How the Democrats Can Win Kansas
2017-5
  Listen, Democrats, do you want my vote? Do you WANT people like me to vote for you, or do you not? Do you want to win elections here in the heart of the country, or are you happier losing them? Because if you want to win back the center of the country, if you want to win elections in Kansas and Iowa and Texas and Utah, I know how you can do that. You can do it without sacrificing any of your core beliefs. It is not political beliefs that you need to change, to win Kansas over; it is behavior.
I am a swing voter. Actually I usually vote with you, irritated as I have become by you. I am not at all opposed to voting for your candidate—in fact, I just did. I voted with the plurality in the US election; that is to say, I voted for Ms. Clinton. I did it, but I wasn’t happy about it, and I understand those who did not. I regard Donald Trump as a Con Man, a narcissist, and a pig—and yet I am 49% in sympathy with those who voted for him. I should not pretend to speak for anyone but myself, but I do suspect that my view of your party is not really all that different from many others’ view of your party; you are free to reject this assertion or to accept it. But it rather seems to me that you could and should have won this election by, oh, I don’t know, 538 to nothing or thereabouts, and that you can in fact win future elections by a wide margin if you will just do a few simple and almost entirely painless things. "Painless" understates it; many of these remedies are things that will actually make your life more pleasant, quite apart from the fact that they will stop you from losing future elections to narcissistic pigs.
Ms. Clinton, in her gracious and eloquent concession speech, urged her supporters repeatedly to just keep fighting, just keep fighting for what is right. What I have to say to you is, for Christ’s sake, stop fighting for a while. This is not a moment that calls for you to fight on blindly. This is a moment that calls for you to stop and take stock of what you are fighting for. Give it a rest. You need the break. We need the break.
Politics is not supposed to be an endless fight; it is supposed to alternate between periods of conflict and periods of co-operation. A war is a fight to the death; politics is a civilized alternative. Some of what you are fighting for, much of what you are fighting for, and even most of what you are fighting for is good and right and justified, and let me address some of that first. It was a great thing that you put forward an African American candidate in 2008, and it was a great thing that you put forward a woman as a candidate in 2016. Keep doing that. Nominate another woman in 2020, a black woman in 2024, and be the first party to nominate an openly gay candidate in 2028. Go for a Muslim in 2032, and a transsexual in 2036. These things have made it easier for me to vote for you in the past, and they will make it easier for me to vote for you in the future. This is the role that you have chosen for yourself in our political debate, and good on you for doing that. I will assure you none of this will hurt you with the Kansas vote; hell, we’ve been electing women Senators and Governors and Representatives all my life, and long before the coasts starting doing so.
I would be doing you a disservice if I went no further with that theme. You have chosen the role of the advocate of minorities, and of the advocate of women, although women are not a minority except if measured by gross weight or hourly income. There is still much work that needs to be done along this line, and I applaud your efforts to keep chopping at that. We have not yet arrived at a racial paradise where the injustices of the past are no longer with us; far from it. We still live in a world in which too many African Americans are in poverty, and too few have nice houses with all the latest junk. By no means has that journey been completed—for Black Americans, or for gay Americans, or for women or for disabled people or for any other minority. Kansas understands that as well as any other state understands it.
You have chosen as well the role of defender of the environment, and for this, again, I applaud you, and in this I will support you as far as I can. We are crawling toward a global environmental disaster which it may already be too late to avoid. You are doing all you can to prevent that, and I support you in this in principle. The MANNER in which you are working on the problem is short-sighted and largely ineffective, but at least you are trying, and that’s a point in your favor; the Republicans aren’t even trying.
Your party has historically advocated for the poor, and for the more equitable distribution of wealth. I agree with you here; I will support you here, and I will try to vote with you here. I believe that it is an entirely appropriate use of the government’s power to insure that wealth is not TOO unevenly shared among the citizens. I think that it is dangerous and destructive to allow massive concentrations of wealth in private hands. I don’t wish that you had done less on this level; I wish that you had done much more on this level, and that you had been much more effective in this area.
Another area in which I am in general agreement with you, rather than with them Republicans, has to do with the use of military power. The Democratic Party, in the last 40 years, has become wary of the international use of force and wary of careless increases in defense spending, preferring to believe that we can manage our international relations better by avoiding giving offense to the people of other nations. While you may go too far in this regard. . . .well, to go too far in ANY direction is simply the nature of a political party; the Republicans go too far in the other direction, but, speaking for myself, I am more in your camp than theirs. These ideas are as marketable in Kansas as they are in California.
I am trying to speak to you as a friend, but not too good of a friend, not a friend who will go get drunk with you, but a friend who will tell you that you have had one too many and are making a fool of yourself. I frequently find myself in situations in which everyone in the room is more liberal than I am. I am what you might call a first-generation liberal. My wife observed about Trump’s election that she was glad that her father didn’t live to see this. My father would have voted for him. It often seems to me that my friends have NO understanding of what just happened. I am not celebrating what just happened, but I think that I understand it. Will you please be patient enough to allow me to explain it to you as I see it?
OK, point one, let’s talk about the concept of citizenship as property. It is a valuable thing, to be an American citizen, or at least it used to be a valuable thing. My citizenship is my valuable property.
Look, I understand that property is not an egalitarian concept. It is not the best of all possible worlds, that some people hold valuable property and other people are excluded from that. I understand that, but you have to understand this: that we are not at the point at which we are ready to get rid of personal property. We are never going to be at that point.
When you don’t enforce the borders, when you allow people who are not citizens to claim the rights of citizenship, you have been disrespectful of my property. I don’t really care, myself; I’m well off, and open to sharing this little bit of my property—but I understand why other people ARE unhappy about it.
When you force people to share their property, their citizenship, when you force them to share this property not by community decision but by YOUR decision to be stop enforcing the laws, people will quite understandably resent that. Of course I know that the Democrats are no more responsible for that than the Republicans are, but the point is that the person who promised to put an end to it was a Republican. You didn’t get on board. You dragged your heels. You made excuses.
You didn’t get on board, because you were kidding yourselves about what a great thing this was going to be for the Democratic Party. Just weeks ago, the liberal world in which I mostly live was certain that the Republican Party was about the self-destruct. I pointed out: The Republicans hold the Senate. The Republicans hold the house. The Republicans hold the great majority of the governorships. The Republicans control the statehouses in most of the states. The Republican Party has never been stronger in my lifetime.
Oh, but the Republicans have lost four of the last six Presidential elections, and they are headed into a Presidential campaign with a terrible candidate who will probably sink the entire slate and, best of all, the Republicans have lost the Latino vote for a generation, if not forever.
No, they haven’t. Latino citizens are citizens. Citizenship is property. Citizens are going to vote for whoever is willing to protect their property—including their citizenship. I am not in favor of building a big wall—but I am in favor of treating citizenship with respect. If that means shutting down businesses that knowingly hire people who are here illegally. . .well, shut them down. If it means enforcing ballot security, enforce it.
What no one says very often about illegal immigrants is that if you drove them all out of the country you would cause a rapid contraction of the economy, and a rapid contraction of the economy would quite certainly trigger a serious recession. I am not in favor of running all the undocumented fellas out of the country, not only out of respect for them but also because I am not in favor of having a big recession. Let’s hope that Trump understands that; I don’t know. He doesn’t seem very smart, but perhaps that’s just the way he talks.
Your party has always. . . .not always. Your party has long pushed for a constantly better America—for higher standards, new rules, more efforts at social justice. It makes people queasy, frankly. It makes me queasy.
Not for agreement, but just for understanding, making sure you are still with us. . . the Democratic Party, basically, pushes to eliminate smoking, pushes for cleaner air and cleaner water, pushes for the destruction of racist institutions and barriers to racial justice, pushes or has pushed in the past for a better judicial process with more protections for those accused and better treatment of those convicted, pushes for a more open and welcoming attitude for newcomers to our country, pushes for the elimination of barriers to international trade, pushes to get childhood obesity under control.
Frankly, many, many, many of the things that progressives have pushed for in the past have proven to be disastrous, and you never take responsibility for the disasters that you have brought upon the country; you either pretend that it was the Republicans who did this or insist that it wasn’t a mistake, we just didn’t do enough of it. If you want a catalogue of your failures along this line perhaps we will do that another time. (Prohibition, Lyndon Johnson’s great society, Bill Clinton’s trade policies, the Warren Court’s willy-nilly extension of legal rights, triggering a massive increase in crime, Obama’s health care initiative.)
Because of these many, many high-cost failures of liberal policies, I am always leery of voting for Democrats, because I am always afraid you are going to push us into some new kind of high-risk venture that will turn out to be a time bomb with a 30-year fuse.
But I am not suggesting here that you should stop pushing for new ideas, because of this wariness that many of us have about your new ideas; far from it. I am making exactly the opposite argument. I believe that many of your plans and schemes from the past have proven to be disastrous; I recognize that you do NOT believe that, but this is about what I believe, not about what we agree on. But while I believe that, I still feel that the Democratic Party represents me, in this area, more than the Republican Party does. I WANT you to come forward with new ideas. Your failure to come forward with new ideas, I think, is among the things which frankly has driven the Democratic Party to the edge of Irrelevance in the center of the country.
