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© 2021 The Somerville Times. All rights reserved.
Conclusion: Reassembling the elephant
*
By William C. Shelton
(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)
I began this series with the parable of the blind people describing the elephant. Each has experienced one part of the elephant—leg, torso, tail, tusk, ear—and forcefully argues that the others have it wrong. An elephant is really like, respectively, a tree, wall, snake, stake, or blanket.
So it has been with explanations for November’s national election outcome. Attributions have been made to Russian hacking, the Electoral College, resurgent racism, nativism, “Bernie Bros,” fake news, the failure of identity politics, the FBI Director’s letter, and more.
But as with the elephant, the truth is in the whole. And the whole is not just the sum of the elephant’s parts, but how they interact with each other and with the environment in which it evolved and survives.
So, for example, the talk radio and TV demagogues would be much less effective in an America in which people still found identity and formed opinions within communities. In turn, the economic trends that disintegrated those communities were the same as those that fragmented media and proliferated a multiplicity of mutually exclusive echo chambers.
The essential elements of any system interact with and transform each other over the system’s long-term development. But some elements have greater influence than others, as for example, culture tends to be more adaptive to economic change than the reverse.
What most influenced how America could reach a moment in which its voters elected Donald Trump is conscious choices made by the Democratic Party establishment. Those choices were the logical extension of similar choices that, over a forty-year period, delivered the benefits of production technology and globalization to the wealthiest Americans, and their burdens to working people. Other developed countries have demonstrated that those choices were neither necessary, nor inevitable, nor beneficial to the nation as a whole.
So the 2016 election turned on class-based economic grievances. This was obvious from the early days of the primary election. It is what fueled Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ insurgencies. Since the Democrats have proclaimed themselves to be the people’s party since 1828, the election should have been theirs to lose.
But while Hillary Clinton’s words paid me-too lip service to Bernie Sanders’ economic-justice policies, her campaign’s deeds illuminated its continuance of the forty-year trend.
Speaking at a Party convention forum in July, Senator Chuck Schumer made it explicit: “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia….The voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue-collar Democrats. They are the college-educated Republicans or independents who lean Republican in the suburbs.”
Schumer and the Party overlords imagined that the identity groups whom they had cultivated, combined with these college-educated “moderates,” would overwhelm Trump’s “basket of deplorables.” But many Democrats stayed home, and those that did weren’t the much maligned “Bernie Bros.” They were precisely the African Americans, Latinos, and youth whom the Democratic leadership smugly assumed they had locked up.
Over the long term, and in hard times particularly, class trumps identity. And while the Democratic leadership trumpeted an unemployment rate of 4.6%, those voters knew that the low unemployment figure represented how many Americans had given up hope of finding a living-wage job.
Politics that fight economic mistreatment need not conflict with politics that fight identity-group mistreatment. On the contrary, they can be synergistic, drawing strength from solidarity, as Martin Luther King demonstrated. But that requires actually fighting economic injustice instead of colluding with it.
The New York Times ran an illustrative story about four African-American barbers who worked in a Milwaukee shop. All had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but they felt that, “We’re worse off than before.” In 2016, two of them didn’t vote, one voted for himself, and one voted for Bernie Sanders.
Mr. Obama seems to have never understood that the voters who gave him his historic 2008 margin of victory did so because they believed he would reject Clintonian politics. Instead, they got from him more of the same, and a fulsome endorsement of the second-most-disliked presidential candidate in modern history.
Nor did Obama and the Democratic establishment notice that their abandonment of working people gave Republicans a forty-year opportunity to play more effective identity politics with voters who had once been essential to the Democrats’ base.
Democratic apologists’ blaming their loss on racism and xenophobia ignore the reality that many racists and xenophobes supported their Party when it economically supported them. Similarly, FBI Director James Comey’s letter would have little or no impact if voters felt certain that they could rely on Hillary Clinton to fight for their interests. Those voters came to their uncertainty honestly.
Blaming the loss on Russian hackers and WikiLeaks suggests a characteristic lack of shame. After all, what the supposedly neutral Party bosses’ emails revealed was their own collusion in subverting the Democratic candidate who had spent his lifetime fighting for working people.
Blaming the Electoral College is like an athletic team’s blaming the direction of the wind or angle of the sun for their loss. Those are the field conditions under which they must formulate strategy, execute, and win or lose.
Blaming anything other than forty years of bad choices bespeaks self-deception. From Reagan on, Republicans offered more consistent policy proposals and ideology, however much history disproved them. For liberals in post-industrial America to pursue policy that would be consistent with their stated values and goals, they would have to advocate the deep institutional changes that Bernie Sanders calls “democratic socialism.” Their living with such stark dissonance between word and deed requires callous cynicism, or willful ignorance, or self-deception, each of which undermines effectiveness.
