Posted on 11/12/2016 11:11:36 AM PST by Petrosius
The Republican civil war was supposed to start this week.
Instead, a ferocious struggle has erupted on the left over the smoldering remains of the Democratic Party.
Liberals are seething over the election and talking about launching a Tea Party-style revolt. They say it’s the only way to keep Washington Democrats connected to the grassroots and to avoid a repeat of the 2016 electoral disaster, which blindsided party elites.
Progressives believe the Democratic establishment is responsible for inflicting Donald Trump upon the nation, blaming a staid corporate wing of the party for nominating Hillary Clinton and ignoring the Working Class voters that propelled Trump to victory.
Liberals interviewed by The Hill want to see establishment Democrats targeted in primaries, and the “Clinton-corporate wing” of the party rooted out for good.
The fight will begin over picking a new leader for the Democratic National Committee.
Progressives are itching to see the national apparatus reduced to rubble and rebuilt from scratch, with one of their own installed at the top.
And there is talk among some progressives, like Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, about splitting from the Democratic Party entirely if they don’t get the changes they seek.
“The Democratic Party can no longer be the same, it has been repudiated,” Reich said on a conference call with members from the progressive grassroots group Democracy for America.
“This has been a huge refutation of establishment politics and the political organization has got to be changed...if the Democratic Party can’t do it, we’ll do it through a third party.”
Reich’s view is far from universal in his party.
A number of Democrats are fuming over pie-in-the-sky liberals who they say prized idealism over pragmatism.
In an election determined by enthusiasm, some blame Bernie Sanders supporters for either not showing up or for suppressing turnout by refusing to rally behind Clinton at an earlier date.
“The Sanders people should be mad at themselves,” said one well-connected Democratic strategist. “If they had come out to vote, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president. If they were trying to prove a point, all they’ve done is further damage everything they claim to be fighting for. It’s somewhat typical of that crowd.”
Sanders supporters reject that reading.
Jacob Limon, the Texas director for the Sanders campaign, said he voted for Clinton and followed Sanders’ lead in rallying liberals to get to the polls for the Democratic nominee.
“Progressives showed up,” Limon said, noting that the election in Texas was closer than it has been in 20 years. The problem, he said, was Clinton’s trustworthiness.
Regardless, the left feels ascendant, with the party’s biggest stars – Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren – carrying a mantle that even some Clinton allies acknowledge is more inline with the zeitgeist.
“One thing for sure is that the Democratic Party will lean more on Bernie than Hillary going forward,” said David Goodfriend, a Clinton supporter and former Bill Clinton administration official.
To some liberals, that means a wholesale purging of the “corporate dominated” wing of the party.
“They’ll hold on to the party mechanisms until you rip it out of their dying hands,” said Jonathan Tasini, a Sanders surrogate. “It’s all about power and money and influence for them.”
The first fight over the party’s future will play out in the race for DNC chairman.
Sanders has endorsed Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) – a Muslim and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – to be the new DNC chief.
For many liberals, nothing less than a wholesale gutting of that institution will do.
“Everybody in the building needs to be fired immediately,” Cenk Uygur, the host of the progressive political commentary show The Young Turks, told The Hill.
After that, progressives are eyeing the 2018 midterm elections — and potential primaries for lawmakers they believe are gumming-up the works — as the next big fight.
It’s a strategy Sanders has endorsed and his supporters are eager to take up.
“We have to install the playbook of the Tea Party,” said Ohio state lawmaker Nina Turner, a Sanders surrogate. “The Tea Party had mainstream Republicans shaking in their boots. Even the ones that hung on knew they had to listen to what the grassroots was saying. Obviously, we don’t want to govern anything like the Tea Party, but from a tactical standpoint, we have to run and support progressive candidates to keep the establishment honest.”
That burgeoning fight is already frustrating some Washington Democrats, who are fearful that the left will hold them to the kind of rigid ideological purity tests that were once the domain of the right.
That would be counter-productive, said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.).
“I love [Sanders],” he said. “But I think his objective is very different from the objective of the Democratic Party as a whole…I think he tried to help, I think he did everything he could. But he cannot help if he’s starting off from the wrong principle. And the wrong principle [is]: The enemy of the good is the perfect.”
There are some areas of agreement among Democrats.
The party suffered a rout in the Rust Belt and Midwest states, as Working Class white voters abandoned them for Trump.
The Hill reached former Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who was in charge of Clinton’s White House transition team, as he packed up to leave Washington and return to his farm in Southern Colorado.
“There were people who felt left out of he economy over the last eight years who were never able to get back on their feet, blue collar men and women,” Salazar said. “Donald Trump was able to capture them in terms of emotion and sentiment.”
“Democrats have not done very well in rural America and I don’t understand why that has happened. The broader question is how to have a Democratic Party that can attract those working men and women.”