This is what I believe has happened. I think that before Reagan, by 1970 or certainly by the early 70s, the American public had turned against the kind of liberalism which dominated the agenda from FDR through LBJ. The War in Viet Nam had undermined LBJ’s Great Society, which had a lot of dead weight on its own (although it had many successes), but, more particularly, exploding crime rates had made the nation deeply, deeply suspicious of liberal courts. Us Baby Boomers, as young adults, looked like clowns, pushing our parents away from us as we pushed away from them. George McGovern was really the last Democratic nominee who was an out-of-the-closet liberal. After Nixon crushed McGovern, Democrats became afraid to openly say what was in their hearts. Reagan solidified that barrier, effectively making "liberal" a dirty word. Clinton won two elections by tacking toward the center, running against welfare and ignoring the unions.
But the lack of confidence in the viability of their ideas, in a contest of ideas, has let in the kudzu vine of political consultants. The invasive species. Psst, they whisper. Negative advertising works. Raise lots of money—I’ll show you how—and spend your money driving up your opponent’s negatives. Negative advertising really works.
It’s BS; it doesn’t work. It works sometimes. What it always does is, it always diminishes the candidate who uses it, and it always distracts from the policy debates which the Democratic Party should be leading and could be winning.
The Democratic Party has never really reclaimed its liberal heart or its progressive soul—and you need to do that. The model I would recommend to you here. . . .belch twice and get ready to fart; you are not going to like this. The advocacy model that I would recommend to you here is the most effective advocacy group in the United States: the NRA.
  I have no rooster in this cockfight. I am not a gun owner or a hunter, but I also don’t believe that regulating guns is going to do very much to prevent violence, nor do I think it is going to happen, nor do I especially think that it SHOULD happen. I’m neutral on that. But the NRA does a sensational job of advocating THEIR position.
So liberalism is not currently popular. . …what, is gun ownership popular? Surveys show that it is not. But the NRA does not back away from what they believe, and they are not hiding in the closet. They are not shy about participating in the debate. They are right out front with their beliefs. They run extremely effective advertising campaigns, and they do the most effective organized advocacy in American politics.
What I am asking of the Democratic Party is simply that you go back to boldly advocating what you believe in. I think that Bernie Sanders proves that you can—and I believe that that will work in Kansas, it will work in Nebraska, it will work in Iowa. Liberal ideas have decayed in the Midwest because liberals have ceased to advocate for them.
SOME liberal ideas; some liberal ideas are just losers, and you need to push them overboard and watch them sink to the bottom of the sea, but some liberal ideas are strong ideas and people will rally around them if you are bolder and braver in advocating for them. Among those:
  1) Strong limits on passing wealth from generation to generation.
2) Much, much, much more aggressive regulation of deceptive business practices by large companies.
3) Free college education.
; 4) Reform and repeal of many national drug laws.
5) Extensive targeted programs to help inner cities.
6) Better treatment of incarcerated people who have not committed heinous crimes.
And many others. You are doing many things right, but I am trying to be helpful by working toward the root of your relative weakness here in the Midwest, which I believe that I understand, and which I believe that you do not understand. The notion that large concentrations of wealth are destructive of democracy has exactly the same resonance in the Midwest that it has on the coasts. Beyond that, I have five suggestions for you, three of which I urge you to consider, and two of which I believe are absolutes; you cannot and will not regain standing in the Midwest until you do these things.
1) Stop pushing for National Health Care.
2) PLEASE stop trying to tell us that you are making something more affordable when you subsidize expenditures on it.
3) Stop conflating political beliefs with economic needs.
4) Stop running against the Republicans, and go back to running FOR the office.
5) For Christs’ sake, stop yelling "racist" at everybody who disagrees with you.
First, I honestly do not believe that our new President is either a racist or a fascist. He is a narcissist, a sexist and a liar. Sometimes he is not lying; sometimes he is living in a distorted reality in which he truly believes things which are obviously not true. He appears to be a superficial thinker, he is crass and insensitive, and he is unworthy of the office that he holds, but these things are quite different from being a racist or a fascist.
Some of Trump’s supporters are racist, and some of Trump’s ideas are proto-fascist are quasi-fascist. As to how many of Trump’s supporters are racist, I don’t know and you don’t know, and your guess is probably as good as mine. I would guess that it is about 5%. Racists now are probably 3% of the country, but, of course, the racists were not voting Democrat, so their percentage within the Trump vote would be nearly twice their percentage within the country.
As to Trump being a quasi-fascist. ..well, it’s a common thing. All Presidents have a little fascism in them; it’s human nature.
