Robert Reich: 7 hard truths Democrats must acknowledge if they want a better future

[workinclasszero]

Robert Reich: 7 hard truths Democrats must acknowledge if they want a better future
If Dems don't understand these truths and fail to do what’s needed, a third party will emerge to fill the void
Robert Reich Sunday, Jan 22, 2017 08:59 AM CST

The ongoing contest between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings of the Democratic Party continues to divide Democrats. It’s urgent Democrats stop squabbling and recognize seven basic truths.

http://www.salon.com/2017/01/22/robert-reich-7-hard-truths-democrats-must-acknowledge-if-they-want-a-better-future_partner/

[Hoyt]

1. Those points are likely true. But next time we get in a situation like the Democratic Primary, Reich

needs to refrain from bashing/undermining a candidate like Clinton.

[workinclasszero]

3. Agreed

But if we don't move past that and start working together we are all doomed.

[Hoyt]

4. Agreed.

[JCanete]

20. No. Reich was not a problem here. We can weather criticism in our party, and if we stopped providing

criticism, we would not be a party that looks as good as it does today.

[Warpy]

28. If a candidate is too weak to withstand criticism in a primary

then that candidate is too weak to run.

Candidates don't run in nice comfy little sealed off boxes. An opponent, even in the primary, is going to tell the people why the other candidate is wrong and why he or she is right.

You're just going to have to deal with that.

[Hoyt]

39. Except Reich was lying and even called out Clinton on NAFTA, something Reich was still supporting

up until a year or so before the primaries. Reich needed to stick to rambling before college freshpeople.

[JCanete]

40. What was his lie? just saying it doesn't convince me. So he used to support NAFTA or defend it and

now he doesn't? Is there a lie in that? Did he craft it?

[democrank]

2. We should let Robert Reich's words sink in.

Reich says in the last eight or so years, Democrats have lost 1,034 state and federal seats, and there are 32 states fully under Republican control.

We can not change this heartbreaking reality unless we change what we're doing and how we're doing it.

[workinclasszero]

5. This is our last chance IMO

If the democratic party doesn't nuture and build on the movement that was born yesterday, liberalism and progressive thought will be dead in this country for a generation at least.

And America will become a full blown fascist state. I see no other future for this country.

[Kablooie]

6. Yep. But I see no indication of these changes.

All I hear is everyone laughing at the latest hypocritical idiocy of Trump and the Republicans. That is exactly how we got here in the first place.
Instead of seriously presenting a plan that sounds better than what Trump proposes we just laugh at how stupid his plan is.
People don't vote against things, they vote FOR them.

Look though the posts here. Every post is against something. None of them are advocating FOR something.

Until Democrats stop ridiculing Republicans and instead aggressively offer ideas that will make EVERYONE'S life better, not just minorities, we will continue to be shut out of American politics.

[workinclasszero]

9. Yes, politics as usual drones on

The press is just pissed at Dump because they helped get him elected and he is slapping them in the face now.

Do you think the press really wants a people power movement to come along and upset their game? Do you think the fucking republicans want that?

But here's the real kicker...do you think the PTB in the democratic party want a people power movement from the streets to take hold of the party and sweep away the status quo?

I kinda doubt it. But its either that or fascism, take your pick people.

They could decide to help of course but we need leaders from this movement to stand up and start running the show!

[Kablooie]

14. Once again, the protests are against Trump...

Not FOR anything except something other than Trump.
Theres no one out there calling for specific policy changes that could excite people.
Even with Obamacare everyone is fighting AGAINST eliminating it. No one is proposing ways to fix it's deficiencies.

Until we get a leader who advocates instead of disparaging we will not regain control.

[workinclasszero]

15. The leaders are right in front of our eyes!

If they want it, that's another thing but those three awesome women that created the largest protest in the history of this country should have a seat at the damn table in the democratic party IMO.

And time is wasting!

[rainy]

32. There is no central leader but

many of those women started organizing the day after the election. My group here in VA has already had meetings. They have set up meetings with congress members and are looking for candidates to run in local elections. Don't underestimate their power.

[Kablooie]

38. If the protests lead to new people taking charge...

That will be a good thing.
I sure hope so.

[workinclasszero]

12. "People don't vote against things, they vote FOR them."

Totally agree!

The leaders of the democratic party should be out front and vocal for cradle to grave, universal heath care, a 15 dollar minimum wage, student loan relief, cutting back our insane military budget, strengthen social security and tie it to realistic cost of living increases, making the rich pay their share of taxes and many other things.


Who is the person running for the head of the DNC that is for those things?

That's the person who should get the job!

[retrowire]

30. I get the feeling that Republicans vote against things

while Democrats vote for things...

