It’s been just over a week now since last Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election and the stunning defeat of the Democratic Party by the Donald Trump-led Republican Party which now controls the presidency, the senate and the house. It was an unprecedented “red wave” that swept all in its path.
Significantly, the Democratic Party and its selected candidate Kamala Harris were defeated in all seven swing states and, nationally, lost by a margin greater than all third party votes combined. This latter reality means that the so-called “spoiler effect” of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein can’t be used as an excuse for the Democrats’ monumental loss.
In the time since Team Blue’s electoral trouncing, a lot of folks have expressed dismay at what they perceive as a “blame game” taking place within the Democratic Party as party officials, pundits, and voters try to figure out where and how it all went so terribly wrong. I don’t see what’s going on as a “blame game” but rather as a much needed and long overdue process of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable.
Longtime Democratic National Committee (DNC) member James Zogby agrees, noting that members of the Democratic Party establishment/elite, their consultancy groups, and their corporate media sycophants “will find fault with the voters and their choices [but] not with the poor decisions they themselves made.”
It is in this spirit of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable that I share the following perspectives on what went wrong for the Democrats in last Tuesday’s national elections, including the presidential election.
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Every election since 2008 has been a referendum on the system and the change candidate has won. Obama was able to hold onto the presidency in 2012 due to sheer charisma and his ability to still wear the cloak of change agent.
2016 Trump was the change agent, 2020 it was Biden, 2024 Kamala’s unwillingness to break with Biden or even name a single thing she would do differently cemented Trump as the agent of change.
So many of our political problems today stem from Obama and the Democrats inability or unwillingness to provide meaningful change after the 2008 mandate. No accountability for the Wall Street criminals, no accountability for Bush and Cheney war mongering and lies, no systemic change to the political system which is incapable of solving problems and no change to the economic system that ensures the majority of Americans live in perpetual insecurity.
As time goes on and the average worker’s lot in life gets worse – worse standard of living, less job security, more financial anxiety, increased costs to basic necessities – the more polarized and radical people’s politics become. The Democrats effectively crushed any populist energy from their left flank in 2016 and again in 2020. This has left people no where to go but right, and that’s where they’ve gone.
I don’t think people are stuck in this position, but as long as the power structure and political system make it impossible for a true populist left movement to emerge, people will continue to get sucked into this right wing trap. And let me be perfectly clear, this outcome is preferable to the Democratic Party establishment and the capitalist power structure. A Trump is much preferred to a Bernie to the DNC and business elite.
There is a lot of anger in the country, much justified, nearly all of it wrongly placed. It’s not immigrants or China that’s destroying this country, it’s the wealthiest among us who want to keep us poor, stupid, and bitterly divided. It’s easier for them to rip us off this way.
From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.
. . . Harris’s flip-flop on fracking is emblematic of her entire campaign, a relatively minor issue that gave devastating insight into her vacuous political character. She could never explain it because the only explanation was pure political calculation (and a bad one). She was willing to invalidate her climate policy to court a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. It was the equivalent of Hillary telling Goldman Sachs she had one policy in public and another in private. But even more inept. How could you make the campaign about honesty and trust, once you’d shown yourself to be dishonest and untrustworthy on an issue you’d described as being an existential threat to human life on earth? Harris sold out the climate movement (and the climate) and still lost Pennsylvania.
. . . In the end, Harris didn’t outperform Biden in a single county in the country.
Following is a November 7 interview with author, activist, and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. As my friend Mark notes about this particular ABC News Live interview:
I sense much grace and soberness in Marianne Williamson’s voice as she diffuses the “vindication” slur/giddiness pitched at her in this interview. I’m curious as to what my peers are feeling they’re being guided toward over the next four years so as to find a path towards environmental and humanitarian hopes of leadership within the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board.
. . . We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.
. . . The absence of cohesion has to do with the general – two things, I think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four decades.
And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity – the Boeing strike, for example – but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of solidarity – in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of cohesion.
. . . [S]omehow the right, for many people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trump[-like figures] for generations.
