The GOP and Trump use blatant racism to garner the white working man/women vote.  Racism trumps Sanders/Hillary/Dem goodies like free college.

Even the great FDR had to pander to the racists of the 30s to get his New Deal programs passed:

Southern Senators threatened a long filibuster that would effectively block everything on the calendar, including the Social Security Act, which was FDR’s most cherished accomplishment. Despite a heated campaign by White, President Roosevelt remained silent on the filibuster and the anti-lynching bill died without a vote.

It is a pipedream to think some socialist programs to help rural whites will pry their votes from racist Republicans. The WaPo and the NYT both had articles on how fed programs helped Trump voting whites in OK, and that Trump wants to cut those same programs,  but they still support Trump.

The lefty Bernie brigade ignores, and dismisses in effect, this fundamental racist exploitation by the right, and it seems only economic collapse causes it not to work at election time.

In the 1930's, 1/4 the population were farmers. In the 1950's, much of our workforce was in mines and factories. Now the "little guys" are often female and sitting at desks. It's not so easy to use the stereotypes of the past for an evolving situation, such as internet workers with 401(k)s or a lot of people running SoHo businesses. Many (the vast majority?) of kids now are largely in school and at soccer camps, not in the street selling matches or milking the cow. But I do recall some heavy drumbeats the past years of lowering the influence of the banks and fixing the extortionary costs of healthcare. That's Democratic ideology.

What's a bigger issue than the crime rate in the 90's? Clinton addressed it - Granny couldn't go to the market safely without getting mugged, her granddaughter might get raped or shot by some gang activity. Yeah, it wasn't our "core" philosophy, just as addressing booming immigration - legal and illegal - wasn't our core, just as dealing with the welfare situation that didn't seem to improve since the 60's wasn't our core. Even the Cold War wasn't our core - we were busy trying to keep weapons out of Europe as the Republicans were upping their ultimately successful game of chicken (and even today Carter & Brzezinski are still lambasted by our own party for setting a honey trap for the Russians - a much bigger deal than letting our hamhanded meddling in Iran fall apart). 

Of course in 1936, *80 years ago*, the only "them" was the Nazis - everyone in America was in sucky shape, and the conservatives had been completely discredited, so just helping everyone - all little guys at that point, or 95% - was a no-brainer. Today FDR would simply be a war-monger in modern Democratic parlance.

Also, our relative wealth these days gives us more room to focus on lifestyle issues and non-essentials. You'd think keeping guns out of the hands of murderers would be "helping the little guy", including the thousands of kids who die each year from handling mom & dad's firearm, "17,383 American children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention" with 2800 of those unintentional. Is our attempt to "help the little guy" welcome there? How about women in abusive homes or trying to prevent an unwanted pregnancy - even contraception is an affront to these callous bastards. 

Society is fragmented, ideology is fragmented, people's desires are frequently contradictory and hypocritical. And thanks to micro-targeting, we can keep them all disgruntled and raging against their own interests forever. Have you considered that trying to find a "core ideology" may just be self-defeating? Republicans have largely abandoned their ideology and gone to completely malleable self-serving partisanship. I suppose if we can use Undivided or other theoretical framework to get ourselves to win elections it might be worth revisiting, but in the case of a public that's showing if not saying it doesn't want to act on principles, perhaps we should start believing them and act accordingly?

I'm done. We disagree. No use in continuing. You don't get what I am saying and you think it is an insult. Sorry for the latter, I assure you it is an issue of miscommunication. I promise I will not be offering criticism about how I think you putting all Trump voters into a stereotypical racist tribe is counterproductive to your cause..As hate speech vs. hate speech is definitely allowed in a tolerant society, no matter how counterproductive it is. One final word: Just know that if my lifelong liberal Democrat father saw some of your latest comments, I am 100% sure it would turn him back into the racist thoughts he often had before he had a half Afro-American granddaughter and his wife, my mother, taught him tolerance.

Actually, there are a number of parallels between Obama and Theodore Roosevelt, the subject of my book. Both were progressive presidents who tried to compromise with recalcitrant conservatives in Congress but eventually resorted to executive action when compromise failed.

One of the lessons I drew is that it's a fool's quest to compromise with opponents who aren't negotiating in good faith. In fact, it's worse than a fool's quest because the inevitable failure to achieve effective legislation just dispirits voters. Think about the sad post-Sandy Hook background check bill that wouldn't have accomplished anything even it had passed.