Winning elections was always the rationale for Clintonian “triangulation” politics. What they have won is Republican control of all three branches of government, the largest Republican majorities in Congress since 1928, a Republican judiciary that will make case law for two generations, and a sea of red statehouses across America.
If the Democratic Party hopes to be relevant to the lives of most Americans, it must undertake a fundamental paradigm shift. It will need to not only remember its historical reason to exist. It will need to replace its feeble pursuit of incremental benefits, which can always be taken away, with forceful pursuit of increments of power.
Despite the unequivocal discrediting of their paradigm, Democratic Party leaders continue to defend their organizational and ideological positions.
In a column that anticipated this election, I referenced Thomas Kuhn, who popularized the term “paradigm shift” in his great work on the history of scientific revolutions. A key finding of his research bears repeating. Paradigms did not shift because those advocating the new one persuaded those who held the old one. They shifted because those who held the old one died.
Power to the young people who clearly see a fully assembled elephant.
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Oh brother. This stuff again. I don’t know what imaginary elephant Mr. Shelton is seeing, but the wide awake and unbiased among us clearly see it differently. This election was stolen by a gang of traitorous thugs through blatant lies and deception about their opponent and interference by the FBI and Russia. He can deny it if he wishes to, but it just makes him appear all the more foolish. His own obvious bias against the Clintons – along with the hilarious proposition that Pres. Obama’s policies was some sort of carbon copy of theirs, as if that’s even a bad thing – reveals an agenda that frankly baffles me.
The Democratic Party has always represented the working class better and more effectively than the other guys – not to mention pulling the country out of the jaws of complete economic collapse after each and every bout of Republican plundering – they just got conned otherwise this time. There’s your elephant, in the whole.
I’m happy for Mr. Shelton that his guy won. Unfortunately for the rest of us a long and painful four years of fighting back and defending the nation confronts us. Perhaps his vision will clear and he’ll join in the fight, instead of continuously attacking the wrong side.
Wow, great honest look inward.
I am a “deplorable” who was quite thrilled with election.
Somerville and Massachusetts will double-down on policies like sanctuary cities and government control of every facet of life to their detriment.
Mayor has very little resistance on BoA, but is backing at-large candidates to remove the few that question his infinite wisdom.
Politics as usual will eventually get rejected, a lesson national Dems learned, but local have not.
Yeah. Honest to be sure. It’s not so easy totally selling out your integrity just to try to sound deep and contrarian for your earth-shatteringly important column in a small town newspaper. Guess what? Fail. Big time. Trump and his hypercorrupt bunch of cronies will go down in history as the most disastrous thing to happen in American politics ever. And innocent people will be hurt. Sellouts like this writer will never get it. They’re so far above the rest of us. Traitors and cowards all. Oh-but emails. Nitwit.
How does this guy continue to get published by the Somerville Times? This is not local news, or local opinion, or even a well-argued position.
Thank you, Mr. Shelton. This and your previous piece are indeed local opinion – they sum up the feelings of many local citizens. There are plenty of people who have worked hard all their lives and can barely afford to live and pay their rent, who feel betrayed by local and national politicians. Hilary and her party lost because they let down so many of the people they claim to care about. People voted not necessarily for Trump but against the smug status quo. If there weren’t so many people here and across the country who feel this way, no amount of hacking, fake news, or anything else put forward as an excuse would have made a measurable difference in the outcome of the election.
bunch of amateur gangsters. real gangsters keep much lower profiles and for good reason. this will be interesting. do the hokey pokey
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/01/12/obamacare_repeal_will_hand_a_nauseating_tax_cut_to_the_rich.html
Sorry Pamela, but simply parroting Mr. Shelton’s specious arguments do not validate them, well-intentioned though they may be. I’m not going to waste space here reviewing the great accomplishments of the Democrats during the Obama years. The actual record is out there. Do your research. Start with where the country was at in 2008 with the deficit, unemployment, environmental issues, etc., and where it is now. That’s the kind of “smug status quo” I’ll take for another 8 years and many more to come. Also, fake news and hacking did make a difference, even though it must be pointed out that Hillary actually won the election by nearly 3 million votes. The crooked Electoral College is what’s putting that racist looney on his throne. So, in reality, every vote cast for Trump by any “disaffected” Democrat or Independent/Green/Purple/Vegetarian et al simply helped to put a crooked, mentally unstable demagogue in office and nothing more. Thanks for that.
