I think these first days, if nothing else, has proven that a moderate conciliatory path is- while not ideal - better than the alternative.
I hope I'll be proven wrong, going forward.
Depends on what you call that path, heh. This last year definitely showed the dems that they have less allies on the far left (so far as the US goes, anyway) than they hoped they did, as well as how little of an actual path there is to connect with some of the groups in that bunch. In a way, it's good, similar to what we were talking about a bit earlier. If you know who you can't get through to, you've worked out a few areas you can divert effort from.
Agreed on most of your points, but I would note that the Republicans are not exactly in a strong position here; they've alienated a huge portion of Americans and they don't have a strong core. They're very vulnerable... which is part of the reason that the Democrat's failures to seize that are all the more disillusioning.
Eh... at this point I'd ask who on the more left spectrum of US politics actually
could have seized on that. Again, much of the problem is that the parts of the conservative spectrum that might just be vulnerable, are largely flat out not going to listen to a single bloody thing anyone leftward of 'em is going to say. Period, end statement, if christ physically came down from heaven and showed up at their door with a democrat sticker the door'd be shut. The fracturing's internal, basically, but the barriers against external influence haven't really weakened, and there's still not much opening to leverage anything on that front.
There's absolutely a platform to establish. We've run the Washington Consensus so threadbare that alternatives are barely even considered before being dismissed out of hand. What we need is strong support for localism and in preparation for reinvesting automation output into the communities that automation exists in.
And you're not going to get that from the communities in question, not without a radical internal shift in their politics. That support means subsidies, it means government investment, it means all the things they have been fighting tooth and goddamn nail against for years even in the face of it tearing their collective noses to shreds in spite. Only way you're going to get that through is if you lie about what you're intending to do, how you expect to go about it, and what the results are going to be. Only way you're going to get those communities to reinvest the output in 'em is if you stop it from leaving (and hey, odds the output is going to manage to hold steady in that kind of situation? Not the best, ahaha!), and if you do that, couple decades later the businesses that weren't crippled that way rolls in and rolls over it.
Even that will only manage so much, though, especially without at least further shoring up by the government. Even automation does not save a business that is out in the boonies, or even much away from major population centers, and has to deal with more costs, less connections, a smaller local market, and all the rest of that list from hell that is the reason businesses are just not going to freaking do something like that on any meaningful scale under their own initiative. Trying means they just shot themselves in the foot and told every investor in town and significantly more importantly all the ones outside it that the RoI is better with the competitor that's set up in a denser area and is taking advantage of all the significantly larger amount of advantages that involves. Everything a business can do out in a low density area, they can do closer to a higher density one and out compete the folks further out.
You can definitely manage that sort of thing here and there, no doubt. Maybe you manage a new factory. Congratulations, you've just brought back 3/4ths of the jobs that left when the last one closed down, or half, or a tenth, and who knows how many of them are actually going to be local. Maybe you manage that everywhere, manage replacements for everything that went out and even bring excess besides. And now you're almost able to support most of the population those areas had before. Not their kids, mind, but that much. Until whatever comes up next that increases efficiency again shows up, anyway. You leverage everything you can, revitalize as much as you're able, but the flat fact is the economy of these areas are going to shrink. Automation is going to shrink them, competition is going to shrink them, economic shifts and the logistical realities involved are going to shrink them. Just about everything is going to shrink them, often enough to the point of nonexistence, because they are not good areas to set up business by sheer dint of physical reality. Every success story you manage is going to be surrounded by another two or three communities around it that quietly died while folks were crowing about it.
You can further slow this shit down, but a solution that actually reverses it, and especially one that maintains that... the reason they're dismissed out of hand is because they're physically not goddamn possible. There is absolutely nothing about what we've seen in the realm of economics or any bloody thing else that's not utter bugnuts over the last, hell, couple hundred years, never mind after we started scratching at being able to even try to understand what the hell's going on, that offers a solution for that. Political tenability ain't the problem with this stuff, for all the mess there, too. It's that these areas are shit places for business now and are going to be shit places for business in the future, and there's not really much you can do about that. Localism you were talking can help in some ways, but it's not going to stop deterioration on it's own and it's doubly so not going to provide for the future. There's not a solution in that kind of thing, not without involving a significant net reduction in a lot of things.
... and no, the WPA managing what they did better than half a century ago is not indicative of anything regarding the challenges that would be faced today, especially considering that entire thing was infrastructure investment -- government investment -- and only did, only can do, so much to keep stuff in the areas it worked on over the long run. Sort of thing is definitely the kind of political investiture that'd help out the areas of the country that're worse off, but dems have been trying to shove that stuff through for decades, to only so much avail and it's a stopgap at best even then.
They don't even fucking try. Last election, you know how many seats that were even attempted to be contested below state level where I live? Three, maybe four, most on the county level. There were roughly fifteen spots up for election that I could vote for. Pretty sure this makes a good amount of people around here tend to vote Republican on the higher levels because why should you vote for a party that doesn't care about you in the slightest? Plus its even further hard to justify voting for Democrats when they're the ones running the nearby US per capita murder capital.
Over the course of my life pretty much every position in my local area's been contested party wise at some point or another. It's been going down as I've gotten older, though. They've tried sodding constantly, but yeah, effort in certain areas start to decrease when nothing gets positions and there's less and less support -- and more and more ostracization if you dare run blue -- in the area.
Despite that, most of
anything in this area that actually does a single goddamn thing for it is being headed by dems or liberal independents, or is getting funding and practical support primarily or entirely from the political efforts thereof. Thing is, basically fuckall of the population notices that, or remembers it when they do. Folks don't tend to run when they know the support's not there and the electorate ungrateful/forgetful as hell besides. Most of the rural areas I've had substantial interaction with are in pretty similar spots, too.
How do you get people to pay attention to the extent you care when not a single one of them gives the least of goddamns about what you're doing, even if it's keeping their life from going entirely instead of just mostly to hell? What's the point of running for office when it's been proved repeatedly doing it with a D besides your name means you might as well have not ran?
It might honestly be a simple gap between their actions and their message. Or rather, they're not converting their (attempted) support of rural communities/etc to actual votes.
Oh, the latter is definitely a major issue so far as that goes. I said it a ways back, but at this point I'd actually accept voodoo curse as a realistic explanation of what the fuck's going on out here in regards to that side of things. Because nothing I've seen over the few decades of my life has managed to get those efforts to stick in the minds of the communities out here, nor has anything I've heard of with regards to folks further afield's efforts. Goddamn
nothing. Not trying to do it via news, not word of mouth, not lives impacted, goddamn
nothing. Persistence does nothing, vigor does nothing, volume does nothing, nothing does anything. I've seen people talking about somethin' of that sort in literally the previous sentence in a conversation, and then fail to remember the political affiliations involved in the sentence after. And I don't think I've seen a single explanation for it, particularly one that was worth even the most remote of damns. If anyone's even attempted to figure out what the hell's going on there, I haven't noticed it yet.
I'd be entirely unsurprised if you ran the message you popped out on every local station, radio and TV, 24/7 for a few months and
still didn't get these communities to notice, never mind actually support you, basically. People who think getting that sort of message through to these communities isn't that hard have not tried to get that sort of message through to these communities, by and large, heh. You can talk at 'em, maybe even get some enthusiasm for a day or two. Week later? When they're at the polls? Heh. That's somethin' different, apparently.
