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<\/a>It’s easy to blame Republicans. They’ve spent four decades obsessed with procuring tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy at any cost. It’s why the GOP is desperate to focus voter attention on LGBT’s, immigrants, or any other distraction they can muster. The GOP and their wealthy benefactors would lose enormously if voters stopped blaming others for their anemic paychecks and started blaming the wealthy.<\/p>\nBut Democrats are culpable as well. “Neoliberalism” has led to a Democratic party that can no longer decide whether to serve Wall Street or Main Street. US oligarchs certainly prefer the GOP over Democrats, but as long as Democrats are dependent on wealthy donors in elections, those donors have the Democratic Party on a leash. The political duopoly protects the wealthy by providing the *illusion* of democracy to the American public.\u00a0 Keep the poor\/middle class squabbling over marginal political issues while the wealthy run off with all the money.\u00a0\u00a0 Simple strategy, but it’s worked surprisingly well for decades.<\/p>\n
So how do we start pushing the Democratic party to meet rural voters?\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s the nitty-gritty: Tennessee is mostly white, mostly straight, mostly Christian, mostly rural, mostly heterosexual, mostly high-school educated, etc. \u00a0 Rural voters are a largely homogeneous group. \u00a0 From rural voter’s perspective, social problems like race and gender and religion that they don’t personally experience are “Someone Else’s Problem”.\u00a0 Rural voters want someone to focus on *their* problems first and foremost, which are primarily class-based (incomes failing to keep up with expenses, lack of jobs due to outsourcing\/automation).<\/p>\n
Tennesseans have always been and likely always will be conservative on social issues. Rural Tennesseans voted for the 1860’s Democratic Party (which was the *conservative* party in that era) in similar proportion that they vote for today’s conservative Republican party. The parties shifted alignment over the last 168 years, but voter’s conservative tendencies have not.\u00a0 So it’s contrary to 168 years of voting data to think that rural TN voters will suddenly veer left.<\/p>\n
But Tennesseans can be noticeably more liberal on economic issues that directly affect them. There are progressive\/populist candidates in our history that punched above their weight in elections because they focused on economic issues important to those voters.\u00a0 History geeks might want to study the 1892 Presidential Election and James Weaver’s 3rd-party candidacy, who won 35% of the vote in 1892’s heavily agrarian Cheatham County, largely at the expense of the then-conservative Democratic party.<\/p>\n
If Democrats want to find their way out of the wilderness, the first step is to put social issues on the back-burner and start pounding the bully pulpit about economic issues. Hospitals closing due to failure to expand Medicaid, low-ranked schools, congested roads, tax cuts for wealthy people paid for by poor\/middle class earners, tariffs that make life more expensive for those voters, etc.\u00a0 In this new Gilded Age we’re in, there are no\u00a0 shortage of major economic issues to tackle.<\/p>\n
We need to make voters understand that the very soul of America is being transformed into something else in real time, and not for the better. We are living under a real and true oligarchy now. Not in the historical sense of corporate oligarchy that we’ve been living in for over a century, but the mask-off, unadulterated, early-2000’s Russian gangster style of oligarchy that we’ve witnessed under Putin.\u00a0\u00a0 There are only two classes now – the elites and everyone else.\u00a0\u00a0 And right now “everyone else” is losing badly.<\/p>\n
For those passionate about social issues, I cannot defend putting social issues on the back-burner morally.\u00a0 To the oppressed, the silence of friends can be more painful than the words of enemies.\u00a0\u00a0 The only defenses I can muster are necessity and urgency.<\/p>\n
To do anything about social issues rural Democrats have to get elected first.\u00a0 And focusing on economic issues is the only route to power for rural Democrats in TN.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a political Gordian knot<\/span><\/span>, but it’s our reality.<\/p>\n And every day Democrats don’t win, the planet gets a little hotter. The wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer. The oppressed see greater oppression.\u00a0 More innocents suffer and die. The public’s desperation leaves us increasingly vulnerable to the depredation of demagogues and oligarchs.\u00a0 And the America we know and love declines a little further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The shellacking the Democratic Party took last November means Democrats must face some hard reality and make difficult decisions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Part of the loss was due to “tactical”, one-time issues.\u00a0\u00a0 COVID inflation across the globe led to incumbents in many countries … Continue reading