Do The Democrats Remain Captive To Consultants, Or Try For Mass Appeal?

 I remain convinced that the main failure of the Democrats comes from not creating a political party that treats its voters as actual members, and not demographics which can be exploited for votes at election time.

Consultants and pollsters have prime importance within the political structure described above.

Television and social media provide the means of exploitation.

While expensive, requiring much fundraising, they are easier than building up the actual party structure that reaches people on a retail basis.

The old party system with its graft was thrown away for a graft that benefits a system of graft that does not spread its wealth to the party members.

It permits the plutocrats to gain even more control of politics. (Anyone thinking that money did not always play its part in politics is even more of a Pollyanna than I am.)

Boston Review's A Real Post-Neoliberal Agenda by Marshall Steinbaum sets out the history of bad political/economic choices by the Democrats, and a history that I think supports my thesis.

The irony is that philanthropy, in principle, should free up advocacy organizations to depart from the old rules and preexisting orthodoxy, empowering progressives to recognize which constituencies are not currently represented and activate them. And indeed, other progressive foundations have been doing just that. If reform-minded progressive philanthropy has any future, it must follow their lead, helping to grow popular movements and working in collaboration with them, rather than continue to operate solely from the inside out and the top down.

Coming from a different perspective, The New Republic's What the Hell Happened to Democrats in Detroit? 

This would seem to echo the often-heard complaint-stereotype that the twenty-first-century Democrats are a party of highly educated “coastal elites” who care little for blue-collar people in flyover country, especially compared with Trump’s populist—some might say “demagogic”—fearmongering. If this is so, can Dingell’s side reverse the MAGA momentum? “It’s not going to come back without you putting in the work,” Dingell said. “We need to understand the message that is being sent to us. I don’t think they want to see people disagreeing and squabbling. The American people are very frustrated about a number of things and want to see things shaken up.”

Easy is all too often laziness. This country can no longer accept lazy thinking in its politics

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Updated 2/17, after reading Mike Konczal's review for Boston Review, The Forgotten State.

Where the right sees subsidiarity in Manichaean terms—either you get big government or local control—Hacker and Pierson recognize that the former is not antithetical to the latter. Building on a description by political economist Charles Lindblom, they argue that markets are like fingers, “nimble and dexterous,” and governments are like thumbs, providing “countervailing power, constraint and adjustment to get the best out of those nimble fingers.” They don’t imagine a hand that is all thumbs or all fingers but instead strive to understand the balance between the two. The principles of subsidiarity are not violated if more thumbs push back against an increasingly unequal, precarious, concentrated, and stagnating economy. Such a move would strengthen, rather than replace, the essential components of civil society.

Hacker and Pierson conclude that “the richer we get, the more government we need.” As the economy evolves, it becomes both more complex and more interdependent. A small, simple economy centered on local activities can be regulated socially in communities, but the scale of global corporations requires something more: a large state capable of effective regulation and investment, with the legal and bureaucratic tools to ensure that trillion-dollar markets can function. Not only is such a state appropriate, but it is dangerous to pretend otherwise.

The truly dangerous poverty is the impoverishment of our imaginations. We are too lazy to see that complex situations need complex solutions, not a single cure-all in the form of a silver bullet. Like small children, we throw away the best cure for being too hard or for taking too long. We get what we deserve.

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As time continues, I keep running into more writers echoing my thoughts - most are efforts better than mine. Today, it is Patrick Nathan on Substack with his We Asked for Leaders, Not Influencers. It is long, it is well argued, and I write that as a warning - the quotes below may not do justice to the original essay.

Shortly after the inauguration, P.E. Moskowitz published an essay about the technology that has effectively undermined most political action in this country: the internet. One thinks of the obvious examples of Musk and Zuckerberg, who control two of the most influential social media empires in the world. Both donated incomprehensible sums to Trump’s campaign and attended the inauguration. But there’s also TikTok, whose Chinese ownership certainly doesn’t save it from being a right-wing propaganda machine; and of course there’s the self-congratulatory Twitter-shaped haven for liberals, Bluesky, which is doing its best to panic, paralyze, and fracture what’s left of the #resistance from the first Trump circus. Beyond social media platforms, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Airbnb, and countless other “apps” all ensure that one no longer need interact with human beings to conduct commerce, despite commerce being the one form of social interaction most Americans are likely to have on a day-to-day basis. Each company, in its own way, seeks to isolate its users — preying, of course, on our most lucratively vulnerable emotions: loneliness, anger, and insecurity. It’s no accident that the right excels in this environment. As Moskowitz puts it, “The internet in its current form and the Republican Party are part-and-parcel of the same system; a system that derives its power from increasing our isolation from each other so that its rulers may more effectively manipulate our psyches.”

The Internet is not going to save the Democrats; it will not save our democracy. Those of us who thought so 20 years ago have been proven so very wrong.

During the first Trump presidency, the opposition party bought the promise of social media and fell for its illusions: that people liked their content, therefore they liked them. Even with only 6,000 followers at my most “influential,” I can attest to how exhilarating it feels to go viral for some witty thing you’ve said, especially an attack on fascist stupidity. But going viral didn’t put me in the street. It didn’t take me to a protest. It didn’t change any senator’s mind. At most, it showed up on a stupid t-shirt someone was selling online. As with social media itself, all I’d done was create content someone else could use to make an easy profit. And this, ultimately, is all Pelosi’s clap was good for: an opportunity for the people who own the server farms on which most of the internet unfolds to make a little more money from all the data we created in celebrating this pathetic spectacle, this supposedly mockery of the man who has returned to dismantle the entire country. And now, because the Democrats squandered their four years in power — four years they could’ve spent stripping Trump of everything he has, impeaching every single one of his appointments, and walking back everything he did — the people who own the internet now own the federal government.

Get down in the dirt and start with the local precincts. Not going to be the kind of thing that gets large contributions, or create memes, but it will make the face of the party a real person. It will create the human contact lacking with the internet. Little glory may be seen in these ideas - other keeping America free.

Finally, I think, consider Raina Lipsitz's article in The New Republic, The Underestimated Alliance That Could Beat Back Trumpis.

Given Trump’s track record, there is no reason to believe that he will reward workers for their support. Like Elon Musk, he would gladly fire them all the second they crossed him. Americans were unmoved by Democratic appeals to “defend democracy” because they don’t experience much of it in their daily lives: Leaders make major policy decisions without the public’s knowledge or approval, take away rights a majority voted to keep, and fund wars a majority oppose. American workers have little to no control over their working conditions and no federally protected right to take time off. These days, even their toilet use is monitored and restricted.

These conditions explain why so many are alienated from politics—more Americans simply didn’t vote in 2024 than voted for Trump or Harris—and why working people cannot put their faith in electoral politics alone. The labor movement is the best vehicle for defending all of our rights and advancing society, and it’s even more urgent to strengthen it under Trump.

 There is truth in this. Why this is included here is why the labor vote has been drained away from the Democrats - their consultants have no roots in labor.

“Folks at the door cared primarily about bread-and-butter issues,” said Hae-Lin Choi, political and legislative director at Communications Workers of America District 1. “We did a lot of message testing and had all kinds of theories about, ‘It’s all going to be about immigration, it’s going to be about crime.’ And it’s not that these issues [didn’t come up], but at the end of the day, it was really more about, ‘How do I put food on the table? I can’t afford housing here.’”

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