It’s still too early to be drawing broad conclusions on the long-term impact of Tuesday’s election, but the trends aren’t promising. To be a Democrat today means having to stifle the anger stemming from the knowledge that millions of your compadres stayed home on Election Night. They could be bothered to vote, and so we’re looking at probably the worst, most ideological and mean-sprited Congress in this nation’s history. When your contribution to our political dialogue is Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, and Cory Gardener, how can you expect any reasonable, thoughtful person to take you seriously? The new crop of Congressional Republicans make Michele Bachmann look like a paragon of sanity…and we’re supposed to believe that a ridiculous, uneducated ideology is a good thing?
In the short term, I do think there are some lessons that can be drawn from the nightmare that was Tuesday night. If nothing else, this sort of postmortem should help provide a bit of perspective at a time when it would be too easy to believe the sky is falling. The next two years likely won’t be as bad as we fear, but the odds of anything positive being accomplished just went from (very) bad to (unbelievably) worse.
Bad and stupid people are elected by good and smart people who stay home, which begs the question of how smart someone who declines to vote really is. Democracy depends on an informed and involved electorate. If you cede the playing field to the corrupt and the venal, you can’t very well complain when the results aren’t what you want to see. If you couldn’t be bothered to vote, STFU. You have no right to expect to be taken seriously…or to be listened to.
Americans need a reason to vote Democratic, but they’ll vote for a ham sandwich no questions asked if there’s an “R” behind its name. Yeah, it sucks, but it’s the truth. Conservatives have succeeded in tilting the playing field in their direction, and they’ve framed the debate in a very simple, easy to understand manner: “Liberals bad”…and Americans are predisposed to buying it. This is what happens when an entire electorate is conditioned to react rather than think.
Cheating works. The efforts to pass Voter
IDsuppression laws in red states ensured that Republicans would not only maintain power, but solidify and increase their advantage. By finding new and ever more creative ways to keep minorities and the poor from voting, Republicans showed what can be accomplished when you have no morals or ethical standards. That they won by doing things like disenfranchising more than 600,000 voters in Texas is reprehensible and anti-democratic. Then again, it’s never been about democracy for Republicans. “One man, one vote” is a variable that’s difficult to control; it’s always (and only) been about political power- achieving, solidifying, and increasing it. Democracy is for losers and Liberals…which is why Republicans win elections.If you’re a Republican, you will never lose by underestimating the intelligence of the American Sheeple. If you don’t believe me, just check out this race in Arizona. Or the election of Gordon Klingenschmitt in Colorado…yeah, the guy who performed an exorcism on Barack Obama.
Lies, character assassination, and disinformation won’t stick to Republicans. Those things will, however, stick to Democrats. Yeah, it’s a double standard, and it sucks, but it’s reality. Deal with it…or continue losing.
Conservatives have created a legal and financial environment that provides them with HUGE advantages. Citizens United has ushered in an era in which money is considered free speech…which ultimately means that none of us are free. Until or unless Citizens United is overturned, Democrats will face the Sisyphian task of fighting virtually unlimited sums of dark money employed by corporations and their Conservative owners. If money is now free speech, Democrats will have to learn how to live and compete with far less free speech.
Left to their own devices, Americans will invariably vote against their best interests. When the two most popular news sources- Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh- are also recognized as the least accurate and most ideological, the only conclusion to be drawn is that Americans don’t want to think critically. They want to have their prejudices and preconceived notions affirmed and validated.
Americans hate Congress…but they love the Congressman who represents them. How else could you explain a body with a 9% approval rating…and a 96.4% re-election rate?
Perhaps worst of all, we’ve outsourced our politics to billionaires who are using dark money to purchase government favorably inclined to support their interests. Candidates no longer run things; billionaires do. Here in Oregon, Dr. Monica Wehby, the Republican candidate for Senate posted a health care policy on her campaign website that was a verbatim of that from Karl Rove’s Crossroad GPS super PAC. She lost, but you can’t reasonably believe she was the ONLY Republican candidate to do something like that during this election cycle.
Forty-two people were responsible for 1/3 of all superPac spending in this election. 42 people. If that doesn’t cause you concern, I can’t imagine what would.
I could go on, but these ten points seem a good place to start. More than anything, though, Democrats will never win unless they either a) learn how to counter Republican tactics, or b) play the game by the rules created by Republicans.
One thing should be crystal clear, though: If you’re a Democrat and you couldn’t be bothered to vote, you need to STFU for the next two years. If you couldn’t see your way clear to meeting your responsibility, you have NO right to piss and moan about what Republicans will be doing to America between now and November, 2016. You had the opportunity to have a say, and you blew it…along with your right to complain.
Thanks for nothing.
