Obama adviser: Democrats must realize ‘our democracy’ angers voters

“Democrats understandably have a hard time fathoming why Americans would put our democracy at risk, but we miss the reality that our democracy is part of what angers them,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under then-President Obama, wrote in an essay for The New York Times this week.

“Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars and elites (like me) who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged, responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity,” he added.

“Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says,” Rhodes wrote. “While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we stand for, and how we tell our story.”

“The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end,” he wrote. “Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.”

Reflecting on Trump’s win, Rhodes wrote that Democrats “lost touch with the anger people feel at government.”

“I would never claim to have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the ‘establishment’ — that most Americans distrust,” he wrote. LINK