They Never Learn

Happy about this year’s election? Don’t get comfortable. To underestimate what Democrats have been up to regarding their base is at your peril.

For all the world, the Democrats should be positively ecstatic right now. Trump may have been chainsawing down regulations left and right, and the Republicans at the moment might be getting closer to the kind of atrocious tax reform that would have Eisenhower rolling in his grave. But every triumph and failure Trump and the Republicans make is manna for the Democrats, who should be using this to engineer a comeback that rivals even their sweep of the government after George W. Bush’s administration cratered into the Earth at a breathtaking speed.

So they celebrated their good fortune by…unceremoniously ushering out notable members of the Democratic National Committee from prominent positions. Their offense: They supported Keith Ellison, current DNC Chair Tom Perez’s main opponent for the position, and who also supported Bernie Sanders.

I wish I could relax. I wish I could believe that a party that has someone who literally fought against the Ku Klux Klan in court, against someone whose very existence revolves around a warped version of Christianity, could win even a race like this. But the DNC fracas is further proof that the Democrats have no shame in showing themselves to be a party so traumatized, they’re doing everything they can to immolate themselves over the fact that the last election even happened. Rather than capitalize on the popularity of Bernie Sanders, the Dems still want to believe that all they need are Obama and especially Hillary Clinton and everything else would fall into place.

It would be so easy to say that the less we talk about Clinton, the better. But people are generating the Clinton-regret machine so furiously, you have to wonder how we reached this point. One pundit tries to point out how “perfectly nice” she is, another thinks that she should “embrace her role as Trump’s nemesis” of all things. Like any of this is supposed to scrub away the atrocities she’s committed. At this point, with everything that’s happened this year, it’s hard not to think that a Clinton presidency would be any more beneficial than it is now. Would the Obama-era regulations and laws remain relatively intact? Reasonably. Would the judiciary be filled with Clinton-appointed judges? Unlikely, given that the Dems blew it in the Senate races. What would be assured? All the disasters of this year, PLUS endless scandals (including one that the Clintons still haven’t been held accountable for). Plus, given that the Republicans mobilize like nobody’s business in the minority and they hate Clinton more than anyone on the planet, 2018 would be nothing short of a nuclear fallout for the Dems. So no, we still don’t miss Clinton.

The Dems do, and that’s their downfall. Yet somehow, they started winning elections again. The mayoral races were surprisingly quiet this year, though the real story was how Socialist Alternative member Ginger Jentzen was taking the Minneapolis City Council race by storm. Bill de Blasio crushed the competition in New York, and other races have made waves. Minneapolis took longer, but the results are in (Jentzen fell short).

With the governor races, there were mercifully only two this year. New Jersey is sort of nondescript, given that the New Jersey state legislature has a heavy Democratic majority. However, the Democrat nominee Phil Murphy, despite LITERALLY having a career on Wall Street, actually has some decent ideas like his tax plan and being supportive of a public bank along the lines of the one North Dakota has. Plus, he just won his race, so there’s reason to stay positive, right?

Well, there were Virginia’s races this year. The candidate for governor was Ralph Northam, and he won his race as well against Ed Gillespie. Even more miraculous, all races pending, the Dems actually took back the House of Delegates from its Republican supermajority. You can find the results here. Also, despite being LITERALLY REMOVED from some campaign literature, Justin Fairfax also won his race for Lieutenant Governor.

But that’s of little consequence, really. Former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile dropped a bombshell in her new book, an excerpt of which was shared by Politico, about the kind of agreement the Clinton campaign signed with the DNC that flooded her campaign with cash. Despite the fact that Sanders also signed such an agreement, and some gaps in credibility, that still doesn’t detract from the very possible reality that Clinton benefited unethically from the cash flow for her own campaign and that the DNC was in no way fair during the primary.

That’s the Democrats’ eternal curse. Until they get their shit together, we’re stuck with Trump. These recent elections suggest that they have their shit together. In the end, the American public suffers the most. The Dems shouldn’t put pundits in a position to make a “lesser evil” argument for the sake of pragmatism. Fortunately, citizens aren’t being complacent about Northam, who deserved the kind of protest he got recently. Some pundits will try and explain away the implications of the infighting the Democrats are going through, but the protest against Northam should send a message to the Democrats: they’re merely placeholders until true leftists sweep them out.