Maybe it was Mark Twain who said, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. Comparing yesterday's election with Donald Trump's first victory eight years ago, I see one of the most predictable rhymes this side of "Hotel California"! (Even the state-by-state results are virtually identical.)
I remember how numb I felt after the 2016 election. I wasn't so impressed by Hillary Clinton's campaign, but I assumed that Trump couldn't win! (I was almost right...) But if Hillary was "the lesser evil," the Donald was--just barely--the lesser unelectable. This time, I can't say I feel any surprise. It's a bit like when screenwriter William Goldman challenged a 1969 studio executive to guess who the top movie star was in the international markets. When he made five or ten wrong guesses and learned the right answer was Clint Eastwood, he said, "Yeah, it would be him."
If the Democrats make the same mistakes in one campaign after another, there's nothing surprising about their failures. The Democrats haven't won three consecutive presidential elections since the 1940s (the Republicans have only done it once since the '20s), and progressives who placed all their hopes in breaking that pattern, in 2000 and 2016, followed a dubious strategy. But in this election, after just one term in power they seemed as worn out as after two--the same as with Trump after his first term.
I'll admit, I actually nourished the hope that this time Jill Stein's Green Party would break 5% and qualify for federal funding! (I wasn't following the polls.) But once again, left-wing voters largely played it safe and voted Democrat in the hope that this would tip the balance against Trump. No doubt that "pragmatic" progressives will again scapegoat the small principled minority who dared to vote Green, ignoring the actual numbers that show this vote was too small to make the difference.
The Nation, that embodiment of the "play it safe" left, sniffed in one editorial, "Third parties are a long road to nowhere," and they've been doing their best to ensure that stays the case! But playing it safe is the long road to what? Things getting worse more slowly? It seems to me that when you don't look beyond avoiding risk, you tend to realize the worst of both worlds!
I think the "pragmatic" left owe Ralph Nader an apology. More importantly, they owe one to the whole progressive movement! By making Nader the scapegoat for Al Gore's failure, they sent the exact wrong message to the Democratic Party: that Democrats can take their left-wing vote for granted. (Like too many leftists, they only cared about their disagreement with a fellow leftist and not about the message they were sending to the people in power...) The inevitable result is that the Democrats focus on ingratiating the centrist voters while assuming the left will vote for them anyway. Such scapegoating wasn't even in the Democratic Party's best interest; on the contrary, it's the Democratic Party that's paid the biggest price!
What does the future hold? Back in 1988, Rolling Stone had a boring political writer called William S. Grieder. (He ended up at The Nation, of course.) He wrote about that year's presidential election, "Whoever gets elected will be in an extremely precarious position, and judging by their rhetoric, neither candidate is aware of it." Judging by their rhetoric, indeed--did he expect Michael Dukakis to rhetoricize "Elect me and I'll be in an extremely precarious position"? That would have got him lots of votes.... But I think that's actually the case this time.
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