Portside

Here we are, the day of the great liberal Facebook hangover, crushed policies, placebo-like petitions driven before you and the lamentations of men and women. Obama’s victories over the last six years aside, this is a familiar spectacle for left-leaning Americans, enough so that the breast-beating is almost as enervating as all of those defeats.

Act like you’ve been here before, people. Because – to paraphrase a cable show about a bunch of elites living in a militarized society that addressed populist concerns only episodically and embarrassingly until everyone finally found themselves on a completely screwed-up planet – all of this has happened before and will happen again.

On Tuesday night, a lot of Republican-ish candidates got crushed by the official Republican candidates, confirming yet again that a gutless, wincing version of one kind of politics always loses to the robust one. Nobody first starts drinking Diet Coke because they think it tastes better, and the only people who keep drinking it are the ones who’ve drunk nothing else for so long that actual flavor seems weird. Why vote for someone hesitantly and semi-apologetically tacking toward the right when you can just vote for someone who goes balls-to-the-wall rightward and is damn proud of it? At least that person gives off the sense of actually enjoying his own beliefs.

If you’d been following the Twitter feeds of unabashed progressives like Zaid Jilani for the last few months, you could watch the gradual unraveling of optimism give way to negativity over, say, the Senate race in Georgia. On Tuesday, Jilani finally unloaded his disgust for the Michelle Nunn campaign. What populist message did she have to offer? Pro-trade agreements that outsource jobs. Pro-Social Security cutting “grand bargain” budget solutions. A pro-business attitude toward regulation that makes a screwheaded case for government by arguing that it “needs to get out of the way”.

In Kentucky, you had Alison Lundergan Grimes, who refused to admit that she voted for the leader of her own party when it was farcical even to suggest she might not have. Which was a loser move on two levels. One, God knows how you ask an electorate to place its trust in you when you lie that badly and meaninglessly. Two, how do you ask voters to adopt your principles when you hold them at arm’s length from your body with a clothespin on your nose?

Of course, whether the Democratic Party stands for anything is a perfectly valid question at this point. On a macro level, a party that is already thoroughly militarized and corporatized – and largely indifferent to Main Street whenever it poses a conflict with Wall Street – offers little alternative to the other party that already celebrates that. But on a specific level, things look just as bad.

You have Florida, where the Democratic Party ran a Republican for governor on a solidly centrist platform and lost, leaving four more years in the wilderness without a seasoned candidate or an election in which Florida Dems could cement their program in voters’ minds. As it is, they have none.

The same thing played out in starker terms in Kansas, where the Democratic Party withdrew its own candidate on the slim hope that an independent might win and might choose to caucus with them. He lost anyway, and in exchange the Democrats have no candidate record or established program. They might as well have run George McGill again. Sure, he’s been dead since 1963, but at least he was a Democrat, and if your state party is already a ghost town, at least you could get behind a ghost with a record of winning.

The micro-level of not running for anything even extends to alienating one of MSNBC’s most famous liberal voices. Rachel Maddow’s suggested that maybe Democrats refusing to campaign on Obamacare deserved to lose, and if anything she was being gentle. If you have one (1) major legislative achievement for the last five years, and your only response is to run screaming from it, then why would anyone want you to get things done? The Democrats were essentially campaigning on the idea that their biggest added value is fucking up but being humble and trying not to brag about it.

The same problems are at work in the case of Colorado’s Mark Udall. He campaigned hard on women’s rights, but in the process exposed a giant hole in the Democrats’ prosecution of the War on Women. Namely, the party wasn’t out there fervently manning the barricades for years but instead had the war brought to them by moronic, anti-science stone-age conservatives like Todd Akin. Democrats became women-positive only after having the issue directly handed to them by people determined to support extremely beatable policies in as loathsome and horrifying a manner possible. Cory Gardner beat Udall in part because he learned the very basic lesson that you can win over women as a Republican by not sounding completely fucking insane. If you dampen that single issue as a motivating factor, you depress single-issue voter turnout and are back to people making compromise decisions on economics, foreign policy and on and on and on.

Unfortunately, the compensatory stories that the Democrats tell themselves the morning after a loss this monumentally headache-enducing sound exactly like the problems Mark Udall faced. You can already see it on TV, some variation on: “This is a beating that will energize the Get Behind Hillary movement.” OK, and then what? Every woman Democrat will vote for her and many Independents and Republicans will too? Why? As Doug Henwood pointed out in a recent essay in Harper’s, Clinton offers the same pro-corporate, bellicose non-alternative alternative, only with different clothes.

Or take the other morning-show identity politics appeal to inevitability: that black and Hispanic voters will continue to flock to the Democratic Party if everyone can just sit tight until demographics win the elections for Democratic candidates. It’s a comforting thought, if you’re a Democrat sitting around nursing wounds from Tuesday night. It’s almost as appealing a thought as the knowledge that, barring a sudden cure for mortality, the GOP’s No1 electoral resource of Ancient White Shitheads is a diminishing return. The Democrats don’t have to worry about converting dead people, but they do have to worry about minorities being converted.

As is the case with the War on Women, Democrats enjoy a solid bloc of minority voters because the GOP can’t stop being ludicrously racist. When they convincingly sound like they consider minorities to be people – hello, Mr George W Bush – they fare better. Minority and women’s votes aren’t a Democratic entitlement. Just like labor, and LGBT and teachers’ votes, you don’t win them just for showing up and then get to spend four years ignoring them and expect your “base” to appear at the bottom of your pocket the next time you need some change for the election machine.

Just look back down to Georgia. It’s white population has shrunk to 52%, and it has 900,000 unregistered minority voters. Just think back to how many of those Michelle Nunn might have won if she’d actually run as a Democrat.