How Democrats Win Elections
Photograph Source: Pete Souza – CC BY 2.0
“If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze back into you.”
– Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
Anyone flying under the Democratic Party banner can win elections only when the Republican Party self-damages.
They’re doing that now, putting themselves on the path of a seriously disturbed leader.
The 10% of voters who floated over to the Republican ticket in 2024 will, given the chance, now vote Dem not because their platform appeals but because the Republicans now scare them. Extremes in views and behavior are not favored in the mainstream American populace. There’s a run from them. There is a Crazed thermometer in the Heartland. Those on either extreme who overheat will lose the numbers to win elections.
Candidates Obama and Clinton made us feel good about ourselves. Carter rescued us from the Dark Vader of Nixon. We put that behind us and elected a hard-shell Baptist with a soft voice. Candidate Clinton spoke of “hope” to voters feeling a recession coming on. It cannot be said that Clinton had a platform that distinguished Dems from Repubs. Voters escaped from the feckless H.W. Bush to the vigorous Clinton. The floating 10% of voters ran scared from the “Drink Bleach” Trump. In 2024, that same 10% ran from Biden dementia into the arms of one who is now a more extreme character than in his first term. In 2026, that same 10% will run to a Dem candidate. Trump is far too scary for those not living on the dark side of the American Mass Psyche.
As the tariffs burn through budgets and all things and folks and Repubs appear more and more crazed, we can expect 2028 Prez elections will be an escape to Dems. God only knows what platform a Dem candidate will run on beyond “We won’t be crazy.”
What anyone on the Democratic Party continuum offers has run counter to the dark side of the American Mass Psyche, slowly and now rapidly taking shape since Reagan. This dark side voted Trump into office twice.
Dark Side Memes, which replicate in psychic recesses beyond market reach are the wellsprings which no one before Trump’s regime has called upon so brazenly. The demonic like energy here has overwhelmed the politics of protocol and conciliation. An angry, destructive urge has been building which Trump has tapped. Not clarity but plaque has built up and the foundations of heart, habit and mind bend toward the abyss.
Bullet points on the American Mass Psyche in the Age of Trump
“Government doesn’t solve problems, it is the problem” has taken root. “Drain the swamp!” Let DOGE take a chain saw to “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Accusations without evidence get a pass in the mass psyche because they’ve rooted there as the truth since Reagan. There’s no place for “Market Rule is the problem.” Speaking well of the Federal Government and its bureaucratic order is like speaking well of bin Laden after 9/11. Being told how and what you can speak builds up a rage identified with government and Dems as the enforcers.
Distrust and fear of the alien Other, masterfully fired up to the hatred level. The moral imperative to love your neighbor is not evident in the American Mass Psyche where the Christian Beatitudes are a Loser’s creed.
There’s a vicious competitiveness in this dark psyche, encouraged by the winner take all mantra of Market Rule. Americans who want to be rich and richer than others have no grasp of sharing with others. Your welfare is the only welfare. The poor fail because of poor choices is the thought. But thought is not here in any persuasive way. In the mass psyche the poor are always the Welfare Queen eating bonbons while you are working to pay for the bonbons. The poor are devilish tricksters. Of course, distributive politics are powerless here, not that Dems campaign on this.
There is only a firm American identity which you and your fellows possess and recognize. It has no need of diversification. There is no advance through diversity, only threat to America First unity. Who is to be included here is a personal choice and not to be forced upon you. Equity is what is yours given away.
We’re now deep into the politics of passion, aka. Populist or Reality TV show politics. The passion is centered in Donald J. Trump, as it was with Jim Jones in Jonestown, David Koresh at Waco, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate, Amy Carlson “Mother God” et al. The U.S. produces them as a kind of capitalist collateral damage. In a post-truth climate, it’s easier to reach people through passion, aka irrationality with millions of online followers than it is to present and defend rational argument. Making a defense or a platform that tries to deconstruct what is held within the mass psyche as true is what Dems try to do and Repubs don’t.
In the American Mass Psyche of the moment, you can throw all the evidence available at impeachment trials and insurrection investigations but when all knowing is shrouded in suspicion, “Alternative Facts” become evidence.
As ludicrous and wrong-headed as it sounds, the politics of passion drown out the politics of reason. No depth psychologist ever found an ounce of reason in the psyche. The irrational attachments they were looking for couldn’t be reasoned away.
When a winning number of voters hit the wall with a world of lunacy created by a politics of passion, they’ll run to a safe haven. Customarily, when the Monopoly game of our economic system scrunches too many, and the Repubs get tagged with the crime, the run is to the Dems. And then the run back. And so on. The escape being planned now is different. Trump lunacy is leaving a lot of destruction, with more bodies to come. We will see what can be saved of our Constitutional order. No one escaped Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79AD.
Repubs want to grow, protect and preserve your wealth. Dems want to share yours with others, which they are afraid of saying. So, they’ve become weak, moaning harping scolds of Repubs and capitalism. In the American Mass Psyche, they are the B team. Right now, there is no escape from plutocracy by running to the Dems. Escape would only come by other means.
Any recovery/reconstruction after Trump regime rule would be confronting the same memes of the American Mass Psyche. The Dems are not shaped to do this. A politics totally occupied with global warming disasters and the fact that national debt exceeds GDP and the disasters resulting from that might nullify the resident dark memes of our mass psyche, something like the way WWII stifled the Great Depression.
That the Democratic Party cannot counter the memes of our darkened mass psyche without fueling that darkness is a terrible admission. That there is something in us personally and societally that registers danger and votes escape puts the Dems in a default winning position.
How the abyss of our mass psyche came to be, however contrary it is to the professed Evangelical spirit of the country and the Constitutional promotion of the general welfare, the fact (pace) remains that we are now looking into the Abyss. And it is looking back at us.
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