By Norman Solomon
A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:
“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.
The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.
After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report -- assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.
So, at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election apply to the latest one. For example:
- “The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.”
- One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”
- “Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”
- The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people.
- “What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in its own base.” The Democratic Party should disentangle itself -- ideologically and financially -- from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.
Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”
Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply -- after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid -- was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s base.
Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders is completely unacceptable.
"If you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a video. That was six years ago.
"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."
Resisting such normalization is now imperative.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.