[uponit7771]

7. Unnn Reich... the LFPR is same today as it was in 2009... what am I missing here? The LFPR is the

... right wings "good economy" caveat.

Don't understand where he's getting his U6 data from

[Buckeye_Democrat]

8. Big money influences might even be diminished if...

everyone voted!

Politicians are going to mostly cater to the people who help them get elected.

Australia requires that everyone vote! I bet we'd get more politicians who reflect the collective will of Americans if that ever happened here.

Why Are the Poor and Minorities Less Likely to Vote?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/why-are-the-poor-and-minorities-less-likely-to-vote/282896/



This shows the level of political participation by different socioeconomic groups.

[Talk Is Cheap]

10. When Democrats run as progressives - they win.

It's that simple...

[msongs]

11. only in selected cases. some do and some don't. nt

[SharonAnn]

16. When Democrats are registered and vote, they win.

There's still a problem with the people having Voter ID and being registered. Then we have to get them to the polls. These are things that need to be done at a local level.

Then there's the voter-suppression that's done on the state level.

If we don't have qualified voters who can and do vote, all the rest of this doesn't matter.

[Talk Is Cheap]

19. True.

I am hoping that when America realizes that republicans are destroying everything, that republicans will be banished to the annals of history.

But, as you wrote, if we don't fix the gerrymandering and all forms of voter suppression, we will *never* win again. And America's democracy will no long be in existence.

[stevenleser]

13. Breathless assessments like these miss a couple of key pieces.

Reich waits until point #6 to note that "This isn’t to denigrate what Hillary Clinton accomplished — she did, after all, win the popular vote in the presidential election by almost 3 million people."

That's not a side-note as Reich treats it, it's a key fact. It is also a key fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one of the last seven Presidential elections going back 28 years. That is a fact, it's not conjecture or opinion. It is also a fact that before whatever it is that Bill Clinton did to change the party, the prior three elections were crushing landslides against the Democrats. I remember many of us wondered if we were ever going to win a Presidential election again before Bill came along.

You have to filter everything else through those facts, not the other way around. Reich and many other folks, some here included, want to interpret everything as a need to go to populist progressive left policies and oratory. That is an opinion. It doesn't stand up to the fact of winning the popular vote of all but one of the last seven Presidential elections. Another opinion that doesn't stand up to fact is that Clinton and his brand of Democratic politics made it harder for us to win elections. It's just not true and demonstrably easy to show it isn't true as I did above by pointing out the facts of what electoral politics was like in the US in the 12 years before Bill and in the 28 years since.

So lets start with the facts and work our way down from those. The idea that the only way for Democrats to win is to go to progressive populism doesn't stand up to the facts we have before us. There has to be another reason why we don't win the state legislatures and therefore (because of gerrymandered redistricting) the congress.

My opinion, and yes I am switching from facts to opinion here, is that there is an element of the Democratic base that does not take elections seriously enough. They come out for the Presidential elections sure. but they don't see the need to vote for state legislature races and barely see the need to vote for congress and governors races. The Presidential election is big and flashy and so they come out for that.

My opinion, while it is an opinion and I freely state that, has the benefit of fitting the actual facts out there. Enough people come out and vote Democratic every four years such that we have close to a lock on the popular vote. So people actually do like our candidates and they like them more than they like Republican candidates. Our message and our policies therefore are not the problem.

Our problem is we need to educate those 5-10 million Democrats who don't come out for midterms or who undervote their local elections on their ballots as to the importance of those races. That's the issue and that's what we need to do.

[SharonAnn]

17. We need serious local work at the Voter ID and turnout levels. 'Nuff said.

[ismnotwasm]

18. Yes--and once again, thank you!

[SidDithers]

22. Good post...

Sid

[JCanete]

23. We need to go populist, because everything else keeps us driving down the same road of

destruction, whether those approaches get a couple of us elected or not. They don't stop the nation's momentum, they merely slow it down. If we don't disrupt the power structure that delivers elections to the likes of Trump--and a good place to start here is acknowledging that it exists--then our nation and its laws are going to continue to be eroded.

For most of their time in office both Clinton and Obama had clipped wings because they had to work with a hostile congress. An interesting note by the way, is that apparently 1994 is the first time in 40 years that the Republicans controlled both the house and the Senate...something that has become common place since. We've had 2 years where we controlled both, and two more where we barely controlled one, in the last 22 years. Yes, for 14 years of that, we've had Democratic Presidents, after these coming 4 years we're going to be slightly over 50 percent for us in the Presidency, and an abysmal showing in Congress. I don't know what the trend on governorships has been over that time, but I know what we have now sucks balls as well.