Three or four years ago, our country made a sort of agreement among ourselves that it was improper to suggest that your political opponents were like the Nazis. As long as I can remember people have been calling each other Nazis, but about three years ago we decided that was out of line, and we shouldn’t do that anymore.
This agreement has now collapsed; the left now openly screams "Nazi!" at Trump, and Trump responds by calling Nazi on whoever he is angry with at the moment. And it is a good thing that this agreement has collapsed; it was a lousy idea to make such a rule to begin with.
Why?
Because we all have a little Nazi hiding inside of us. To say that no one can be likened to a Nazi makes it seem that the Nazis were some different species, so wildly different from us that we share no DNA. This is not true. The Nazis were just ordinary people who invested in their prejudices, allowing their hatreds to grow from potted plants into a jungle. They let their crazy side loose—but I have a crazy side, too, and you do, and you do, and you do. I’ve got a few potted plants around here m’self. We are better off to admit that we do, rather than pretending that we are a society of saints. The political consultants who sell negative advertising to the candidates are working on the little Nazi in you. To say that Trump has quasi-fascist ideas is not to condemn him, in my view, because I believe that all Presidents have quasi-fascist tendencies.
Is Trump more heavily colored by fascist hunger than other Presidents? I don’t know. Maybe. He won the election. There’s no Mulligan Clause in the constitution. "Fascism" is not a description of one man; it is a name for a system of government or a system of thought. Fascism is not created when a power-hungry man, insensitive to the pain he is causing, is elected. All Presidents are power-hungry, and all people are sometimes insensitive. Fascism is created when the rest of the system stops resisting. I don’t really see much risk of that happening, and frankly, all of this "fascist" talk looks silly to me.
Trump has personal failings which may, on their own, lead to something of a comeback by the Democratic Party in 2018 and 2020, but I am not talking about THAT comeback; if that is all you guys get out of this, you will be in worse shape in ten years than you are now. I am talking about recovering the power of your ideas.
When liberals write about this election, they write about it as if the center of the country
1) was blind to Donald Trump’s failings, and
2) had endorsed all of his worst ideas.
Neither of these things is true. We are not blind to Trump’s failings, and we recognize that a lot of what he says is dangerous and destructive. We recognize that many of his comments are crass and grossly inappropriate.
Trump won the center of the country because:
1) SOME of the stuff that he says is true, and
2) the Democrats nominated a candidate who is, depending on your judgment, (a) almost as offensive as Trump, (b) as offensive as Trump, or (c) even worse than Trump.
The truth is not that we have blinded ourselves to Trump’s failings, but that you have blinded yourselves to Ms. Clinton’s failings. She is as dull as dishwater, she is a criminal who should have been indicted for her careless handling of national secrets, followed by a long campaign of defiance of the law in covering up her crimes, and she is a corrupt politician who has sold out her values for power and money. She is phony to the bone, and I wonder about the bones.
  I voted for Ms. Clinton, but it was like eating rancid soup. It was like being in a restaurant, you’re really hungry, and the waiter says "OK, we’ve got rancid soup, and we’ve got sandwiches with mold on the bread and rotten meat. Which one do you want?" Gee, I guess I’ll take the rancid soup; thanks. Perhaps I’ll take the moldy bread for later.
There is a lot of talk just now about Trump beginning his Presidency with low approval ratings. Well, DUH. If you give the public a choice between two people that they mostly despise, they will choose someone that they despise. What you are missing is that, if Ms. Clinton had won the election, she ALSO would be beginning her Presidency with historically low approval ratings. We had two bad choices; we made a choice that we are unhappy with.
Trump, in his inaugural address, said that "For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed."
CNN, in its coverage of this speech, focused not on how this sounded to the American people, but on how it must have sounded to the privileged people gathered around the podium. One commentator after another said something very much like, "If I had been one of those former Presidents, I would have been tempted to get up and walk out at those words." But if a politician takes $700,000 to give a speech to Wall Street, do you really think that politician is entitled to take offense at the suggestion that she has used her office to line her pockets?
What Trump was saying there is true, and you know damned well that it is. It is the point where Trump and Bernie meet. If you add Trump’s supporters and Bernie’s supporters, you’ve got 65, 70% of the country, and this is the point upon which they agree.
The Democrats have as much ability to benefit from that message as the Republicans do—but to do that, they need to nominate candidates who haven’t been feeding at the trough. And they need to stop covering up for the members of their party who ARE feeding at the trough.
