Is there a Pantheon for hubris and denial?

If so, Nancy Pelosi’s December 4th Face the Nation interview offers us a brilliant new candidate for admission:

DICKERSON: The Democratic party is in a moment of questioning about its identity. You were reelected to lead the Democrats in the house. What do you tell Democrats who want a new direction and what are you going to do differently?

PELOSI: I don’t think people want a new direction. Our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families. that’s one that everyone is in agreement on. What we want is a better connection of our message to working families in our country, and that clearly in the election showed that that message wasn’t coming through. But we are united in terms of the security of our country, which is our first responsibility. To be smart and strong and not reckless in how we protect the American people, strong in how we protect our economy.

DICKERSON: Here’s my question, though, Democrats since 2008, the numbers are ghastly for Democrats. Democrats are down 10%, in the house down 19.3% and in governors 35%. The Democrats are getting clobbered at every level over multiple elections. That seems like a real crisis for the party?

PELOSI: You’re forgetting that we went up so high in 2006 2008, and let me just put that in perspective. When President Clinton was elected, Republicans came in big in the next election. When president Bush was president, we came in big in the next election. When President Obama became president, the Republicans came in big in the next election.

[Italics mine]

The essence of Pelosi’s argument:

A) The problem is not our product, it’s our sales pitch.

B) The Democratic party’s reduction to a ghost in the US House, State Houses, and Governors’ mansions is just cyclical politics, even though the bleeding has been going on at least since Reagan.

You’d think after years of the party’s shrinking influence in state government, the 2016 electoral map, and the statistics behind the disasters in the Rust Belt, Pelosi would at least pretend to wonder if a new direction might be advisable. The figures from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are brutal, too brutal to be a mere lapse in messaging.

*In Michigan turnout was up about 100,000 from 2012, but Democratic turnout was down significantly more, most notably in Detroit. Trump won because Michigan’s usually reliable Democratic constituents did not show up in their 2012 numbers. If they had, Clinton would have won Michigan by over 275,000 votes.

*Turnout in Wisconsin was the lowest since 1996, with Milwaukee county showing the greatest drop from 2012. While Trump’s total was actually about 1,000 votes down from Romney’s, Clinton’s share dropped almost a quarter-million from Obama’s 2012 total. Obama’s 2012 Wisconsin vote would have been enough to beat Trump’s 2016 vote by over 200,000.

*In Pennsylvania Trump gained a little over 200,000 more votes than Romney in 2012 while Clinton was down about 150,000 from Obama’s winning total. Once again, if Clinton had won the votes that Obama did in 2012, she would have beaten Trump in Pennsylvania by over 95,000 votes.
Not only did the Democratic leadership (and who is Hillary Clinton but their distillation?) lose three formerly reliable Democratic states, the DNC lost states it would have won if most of Barack Obama’s second term voters had turned out. All the racists and all the Hillary Haters would be crying in their beer today if only the DNC had motivated them.

And what about that message, the one that Pelosi feels didn’t connect? Repeated for months on TV and the Internet, it appeared to come in three parts: Donald Trump is emotionally unstable; Donald Trump hates women and minorities; vote for Hillary Clinton and her Government of National Salvation or you invite the apocalypse. On the surface, it sounds powerful. What could stop a landslide of people from casting that most-important-of-our-lives vote for the DNC’s candidate? It was the vote for decency and competence and stability.

What could stop the landslide was this: wrapped up in Clinton’s message was a notion no longer credible given the state of the working class: “you can believe in me and the leaders of the party”. Thus, hundreds of thousands of people who agreed they could rely on the Democratic party in 2012 didn’t believe so in 2016 and didn’t see why a Democrat’s promises mattered enough to leave the house for a few hours to cast a vote.

That’s not a failure of messaging, it’s a collapse of credibility. Had the Democrats been believed, Trump would have lost in the predicted landslide.

How will the party respond?

So far, the thrust seems to be blame it on the Russians. How the Russians managed to depress hundreds of thousands of votes among traditional Dem constituencies in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania hasn’t been coherently explained yet, but it does helpfully draw attention away from the DNC’s chronic failure to keep the number and influence of Democratic elected officials, already embarrassingly low, from falling even further.

The key to understanding why is to follow the money. While we swoon at the list of big money types entering the Trump administration, it bears remembering the long list that was integral to the Clinton and Obama administrations from their start, that succored the Hillary Clinton campaign, and elevated the Clintons to huge personal wealth. Both Democratic and Republican elites cycle through business, government, and occasionally academia maintaining careers that adeptly ride the cycles of victory and defeat, competing to serve money best while seeing who can fool a large enough portion of the electorate to take a turn at power. That’s why money keeps winning, because both parties serve it without fail.

Hearing Nancy Pelosi, it becomes clear that the party elite have no intention of changing. They can’t go further right , i.e. further into the arms of big money, because they will lose even more credibility in economically marginal states and lose by bigger electoral college margins than they did with Hillary Clinton. But they can’t move to the left, either, as it would force them to turn their backs on the moneyed interests who have come to own the party.

People like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders don’t matter. They are performers on a stage serving the interests of an elite that want the appearance of caring, whatever Ellison and Sanders’ personal intentions may be. Ultimately, the party would rather stay the same and loose because winning means going left, and there is no way to move left without threatening the neoliberal project. Still worse, it would create the expectation that pro-people change is possible within the Democratic party and convey the message that pressure to change works.

Too many careers are at stake in the current party leadership. Without an intra-party revolution, the Democrats will be paralyzed. How that can be accomplished in the face of dedicated opposition is unknown.

Cross-posted to TGOS