The Democrats Will Win In 2020

[Eric the Green]

(01-08-2017, 04:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-08-2017, 01:10 AM)naf140230 Wrote:

(01-08-2017, 12:28 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-07-2017, 11:55 PM)naf140230 Wrote: I found this article I think you shuold see. Here is the URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-siege...92304.html

Here is the article:

Quote:In 1928, despite Democrat Al Smith’s loss to Republican Herbert Hoover, political scientists found critical changes in American electoral and demographic patterns that began the reversal of the three decade Republican lock on party identification. These changes led to a restructuring and realignment of the major American political parties that lasted for generations. I believe that the 2016 and 2020 elections can repeat the sequence of the 1928 and 1932 resulting in sustained Democratic political domination and a potential long-term hemorrhage of Republican party support on the national level.

There are three reasons for the realignment that is already underway. First, the new demography of the United States is dramatically changing party identification and the current Republican Party doesn’t look or think like the new America. Second, the Trump phenomenon has ruptured the Republican political brand and accelerated the party’s fatal weaknesses with the expanding constituencies of this new America. Third, the coincidence of the 2020 decennial census and a presidential election will swell Democratic turnout for down ballot elections of Governors and state legislatures that will subsequently redistrict the House of Representatives for a decade.

The 1928 campaign of Governor Al Smith of New York expanded the demography of the Democratic Party to embrace urban voters, workers, blacks, academics, the senior citizens and Jews. The campaign began to uproot the Republican political dominance that had been in place since 1896. Political scientists label 1928 a “critical election” because it signaled the beginning of a structural change that culminated in the 1932 “realigning” election of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.
.......


All of these factors make it reasonable to predict that 2016-2020 will give political scientists what they have not seen for almost a century: a “critical election” (2016) followed by a “realigning election” (2020) resulting in Democratic domination on the national level of the emerging era of American politics.

Oh, do I wish this were true.

Just to remind you  -- the Republican Party has achieved an ominous resemblance to the racist Nationalist party of Apartheid-era South Africa, and in a very short time.  Beyond any question the demographics of South Africa under Apartheid were such that the Nationalist Party could never win a free election. It got electoral results much like those of Commie states except for being a racist, ultra-capitalist party with a populist veneer. Does that sound familiar?

Republicans have mastered the art of gerrymandering to ensure that the House of Representatives will represent rural areas very well (rural voters vote like European peasants -- keep taxes and government services small) and people elsewhere badly. It isw safe to say that about 20% of the electorate does not matter in Congressional politics -- ever, at least since 2010. The right-wingers can get away with just about anything short of calling for genocide or a restoration of slavery, and in practice they are but stooges for corporate lobbyi9sts responsible only to their paymasters.

I expect the current Congress, most state legislatures, and the President to be so corrupt that they dare not lose. Should they lose they will face prison terms -- so they would rather criminalize dissent as prevention and ensure their re-election in a rigged election. I expect violence against Democratic politicians who challenge Republicans meaningfully.

There is no historical analogue to Donald Trump in American history. That's scary. He is a wild card in the worst possible way. At best he is Horthy. At worst he is Duvalier.

Can you really predict that? There are problems with that opinion. Many Republicans in Congress don't support Donald Trump on a lot of things. Also, in 2020, many of Trump's working class and middle class supporters will probably have turned against him when they realize they have been tricked. There is also the possibility of Trump being impeached by Congress which is becoming more likely as we speak given recent events.

I wish that I could share that hope. Herbert Hoover was a man of integrity who got caught with an economy that he could not deal with due to his rigid ideology. Donald Trump is a thoroughly-awful human being. Yes, he will quickly betray the working class, and he will be very unpopular. But the Republican-dominated House and Senate are well-entrenched wi9th gerrymandering that dilutes much would-be liberal vote with conservative rural voters. The Republican Party has practically no moderates anymore, and Republican po0liticians can get away with nearly-fascist ideology because of 55-45 ideological splits in most of their districts. Those pols can get away with much, especially with subservience with corporate elites through lobbyists. Republican pols can now get away even with garden-variety racism... so far.

(What is the term for "government by lobbyists"?).

