Why do you think the Democrats aren't acting like there's an existential threat to American democracy?

Politics & Elections
1

I ask this question because I think its answer would inform some of my reactions on various political news stories and discussions.

There’s a lot of despair and frustration out there amongst those on the left, enough that I’ve occasionally wondered whether we’d ever see family annihilations because of the current state of affairs. One refrain I see constantly is that national Democrats don’t, in general, seem to be acting as their some of their voters think they should be acting. Those voters/commentators see an existential threat to American democracy and the Democratic Party in general, perhaps even up to their lives. Thus, it seems that their actions and rhetoric don’t match up to that perceived threat.

Now, Democrats arguably have more skin in the game than the average voter, considering they’re the ones who will lose power, prestige, and (most importantly) money at the least if Republican rule is cemented permanently. So why do you think the current Democratic response isn’t commensurate with that? Some answers that have either come up or that I think of:

  • They’re fatally stupid, either ignoring the threat or everyone who tells them about it. I hesitate to jump to this conclusion, given their ability to get themselves into power to begin with. I’m not dismissing this outright, but I think I’d need more evidence of this than what I’ve seen so far.
  • They’re completely ineffectual/helpless. See above; plus, as I said, part of the complaints is that they’re perceived as not doing anything to begin with.
  • They’re hopelessly naive and stuck on bipartisanship. See above. I also put “they’re simply not convinced that Republicans are a threat to the system” in this category, honestly. If so many random political pundits are talking about it, I don’t see any way a lot of high ranking Democrats aren’t as well.
  • They’re completely corrupt, in hock to the same people the Republicans are, and so are happy to go along with what the Republicans want. Possible, but as I said, the necks of Democratic politicians are maybe literally on the line, and I’m not seeing evidence that they’re being paid enough to abandon self-preservation.
  • They’ve got a cunning plan that they’re keeping completely secret. I had to put it out there, but I’m guessing this is probably not the case.
  • I had another one, but I forgot what it was, goddammit. Noting this here in case the comments bring it up, so I don’t look completely hapless.

So for one reason or another, I’m not satisfied with the obvious answers, so I decided to toss it out there. What do you think the reasons are? I’m speaking mostly to those who share the above opinion, obviously, but others can chime in if they have any guesses.

2

It’s a good question. How are Democratic members of Congress not more galvanized to defend democracy (especially after their very lives were placed in jeopardy on Jan. 6)?

My theory is that the American electorate in general is just not as committed to democratic norms and the rule of law as we were once led to believe. We have one major party that is increasingly openly authoritarian. We also have chronic voter apathy across the political spectrum. And we know that even many of those who vote are far more concerned with day-to-day issues like inflation than what they might consider “abstract” issues like preserving democratic norms.

Because our system is still generally responsive to “the will of the people,” the politicians reflect this disengagement. Democratic politicians have, I think, escalated their rhetoric to warn of the danger to democracy. But the action taken has not been commensurate to the threat (and frankly, it’s not easy to see what kind of action would command the necessary majorities). Only a few Democratic lawmakers (AOC comes to mind) seem passionate about, and willing to jump ahead of their voters in, confronting this threat.

3

I think it is simply that the majority of Democrats are as corrupt and power hungry as the Republicans.

A few, AOC and Sanders come to mind, seem reasonable. I think some, like Biden, are idiots and wont admit the truth to themselves. (See Biden denying american history of discrimination against Asian peoples).

But I think the majority (Joe Manchin being obvious example) are obsessed with power, and realize what the Republicans are doing. I think they are calculating the best way to hold onto their power. They realize if they do the right thing and fight then they will most likely loose. Thus, they are taking the strategy of trying to push right and cozy up to the Republicans so they still have some token position as the Republicans take more control.

4

Cite?

5

What specific actions would be a part of “Democrats…acting like there’s an existential threat to American democracy” and is there a path for those actions to have any effect under our 18th century constitution?

The brass tacks are that Democrats didn’t do so well in a lot of the elections in 2020, 2018, and 2016 that would have enabled more to be done now, and there is no amount of Doing Something now that will change that after the fact. It was pretty obvious on the morning of November 4th, 2020 that this was going to be a do-nothing Congress (with the runoffs in Georgia determining whether it would be do-nothing on legislation only or do-nothing on appointments as well).

