REFLECTIONS ON ELECTION NIGHT

Oy. What now.

To those of you who voted for Donald Trump, congratulations are due. In a democratic society we honor the will of the people, and as of Election Day the people have spoken.

For those of us who voted for Kamala Harris, this is not simply a lost election. For millions, this result represents a collective state of trauma. The fears of authoritarianism among left-leaning Americans are very real, and in many ways legitimate. We will need to mount a powerful, loyal opposition to any efforts by the President-elect and his administration to transgress the norms and rules of a democratic society.

Democratic voters will need to grieve, but our time of grief should not be wasted. To lead to positive next steps, it must include a meaningful analysis of how this debacle could have happened. And we should not let those who led us to this place assume leadership of that analysis now.  Acquiescence to the canned narratives of a few people who got us into this mess is not the way to get out of it. Slavishly accepting their version of events was the problem, and it would not be the solution.

Make no mistake about it. Responsibility for Trump’s victory lies squarely at the feet of those who took it upon themselves to cancel the Democratic Presidential primary. They’ll be working overtime over the next few days and weeks to promulgate convenient narratives that displace the blame onto anyone and anything other than themselves. But that is nothing but a cover-up, and no one should buy it.
 
It was they who decided that Donald Trump posed such a threat to democracy that democracy needed to be cancelled this year. For the last year and a half, we should have been having a robust conversation among Democratic voters regarding what it would take to defeat Donald Trump this year. That is what a primary is for. In a democracy, it’s the voters – not party leaders and media elite - who are meant to choose the nominee.

The appropriate role of a political party is to facilitate democracy, not engineer it. Its job is stand back and let the voters decide who a nominee should be, and then step forward to support the people’s choice. In this year’s campaign, in an absurd perversion of the democratic process, the Democratic National Committee took it upon themselves to simply decide that Joe Biden would be the candidate, as they later simply decided to replace him with Kamala Harris at the head of the ticket. The outsized power of political parties has become the danger to democracy that both George Washington and John Adams warned that they might become.

Their control of the process was exerted primarily through media and the Internet. Narratives such as, “We don’t primary incumbent Presidents” are simply ridiculous. Many of us are old enough to remember that Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy Sr. primaried the sitting President Lyndon Johnson. It was that which turned the fervor for ending the war in Viet Nam into a decisive political factor that could no longer be ignored.

Another such narrative was the notion that “Anyone running against Biden is a spoiler,” totally contradicting the basics of a seventh grade civics class. You cannot be a spoiler if you’re running in a primary.

And it was said repeatedly, creating an almost trancelike state among Democratic votes, that no other “credible” or “qualified” candidates were running against the President. This was used to justify a de-amplification of any candidate who tried. First myself, then Bobby Kennedy Jr., then Dean Phillips were treated with various degrees of derision by these self-appointed protectors of our democratic project. What they really meant by “credible” was someone from their club, someone they chose; and what they meant by “qualified” was someone qualified to perpetuate the system that the American people made very clear tonight that they don’t want.

What we should have seen as qualified was someone able to foresee that this disaster was coming, should we look to the corporatized Democratic playbook in order to win this year. Someone not only who could explain why that was, but also present to the voters a reasonable and compelling agenda for exactly how to avoid this outcome.

Instead, a relatively small group of people, men and women who apparently haven’t strolled much outside their gated communities over the last few years to have even a clue as to what was really going on with the American people –  assumed the position of deciders. Because Joe Biden had beaten Trump in 2020, this group of Democratic political and media elites assumed he had the best chance of beating him again. They were certainly within their rights to hold that opinion; what was not within their rights was to suppress any democratic efforts at challenging that opinion. They assumed the authority – feeling entitled to do so - to basically choose the Democratic nominee this year, suppressing any genuine effort that might be posed by a primary challenger.

In order to defeat a challenge to democracy, we need more democracy, not less. And we need a major political party in this country dedicated unequivocally to the needs of the working people of the United States. That means, in too many cases, those who are hungry. Those who are medically uninsured or underinsured. Those who are drowning in medical debt. Those who are without hope. On many issues Donald Trump offers only false hope, but people will go with false hope before they’ll go with no hope at all.

From party bosses, to media elite, to progressive organizations that complied with party and donor demands that you not even speak to me, to the unethical operatives who conspired in all of this – I hope you will feel the shock of this moment, just as the rest of us do. And for the sake of the country, I hope you resign your imaginary leadership positions going forward – positions which existed nowhere except in your own minds, by the way – in forging a loyal democratic opposition to our President-elect. To put it bluntly, at this point, We the People can better take this from here.

The Democratic party, if it is to survive as a major force in American politics, must become more genuinely democratic again. Their media partners should reject the journalistic malfeasance whereby they felt justified in de-amplifying candidates that they simply don’t like. Many people in the party need to look in the mirror now, and not to “messaging experts” to help them spin this. It will be the purification of conscience, and critical thinking on the part of all Americans, that will lead us forward, better than ever in fact, having left this unfortunate chapter behind us.

The election is over. The days ahead are uncertain, but if we remain true to our hearts, dedicated to integrity, and committed to our country, then better times will still yet lie ahead.