The Center Has Fallen and White Nationalism is filling the Vacuum

[Maeve]

A long read, but important--
(snip)

White nationalist ideology is powerful enough to bridge the left-right divide, but it is not yet powerful enough to command an electoral majority. Donald Trump lost the popular vote, and he is currently the most unpopular president-elect in the history of modern polling. Whatever their individual prejudices, most Americans want to live in a multiracial democracy.
But that democracy is under threat. White nationalists understand they can’t win a fair election, so they will spent the next four years trying to render more elections either unfair or irrelevant. They’re already well along in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature has moved to strip power from the incoming Democratic governor. In any state they can, white populists will soon take further steps to hobble the offices they don’t control and suppress non-white votes.
They have power, but not numbers. In order to stop them, supporters of pluralist democracy will need to assemble a mass movement that reaches into every community, every state capital, and every congressional office it can. The existing liberal infrastructure in most states is not what it once was, but activists will need it as a starting point to rebuild newer, stronger networks. Most of the important work will be done on the state and local level. Labor unions, houses of worship, and community groups all have key roles to play.

This is where we are, folks. Prepare

https://thinkprogress.org/the-center-has-fallen-and-white-nationalism-is-filling-the-vacuum-beb0611dfe94#.zf81e63v0

[Zambero]

1. It's that coalition thing

Economic conservatives, Dominionists, anti-choicers, white supremacists / xenophobes, militarists, pro-military buildup, habitual knee jerk GOP voters, I've-got-mine-so-FU's, wealthy and keep my taxes low types, anti-feminists, et al. When the number of "mainstream" GOP voters are added to out-and-out deplorables, the numbers begin to work out in their favor. at this point I can begin to see how the term "Good Germans" originated. History's evil-doers would not get anywhere without their unwitting enablers.

[heaven05]

2. yep, they finally have

loud, loud racist white supremacist voices in the WH, the fuhrer and bannon, sessions et al. Prepare? uuummmm okay.

[OrwellwasRight]

3. Actually, it is the left that has fallen and white nationalism has replaced it.

The Democratic Party became economic neoliberal over the past 25+ years, abandoning support for labor unions, welfare programs, and progressive taxation. As they bought more and more into the argument that good governance means business friendly + minimal safety nets, their voters felt abandoned. Of course, many individual Democratic candidates and office holders continued to believe in and work New Deal era programs, the height of U.S. leftism, Democrats at the presidential level and those in control of the powerful Ways and Means and Finance Committees, and those in charge of fundraising pursued a different , business friendly. Too many Dems looked away as Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln killed the Employee Free Choice Act, as Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA, which was designed to free US companies from high wages and having to bargain fairly with labor unions, and as Lieberman--who had already betrayed the Democratic Party by refusing to accept his primary loss--killed the public option. They went along with welfare reform in 1996, prison privatization, under-investment in infrastructure, a tax code that advantages income made from capital over income made from labor, the gutting of Glass-Steagall and on and on.

There are of course still people and Democrats in the "center," there always will be. But the voters who switched allegiances were never centrists begin with. It's a myth that all non-aligned voters are centrists. Many of them are just working people who wanted a fair shake, which the Democratic Party stopped working for in about 1990. If there is not effective populism on the left, people will move to the populism of the right. And that is what we see happening now.

[markpkessinger]

4. Agree 100%!

Also, what many people who are old enough to remember have forgotten (and what many younger folks never knew) was that back in the day when Congress managed (more or less) to function in a reasonably healthy way (say, 40-60 years ago), both parties had very distinct liberal, moderate and conservative wings. And it was common for, say, liberal or moderate Democrats to be able to find common cause with liberal or moderate Republicans. Legislative coalitions tended to form around particular issues more than around parties. But then, during the Reagan years and up to the present day, Republicans began a process of consolidating around an increasingly hard right (and eventually radically hard right) legislative agenda, and culling members who weren't willing to toe the line. Democrats failed to appreciate fully what they were up to, and failed to understand that if they didn't begin consolidating and pushing equally hard in the opposite direction, they were doomed to be dragged further and further to the right, even as they believed they had maintained their traditional liberal, moderate and conservative wings. Then, with the rise of the DLC, the liberal wing was cast into the farthest Siberian wilderness , further accelerating the rightward drift.

Oh, and thank you for seeing and calling out the mythical nature of the linear left-to-right political model. Unaffiliated voters are just that: unaffiliated. Some may be more or less in the middle, but many are actually quite far right or quite left -- they're all over the political map, and for a variety of reasons!

[OrwellwasRight]

6. Great point about Reaganism!

and party consolidation. If the so-called "Reagan Democrats" had only known that Reagan was the first President to begin implementing the Powell Memo in earnest, many would not have voted for him. U.S. political views could probably uphold at least 10 additional parties (some regional) if only we had a proportional representation system to make such sorting viable. Until then, we'll have Rs and Ds and the mythical "centrist voter."

[yurbud]

5. it is not just a multicultural democracy we want, but an economic one that looks for ways to avoid

war and gives up subverting democracy and human rights abroad at the command of the already very wealthy.

Wars for resources, cheap labor, and markets cost us here at home.