Let this be a reckoning. In 2016, I warned that Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders alone, could defeat Donald Trump. The country was ready – desperate – for transformational change. The air was thick with a demand for something real, something that spoke to the soul of working people. Yet, the Democratic establishment fought this truth tooth and nail. They threw their weight behind Hillary Clinton – the so-called “safe choice” – dismissing those of us who saw the storm coming. They believed the path to victory lay in moderation, in reaching to the middle, as the books and scholars of traditional politics have always taught.
And here we are again. In 2024, they turn to Kamala Harris, who walks beside Liz Cheney, while Sanders is cast to the shadows. The outcome? Trump has won the popular vote. Once again, the establishment was wrong. Wrong in 2016, wrong in 2024 – will you be wrong again in 2028?
. . . And let me say this, to those who’ve been ignored, belittled, and alienated for nearly a decade: to the supporters of Sanders, to those who stayed home [last] Tuesday because they could no longer recognize the party that once claimed to fight for them – we owe you an apology. A true one, unflinching. And we must give you a reason to believe in us again.
Following is a 10-minute segment from the Politics Done Right podcast’s November 9 show. This segment highlights Dr. Eddie Glaude’s recent on-air exchange with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on why Kamala Harris did not win. According to Politics Done Right host Egberto Willies, how Glaude speaks about the reasons Harris lost is how we all “should be tackling racism, sexism, and misogyny.” (NOTE: Other progressive voices disagree that Harris's loss essentially boils down to sexism and racism rather than her policies – or lack thereof. See, for example, Sabrina Salvati’s video commentary here.)
The last eight years have demonstrated that reforming neo-conservative, Wall Street Democrats is a fool’s errand. Post-1970s Dems have proven to be the greatest threat to the American left, and the Democratic Party has become the graveyard of progressive movements.
You want to make a difference, House and Senate “progressives?” Easy peasy: Dem-EXIT en masse and declare yourselves Green Party representatives and senators. Your first order of business: agitate like angry hornets for sweeping election and campaign finance reform, complete with instant-runoff voting, so progressives don’t get attacked every 2-4 years by malignant, genocidal, right-wing “centrists” with delusions of liberalism.
On issues of importance to progressives, duopoly-liberated Green Party representatives and senators can caucus with whichever party holds positions we agree with. We can caucus with the Republicans pushing to end the Ukraine War, and we can caucus with Democrats if they ever push for Medicare-for-All or anything else of value.
But only a mass-defection from the neo-fascist Democratic Party by principled liberals and progressives has a chance of putting this country on the right track.
The rest of the “leftists” who sheepdog for Team Blue without making a single demand – and the precipitously-endorsing “progressive” activists who beg and beg Democrats to do the right thing – are pissing in the wind.
Until you advocate for a complete abandonment of the Democratic Party that abandoned us decades ago, you are part of the problem.
You’re why Trump – and worse demagogues to come – have such an easy path to victory. You stand for nothing and fight for less.
Speaking of the Green Party, here’s a 16-minute segment taken from Breakthrough News’ Election Night coverage featuring Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein sharing her thoughts on the election results.
On the day after the election, renowned consumer advocate, corporate critic, and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader was a guest on Democracy Now!. Here he talked about the “collapse of the Democratic Party” and the roots of Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris.
It all started when the Democrats . . . started getting corporate cash in 1979, dialing for the same commercial values [as the Republicans]. That blurred their difference from the New Deal-type Democrats to the corporate Democrats. Then they contracted out the election to these corporate-conflicted profiteering consulting firms, which the mass media never seemed to want to investigate in this campaign. And then they abandoned public media. Basically, they abandoned radio to the Rush Limbaughs and created the Reagan Democrats. And then they never learn from their mistakes. They didn’t learn from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then, they never fire anybody after they lose, in one state after another, to the worst Republican Party in history.
