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Like many people, I think the whole thing is just symptomatic of the change from contacting voters to get elected, to contacting rich corporate donors to give money to the media, to get elected. Eventually, given enough time, the whole orientation would be remade. It is deeper than the switch from thinking of John Kenneth Galbraith to this asshole Milton Friedman, or even than the switch from longer, sustained explanations to the kind of mental short-circuit that is sloganeering and advertising, although it includes it. It is a mental, and then political, change from our Nation as a society of people, wanting the general good; a government with laws, and a court system that citizens can access, to considering only what corporations want--wanting now to negate government and reduce legislation and regulations that protect. It was actually the switch from the middle class and poor having any influence at all, to the rich corporate boardrooms deciding everything, and imposing it on the rest of us. The problem goes far beyond "not having a message"; they are actually living in another world now, with another constituency, and restating things will not help.
Ever since the takeover of the "D"LC/consultants/"framing"/corporate lobbyists, etc., a whole new frame of mind has been introduced, that has shut out the entire American population and its real concerns, and that introduced judgments about things, that were never there before. Rich people and corporations, the investor class, all these groups, are "winners," are "doing well," and the poor and middle class are "less successful," or are actually--although they conceal the phrase, "government-dependant losers." They are ashamed of the poor, do not want to hear about their problems--no affordable housing, slum landlords, price- and bill- gouging--and do not even know what they are. Many Democrats even voted for the Energy Bill, the Bankruptcy Bill, and the Medicare Prescription Bill, every one of which were corporate subsidies that are killing the people who have to live under these new rules--they are totally out of touch, and living in a world of corporate propaganda.
I remember when these things started to change, during the '80s, when they started to fuck around with the meaning of these earlier understandings of how things worked. When they changed the meaning of "deficit spending" from spending that needed to be done to give people money and government programs to recover from a Depression, or spending during war or other crisis, to a totally new, invented "meaning," that of Republicans cutting taxes and increasing defense contracts and corporate subsidies, and driving us into debt and getting nothing for it, as if this were the same situation, and no Democrat corrected it, I knew something was lost already. Already, Democrats were saying, "Oh, I want to cut the size of government and 'privatize' (commercialize!) everything, too," "Oh, I want to cut taxes, too," and I already did not recognize them anymore. They have been fucking up the language routinely for so long...You can just hear them all, "Pwesident Buss wants to increase the deficit--THAT'S not conservative!" You, asshole, it isn't liberal either! Why do they stab us in the back this way?
This was when Democrats no longer talked like real people anymore, and began to sound like these horrible policy statements, because they had contact only with that type, and lost their common sense. It is just like when a corporate/"D"LC/Republican type wants to break in on an economic thread, and impose a " 'free' " market, deregulated, no tax, no government, etc., argument--the first thing they do is trot out the economists' jargon, to try to make you feel as if you are just in over your head next to the great expert and no doubt rich person, who plays the stock market, owns bizzesses, and all the rest. The atmosphere is poisoned with this "superior" jargon that has no instructive values at all, and always, no logic. No one with actual knowledge talks that way to a general audience. Remember somebody like Carl Sagan, the great astronomer who was so popular. Sagan made everything very clear and simple, yet never talked down to anyone, and treated all kinds of different subject matter as equal.
This will not be solved by the same rich consultants giving Democrats new catch-phrases; that is what we have now. They need to actually get a middle class presence in the Party again. The deeper problem is that Democrats no longer talk like real people--who are very anti-corporate, surprise!--but instead always sound like this horrible type that is trying not to make the corporate world mad, which effectively sabotages everything.
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