Clinton addresses the "Sanders or I Stay Home" mentality

[BainsBane]

54. Do you have any evidence to suggest the numbers are shrinking?

Have you seen any polls to that effect? Or is your comment based on your social circle and comments online?

People across the political spectrum are fed up with government, hence the emergence of so-called outsider candidates like Trump and Sanders (neither of which really fit that designation but are seen as such). Yet the reason that government doesn't function is because of the increasing political divide, a divide that many of those same voters want to see increased rather than lessened.

Your own voting decisions are entirely up to you. If you don't want the Democratic Party to retain the presidency, you are free to vote for someone else. However, there is a clear terms of service for this site which has to do with commitment to a political party.

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Everyone who signs up for DU agrees to that TOS, only now people are outraged that it is even occasionally enforced.

---(I wound up writing on and on. Please don't think this is directed at you personally because it is not. Rather it was prompted by your comment that fewer and fewer people are Democrats).

As for the Democratic party, new Americans--particularly Hispanic immigrants--are overwhelmingly Democrats, while white Americans are overwhelming Republican. I personally think we are witnessing a new party realignment like the US experienced in the 1930s and then the 1960s-1980s. I think more whites, particularly men, will either migrate to the GOP or outside the Democratic Party in some other way.

There are people who insist they are "true Democrats," but their notion of Democrat seems to mean what it did in the 1950s-60s. They display a great deal of resentment toward America today, not just or even primarily "corporatism" but especially toward Democratic voters. The personal vitriol toward individual Democrats who support a candidate other than Sanders is unparalleled; I have never witnessed anything close to it in my life. That is accompanied by a contempt toward groups of Americans who likewise support other candidates. African Americans are insulted as suffering from Stockholm syndrome and women voters as uninformed, voting based entirely on gender. Both of those arguments are right wing, the sort of thing the GOP has long said about Democratic voters for some time. Now people who claim to be "progressive" engage in the same arguments and some even demand that Hillary Clinton apologize to Trump for making a factual statement. None of that is leftist, not by any stretch the imagination.

We've seen the Democratic Party recently move to the left, but at the same time we see increasing dissatisfaction from the white middle and upper-middle class. Meanwhile, the same people have no problem justifying a candidates' voting with the GOP on guns and immigration. They even justify their candidate's support for drones, while denouncing President Obama as a war criminal for the same policy. The claim that the Democratic party is now, in this election as opposed to all others, suddenly more conservative is not supported by evidence, not when the entirety of the population is taken into account.

Part of the problem, I think, is that those now most disenchanted with the party are people who bought into the mythology of the American dream, who believed the grade-school indoctrination about the US being a government of the people. It has never been that, not for the majority. Global capitalism has wrought changes in the economy that are now experienced throughout American society, including among the white bourgeoisie who previously benefited; the rest of Americans, however, never experienced those same benefits.

An African American president followed by a leading female candidate as a serious contender for the presidency has brought to the fore fissures in American society. Polling demonstrates that this primary cuts along race, class, and gender lines. We have people who average incomes over $80k a year angry that the subaltern doesn't share their same priorities. They assume their concerns and experience are universal, and they refuse to hear otherwise. No matter how many times we explain that that many--in fact the majority--were excluded from prosperity and denied basic rights in the good ole days they long to return to, they repeat the nostalgia. They then turn around and insult those, often far less fortunate, as allied with the 1 percent or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Some arguments are particularly tiring when those doing the lecturing are in the upper 5-10 percent of incomes (or, in one case, the upper 1 percent).

Not a single vote has been cast in the primary, yet some are already calling for write in campaigns. The idea that anyone but their chosen candidate getting the nomination is unacceptable. They can't conceive that the rest of Americans have any legitimate reason to prefer another candidate or care about other issues. They describe the majority of Americans are ignorant, uninformed, as intrinsically less valuable as human beings. Claims that they care about the "99 percent" (an artifice that enables people of means to pretend they are as exploited as the poor) or great equality are exposed as false by their contempt for most American voters. People can claim to care about equality, but when they treat people as less, their rhetoric rings hollow. They can claim they know what is best for the poor and people of color, but when they don't listen to what those voters have to say, they aren't convincing.
Ultimately, their concerns about their own interests, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem comes in assuming those interests are universal, so much so that they refuse to hear what the rest of Americans have to say and insult anyone who disagrees.

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