Elizabeth Warren on her Facebook page today (10/06/2018) said, "Don’t forget this: Even the fights we lose matter. History will remember that we didn’t go quietly. We resisted, persisted, and fought to be heard."
She's referring to the fight against putting a lying misogynist on the Surpeme Court.
But she put her finger on what may be the single biggest reason that the Democrats reached the state that yielded the disastrous results of 2016 up and down the ticket.
The Democrats haven't been willing enough to fight and lose on partticular programs and issues. The Republicans, on the other hand, staged countless sure-to-lose votes on abolishing the ACA ("Obamacare"). Today they have gone a long way toward wrecking it. And have certainly reduced access to health insurance for millions of Americans.
They used those losing votes to gin up their base voters. But they also served to establish a narrative which not only pleased their base. It also accustomed the press to regarding that position as a "mainstream" position, even though the program itself was very popüular. But they managed to make the name "Obamacare" unpopular.
That's one important example of this process. But only one. The Republicans were willing to take highly partisan positions and fight for them, even when it was unrealistic and impractical to think they would win on it immediately. While the Democrats have spent decades using Republican framing to argue for Democratic positions. And even on two of his most important successes as President, the economic stimulus of early 2009 and the ACA, Obama started the negotiations with the Republicans with a pre-comprised version aimed at getting Republican support - and negotiated the program down from there in the Republican direction.
What's important, of course, is not that the Democrats fight and lose. The point is that they should fight for key programs and principles.
The Washington Post featured an article yesterday that could reasonably be described as gushing over Trump's supposed political brilliance in getting the Kavanaugh nomination approved (although it hadn't gotten a final Senate vote yet). It's an example of how the Establishment press normalizes Republican radicalism, including Trump's. (Philip Rucker et al, ‘Willing to go to the mat’: How Trump and Republicans carried Kavanaugh to the cusp of confirmation 10/05/2018)
But it does give an example of the intensity gap between Democratic and Republican elected officials in fights like this:
Tuesday evening in Southhaven, Miss., Trump laid into Ford with the ruthlessness of an attack dog and the pacing of a stand-up comedian. The crowd roared with laughter and applause. Aides privately crowed as footage of the performance was played and replayed many times over, shifting the national discussion from scrutiny of Kavanaugh’s honesty and drinking habits to doubts about Ford’s memory. And in Washington, Republican senators — though they condemned Trump’s mockery of Ford — felt emboldened to aggressively demand Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which became a near-certainty Friday and looks to become official with a vote Saturday.
“As long as he was willing to go to the mat for him, it fortified probably people up here, too,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the chamber’s third-ranking Republican leader.
Can anyone claim with a straight face that Barack Obama was "willing to go to the mat" fighting for Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination? Because Obama - and most Congressional Democrats - were unwilling to operate on the notion that, "Even the fights we lose matter."
Democrats were outraged, of course, but were short of tools with which to respond. As the minority party — following a disastrous midterm in 2014 — they could not force a committee or a floor vote. They gave speeches, and they urged voters to turn out in protest in the November elections.
Scores of scholars — law professors, historians and political scientists — urged the Senate to at least have a process for Garland as a duly appointed nominee with impeccable qualifications. But some lawyers and academics pointed out that the Constitution empowered the Senate to "advise and consent" but did not require it do so. (Some adding that they thought the Senate still ought to do so.)
So they shrugged their shoulders, and said, hey, what can we do, the Republicans control the Senate. And used the nomination as one more item in their list of issues that they say they support but are notably reluctant to fight for.
Elving rightly notes that there is "ample evidence that the Supreme Court motivates conservatives more than it does progressives."
That's also true on about every other issue that matters to the Democratic base. But, hey, Nancy Pelosi is committed to PayGo!
Elving recalls that blocking the Garland nomination was sucessful for the Republicans in two important ways: "it prevented the seating of a Democratic president's choice" and "the vacancy became a powerful motivator for conservative voters in the fall."
"Again and again in the fall, candidate Donald Trump treated the Supreme Court as a touchstone, sometimes simply shouting the two words to his rally crowds. And indeed, polling has shown the court vacancy did mean a great deal to Trump voters, especially those religious conservatives who had personal misgivings about him," he writes.
The elected officials and party establishment of one the two major American parties are just more serious about achieving their programmatic goals. That party is not the real existing Democratic Party.
One might be tempted to think this incompetence is a blessing in disguise, considering Trump's authoritarian impulses. But as we've seen with the travel ban and the manufactured border crisis, his incompetence is no protection against cruelty and inhumanity. An unfit president is no less powerful.
The good news for Republicans is that when all is said and done, this train-wreck of a presidency will be repurposed as yet another example of how government can't do anything right. They'll tell us that the only solution for that problem is another round of tax cuts, the cure for whatever ails you. It's quite a racket.
