My take on why we lost, originally posted on Daily Kos.

[backscatter712]

Written when DU was still down.

Anyways. Posted in its entirety because I wrote it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14/1596653/-Values-and-vision-Let-s-reboot-the-Democratic-Party-No-more-We-suck-less-campaigns

Values and vision. Let's reboot the Democratic Party. No more "We suck less!" campaigns.

by ApostleOfCarlin

Well, I was drunk on rageahol for the past few days, and out of commission. Now, here’s my take on what happened. Donald Trump is going to be alleged President of the United States, and as a result, the next four years are going to be America hopped up on bath salts, eating the face off the world.

I think in all the toxic poo-flinging that was this election cycle, we took our eyes off the prize. Instead of focusing enough on the ultimate goals, like the kind of society we want to live in, we focused on the means. Electing Hillary, or electing Bernie, was the means to the goal, but over time, as the shit-flinging escalated, the means became the goal. We were focused on electing Hillary Clinton, or electing Bernie, and not focused enough on building a society that’s stronger together. Stronger Together really wasn’t a bad vision, but it got neglected, until it became little more than an advertising slogan. And the voters didn’t see what we were trying to build.

Our cohesion failed, a lot of good progressives and Democrats turned on each other, and we just couldn’t inspire enough people to stand in line and vote and volunteer and push to get the job done.

We were focused too much on saying “Hey, Hillary isn’t that bad”. That’s true — she would have made a great president. But the voters didn’t buy it, and ate up all that email bullshit the right-wing and the corporate media were peddling. We weren’t focusing on what we were for. We were focused on the means — electing Hillary, bashing Trump and running a campaign of “We suck less than those mean Republicans.” These campaigns bring lousy results.

I think we need to reboot. Refocus on values, vision, and mission. I’m basing this diagnosis of some of what I’ve learned getting my MPA from UC Denver, and working with a few non-profits. Any nonprofit director worth his or her salt will be making sure the organization has a solid mission statement, vision statement, and statement of values. And that director will be working to make sure his organization strives to fulfill its mission, achieve its vision, and uphold its values.

What we should have been doing was emphasizing our values, telling the story of our vision for America, and making a clear statement of the mission of the Democratic Party. We did a lousy job at that. And as a result, the election became close enough to steal.

Trump pushed his vision. A moronic vision. A Nazi-grade-evil vision. A nightmarish vision. But he pushed it. Make America Great Again (TM). Build a wall. Kick all the Mexicans/Muslims/blacks/queers down, put ‘em in their place. Be Jesus-ey (he actually pulled that one off and got the fundies voting for him, despite being about the exact opposite of Jesus.) And he got his lynch mob to the polls.

Because he had a vision that he pushed incessantly. Hillary’s and the Democrats’ vision was an afterthought.

And in the end, the Democrats didn’t push the vision. Nobody got to see it. Instead, it was attacks on Trump. Which aren’t that hard — the attack ads are nothing more than showing clips of Trump at his most bigoted, misogynistic, and mean-spirited. The ads had an effect, but not enough.

The Democratic campaign devolved into “We suck less than those mean Republicans.” Not. Inspiring.

Barack Obama inspired, and that’s why he won in 2008 and 2012. We all remember the Obama campaign — Yes We Can, The Audacity of Hope, and a vision of a bright future for America, and for all Americans, and for the entire world. That got him elected, even though he was black in a nation full of racist shitheads.

So we need to reboot. It’s time to rebuild the vision.

Values

What are our values? Well, we’d better have a good answer to that question, because they’re at the core of what makes people get out and fight for us, or what makes them stay home.

I have a few suggestions, having a progressive frame of mind. There will be disagreements. That’s fine. I’ll base some of my suggestions on the work I’ve seen by Jonathan Haidt. He has liberals and conservatives differing by their emphasis on six moral foundations:

• Care/Harm


• Fairness/Cheating


• Liberty/Oppression


• Loyalty/Betrayal


• Authority/Subversion


• Sanctity/Degradation

These six are ordered, with liberals aligning on the Care/Harm & Fairness/Cheating side of the foundations while hard conservatives are on the Sanctity/Degradation and Authority/Subversion side.

Based on that, being on the Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating side of those foundations, I suggest the following incomplete, and admittedly contentious set of values.

• Compassion


• Kindness


• Hope


• Fairness


• Equality


• Social and Economic Justice


• Opportunity


• Liberty


• Democracy

There’s lots of other values, and I’m sure there will be arguments out there. That’s fine. This is just a starting point. But it’s an important starting point. I think as Democrats and Progressives, we’re mostly in agreement, just arguing over details. Setting up a core set of values is vital, and the Democratic Party MUST be striving to uphold its values at all times. When Democratic politicians are seen as doing things like watering down legislation to bring social justice, or medical care, or anti-discrimination regulations, they are going to be seen as compromised. And those that could be strong allies walk away.

Look at the Hillary Clinton/Goldman Sachs controversy. Hillary was seen as neglecting economic Justice. People were clamoring for better jobs, for more opportunities. Students, patients, and their families were struggling with mountains of debt. They needed help, and Hillary was seen as cavorting with the enemy. I’m not saying that’s true, but that’s how she was seen. And a lot of people walked away from Hillary because of that.

