Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
Here
is Glenn Greenwald making lots of important points about the reasons
for Trump's victory and the lessons that need to be learnt fast.
The whole article needs reading. Here is one short section:
Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and
everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s
crushing defeat of their party. You know the drearily predictable list
of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie
Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, the
Intercept) which sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton.
Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning
in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in
words.
When a political
party is demolished, the principle responsibility belongs to one entity:
the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the
candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them
and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed,
resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or
pro-Clinton-pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their
own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.
Put simply,
Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely
vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was
widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst
components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those
of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary
Clinton was a huge and scary gamble, that all empirical evidence showed
that she could lose to anyone and that Bernie Sanders would be a much
stronger candidate especially in this climate — are now the ones being
blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data
and nominating her anyway. ...
It was only a matter of time
before instability, backlash and disruption resulted. Both Brexit and
Trump unmistakably signal its arrival. The only question is whether
those two cataclysmic events will be the peak of this process, or just
the beginning. And that, in turn, will be determined by whether their
crucial lessons are learned — truly internalized — or ignored in favor
of self-exonerating campaigns to blame everyone else.
