Nes Gadol Haya Sham
Dec. 13th, 2017 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexNun, Gimel, Hey, Shin - the four letters on the dreidel - are an acronym for this phrase, meaning "a great miracle happened there". In Israel the last word becomes "Po", for here. It's been suggested we should send "po" dreidels to Alabama. Let's talk about that for a bit.
Like every election in this new world, analyzing this thing is like Rashomon: everyone has a story; the stories share elements; where does reality lie?
Story 1: how far have we fallen that we treat it as a miracle when a mediocre Republicrat squeaks out a victory by less than 2% of the vote against a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic child molester?
In this story the Trumpists remain a solid festering bloc of hatred. On the one hand choosing party over principles - any vote that will push forward a destructive, starve-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich agenda is an OK vote. The GOP backed Moore, despite some early pearl-clutching. When the chips were down, they went all-in for hatred, bigotry, islamophobia because that's who they are.
White women voted nearly 2:1 for someone who thinks it was OK when "we had slavery"(1) and women couldn't vote. You people voted for someone because you think possible unborn children are more important than actual living 14-year-old girls. The twisted level of self-justification here is literally nauseating.
Story 2: black people will save us. Well, they sure did last night. Black women, black men, and young voters (those Millenials that it's fashionable to blame for things) carried the day for Jones. I'm not even going to talk about the white men, except in disgust. The picture is not entirely terrible - Moore lost handily in a number of affluent white suburbs. These people have been voting with Trump (or Trump-alikes) in the past. But I'll talk more about this in the next story.
This current story has a number of great elements and a number of problematic ones. To begin with, the problems. They start with the DNC, which has just sort of offhand expected black folk to show up. When I called Jones a Republicrat I wasn't particularly kidding. He's pro-choice and made a name for himself prosecuting Klansmen who killed black children, but he hasn't done a lot lately. And he did play to the conservative white voter more than to liberal black voters. And he left black folk out of his calculation until it became clear in the last few weeks that they might actually put him in office.
There was some great effort led by organizations like the NAACP to do neighborhood-level organizing, door-knocking, phone banking, and engaging with traditional black religious figures to counterweight Moore's overt religious appeals. There was more great effort done by other grass-roots organization to document and counter the extremely racist voter suppression that went on. Black people and black polling places were singled out in frighteningly overt ways.
Where is the goddamn national Democratic leadership on this? Why the hell aren't they flying in any (or all!) of the 46 faces I count on this picture: https://cbc.house.gov/ Why is the DNC so goddamn afraid to speak with a black voice, to black communities? Partly it's because they'd have to address the neglect that the national (and many state) parties have inflicted on communities of color. Yes, the Jones campaign brought in Deval Patrick and Cory Booker, but only at the last moment.
We have a Voting Rights Act because of places like Selma, Alabama. Why aren't national Democratic figures recognizing the decades-long debt we owe and putting resources into repaying it?
Story 3: the black belt. The core of this story is the idea that no matter what else happens, the Republicans are now going to have to play defense everywhere. People emboldened by Alabama are going out to take on Paul Ryan. A year ago, he seemed unassailable. Now, it may well be the case that there are no safe seats. Trump lost this race, twice. Chief Strategist Bannon lost. Moore lost while tying himself hard to the Trump wagon.
There is blood in the water, my friends, and if the Democrats can get out of their own way, stop having stupid circular firing squads, and really seriously NEVER EVER AGAIN UTTER THE WORDS "Bernie" or "Hilary" then we might stand a chance. In particular, that deeply red south elected a Democrat governor of Louisiana. It just elected a Democrat to the Senate in Alabama. Democrats crushed it in Virginia.
The demographics of the rest of the Southeast United States can be modeled as more like Alabama, more like Louisiana, or more like Virginia. But right now we have models for how to win. Those models all start with the reality that there are significant, if not dominant, communities of color in those states.
We cannot count on the Republicans consistently to nominate and back monsters of Moore's caliber. "At least we're not Trump" is not a winning strategy. If we want to win those states it's going to involve going to those communities of color, listening to their needs, understanding and starting to reverse the decades of neglect, and picking/training/funding new candidates who come from those communities. This means using resources, and time. White voters who are uneasy with hard, angry, divisive politics can be peeled away from the core Trumpists but only if they see a better vision on offer.
It is, however, a winning plan - as last night demonstrated. We have benefited much more than I think anyone anticipated from the open civil war inside the Republican party but that's not going to last forever.