That's an updated-for-the-Trump-Age version of the old Democratic saying, now more accurate than ever: Republicans run on the idea that government can't do anything right, then they get elected and prove it.
The story [from Susan Glasser] goes on to handwring about how this [kidnapping immigrant children] is the one wedge issue that really works for Trump and how dangerous it is for Democrats to stray from their positive message of health care and the minimum wage. The implication is that talking about Trump's incompetence and malevolence will just make his voters love him so we need to complain about the Republicans trying to repeal Obamacare and pretend it's 2008 and say "yes we can!" (Don't say si se puede, though. That might rile up the Trumpies and we need to keep them as happy as possible at all times.)
Trying to appease these people and motivate the Democratic base by re-running their old campaigns and presenting a sunny vision of America is delusional. Republicans can't be appeased by Democrats because they are completely delirious that their Dear Leader is holding a national hatefest. That's what makes them happy. Meanwhile, Democratic voters will think these Democratic politicians are as depraved as Trump if they don't describe this grotesque insanity for what it is.
Pretending that what is happening isn't happening will simply not work. Trump is going to spend the next few months doing what he always does: spew racist to thrill his racist base. The only thing Democrats can do is get their own base out and acting like a bunch of cynical cowards isn't going to get the job done. [my emphasis]
Nancy Pelosi, The putative leader of the Democratic "Resistance" to Trumpism gave her weekly news conference today. It's safe to say it will send no one rushing to the barracades. Rep. Pelosi holds weekly news conference 06/14/2018:
She's still using the "Better Deal" slogan that apparently some Democratic marketing consultants came up with, presumably on the theory that boring voters to sleep is the best way to inspire midterm turnout this year.
Pelosi generally comes off as tired and bored. "Phoning it in" comes to mind when I hear her speak.
It's not so much that what she is advocating is bad. It's just that it's the stock conservative (yes, conservative) Democratic rhetoric that has become the standard language of the corporate Democrats. You won't hear any phrase like "single payer" or "Medicare for all" in this press conference. But she wants to give us a Better Deal on healthcare, somehow.
But even when she's talking about the scandalous separation of children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border and calling it "barbaric," she sounds like she's reciting dull talking points that really don't make much difference to her one way or the other. She'd rather be schmoozing with mega-donors.
She even sounds dull and unserious when she says, "I just don't even know why they aren't uprisings all over the country and maybe there will be, when people realize that this is a policy." (Just after 13:40)
In the real world, her response and that of her House Democratic Campaign Committee to the popular uprising against Trumpism in the surge of activist candidates has been ... to try to get more conservative, owned-by-corporate-donors candidates elected instead of people involved in "uprising."
But she does talk about "reducing the deficit" and "infrastructure." Both of which have been reduced to meaningless by endless and vapid repetition. And nobody really cares about the deficit anyway. Nor is there any particular reason to.
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 WaveMajority 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-goThe 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.
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.
Medium just reposted (05/25/2018) an essay by linguist George Lakoff from December 2016 with advice for Democrats in particular on how to respond to Trump. It was posted at his blog as How to Help Trump 12/15/2016.
Lakoff is famous for his work on political "framing," how political actors define issues and narratives. Usually whenever I mention him, I say that while I have some reservations about parts of his argument, he's basically right about the Democratic Party's problems in framing political issues in ways that are most likely to win support for them. So I've now made that ritual qualification for this post.
His 12/15/2016 piece falls more in my "reservations" category. Because he seems to be arguing there that Democrats should try to ignore what Trump says:
Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.
Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.
When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.
Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate. When he picks a fight, he does so deliberately. He tweets or says outrageous things, knowing they will be repeated millions and millions of times. When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.
Phrased like that, it sounds suspiciously like a concern-troll argument trying to get Democrats to shut up. That's not what he's trying to do. But this is one of his weaker pitches.
This clip from Sam Seder's Majority Report features Sam and Henry Farrell talking about the posturing of conservative intellectuals on political ideology, What The 'Intellectual Dark Web' Fears The Most 05/24/2018. They also discuss the argument that criticizing rightwingers' ideas and policies just makes them even more rightwing, a variation on the undying "things will be worse if you protest" argument.
Lakoff is on much firmer ground in other posts on his blog, like The President Is The Nation: The Central Metaphor Trump Lives By 08/01/2017, where he analyzes some of Trump's own self-framing. "From all of these considerations, it seems clear that the President is living by the metaphor, with enormous repercussions for our nation and the world. We see this in his speeches, his tweets, and his official actions."
And he elaborates his idea about how Democrats can do positive framing on the issues of press freedom in A Modest Proposal: #ProtectTheTruth 01/03/2018.
