Unfortunately so. My suggestion on how to deal with the problem would likely be unpopular with Democratic leadership, but IMHO it just might work. Democrats need to become the party of Law and Order. They need to point out that the 1/6/2021 insurrectionists, including Trump, are no better than various other groups of barbarians that have brought down other historical empires. Yes, this means Garland getting off his ass and starting legal proceedings against Trump and pushing for longer sentences against the insurrectionists. It also means that those running for office need to begin fighting fire with fire. Remember the Willie Horton add Bush Sr. used back in the day? Democrats need to do the same, only instead of demonizing the Scary Black Barbarian (Clarence Thomas excepted), they need to start demonizing the Scary White Barbarian, calling them out for what they are. If this means having to give up things like criminal justice reform, then so be it.
Become the party of Law and Order to win back the suburban middle class, which IMHO is where the electoral fight is. Forget about defunding the police. Democrats should instead talk about reforming the police. Fire the bad officers and hire good ones. Make Protect and Serve the true mission of police forces around the country. If a violent person gets on the force and violates the public trust, charge them criminally. Yes, this would mean locking up a lot of criminally violent young Black and Latino men as well. I, personally, would have no problem with that, since this would mean locking away insurrectionists for a long time as well.
I’m a white man. Can you tell me how terrible anti-Asian discrimination is for ME? Also, keep in mind that you said to stop campaigning on helping “other people”. Are asians “other people” in your calculous here?
The problem is is that we don’t need more people to vote for Democrats, we need people who have Republican congresscritters to vote for Democrats.
If Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer get more votes, that’s not going to do anything. What needs to happen is for the people in Ohio or Pennsylvania or other states with Republican senators up for election to vote for Democrats.
Agreed there. It’s part of the cycle that the Democrats do the best they can with what they are given to work with, but it’s not good enough for some, so they stay home for the midterms, and so the Democrats have even less, or are even in the minority.
Why does OP presume to know what I think?
And the ‘Biden denies Asian hate’ nugget is just the kind of thing one must struggle heroically to believe.
This American is actually pleased to see an independent DOJ again.
I agree. It’s probably distasteful for someone like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer to even think about, but they need to start re-learning about how FDR and LBJ did things back in the day. Democrats need to stop being the Nice Guy and really start hitting hard against the people who are actually causing the problems.
Many in the Democrat leadership are rich and powerful people who believe that, come what may, they personally will be just fine.
Their only skill is to conduct business as usual via consensus-seeking. They are unequipped to function in a reality where their main skill no longer works, and are therefore disinclined to see that this reality is now at hand.
They suffer from a colossal amount of torpor and inertia that’s born of being the only game in town w/r/t pushing back on Republicans. Many voters would love to solve this with a third party, but understand this would mean handing power fully to Republicans at a time when this seems like national suicide.
So, the Democrat elite aren’t really fighting because they don’t really feel that they need to. They feel no real threat from Republicans, they feel no real threat from their own voters, and they have no capacity or motivation to imagine any outcome more serious than losing the next 2-3 elections.
I broadly agree with you on background, but not on strategy. I think Biden’s rhetorical strategy (in this instance) is more likely to appeal to the selfishness and ignorance of most Americans, by pretending that violence against Asians and other minorities is some terrible outlier that must be opposed because of its danger to everyone, rather than the norm throughout history.
Go back to leaning into healthcare reform, hard. The Republicans have successfully derailed that message with their cries of SOCIALISM, and the Democrats have played into their hands by pulling back. If you ask they will tell you in a whisper that they have been quietly enacting healthcare reforms (like insulin pricing), but they seem scared to champion them. I think the need for further healthcare reform is an issue that could resonate with red state Americans if presented properly. Even my racist “Trump won” neighbor is in favor of universal healthcare - she’s an exception because she European, but still……in listening to “insurrectionist stories”, I’ve found that “I got screwed by the healthcare system” is a common theme - they’ve just been taught to blame black and brown people. Maybe there’s opportunity for a breakthrough here.
Go with REPUBLICANS WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY as a primary message. Run big, loud scary ads featuring senior citizens dying in the streets, with the selective quotes from Republicans in favor of Social Security “reform”. Don’t worry about the half-truths and fact checkers……Republicans don’t check facts anymore.
And this one is going to be controversial, but stop hating on rich people with money and power. Align with the ones that are on your side on social issues. Align with corporations in pushing back against the erosion of civil rights. If they offer you money, TAKE IT! You don’t have to change your stances, but change the message to “a healthy, well-educated and financially secure workforce and consumer base is GOOD for business” instead of “Rich people are evil, billionaire tears!”.
I’ve been saying this for years. Democrats need to grow a spine and fight dirty. They’re in a war with people who lie, blatantly, yet rarely are called out on it. It just isn’t polite to call your opponents liars, in the old-world way politics used to work. Those days are long gone. And people like Manchin and Sinema need to be slapped upside the head and get with the program.
In response to the OP, I would argue that one reason Democrats aren’t acting like there’s an existential threat is because there isn’t much way to push back against the threat without becoming precisely the boogeyman they’re portrayed by Republicans to be.
