Despair

I have a liberal friend who is in despair about the presidency of Donald Trump. I also have a theory about worry: there are always real things to worry about, but more often than not we end up worrying about the wrong thing rather than what turns out to have been the right thing, so worry is just a waste of time and energy. Of course the congenital worriers in my family don’t find this argument persuasive.

But let me suggest that the same line of thinking applies to despair.  If one is really committed to being in despair I would argue that the real thing liberals ought to be in despair about is not President Trump, but the sorry state of their own political party, that was so incompetent as to put up a candidate as flawed and tainted as Hillary, and then ignore the very voter block she most needed to win. Liberal values need a strong representational voice. American politics needs two healthy political parties to keep each other in check. The current Democratic Party is neither of those things.

Liberals have spent the first six months of this administration whining like spoiled children, with little or no realistic self-examination, no realistic postmortems to try to understand why they lost, and no strategic thinking about the future. Now, after months of intense consultation, polling and focus-group testing, they have finally come out with a new slogan “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.”   As one observer wrote, the new slogan channels the Papa John's Pizza slogan (“Better pizza; better ingredients”), or as another put it: "The Democrats' new slogan is like a bad pizza slice slathered with 40-year-old ingredients and almost no meat."

Notice they went first for a new slogan, not a rethink of their policies, not new plans to address the problems of the nation, not a strategy for winning local offices, not the outline of a way to address the distress of working Americans. That is what the party is reduced to, thinking up slogans, and they are not even very good at that. And this isn’t likely to change so long as the old guard is running the party. Things aren’t likely to look up until/unless the old guard (Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, etc) gets displaced by young new Millennium blood.

So if you must be in despair, be in despair that liberals currently don't have a political party which can effectively represent liberal values, and can win local and national offices to put them into practice.