So when the president attacks the press ..., don’t take the bait. Instead, focus on truth and its moral context. Truth is under attack. Let’s protect it, and express our appreciation for those brave journalists whose job is to spotlight it.
Some ground rules:
Don’t use any of his terms, images, or hashtags.
Ignore his antics — if you retweet it you can’t defeat it, and when you embed it you spread it. Deny him the virality he craves. Ignore his antics.
Shift the frame to focus on powerful, truthful reporting.
And he cites three examples that he considers good instances of framing by the left/center-left while staying true to factual reporting: Mother Jones' reporting on The Russian Connection; "Rachel Maddow’s steely-eyed focus on the Republican Party’s culpability in this mess and the need to hold them accountable" (although good framing in her case doesn't necessarily equate to the best reporting, given her frequent perkiness in reporting very serious material; and, Mark Hertsgaard's reporting on the climate crisis, e.g., Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch Have Set Our Future on FireThe Nation 12/11/2017.
But I don't think it's realistic to ask people to ignore Trump's tweets. He is the President of the United States, and his tweets can have major effects on how domestic and international issues are understood. I'm reminded of someone years ago writing to Miss Manners (Judith Martin) relating an instance of being at a party and the hostess tripped and fell onto the food table and the punch bowl. The question was whether guests should comment on it, or just pretend to ignore it. Her response was that if you consider it normal for a hostess to fall face-first into the punch bowl, in that case it would be appropriate to ignore it. Trump's tweets are pretty much face-down-in-the-punch-bowl every day.
David Sirota has it right on the chronic advice to Democrats to stick to "safe" centrist positions:
This seems like a really smart and savvy idea, as long as you erase from your mind the fact that Dems did exactly this and proceeded to lose 1,000 state legislative seats, most governorships, both houses of Congress and the presidency https://t.co/pj7oG2gf86
His wife is currently running as a Democrat for a state legislative seat in Colorado.
The corporate Democrats and their donors have developed a formula they invoke year in and year out, after successes and after failures: Democrats have to rely on centrist candidates and centrist positions.
The Beltway Village conventional wisdom, at least as persistent as the Democratic centrist obsession, is that "America is a center-right country." Just ask Chuck Todd.
Sadly typical of the sclerotic state of major Democratic leaders is that they want a replay of the past to be performed in what they take to be the most risk-free manner: Democrats Look To Their Successful 2006 Messaging In Bid To Retake The HouseHuffPost 04/21/2018. Nancy Pelosi wants to put corruption front-and-center in 2016, that of the Trump Administration of course. And they should be raising holy hell about that. On the other hand, they are tiptoing around the whole question of impeachment. And the Democrats can't even maintain a united front against an atrocious nominee for Secretary of State like Mike Pompeo. They've also done a pretty lame job in how they've treated the Russia-Russia-Russia issue, because they can't resist the temptation to link it with hawkish foreign policy posturing, which the Democratic base mostly really does not want to hear.
And the former Senate leader Harry Reid, who I liked despite his tendency to centrism on may issues, joins in with the dreary litany: Quint Forgey, Reid warns Democrats to lay off impeachment talkPolitico 04/25/2018.
Nothing I could say about that would add to what Oliver Willis has already said:
democrats: don't want to seem too partisan by saying "impeach"
republicans: obama wasnt born here. pelosi is a devil worshipper. schumer is socialist. hillary has murdered 5,000 people. this morning.
In an era of regular wave elections — 2006, 2008, 2010, and onward — sustainable majorities may be elusive. The smartest play for the party that takes power, said Michael Podhorzer, political director for the labor federation AFL-CIO, is to seize the opportunity when a wave washes it into power, implement an aggressive agenda, and then defend it from the minority when the party is inevitably washed back out — much as Democrats did successfully with the Affordable Care Act, and as Republicans hope to do with tax cuts. It’s a strategy that means moving two or three steps forward and holding as many of those gains until power is reclaimed, then moving another two steps forward. But it’s only possible with candidates-turned-lawmakers ready to take bold action when they have the chance. [my emphasis]
And this is the biggest problem with the let's-focus-on-corruption-but-don't-say-impeachment approach. From the standpoint of raising money from big donors, that may look like a play-it-safe approach. But it means that the party also doesn't focus on messaging their support of popular ideas like taxing oligarchs, single-payer healthcare, Medicare for all, free college education, college loan relief, restricting gun proliferation, renewable energy. And forget demanding a real peace policy for the Middle East, or accelerated nuclear nonproliferation efforts.
So they build up support and momentum that would prepare the way for substantial progressive accomplishments when they do have enough power in the national government to demand them.
