According to MSNBCs Krystal Ball -- There is an unprecedented gap between the voting preferences of young voters and everyone else. Millennials may not be crazy about self-identifying as Democrats but whatever they call themselves theyre liberal. They are much more likely to vote Democratic than older generations. So Republicans, do you know why in five of the last six Presidential elections youve lost the popular vote? Its because every year the electorate is becoming browner and more influenced by the millennials who are more liberal than any other modern generation, and sorry GOP, theyre staying that way. To paraphrase Sally Field at her Oscar win, they dont like you, they really dont like you. And who can blame them? The second reason the GOP is irrelevant is because your economic ideology is toast, debunked, discredited. Your intellectual heavy is Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan! Youve been flailing around in a house that Reagan built for three decades and still havent realized its just an empty frame with no foundation. Come back to me when you have some actual evidence for your economic ideology, and no, Ayn Rand novels dont count. Nope. Republicans and their deck-chair shifting civil war dont matter. If you are interested in where the country goes from here the action is all on the Democratic side, and while our own internal divide is less noisy than the Republican one it is just as real and waaaay more important. This divide, the one that counts, is between the pro-corporate democrats and the pro-worker democrats. Its pretty easy to tell which are which. In their best incarnation the pro-corporate dems do Wall Street and corporate Americas bidding while doing the best they can to shore up the safety net so that when working folks are inevitably abused by big banks and big business at least there is something of a net to catch them. Pro-worker dems want to stop the abuse in the first place and keep and expand the safety net just in case those protections fail. When pro-corporate dems get their way, as they have in democratic politics for, oh, the past twenty-two years, inequality rises. And when inequality rises the power of the plutocracy rises. And when plutocrats call the shots like they do now the safety net gets it. Plutocrats, it turns out, dont much care for supporting the workers on whose backs they earn their riches. So even though corporate democrats may be well intentioned their policies lead to a toxic brew of money, plutocracy and power that shreds the safety net, strips workers of their right and hollows out the middle class. The plutocracies wish is their command. Now to be clear, either type of democrat is a million times better than the folks the GOP has to offer, but that is a pretty low bar. Time to expect more. To demand more. Do we want a society that governs for the needs of the many, or the desires of the few? I know which side Im on, do you? Yes, I do, Krystal. Yes I do.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:16:19 +0000