I feel that everything that went wrong [for the Democrats in this election] is what I’ve been saying would go wrong for the last year and a half.
I ran for president because I knew that the traditional Democratic playbook – the corporate Democrats are in charge of that playbook now – would not be enough to defeat Trump this time. I’ve said repeatedly that this election would be more like 2016 than like 2020, and it’s very clear to me that the elites of the Democratic Party and media don’t know how to read the room. The Democratic elite should resign their positions tonight. Many of those people have not sauntered out of their gated communities long enough to have made sense of what is going on out there.
Over the last year and a half, we could have been having a robust conversation about the following facts:
• 46 percent of Americans are regularly skipping meals in order to pay their rent.
• 70 to 90 million people are underinsured or uninsured.
• Over half of our bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies.
• One in four Americans live with medical debt.
• 1.3 million Americans are rationing their insulin.
Over 70 percent of Americans say that they are living with chronic economic anxiety.
People are feeling hopeless out in America now. In my opinion, Donald Trump offers false hope. He’ll name a pain, but he will not name a policy that’s going to fix it. But people will take false hope over no hope.
And the Democratic Party offered no hope. Instead of talking about these things, what the Democratic elite did was this: They just decided on an agenda. We weren’t even supposed to discuss what an agenda might be. They suppressed a presidential primary. They felt, in their smug arrogance, such a sense of entitlement: They would choose Joe, then they would choose Kamala, and they would suppress any candidate or any conversation about the wider issues that could have provided a compelling alternative – a compelling vision – for the American people.
~ Marianne Williamsom
“The Democratic Elite Should Resign”
The Free Press
November 6, 2024
“The Democratic Elite Should Resign”
The Free Press
November 6, 2024
Related Off-site Links:
Forging a Coalition of Conscience: This Isn’t the End. It’s the Beginning – Marianne Williamson (Transform, November 6, 2024).
Marianne Williamson: If the Democratic Electorate Was Exposed to Their Options, We Would Have Won – Jessie Watters Primetime (November 8, 2024).
Democrats Deserted Working Poor: Bishop William Barber on Healthcare, Living Wages, and Voting Rights – Democracy Now! (November 8, 2024).
U.S. Election Result: Where Did Harris and Her Campaign Go Wrong? – Dwayne Oxford (Al Jazeera, November 8, 2024).
Robin D. G. Kelley on Trump’s Election Win: “We Can’t Keep Relying on the Democratic Party” – Democracy Now! (November 7, 2024).
Bernie Sanders Shreds Democratic Party for Abandoning Working Class – Breaking Points (November 7, 2024).
Why Democrats Lose Even When Republicans Are So Endlessly Terrible – Chuck Idelson (Common Dreams, November 7, 2024).
Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold – Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, November 6, 2024).
“This Is a Collapse of the Democratic Party”: Ralph Nader on the Roots of Trump’s Win Over Harris – Democracy Now! (November 6, 2024).
Why Did the Democrats Lose? Because They Gave Up on the Working Class 40 Years Ago – Les Leopold (Common Dreams, November 6, 2024).
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Democrats Demobilized Their Base. A Movement Is Now Needed to Oppose Trump – Democracy Now! (November 6, 2024).
Cenk Uygur: Democrats Have Failed Us – The Young Turks (November 5, 2024).
UPDATES: Democratic Senator Chris Murphy Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: “We Are Out of Touch” – The Secular Report (November 11, 2024).
The Male Vote: The Democrats’ “Fatal Miscalculation” and What Trump Got Right: An Interview with Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men – Amanpour and Company (November 11, 2024).
Musa Al-Gharbi: Democrats Must Stop Shaming Voters – Undercurrents (November 12, 2024).
Jon Stewart Destroys “Woke” Dem Autopsy Takes – Krystal Ball (Breaking Points, November 12, 2024).
A Conversation with Marianne Williamson – Annalise Grueter (The Sopris Sun, November 13, 2024).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Marianne Williamson on the 2024 Presidential Election Results
• Venice Williams on How We Get Through the Next Four Years
• Something to Think About This Election Day
• Prayer of the Week
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’ Faltering Presidential Campaign
• Jeffrey C. Isaac: Quote of the Day – October 28, 2024
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Progressive Perspectives on an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• “Let the People Decide”: Marianne Williamson on the DNC’s Efforts to Deny and Suppress the Democratic Process
• Marianne Williamson on How Centrist Democrats Abuse Voters with False Promises
• Cornel West: Quote of the Day – December 3, 2020
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
5 comments:
1. That's a time-honored message from, say, 2016, but less so 2024. (Nobody, sadly, not even Bernie - who also should not have run for reelection - nor Warren nor Williamson - talks about the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 as such. Why? Because we are soooooo far from electing a Congress that would fix it, and no President can fix it without legislation.)
