Now that everyone has had time to come terms with the results of the 2016 election, I’m going to have a much needed word with the American Left.
Donald J. Trump should have been an easy to candidate to flatten, but the Democrats failed to thwart him. Now comes the part where we can have a sober discussion about what went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again. And we’re gonna have an honest talk about the real reasons he won, not the democratic establishment’s lame attempts to blame everybody but themselves because they lost the easiest election of the century.
Nearly a year ago conservative author Michael Dougherty said this in discussing Trump’s candidacy:
“Chinese competition really did hammer the Rust Belt and parts of the great Appalachian ghetto. It made the life prospects for men — in marriage and in their careers — much dimmer than those of their fathers. Libertarian economists, standing giddily behind Republican politicians, celebrate this as creative destruction even as the collateral damage claims millions of formerly-secure livelihoods, and — almost as crucially — overall trust and respect in the nation’s governing class.”
All the usual suspects of the democratic party and media are busy throwing a tantrum, and saying stupid things like that Hillary lost “because of the angry white man.”
Here’s a thought experiment: if Hillary had lost because a large percentage of African American males voted for Trump, would anybody dare say that “Hillary lost ’cause of the angry black man!”? No. Any reasonable person would ask how the democratic party failed to reach this demographic, and work hard to include and appeal to them next time around. The same has to be done with the working class white vote, especially in the Midwest.
Look at the election results map, the “change from 2012” version, you’ll see that the Midwest and “rust belt” especially turned heavily from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Some of these states, like Michigan, went to Bernie in the primaries. Let us ask: what do Trump and Obama have in common that Clinton lacks? Both of them were exciting candidates who ran on a campaign message of big changes, both of them had ways of appealing to the white working class (especially in economic terms, with Obama speaking of “spreading the wealth around,” and an opponent who was widely perceived as an out-of-touch-elite, and Trump speaking of bring back jobs). And if we ask, “what do Bernie and Trump have in common?” to explain their common successes in the midwest, both of them are populists with bold visions for where to take this country, and both of them are highly focused on the economy (Trump talked about bringing back jobs from China often, Bernie was accused of being a “one issue candidate” because of his focus on the economy).
If you were one of those people who blindly believed everything the establishment Dems said about Bernie being ‘unelectable’ — in spite of all relevant evidence showing the opposite conclusion, I want an apology from you. But not with words: You are going to have to apologize with your actions. That means step aside and get ready to support a much bigger, bolder Democratic platform. Senator Harry Reid got the memo: he was very pro-Clinton, but has now joined Bernie Sanders to endorse Keith Ellison for President of the DNC.
Bernie himself just announced in a New York times piece that,
“In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.”
They better listen.
