In the impeachment thread, folk have been questioning just about every step the Dems have taken. And this is not an unusual incident. It does not seem uncommon that the Dems take stances with little clear idea of how to attain effective results. Whereas the Repubs seem more effective in achieving practical results.
So why are Dems generally so ineffective? Ho have they NOT been able to score more apparent results against someone as incompetent and offensive as Trump? Many of the Dem Congresscritters are quite intelligent, and I assume they are more knowledgeable and experienced that the likes of us Dopers in the ways of Congress and how to achieve results.
But HOW could Hillary have lost to Trump?! And HOW could Kerry have lost to W? Why did Obama not achieve more?
I acknowledge that there have been positive trends over the past 50 years - from the Civil Rights legislation in the 60s, through recent action on gay rights, legal pot, disability rights, and ACA.
-Am I being myopic WRT specific issues, and not giving enough weight to the consistent positive trend? Because the Trump’s judicial appointments are going to be HUGE for decades to come. Womens’ rights and minority voting rights are under constant attack. The idea that he could well have 4 more years to push his agenda on the national and international stage will GREATLY affect our nation’s course well into the future - as well as changing the idea of what is acceptable political behavior.
-Are Dems constrained by some factors Repubs aren’t?
-Why do Dems seem to squander every opportunity they are given?
Is the truth that both Dems and Repubs are beholden to the same monied interests?
-Are Dems just too diverse and disorganized compared to Repubs?
At the outset, I admit that I am quite liberal on most issues. And I personally think most liberal trends reflect an enlightened, inclusive, and humanistic approach. It also seems as though at least some aspects of most liberal positions have a majority support among Americans.
Flippant answer is: Dems are playing chess with a pigeon. Republicans enable Trump & Co., then strut around, shitting on the board, knocking over the pieces and declaring victory. MAGAcult eats it up.
Serious answer: Dems are limited by the higher ground they have staked out for themselves. It’s tricky to stand for higher principled ideals while behaving like an unconscionable jackass and continue to get away with it for very long if you’re a Dem. Not that some haven’t tried.
It’s difficult to play hard-ball when you’re busy trying to be nice. The Democratic party is the party of niceness, for good or ill, and that hinders them in being as hard-nosed as they probably need to be.
They’re more scattered in terms of actions than the GOP. The GOP has very firm party discipline, and tends to goosestep in unison to whatever the party has decided they should be doing. Democrats are more free to do what they want, which is good in a sense, but also means that even when you have a vote like yesterday’s impeachment vote, you STILL have two clowns who voted no, while not a single Republican representative voted “yes”, even though I’d have thought normal conscience and awareness of what’s right would have won through on a few of them.
They’re more ideologically disparate- some are progressives, some are center-left, some are a blend, and some are even further to the edges of the party. And there’s no party push to really present a clear, coherent and unified message; you have Elizabeth Warren saying one thing, Biden another, and Buttigieg a third, and they’re all apparently kosher as far as the party is concerned. So the debates and the public in general are centered around WHAT direction the party may be going, and not (like the Republicans) about how they’re going to implement the party platform. I mean, IS single payer healthcare a plank in the national platform? What is the plank? And if there is one, why aren’t they all talking about how they’ll implement it, instead of pushing their own personal solutions?
Combine those three, and it’s really hard for the Democrats to have the same sort of overall directed effect that the GOP has.
[ul]
[li]Liberals are generally less united than conservatives, due to greater diversity and other infighting factors. “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”[/li][li]Liberal messaging is often considerably more complex than conservative messaging, which tends to be simple and to the point.[/li][li]To a certain extent, structural disadvantages such as 2-Senators-per-state, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering.[/li][li]Some liberalism goes against human nature (such as the teaching that there are more than 2 genders, which strikes many people as flouting common sense, or calling for leniency in criminal sentencing rather than stiff punishment.)[/li][li]Much of the mainstream media is liberal, which means that conservatives generally have a good idea of what liberals want or stand for, but liberals generally do not understand conservatives as well vice versa, which hampers liberals in winning red-state votes.[/li]Liberal views that support LGBT or a minority are, by definition, in the statistical minority. It will be clashing with a statistical majority.[/ul]
I’m not convinced the Republicans ARE any more effective at achieving practical results. They haven’t achieved a lot of stuff they’ve been campaigning on for years (repealing Obamacare, banning abortion, cutting government spending) despite having had unified control of the executive and legislative branches, and the majority of state governments, prior to the 2018 elections. (A reasonable observer might question whether they actually wanted to achieve all of these things, many of which are more popular in theory than their results would be in practice – but this is probably true of a lot of Democratic policies as well.)