6

And realistically, given the severe constraints in place, doing something to save democracy is going to look a lot more like doing quiet, boring stuff to reduce inflation in hopes salvaging some more marginal seats in November, not doing some elevated rhetoric about how Democracy Is Under Attack or losing another 48-52 show vote in the Senate. The people who are motivated by that stuff are already motivated.

7

Should’ve seen this coming.

here is article discussing it, and John Oliver’s views on it: John Oliver on Atlanta Shootings: “Anti-Asian Racism Has Long Been a Fact of Life” – The Hollywood Reporter

and the show the article was referring too: Asian Americans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube

In short: Biden said that hate crimes against Asians are un-american. John Oliver points out, correctly in my opinion, that if you look at the history of the US it is obviously filled with hate crimes against Asians. Therefore, saying that hate crimes against Asians are un-american is being entirely oblivious to American history.

There is plenty the Democrats can do. The Republicans are masters of rhetoric, but the Democrats seem to be severely rhetorically challenged. The Democrats need to SELL themselves to the voters. I.E. often I see Democrats advertise how moral they are “Vote for us because we’re good!” This is stupid, no one actually cares about morality. It doesn’t motivate to vote. The Democrats need to pay attention to the types of rhetoric that motivates people. I.E. Democrat advertisements should play off fear (without lying or distorting truth). I.E., should read like (if in a Gerrymandered state ) “The Republicans have gerry-mandered your state so that your vote only matters 1/4 of theirs! Vote for us, the true party of law and order so we can fight for your rights!”
Or “The Republicans have actively attempted to take over our government. Vote for us so we can bring these criminals to justice before they try again!”

Stop campaigning on helping the poor or “other people”. No one, unfortunately, cares about other people. Base campaigns about how “YOU” will be helped, and all the terrible things that will happen to “YOU” specifically if the Republicans win.

“The Republicans have attacked your right to make enough money to live! The constantly lower the minimum wage, increases taxed for you, and give money to their corporate sponsors. Vote for us and we’ll fight for your American right to support your family!”

8

That’s not denying that discrimination happened. That’s saying that discrimination goes against the principles America, as a country, are supposed to be practicing.

9

Apparently Biden was supposed to say that hate crimes against Asians is as American as apple pie.

10

Yes, yes he should have.

As well as hate crimes against almost every other minority as well.

Anything less is a denial of American history

11

Anything other than what Joe said is a denial of American aspirations.

12

He wants to reduce these hate crimes; saying they are un-American is a rhetorical strategy to try and increase their stigma in order to reduce them.

13

It’s a piss poor rhetorical strategy.
Who does it target? It only targets those who are already convinced that the US has a systematic history of racism and that drastic personal action needs to be taken to fix it. This is a small portion of American society (otherwise the Republican party would not be such a problem).

A more proper strategy is to point out the problem, point out how terrible it is for YOU (targeting white men mainly), and then detail precise positive action that needs to be taken to protect yourself.

This is my exact point about the Democratic party. You assume everyone thinks like you, that everyone (or the majority) is fundamentally good. You must realize the average american doesn’t give any real damn about minorities. Many Americans will pay lip-service to fighting racism, right up till it inconveniences them. You must face the fact that American exceptionalism is not only a malicious lie, but is believed by the majority of Americans to be pure truth.

Fighting hate-crime is NOT a typical American aspiration, as few Americans think it is a real systematic problem. Ask Americans on the street what it means to be American. None will say it means fighting against hate and racism, or fighting for immigrant rights. The closest they get is a vague mention of “freedom”, with no further thought to what it means.

Once you face this, that your job is to force normal selfish people to sacrifice and fight, then you’ll start to sell to their selfishness instead of appealing to their non-existent better nature.