Right now, Republicans have portrayed Democrats as villains who want to seize or maintain power by any ill means they can (you can claim that’s mirror-projection, but that’s off-topic.) If right now, Democrats were to pack the Supreme Court, forcefully clamp down on Republicans, throw some Republicans in jail, pass laws intended to make it easier for D’s to win and harder for R’s to win, etc. then they’d be confirming that image in Republican heads, thus further driving up R-turnout and making the R’s all the more determined to pass laws that allow Republican gerrymandering (“It’s our only hope, we need everything we can to fight against the D-threat.”)
I think the solution to the Manchin and Simena problem is “make them insignificant by electing more Democratic senators and increasing the majority”. It’s a universal problem with slim majorities, the Republicans had the same problem with McCain. Simena should be primaried by a good candidate, but Manchin is probably the best you’re ever going to get out of West Virginia (unless the Republicans make an Alabamaesque mistake and run a sex offender) and at least he’s keeping a Republican out of the seat. It’s infuriating, but it was a predictable outcome,
My understanding is that that is the position of the Democratic party for the most part. And, while I have no problem with it, it is why parts of the lefter side of the party complain about Democrats being no better than Republicans. If you take any money from any business, you are exactly the same.
I agree with the first part, but disagree with the latter. IMHO we need more people like Manchin and Sinema. That’s the only way to break through the system we have where rural voters have more power than urban voters (and I don’t mean gerrymandering, I mean the electoral college and the way the senate is apportioned). Imagine if instead of just those two, we had another 10 or 20 of them in the senate, and maybe a good 20 or 30 in the house. All from red states of course. Imagine, for example, if we had Senator Henry Cuellar (D) - Texas, instead of Ted Cruz (R) - Texas. Or Andy Beshear (D) - Kentucky instead of Mitch McConnell (R) - Kentucky. If the national party would signal to those types that they can run as conservative blue dog Democrats and we won’t hammer you on your conservative positions, that would go a long way to bringing back working class voters. The alternative to Joe Manchin is having another Trump Republican, not Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you there. The Republicans are good at predicting what the consequences of their actions should be, and claiming in advance that those consequences would be a form of persecution.
“If I rob that bank, the cops are going to chase me, maybe even shoot at me, and then they are going to put me in jail! How unfair.”
Then you go out and rob the bank, and when the cops chase you, shoot at you, and put you in jail, you say, “See, I told you so!”
Unfortunately, enough of the American public is disengaged enough that that sort of tactic works.
Sinema maybe, because Arizona is purple, but how do you slap a guy like Manchin when he represents a state that went for Trump by 40 percentage points? The Democrats have no leverage over him.
With a state like West Virginia, you either get a Democrat as conservative as Manchin as your senator, or you get…a Republican. Under no circumstances do you get a liberal Democratic senator.
This one is big for me, because I’m a liberal and I’m also a capitalist than owned a successful small business for 25 years.
I’m a big fan of business regulation. As an honest business owner that cared about my employees and community, regulations prevented me from being undercut by companies with harmful practices and allowed me to run my business in a way that aligned with my values.
And I believe we should be working towards universal healthcare, because if businesses and individuals were freed from outrageously high healthcare premiums they would have more money to spend on other things. My insurance premiums in the 5 years before I qualified for Medicare were larger than most people’s mortgages, and in that time the sum total of my healthcare (which cost about 40k over 5 years) was one wrist X-ray, it wasn’t even broken. I think the money freed up would more than offset the increase in taxes for most people, and lead to general economic stimulus.
And I’m in favor of increased immigration because while immigrants “take” jobs, they also create jobs simply because they buy food and housing and services, just like non-immigrant people. And I think increased immigration is an ideal economic solution to the current labor shortages. I think there should be a program where large retailers and food processing companies can set up shop near the border to interview and sponsor immigrants.
I don’t like taxes, who does, but a tax cut isn’t real if it’s accompanied by a cut in services that you now have to purchase from the private sector, and by the same metric a tax increase that funds healthcare and higher education costs isn’t really an increase for most people. And businesses will benefit from a healthy, well-educated work force.
And maybe I’m an optimist, but I think this reasoning should appeal to any sane conservatives that might still exist.
This basically sounds like “they’re corrupt and stupid” to me. But if that’s your answer, that’s your answer; I deliberately tried to leave it open to that being the response.
(Though I’ve always had a small doubt about the general rich person willingness to “cash out” on society, that’s another topic entirely.)
And it feeds despondency in voters. Being in California and always voting Democratic, there’s nothing else I can do vote-wise. I have local friends who say “I voted Democrat and elected Republicans are still being shitheads, so why should I vote anymore?”. For people who slept through civics class and barely pay attention to current politics, it feels to them like their vote didn’t matter. Republican and Russian trolls feed that.
This may be a good discussion to have, but it is a hijack to this thread. The intent of this thread is to discuss a perceived lack of response on the part of Democrats concerning threats to American democracy itself.
Please start a new thread if you wish to discuss hate crimes against Asians and cease discussion of this narrow topic in this thread. Thanks.
But if that’s your answer, that’s your answer; I deliberately tried to leave it open to that being the response.