The real problem is that accomplishing stuff is hard, requires a ton of compromise even within one’s own party, and is usually unpopular with the public, who tend to be hopelessly split between those who like the status quo just fine, those who like the proposed new policy, and those who want some-other-solution-but-not-this-one. Also that electing a member of any party to the presidency seems to spark an almost immediate backlash, these days, so barring unusual circumstances like 9/11, a party has to make its downballot gains BEFORE recapturing the presidency.
Are the Dems constrained by some factor that the Republicans aren’t? Yes, they are. They are constrained by morality. The Republicans will do whatever it takes to win, whether it’s right or not. They will cheat, collude with foreign powers, and anything else they can think of if it will help them win an election. The Republican base is aware of this, they just don’t care. To make an analogy from comic books, the Democrats are like Superman and the Republicans are like Lex Luthor. In a fair fight Superman will win, but Lex Luthor doesn’t fight fair.
Why do Democrats squander every opportunity they are given? I take this to mean Clinton’s and Obama’s victories in 1992 and 2008 and the subsequent red waves in 1994 and 2010. I think what happened is that in both cases the Democrats started with a controversial topic in health care reform rather than focusing on more straightforward things where even the Republican base (not the politicians, Gingrich and McConnell were not persuadable) could be persuaded to go along. Infrastructure, for example, would probably have been a better place to start.
Are the Democrats and Republicans both beholden to the same moneyed interests? No, they aren’t. Democrats are not beholden to interests like the fossil fuel industry and their campaign to not do anything about global warming. Democrats are not beholden to the pharmaceutical industry and their campaign to charge Americans exorbitant prices for medications like insulin, epipens, or colchicine.
Are Democrats to diverse compared to Republicans? Yes. We’ve reached a point where the Republicans are defined by one large group and Democrats as everyone else who doesn’t belong to that group. This tends to lead to a “perfect is the enemy of the good” problem. Rural white cis-het evangelicals and Catholics are a large group and mostly monolithic. Democrats have to cobble together minorities of different kinds that don’t have things in common other than that they don’t check all the boxes in the Republican category. There’s religious minorities, racial minorities, gender minorities, sexual orientation minorities, and so on. A gay white guy from San Francisco, a black woman from Mobile, a Muslim from Detroit, and a Latino atheist from San Antonio don’t have much in common other than that they don’t fit into the dominant group.
If your objectives are to roll things back to the point in time when things were “great”, you arguably have less work to do compared to trying to solve complicated problems to continue to move forward. e.g. To solve rising demands for cheap energy, Republicans just decided to drill more oil, frack more, and dig up more coal; Screw the environmental protection laws - just repeal them!
Not only do such groups often share little in common, they can outright clash. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and trans people, for instance, are usually overwhelmingly liberal/Democratic, but the former is by definition highly hostile to the latter.
Gays and Muslims, too, are by and large Democratic but Islam is arguably the world’s most homophobic religion.
Trump and conservatives appeal to more fundamental human instincts, and they play by a less complicated set of rules. The Republicans campaign on tribalism and they don’t care if their messages are based on facts. They take advantage of the masses of people in a democracy who don’t want to do the hard work of finding facts and analyzing the truth. I think that, for the foreseeable future, the Republicans will always have an advantage.
[ul]
[li]Liberals are generally less united than conservatives, due to greater diversity and other infighting factors. “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”[/li][li]Liberal messaging is often considerably more complex than conservative messaging, which tends to be simple and to the point.[/li][li]To a certain extent, structural disadvantages such as 2-Senators-per-state, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering.[/li][li]Some liberalism goes against human nature (such as the teaching that there are more than 2 genders, which strikes many people as flouting common sense, or calling for leniency in criminal sentencing rather than stiff punishment.)[/li][li]Much of the mainstream media is liberal, which means that conservatives generally have a good idea of what liberals want or stand for, but liberals generally do not understand conservatives as well vice versa, which hampers liberals in winning red-state votes.[/li][li]Liberal views that support LGBT or a minority are, by definition, in the statistical minority. It will be clashing with a statistical majority.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
•You’re assuming that only LGBT people support LGBT issues. Not true. Almost two-thirds of Americans support gay marriage, for instance.
• Some liberalism goes against human nature? Don’t you mean goes against your take on human nature? And while you’re correct that more liberals understand and accept that nature is, in fact, less binary than many had previously believed, the majority of Americans–again, about two-thirds--say they’ve become more accepting of transgender issues in the last five years.
• The mainstream media looks more liberal if you’re viewing it from a rightward slant. Those who watch conservative-biased media have less understanding of what liberals stand for, not more, because they’re not watching “liberal” media; they’re watching Fox News and its warped, propagandistic take on liberal views.
My suggestion largely reflected something I once read comparing the donors to Obama and McCain - which were VERY similar. Many/most of the same big businesses contribute to both sides. And Dems are no strangers to bringing home the pork.