So believe me, anyone who thinks their “protest vote” is going to do anything but benefit big corporations and the very wealthy is sadly deluded. And pretty much a traitor to their country specifically and humanity in general. A lot of damage is going to be done. Good people are going to be hurt and even die at the hands of these lowlifes. That’s not political rhetoric, that’s a fact. We need to learn to pull together and take care of each other until this corrupt regime can be unseated. As fun as it may be for some to try to be glib and promote themselves as learned pundits, there’s too much at stake now for this type of misinformation to be taken seriously.
And yes, as the late great Tip O’Neill pointed out, all politics is local. On that we can agree, and I hope we will all take the appropriate action in response to the current calamitous situation.
So far, the critics of this article remind me of Donald Trump—denial, hysterical name-calling and fictional assertions. If they have any ability to understand and respond to the substance, they don’t show it. Saying that the presidential election was “stolen by a gang of traitorous thugs” doesn’t explain how the Democrats have lost over a thousand elected offices in Congress, governorships and state legislatures over the last eight years.
As far as “integrity” goes, this is the kind of clear-eyed soul searching that my Party has to do if it wants to have a future. The book of Jeremiah has another proverb about blindness, and it applies to these name callers’ denial and avoidance: There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Really? You think that? Seems pretty much over the top to me. Reminds me of Donald Trump.
First, believe me, the so-called “substance” of this article has been fully understood and, speaking for myself, the responses have been appropriate.
Then, where is this denial you speak of? Because so many disagree with you and this writer? This is denial? Looks more like differing points of view to me.
And where is all this “hysterical name-calling” you mention? What I see is people telling it like it is. Those who voted for Trump are traitors. The news about Russian interference broke well before Election Day, so there’s that for the turncoat Democratic voters to deal with, along with everyone else who voted for him. Then there’s the undeniable fact that many if not most Trump supporters are bigots and/or tax-dodging deadbeats. The true agenda of the Republican party and its prime directive is to lower taxes on the wealthy. That’s it. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. If you don’t know that you don’t know enough to be walking around. So, any so-called “name-calling” on these…individuals…is fully proper and fitting.
No “fictional assertions” here, although there are plenty in this article. Trump and his ilk are bullies. So are his supporters and apologists. With bullies you push back. Hard. What’s your plan? Sending them flowers and chocolates? The situation is deadly serious. So, either fish or cut bait, or get lost. The grownups have work to do.
And in the spirit of sharing some actually accurate and important information, try this as a primer: http://europe.newsweek.com/neil-buchanan-why-did-so-many-americans-vote-be-poorer-542453?rm=eu
Maybe you’ll begin to get it and join in the effort to actually fix this mess.
Peace and love.
Elliot, I agree with you. I think part of the reason we see this is because of the bubble where we live. Many of the dangers of the new regime will be blunted, if not avoided in Mass and New England.
Elliot – keep talking down to us ‘traitors and bigots’ – didn’t work in November, but I’m sure it will work now.
I only hope that the next 4 or hopefully 8 years cause you the same pain that was felt by the “other” half of the country over the last 8 years.
It worked in November, as the landslide popular vote victory demonstrates, but as you know it got overturned by the crooked Electoral College system (whose day’s are numbered).
It will work now because Golden Boy (whose days in power are also numbered) and his corrupt cohorts are being exposed for what they are on a daily basis, and those who got suckered in are wising up fast. The “pain” you and your kind suffered under the leadership of a black president and the fact that you still had to pay your fair share of taxes elicits no sympathy among the honest citizens who are concerned about the country’s future. Oh, and P.S. You’re not getting any tax break, unless you’re among the wealthiest of the true elite.
You are traitors and the shame you will have to bear once these characters have ravaged our economy and driven the sick and elderly to ruin and even death will haunt you for the rest of your days and, hopefully, send you crawling back under the rocks from where you came.
There’s nowhere else to talk but down.
Dear Bill
Much enjoyed your article and your many original thoughts on the old election.
It a shame Bernie didn’t run against Trump. That battle of ideas and personalities would surely have a been a beautiful growth experience and philosophical adventure for many.
What a beautiful reminder of the ‘non so blind’ thanks for that. So yes there’s good that came out of the election. one has to look outside partisan politics.
trumps win ended up proving how badly media truly sucks. They even suck at evaluating their own suckiness. We should all be glad that came out. That’s huge. we are getting bad information we must be making bad decisions. and at least now we know about it.
also be happy about another huge and unexpected long term benefit. Political outsiders can become president. Who knew ? We can look forward to wider net of accomplished people winning. and hopefully a commensurate deflation of the Washington political elephant.
Thanks
esigned to continue work in balance between the branches