Grim and Fang contrast that to the approach of Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emmanuel after the 2006 Democratic wave:
... in the 2009-2010 session [when Obama was President], ... then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was in charge of the DCCC, as well as committee assignments, packed key panels with centrist and conservative freshmen and sophomores.
Those centrists were there not because the nation demanded moderation, but because Democrats had recruited them in 2006 and 2008 and put them there. Rahm Emanuel, Pelosi’s lieutenant who, at the time, ran the DCCC, looked for wealthy candidates who could self-fund a race. “The most important thing to the DCCC then was if you were self-funding,” said Michael Podhorzer of AFL-CIO. “That moved candidates toward business centrists and their ability to last after that election was not that great. And it set the stage for Obama’s Democratic majority not being as aligned with his policies as a more progressive majority might have.”
And those committees stacked with new centrists delivered weaker legislation than they otherwise might have. In 2009, Democrats dialed back their ambitions when it came to the size of the stimulus, the strength of Wall Street reform, and the quality and extent of coverage that would be provided by Obamacare — all in order to accommodate centrist members representing swing districts. Polls show that the ACA is not unpopular because it is too progressive; rather, its problem areas are the elements of it that are too conservative — high premiums and high deductibles. [my emphasis]
But the experience of the Obama Administration, including the staggering Democratic losses up and down the ballot in 2016, haven't jarred the Democratic establishment:
Yet the types of candidates Emanuel wanted to bring to Washington in 2006 are the same ones today’s House campaign arm is working to get elected. Even if you agree with the ideological approach, said 2016 congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout, it’s a flawed strategy structurally. Last cycle, the DCCC worked against Teachout, a progressive activist and law professor, in her primary campaign in New York. She went on to win it by 40 points anyway, pulling in 2 points more than Hillary Clinton, but still lost the general election.
“Structurally, they’re going to be idiots because there’s no way they can bring in the talent to do it right,” she told The Intercept of the DCCC’s approach to picking candidates. “Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”
The ideological battle within the Democratic Party is between the Democratic wing of the party (progressives and populists) and the Republican wing of the party (New Dems and Blue Dogs). The DCCC is part of the Republican wing and working hard to elect uber-corrupt former New Dem head, Joe Crowley, to lead the party after [House leader Nancy] Pelosi and [Democratic Whip Steny] Hoyer are gone.
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.
A report about vandalizing a statue fits in well with an issue I've been thinking about, which is how Trump and the Republicans are willing to use "revolutionary" means to achieve their ends, while the Democratic Party tends to be phobic about the word "revolution," except when they are pushing for regime change in a foreign country whose government has fallen out of favor with them.
I'm more reserved than ever about easy generalizations on typical ways democracy in other countries is eroded. That's because so much of it is proposed in service of some regime-change agenda. And the international reporting in the mainstream US media is often so spotty or just plain bad, I try to be careful about jumping to conclusions.
Having said that, it's generally understood that some kind of independence of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies is necessary for the rule of law to function. And at some point, attempts to influence the justice system for political reasons does become an overriding of the rule of law.
You can tell this isn't a straight polemic, because I'm putting so many qualifications out there. But the lines can be confusing. I have serious doubts about lifetime appointment of federal judges, for instance. But electing judges is also a bad idea because that inevitably politicizes the justice system to so extent. But every system of selecting judges depends for its effectiveness on the participants taking their responsibilities seriously. The Dred Scott decision was clearly a political decision with massive consequences. It was an instance where the judicial system tossed its responsibilities and the rule of law overboard for a political cause: slavery, a cause of the worst kind.
Another famous situation where these issues were raised was Franklin Roosevelt's fight against the Nine Old Men of the 1930s Supreme Court. (William Leuchtenburg, When Franklin Roosevelt Clashed with the Supreme Court – and LostSmithsonian Magazine May 2005) A reactionary Supreme Court was knocking down law after law passed by Congress that were aimed at improving economic conditions after the devastating Great Depression. Leuchtenburg gives a measured judgment on the practical lessons that historians and politicians have drawn from that fight:
The 168-day contest also has bequeathed some salutary lessons. It instructs presidents to think twice before tampering with the Supreme Court. FDR’s scheme, said the Senate Judiciary Committee, was “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” And it never has been. At the same time, it teaches the justices that if they unreasonably impede the functioning of the democratic branches, they may precipitate a crisis with unpredictable consequences. In his dissent in the AAA case in 1936, Justice Stone reminded his brethren, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” These are lessons— for the president and for the court — as salient today as they were in 1937.
The conventional wisdom is that FDR overstepped and tried to improperly interfere with the Court by his proposal to appoint additional Justices, remembered mainly by the pejorative label of Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme." But the CW also holds that FDR's public fight against the Court jolted them into a (genuinely) more judicially reasonable position on New Deal legislation.