It just seems so frustrating that - however diverse the Dems, that they cannot clearly identify the Repubs as the enemy of ALL of them, and acknowledge the vast desirability of achieving AT LEAST incremental improvement AND maintaing past victories.
Sometimes I resent the far left, who seem to act as tho if they cannot immediately achieve their extreme agenda, that they’d just as soon blow up the whole mess. But then I feel that Obama wasted too much time/effort TRYING to be reasonable w/ the Repubs, when the Repubs had no interest in meeting anywhere near the middle. But when I see the crowd of Dem candidates, I’m torn between voting for an electable mediocrity, or voting for some extreme change agent who will at least firmly plant the goalposts in the back of the endzone.
We used to have an independent media. Now we have a handful of megacorporations that control what gets reported*. The Republicans are the party that serves corporate special interests so they get favorable coverage.
*It’s not even a full handful. Four corporations - Comcast, Disney, National Amusements, and AT&T - control over ninety percent of the media outlets in the United States.
Speaking as something of an outsider (typically not a Democratic voter, except since about 2015-2016), I think this is something of a huge problem.
Not only does the extreme left act like they’d sooner blow it all up than vote for someone who isn’t in completely with their agenda, they don’t seem to realize that politics takes compromise and communication, and that being on the extreme end, they’re going to have to play a long-term game, instead of being frustrated that their extreme agenda isn’t getting traction.
But they don’t, and their antics combined with a reluctance of other Democratic politicians to call them out on their behavior or unreasonability of their agenda, can be seen as tacit acceptance of those ideas. That’s something that turns a LOT of people right off- they might be ok with Obama/Clinton/Biden style left-of-center politics, but they’re not about to get on board with socialist or a significant degree of overt wealth redistribution. And by not saying “No, those people are f**king crazy; the Democratic party isn’t about that.” they’re in effect saying they are about that.
Their best bet IMO would be to try and change attitudes within the party- in essence try to get some of their policies to be within the Overton Window through convincing the party faithful that their agenda isn’t as weird as it seems or maybe by trying to pave the way with lesser policies that could eventually lead to their agenda being adopted.
Any appearance of ineffectiveness on the part of Democrats is due to McConnell abusing his power as majority leader. The House has passed hundreds of bills, many bipartisan, that Mitch simply refuses to allow the Senate to vote on because he can and there is no mechanism to make him. Then there’s all the Obama judicial appointees he blocked and Trump appointees he rushed through for the same reason.
Meanwhile, out where he has no power Democrats flipped the House, several state houses, and governor’s mansions as well. Oh, and they impeached a President when barely more than three months ago most people thought it wouldn’t happen.
I want to say the Democrats are trying to do what’s best for the country as a whole. I don’t think that’s 100% true, but I think it’s a lot truer of them than of the Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans are playing the zero-sum game of Republicans vs Democrats.
Sure, but why does this BIG TICKET item - the impeachment, come across as a slowly leaking balloon? Damned if I can see the gameplan where the impeachment - and/or the Mueller investigation, bears significant fruit where it matters. Sure, there MAY be all manner of lawsuits when he is out of office, but why aren’t the Dems able to get PR behind them NOW? Even the most rbid liberals I know are thinking this awfully weak beer.
I gotta figure the Dems have enough high-powered PR specialists and strategists working for them. But damned if I see their plan. Of course, I imagine that if I am not in one of the 3-5 key states, or a state w/ a Senate seat at issue, I might be unaware of the efforts underway.
WRT impeachment there’s only one potential positive outcome that I can see. If there are others I’d be happy to know about them. The good outcome is if Republican senators from blue and purple states are seen to be unfair by the swing voters in those states and end up losing reelection. Even that seems to me to be iffy at best. Removing Trump from office is a non-starter. Trying to win the general populace over with the impeachment articles will also go nowhere due to the right wing media and how they are presenting this. I’m not sure what else that leaves as a potential positive outcome. Maybe it helps the more liberal representatives by allowing them to claim they did something, and thus avoiding being primaried from the center?
I never thought there was a chance in hell of getting the bum out. I am surprised any other than cockeyed optimists woulda thought so. The current Repubs - the same folk who said their primary goal was defeating EVERYTHING Obama proposed - clearly indicated they had no desire of refreshing any familiarity with honor and professionalism.
So lacking that as a possible outcome, I hoped it would do any or all of the following:
-reduce his chances for re-election
-distract him/hamper his ability to push his agenda
-enhance chances of picking up senate/house seats/governors/etc
If they didn’t expect ANYTHING other than his immediate ouster, I really gotta wonder why they pursued it. Or what else have they been pursuing to improve electoral chances next year.