That clearly speaks to a serious problem. You are welcome to tout Clinton's popularity over a transparently moronic sociopath, and at the end of the day I voted for her with even a certain amount of enthusiasm, not just for the sake of holding my nose...and yes, I think that we should be making sure that people remember, as both Reich and Sanders have done recently, that Clinton beat her opponent by 3 million votes!...but that does't change the fact that he's still in Washington, any more than it changes the fact that we as a party are consistently getting trounced again and again on the rest of the battlefield.

People want to point to isolated races where our more progressive candidates lost, versus other places where our less progressive candidates won in this cycle, but that really misses the bigger picture. The fact is progressive ideals are an upward battle--not because they are unpopular with the voters--but because they are unpopular with the money. You can certainly use the evidence to point out that the populist numbers just aren't there, and then use that to support an argument that we shouldn't be populist...but those numbers aren't there because we haven't seized that movement as a party. Our leadership hasn't been interested in truly fighting against the corporations. It's like they're saying "it's an honor just to have been nominated..." We seriously need to say "fuck this rigged system already, it's the money in Washington and media stupid!"

You know who is never going to give a shit about voter suppression and embarrassingly acrobatic gerrymandering or all the other ways in which voting blocks, particularly minorities are underserved, or about the continued erosion of education, especially as it comes to civics and history, but really critical thinking at large...or for that matter money's influence on elections and policies? That fucking media that has helped it all to happen. From radio to cable to its internet influence, there is a consistent trend of silence or misrepresentation on these matters within our fourth estate, and that is pervasive. I know too many people who don't themselves listen to Limbaugh or Hannity, Beck or Jones....but their parents do, and their bosses do...and other people of authority that they haven't got any reason to disbelieve...and this shit gets into their heads. Either we stop pretending like we can work with the very corporations that pay for advertising to other mega-corporations for the purpose of funding their political agendas, or we are going to be forever screwed.

[stevenleser]

24. Nope, what you post is opinion that flies in the face of facts.

And this isn't about just one election either. You attack Hillary's ability to get only a 3 million vote difference against Trump, but we win the popular vote every Presidential election but one over the last 28 years.

You don't have a thesis that accounts for the actual facts.

[JCanete]

26. really? What did you just disprove that I said? The facts are that public sentiment matters,

and the media controls and manipulates it. You can't pretend the media didn't have a part in selling W's legitimacy to us in the wake of his contentious win. How much news was coming out about the voter role purging? What outrage was ginned up by our media over that?

AND you're stuck solely on the Presidential race because that somehow corroborates your argument..whatever that argument is...that we can be out of power and still more people will have voted for us than Republicans in one specific race?

[PatsFan87]

25. I think we can acknowledge and thank Bill for stopping 4 consecutive terms

of Republican control of the White House while at the same time realizing that it's a new era and a new political landscape. Bill was elected about 25 years ago. What worked then isn't going to work now. His strategy of triangulating and adopting some Republican policies to appeal to southerners and whites isn't appealing to a younger generation that is much more accepting and progressive (and if you look at the 2016 primary maps, Bernie's populist message was more popular in many of those rural, whiter areas than Clinton's message). Establishment policies aren't appealing to the blue collar workers who saw their factories being shut down. They aren't appealing to the average Joe on Main Street who saw the deregulation of Wall Street under a Clinton presidency. They aren't appealing to those in the BLM movement who have lived through Clinton's "tough on drugs/mass incarceration" policies. We shouldn't have to sell our African American brothers and sisters down the river to win white voters. People out their from all walks of life are craving something different. Clearly they were willing to look past a LOT of crap with Trump to get a change of pace.

And to address the elephant in the room, many of the people who do not take off-year elections seriously are young people. Don't you think if we had candidates who excited them, they'd show up? To give credit where credit is due, they were the ones pouring into stadiums to hear their candidate. They were funding their candidate. They were phonebanking like crazy for their candidate. They were spreading information about their candidate on social media when the mainstream media stations weren't covering Bernie early on. Should we not be harnessing that energy instead of fighting it? Should we not be listening to what young people want so they DO show up in non-presidential election years? It seems like a no-brainer to me.

[BlueWI]

43. This.

Bill Clinton never earned 50 percent of the popular vote, even in the heyday of the Third Way. Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, Democrats got their clocks cleaned at the state level and missed a chance at taking the Senate and the White House in 2016. Unless you're good with these results, there's every reason to rethink strategy.

[delisen]

33. Agree.

I also think that their is a Lost Paradise myth operating among the "Intelligentsia" of the Democratic Party.

A lost paradise myth of the union worker who has been cheated out of his birthright and that there will be Paradise Regained if we just find the right charismatic leader to vote for in 4 years.

It is an illusion that has been kept alive in the more elite college that educate very few of the people they refer to as "working class."

