The Democratic "wave" may happen, despite the best efforts of the Democratic leadership

Sam Seder and one of his informed callers took an upbeat tone in talking about the possibility of high Democratic turnout in November, with particular reference to the June primaries in California, Republicans Should Be Terrified Of The Incoming Blue Wave Majority Report 06/12/2018:

But I must admit that the national Democratic establishment's unrepentent conservatism in the 2018 - and conservatism is the right word in this context - makes me dread that they will blow the chance for the much-discussed "blue wave" in November.

the single most discouraging sign to me was this: Pelosi, Hoyer Letter to Budget Committee Conferees on PAYGO 04/28/2018. Trump and his loyal Republicans passed a huge and unnecessary increase in the military budget without any "pay as you go" actions pared with it. And they spent even more on a gigantic tax cut for plutocrats, also without any "pay as you go" actions pared with it. Then the Republicans immediately started talking up cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ("entitlements" in RepublicanSpeak) in order to deal with the looming budget deficit.

And what do the Democratic leaders in the House who style themselves as part of the "Resistance" to Trump do? They go full Simpson-Bowles and demand an end to deficit spending! from the Pelosi/Hoyer letter:

The House is strongly committed to passing statutory PAYGO. The President asked the Congress “to develop a PAYGO law that would help return the nation to a path of fiscal responsibility.” To achieve this objective, the House will attach statutory PAYGO to each of the four bills mentioned above or follow the House PAYGO rule. The House will not consider any conference reports on these four bills or any of them directly from the Senate unless these conference reports or bills include statutory PAYGO, the bills are fully offset under traditional scorekeeping, or statutory PAYGO has already been enacted into law.

Awesome. Awesomely conservative, that is. And remarkable politically-tone deaf. Because there aren't mobs in the street demanding cutting the deficit by flushing Social Security and Medicare down the toilet. Voters don't care about the deficit! Neither to Republicans politicians, who now only bother to pretend they do when they want to cut some program that doesn't primarily benefit the very wealthiest.

Look, and marvel at the leaders of the "Resistance" (Mike Lillis, Dem leaders embrace pay-go The Hill 06/06/18 06:00 AM EDT):

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other top Democrats are vowing to abide by fiscally hawkish pay-as-you-go rules if they seize the majority next year, rejecting calls from liberals who feel they’d be an impediment to big legislative gains.

Pelosi, who adopted “pay-go” rules when she held the Speaker’s gavel more than a decade ago, says she’ll push to do it again if the Democrats win the House in November’s midterm elections.

“Democrats are committed to pay-as-you-go,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said Tuesday, affirming the policy would be a 2019 priority. [my emphasis]

I internally flinch a bit when I hear Cenk Uygar say that the establishment Democrats are "paid to LOSE," paid by major campaign donors, that is. I always think he may be underestimating the fecklessness of the Democratic leaders when he says that.

But I have to admit, "they're paid to lose" fits the Occam's Razor criteria for explaining why the Democrats would choose to emphasize this in the middle of what is potentially a Democratic wave election this year.

Charlie Pierce, as he often does, gets what a bad idea this is (Pelosi's 'Pay-Go' Rule Is Entirely Counter-Productive to Progressive Policy Goals Esquire Politics Blog 06/08/2018):

In fact, it’s a stupid rule. It is entirely counter-productive to progressive policy goals. It puts the Democratic Party in conflict with the blog’s First Law Of Economics – Fck The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money – and it revives Zombie Simpson-Bowles to stalk the halls of Congress again. In case nobody in the Democratic leadership has noticed, the rising energy in the party is not coming out of the budget-hawk cryptkeepers. This takes seriously the laughable fiction that the Republicans care about deficits and will use them as an effective club on the Democrats. Right now, the country is giving serious consideration to things like Medicare-for-all and some sort of free college. This isn’t the time to go all Al From again. It also guarantees a serious intraparty skirmish that’s already underway.

As Jamie Galbraith explained in his 2008 book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, the Keynesian notion that federal budgets need to be balanced over time, or over a business cycle, became obsolete with the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. Aside from the fact that a country borrowing in its own currency can't go bankrupt, US budget deficits are a result of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency and the surplus recycling mechanisms in the world eocnomic system that developed after the end of Bretton Woods.

But instead of looking at the real world of the last 45 years, "Resistance" leaders Pelosi and Hoyer think Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics policies are the way to go.

Even a 2018 wave election won't save a Democratic Party with this kind of leadership.

Can the Democratic Party rise to the challenge?

Uh oh. If Larry Sabato is saying it, it must be official Conventional Pundit Wisdom. Morgan Stalter, Poll: Dems now lead among older educated white voters The Hill 04/09/18:

White college graduates over the age of 60 now favor Democrats over Republicans for Congress by a 2-point margin. The same group favored Republicans by 10 percentage points during the same polling period in 2016.

The 12-point swing toward Democrats is one of the largest the Reuters–Ipsos poll has measured over two years. ...

“The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, told Reuters. “If that continues to November, they’re toast.”

Health care is the primary concern for this demographic, according to the poll. Twenty-one percent of respondents cited it as their top issue, compared to only 8 percent two years ago.

This could be quite a challenge for Democrats. How will they be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a situation like this?

A very significant number of Trump voters in 2016 are prepared to switch to the Democrats this year, particularly over concerns about the health care system.