And so, what is the message that they gave to the American people? The message is Trump is terrible, and you can’t believe how bad the Republican Party is. It’s too general a message, too simple. A vast majority of people think corporations have too much control over their lives. They didn’t fill the blanks, denial of healthcare benefits. And they didn’t fill the blanks on a living wage. They didn’t fill the blanks on cracking down on corporate crooks. They didn’t fill the blanks on reversing a tax system which undertaxes the very wealthy and the big corporations. They didn’t reverse themselves really on trade. They didn’t know how to rebut Trump on immigration. He called the people coming in rapists, criminals, drug traffickers, etc. Instead of saying, “Well, they’re fleeing oppressive countries that are backed by the U.S., dictators and oligarchs in Central and South America,” they didn’t say that millions of Americans trust immigrants to harvest their food, to care for their children, to care for elderly, to provide critical services that nobody wants to work in in the U.S.
So, you know, there’s such a bill of particulars against this Democratic Party. And what’s happened, of course, is that millions of people are basically saying, “We’re sick of throwaway lines. We’re sick of not having the government return the benefits of massive taxation to us. We’re sick of – all we hear about is empire abroad. All we hear about is more military budgets by the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress, giving the generals more than they ask for, eating the public budgets that should be providing public services and public infrastructure in communities all over the country, creating key jobs.”
The following is a 25-minute segment from Marc Lamont Hill’s Upfront show on the Al Jazeera network. In this segment. Lamont Hill speaks with Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University; Katie Halper, co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast; Ryan Grim, reporter and co-founder of Drop Site News; and Emma Doyle, former Deputy Chief of Staff under the Trump administration.
I close with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges’s insights on the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides – especially among middle-aged white males – morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative – destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
. . . We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
The Duluth MN–WI Metropolitan Area, commonly called the Twin Ports, is a small metropolitan area centered around the cities of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin. The Twin Ports are located at the western part of Lake Superior (the westernmost part of North America’s Great Lakes) and together are considered one of the larger cargo ports in the United States. The Twin Ports are close to many natural attractions such as the North Shore, the Apostle Islands, and the Superior National Forest.
Following are some images of my time in Duluth and Superior. Enjoy!
Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist and far-right political pundit whose “your body, my choice” misogynistic remark has recently gone viral, resulting in women across the country reporting a rise in online harassment and abuse in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s presidential election.
While Trump’s victory has been a focal point for communities which support restricting women’s reproductive rights, there was a spike in misogynist content in late October. ISD found a significant rise in posts focused on repealing the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote). This appears to reflect the Harris campaign’s acute focus on securing a sizable majority of women voters. Many of these posts – which targeted women and supporters of their rights – faced quick rebuke. Their spread nevertheless demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindicative set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights.
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.
Autumn, that universal symbol of change, gently suggests to us that winter is on the way as the leaves turn red, and somehow, equally gently and gradually, reminds us that nothing is permanent. . . . If the seasons change this way, then everything else probably does too, so holding the moment becomes important. Each event must be savoured for what it is, and nothing can bring it back. On the personal level, as Pico Iyer notes, we should “cherish the seasons inside us,” and “seek out changelessness in change.” Or, as the 19th-century French novelist and critic Jean-Baptiste Karr famously put it, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” [“The more it changes, the more it’s the same”]. Autumn somehow reminds us of this, too; it’s the season, Iyer says, “when everything falls away,” but at the same time it will be preparing to come back.
You are awakening to the
same country you fell asleep to.
The very same country.
Pull yourself together.
And,
when you see me,
do not ask me
“What do we do now?
How do we get through
the next four years?”
Some of my Ancestors dealt with
at least 400 years of this
under worse conditions.
Continue to do the good work.
Continue to build bridges not walls.
Continue to lead with compassion.
Continue the demanding work
of liberation for all.
Continue to dismantle broken systems,
large and small.
Continue to set the best example
for the children.
Continue to be a vessel of nourishing joy.
Continue right where you are.
Right where you live into your days.
Do so in the name of
The Creator who expects
nothing less from each of us.
And if you are not “continuing”
ALL of the above,
in community, partnership, collaboration?
What is it you have been doing?
What is it you are waiting for?
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
