Saturday, November 12, 2016

Handing out blame for the 2016 presidential election

Alex Pareene is ranting. Here's a couple paragraphs:
Blame nearly every single person with any power in the Democratic Party, who were gifted a large and growing national majority and managed to piss it away into complete, across-the-board failure at every level of government. Blame them for doing nothing at all to support and fortify organized labor in any period in which they’ve held power since the 1970s. Blame a party that keeps foisting people like Rahm Emanuel, Terry McAulliffe, Patrick Murphy onto increasingly unhappy electorates. Blame a party that can’t recruit electable congressional candidates; that allowed the Texas Democratic Party to dissolve into complete irrelevance even as that state grows more diverse; that pulled out of the Florida Senate race so that Chuck Schumer could buy a couple of ads in the most expensive media market in the country; that lost the Rust Belt in a generation; that chased well-off, well-educated whites as working-class whites were radicalized by psychotic nationalists; that, despite lip service, has done barely anything to make it easier for black people to vote, or to re-enfranchise victims of our fundamentally racist criminal justice system; that allowed ACORN to be dismantled and then watched in horror as urban black votes failed to materialize in Michigan and Pennsylvania; that still can’t grapple with its own responsibility for a foreseeable backlash against the financialized, globalized economy, a backlash that has now been permanently tinged with revanchist racism because only one side provided a coherent narrative for how things went to shit, or was even willing to admit that things went to shit in the first place.

Blame the party, and blame the Clintons, and blame nearly everyone in the upper echelon of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for clearing the field for her coronation, dismissing every indicator of her unshakable and widespread unpopularity; for pushing the most emblematic representative of the establishment imaginable in an anti-establishment era; for relying on out-of-touch advisers with no meaningful understanding of the lives of most people in her electoral coalition; for failing to sufficiently defend the black vote in states where it was actively and vehemently suppressed; for running a purely defensive campaign, best embodied by her choice of a slice of white bread with a clean record as her running mate; and for not understanding that she was uniquely vulnerable to an opposition campaign based on the clearly true premise that the system is rigged in favor of the powerful and connected.

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