About That GOTV Thingy... 'Quiet Desperation and American Fascism' - HuffPo [View all]

[WillyT]

Quiet Desperation and American Fascism
Robert Kuttner - HuffPo
Posted: 11/22/2015 9:59 pm EST Updated: 15 minutes ago


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There's a must-read article if you want to understand why Democrats are losing the support of low income people who benefit from government programs like Medicaid and food stamps and logically should vote for Democrats based on pocketbook interests.

Alec MacGillis, of ProPublica, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, observes that for the most part, the poor aren't defecting to Republicans -- they are not voting at all: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html?_r=0

His exhibit A is eastern Kentucky, one of America's poorest and most government-dependent regions. But the poor are so marginalized and disaffected that they are disconnected from civic life entirely.

Looking more broadly, MacGillis reports that non-voters are far more likely than voters to have incomes under $30,000, not to have health insurance, not to have bank accounts, to have received government aid such as food stamps, to have borrowed money from relatives.

As if to confirm MacGillis's point, consider Saturday's Louisiana gubernatorial election. Remarkably, the Democrat actually won. All it took was a thoroughly disgraced and corrupt Republican opponent in David Vitter, who consorted with prostitutes, and an outgoing incumbent Republican incumbent, Bobby Jindal, who was a national joke.

How often can Democrats expect that sort of harmonic convergence? Not very. Even so, Democrat John Bel Williams, a Catholic social conservative with a military background, only won 56 percent of the vote.

But the deeper story is in the turnout. Louisiana has 3,536,185 people of voting age. In the 2012 presidential election, 1,152,262 -- less than a third -- turned out to vote. Four years ago, in the gubernatorial election that Jindal won by a landslide, just 673,239 voted. This time, only 444,517 bothered--about one in eight eligible voters. Williams was elected governor with the support of about nine percent of the Louisiana electorate.

A lot of the people who stay home would vote for Democrats if they bothered to vote at all. This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems richly earned.

This is also the soil in which fascism grows...

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Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/quiet-desperation-and-ame_b_8625538.html