14

To answer your question, we need to clarify what exactly the existential threat is. The obvious answer is that the threat is the Republican Party, but that has only been true relatively recently. The seeds may have been planted a while back, but the actual threat started only some time in the week or so after the 2020 election, when Trump decided he wasn’t going to go peacefully. Up until then, if you had asked me what the most immediate existential threat to the United States was, I would have said global warming. My guess is that most other educated people would have given the same answer. That means we’ve had about 1 1/2 years for the Democratic Party to switch gears, and the one that needs switching into is a particularly gnarly one to deal with.

We’re not talking about an impersonal force like an asteroid headed our way, or a seemingly impersonal force like global warming, or even a foreign human threat like Putin, China, or al Qaeda. We’re instead having to deal with a substantial segment of the US population now seemingly wanting to bring the whole thing down. To use some terms from D&D, the Republicans have gone from the party of lawful evil under the likes of Reagan, Bush Jr., Cheney, and even the first two to three years of Trump, to the party of chaotic evil, maybe neutral evil at best. That’s a much more difficult task to try to address than dealing with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.

15

For a start, how about indicting Donald Trump and others for inciting the January 6 insurrection. And yes, there absolutely is a path for those actions to have an effect under the constitution.

16

I didn’t realize that was something the Democrats could do!

17

Because the Republican campaign of stochastic terrorism, which is intended to intimidate and chill opposition, is working as intended.

18

Democrats are doing as much as they can. Voters have given Democrats such extremely slim margins that they must work with conservative Democrats and Republicans or get nothing done. If voters want Democrats to be effective and not bipartisan, then they need to elect enough Democrats to be effective.

Too many voters expect the impossible. If anyone else were president, there might be more shouting or whining coming from the White House, but nothing more would be getting done because we’ve created a hobbled Congress.

19

I think it is multifaceted.

  1. Democrats top leadership is a gerontocracy, Hoyer, Pelosi and Biden are all over 75, Schumer is 71. They all have many decades of experience in Washington. Much of that time in Washington, Republicans beat the drum of “Democrats are socialists” and other rhetoric, frequently pandering to a somewhat extremist base. However, at the end of the day they could “work” with most Republican elected leaders. Biden and McConnell have certainly sat down for lunches together going back decades. I think this has just fatally colored their real recognition of what is happening. I think they simply have not fully accepted that the sort of Republican who used to talk a big talk on right wing issues, but still at core accepted the premise of democracy and understood it meant compromise is not the norm, the party has been taken over by extremists. I’m not fully sure how they haven’t grokked this yet when they saw the GOP House leadership progress from Boehner (more of a compromise Republican) to Ryan (tea party, but committed to democratic norms) to McCarthy (completely fascist / authoritarian, en fief to the extremist base) and think nothing is going differently. Then you had Trump elected, who ran on almost entirely fascist rhetoric, and frequently abused the Presidency for authoritarian reasons. Then you had 1/6, and McCarthy and many other Republicans not standing up for democracy. The gerontocracy at the top of the party is frankly, blind.

  2. To some degree I think the top leadership is so blind because they are all just such “creatures of the system”, I don’t think they can fully believe the system on which they built their careers is really a threat to democracy. On some level they still think it’s just rhetoric and a way for the GOP to fundraise and rile up their base. This is a fatal blinder.

  3. Democrats have not known how to conduct grievance politics since the 1960s. This is odd, because frankly the Democrats won their New Deal coalition and held on to the House for so many years largely because they understood grievance politics. The late Mark Shields, a lifetime Democrat who got his start in the 60s, recently said before his passing that the Democrats used to be the “party of blue collar guys with a shot and a beer lined up at the bar after work.” I think some of this stems from the Clinton transition to the Democratic “Third Way”, once the core of the Democratic party was as pro-big business as the Republican party, it became somewhat hard for the Democrats to attack “elites”, and in fact now Democrats are associated with cultural elitism–they can’t ding the Republicans for being vassals to the economic elite because…Democrats have clearly become vassals to the economic elite as well. This ties into the threat to democracy because Democrats as a party that now don’t believe in attacking pillars of “the system” can’t meaningfully campaign on a crisis because it would require them to attack things they don’t want to attack. The Republicans campaign on crises that they are happy to wage grievance war on–things like immigration, sexual “deviancy”, and loss of Christianity.