One would think a normal political party would seize the opportunity to put forward popular health care proposal and repeatedly demand a Republican vote on them in Congress. Since they are looking at a potential "wave" election, they would try to build an actual mandate for their policies.

One would think.

But this is the Democratic Party we're talking about. The Democratic Party led by Nancy "all that counts are the donations" Pelosi and Charles "bomb, bomb, bomb/bomb, bomb Iran" Schumer.

It may actually be quite a challenge for them to turn this into a defeat. A Pyrrhic victory, that the Democrats can always obtain.

Establishment "identity politics"

I'm still cautious about using the term "identity politics" because it doesn't yet seem to have achieved a reasonably stable meaning in the American political vocabulary. And the "Identitarian" movements in Europe are a small but militant and influential group among the far right.

The term was tossed about a lot in connection with the 2016 elections. It was often used by pundits to distinguish Hillary Clinton's pitch that emphasized civil rights for women and minorities from Bernie Sanders' emphasis on economic issues. while this wasn't entirely off-base, "identity politics" still carries a pejorative connotation. Especially among Republicans. Which is why some Democrats take care to emphasize that Trumpism is very much white identity politics. Dibgy Parton recently wrote, "This is the fundamental contour of American politics. When the two parties take opposite positions on slavery, now racial equality, we are divided. It's hard to believe that we are back to this place, but we are. And we can try to ascribe that to other motives all we want, it won't change anything." (It's white supremacy, people. It's always been white supremacy. Hullabaloo 02/04/2018)

But whatever term we use for it, it has become common in the internal arguments within the Democratic Party for the corporate Democrats to try to accuse progressives of being deficient in their concern for women's and minority rights. On the face of it, this doesn't make much sense, since the Sanders wing of the party is very much in favor of women's rights, including abortion rights, and of protecting minority civil rights, including affirmative action. The key difference is that the Democratic progressives also support New Deal economic policies, while the corporate Democrats are on board with the neoliberal economic agenda which is mostly in agreement with Republican positions.

After the 2008 and 2016 primary campaigns, it is now pretty much standard practice, at least at that level, for female candidates to try to portray male opponents and minority candidates to portray theirs as anti-black, anti-Latino, etc. In some cases, it's more objectively accurate than in others. But politics is politics. It's part of the mix. Whether it's effective or not depends on a lot of variables, including who is making the criticisms and, obviously, how the target audiences process the attacks.

I've expressed concern before about the Gillibrand Standard applied in the defenestration of Al Franken by his fellow Democratic Senators in 2017. I'm worried that the lessons Republicans have taken from it is to prepare to deluge Democratic candidates in October 2018 with frivolous allegations of sexual harassment. (Which doesn't exclude their being able to find some real ones.) See my posts: Kirsten Gillibrand as Presidential candidate 12/12/2017; The Gillibrand Standard Takes Out a Female Candidate? 12/17/17; Two weeks too late 12/19/17

Branko Marcetic writes about the use of "identity" issues against progressives in Only When It Suits Them Jacobin 02/02/2018.

During the primaries, Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright appeared to admonish young women for favoring Bernie Sanders over Clinton. Numerous liberal feminist writers insisted on the importance of getting Clinton into the White House, regardless of how centrist she may be. “Not electing a woman, again,” warned Rebecca Traister, would be “much more than symbolic.” In a now-deleted post on David Brock’s Blue Nation Review, Clinton loyalist Peter Daou explained that, “[Sanders’] views notwithstanding,” he was “a white male who has been in Congress for over a quarter century,” making him the “definition of establishment,” while Clinton, solely by being “a woman attempting to break the ultimate gender barrier” was “the definition of anti-establishment.”

This line of attack continued into 2017, when similar claims were used to deflect substantive criticisms of potential presidential candidates. Skeptics of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick — three establishment Democrats floated as 2020 contenders who also happen to be black — were told they were simply motivated by bigotry, to the point where some critics were blithely misidentified as white men. In the words of Briahna Joy Gray, liberal discourse became “a world in which personal identity [is] shorthand for ‘progress’ … and ‘white man’ [is] an epithet.”

Howie Klein of Blue America comments on that article at his Down With Tyranny! blog in an apparently ironically-titled post, My Budding Romance With The DCCC, The Blue Dogs, The New Dems And EMILY's List 02/06/2018. "I like his line of thinking," he writes of Marcedtic's article, "but he wastes it on [Chelsea] Manning and [Paula] Swearengin, one step up from vanity candidates." But Klein also stresses, "The tragedy of all those walking garbage candidates the DCCC--along with the Blue Dogs, New Dems and EMILY's List-- try to pass off as real Democrats is that most of them have-- or had before the DCCC chased them away-- fine progressive candidates. Don't be fooled."

Zaid Jilani calls attention to establishment Dem primary mischief in Democrats Anonymously Target Muslim Candidate, Questioning His Eligibility to Run for Michigan Governor The Intercept 02/01/2018.

Charles Blow also uses the establishment-Dem trope here, somewhat carelessly equating Trump's vote with white working-class voters assumed to be primarily motivated in their voting by white identity issues, "He [Trump] was working-class white America’s rebuff to an erudite black man and a supremely experienced woman. Trump’s defects had been validated. He was loved among those who hate." (my emphasis; Constitutional Crisis in Slow Motion New York Times 02/05/2018)