I am still reeling from the results of the American elections. My throat is sore from screaming into a pillow on Wednesday after knowing them… But damn, was that a good catharsis.
That same Wednesday, a good friend of mine also showed me something that I had failed to see. Amidst the flotsam, there is a silver lining.
Having won the Presidency, the Senate, and (probably) the House of Representatives, this time the MAGA Party (formerly known as the Republican Party) will have no one to blame but themselves for any and all policy failures.
They have driven themselves into a corner. It’s a classic case of being too successful. With no meaningful opposition from a Democratic Party that, admittedly, is in a deep ideological and leadership crisis, they are now forced to deliver — or else.
Now it is also the winter of discontent for the Democratic Party. According to several analysts, it has voted itself into a corner as well, by embracing ideologies that, simply, do not resonate with the majority of America — a nation that, at its core, is deeply socially conservative and firmly rooted in Protestant Christianity.
The Democratic Party, for good or ill, up to now has embraced a secular, elitist, cosmopolitan ideology common to coastal cities and urban centers nationwide. This ideology, while espousing left-of-center policies that call for a more present role of the State (a pressing necessity in American healthcare, where an ongoing affordability crisis has turned healthcare access into a privilege instead of a right) also pushed the ideological envelope with a discourse centered around identity and inclusiveness with which privileged people living in large urban areas (hereafter called urbanites) are very familiar, but too removed from the average person’s moral compass for them to accept.
The main problem here was that the Democratic Party did not have enough internal criticism to correct the course. It became stuck in an ideological «ivory tower» where everybody spoke the same language and said the same things, without any input from other walks of life. Progressively, the Democratic political language less in touch with the political reality of America, until its own base no longer recognised it.
Ultimately, that rarefying of the Democratic political language alienated its base in favor of independent, third-party, and, yes, even MAGA propositions. If that is not political suicide, I don’t know what is.
I believe that the time has come for the Democratic Party to stop catering exclusively to the urbanites.
It’s time for the Democratic Party to get out into the rural areas and blue-collar neighbourhoods that constituted its historical base, and win back their trust — and votes — door to door, voter to voter. It needs to drop the image of a cosmopolitan, elitist, urban party and embrace the plight of the working poor everywhere in America. The goal is to kick the MAGA Party — the real party of the privileged, but capable of saying things in a way that resonate with the average voter, even when they are not in their own interest — in the slats, over and over again, keep kicking when it eventually comes down, and then take a sledgehammer to them — a sledgehammer made out of policies that uplift and resonate with the blue-collar class.
It’s time for the Democratic Party to get mad, stay mad, and build policies and ideology based not upon the urbanites’ abstract concepts of inclusiveness, equality, and other such niceties. It’s time to shed that ideology. Inclusion, equality, and diversity may be good for high-minded conversations in the upper-class neighborhoods of the coastal cities, but they don’t fly with the electorate that gets votes in ballots. They have much, much more pressing necessities that need attention in the short term.
It’s time to appeal to the blue-collar class once again, with table-top issues about healthcare, cost of living, and education, and for now leave the more abstract ideals of a more inclusive society on the back burner. Those ideals, though nice to have, won’t put bread on the table.
It’s time to wake up. Time to make a revolution within the Democratic Party, time to kick the robber barons. Time to get sweaty foreheads, pain from tractor back, blisters on the hands, and get to work to grind the MAGA Party to dust.