|
The Democratic party just admitted it doesn't stand for anything. New motto: “Have You Seen The Other Guys?”
 [CurrentAffairs] The Democrats are trying out new campaign slogans, and all of them should leave progressives deeply worried. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) recently sent out a series of proposed bumper stickers, asking party members to vote on which they liked best. The four possibilities included: "Resist, Persist," "She Persisted, We Resisted," "Make Congress Blue Again," and, most tellingly of all, "Democrats 2018: I Mean, Have You Seen the Other Guys?" Many of those on the party’s left have long been concerned that contemporary Democrats don’t seem to actually stand for anything beyond "not being Republicans." The bumper stickers seem to confirm exactly that.The party’s struggle to offer voters reasons to support Democrats has been going on for some time. Bernie Sanders has said explicitly that he doesn’t know what the party’s political principles actually are these days, and even Vox’s Matthew Yglesias has suggested that the party "could use a substantive agenda." But party leaders seem to have adopted the position that having a "substantive agenda" would be unduly divisive. That could be seen very clearly in the recent special congressional election in Georgia: Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, funded by tens of millions of dollars from the national party, carefully refrained from advocating any actual policies. His advertising focused on pointing out the (obvious) fact that he was not Donald Trump, and the closest he came to proposing any legislation was in his plan for "consolidating federal data centers," a policy so arcane that it would put even the wonkiest Capitol Hill politicos to sleep. The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton was similar: Clinton’s strategy was entirely focused on issues of character rather than plans for how to make voters’ lives better, to the point where almost nobody can name a single thing Clinton was promising to do as president. (If you don’t believe me, ask your Clinton-supporting friends what her policy proposals were.) The bumper stickers are the absurd logical endpoint of this approach. Note that they do not imply anything about what the Democrats’ actual values are. It’s not "Democrats: Fighting For a Humane and Decent World," or "Democrats: Because Your Health and Happiness Matter." It’s just "Democrats: We’re Not Them," a statement that is totally empty of meaning. (It is, after all, true by definition that Democrats are not Republicans.) The differences between the parties are reduced to the fact that one of them is the Red Team and the other is the Blue Team. This kind of focus, on why Democrats aren’t Republicans rather than what Democrats actually are, is a strategic disaster. Hillary Clinton lost, Jon Ossoff lost, and since 2010 Democrats have been losing catastrophically at every level of government. Formerly safe blue states now have Republican governors, and in red states Democratic opposition has collapsed completely. Worse, there seems to be almost no recognition in the party leadership that there is even a problem: Nancy Pelosi has flatly rejected the idea that the party needs to change, and if the new bumper stickers are any measure of what the DCCC is planning for 2018, the party’s messaging is only going to get worse rather than better. I have a theory. These days, the new pornos that are coming out show us that leftists are really, really into cuckoldry. Like, the fantasies are being tied down while an Islamic invader fucks and impregnates your wife. They like losing. It's a fetish. Hell, if they won, what would they do? They couldn't be "La Resistance". Posted by: Herb McCoy7309 2017-07-11 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=492279 |