The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, from 2009 with President Obama's first term. Our focus has been eclectic ... the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. ____
This post responds to 'Jamess's June 25, 2022, article in the DailyKos (Simply Amazing! The "Common-law experts" that Alito relies on -- Weren't Even Americans).
Yes, we know that Alito's twisted-history argument leading to the reversal of Row v Wade is bogus. But the Jamess title implicitly carries two lessons for Democrats - become grownups, both politically and sometimes personally, and stop the Democrat Party's inclination to drown itself with ego-centered bickering?’
The lessons from the Trump debacle are:
POLITE DISSENT, viz., A SPLINTERED BALLOT LOSES EVERYTHING; and
STOP INTERNAL BICKERING - UNIFY ON BASIC RIGHTS (COMMON GOOD)
To repeat: the new reality of American politics for Democrats and progressives is that loyal dissent by ballot-splintering factionalism or by abstaining from voting is just 'patio chest-pounding' and the Dem intra-Party bickering is a self-destructive privilege, so 1950s', of a less complex past when we did not lose sleep over Republican or Democrat election winners. (Dems also have their MAGA aspects, too.)
The Dems lost the 2016 presidential election, IMO, because of their 'naive' internal splintering.
Democrat Party Loyal Dissent as expressed in do-or-die factionalism and abstaining from voting weakened the progressive vote and helped bring on a regression in America's cultural tone. Within weeks after his inauguration, Trump veered America from Obama's mid-road tone to a hard right wing direction.
The sudden sharpness of Trump's right-hand turn ofAmerican governance stunned and demoralized Democrats. More stunning was the barely hidden grift and greed behind Trump's foreign policy and his regressive use of America's national resources. Under Trump, government operations were hidden behind a personal, transactional style that created and favored policies that yielded financial gains for Trump, his family members, and for his corporate supporters.
As Trump's government operations became more personally transactional, they also became less transparent, And our foreign policy was made a shambles.
Major examples illustrating Trump's radical shifting of America's foreign policy alliances were his November 2017, approval of Phillipine dictator Rodrigo Duterte's bloody campaign to rid the Phillipines of homosexuals and criminal suspects by murdering them on-site by roving right-wing para-military execution squads .
Then came Trump's September 2018, declaration of "love" for Kim Jong Un, dictator-for-life of North Korea, a rogue nuclear state.
This was followed by Trump's 2018 expressing that America should withdraw from NATO ... because NATO is a concept outside America's direct interest (which we now strongly suspect really meant that America's NATO membership offended Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, thus interfering with Trump's negotiations with Putin to construct a Moscow Trump Tower... with huge financial gains for Trump and his family.
This was the cess-pit where Trump had quickly, with a near-savant's nose for money, had lowered America.
America's regression under the Trump presidency could have been avoided if Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College. Hillary won the popular vote, but lost the election because of Democratic Party vote-splitting factionalism .... and additionally, as is now known, because of Russian intelligence's proxy operations that exploited America's addiction and vulnerability to its world of extremely profitable internet social media platforms. Facebook was front and center among Russian intelligence's social media targets leading up to the 2016 election. (Russian interference in the 2016 election was known perhaps shortly before and then after the election...but this knowledge quickly was buried under Trump's threats and misinformation programming.)
Dems must grow up from naive 'do-or-die' idealism ....look around at the pitchfork regressionism that followed Hillary's 2026 'loss' to the Trumpists.
America's fall into regressionism has been recently capped by the American Supreme Court's June 24, 2022, anti-abortion reversal of its 1973 Roe v Wade decision that had legalized abortion for the past half-century.
DEMS MUST LEAVE THEIR HIGH SCHOOLISH DREAM STATE AND BECOME ADULTS ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICS (Yes, Dems feel outraged and disbelief about the Trump camp’s lies and disinformation...and their control of major parts of American governance, e.g., the Supreme Court, which Trump reshaped with the hypocritical support of the Mitch McConnell-led Senate and which is steadily eroding American life.
But Dem reactions must be within Constitutional (legal) boundaries... because that is a core Dem message.
Also, Dems can’t do a ‘progressive version of ‘Jan 6’ without becoming what is detested ..along with bloodshed. (MAGA supporters must be ‘itching’ for an excuse to use their automatic weapons on a destructive Dem protest… that is today’s reality).
A solution to the Democratic Party's current stasis - Dems must first define what lessons have been learned from the 6+ years of the ‘Trump Era’ (his campaign years until Jan 20, 2021 … and in the future).
LESSON #1: DEMS MUST STOP NAIVE INTERNAL BICKERING...while sustaining their major strengths which are INCLUSIVENESS and PROMOTING THE COMMON GOOD.
The Dems lost sight of this in the 2016 election which they lost through their own egotistic, (childlike), internal-splintering of Dem voting power by offshoot, dissenting yet liberal Dem candidates who insisted on having their place on the November 2016 election ballot ...regardless of consequences.
And we saw the consequence: HILLARY CLINTON’S 2016 ELECTION LOSS WAS THE RESULT OF THE DEMS’ OWN FACTIONAL CONTRARINESS ...that splintered the anti-Trump ballot from within the Dem party.
The era of idealist sincere (but naive) LOYAL DISSENT VOTE, ‘I’ll show them, I just won’t vote’ or ‘I’ll vote for a splinter group, Ha!', ended on the morning after the 2016 national election.
A unified Dem voting bloc would have boosted Hillary’s Electoral College count beyond what was needed to win, but Dem self-centeredness prevented that.
LESSON #2: The Electoral College must be central to the DEM's future political calculus. The Electoral College is a reality even if it is poisonous and a dinosaur CREATED FROM and sustained by entrenched structures that originate from America’s slavery past. It seems the Electoral College will live on for a good while under America's two party system.
As stated above, Hillary’s substantial 2016 popular vote win meant nothing because Dems still lived in their own version of the MAGA dream that ‘proper’ America was or should still be life as it was in the 1950’s.
In summary - ‘when are the Dems going to be adults about American politics and stop the Democratic Party's inclination to internal self-destruction?’ There is so much more to lose by bickering within the Dem bloc.
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