A better strategy is to shoot for moon with big, ambitious proposals, even though they stand no chance of passing the current Congress. Those big ideas attract voters who punish legislators for obstructing them. Most of the big legislation of the 20th century occurred between 1912-1916 and 1932-1936 after wave elections in which progressives demanding radical changes decimated conservatives who had bottled up the legislation. Those demands came not from the pragmatic center but the ideological fringe--the only ones crazy enough to push for legislation that seemed so impossible at the time.

Sanders is derided for his pie-in-the-sky ideas--universal healthcare and free education. But we actually need more ideas like these, which may take decades to achieve, to recapture the majority necessary for serious legislative change.

I second this question - but I would put it differently. What do democrats, and progressives generally, think needs to change in the Democratic party going forward? What, if any, are the lessons of the last election?

To go first - I would like to see the party move towards the more popular elements of Sanders' agenda

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without thereby downgrading any of the strong positions defending women's rights and minority rights. 

That would involve a very different donor network and think-tank network than the current one. so it will be a fight happening through some primary challenges I guess. 

I know others disagree on the merits or viability of this strategy, but I would really like to see what people want from the party. 

My take's simpler. I'm not a fan of any particular organization - I'm simply looking for solutions.

I keep noting the objections of the WTO's chief economists on our actual understanding and evolution of monetary theory, and have largely been critical of austerity et al (except when the Greeks are just oblivious to any sort of self-responsibility and refuse to pay taxes & not funnel money across to banks in Switzerland... at some point, what can you do?). World Bank, European Central Bank, etc. - poor scores through crises over the years. To continue:

1) We overall have low inflation, but have lower or stagnant salaries while some prices are rising.

In particular, I think the biggest contributors to household inflation are housing costs, healthcare and education. (there maybe a 4th, though I think energy & car are fairly constant; energy maybe even going down).

If the ACA ever rounds the bend to drive down the cost curve, and we elect someone to revamp education fairly and affordably, then our continued housing mess should be the only *huge* issue on the costs side. I've been quite critical of the slow compromising road we took to do this, but I can't change it except through who we're able to elect, and that's quite rigged and complicated these days.

As Bob Somerby points out ad nauseum, we pay 2 1/2 times more per capita for healthcare as any other advanced country. And it has nothing to do with Mexico or China taking our jobs - it's simply a stupidity tax for our own internal psychotic system, but because we're hurting, we blame the others. Same with education - how come high cost Germany can manage lower-cost schools? Perhaps because they're not greedy bottom-feeding maggots exploiting what we consider our foremost "greater good" experience of our lives. To be fair though, Democrats of all stripes have been pretty insistent on fixing health care/insurance and education, so there's not to persuade or complain about *except* for execution.

But if we didn't have vulture insurance companies and tuition reaching $40K a year, our salaries and our job growth would likely be sufficient to keep most of us quite happy, even augmenting our WalMart basement bargain shopping & mandatory Apple phone with even other quality goods. But stop blaming some kid in Shenzhen or Bangalore or Nairobi or Juarez for trying to make a much lower buck than we make just to survive. Raising all boats is still a mandatory consideration in my eyes, and this callous us vs. them or simply we we we is pissing me off.

Oh yeah, the trillion+ dollars we spent chasing mirages in the Mideast - think how that looks to a country like India with a yearly budget of $32 billion to service over a billion people. Yeah, America blew its paycheck at the racetrack, and now it's back to complaining about the hippies and poor blacks. What's new.

And yeah, we get cheap knock-off shit via Walmart & other retailers that make it hard for our own toy or small electronics industries to survive. But we're doing damn well in IT, agricultural equipment, jetliners, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, cars, oil/gas, military equipment, etc, etc, etc, while we own much of the financial & IT infrastructure that will control things going forward.

2) On the jobs & wages side, we have a couple things working against us. First, between China's opening in 1980 & the collapse of the wall & Soviet Union in 1989-1992 we expanded the available global workforce by a couple billion. Additionally, countries like Malaysia, India, Brazil and Vietnam modernized quite a bit at the same time that online internet technologies expanded the ability to outsource & coordinate a lot of this work.

This is a big hump that will eventually settle down, but like with Keynes, in the long-term we're dead as well. Still, Germany survived the post-wall East German unification tax and all things EU until it's largely accounted for now almost 30 years later. Population growth has largely leveled off, so we're not facing an expanding Asia that would have worsened this situation.

There are several other aspects to consider. One of them of course is that jobs to China have vastly improved jobs & wages for what was once a destitute backwards agricultural paradise of 1 billion+ people. That progress hasn't come without cost as they battle pollution, heavy inflation, huge internal migration, overdevelopment and the loss of much of their cultural past. This is not unique to China, but it has been much faster & in much greater volume than anywhere else.