Elections have consequences. LOL
Well, yeah, screwing Sanders left a bad aftertaste.
Rural America is made up of WORKING whites and blacks who don't fit neatly into the special interest groups the Democrats pander to. Democrats ignore them because they are incapable of understanding and engaging people who just want to work and live their lives.
CSPAN has a fascinating roundtable by liberal, “oppressed” activist leaders this morning. They are seething, to say the least.
Several are in favor of a third party for the “oppressed”.
They see the Dems as feckless, elite driven, chummy self promoters that talk about diversity but are tone deaf to most of the Dem liberal supporters.
Hmmmmmm, perhaps not too far off the mark? They see the Dems as fatally flawed for future elections.
IMHO, the Dems are certainly a capable force, without the “oppressed”. The Dems were caught between a master campaigner and an deep anger against the political status quo, that played out in the “battleground” states.
I live in WA state. Republicans here are badly outnumbered, we really offer very little to national campaigns. I was amazed when Trump came here to a huge rally.
Hillary and Obama came here three times, did nothing but tie up traffic and collect money, no rally or speeches, no voter contact or even interviews with the local media.
That’s when I realized the imperiousness of the Dem elites and began to believe that Trump could take his outreach to the country and win.
Buy popcorn stock. :)
Instead they want a Minnesota Muslim. That will work well for them.....s/ Especially after Europe blows up due to the Invasion that is sponsored by Soros.
They are blaming the Bernie people? Didn’t we learn that the Dem party literally CHEATED him out of the Primary?
Sounds like the Dems haven’t learned a dang thing and that makes me very, very happy.
Democrats simply do not understand real Americans.
“...revolution in Democratic Party”
Yeah, how about they try basic common sense for once or that just too “radical’ for them?
““Democrats have not done very well in rural America and I don’t understand why that has happened. “
I live and work in rural America. While there are plenty of people on EBT they go to church on Sunday. They understand how damaging liberalism is to jobs and they don’t like living next to Muslims that got bussed in by the government and are now demanding that they dress like Muslims. They have children and they want a car large enough for the family, not a Prius or some dumb all battery job that can’t get them too and from work without a 24 hour charge. They never get the social amenities like cheap bus fairs because there are no buses. The “woman’s health clinic” closed for lack of customers.
The Democratic party has zero connection with these people beyond threatening their EBT cards if evil, rich, racist Republicans win. They realize that if there were jobs they wouldn’t need the EBT cards.
These are good people in bad times.
Instead, a ferocious struggle has erupted on the left over the smoldering remains of the Democratic Party.
Note to liberals...there is no s in moldering.
Very dangerous.
The Democrats are going to move farther left. They will become outright pro-socialism, pro-Muslim, pro-social engineering, pro-political tests for everything.
They and their cronies throughout government and media will spend 4 years attacking Trump, worse than you ever saw with Bush.
If they dupe Americans to put them in power again, the USA will become Venezuela of the North.
What ever happened to that liberal grass roots organization Occupy Wall Street?
Go ahead and make yourselves Moose bait, if you must.
Can’t get any leftier (or caricatured rightier) than the devil. However this is going to get them closer to the devil.
I would rename it the AntiSocial Party. That's what they are.
Swell! They'll only turn the Demonicrats into a party of people striving for a hotter place in hell.
Or they could tantrum themselves into insignificance, and the vacuum would result in the rise of a more reasonable second major party to rival the GOP. Perhaps it will be called “Libertarian” and it will still be well right of these shriveled, shrunken Democrats.
The phony-baloney plastic-banana Astro-Turf “liberals” never meant to go peacefully. There is a vein of BIG money funding these continuing protests, and most of the streams lead right back to some internationalist movements that have had their finger in illegal commerce politics for some time now. Chaos and economic distress are their tools of choice, doing what they are able, to disrupt the normal flow of commerce and to set up pockets of civil unrest. And the worst part is, the authorities KNOW the names and connections of the big players, yet will do nothing, as they have been bought and neutralized already, helpless pawns of a far wider internecine struggle.
Along comes a different player, neither bought off nor yet neutralized, that is combating them in their own arena, and the threat posed to them is nothing less than existential.
The threat of violent revolution, like that of widespread poverty, is with us always, and may only be held at bay with a vigilance that must be renewed on an almost daily basis.
The libs are both right and wrong here: right about rooting out the corrupt elite in the party, but wrong that moving further left will “connect with the working man”.
Actually, I think the Democrats are screwed right now, because that which will actually appeal to the “working man” is anathema to their young communist millennials, and vice versa. In the mean time, this particular civil war pretty much relegates their inner city voters to the sidelines, because many won’t relate to either the “working man” or the highfalutin millenial communist philosophy.
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