What Democrat Candidates Need to Do

I have been trying to figure out how the Democratic candidates almost uniformly across the entire range of office running lost their economic message.  Today David Brooks wrote a wonderful column that points the way.  I will provide the link later.

I have recognized that Democrat's did not offer an economic message to anyone other than those involved in the global economy, but their platform and basic instincts certainly pointed at realistic solutions involving training, better education and access to both education and healthcare that would help those in rural areas.  Combine that with some sensible tax reform, some rethink of regulation (not wholesale like Trump wants to do, I mean who wants coal waste in streams), and you would have an economic platform to run on.

But the really distressing part of this past election was that King Donald had a snappy saying, Make America Great Again, that conveyed an upbeat economic message that the Democrats could not counter running their negative campaign against Dangerous Donald.  While the Democratic message worked on the Coasts, it did not work in rural dominated states who were looking for a positive message.

What Brooks highlighted is something I have felt but couldn't find the words for.

America was founded and has endured through the two centuries on the unifying myth that America is a country that "embraces strangers and seizes possibilities".  "That the physical stuff in front of us is also a manifestation of something eternal".

That myth has been battered in rural America and the Democrats had no answer for them. So they gravitated to an alternative myth promised by Donald Trump that the world is a zero sum game:  if someone else wins, we lose and if they lose, we win.  It's a very Russian view that a country is "bound by its nostalgia, not its common future and the pure folk, who live in the heartland embody the pure soul of the country and are threatened by the cosmopolitan elites."

So before your read Brook's more evolved summation of this, I propose that Democratic candidates need to jump shift their rhetoric, combined with some rational policies to encourage job creation in rural areas.  I believe the GOP's policies will just encourage job creation in urban areas and thus rural voters are bound to be open to new ideas by the Democrats.  The rhetoric has to be focused on an upbeat revival of our unifying myth with a focus on including those rural people in the vision and having policies that will bring concrete evidence to them that the myth is reality.  People want to have hope.

Link to David Brooks "A Return to National Greatness"

David Brooks Analyzes the GOP

and in the process starts agreeing with Thomas Friedman and me.  But his words are more eloquent and his thought process clearer than mine.  Which is why he gets the big bucks for punditry.

"Since Goldwater/Reagan, the GOP has been governed by a free-market, anti-government philosophy.  But over the ensuing decades new problems have emerged.  First, the economy has gotten crueler.  Technology is displacing workers and globalization is dampening wages.  Second, the social structure has atomized and frayed, especially among the less educated.  Third, demography is shifting."

"Orthodox Republicans, see no positive role for government, have no affirmative agenda to help people deal with these new problems.  Occasionally, some conservative policy mavens have proposed such an agenda - anti-poverty programs, human capital policies, wage subsidies and the like - but the proposals were killed, usually in the House, by the anti-government crowd."

The 1980's anti-government orthodoxy still has many followers; Ted Cruz is the extreme embodiment of this tendency.  But it has grown increasingly rigid, unresponsive and obsolete."

"Along comes Donald Trump offering to replace it and change the nature of the GOP.  He tramples all over the anti-government ideology of modern Republicanism.  He would replace the free-market orthodoxy with authoritarian nationalism."

"He offers to use government on behalf of the American working class, but in negative and defensive ways:  to build walls, to close trade, to ban outsiders, to smash enemies.  According to him, America's problems aren't caused by deep structural shifts.  They're caused by morons and parasites......"

"If the GOP is going to survive as a decent and viable national party, it can't cling to the fading orthodoxy Cruz represents.  But it can't shift to ugly Trumpism, either.  It has to find a third alternative:  limited but energetic use of the government to expand mobility and widen openness and opportunity.  That is what Kasich, Rubio and Paul Ryan and others are stumbling toward."


I would add, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders represents a similar set of policies to Donald Trump and Hillary is stumbling toward a moderate balanced set of policies with somewhat more energetic use of government than Paul Ryan.

Link to Brooks column