Sanders had a young enthusiastic following, so did Reagan, so did Nader. Fellowship can foster change, I don't think it can feed democracy. I think we are going to be in trouble until we learn the virtues of n0o-charismantic leadership.

We need to meet the future. I don't want be listening in 5-10 years to Democrats lamenting the loss of "the jobs"-truck drivers, uber drivers and so on.....

JFK ran in 1960 with a theme of eradicating poverty in Appalachia-

[JCanete]

35. Its not about what we used to have wholesale, because there were a lot of people

entirely disenfranchised and exploited in that model. It is about what direction we were actually going as a nation, and about what changes made us take huge losses in that momentum, and to even backslide in a lot of ways.

Yes, in spite of that we still have a little bit of progress here and there. Gay marriage rights, and the erasure of preexisting conditions(for the time being), an exemplary black President who shattered that ceiling and made it very hard I think, for it to be duct taped back together...But I'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint any other progress we've made that didn't benefit the moneyed people a thousand fold. Under democrats our emphasis on technology and science is no joke and can't be scoffed at, and thankfully, a portion of that investment actually goes into the commons...just not as much as should, although there's no question that we tend to benefit from more technology. All of those things are great...

but we've lost a lot of ground for people at the bottom in this time. Democratic policies and concessions might have been better than unchecked republican management, but the erosion has been trending regardless. People still have to work...hell slave for a living...but they have less and less protections, and their retirements aren't safe, and the banks are out to suck them dry. People live on less than they used to, and have more debt. Our jobs numbers don't do justice to the fact that a lot of those replacement jobs suck by comparison to what was lost.

We absolutely do need to meet the future. The reality is that we are transferring more and more wealth to the elite, and that there will be less and less jobs to replace the ones that disappear, and that there will be less and less resources to even feed us and more and more natural disasters. We do need to start having serious conversations about that hoarded wealth being re-redistributed back into the commons via infrastructure and technology and basic human rights--survival without constantly debilitating stress, appropriate nutrition, shelter...--while we still can. If we don't break away from this meritocracy bullshit that both parties have fallen into, we are going to be fucked. Credit by the way to the Democratic party, for slowly but surely starting to reintroduce these themes into their rhetoric and platforms, particularly post Occupy Wall Street, but they need to stop pretending we can do it with the help of the corporations who have brought us to the brink.

[PotatoChip]

44. So true. Thank you. (nt)

[mrgorth]

21. I know this is supposed to be a party trait...

but ever since I've been here, all I've ever seen is venemous infighting...Dean vs Clark, Dean vs Kerry, Obama vs Clinton, Clinton vs Bernie...I don't see it ending. Call it insurgent vs the DLC. Call it BOBs and PUMAs...it doesn't matter. In the meantime, the deplorables get what they want.

[saidsimplesimon]

27. mrgorth, democracy

is a divider? We need to challenge primary candidates, from all parties. I am not a "get in line" kinda gal.

The deplorables got what they thought they wanted. Now, let's see how willing they are to pay the price when it hits their most precious benefits, like Social Security and Medicare. "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

[Lord_at_War]

41. Sometimes, it has to be a fight.

Look at the teabaggers. They took down a sitting Speaker of the House, Eric Cantor, because he wasn't Reich-wing enough- and put a new 'bagger' in his seat. They made "spray-tan" Boehner decide it wasn't worth the trouble to run again- and got Paul Ryan. They threw out Crist as a Repuke Fla Gov.- and elected criminal 'bagger Scott. Then they beat Crist running as a Dem for Senate with Rubio. (BTW, how in the hell did Crist even get the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat?) smdh!

They haven't always been successful- see Angle in Nevada, O'Donnell in Delaware, and that fricking @sshole Akin in Missouri- but they just come back with another loony-tune-- and they fight for them against the "party leadership".

[Warpy]

29. I'd add one more to that

Democrats have to realize their money machine has never been adequate, that the 0.1% on the GOP side has bought up the media and there is no way to compensate for that by buying 30 second commercial spots in prime time. The party as a whole is going to have to come with with strategies to do an end run around the mass media once they've decided to become a movement.

[JCanete]

34. Absolutely! I'm not sure why people so badly want to ignore the impact of the media,

and WHY it has the impact it has, and in WHO'S favor it always cuts, on these boards. Maybe those who disagree with Warpy's assessment could shine some light.

[retrowire]

31. Great read and I highly recommend all Democrats read the damn thing. nt

[TheFrenchRazor]

36. was getting rid of computer voting machines on there? it should be. nt

[mrgorth]

42. That's really

not going to happen. We need to be realistic and anyone that tells you that they can do this is lying.

[mdillen]

37. Our next presidential candidate

should be none other than Robert Reich.