So there are three things at the core of Trump’s message which are absolutely true:
1) That the citizens have a right to expect that their citizenship will be valued and protected,
2) That the trade deals of the 1990s and since were not well thought out, and have not worked in America’s favor, and
; 3) That the political class has been allowed for too long to put its own interests ahead of the interests of those who elected them.
I also agree with Mr. Trump, agree with President Trump, that large companies can be and should be intimidated out of careless decisions to ship jobs out of the country. It is entirely appropriate for the President of the United States to go to the owners of a factory and tell them, "Look, you move these jobs out of the country, you’re not bringing the goods back in." Whether it will work or not, we’ll see, but it deserves a shot. "Free trade is good for everybody" is not a serious trade policy; it is just a slogan.
Many of the countries which are in NATO are the same countries which are in the European Union. They want to have it both ways; they want to send one message when they act as the European Union, but a contradictory message when they act as NATO. As the European Union, they want to be our rival or our superior. It is entirely reasonable for President Trump to say "OK, you want to be our economic equal, step up. Pay what you have agreed to pay." There is nothing wrong with his doing that.
I can’t believe that I even have to say this, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the American President putting American interests ahead of international interests. Is it wrong for the Green Bay Packers to put the interests of the Green Bay Packers ahead of the interests of the NFL? Is it wrong for Microsoft to put the interests of Microsoft ahead of the interests of the software industry? Is it wrong for Hilton to put the interests of Hilton ahead of the interests of the hospitality business?
Of course there is a place for internationalism, but we are not electing the President to be the leader of the Free World. We are electing him to represent America’s interest. There is nothing wrong with that.
The Democratic Party does not need to abandon ANY of its principles to get on the right side of these issues with that little part of the country that runs from the western border of New Jersey to the western border of Nevada. But here is what you really, really must do, my Democratic friends.
I will not use the N word even for purposes of illustration, but let us pretend that the N word is "Nashville". I am old enough to remember when the real racists could control those who started to leave to the fold by calling them Nashville Lovers. It was a highly effective technique, in its day; if you supported Civil Rights legislation you were not being faithful to your group, you were not being true to your kind, you were being a Nashville Lover. People did not want to betray their group, so they did not want to be called Nashville Lovers.
It was an effective technique, and then it wasn’t. A point was reached at which everybody was just sick of that. There was a sea change in 1963, 1965, and all of a sudden the backward, sweat-soaked rabble were left standing in the street yelling "Nashville Lover! Nashville Lover! Nashville Lover!" as the future paraded past them.
Well, it is every bit as despicable to call someone a racist who is not a racist as it is to actually be a racist; in fact, I would argue that it is more despicable to do this, since it both promotes racism and debases public discourse. People have just gotten sick to death of that. There has been a sea change, and now you are the filthy old creeps standing in the street yelling "Racist! Racist! Racist!" at everybody who walks past you and will not salute.
Why is it worse to call someone a racist who is not a racist than to actually be a racist? Well, first, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? If you call someone a (insert racist slur here) or you unfairly call them a racist or anything else profoundly insulting, isn’t that the same thing? But beyond that, what happens if I and 2,000 of my close friends start calling someone that you admire a racist. . .let’s say, Bill Gates. If 2,000 of us start yelling "racist" at Bill Gates, you’re going to think "maybe it is not so bad, to be called a racist." When your turn comes, and you are called a racist, you shrug and say "OK, call me a racist, then."
  You’re letting David Duke out of his cage. If you call a million people racists, he’s just one of the millions, just another guy. David Duke and you, you’re on the same team now. To do this promotes racism, aggressively promotes it. It’s not like putting fertilizer on a tomato plant; it is more like pouring fertilizer on a fire. If you keep doing this, you are going to push America back toward overt racism. This is not a theory; it is already happening. You are pushing America back toward overt racism. I beg you to stop it.
Mr. Trump is not a racist, Jeff Sessions is not a racist, and no one in Trump’s cabinet appears to be a racist. Every time you call one of those people a racist, you might as well put $20 in an envelope and mail it to Rush Limbaugh. You are feeding his fire.
Give it a rest. Stop feeding the fires. It is not your beliefs which are causing you problems in the center of the country, my Democratic friends; it is merely your behavior. It is nominating a candidate who is very obviously corrupt, and then pretending that she is not corrupt. It is trying to win elections by piling up money halfway to the sky, and using that money to demean your opponents. It is tiptoeing around what you really believe, rather than asserting what you believe. It is treating the rights of citizenship with disrespect. It is making political battles out of all political issues. It is yelling "racist" at people who are not racist. If you will merely stop doing these things, I promise you that the center of the country will come back to you like a grownup son returning to his mother. After she kicks the step dad out of the house.
  I will open this up to comments by readers in a couple of days.