Closing The Window

In the aftermath of the election, I think there’s a major lesson for the entire country to learn with two big offshoot lessons, one for each party.

I think very few people voted for Joe Biden this year.

I think a lot more people voted for Donald Trump.

But I think there was one helluva larger number who voted against Trump than voted against Biden.

Catch my drift?

THE BIG LESSON:

Americans by and large are centrists.

They do not want their daily lives disrupted.

They resist change, but once change occurs and they see how little effect it has on their daily lives -- viz women voting, civil rights, LGBT+ rights, etc. -- they accept it and roll on.

Americans actively seek change only when something is going Very, Very Wrong.

Trump trailed in the popular vote in 2016 because most people correctly read his character:  Shallow, impulsive, self-centered.

They recognized he lacked both the temperament and the discipline to effectively lead a nation of 323 million people in a world facing rapid social, political, and climate change.

The next three years bore this out repeatedly, yet Trump managed to hold on despite his bunglings and betrayals simply by not adversely affecting the daily lives of the large minority who voted for him.

Trump’s base can most charitably be described as people anxious about their position in America, and Trump -- to no one’s great surprise, not even those who voted for him -- simply lied and promised to make everything better even though he lacked any clear plan for doing so, much less the actual talent and ability to follow through on his promises.

And for three years, it didn’t matter.

While others could see the great harm he inflicted upon America’s long term interests, by and large he let his base feel they were no longer slipping in their standing, that their lives were stabilized and ripe for improvement.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

To be 100% fair to Donald Trump, he neither created the pandemic nor could he stop it from eventually reaching America.

But he could have followed the effective pandemic response plan put in place by GWBush.

Doing so would have disrupted Americans’ daily lives, to be sure, but could be offset by the truthful claim it prevented an even greater disruption.

Most importantly, instead of nearly a quarter million dead Americans as of this posting, the fatality rate would be only in the tens of thousands.

If Trump followed the pandemic response plan, he would have cruised to an easy re-election victory.

But as anyone who observes him knows, he is incapable of the foresight and discipline needed to serve his own best interests.

Biden didn’t need to be better than Trump to beat him.

All he needed was to be “not Trump”.

This is why Biden didn’t have any coattails in this election.

The Democratic Party’s lesson:

Right now, America wants stability.

Trump’s cheesy theatrics aside, until 2020 he didn’t disrupt the average American’s life.

The bad things he stirred up were by and large just continuations of already existing bad situations, not new problems.

And yes, those already suffering from those situations continued suffering, and in many cases it grew worse, but it was not a new thing.

This doesn’t minimize or mitigate their suffering, it simply marks it was not a radical change from the status quo.

But killing a quarter million people through deliberate lies and bungling, then seeing the nation’s economy go into the dumpster due to lack of a coherent national response to the pandemic?

That disrupted a lot of people’s lives.

Right now the best thing the Democratic Party can do is create a semblance of order and stability in the face of the pandemic.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

The Republicans will try to paint them as radical leftists determined to undermine everything that makes America great.

This is because the far right in America has spent decades trying to shove the Overton window further and further to the right.

The GOP’s problem is this:
They engage in magical thinking, presuming that if they wish for something rilly rilly hard enough, they can make it a reality.

The truth is the Overton window is not a rigid frame that can be repositioned but a stretchable boundary.

The reality of what the populace wants will not move greatly from its fixed cultural point.

And for the overwhelming majority of Americans that fixed cultural point means some form of health care available to all that doesn’t render people destitute if they get ill, some sort of social safety net for the elderly and those who want to work but can’t find employment, an environment as clean and as safe as possible to live in, and the freedom to live their daily lives unmolested so long as they show the same courtesy to others. 

These are all things the GOP claims represent progressive radical socialist COMMUNIST ideas.

That’s a lie, of course.

But today’s GOP leadership is nothing if not disciples of Josef Goebbels.

The Democratic Party must not rise to the bait.

The Democratic Party must present the political desires of the majority of Americans as what it is:  Reasonable and sane centrist policies.

It will be difficult, because the GOP will continue lying, and will be quick to blame every setback and mistake as a grievous failing of the Democrats, but success will lay in embracing those centrist values and making the Overton window snap back to its real position.

And the leftists and radicals in the party who chomp at the bit to push things really further to the left?

Just getting back to a true centrist position is going to address most of their concerns.

The Republican Party’s lesson:

There’s enormous potential for conservative gains among American minority groups.

Case in point:   
Crime-plagued communities want effective law enforcement.

They do not want a police force that acts like an occupying army, treating every member of the community as a criminal suspect.

Learn that lesson, and you’ll peel off huge numbers of Democratic voters.

Right now the GOP thinks it holds the American center.

It doesn’t.

It holds a reverse Venn diagram, a wide circle that goes around the center but doesn’t truly occupy it.

It holds a few extremely wealthy plutocrats concerned only with making more money -- and keeping more of what they make, as well.

It holds so called “conservatives” who are so ultra-right wing as to shoot right off the scale of libertarianism and plunge into virtual anarchy -- only they lack the self-awareness to acknowledge that,

It holds a rapidly shrinking organized religion contingent that is rapidly losing members to uncommitted centrists or the new burgeoning pseudo religion of conspiracy fanatics.

It holds an increasingly aging and rapidly dying generation of mostly white voters who feel threatened by the inevitable change going on around them, and cling to any false promise that the America of their perceived fondly remembered childhoods can be restored.

It holds bona fide hate-mongers and bigots of a wide variety, all of them itching to inflict harm on groups and genders they don’t like and not particular about what policies are used to do so.

This is not the healthy formula for a long lived viable political party.

America can benefit greatly from a real conservative party, one that acts with fiscal responsibility and tries to preserve everyone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It can’t benefit from the GOP as it’s currently constituted.

For the GOP to thrive in the remaining years of the 21st century, it needs to regain the ability to compromise and when necessary, embrace change.

It’s about to find itself outside a window that’s about to snap back to the middle, and if it’s not already there when the snap occurs, it’s going to have a hard time getting back in.

© Buzz Dixon