The Chris Moeller Archives

The majority will

The pandemic has revealed the fact that socialism is the only system of government that can prevent the U.S. from becoming a failed state. A coordinated national response is required, but we've been left instead with governance mired in sectional conflict and a chaotic and mismanaged supply chain of basic goods and services. The Banana Republic, like so many we've propped up around the world in the past with tinpot dictators and business-friendly goons, has come home.

As the corporations crank up their level of looting in Washington D.C., the global capital of neoliberalism, it’s unconscionable to consider that health care could still not be considered a human right within this treacherous climate, but it's not. It’s been revealed for any idiot to see that nurses and bus drivers and factory and farm workers and shelf-stockers and all the members of the subordinate class are truly the essential ones and the billionaires are nothing more than thieving freeloaders. The ones we were told would save us, such as Elon Musk, have been revealed to be frightened and petulant frauds.

Every action that’s been taken by either Trump or Pelosi has been a reactive measure couched in their subconscious understanding that the free market has no actual solutions to offer and the only system that does is the one they have both very publicly rejected, and only a few short weeks ago. For Democrats this electoral cycle, it was never really a choice between the “radical left” and the “rational center." It was never fairy-tales up against the sensible and pragmatic. It was about courage of conviction versus self-doubt and self-hatred.

On Super Tuesday and during the strategic weekend prior, self-identified Democrats lashed out in concert against the ideology of socialism. Joe Biden’s nickname should not be "Sleepy Joe," but rather “TP,” since he was the biggest panic buy in American electoral history. The voters swallowed the line they've been relentlessly fed that the larger whole of America-- those others less enlightened than themselves-- would reject the concept of Medicare for All. But a majority of Americans favor Medicare for All-- 55% of all voters as of March, according to Morning Consult/Politico. It’s the class-blind establishment of the Democratic Party and those that financially benefit from the absence of Medicare for All that oppose it.

We knew that the Washington duopoly of power was more conservative than the coalition being pulled together by Bernie Sanders since 2015. What we have failed to acknowledge, to our most damaging detriment, is that it’s also more conservative than the average American, who, according to countless polls, favor one socialist policy after another, whether it’s Medicare for every person, or higher taxes on the wealthy, or an increase in the minimum wage, or business restrictions to protect the climate. The largest plurality in the electorate is independents, and they’ve supported these ideas and simultaneously rejected both the “Democrat” and “Republican” brands.

Primary-goers in the state of Mississippi are a good example. We’re told it’s a conservative state, even on the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders lost to Biden there in March by 65 percentage points. Yet over half of those voters on Super Tuesday say they support Medicare for All. Sanders had high favorability ratings too, but they voted against him because they were told to. Beating Trump is paramount to most “left-wing” voters in 2020 and they were told by virtually everyone that, despite head-to-head polling, Trump would have an easier time defeating Sanders than Biden.

They’ve been falsely led to believe by pundits and political insiders that, as Democrats, they are to the left of the average American. Many will tell you to your face that this is a “fundamentally conservative country.” If I don't prefer Bernie, they ask, why would a non-Democrat choose him? They’re correct that the news media's image of the United States is that of being fundamentally conservative. It’s easy to get the message drummed home each day on cable news that, despite the shouting and their manufactured-conflict, an entry ticket to “centrism” in the U.S. is given to those that bow down to corporate power.

But what about these others issues-- ones that Sanders championed and that resonated with voters, particularly those voters that don't normally participate, and that hold majority support not just among “liberals” but among all Americans? When someone on Comcast Corps' MSNBC or at Jeff Bezos' Washington Post tells you that Bernie failed to extend his appeal “beyond the left,” they’re neglecting to tell you that the largely-disengaged plurality of the country is not ideological at all. They put themselves nowhere at all along the political spectrum.

It should come as no surprise that a party that has spent 40 years ignoring the existence of “class” in the country would be wholly incapable of framing issues that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden promote their belief that we have to cut entitlement programs. You’re painted as a radical if you attempt to argue that we shouldn’t do it. For those tens of millions that don’t follow politics as sport, this obscures the difference, if there actually is any, between the two parties. You rarely, if ever, see a television commentator friendly to Democrats on the air acknowledging wealth or income difference in their polling, in their reporting, or in their commentary. Their professional goal and that of their bosses is to reinforce the beliefs of their existing audience, not to challenge them. It would likely shake a loyal Democrat to his or her core to know how badly the party really does at the ballot among the most economically-disadvantaged populations of the country.

Rarer still is to acknowledge how few of these people are bothering to vote at all since they see no personal benefit to trying to parse the difference between two corporate parties, other than upon the targeted social issues we're given to play with that purposely divide us. The Democrats’ solution to their quandary-- rather than firming up their bona-fides by actually protecting the poor and the working class-- is to blame the voters and accuse them of being misinformed. Biden won big over Sanders in Michigan, but still lost to him by 9 percentage points among voters with a total family income under $50,000. Now that the unemployment rate is shooting up at historic speeds since that vote, it doesn't bode well for November in a must-win rust-belt state that Hillary Clinton already failed to deliver.

How many low-income voters-- the ones that aren’t registered to vote as Democrats and therefore eligible to participate in the party primary-- are they ignoring? Okay, blame them for their lack of civic engagement. And also say hello to another four years of President Trump. Slap on your “I voted” sticker, shame them for not getting similarly involved, and say hello to another four years of White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller.

Democrats have protected their Washington leadership, insulated them from uprising, by convincing voters over a generation that a candidate with a platform of structural political change can’t win in the general election. Yet Trump just did it in 2016. And before that, they said that Obama couldn’t win, but he did, and then he did again. When given the choice, that's actually the only thing that wins.

The charges of elitism thrown at Democrats from Republicans and the Right are politically-based, disingenuous, and hypocritical, but they're not incorrect. It's the simple arrogance of demanding solidarity after you’ve rigged the game, the hard-core belief that your ideology is the only one grounded in both warm compassion and cold logic, and this idea that if you deign to hand over your vote to them every other November that you're a dupe. How dare you. Discouraging divisiveness is telling the marginalized to shut up. Sanders would have done better in the general election than he did in the Democratic primaries. In a general election, voters are younger, less affluent, and have no reason to act like pundits.

Despite their claims to the contrary, protecting the status quo is an agenda, and it's not a noble one in this time and place. Media and party people alike have to convince you they're without one so that you continue to see life necessities as unreachable dreams. How else are they going to square 55% national support for Medicare for All with the fact that pharmaceutical companies pump $4.5 billion a year into advertising? How else can they downplay the threat of climate change, which polls show Americans of almost every stripe are very concerned about, when the fossil fuel industry is funding tonight's edition of The Situation Room? 

Democrats have been loyal to focus-group tested policies for decades. They're allergic to anything remotely "revolutionary," and they have paid the price for it dearly. It must still blow their collective mind that Bernie Sanders would attempt the type of presidential campaigns he has. And when the pandemic first started hitting the front page, they stocked up on their toilet paper candidate, having no foresight at all to see that the coming crisis would only make the need for socialized medicine more pronounced, not less. They made a bet that has no assurance at all of paying off this November. As people continue to die from lack of care or go destitute from the debt of their illness, future voters-- not just the ones in 2020-- will remember this fear-based mistake and it will cause even greater damage to their diminishing credibility. And they'll have had the polls in their favor the entire time.

posted by CM @ 1:45 PM