2020 US Presidential Election

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/women/2015/11/13/matrix-neo-red-pill-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpg

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/whats-wrong-with-the-democrats/528696/ Currently reading. Was written in 2017, lots of 2016 Election hindsight. 3 years later little has changed. "Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election."

"The spectacle of Democratic elites flagellating themselves for their growing distance from these voters has the whiff of the comic—the office-tower anthropologists seeking to understand Appalachia from their Kindles. But there’s another way of putting the problem. If the stagnation of the middle class and the self-reinforcing advantages of the rich are among the largest issues of our time, the Democrats have done a bad job of attuning themselves to them. The party that has prided itself on representing regular people has struggled to make a dent in the problem—and at times has given the impression of indifference to it. A healthy republic can’t afford for a seething populace to fall deeper into its hostilities. A healthy party, arguably, ought never to write off a whole category of voters. Greenberg’s focus groups begin to hint at a way that Democrats can stay true to their principles and still reverse some of their losses with the white working class—but will their leaders pursue that path? It’s hard to forecast a front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination so many years in advance. Anita Dunn, the communications czar in the early days of the Obama White House, told me in March that a group of party insiders had recently met socially and compiled a list of potential contenders, both those actively exploring a run and those who were likely mulling the idea. It had 28 plausible names on it—and that didn’t include oddballs with a delusional sense of their own potential. Donald Trump profited from such a densely populated Republican field in 2016, which raises the possibility of an outsider similarly prevailing in a many-sided melee among Democrats. The current politics of the Democratic Party make it less likely than usual that the nominee will be a centrist in the traditional mold. During the Democrats’ long losing streaks in the late 20th century, the party ritualistically engaged in postmortems that propelled it toward the center. That was the natural cycle of politics: Getting repeatedly clubbed by conservatives suggested trekking in a more conservative direction. But as a candidate, Trump placed little priority on traditional conservative positions, and often flouted them. His victory suggests a very different set of lessons, lessons in tune with the mood of the Democratic Party’s base. Since 2008, energies have been building on the left—fueled by growing inequality, mass incarceration, and the inevitable frustration with a party that held the White House for eight years but couldn’t deliver everything activists wanted. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter arose. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist captured 43 percent of the primary vote. Then Trump was elected, an event that was received by the party as a catastrophe and that has extended the activist spirit to a far broader audience." **** wait for it.

"Anger and activism are an opportunity for Democrats to grow their nucleus of supporters motivated to vote in midterm elections. The main question is whether those energies will be channeled in a way that reinforces the long-building demographic divide in American politics or in a way that—at least to some extent—blurs it. Or to put it another way: whether the Democrats accept the continued outflow of the white working class into the arms of the GOP as a fait accompli, or whether they try to stanch it. There are in fact two different lefts in bloom today, with differing understandings of American politics. One strain practices what its detractors call identity politics—it exists to combat the bias and discrimination that it believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them."

https://media.makeameme.org/created/boy-were-they-5be58a.jpg They shouldn't have leaned into the activism. They should have kept strong at fixing the class gap.

"While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the post–Cold War years. As the financial crash of 2008 worked its way through the Democratic Party’s intellectual system, the economic left migrated from the fringe protests of Occupy Wall Street to just outside the mainstream. While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters—clustered in the upper Midwest—whom Greenberg deemed persuadable. Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform. But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given time—and the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology."