Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together! by Eric Raymond. The Republicans need a serious counterpoise. Democrats, your problems are legion and deep:
First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. …
Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. …
Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night. …
Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost. …
Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump. …
The illusion is shattered forever, and we no longer believe.
Trump has popped the preference bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.
That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated. …
What the Democrats need to do: stop the mad dash for double or nothing under the influence of your activists, and get back to the political center where the votes are.
You need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.
That center is far to the right of what you would prefer. For that matter it is rather the right of where I would prefer – but facts are facts and denying them isn’t going to help. You Democrats need to think about what it takes to be competitive on a continuum where Fox News is barely right of center, Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch liberal, and as near as I could tell the politician who actually nailed the psephological center in 2008 was none other than Sarah Palin. …
It’s probably going to get worse for the Dems before it gets better:
State-level control means the Republicans will largely determine redistricting in the 2020 census. Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well. …
Trump’s popularity has risen as his program becomes clearer. You need to be positioned so that you can cope with outcomes other than catastrophic disenchantment with Trumpian populism.
Suggestions:
The most obvious thing is that you have to stop contemptuously dismissing the largest single demographic segment of the American electorate. Because believe me, they noticed. So did their wives and children.
This has larger implications than you may yet understand. It’s not just that you need to take any Democrat who uses the phrase “angry white men” out to the woodshed and beat him or her with a strap until he/she wises up. The whole apparatus of racial and ethnic identity politics is turning in your hand, reversing (like your old-media dominance) from an asset to a liability.
Just to drive the point home, the gender card doesn’t work any more either. Trump is a feminist’s worst nightmare. He won anyway. …
Your worst — and increasingly likely — case is that white people now begin voting as something like an ethnic bloc. This is, after all, how you’ve been teaching other ethnic groups to play the game since the 1960s.
You will not prevent this development by screaming “racism!”. Here’s a hot tip: people you dismiss as retrograde scum will not, in general, vote for you. In fact, one of the things you Democrats most urgently need to do is banish “racism” and “sexism” from your political vocabulary.
While these words point at some real problems, they are also a trap. They lead you to organize your political pitch around virtue-signaling, exclusion and demonization. … You were trapped by your own privilege theory. You demonized a plurality of American voters, and in return they gave you Trump.
What, and argue with people instead of shouting them down? De-legitimizing, de-funding, and de-platfroming all your opposition is no longer working–see “Internet.”
You Democrats don’t just need to reform your gun policy, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present policy looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.
You Democrats don’t just need to reform your rhetoric about racism and sexism, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present rhetoric looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.
I grew up in a very white area of the country and remember there being high levels of social trust, low crime, and a general esprit de corps and happiness in the community. You could leave your door unlocked and be reasonably certain that nobody could come and steal your belongings. I’ve since lived in a lot of different places, and can say with reasonable certainty that the more diverse an area is, the less people trust each other/are engaged in civic life. …
Demography is destiny. When I realized that the Left is trying to en masse import poorly educated minorities to act as voter ‘shock troops’ against conservative whites, I really flipped. Not to mention the intergenerational albatross they’re going to place on the American taxpayer, and the social cost they’re going to inflict in terms of a divided culture and lower national IQ (Jason Richwine from Harvard had a good paper on this – it even got him fired by an SJW lynch mob).
The premise of the article is false. … All the demographic trends are against the Republicans and in favour of the Democrats. Being the Anti-White Party still becomes more powerful each cycle.
Trump is a blip caused by more American whites realising that they are facing an Anti-White Party, leading to consolidation of the white vote, but the trend is still toward the total white vote, and total historical Republican demographic vote, becoming a strict minority in the United States in the very near future. …
