Democratic and Republican Bases React Differently to Getting Screwed

Base Republicans in this epoch for which Base Republicans are overwhelmingly "Movement Republicans," that is to say variations on your basic white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarist Christianist loon are Base Republicans because they essentially hate America as it actually exists, a secular multicultural urbanizing planetarily-aware nation.

Base Democrats are people who really want the nation to solve actual shared problems that are not susceptible of private address (the provision of non-commodifiable services like, say, healthcare and policing), to respect the rule of law and ensure equal access to the law, to ensure through the provision of basic healthcare, education, infrastructure, and public services that individual acts of self-determination are consensual in ways that are actually informed and nonduressed, and celebrates its diversity.

Base Republicans can be counted upon to elect Republicans because they have all the discipline of a desperate defensive militant minority fighting for its life in what they know to be hostile territory.

Base Democrats cannot be counted upon to elect Democrats who don't actually work to achieve the outcomes that make us Democrats.

This is all perfectly rational, because outcome-oriented Democrats actually have nothing to gain from the election of Democrats who don't work to accomplish Democratic aspirations, while defensive tribalist Republicans always gain from the election of even imperfect Republicans so long as the ethos of their Party is shaped by the Movement Republican milieu.

If Obama keeps caving, the Base will stay home, we won't sacrifice our meager paychecks to donate money, we won't sacrifice our meager free-time to make phone calls. We need outcomes (Public Option, EFCA, Green Stimulus, ENDA, repeal of DADT and DOMA, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, accountability for torturers, war-criminals, war-profiteers, restoration of progressive income taxes).

We aren't a cult of True Believers or an army of Good Soldiers driven by tribalist dog-whistles and secret handshakes.

(Of course, when Movement Republicans accuse us of these palpably ridiculous things they are exhibiting their own dirty laundry in classical projective fashion -- just as when they accuse Democrats struggling to restore the rule of law as totalitarians, just as when they accuse multicultural Democrats as racists, just as when pro-war pro-death penalty pro-pollution pro-fetus anti-child zealots accuse their opponents of being "anti-life.")

Unfortunately, it is not at all clear to me that Obama's corporatist advisors or Blue Dog strategists understand this sort of thing at all.