Democrats being just a big city party for some groups but not others has already failed.

[BainsBane]

13. When you refuse to look at exit poll data

Last edited Sun Jul 23, 2017, 01:08 AM - Edit history (1)

And post-election research, it makes your analysis void.

Your claims about why people voted as they did are directly contradicted by that data. All the data shows that voters who prioritized the economy chose Clinton. To claim otherwise is false, and given the amount of information in the press on this subject, we are at the point where continuing to promote that argument becomes deliberate misinformation.


Yet we continue to see the argument presses regardless. Clearly it has nothing to do with winning. That would require looking at data. When people refuse to consider evidence, it's because they have an agenda, whether it's to deny climate change or promote certain interests.

White men are not most people. They are a minority, getting smaller by the day. As much as you want the party to abandon the majority of the population to cater to the demands of the $100k plus a year crowd--because those are the voters Clinton lost.

When you call civil rights divisive, you are saying you want a party focused on promoting the interests on white men over the majority. You don't get to decide what is the priority for most people. You decide your own. You may view your own class, race, and gender based interests as universal, but they are not. Moreover, I think deep down you know that, or you wouldn't be pronouncing that the Democratic party should abandoned civil rights and "identity politics," concerns about the lives of those who combined are in fact the overwhelming majority.

It's not surprising you ignore the data about the millions of voters of color disenfranchised and instead declare it's focus should be on appealing to white male Republicans, which all data shows voted primarily based on race. Acknowledging disenfranchisement doesn't fit the narrative of the centrality, and hence superiority, of a small handful of white, conservative voters and it doesn't fit the agenda of recentering the party around the interests of white men.

Voters are going to continue to vote in their interests, and there has been extensive discussion among writers of color and in social media about exactly what this argument seeks to do. You can't possibly think repeating it will convince them to abandon concern for their own lives so that those who already make 7-8x what they do can accumulate even more?

Now, we might see the crafting of a less dismissive and less exclusionary economic argument if there was enough respect for those citizens to listen to what they have to say. Instead, a fictional narrative persists that pronounces their rights and concerns as less.

Given the demographic changes in America, there are only two ways to engineer the party away from the poor, people of color and single women--who are the great majority of its electorate--toward yourself and your Trump-voting brethren: continued and ever more aggressive voter disenfranchisement, or genocide. OR you could start to listen, stop assuming that your interests are universal, and think about how to include concerns of others into your argument. Yet the resistance to doing so is seemingly inexhaustible. Why?