The election results should have brought more glee for us liberal progressive Democrats than it has. We at least stopped the bleeding but didn’t win enough Senate and Congressional seats to move critical legislation forward.
The reasons are primarily with the Democratic National Committee’s inability to look beyond the urban areas and reach out to rural America. This has to change, not only for political purposes, but for the overall benefit to the common good in those areas of the country. Time to restart the 50 state strategy.
During the campaign, the U.S. map showed a blanket of Republican red across middle America. Why? Democrat programs since the depression have had major impacts supporting farmers and small businesses. Nationally, big investments like the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and Rural Electrification Administration, supported and expanded public education, and essential elements of our economic infrastructure were advanced by liberal progressives within the Democratic party. Republican legislation over the same period shows little or nothing of major benefit to rural America.
Democrats seem to be too eager to accept defeat in those areas and look like good losers instead of going on the offensive with their past successes and plans for the future.
Seems the major reasons folks buy into conservative Republicanism are simply less regulation and lower taxes, but those two things stifle progress for the common good.
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Less regulation endangers the environment, food and water safety, consumer safety from predatory lenders, etc. but it does help the bottom line for corporate America and the big donor class.
Corporate farming with its reliance on toxic chemicals and huge machinery has driven family farms out of business as evidenced by tree groves with buildings torn down, barns and granaries gone, and with it the families who have gone to the “cities” weakening the robust energy of small towns across rural areas.
There is great opportunity to reverse this trend as advancing technology encourages migration from heavily populated areas to safer, more serene small cities and towns, farms, lake and country homes, even motorhomes for the adventurous. Computers, cell phones, internet, GPS (all government socio/capitalist investments by the way), have made it possible and profitable to spread the working force where people want to live, not where they have to live.
Wake up moderates, engage with progressives to advance plans with some excitement or leave middle America to wither under moderate and conservative approaches to governing in this fast moving economic environment.
