If you follow pro football like I do, you know what a “Monday morning quarterback” is.
If you’re not a fan, it’s somebody who claims to know why a game (usually played on Sunday in the pros) was lost. Usually, Monday morning quarterbacks insist — often wrongly — the game would not have been lost if it had been played their way.
In an insightful essay on LA Progressive, Los Angeles journalist Erin Aubrey Kaplan took aim at the ongoing post-election Monday morning quarterbacking by the punditocracy and by self-flagellating Democrats.
“In the wake of the election of the century, as a second (and certainly worse) Trumpocalypse looms, recriminations and analyses about the Democrats and all that the party did wrong continue to flow like lava,” she wrote. “Pundits are still refusing to get it: the country went fascist because it wanted to.”
Kaplan said the national slide toward fascism began in “the 2016 election, when the white Trump base sprang into view, solidified, and didn’t budge an inch afterward. The emergence of that base — I call it the white wall — and its slavish devotion to Trump was always too disturbing a phenomenon for Dems to really examine, creating a myopia in party ranks that remains stubbornly reductive.”
Kaplan analyzed the ongoing Monday morning quarterbacking:
- The Democrats made too much of the fascist threat to democracy. Kamala Harris and her party rightly “highlighted the existential threat that fascism poses to democracy in 2024 ... yet that’s been criticized as overkill.”
- The Democrats didn’t score with working class voters. “... Most of the mea culpas are about how Trump prevailed because the Democrats failed — again — to connect with its own base of ordinary people. ... Not only has the GOP/Trump cult not helped the working class with any economic policies or even basic economic observations, they’ve made a fool of it in plain sight.”
- The Democrats went “woke” wild. Kaplan found “most disturbing ... the sudden Democratic remorse about overdosing on ‘wokeness.’ Scapegoating efforts to respect and acknowledge people and histories of oppression is the worst kind of capitulation to the right, especially this right. ... Has there ever been such a thing as too much respect or social equality in this country? Yet some Democrats are acting like public expression of humanist principle is a transgression on par with the genuine evil of Trumpist bigotry, hate, lying, bullying, revenge and criminality. ... We cannot, and should not, validate MAGA beliefs just because too many people hold them.”
- Trump made inroads with persons of color, “proving” he had something genuine to offer them. Kaplan wrote that “one of the most dangerous ideas floating around in the election postmortems is [the notion] that because more people of color voted for Trump — chiefly Black and Latino men — Trumpism must indeed have a point, or some kind of virtue. ... The most powerful appeal of MAGA is making followers of all colors and income levels feel like they, too, own the ultimate American privilege of doing whatever the hell they want to whomever they don’t like, and believing in that as the true path to success.”
- The Democrats are the party of elites. “And MAGA isn’t? I can’t think of any prominent Republican in the last forty years who isn’t some combination of wealthy, educated, self-righteous, and utterly disdainful of the poor. ... MAGA may attract the little people, but its leaders are not their heroes; they never were, no matter how much they’re cheered at rallies.”
Kaplan argued against the Democrats hewing rightward to win elections as President Bill Clinton did in the 90’s. “Instead of building real multiracial and class unity among its ranks, the party became more Republican — more elite — while retaining the rhetoric of equality, and occasionally delivering on it. ... That’s tragic. But it’s a tactical failure that pales in comparison to the deep, destructive awfulness of Trumpism that openly promises to take down democracy in total, to eliminate every scrap of justice it can, while it can. That’s the whole game. People will die in this takedown. ... Democrats, whatever they aren’t, are not about this takedown.”
--30--
Comments
