The Energy Gap: Why Democrats Keep Losing to GOP Plutocrats
Energy counts, matters, and wins the political battles. There isn't even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article “Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?” He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all.
In 2001, long after the 1980 Reagan landslide of Jimmy Carter, Labor Secretary under Clinton, Robert Reich, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post which declared, “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.”
In the following years, while the Democrats were accelerating their abandonment of half the country as “red states,” and became more out of touch with blue-collar workers and unions, whom they took for granted, the Republicans were becoming more energized by the year. Their mouthpieces dominating talk radio – e.g., Rush Limbaugh – were directly sowing unrebutted discord, day after day, among blue-collar workers against the Democrats. Why? It’s because the Democrats essentially gave up on Talk Radio and didn’t bother listening to how these corporatist radio bloviators were turning hard working listeners into Reagan Democrats.
While the GOP was eroding the core base of the Democratic Party and taking total control of red state legislatures, governorships, and courts, the Democrats, starting in 1979, were plunging into enticing and taking corporate PAC money, as urged by then Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA). This reliance on corporate campaign money weakened the Party’s positions and actions on behalf of workers, consumers, the environment, and the need for an expanded social safety net for the populace. Western nations have provided their citizens superior health care, family support and education programs for decades.
The comparative energy levels were exhibited in the 2010 state gerrymandering drive. While the Democrats were snoozing, a laser beam effort in several states, like Pennsylvania, took the Dems to the cleaners. The result: majority GOP Congressional delegations for a decade even though the Democrats won the popular vote there. (See: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley.)
"The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers."
Recall, in 2009 Obama had a large majority Democratic advantage in the House and Senate as a result of his win over John McCain in November 2008. Instead of going forward full throttle with this mandate, Obama chose extreme caution. He focused on Obamacare, after giving up right at the beginning the crucial “public option” allowing people to opt out of the corporate health insurance grip. He gave it up unilaterally before negotiations began with the obstructive GOP.
For the rest of his term, Obama appeared to be resting. He promised a $9.50 federal minimum wage in his 2008 campaign but didn’t lift a finger for it during his first term. It is still at a poverty wage of $7.25 per hour to this day. He didn’t really put up a grassroots fight for his stimulus bill following the Wall Street collapse and the great recession starting under George W. Bush, (the war criminal against the Iraqi people.) Obama even declined to prosecute the Wall Street crooks.
In the meantime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, managed to lose the House to a reactionary GOP in the 2010 elections, the 2012 elections, the 2014 elections and the 2016 elections, straightjacketing any possible Obama agenda in the Congress. The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers while the GOP had a corporatist anti-worker, consumer, and women’s agenda and with ferocious energy blocked improvements supported by a majority of people in the US.
Even more inexplicable was the Democratic Party’s refusal to strongly support the galvanizing political civic movement to cancel the Electoral College (see NationalPopularVote.com). This organizing effort has led so far to the passage of state laws (California, New York, Illinois, etc.) handing the Electoral College vote to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton) but lost the Electoral College vote to G.W. Bush and the surprised Donald Trump. Still, the Democrats stay on the sidelines though this movement already has enabled state laws totaling 215 Electoral College votes, needing only to get to 270 to neutralize this anti-democratic vestige from the historic era of slavery.
Almost everywhere you look you see this huge disparity in energy levels. Compare the smaller Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives with the Pelosi-toady Progressive Caucus. The difference is that between thunder and slumber over the years.
Compare the Tea Party’s slamming impact on the established GOP in Congress with the tepid attitude of most labor unions and the AFL-CIO deferring to the Democratic Party.
Compare the over-the-top corporate judges to the so-called liberal judges, as relating to federal cases against Trump.
Compare the comprehensive ghastly Heritage Foundation’s 900-page 2025 blueprint directed toward the GOP expansion of the corporate state and the stripping away of services to the people and their rights with the agenda advanced by the progressive citizen groups. No comparison. The media notices this difference in energy levels which is one reason it gives more coverage to the right-wing messianic bulldozers who show in every way that they are hungrier for taking power as they take no prisoners.
Partisan energy disparities even extend to the right-wing vs. left-wing media. The former has the brazen Fox News network. The left has nothing like that. Bill Moyers told me he urged mega-rich George Soros and allies to start a competing progressive network after Fox became quickly formidable. No way.
The right-wing magazines cover the actions of their right-wing allies, plus those gatherings and books. While the progressive media mostly ignores reviewing progressive books and what citizen groups are driving for against corporate power in Washington, DC, and at the state level. The Progressive media prefers publishing their opinions and exposé pieces. That’s one reason why there are more non-fiction right-wing corporatist books which become best sellers, while progressive tomes gather dust.
Further weakening the energy gap in favor of the GOP are the Democrats who look for scapegoats like the Greens to account for their disgraceful losses. They rarely look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats like Norman Solomon (See, Roots Action) issue “autopsy reports” following Party defeats. The 2017 report documented the Democratic Party’s arrogant, entrenched leadership which ignores the progressive base.
After the November 5th debacle, have you heard about mass resignations by Democrats responsible for this victory by the convicted felon, chronic liar, bigot, corrupt, phony promisor Trump? Well, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison is resigning but that is pro forma. Other Democratic leaders are still on board at the state and federal level, in addition to, astonishingly enough, the failed corporate political/media consultants who enriched themselves while wasting away the biggest flood of campaign money in American history on the Kamala Harris campaign.
Younger Democrats who raise the need to displace the failed Democratic apparatchiks, and who want popular vigorous progressive agendas, as espoused by the naturally popular Senator Bernie Sanders, get ignored or worse pushed out of contention, visibility and, importantly, respect.
The Party’s losing elders have assured the absence of farm teams, of successors. Speaker Pelosi and her deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer are experts at this geriatric supremacy despite their track record of losing to the aggressive Republican plutocrats. Energy counts, matters and wins the political battles. There isn’t even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