It is up to the Republicans to decide in 2018 whether they are willing to lose some Governors' races that take out loyal soldiers in Republican Presidential campaigns. Should they deny a free and fair election in 2020, then they could get away with an economic meltdown as severe and protracted as that between 1929 and 1932, a military debacle, and even systematic corruption. Just think of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, a country with a political system designed to imitate ours.  Marcos won several elections despite the horrid economic performance of the Philippines in contrast to such neighbors and near-neighbors as Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Meet Filipino-Americans and you will find it hard to believe that the Philippines could be a very poor country.

Economic elites do not surrender their class privilege or the power  that underpins that privilege except when physically overthrown or when they fear being dispo9ssessed and killed... and must choose which revolutionaries are to take over. Those elites are going to have it great under Donald Trump, and that is what I believe Donald Trump really means by "Make America Great Again". The fools who wore those silly red hats with that vapid slogan never asked such questions as I made as:

Who in America?
By what means?
What does one really man by "greatness"?
And what time was without qualification better?

We get to find out what he means. Most of us will be disappointed. The question will be whether we get to respond with elections to throw the bums out. Those bums have big money behind them.

Bringing back the sorts of economic norms of the 1920s -- which includes no unions, no Social Security, no Medicare, lots of working-class kids dropping our after the eighth grade to do farm and factory work, Jim Crow in the South, WASP dominion over such peoples as Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans*, let alone Hispanics and blacks, no minority middle class, government representing only property owners... I could update a book:



Bettmann stopped with 1900, before the Pure Food and Drug Act and the extensive outlawry of child labor. But I could go on about 30 years, recognizing that the Great Depression, harsh as it was, forced institutional changes that made life better for most Americans even while the Depression was still around in the late 1930s.

I have known plenty of GIs, and those born in the first and second decades of the twentieth century never shared any fond memories of the 1920s other than love, marriage, having children, and school completion (to the 'solid eighth-grade education that was then the norm). Prohibition and the dangerous, fascistic Klan... no thanks. Elderly people holding onto industrial jobs for dear life until they dropped dead on the shop floor or died in industrial accidents? No thanks. Social Security put that largely to an end. The intellectual quackery known as eugenics that established a hierarchy of economic opportunity by ethnic group? Unthinkable now, but when it was fashionable it did great harm to anyone consigned to the 'inferior' peoples, especially blacks. No industrial unions to keep employers from driving wages down even in machine-paced jobs based upon the bargaining weaknesses of workers? Collective bargaining is enough to justify the union dues. Don't forget the economic meltdown that put an abrupt end to the supposed good times.

OK, there has been technological progress... and I would not want to use the dangerous cars on the Blood-Alley roads of the time. But if you are discussing the technologies of entertainment of the 1920s, those are the least objectionable features of the time.

....I have no reason to believe that Donald trump either can or will stop GOP designs to eviscerate (if not outlaw) labor unions, allow polluters to go unchecked, exempt the rich from taxation, replace Obamacare with "Get sick, tun out of money, and die" medicine, privatize Social Security and Medicare... I expect the worst from greedy people who have neither conscience nor empathy, and such people will rule America.

We can no longer expect certain norms to hold with the words "This is America". We have never had a President like Donald Trump, so we must look elsewhere for analogues with a semi-fascist head of state and a legislature that believes in the purest possible inequality. Trump barks out orders like a dictator. It will not work well.

The worst is of course that the elites will allow no effective challenge to their economic and political power. I expect much corruption because the politicians in power will be able to get away with almost anything. They risk losing much if they lose any of their political power -- like cheap labor, harsh management, and soft regulation.

The best that can happen is for us liberals to make America ungovernable if the President and Congress try to establish a dictatorial order -- and ensuring that America can get a renewal of liberty and equity.

We are approaching the maximal point of danger. In the last one, the great heels ruled Germany, Italy, and Japan. This year they are already in America. We Americans solved the fascist menace by defeating foreign powers.


*Probably because the WASP group includes lots of wretchedly-educated, unskilled people of the Mountain and Deep South, WASPs as a group do not fare as well on the average as the more urban Polish-Americans (the best-faring white ethnic group except for Jews) and Italian-Americans. There is a large black middle class and a fast-growing Hispanic middle class... and I could make the case that Mexican-Americans, still statistically a poor group, are rapidly adopting values (like having a strong community, taking formal education seriously and participating in entrepreneurialism) inconsistent with remaining poor. And that's before I discuss groups from South, Southeast, an East Asia.