Democrats Ignored Every Warning and the Results Are Catastrophic

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate 
and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are 
truly beyond comprehension.

A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic 
political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:

“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign 
officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to 
many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Timesreported 
three weeks ago.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we 
will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. 
And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic 
Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.

The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened 
the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.

After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster 
the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report—assessing what went wrong and 
what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost 
as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National 
Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.

So, here at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task 
force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic 
Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election 
apply to the latest one. For example:

The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional 
leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican 
voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young 
people and working-class voters overall.
One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, 
“who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP 
efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of 
Democrats.”

“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party 
to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic 
injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental 
destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who 
constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be 
afraid of them.”

The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have 
been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, 
enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people.

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate 
and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are 
truly beyond comprehension.

“What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and 
confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service 
to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in 
its own base,” our autopsy argued. The Democratic Party should 
disentangle itself—ideologically and financially—from Wall Street, the 
military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put 
profits ahead of public needs.

Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done 
anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris 
was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”

Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with 
horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply—after a full year of ongoing 
mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military 
aid—was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris 
stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice 
to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s 
base.

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate 
and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are 
truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include 
maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and 
other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders 
is completely unacceptable.

"If you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before 
long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in 
trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a 
video. That was six years ago.

"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges 
of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms 
are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 
2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching 
ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because 
they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem 
extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use 
of 'extreme' terminology continually move."

Resisting such normalization is now imperative.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/failures-of-democratic-party