Re: 115th Congress. In Bridge, Can Hearts be Trumped? In Spades!
But aren't the coastal social liberals the (current) face of the party? Those Ds are currently strong in population centers and mostly ignored in the rest of the US. They cost you the last election.
Yes and I maintain that is the fundamental problem with the Democratic party. The Democrats right now push social liberalism to the forefront and hide economic liberalism in the attic. That is exactly the opposite of what we should do pragmatically. The Courts have been furthering social liberalism for decades while at the same time destroying economic liberalism and turning this country into a neofeudal state. We should be trumpeting our economic liberalism and making that the centerpiece of our elections. Social liberalism happens
sort of automatically: people become more cosmopolitan, more educated, less religious, less parochial, less intolerant, less
conservative over time and bigotries erode. We can to some degree allow that to happen as the "long arc of history" which has brought rights first to non-Christians, then blacks, then women, then gays.
What we obviously need to push, hard, is the never-ending fight to keep the rich from enslaving the rest of us. And that is a very popular message to run on.
We have the wrong public face. You are correct.
There's one thing you're wrong about, though: the cartoon image of rural America as a bastion of good sense and good values is dead as a doornail. It's always been a myth but now it's flat out a lie. Not just that, but a self-defeating lie. The US is now majority urban. Urban America is the
real America. The "family farm" is bullsh-t -- something like 95% of agriculture is controlled by huge agribusiness. Coal miners might as well be cowboys they are so irrelevant to actual America.
Real Americans now work in office buildings or fast food restaurants or malls. Political campaigns should be built around
them rather than atavistic soft focus images of Morning In America which have been irrelevant to the actual experience of real Americans for half a century.
We should drive HARD at the cities and the suburbs. Insofar as there is a rural vote left it chooses to be the Battered Wife of the Republican party -- don't waste a dime on it. We should be using local appeal but to suburban social moderates who have had enough of Wall Street as-sf-cks destroying democracy.