Roosevelt's proposals in that situation were a very different thing from what's going on now in Pennsylvania, where the Radical Republicans are trying to impeach the state supreme court justices who struck down an extreme, partisan gerrymandering scheme the Republicans put in place. (Sam Levine, Pennsylvania GOP Moves To Impeach Supreme Court Democrats For Gerrymandering RulingHuffpost 03/20/2018)
The Republicans are willing to use impeachment for the most crass partisan purposes. But the Democrats never bothered to even hold Congressional hearings on strong indications of what looked an awful lot like improprieties by Supreme Court Justices Clalrence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. The symbolism of this is sadly ironic: "When Justice Scalia died two weeks ago, he was staying, again for free, at a West Texas hunting lodge owned by a businessman whose company had recently had a matter before the Supreme Court." (Eric Lipton, Scalia Took Dozens of Trips Funded by Private SponsorsNew York Times 02/26/2016) See also: Ujala Sehgal, A Brief History of Clarence Thomas' Ethical EntanglementsThe Atlantic 06/19/2011.
Currently, we have a Republican Party that is committed to appointing highly activist judges and is willing to toss normal procedural and normative practices out the window in order to get rightwing ideologues entrenched throughout the federal judiciary. (See Garland, Merrick) In 2016, the Republicans in Congress effectively nullified the Constitutional procedure for selecting Supreme Court Justices. But when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Court, there was no resistance on the Democratic side remotely comparable. The net result is that the Republicans have dominance of the selection of federal judges entirely out of proportion to the number of American voters who support their party.
As bad as that is, I wouldn't call that a "revolutionary" method. Trump's blatant threatening and bullying of the FBI and the Justice Department over the Mueller investigation is. From his public statements and the firings of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, Trump has made it very clear that he wants the Justice Department to act on his behalf in much the same way his political mentor and longtime attorney, mob lawyer Roy Cohn, did for years (Ron Elving, President Trump Called For Roy Cohn, But Roy Cohn Was Gone NPR 01/08/2018):
This much is clear: Cohn was Trump's model in the handling of public relationships and media warfare.
Cohn's code was built on self-interest and loyalty; his style was all about intensity. If he was your lawyer, he was prepared to do anything for you; if he was your adversary, no holds were barred.
As Schmidt reminds us, Cohn "had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986." So Joe McCarthy's authoritarian heritage that was willing to ignore democratic and Constitutional rights and norms has now come to the White House is a potent form via Roy Cohn's political protege Donald Trump. (For more on Cohn, see also: Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand ManNew York Times 06/20/2016; Marie Brenner, How Donald Trum and roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America Vanity Fair Aug 2017; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg; The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fearWashington Post 06/17/2016)
Seve Bannon has rotated out of Trumpian favor for the moment. But his declaration that his goal in February 2017 when he was still a White House strategist that his goal is the "deconstruction of the administrative state" echoes the advocates of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s, from which he draws some of his ideas and perspective. Francis Wilkerson reported last year (Bannon's Requiem for the Administrative StateBusiness Insider 03/27/2017):
It's unclear so far what Bannon's phrase "administrative state" means, or what "deconstructing" it would entail. Deregulation is surely a key element of it. But Obamacare seems about as clear an example of the administrative state as you can get. It's a vast and highly complex regulatory regime that administers intrusive and often restrictive rules while transferring payments and benefits from some Americans to others via federal and state governments.
In effect, Obamacare is the leading edge of what National Review writer David French called a "vast and bloated executive branch -- existing through its alphabet soup of agencies such as the EPA, IRS, DOE, ATF, and the like."
The "administrative state," in other words, is all the structures and functions of government that conservatives dislike, an alien force that, as French said, "intrudes into virtually every aspect of American life." [my emphasis]
This certainly is a goal that has a "revolutionary" edge to it, though in the sense of "conservative revolution," i.e, overthrowing the existing legal order by extralegal means to establish an authoritarian order.
There is a rich and contentious history of debate and polemics over what how revolution should be defined which I'm not addressing here. But the Republicans have invoked revolutionary rhetoric for decades. The Reagan Administration and its policies were referred to by Republicans as the Reagan Revolution, a term the mainstream press didn't find alarmingly inappropriate. The official White House website still contains this: "At the end of his two terms in office, Ronald Reagan viewed with satisfaction the achievements of his innovative program known as the Reagan Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the American people and reduce their reliance upon Government." (my emphsis) 40: Ronald Reagan (n/d; accessed 03/20/2018; sourced to “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey; 2006)
Later there was the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, also called the "Republican Revolution," in which the Republicans under Newt Gingrich's leadership won control of the House of Representative. (Andrea Stone, Republican Revolution fadesUSA Today 01/19/2003; updated 01/22/2003) Steven Gillon in 2016 characterized the Gingrich Revolution by its highly abrasive, transgressive style of politics that failed " to appreciate the distinction between means and ends." (The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican DysfunctionHuffpost 10/12/2016) He writes:
The person most responsible for injecting [the current] virulent strain of partisanship into the Republican party was another dethroned House Speaker — Newt Gingrich. The firebrand conservative leaders today are Gingrich’s children. Gingrich rose to power in the 1980s as the pied piper of a new assertive conservatism that merged the moralistic rhetoric of the New Right, and the mystical conservative faith in tax cuts, into a powerful ideological message. It was Gingrich who manufactured the hyper-partisanship that defines modern politics.