Biden should have announced he wasn't running for reelection after the GOP House conducted its first wrestling match for Speaker in January 2023 (why after? because announcing before would have screwed the Democrats more for reasons I won't go into here). That said, 2024 was about as far from a progressive-Left-agenda-friendly electoral mood as we've had in this century. (The progressive Left agenda in the USA is in rigor mortis but doesn't realize it yet. History rhymes, of course.)
All incumbent government parties that have faced democratic elections this year have been repudiated in some way at the polls. Analysts say that’s never happened before since the dawn of the era of modern first-world democratic governments in the early 20th century. Voters in all countries this year are punishing incumbent parties for inflation, even if they are personally ahead net of wage growth and are primed to be sustained in fury over a sense of social disorder, including where applicable the lack of sufficient control over disorder in the form of (1) migration across borders, and (2) crime.
2. It appears that a significant portion of Trump’s voters consider his bluster (one could use a lot of more pungent words in place of “bluster” – and I would, but I am looking at this from the perspective of people who are not aligned with my worldview) to be a form of anger entertainment rather than real substance. The strong swing of an impressive minority of non-White voters away from Democrats toward Republicans was a significant confirmation of this.
• Activist progressives do not really get the desire for entrepreneurial opportunity and business success by many working-class people, esp. within first- and second-generation immigrant groups (Latino, East/South Asian, West African, et cet.) These people want to become successful and rich - they want the stereotypical American dream of striking it rich - they have aspirations that are off the radar of those Democrats. Trump is a model for them, even with his myriad business failures, because he’s a totem of ambition (even while being personally lazy too an astonishing degree; he’d be fired as employee by any of those aspiring folks). Harris rightly tried to channel Thomas Jefferson (who appealed to America’s dreams over its reality) instead of John Adams (who held up a mirror of realism to Americans about human nature - Adams was, btw, right...), and that was an excellent instinct, but it wasn’t enough.
• These working-class people hate taxes and inflation and distrust regulation that is not obvious how it helps them (of course, the Biden administration moved heaven and earth to revive populist antitrust policy for the first time since Robert Bork euthanized it under Nixon/Ford, and the FTC’s rules on non-competes is also very helpful in practical terms, but not sexy politically).
• Democrats (including Himself - that is, Bernie) have had a hard time convincing these working-class people that Trump is the guy who stiffs them after they complete a job for him and then hurls a ton of lawyers at them if they push to get paid. It’s not a simple message to get across, and Trump relies on that.
. Enough voters, quite predictably, also react contrarily to being told that they think and/or feel insufficiently progressive in a variety of ways and are very happy to punish them who they feel are telling them that. (See my reference to Gen X below.)
Turnout in all swing states was roughly the same or higher than in 2020, so it’s not an issue that 2020 Democrats stayed home* – it’s just that many swung Rep.-ward. It appears that Free Gaza (and other Left objections to the Democrats) were not material to vote results in any swing states; Stein & West – the people to whom the very online Left made noises about voting for - made no difference whatsoever in those states. (*There are still millions of votes being tabulated in places like California; it always takes 3-4 weeks. There appears to have been an anomalous decline in Democratic voters in Mississippi and, less so, in some other very red Southern states; that affects total popular vote but nothing else of consequence.)
People - esp. White people - born in from the late 1950s through the 1960s are the most Republican voting now: the waning end Boomer/cuspers/early Gen X voters. And, when it comes to the political sensibility of this group when it was young, this was perhaps its most succinct capture in film even though the sensibility was very present when I was in college (a reaction to the economic miasma of 1973-1983+) and I think had ebbed in youth by the time of the film (1999) because of the comparatively Goldilocks economy of the 1990s. Here’s Tammy Metzler for the closer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh3TXsx8B40
4. Notice I didn’t mention abortion. It helped Democrats, but did not prevent ticket-splitting in either direction. It’s not a universal solvent on the Democrats’ behalf. By contrast, the Republicans do have a more successful wedge issue on certain trans issues (esp. biologically sexed pubescent boys playing on competitive girls’ athletic teams, and physical interventions for minors experiencing gender dysphoria - the center of gravity among Democratic-inclined voters is strongly skeptical at best of both) that I suspect will remain an arrow in the GOP quiver for years to come, after it may have accounted for 2% or more of the swing in popular vote to Trump.
Notwithstanding the perennial dreams of ideologues, there is no one - not even Trump and his Tech Bro Titans - who is going to produce the long longed-for societal collapse in the USA that is going to effectively midwife the rise of progressive Left desiderata from the ashes. There's no proletariat to be organized and galvanized in that direction. 2024 showed the erstwhile proles want anything but that. That's why that message from MW has passed its political expiration date.
We are now firmly in an age combining a Lottery Economy model with a Sensibility of Impunity, bereft of any sense that the (or a) common good ought be privileged over individual good. I suggest calling it the Devil Take(s) Hindmost Era – you can choose either the indicative mood or the original subjunctive mood of that handle.
Thanks for your informed and insightful comments, Percy.
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