“We suck less” is what Democrats have been running on for 22 years. Obama’s two presidential runs were the only exception to this, but at the end of the day, he was where hope went to die in America. To the die-hard Obama fans, you have to stop ignoring the fact that he had orchestrated the biggest income redistribution to the top 1% in American history up to that point. He admitted it in that link I just shared. Trump subsequently outdid Obama when his big bullshit bill passed. Nonetheless, Obama’s presidency was the last shred of “hope” that the American electorate had. The country became less and less hopeful every year he served, as evidenced by the loss of 910 Democratically held seats across the country during his tenure as president. Virtually every election since 2016 has been about “no more of this shit”, with the electorate shifting away from partisanship and into voting for anything different.
I’ve been saying this for a few weeks now, on my Facebook page, and I still stand behind this analysis: yesterday’s elections were not a blue tsunami. They were a red riptide. Democrats did absolutely nothing to win favor among the electorate. The response was purely a function of how badly Republicans stunk up the place.
A blue tsunami and a red riptide look exactly the same on election night, but they’re different in one very important way: A tsunami has durability in the next election cycle. A riptide does not.
Democrats have 9 months to do something once they’re sworn in. Sucking less isn’t going to carry them through the 2028 election, so they will be very vulnerable to a populist Republican presidential candidate like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Green. No republican who served in or didn’t fight the Trump administration has a snowball’s chance of ever getting elected, but a Republican who has been railing against Trump for the past year will. The electorate has been voting for “no more of this shit” since 2016. This is never going to change unless one of the 2 parties starts delivering meaningful results for working people. I believe that we’re largely past the era of 2 term presidencies. We’re past the era of strictly partisan voting. Seven million people who voted for Obama twice voted for Trump in 2016. Voters are willing to try anything to stop the immiseration they’ve been subjected to for the past 30 years. This isn’t unique to the US. It’s happening all around the world.
The good news is that we only have 8 weeks to definitively find out which path Democrats intend to take. Do they plan on keeping up the well-meaning-but-hapless shtick they’ve been putting on for 30 years, or do they intend to do things? We’ll have our answer on January 4th, the very first day of the new Congress. If Chuck Schumer doesn’t end the filibuster on that day, that will be a clear signal that they plan to continue the losing strategy of “What can we do, we don’t have a super-majority?” I wrote this same fucking post in 2012 when Harry Reid had a chance to end the filibuster. He didn’t. The reason was clear to me then: Democrats wanted to hide behind the filibuster by using the rotating villain strategy, to claim that they just couldn’t get anything done without a supermajority. Fortunately, a significant chunk of the electorate has figured it out now. The well-meaning-but-hapless shtick will never work again.
From now until the end of the year, we need to make sure that #endthefilibuster is trending on social media every single day. If you are represented by one or two Democratic Senators, you need to call them and make it clear that what you expect for your vote is an end to the filibuster.
I honestly can’t emphasize this enough: your vote yesterday won’t make a fucking bit of difference if you don’t actively put pressure on Senate Democrats. Your work here is not done. As it was in 2012 when Reid didn’t end the filibuster, not doing a little more work right now will lead to another decade or more of increasing misery for all of us.
I’m calling Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices today. I will make sure that they get at least 2 calls a week from people that I know. If we all do this, we have a chance to start meaningfully reversing course on the nightmare we’ve been living through. If we do nothing, there’s absolutely no chance of that happening since Schumer has absolutely no intention of jeopardizing funding for Israel by ending the filibuster. I bring up Israel because he has plainly stated that his main objective is to maintain Democratic support for Israel. Not ending the filibuster means that there won’t be any bold action on anything from Democrats, which (let me say it again) means that President Tucker Carlson will be a scenario we end up with in 2028.
