Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Coalitional Politics

 Good piece from Josh Marshall on how the Democratic Party is - by necessity - much less homogenous than the Republican Party, making it harder to sustain coalitional politics. We see this all the time with niche issues like student debt forgiveness. That appeals to part of the Democratic Base, but not all of it and it probably alienates middle-of-the-road voters.

And Democrats are really dependent on middle-of-the-road voters. We don't have a built in reservoir of authoritarian-leaning Christianists to depend on. 

The whole tedious "Bernie Would've Won" crowd assumes that Clinton lost because she wasn't radical enough. (In fact, she went pretty far left on cultural issues.) Very, very few Americans are consistently radical in their politics. They might rail against the "status quo" but many of them are reactionaries, wishing to drag us back to a time when we didn't have to tolerate gays, Blacks and uppity women.

Biden won, in large part, because he wasn't radical. He was the safest possible bet. Democrats need to meet this moment by presenting universalist positions that had broad support, because the Republicans are running on christofacism. 

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