On low enthusiasm

Hillary Clinton lost for a lot of reasons, many of them intertwined and some actually beyond her control, but the end result was that Democratic turnout in the states that ended up mattering wasn't enough to overcome a surprising surge in Republican turnout, it isn't like Dem turnout was down particularly from previous elections, but it didn't go up that much and the Trump campaign brought a lot of new voters out of the woodwork, particularly in Florida.

There are a lot of reasons for low enthusiasm among voters, the one that killed the Democratic party is I think that the party tried to be too many things, yes they adopted the most liberal platform in its history at the DNC, but down-ticket many of their candidates really didn't much care for a lot of that stuff, and avoided talking about it, particularly in the south where the assumption is liberal shit won't fly, so we got a national party advocating one set of things, but in individual states they attempted to ignore some of it, this combined with the overt denial of support to Bernie Sanders meant that progressives in red states weren't really seeing any signs of, well, progress, either with local candidates or the Presidency.

Now my main reaction to all that is fuck them, I mean seriously, they saw who Clinton was running against and they decided that they would rather let Orange Hitler be president than compromise their fucking ideological purity. However we can and should learn something from this.

It is clear that being the party of the middle isn't working for Democrats. And it is clear that a lot of progressives are staying home because of it, the conclusion is, rather than run the reddest Democrat you can in a red state and hope for the best, is to run someone who actually believes in the platform the party purports to have, and support them to the hilt. Don't hide from progressive ideology in the red states, we know beyond a doubt at this point that the conservatives aren't gonna vote for a Democrat no matter how light blue they are, so go the other way, inspire the progressives and the young people who don't know what they are yet, run the same candidate in Georgia as you would in Massachusetts or California, explicitly tell people that if they don't support raising the minimum wage, or college debt relief, or LGBT rights, or abortion rights, then they aren't actually Democrats and won't be getting support from the national party.

Yes people should be smart enough to vote in their own best interests without being "inspired" however if we have learned anything from this election it is that if they can be inspired there are a lot of untapped voters out there, the Republicans found that out and took advantage of it, albeit accidentally when they ran a fascist. It seems worth a try to go the other way for the Dems. Are there enough to make a difference? I dunno, but the last four election cycles seem to me to be showing that the electorate isn't interested in the compromise party anymore, if indeed they ever were.

That's the problem with compromise in the political context, when people say the left needs to compromise, what they are actually saying is they need to roll over and make friends with fascism. They are not saying that the right should soften their views, only that the left should ignore those views, or embrace them.

That isn't compromise at all, it's collusion.