And when Republican donors like the Koch Brothers decided in 2009 they needed an Astroturf movement to publicly protest Obama, it quickly became branded as the Tea Party, i.e., a familiar patriotic symbol of the American Revoluiton.
The there was the Neoconservative Revolution, which was heavily influenced by Trotskyism, which became the defining outlook of the Cheney-Bush Administration's foreign policy, including the Iraq War. John Judis wrote about this aspect of the neocons' outlook in the very Establishment journal Foreign Policy in 1995 ("Trotskyism to Anachronism - The Neoconservative Revolution" July/Aug 1995). Noting that the hawkish foreign policy adviser Paul Nitze, who drafted the famous 1950 NSC-68 memorandum during the Truman Administration, was a major influence on the neocons, he also writes:
The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism .... Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohistetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 193os and early 194os. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.
What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. ...
The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a
crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class. [my emphasis]
The distinction between conventional war and revolutionary war was a familiar one in the 19th century. Conventional war involved fighting to defeat an enemy army, possibly taking over the opposing country or part of it, without seeking to change the basic structure of social relationships in the enemy country. Revolutionary war includes the latter. A model case would be the wars immediately after the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, in which not just conquest but the implanting of republican governments and the dislocation of feudal social relationships were a part of the goal and practice. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, that was understood as a shift from conventional war, aimed at removing the rebel governments, to revolutionary war, that intended to undo the slave system that was the foundation of the Southern plantation economy.
The main official justification for the Iraq War was Saddam Hussein's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction." And Dick Cheney didn't give a flying flip about democracy or freedom or basic human rights in Iraq. But that Administration's policy in the Middle East was also justified as installing democratic governments on the inverted-Trotskyist model.
So the Republican Party has been comfortable with the rhetoric of "revolution," though overthrowing corporate capitalism is certainly no part of their agenda. And the highly partisan approach of Trump and his party toward justice right now is a (conservative) "revolutionary" approach to policy. Joe Conason describes the recent majority report of the House Intelligence Committee on Russiagate as a "surrender of Congressional authority to the White House" of a kind which bears "a sad resemblance to the behavior of bogus legislatures under authoritarian regimes."
The Democrats on the other hand, have become allergic to the whole idea of "revolution," unless it comes in the form of a "color revolution" against a government friendly to Russia or hostile to the United States (and to Israel, in the Middle East.) We see it in the way the Democrats shrink from any favorable invocation of the party's two main founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both of whom fought in the American Revolution and both of whom were key leaders in establishing and expanding democracy. So they leave behind any patriotic imagery or symbols associated with the American Revolution and shrug when the Republicans appropriate the symbolism of the Tea Party or Andrew Jackson.
Yes, in real history there are elements in every period of American history that deserve critical summary, not the least of them slavery and Indian policy. But it's one more element of partisan imbalance when the Democrats are unwilling to claim any of the patriotic heritage of the country prior to 1860 while the Republicans effectively appropriate all of it they want to for their own purposes. The Democrats don't even contest it, for the most part, which is one of the ways they allow the Republicans to define themselves as the party of Real Americans.
In the 2016 Presidential contest, Bernie Sanders straightforwardly talked about his program as a revolution. Which he defined clearly as getting more people to participate in the political process including voting, reducing the massive corporate corruption in American politics which is plain to everyone,establishing a solid social-democratic infrastructure including single-payer healthcare, and a more peace-oriented foreign policy with a smaller military budget. Whether that qualifies as dramatic a change as kicking Britain out of the US in the American Revolution or overthrowing the Slave Power in the Civil War is open to discussion. But it certainly is more deserving of that name than the Reagan Revolution or the Gingrich Revolution.
But the Clinton campaign tried to use the "revolution" label against Sanders. Politics is politics, so of course they were going to do that. So we heard campaign-promoted comments like: revolutions get people killed; we don't want to have a revolution, we want to elect a President; Sanders talking about "revolution" and "socialism" makes Hillary the Electable One for the general election.
