Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

When I was child in the early 1980s, my family drove across the country to see my uncle in Phoenix, Arizona. We left Alabama one summer morning, and our first stop was for lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Louisiana. Behind us in line was a grandmother with probably half-dozen children around my age. After we ordered and sat down to wait, the old lady began calling the children up one-by-one to order. And one-by-one they came, then came back after hearing what another kid was getting, and then did it again, and again. My family got our food, ate, and were leaving, and that poor woman – I can still picture her – was leaning on the counter, face in her hands, with those kids hollering at her about being hungry. 

What I saw that day more than forty years ago is a good metaphor for what I see today among our country’s center-left and progressive-left. In terms of elections, Americans mainly have two choices on most ballots, even though we’re a people of broad and diverse interests and beliefs. For right-wingers and conservatives, the choice is clear, if not always desirable. Over the last thirty years – since Newt Gingrich in the mid-’90s then Dubya in the 2000s – the Republicans have coalesced their “base” by solidly organizing about one-third of American voters around a group of ideas that connect faith, family, guns, law and order, and the economy to form a definitive concept of national identity. (Millions of those voters live in the South.) For those of us whose concerns include workers’ rights, public education, healthcare, voting rights, racial justice, income inequality, gender equity, LGBTQ rights, prison reform, the arts, and/or the environment, we must find a political home within the battle royal of competing interests that is today’s Democratic Party. 

While my beliefs haven’t changed and what I stand for hasn’t wavered, it is my humble opinion that today’s Democratic Party is struggling for the same reason that grandma in the KFC did. As a GenXer who grew up working-class in the South, I learned a valuable lesson from our family dinners, including the one in that KFC, and it applies to the current political dilemma. Back then, a meal was put on the table, and I could eat what was there with my family, or not eat at all. In 2024, the national Republicans did with Donald Trump what my folks did with meals. And it worked in our election system. Republicans in Alabama have done this for years, and they’ve held every statewide office and a supermajority in the legislature since 2010. For a political party to have earned that level of support for that long, you’d think they were doing some A++ public administration. They’re not. Republicans are winning elections by putting up recognizable candidates with a cohesive message against a cacophony of unrelated, competing, individual interests represented by a party that squabbles internally and often doesn’t field candidates in state and local races. 

I was already feeling this when, in mid-November, I read an essay in The New York Times that asked, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?” In it was this:

Democrats cannot do this [win elections] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.  [ . . . ] Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

What he’s saying is: it’s time to stop worrying about pleasing every single person. It might be time to acknowledge that a majority could vote for a candidate even when many have to hold their noses and pick their lesser of two evils. Getting candidates into elected offices to enact policy seems to be the goal of the whole thing. I don’t have the insider’s view to know who or what might coalesce a center-left and progressive-left “base,” but I do know this: It’s time to start thinking about winning.