Tag: Democratic Party

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Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?

There’s been a lot of speculation about what will happen if Trump is elected. Less discussed, but no less consequential is what will happen if Clinton is elected. This past summer, a group of progressive activists were gathered from across the country at White Salmon, Washington by ChangeLab, a national racial justice thought laboratory, to discuss the implications of the Trump and Clinton candidacies. This article is based on that discussion and subsequent observation and analysis of the odd, frankly frightening, events that have unfolded in this election season since then:

One popular thread suggests that if Trump is elected … Read more “Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?”

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The Democrat’s Jefferson-Jackson Fundraising Tradition and the Limits of Perspective

One of my weekend rituals involves watching MSNBC’s Saturday and Sunday morning political talk show, Up, now hosted by Salon.com’s Steve Kornacki. Up provides a pretty good capsule account of the political week according to the center-left media. So I watch, occasionally find myself nodding in agreement, and just as often end up arguing with the TV.

This past weekend, Up featured a story about the annual round of Jefferson-Jackson Day spring Democratic Party fundraising dinners. The point of the story was that, in the face of an increasingly racially diverse electorate, it might be time for the Democrats … Read more “The Democrat’s Jefferson-Jackson Fundraising Tradition and the Limits of Perspective”

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Red, Blue, Slave, Free

The maps above (originally from PolitiComments.com) were cut and pasted into this post from the new Changelab report, Left or Right of the Colorline? Asian Americans and the Racial Justice Movement. The first one describes the Red-Blue electoral breakdown in 2004, and the second indicates in tan and red those territories that were once open to slavery. The chilling correspondence between these two maps used to feel like our unchangeable political destiny.

Forget the political parties. Both sides have had their day as the party of white supremacy. What we should remember is that whichever side racially sensitive whites … Read more “Red, Blue, Slave, Free”

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Politics is a Battle for Position: More Thoughts on the Election

As relieved as I am about the outcome of the national elections, I can’t get the thought of how much we’ve lost in order to “win” out of out my mind. Something an old colleague of mine told me in the 1980s keeps popping into my head: politics is a battle for position.

What he meant by that, I think, is that political fights are won or lost based on how one is positioned vis a vis the public, and relative to one’s opponents. He told me that in order to help me wrap my then relatively inexperienced mind … Read more “Politics is a Battle for Position: More Thoughts on the Election”

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The Right, The Election, And What’s Next

A while back I wrote a post called “The Party of Lincoln.” In it, I said that the GOP,

[has] become the instrument of power of a right wing movement bent on resetting the social, political, and economic clock in America to a time when women were marginalized, the rich were beyond accountability, and overt racism and racial codes were business as usual…

The majority of the Republican activist base is made up of ideologically inflexible, overlapping rightist factions. They include the Tea Parties, the religious right, libertarians, white nationalists, anti-communist conspiracy theorists, and assorted more exotic white supremacists. That’s … Read more “The Right, The Election, And What’s Next”

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Who Is More Racist, Republicans or Democrats?

Lately, the debate over who is more racist, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, has heated up, with accusations flying from both sides. The discussion really got going when Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, said of Republicans, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”

That got the twitter-verse screaming foul. Hayes himself quickly took back his statement citing economist Alex Tabarrok’s research revealing that where racism is concerned, the parties are pretty much in a tie.  Hayes also cited John Sides‘ … Read more “Who Is More Racist, Republicans or Democrats?”

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Why I Voted for Barack Obama and Will Again

A lot of folks I think of as leftists have told me they are considering not giving their vote to Barack Obama in November. They say they feel cheated that the actions of his administration didn’t live up to the soaring rhetoric of his campaign, and are opting out in protest.

I’m no Democratic Party loyalist, nor am I uncritical of the President. But their disappointment to the point of opting out frustrates me nonetheless. My frustration can be summed up by the question, “what in the world did you expect?”

It speaks to an uncritical liberalism not … Read more “Why I Voted for Barack Obama and Will Again”

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Appalachian Voters

Thanks to a great article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic, I came across this quote by Steve Kornacki concerning Obama’s lack of popularity in Appalachia:

A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about…

Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was … Read more “Appalachian Voters”

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Homophobia and Racism: How They Are Connected And Why People Of Color Should Care

The recent document dump of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) reveals their racist and homophobic strategy to divide the Democratic Party. Among other things, the docs state: “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and Blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…”

And, “The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote… Will the process … Read more “Homophobia and Racism: How They Are Connected And Why People Of Color Should Care”