Values must be at the core of what the Democratic Party does, and Democrats must be striving to uphold them at all times. Otherwise, we’re dead in the water. Values are our moral compass, and to break them is to tempt disaster.

I’ll make a second note about Jonathan Haidt and his moral foundations. He pointed out that liberals have a blind spot. Liberals tend to focus on care/harm, and fairness/cheating as their core values, and completely ignore sanctity/degradation, and authority/subversion. Conservatives, on the other hand, while they tend to emphasize sanctity/degradation and authority/subversion, put all six of the moral foundation values in their moral equation. Which means that, well, as anyone here who’s read a lot of Daily Kos articles has seen, we see conservatives as completely immoral and insane. While conservatives tend to think of liberals as misguided, but are capable of empathizing with them.

We have a blind spot, but the converse is this. We can poach conservative votes, because they can empathize with our values. And we did this year. There were quite a lot of conservative Hillary voters who hated Donald Trump. Not enough to win, but we can build on that. And build enough of a base of support to make us invincible in the next election, if we’re smart.

So I’ll say this about the conservative values. I’m not an anarchist. I’m all for government and authority, but that authority MUST adapt to serve the needs of the people, and when government fails to uphold the people’s needs, that’s why we have democracy, and why we seek to subvert destructive authority.

For sacred institutions, it’s the same. I make no secret of being an atheist, and having no truck with religion. For religious institutions to get the slightest bit of respect from me, they must be kind. If your religion is compassionate and just, and does what Jesus did — feeding the poor, healing the sick, and fighting unjust authority, hey, I’ll pray with you.

If your religious institutions are mean-spirited and bigoted, if your priests/pastors/mullahs are self-serving greedheads, if your priesthood is a boys-only club that preaches misogyny from the pulpit, or if your religion preaches hate and intolerance, or feeds corruption, I will defile and blaspheme such religion with GLEE. Hell, I’m all for taking Mike Pence’s stupid Bronze Age magic book of fairy tales, and shoving it so far up his ass he feels the Word of God on his tonsils. Mike Pence’s Jesus is an asshole!

So. I’ll just throw a quote in, of the kind designed to appeal to conservatives, and have them uphold our values.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Vision

Tell me a story.

That is a vision. A story of what you want to do. For nonprofits, a vision statement describes what the organization is doing for the world when it’s successful.

Stories are powerful. Stories make our culture. They change minds. And they can make or break us.

A compelling vision of how we want to remake our country can not only bring us to electoral victory, it can drum up enough popular support to make the vision real.

The Democratic Party also needs to tell its story. Its vision. How do we intend to change the country for the better? How do we intend to make people’s lives better?

Tell us the story of how we make America the greatest country in the world? The real greatest. Not just the most powerful, but the most just, the most compassionate, that beacon on the hill. How do we live up to that promise on the Statue of Liberty that says

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

That is vision right there. Just a few lines written by Emma Lazarus. Words with incredible power.

We saw a small taste of that at the DNC. And then the vision got neglected. The focus drifted back to “Elect Democratic Politicians”. We didn’t tell our story. We went right to attack ads, how horrible a person Donald Trump is (and yes, he is fucking horrible), and how Hillary sucks less.

We didn’t tell our story. Trump did. With a fourth grade vocabulary. Very effectively.

We all know Trump’s vision. Make America Great Again. Build a wall. He left the rest of the story unspoken, but not unheard, parts like bringing back Jim Crow, bashing queers and rolling back LGBTQ civil rights, barbecuing spotted owls and coal-rolling to spite tree-hugging libruls, and bombing the shit out of the Middle East just for shits and giggles. A vision where bullies are in power and encouraged to bully. It’s a terrible story, but they got that story across to the voters. It was a siren song of evil, and it worked.

Mission Statements and Campaign Slogans

Now give us the short and sweet version of your vision: In other words, tell us your values and your vision in a short, pithy sentence. Or a bumper sticker slogan.

Don’t do Dilbert mission statements. Those are worthless.

But here’s a good one. Microsoft’s original mission statement was good: “A computer on every desk.” Short, to the point, not full of corporate babbling.

Hillary’s campaign slogan, “Stronger Together” was good. Captures a lot of our values. I think after this election, it’s used up. We need another one.

Here’s my suggestion, going from the core values:

Compassion and Justice for all America.

I’m sure someone else will think of a better one. By all means, get to it!

Final Thoughts

I have two rules for Democratic campaigns going forward.

1. The values and vision have to be absolutely at the center of the campaign.

2. The candidates must remember they are the means to the end. Not the end itself.

Violating rule number 2 was a great sin for Democrats in the last few years. The objective stopped being building a country of hope, and the objective switched to keeping Democrats in elected office.

Now granted, one makes the vision happen by electing Democrats to political offices. Then the job is to use the power of those offices to implement the vision. And they failed at that. They succumbed to the siren call of the big donors. So then Obamacare lost the public option. And Gitmo is still open. And Democrats threw their support behind TPP. They compromised our core values, and lost sight of the vision. So supporters walked away.

And that is how we lose. To win, we must bring values and vision back to the core of the Democratic Party.