Since I don't even live in the US, I have trouble reducing the equation to simply the US vs. everyone else. I'm looking for win-win solutions in the global economy, but often from the US perspective they not only feel like they should never lose, but that should be winning by a lot, 24x7, certainly more than anyone else.

3) Modernization - the cycle of obsolescence and bankruptcy is getting faster, and the business world is looking for solutions that require less labor and/or utilize less costly labor, at least where labor is expendable and not so essential to the quality & delivery of the good or service. Cloudified online expandable services are all the rage, while robot automation 2.0 is getting past its hype curve into actual production. This genie isn't going back in the bottle, so we'll have to get much better at figuring out how to equitably distribute money as we fight imbalanced growth that tends to coagulate around certain industries, certain locales, etc, to the detriment of everyone else. This isn't unique to the US by any means, so I think of a solution as more likely to come out of global cooperation and putting the ol' thinking cap on, rather than expecting some homegrown populist movement to find a comprehensive humanitarian solution.

4) I'm not against barriers per se - on goods, on borders, on various requirements. I find lowered barriers more convenient and think in many cases they lower unnecessary structural costs, but one lesson I took away from Malaysia's defense against a Soros monetary speculation that butchered everyone else was that sometimes it helps to have some restrictions available as a policy measure to ward off attacks. This is one of the big concerns in the EU re: the Euro & non-differentiated policy, which lowers the ability of individual nations to take unilateral measures that might have better effect. As I consider the EU a growing and cooperation experiment, I take this simply as a challenge to improve on, not a final condemnation or expectation that any problem will be solved completely. Of course the US has similar regional issues, such as the South running non-labor factories to siphon work away from the north, or much of our IT brainpower migrates to SF or Boston, etc., along with overspecialization as West Virginia - our version of Greece without the tax avoidance and sunny beaches - has to deal with.

5) I'm certainly not against bank restrictions, lowering unnecessary subsidies (including Fannie Mae et al unless we really find it's helping and not just exploiting citizen home ownership or propping up unscrupulous mortgage companies & landlords. At the same time, easy credit (& easy bankruptcy) have been great underpinnings of our success - driven more through greed than benign intentions, though sometimes the latter, to conform to Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Venture Capitalists are quite active in digging out & funding a huge variety of startup business models. I think much of it is bullshit, but if 1/10,000th hits paydirt, that's quite likely to be our next Google or Amazon or eBay. Another aspect is that the banks of 10 years ago may not be the banks of today, in that that behavior, challenges, details of competition & revenue, and specific applicability of particular regulations may have shifted significantly. I'm skeptical of people's certainty that something like Glass-Steagal can be assumed to be forever valid or 90 years later even as the underpinnings of our economy & financial system continue to revamp every few years, through multiple huge crises. A lot of simplistic curealls in all things.

6) NAFTA like TPP is simply an agreement based on evaluation of production, movement of goods and people, payments, and other issues. I don't see it as inherently good or bad, just as I don't see the much more complicated European Community trade model as good or bad outside of whether it works effectively for X,Y or Z, meaning particular people, industries, transactions, social cohesion, crisis avoidance, et al. If there's a problem with NAFTA, just renegotiate, but be specific (our trade representatives, not necessarily you personally) about what the issues are, what the seeming solutions & workarounds might be, and so on. Many of the people who mock Trump's wall are quite eager to have an economic and de facto population one in its stead. If we help improve trade that bolsters both economies as well as reining in corruption, part of the idea is that the type of Mexicans who drive illegal immigration may not feel so desperate to live here, but will find the Mexican States perfectly sufficient. God knows we have enough retirees heading there for the low cost and lots of sun.

But while I think NAFTA has been largely disastrous for Mexican farmers (but a boon to Iowa - why are *they* complaining?), I think there are other areas that have been exaggerated. Much was made of Zenith relocating TV assembly south of the border, but these were old CRT's which were quickly getting eliminated by LCD/LED panels, and even Japanese companies like Panasonic couldn't stay competitive in this high investment, heavily commoditized and low margin market, so basically *all* TV production is out of China now. We don't appreciate how many of these industries are roughly like horse-and-buggy or the equally anachronistic CD production - you can't put up borders to keep out the next technical advance - the Communists tried & failed miserably.

Alright, enough, back to work.

It's over - neither Bernie nor HIllary are running again, so it doesn't matter what their records are.

It simply matters whether we address any blind spots going forward - no key issue/constituency left behind.

establishment that's the word, thank you. happy to have your input on what I said, was not thought out, just sharing what popped into my head.