ll accept you, we’ll take you in, no te preocupes, nuestra casa es tu casa[2].

This unity is bullshit. 2 main things: the first: we shouldn’t be surprised by this embrace of ‘moderate republicans’ because the democratic party has been moving right for quite some time, in case we forgot Hillary’s campaign sign is literally an arrow to the right. Most of Hillary and Barack’s policies are what would traditionally be considered republican policies, we just don’t see them as such because the ‘republican party’ we have today is actually an insurgent party of the neo-fascist Christian right which thinks the US is a Christian nation and that week old fetuses deserve more rights than black people. The GOP no longer deals in facts, which should be clear to the whole world after both the Hobby Lobby ruling,[3] which I’m sure is just the most recent in a long line of policies and SCOTUS decisions that allow one of our major government parties to deal in opinions and feelings rather than facts, and the RNC where Newt Gingrich inferred that the FBI is a liberal think-tank. The GOP has created the narrative that facts have a liberal bias, which makes them impossible to argue/discuss things with, and it ought to make clear to us that they are an illegitimate party.

Okay this isn’t the clearest transition in the world and I can’t remember exactly how I intended to end that paragraph/thought but it’s only a blog post so I’m gonna keep going anyways: by making the democratic party a home for republicans and assuming that Bernie supporters will fall in line for Hillary, the democratic party is making the same strategic mistake that the Democratic Party made after the passage of the civil rights act up until the campaign of Bill Clinton. Nancy Cohen talks about this in Delirium; after the passage of the civil rights act, the democrats lost a big chunk of their voting block: poor southern white people. This group of people (or at least the ones who voted) in the 60s/70s were the ones who the brunt of integration largely fell upon, meaning their jobs were integrated and their children’s schools were integrated. There obviously weren’t enough jobs or resources and a lot of their qualities of life were diminished and so they harbored a lot of racial resentment that the democrats didn’t really do anything about. The Republican Party on the other hand recognized, exploited, and channeled this resentment into support for their racist policies coded in colorblind rhetoric. This is called the Southern Strategy: republicans harnessed the anger, resentment, and disappointment of poor southern white folks after the passage and implementation of the civil rights act and used it to their advantage. The loss of this demographic was terrible for the democrats and they spent the next ~30 years trying to transparently re-appeal to this demographic, this demographic which Nancy Cohen refers to as the Elusive Southern White Man. As I said, their efforts were transparent, so they never got them back. Importantly, in their quest for the Elusive Southern White Man the Democrats completely ignored the voting power of black people, women, LGBTQ people, Latinos, etc. I can’t remember if Cohen concludes that the Dems just though these groups would vote for them or if the Dems didn’t realize their voting power. Regardless, throughout the 70s and 80s the Dems ignored marginalized groups in search of regaining the support of their former voters who turned republican. This strategy changed with Bill Clinton, who appealed to black people and women, and then he won. That’s a simplification but it’s fine, you can read the book on your own it’s really interesting.

So I ask, what did we see Tim Kaine[4] do last night? What did we see the democratic establishment do throughout this primary season, during the convention, and now after the convention? Actively ignore and discredit the concerns of already oppressed people in search of the support of the lost Republicans the Dems never got over. Democrats have assumed that because of the vile rhetoric that Trump spews, the people he attacks will undoubtedly flock to Clinton. It assumes that the oppressed will not recognize the oppressor that is embodied through Clinton and her policies, it assumes we will ignore the reality that Clinton has a history of endorsing and enforcing policies that cryptically oppress people in the explicit way Trump can only hope to. The Dems and Hillary feel entitled to the votes of marginalized and oppressed folks, they assume they have our votes without doing anything to earn our trust, all the while actively appealing to republican voters to come and join them. By giving a ‘moderate Republican’ like Bloomberg a place to speak at the DNC, the Democratic party is tacitly endorsing ‘law and order’ realized through racist stop and frisk policies, and though they don’t quite endorse placing a ban on Muslims entering the country, spying on every mosque within 100 miles of NYC might just be collateral damage in the necessary fight against terrorism. This strategy of privileging and actively seeking out the vote of disaffected white people who would prefer to vote for Kasich (who defunded planned parenthood) over Trump are not really people I want to share a candidate with. It’s predictable given the white supremacy and patriarchal existence of the United States. It might be a bad and upsetting strategy, but it shouldn’t surprise us especially as inequality is embodied within the US government. The Dems do not really give a shit about marginalized people, they give all their shits to the lives and votes that are already respected and sought after in society: conservative white men. They embody this in their campaign strategy. The loop of history of the campaign of 1972 is on repeat right now and the Democratic Party is too full of stubborn and corrupt traditionalist and corporate money to give a shit or take action. I guess it’s fine, I don’t trust them anyways.

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[1] Perhaps I’ll write something else about this performance and the illusion of politics (read: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)

[2] I write this in the spirit of Tim’s gringo Spanish

[3] The Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision, summer of 2014, declared that the owners of closely held private companies do not need to provide birth control coverage for their employees so long as the owners have a sincerely held religious belief in opposition to the use of birth control. The objections the employers have to the use of birth control need not be factually true, it only matters that the belief in sincerely held. In the specific case of Hobby Lobby the owners see IUDs and Plan B as abortifacentes (a drug that induces abortion) even though they’re not. SCOTUS declared that it doesn’t matter if their beliefs are factually accurate or not, so long as they are sincerely held. In other words: IUDs do not cause abortions. This is a fact, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t believe it. I believe that IUDs do cause abortions, and because I believe that, I don’t have to provide birth control to my employees because my paying for their birth control would conflict with my sincerely held, factually-inaccurate religious belief and my beliefs are more important than my employees reproductive health.

[4] and obviously Hillary’s campaign by nominating him for VP