My main takeaway from this, a hypothesis that I've been developing since the first time I voted and was appalled about how our side managed to lose, is that the people running the Democratic Party don't want to win.
Look at how the Democratic Party works in South Korea. The they're hounding the current president's wife because:
Would be such a MILF but...
She's a weirdo.
She's into geomancy.
She believes that she's clairvoyant.
She accepts very small bribes.
She's childless. She doesn't hear the pitter patter of childrens' feet in her house, just the paws of cats. (Yes a female DP member actually this.)
The last president before that:
She might have been fricked by a cult leader in the 1970s. (Heard this one direct from a Korean ajumma.)
She's the lesbian lover of that guy's daughter (I've actually never heard any Korean say this but it's so fricking obvious I'm gonna say it now.)
She's always been controlled by the cult.
She sank a ship carrying 1000 kids as part of a human sacrifice to that cult.
She's childless.
It's not important how many of these things are true (it's a lot 
). There's one pattern here to me that's really obvious: None of these things are ideological. They're things that would offend rightoids as much or more. That's what you do when you're trying to win. You try to appeal to the middle to join you and the other side to be so disgusted they stay home.
In America the Democratic Party would rather lose than do anything obvious like:
Call Trump an r-slur.
Call out Trump directly for adultery. (It's everyone's right these days.)
Call out Ivanka for being a literal whore. (Some GenX dem got really offended at me when I even said this on a message board.)
Cut ties with the Teachers' Union and appeal to parents. (You ever wonder why you're losing support among blacks?)
Drop the whole gun control issue. You lost on this long ago. Every time you bring it up you're (no pun intended) shooting yourself in the foot.
Say that you're against illegal immigration without using a bunch of euphemisms that us regular people don't understand because we didn't just graduate from Oberlin with a gender studies degree.
Block blatantly illegal mergers that directly effect consumers, like the one where all grocery stores in the western US are merging.
Do a publicity stunt on Columbus Day where you say something like "I won't apologize for America."
Insinuate that Lindsay Graham is homosexual.
Say that abortion is really bad but it shouldn't be illegal. (Remember when Clinton did this and won?)
Say that you're not "woke" and denounce "anti-racism". (Virtually everyone in America agrees with this.)
Acknowledge that blacks have been losing their jobs to illegal immigrants for a long time.
Reform the tax code so that ordinary people don't need to have so much stress about it. Blame the other side for stopping you.
Reform corrupt county sheriffs and judges so that you can't get held up by highwaymen in uniforms and given a ticket while traveling through hick towns. (The President can't actually deliver on this, but promise it anyway.)
Stop treating Cesar Chavez as the token LatinX you'll appeal to all Latinx through, because you're lazy and want a Martin Luther King of every minority and they're all the same.
Stop saying LatinX.
Call out Republicans for blocking every attempt to stop illegal immigration for generations.
Propose actually doing e-Verify.
Explain to r-slurs that building a wall was always a scam because most of the illegal immigrants come right through the gates and just overstay their visa.
Emphatically support nuclear power to combat climate change.
That's just off the top of my head. I've got better ones I can't remember right now, issues that neither party will address but are really important to the American people.
I've heard that the Democratic Convention in 1980 was already like this. By now it's terminal. The Democrats these days are a bunch of special interest groups tied together by intersectionality, which just means nobody can do anything because someone might be offended. It's an organization where most of the people don't give a shit if their party wins or loses because they'll keep their "activist" job either way. For the rest of us who are actually voting, that's not good enough.
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I've always
at the GOP line that "Democrats are the party of slavery/KKK!" as though it still applied in <CURRENT_YEAR> (whoa parties change whoa), but I think that Democrats always have been, and look like they will continue to be, the party of disparate interest groups. Too many interest groups means that you can't come up with a policy without pissing off entire interest groups. They're at the point where they clearly can't keep their interest groups in line - union leaders not backing Kamala, "destined demographics" turning out to be more Republican (and thus less unified as a coalition) than anticipated - and their gains have been coming through college-educated mayos, which they are trying to create a coalition group out of by being anti-conspiracy. They have no idea how to actually do this though, hence the campaigning with the Cheneys. Trump's also going to be a temporary phenomenon, so you cannot build a long-term coalition around opposing him.
Will Democrats try to move away from coalitions entirely? (The Democratic Leadership Caucus and the Bill Clinton presidency I think were attempts at this.) Will Democrats manage to establish coalitions which can reliably hand them elections and not be susceptible to fracturing? Who knows, but all paths lead to drama.
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no way
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It seems to be all falling apart at this point. They're losing the minorities they always took for granted. The only unions that still exist anymore are like the teachers' union that are fricking cancer and force them to do insane shit that destroys any chances of winning an election. It's coalescing as the party for college-educated white women. Now, jokes aside, seriously, how many people in this country want to vote for a party that's dedicated to the interests of college-educated white women?
These are not issues where they can just decide to change overnight. Their people at the junior level are college-educated white women. Some of them might have dark skin but they're from the same cultural milieu. The party is all about serving their interests now.
I think they're going to just disintegrate at some point and be replaced by a new party but I have no idea how long that will take.
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