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Rolling Stone: After Bernie, Does the Left Need a Rethink?
After Bernie, Does the Left Need a Rethink?
What to make of the fact that Sanders ran the campaign progressives have been dreaming of for years, and lost
By Joshua Holland June 10, 2016
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/after-bernie-does-the-left-need-a-rethink-20160610
For as long as I can remember, there's been a deeply held belief on the American left that if a Democrat would only stop pandering to the mushy middle and run an unapologetically liberal, unabashedly populist campaign, he or she would win in a laugher. For too long, the Dems have offered nothing more than Republican-lite candidates, according to this view — and why vote for the "lite" version when you can have the real thing?
Call it the "What's the matter with Kansas?" theory of politics. In his 2004 bestseller of that name, liberal writer and political analyst Thomas Frank argued Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism and disastrous trade deals and their coziness with Wall Street left a huge opening for the right. Conservatives had swooped in with a bait-and-switch: They promised to clean up our "depraved" culture and lead the fight on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but as soon as they were in office, they turned around and gave those Americans cheap public services and a bunch of tax cuts they were too poor to use.
The answer seemed simple: Give low- and middle-income folks — i.e., the majority of the country — an opportunity to vote in a way that would better serve their economic interests. This would bring "Reagan Democrats" and socially conservative blue-collar types back into the fold, giving them reason to stop bitterly clinging to their God and their guns.
This was also seen as an answer to the midterm drop-off effect — the tendency of key Democratic constituencies to only vote in presidential years — that's long bedeviled the party and, in recent years, delivered unified Republican control of 30 statehouses and both chambers of Congress. After the 2014 midterms that Barack Obama called a "shellacking" for the left, Frank told Salon we were seeing Democrats demonstrate "a logic that's very familiar here in Washington, D.C. You move to the center, you always move to the center. But it's a logic that's just going to lead to more and more disasters down the road." He warned that "if they do enough of this triangulation, they'll become a party that has become so similar to Republicans, then why bother with them?"
What to make of the fact that Sanders ran the campaign progressives have been dreaming of for years, and lost
By Joshua Holland June 10, 2016
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/after-bernie-does-the-left-need-a-rethink-20160610
For as long as I can remember, there's been a deeply held belief on the American left that if a Democrat would only stop pandering to the mushy middle and run an unapologetically liberal, unabashedly populist campaign, he or she would win in a laugher. For too long, the Dems have offered nothing more than Republican-lite candidates, according to this view — and why vote for the "lite" version when you can have the real thing?
Call it the "What's the matter with Kansas?" theory of politics. In his 2004 bestseller of that name, liberal writer and political analyst Thomas Frank argued Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism and disastrous trade deals and their coziness with Wall Street left a huge opening for the right. Conservatives had swooped in with a bait-and-switch: They promised to clean up our "depraved" culture and lead the fight on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but as soon as they were in office, they turned around and gave those Americans cheap public services and a bunch of tax cuts they were too poor to use.
The answer seemed simple: Give low- and middle-income folks — i.e., the majority of the country — an opportunity to vote in a way that would better serve their economic interests. This would bring "Reagan Democrats" and socially conservative blue-collar types back into the fold, giving them reason to stop bitterly clinging to their God and their guns.
This was also seen as an answer to the midterm drop-off effect — the tendency of key Democratic constituencies to only vote in presidential years — that's long bedeviled the party and, in recent years, delivered unified Republican control of 30 statehouses and both chambers of Congress. After the 2014 midterms that Barack Obama called a "shellacking" for the left, Frank told Salon we were seeing Democrats demonstrate "a logic that's very familiar here in Washington, D.C. You move to the center, you always move to the center. But it's a logic that's just going to lead to more and more disasters down the road." He warned that "if they do enough of this triangulation, they'll become a party that has become so similar to Republicans, then why bother with them?"
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