This is a response to a question posed on Quora.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-the-Democrats-not-effective-in-providing-an-alternate-vision-to-the-creeping-fascism-in-America-How-can-they-win-in-red-states
I believe the Democratic Party, and especially the “loony left” wing of it, absolutely does have an excellent “alternate vision” to fascism. Such a vision can be, and has been, communicated quite clearly in language and “bedside manner” that “Middle America” can understand. President Bill Clinton comes to mind as a Democratic leader who did this, and President Obama also.
Go back and look at Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which was basically his coming-out party as a national Democratic “leader.”
- There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
People listened to Barack Obama. They heard him out. They heard Bill Clinton out. Some of them even heard Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders out. The message of the left is a GOOD message and an AMERICAN message.
Question is: in this new age of fear, mongered by a conservative movement desperate to hold on to power before minorities and young people “take over,” will people in the “red states”
actually LISTEN to our arguments and actually HEAR US OUT before condemning us as “communists” and “radicals” and “snowflakes”???
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young, energetic and highly educated lady from New York City, who had to work as a bartender to support herself, had a pretty good alternate vision if you ask me.
Unfortunately, the “red states” see a lot of this “alternate vision,” which really is just as much common sense and sane thinking as it is “alternate,” as “socialist” and “communist” and “radical” and therefore won’t even hear people like Ocasio-Cortez out.
The prevailing wisdom is that the only Democrats who can even have a chance to win in red states are “centrist” Democrats who aren’t as far to the left as a candidate who can easily and resoundingly win in New York City or San Francisco. Candidates who agree with conservatives on issues such as the right to bear arms, for example. Even in the wake of mass shootings that have happened IN THE HEARTLAND, shootings such as the one in a high school in suburban Houston and
an earlier one in a church in a small town outside of San Antonio - shootings that have affected people so much that even Greg Abbott, one of the most conservative GOP governors in the nation, was compelled to do SOMETHING:
Gov. Greg Abbott announces school safety plan and proposed changes to gun laws after Santa Fe shooting
But listen to this:
- “With only 23 percent of voters casting a ballot in the 2018 Kentucky primaries for both parties, progressives within the party have a real opportunity to expand the voter pool by offering a message that draws people into the political process. The Democratic Party can win by attracting non-voters who are disengaged from a political system and bought and paid for by corporate America — and by embracing the next generation of political leadership, a generation that by all accounts is more progressive than their parents on almost every issue. Although I didn’t win my bid for public office, the issues I ran on — Medicare-for-all, restoring and strengthening workers’ rights, and free college tuition — resonated overwhelmingly with the voters I spoke with. I earned the endorsements of sitting members of the Kentucky General Assembly and more than a dozen local labor unions. Not bad for someone campaigning on an openly left-wing platform in a supposedly centrist city.”
Who said this? Richard Becker, a millennial who ran for state representative in Kentucky. A red state. He didn’t win, but he got people to
at least hear him out.
Another key is recognizing that not all people in “flyover country” hate “socialist” ideas. Not even all people in “flyover country” are even White. “Flyover country” does still have major cities and urban centers that are just as racially and ethnically diverse as the Bronx. Or Oakland.
- The Midwest is pretty damn white, but it ain’t Happy Days. The region is dotted with cities whose populations resemble that of the Bronx; in these cities, people of color have suffered mightily for decades and make up an overwhelming majority. It’s clear which “flyover country” the critics of the progressive movement have in mind: One where Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland, to name a few, never made it out from under the rubble of the 1960s and ’70s. But we are there, and our views are knowable…Strategically, the Democrats need black Midwesterners to come out and vote. As Sean McElwee details in the Nation, a significant slice of black voters, especially in the Midwest, sat out in 2016 after paving the way for Barack Obama’s election just four and eight years earlier. McElwee finds that “38 percent of individuals who voted for Obama in 2012 but then didn’t vote in 2016 were black, and 15 percent were black voters under 30.” Without them, the odds are dim indeed. Given what we know about the policy preferences of black voters, and their importance to the party, it seems like a no-brainer that the entire Democratic Party should be lining up behind a progressive platform that promises to improve their lives.
People of color in “flyover country” will most definitely hear progressive ideas out.
But racial prejudice and intolerance is still a hard and bitter reality in Middle America. My problem: will the conservatives in power in many of these areas commit to making the electoral system fair,
so that ALL citizens of “flyover country” have a fair chance to cast their vote? Judging from the very
recent Supreme Court ruling which makes it easier for states to purge voters from the rolls, I’m skeptical.
Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748)
Judge Rejects Kansas Law Requiring Voters to Show Proof of Citizenship
Supreme Court gives Ohio right to purge thousands of voters from its rolls
I am also skeptical that the more conservative White people in “flyover country” will be reasonable enough to hear out the arguments of the far left and carefully consider them.
When there are people even on Quora submitting questions like these:
Why is fascism considered wrong? In theory, isn't it an effective way to establish order and loyalty to the state by its subjects?
Isn't Antifa obviously fascism, too?
Why is fascism's ethnic exclusion considered hate speech when communism's class war isn't?
…I remain convinced that fascism just needs to be resoundingly defeated.
Bottom line: America belongs to ALL of us.
That means ALL of us, period, regardless of race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, churchgoer, atheist, college student, senior citizen, whether one lives in a city or on a ranch or farm, whether or not one owns a firearm, whether one votes Republican or Democratic.
When we finally get that through our thick skulls, we actually might be willing to accept, vote for, and protect and defend an “alternate vision” that will improve the lives of ALL of us as fellow Americans.
P.S. I just found
an article in The Nation which attempts to answer this question and speak to some of the challenges I noted:
- We have to have the courage to talk directly about the tough issues facing us like the racial divisiveness Donald Trump is trying to stir up, and connect that to the economic hardships most of working America is still facing. We have to be willing to say: You know why Trump is attacking immigrants and the black folks upset about the criminal-justice system? It’s because he wants to pick your pocket…We have to remind people that Trump is all about looking backward, but that the Democratic agenda is about the future. And we need to have the definitional debate with Republicans about what the word “freedom” means…That message plays in Queens and the Bronx, where Ocasio-Cortez is from, but it also plays in Omaha, where Kara Eastman won an equally surprising victory against a former congressman who was the Democratic-establishment candidate in the primary, and in Kentucky, where Amy McGrath beat the mayor of Lexington, who had been recruited by national party leaders to run in the congressional primary.
Works cited:
