An Open Letter to the Democratic Party: (part one)

[Admiral Loinpresser]

One of my daughters has launched her legal career spending a great deal of time in Guatemala investigating genocide committed in the 1980s. Why were native people in Central America hunted like dogs by death squads in that era? Because authoritarian regimes were empowered to send their savage militias into the bush in the name of anti-Communism. They were empowered to do this by Ronald Reagan.

You remember Ronald Reagan, don’t you? He was that right wing chicken hawk who was too busy bedding B movie starlets in Hollywood to be bothered to enlist and fight fascism in WWII. But when it came to politics in the 1980s he was ready to do his patriotic duty by demonizing the mythic “welfare queens” and bolstering Central American juntas to see to the rape of American nuns and the torture and massacre of native peoples.

Why do I bring up Ronald Reagan? Because he has been publicly praised by the last two Democratic Presidents. Shame on them. The people have very real reasons to vote in their own economic, political and cultural interests, but there has been no consistent articulation of the need to fight back against the very effective class war prosecuted by the GOP in this tragic Age of Reagan.

That is why the Democratic Party is shrinking in membership and political representation. That is why the Democratic Party in my state is teetering on the brink of irrelevancy. That is why people are being denied education, health care, livable wages and hope. That is why the U.S. has become a third world country in terms of infant mortality, childhood poverty, health care, etc., etc. That is why America has become an unsustainable, dysfunctional oligarchy. That is why we are rushing toward an ecological Armageddon, which could mean the extinction of our species.

Don’t think the Democratic Party is shrinking?

Rory Cooper @rorycooper
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy.
8:01 AM - 4 Nov 2015

"Ouch. The context for Cooper's tweet is last night's elections, which should come, as Greg Sargent writes, as a "brutal reality check for the Democratic Party" — and one with real consequences for Obamacare and climate change.

• For more on the Democratic Party's downballot crisis, read Matt Yglesias's feature on the subject.

• Political scientist Phil Klinkner has a more optimistic take for Democrats: "There's nothing wrong with the Democrats that losing the presidency probably won't fix," he writes.

• But Lee Drutman thinks the party's fortunes are darker: In a fascinating analysis, he argues that America is entering "a reinforcing feedback loop of growing inequality and Republican rule."

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/4/9669918/democrats-elections-crisis

End of part one.

[elleng]

1. Right. We're screwed.

[n2doc]

2. People like to talk about the upcoming end of the Republicans

Seems the opposite is also possible. An awful lot of folks are putting all of their eggs in the HRC basket, neglecting everything else because they don't want to criticize Obama and the party leadership (who are intertwined with HRC). It is unsettling.

[rhett o rick]

3. A problem is that we often hear that the two sides of this political war are the DEms vs the Repubs.

That is a distraction. The war is a class war. It's a war by the 1% against the rest of us. We represent a source of resources to them. They've been looting us, sucking out our souls for four decades. And yes it's a Conspiracy. While yes the complete Republicon Party has been co opted by the Billionaire Oligarchy, so has the Conservative Democratic Party Elites. The Democratic grass-roots may still hold to Democratic principles, but the Party Leadership answers to Goldman-Sachs and the Billionaires.

We badly need a viable two party system.