(1) I hate that phrase so much. It's like "we had bunions" - a thing we "had" rather than a horrific system of torture and murder we built, funded, and perpetuated.
Like every election in this new world, analyzing this thing is like Rashomon: everyone has a story; the stories share elements; where does reality lie?
Story 1: how far have we fallen that we treat it as a miracle when a mediocre Republicrat squeaks out a victory by less than 2% of the vote against a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic child molester?
In this story the Trumpists remain a solid festering bloc of hatred. On the one hand choosing party over principles - any vote that will push forward a destructive, starve-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich agenda is an OK vote. The GOP backed Moore, despite some early pearl-clutching. When the chips were down, they went all-in for hatred, bigotry, islamophobia because that's who they are.
White women voted nearly 2:1 for someone who thinks it was OK when "we had slavery"(1) and women couldn't vote. You people voted for someone because you think possible unborn children are more important than actual living 14-year-old girls. The twisted level of self-justification here is literally nauseating.
Story 2: black people will save us. Well, they sure did last night. Black women, black men, and young voters (those Millenials that it's fashionable to blame for things) carried the day for Jones. I'm not even going to talk about the white men, except in disgust. The picture is not entirely terrible - Moore lost handily in a number of affluent white suburbs. These people have been voting with Trump (or Trump-alikes) in the past. But I'll talk more about this in the next story.
This current story has a number of great elements and a number of problematic ones. To begin with, the problems. They start with the DNC, which has just sort of offhand expected black folk to show up. When I called Jones a Republicrat I wasn't particularly kidding. He's pro-choice and made a name for himself prosecuting Klansmen who killed black children, but he hasn't done a lot lately. And he did play to the conservative white voter more than to liberal black voters. And he left black folk out of his calculation until it became clear in the last few weeks that they might actually put him in office.
There was some great effort led by organizations like the NAACP to do neighborhood-level organizing, door-knocking, phone banking, and engaging with traditional black religious figures to counterweight Moore's overt religious appeals. There was more great effort done by other grass-roots organization to document and counter the extremely racist voter suppression that went on. Black people and black polling places were singled out in frighteningly overt ways.
Where is the goddamn national Democratic leadership on this? Why the hell aren't they flying in any (or all!) of the 46 faces I count on this picture: https://cbc.house.gov/ Why is the DNC so goddamn afraid to speak with a black voice, to black communities? Partly it's because they'd have to address the neglect that the national (and many state) parties have inflicted on communities of color. Yes, the Jones campaign brought in Deval Patrick and Cory Booker, but only at the last moment.
We have a Voting Rights Act because of places like Selma, Alabama. Why aren't national Democratic figures recognizing the decades-long debt we owe and putting resources into repaying it?
Story 3: the black belt. The core of this story is the idea that no matter what else happens, the Republicans are now going to have to play defense everywhere. People emboldened by Alabama are going out to take on Paul Ryan. A year ago, he seemed unassailable. Now, it may well be the case that there are no safe seats. Trump lost this race, twice. Chief Strategist Bannon lost. Moore lost while tying himself hard to the Trump wagon.
There is blood in the water, my friends, and if the Democrats can get out of their own way, stop having stupid circular firing squads, and really seriously NEVER EVER AGAIN UTTER THE WORDS "Bernie" or "Hilary" then we might stand a chance. In particular, that deeply red south elected a Democrat governor of Louisiana. It just elected a Democrat to the Senate in Alabama. Democrats crushed it in Virginia.
The demographics of the rest of the Southeast United States can be modeled as more like Alabama, more like Louisiana, or more like Virginia. But right now we have models for how to win. Those models all start with the reality that there are significant, if not dominant, communities of color in those states.
We cannot count on the Republicans consistently to nominate and back monsters of Moore's caliber. "At least we're not Trump" is not a winning strategy. If we want to win those states it's going to involve going to those communities of color, listening to their needs, understanding and starting to reverse the decades of neglect, and picking/training/funding new candidates who come from those communities. This means using resources, and time. White voters who are uneasy with hard, angry, divisive politics can be peeled away from the core Trumpists but only if they see a better vision on offer.
It is, however, a winning plan - as last night demonstrated. We have benefited much more than I think anyone anticipated from the open civil war inside the Republican party but that's not going to last forever.
(1) I hate that phrase so much. It's like "we had bunions" - a thing we "had" rather than a horrific system of torture and murder we built, funded, and perpetuated.