  4. To quote the Wire–“you want it to be one way, but it isn’t, it’s the other way.” Democrats really want elections to be about social welfare programs, and they want there to be a political system where if you win enough votes to deliver social welfare programs to people who need them, those people will reward you with more votes. That is not how it works. Maybe it worked that way in the New Deal and Great Society eras, but it doesn’t work that way now. Many of the biggest beneficiaries of the PPACA were in red States like Kentucky–where its Kynect PPACA health marketplace has been very popular. Yet in 2012 and 2016 many of the same Kentucky voters who liked their new access to healthcare voted strongly against Democrats. Modern social welfare policies tend to be complicated and hard to understand, the Democrats got a lot of money to the lower income quartile and middle-income quartiles when Biden became President, to no political benefit–this is partially because it’s easy to sort of obscure who granted these people what. Meanwhile the GOP are dominating narratives focusing on issues like cultural decay, “crime infested cities” and et cetera. The Democrats have long wanted to view the culture wars as a distraction, but unfortunately culture wars are winning elections, and Democrats aren’t just losing the culture war battles, they are largely not even contesting the field of battle. This ties in to the threat to democracy in that part of why Democrats can’t respond, is they don’t know how to fight the fights that matter in this era of politics. They clearly have not figured it out despite it having gone this direction back in 2010.

20

That’s quite a stretch, and putting quite a few words into mouths that don’t belong to you. By your standard, saying anything is un-American other than white supremacy and a foundation of slavery is “being entirely oblivious to American history.” I took the statement as being aspirational, in that hate crimes against Asians (or anyone, for that matter) are not the America that Biden wants to see.

Lies are easier to sell than the truth. Would you rather me tell you that you are getting a pony (assuming you like ponies) or be honest with you and tell you that, while we are working hard on it, there probably won’t be a pony in the future? When you don’t get the pony I promised, I will blame my political opposition, even though they are the ones actually trying to get you a pony, and I am the one that is obstructing them.

Messaging also has the problem that the right has an entire network dedicated to spreading their lies. If they want to get a message out, they just call up their buddies and get all the time they want. Then they get fawning adulation from the talking heads all day long about their message. The counterpart is not nearly as Democrat friendly. Sure, they are a bit less biased towards the right, but they still have their corporate masters to answer to, and they are still far more critical of messages coming from the left. I mean, just look at what I started this post in response to. A president trying to show solidarity with victims of violence is accused of being entirely oblivious to American history based on contrived and motivated interpretation. How can the Democrats put out any message usefully, when it’s not only going to be misrepresented by their political opposition, but by those supposedly on their side as well?

I’ve never seen this. Can you cite anyone actually saying the words you have put in their mouth, or is this just your interpretation of their words?

So, “Vote for us because we are good?” Admit it, if they said the exact words that you just used, that would be your interpretation of what they said. They do talk about the dangers of gerrymandering, and how that will harm the electorate’s rights.

That sounds like the entire point of the Jan 6th hearings.

Who is “you” in this? Are we saying that poor or “other people” are to be ignored, that they are not a “you” to be addressed? I mean, poor people do vote, as well as “other people”, so you are just writing off all of those. You also are writing off the votes of people who actually do care about people who are not themselves. Honestly, as a white cis-het male business owner, the Democrats aren’t in much of a position to help me out, terrible things won’t happen to me if the Republicans win. So, your message is alienating all minorities and anyone who doesn’t make $70,000 a year, and not motivating any white men, and probably not that many white women either. Who is your demographic here that you think you are catering to?

Nah, I’ve done well under Republicans. Now, part of this is that Republicans make a mess, Democrats work to fix it and are blamed for not fixing it fast enough while being obstructed by the Republicans. After the Democrats finally get things stable again, Republicans take over and claim that starting on third base is an accomplishment. Now, I understand that, but much of the public doesn’t, and it’s too complex an issue for a simple message to get that across.

Besides, you just said we shouldn’t be worried about the poor, then you make a message directed at the poor?

Both of those are actually untrue. The minimum wage has never been lowered,and while it hasn’t kept up with inflation, that’s not what your message says. And the last Republican to raise taxes was 30 years ago.

Eh, so do Democrats.

You mean, “Vote for us because we’re good!”?