Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Circular Firing Squads

If one didn’t know any better, one might think the Democrats suffered a catastrophic defeat in November. nnThat’s because, despite winning the White House, keeping control of the House, and picking up seats in the Senate in a difficult year, the Democrats expected a blue tsunami. Relying on polling that, for whatever reason, could not pick up the depth of support for Donald Trump, and the ahistorical notion that the 2018 results (huge gains in the House) could be maintained and possibly replicated elsewhere, they made assumptions that could not hold up and now have turned on each other.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) got the ball rolling, blaming the party’s progressives for its progressivism, as she conflated left-leaning candidates with the activists in the streets. The losses suffered by moderate Democrats, she said, were preventable. In a rant during a private conference call among Democratic House members, Spanberger and several other moderates was “that Republicans were easily able to paint (Democrats) as socialists and radical leftists who endorse far-left positions, such as defunding the police,” according to the Washington Post.

“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” the paper reported. Spanberger won narrowly — which probably should not have surprised her or anyone else watching the race, given the district’s history. It’s important to note that she beat the Tea Party favorite David Bratt in 2018 by less than 7,000 votes — 176,079 to 169,295 — running well behind the top of the ticket, incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). She won an equally narrow race this year, 232,995 to 224,679.

It’s important to remember that Donald Trump was at the top of the Republican ticket and, despite the efforts of groups like the Lincoln Project, he enjoyed deep and abiding support among Republicans. They came out for him in record numbers — he pulled in more votes as a loser than any candidate in history save Joe Biden. That mattered — in Virginia, across the heartland, and even in California and New York. Max Rose, the Staten Island Democrat, got walloped in 2020 after winning his seat in 2018 in a rock-ribbed GOP district. Rose’s 2018 win — 101,823 to 89,441 over incumbent Dan Donovan — appears not to be a harbinger of change, but an outlier. This year, he lost 136,382 to 99,224, which matches the historical vote tallies in his district.

I live in the New York City area, which means I got to watch the ads aired by Rose and his Republican opponent, Nicole Malliotakis. Rose sounded like a run-of-the-mill Republican in his ads. He touted his military service, his leadership, his support for police — all things that make sense in Staten Island. And yet, he came off in the ads as undefined, unremarkable, and that left him prey to the attacks leveled by Malliotakis, which focused on a photo of Rose at a post-George Floyd rally that the campaign labeled antipolice. That, according to news reports, was incredibly damaging — but perhaps expected.

Rose did not lose because of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, or Bernie Sanders. And if he did, rather than attack progressives, who have been successful in their districts for running campaigns that electrify their districts and win them support, the moderate/conservative wing of the Democrats needs to look at their own failures. If you are a Democrat and you are running in a moderate district, you have to anticipate the attacks, the attempts to paint you as anti-police or as a socialist — it has been and continues to be the main strategy in the GOP playbook. Ignoring that and allowing the Republicans to define you is political malpractice.

My point is not that every Democrat needs to move left. I am unabashedly of the left, a socialist believer in remaking the criminal justice system, in single-payer health care, and the like. But I also know that, in a representative democracy, elected officials have to go where the voters are. Moving too far left will cost some Democrats their seats.

In a perfect world, we would have multiple parties that allow for more a nuanced politics — a true party of the left, a liberal party, centrists, right-wingers — but this is not a perfect world. I’ve come to realize as I’ve gotten older that, while I would like to see better alternatives, our best bet as progressives is to have a strong Democratic Party.

That gets to the ultimate issue. The Democratic Party is far from strong. It has nothing to do with unity of vision — a Democrat serving a safe district in central Detroit is going to have a different outlook than one serving the northwestern corner of New Jersey. The problem is a lack of functioning infrastructure in many of these areas and an abandonment of down-ballot races in favor of the presidency and the Senate.

Republicans have been smarter about this, have focused on state houses and governorships to a much greater degree, and it has given them the power to draw district maps that entrench their power. Wisconsin is a perfect example of how this works. It is a state where Democrats regularly win a majority of votes for the legislature, but have structurally been prevented from gaining a majority. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and numerous other states have been redistricted in similar ways at the legislative and Congressional level.

If the Democrats are serious about building a workable and sustainable majority, they should take a step back, stop firing at each other, and start the needed groundwork.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com; Patreon, patreon.com/Newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.Kalet; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2020

Populist.com