This kind of fearful/contemptuous attitude toward the left has been a chronic problem for Democrats since 1972. The 2016 Hillary campaign version of it just reinforced the conservative tone in which the Democrats all too often frame themselves.
It doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats could speak with approval of the Roosevelt Revolution that brought the New Deal. The Dems still will speak sometimes of the "civil rights revolution," though it's typically framed as a series of events in the 1950s and 1960s rather than anything ongoing. And even as non-revolutionary a Democrat as Lyndon Johnson could invoke the song that for the civil rights movement was a hymn invoking militancy and radical change: "And we shall overcome."
And even now, the Democrats as a group are trapped by a toxic centrism with a conservative cast that recently led them to oppose Trump's militant populist rhetoric, which included actual incitements to violence at his rallies, with a bland slogan like Stronger Together. Which goes well with the obsession with Bipartisanship that the Democrats can seem to shake off.
Which brings us to John Brown's statue. If there was any white man in the United States prior to the Civil War who was devoted to democracy, despised slavery and actively tried to end it, considered blacks equal to white and women equal to men - in other words, characteristics that liberals now condemn pretty much every citizen of the US prior to 1860 - it was John Brown.
But will Democratic Party liberals be jumping up and down in outrage over seeing his statue defaced? This is the Democratic Party we're talking about, so the answer is: not many. The reason is illustrated by the opening paragraph of an article on Brown from 2005 by historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote a good short biography of Andrew Jackson that takes a nuanced view of him without falling into anachronisms ("Homegrown Terrorist" New RepublicThe New Republic 10/24/2005):
John Brown was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes. Every one of his murderous ventures failed to achieve its larger goals. His most famous exploit, the attack on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, actually backfired. That backfiring, and not Brown’s assault or his later apotheosis by certain abolitionists and Transcendentalists, contributed something, ironically, to the hastening of southern secession and the Civil War. In a topsy-turvy way, Brown may have advanced the anti-slavery cause. Otherwise, he actually damaged the mainstream campaign against slavery, which by the late 1850s was a serious mass political movement contending for national power, and not, as Brown and some of his radical friends saw it, a fraud even more dangerous to the cause of liberty than the slaveholders.
While it's a serious point, Wilentz' argument here bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the notorious "moderate" argument during the 1960s: if blacks actively protest against segregation, it will make whites more resistant and damage their own cause.
John Brown fought in the guerrilla war between the pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas Territory. And the operation during which he was captured at Harper's Ferry was one he designed to set up resistance bases in the Appalachian Mountains to encourage and facilitate the flight of slaves from their masters' plantations. But America's center-left party, the Democrats, don't really want to invoke that heritage, either. It might get in the way of Bipartisan cooperation.
I'm not suggesting that the Democratic Party set up guerrilla bases in the mountains. In fact, I can't really envision such a thing in my imagination.
But the Democrats mostly let the Republican have John Brown, too! Antiabortionists invoke John Brown to justify extralegal violence against abortion providers. The racism and anti-woman attitudes so common in that movement would be completely repugnant to Brown.
And the Democrats should be able to recognize that in the face of a Republican Party in power employing revolutionary means to wreck liberal democratic institutions, something more militant than Stronger Together bipartisan bromides is needed. As long as they are allergic to even talking about "revolution" in the sense of getting more people out to vote, they will have a hard time getting there. And unless they can do more than "bipartisan" surrender to Trump and the Republicans on issue after issue, it will be hard to convince voters than the Resistance talk is serious on their part.
On the other hand, for the Democrats to try to imitate the loose talk from the right about "Second Amendment solutions" sounds kind of bizarre. (Ed Kilgore, Democratic Congressman Hints at Armed Rebellion Against TrumpNew York 03/19/2018) A party that can't organize its Congressional representation to block an ill-conceived bank deregulation law isn't going to be organizing its own popular militia.
The problem for the Democrats is that so many of its leaders and office-holders are stuck in the we-aren't-lefties attitude that establishment Democrats in the 1968-72 period used, even Democrats who were born well after that time. This way too often leads them to frequently adopt conservative framing and conservative arguments for their more liberal/progressive positions. They really need to stop doing that, as George Lakoff has been urgently recommending for years now.
Also, despite their enthusiasm for "color revolutions" today, Democrats have often blundered and sometimes caused great harm in no small part due to their inability to take a practical, nuanced view of homegrown revolutions in other countries, from Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution, to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Libya and, to some extent, Syria.
Congress just passed a new bank deregulation bill with the usual propaganda name, Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act. A more descriptive one would have been the Financial Destabilization Act.
