John Cassidy has a story in the New Yorker on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s message to the Democratic Party from which I excerpt just Ocasio-Cortez’s words, with as few additions as possible.
“What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in, and getting into Twitter fights with the President is not exactly, I think, where we’re going to find progress as a nation.”
“He [Trump] spoke very directly to a lot of needs that were not being met by both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Our neglect of that is something we wholeheartedly have to take responsibility for, and correct for.”
“I do think the role of Russian interference was aggressive in the election. But that didn’t get Donald Trump to forty per cent. It didn’t get him to forty-five per cent in the polls.”
To position itself as a truly populist force, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Democratic Party must make a decisive leap from the standard methods of financing campaigns through corporate-money politics—and from the conflicts of interest that come with them. “Once we break free from that system [and] start to finance our campaigns with grassroots donations, we are able to speak more directly to the needs of the American people.”
John Cassidy points out “That is the traditional Democratic Party message, and it is one that never grows old.”
Starting from the bottom, my assessment is that Daily Kos is good at grassroots activism and donations; it is shrill where it should be merely serious about Russian interference; at least on the Daily Kos front page, the outrage and anti-Republican messages outweigh the “how we directly address the needs of the people”; and too much of the the twitter war finds its way to the front page too.
I’m thinking that at least for the next few months, more of “here are the problems people face, here’s how Democrats see how to solve them” would help. I think we should remember:
- the best politics is local (I keep remembering Danica Roem)
- that representatives who are truly working for their people constituents — not the interests of corporations, lobbyists, billionaire contributors — will have legitimate differences of opinion.
- that compromise — a balancing of the weights of different objectives and principles — is an essential part of satisficing all the varied needs and priorities of the people.
- what unites diverse democrats is not adherence to an ideology, but shared values, vision, goals.
e.g., “equal justice for all” is not an empty slogan.
e.g., the belief that government is a good, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
e.g., that in practice, life and liberty are threatened by an excess of inequality.
If Daily Kos cannot truly reflect a positive message, then we can’t expect the much more unwieldy Democratic Party apparatus to do so.
So that is my challenge to diarists, recommenders, commenters, everyone — much more of what it is we are fighting for, and much less of what we’re fighting against. Small difference but, IMO, with a big effect.