Defeated a year ago.

In my last post I was trying to identify the defensive equivocation that Prof. Drew Westen offered as being so damaging to Democrats being displayed by a romney surrogate. I just finished rereading his excellent analysis The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation and thought I had a pretty good handle on how it worked.


Then I read a post he made in huffington post and I want to welcome him to the gloomy club.

"Democrats have always found creative ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so the title of this piece may unfairly limit the possibilities. And they could win or lose this time for a range of reasons that are largely or entirely out of their control, most importantly who the Republicans nominate for President and whether the economy continues to falter or regains steam.
But there are three ways Democrats could choose to lose, and they are threatening to do all three now. Hopefully they will change their minds before they commit to campaigning for the GOP."

This post was written a year ago and at the rate things change we can examine recent history to see if any of these three have come to pass. The first is obsession with austerity and deficit reduction. Much of Westen's work is more concerned with Democrats. He tends to treat the republicans as they should be treated, like dangerous predators.

"If the deficits Republicans racked up under Ronald Reagan didn't disabuse Democrats of the idea that Republicans care about deficits, surely the near doubling of the national debt under George W. Bush and a Republican Congress should have. Grover Norquist and others could not have been more explicit about the conservative position on debt: make it is big as you can when you're in office, with tax giveaways to all your friends, and you'll tie the hands of Democrats when they take control, at which point you start the shrill screaming again about fiscal responsibility and "entitlement" spending. (Meeting obligations to our seniors, educating our children, and taking care of people who need help are "entitlements," whereas cutting taxes to those who least need it somehow doesn't fall under that rubric -- a term and concept Democrats should stop echoing.)"


Working backwards, entitlements are terms that originally meant something good and noble but has fallen victim to radical attack. By lumping in all social spending under the term "entitlements" the republican assholes have successfully redirected social insurance programs that we all pay for into the catagory of welfare for the undeserving and ungrateful (stereotyping that was also manufactured from selective examples). Thomas Frank also identified and expanded the idea of debt as sabotage. Third world states are often characterized by undemocratic regimes borrowing gobs of money that then disappear into pockets of the leaders and into repressing the population. In the US, the borrowed money is wasted in the ways Prof. Westen describes but also on the repression of Americans through the war on drugs and the reinstatement of slavery that is the private prison industrial complex. Of course, even in the driver's seat, Democrats take the worst course.


In the Political Brain, Westen argues that despite the vehemence with which it is asserted and in the face of all empirical evidence, the republican narrative is utterly incoherent. It would only take the national Democrats finding their spines to challenge the ridiculous premise that tax cuts for rich theives is the key to prosperity. But they don't, and that narrative is maintained so forcefully that it gives republican candidates an automatic start of about 40% of the electorate. This narrative also defines Democrats before they ever get a chance to introduce themselves to the public, which they have to do over and over again because they have no running narrative.

Second, Democrats accept the tax cuts line as legitimate. They argue over the merits of tax "relief" as though there is any evidence that the republican network constructed over tax cuts is real. Westen describes this as "waving at the smoke" instead of putting out the fire.

"Every time a corporate CEO gives himself a bonus of 15 million dollars, he's just cut the pay of 15,000 of his employees by $1000 each. That's an extraordinary fact, which does not require a complex grasp of either economics or math to understand.
Want to change the calculus that leads to that kind of greed? It isn't hard to do: Impose increasingly high income taxes for all income above 1 million, 5 million, and 10 million dollars, with a top tax bracket of, say, 75% for all income above 10 million (far less than Eisenhower's 90% tax rate for people we would today consider just above upper-middle class).
What would that do (aside from balancing the budget by next week)? It would change the incentive structure in America back from a third-world country to a first-world one, because 75% of the incentive to treat yourself to an extra Jaguar or two rather than to share some of the benefits of your company's productivity with your workers would disappear. And aside from being more fair to the workers who presumably contributed to the productivity that earned their boss such a big bonus, the benefits to economic growth would be substantial, because there are few better ways to stimulate the economy than to put money in the hands of working and middle class people, who spend most of their income, and to take some of it out of the hands of hedge fund managers and derivatives traders, who don't."

"The third way Democrats could choose to lose faster than you can say "screw your mother" (not in the Freudian sense) is to participate with Republicans in cutting Medicare." Self-evident but it would take some spine to do.

"Just last year, after Democrats passed a health care law that cut half a trillion dollars from Medicare (over the objections of House Democrats, who would instead have had the wealthiest Americans pick up the tab for subsidizing health care for workers their friends pay too poorly to afford it), Republicans all over the country demagogued the issue and ran against Democrats for "trying to take away your Medicare." Because, when you are a predator with no conscience you can say anything. Including just making shit up because you know the opposition has no clear response.

In the end, this is it:


The Democrats have to do it themselves, bloggers like me are a fart in the wind. The media won't defend them and as long as The Democratic Party keeps hoping laundry lists of facts and policy prescriptions unaccompanied by a narrative will get the average person to "get it" we are SOL. The party really should hire some historians to replace the scaly moron consultants in their messaging system, that is what we do. Take primary documents and arrange them into a story. Not me of course, gloom doesn't sell.