In this case, the bill had to have Democratic support in the Senate to prevent a filibuster from stopping it. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer opposed it. But 16 Senate Democrats voted for it, including Independent Angus King who caucuses with the Democrats, allowing it to pass. Here is the list from the Senate website:
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Chris Coons (D-DE)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Doug Jones (D-AL)
Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Angus King (I-ME)
Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Ben Nelson (D-FL)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
Mark Warner (D-VA)
The list includes the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate for 2016, Tim Kaine and press favorites like Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Debbie Stabenow, and Mark Warner. Heitkamp and Warner signed on as co-authors. It weakens regulations on mortgage lending for smaller banks and reduces reporting requirements aimed at detecting illegal discrimination in lending.
While the bill is a huge victory for bank lobbyists who have been working to curb Dodd-Frank since it was first drafted, the industry will keep pushing lawmakers and regulators for carve-outs in the years to come.
"This is a first step," American Bankers Association President and CEO Rob Nichols said.
A provision in the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act would exempt the large majority of mortgage lenders from key disclosure requirements that help the government identify racial discrimination and enforce fair housing laws. The provision would facilitate redlining, allowing lenders to deny loans to black homebuyers, while also giving lenders carte blanche to overcharge black homebuyers or steer them into the same predatory loans that exploded during the financial crisis, pushing countless families into foreclosure.
Yet this bill, which would widen the already staggering racial wealth gap, won support from more than a dozen Democratic senators, including members such as Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, and Doug Jones who rely on black and Hispanic voters to win elections. (The bill is also backed by one independent, Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats.)
I hope progressive Democrats won't overlook this Republican vote by Doug Jones. Strong bank regulation should be a no-brainer for Democrats. But Jones got elected in a tough race by running as an unapologetic Democrat with a strong Democratic turnout and enthusiastic support from black voters.
And then he turns around and kicks his voters in the teeth with this vote. This is not a good thing.
It makes no sense. Blessed with a touch of momentum going into the 2018 midterms, Chuck Schumer and his colleagues have decided that the best way to “win” is to build up their fundraising apparatus, reach out across party lines, and pass legislation that serves banks more than it serves people… legislation friendly enough to conservative folk that Senators like Tester (Montana) and McCaskill (Missouri) can sell it to their red state constituents and not have them get too mad.
This is the DNC's game plan, and it blows.
It’s an enraging time to be an American, and one of the most frustrating things about it is that the opposition party - the only one with the money and infrastructure to take on a Republican party that is now a de facto criminal enterprise - still leads and acts as if everything is Fine, and that we are not in a state of absolute crisis. I know Barack Obama is venerated for the speech he made at the DNC in 2004 that unofficially introduced him as a presidential contender, but he vastly overrated the value of bipartisanship that night. That Pollyanna mindset would continue haunt him through a great deal of his presidency, as Republicans openly schemed to destroy him at every turn. And, as a final insult, they’ve spent the past year feverishly, and hatefully, working to dismantle his legacy. Time and again, Democrats think the only way to win elections is to NOT fully be Democrats, and this bill is the toxic runoff of that discredited philosophy. Too many Democratic leaders and thinkers are beholden to a bullshit fever dream of civility that has led to staggering electoral losses and Republicans gleefully stripping lower income Americans of their rights and bodies.
Will Bunch worries that whether Trump wins or loses in the special Congressional election, the national Democratic Party leadership will draw the wrong lesson from it. (Yes, that's about as safe as predilections get, I know, but stay with me.)
These are the voters who deliver special elections, and they may do so on Tuesday because of antipathy for Trump, not because of any love for Lamb. And there’s a lot for the Democratic base and voters on the left not to like about their special-election candidate. Although ostensibly pro-union, Lamb won’t support a $15 living wage. His attacks on fellow Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are more than a tad awkward in this season of #MeToo politics. But then, Lamb goes out of his way to not mention that he’s a Democrat, or discuss any policy at all other than he’s for “working people.”
While there’s no dispute that Western Pennsylvania leans right on guns, Lamb’s passion for weaponry — he filmed a campaign spot firing an AR-15 — is shameful in a political moment dominated by the Parkland massacre. Hours after a teen gunman mowed down 17 people in the corridors of that Florida high school, Lamb (who mildly supports stronger background checks and thus sits a tad left of his fellow gun zealot [Rick] Saccone [the Republican candidate]) said, “I believe we have a pretty good law on the books.” Since Parkland, Florida’s NRA-backed Gov. Rick Scott has shown more gumption on guns than Lamb. Let that sink in. Sometimes firing an assault rifle for the camera isn’t a mark of political courage but cowardice.
Bunch talks about the shift the pollsters are finding nationally of suburban women being particularly disturbed about the Trump Orange Clown show. He thinks it's probably not a good strategy for Lamb to de-emphasize criticism of Trump.
On the other hand, for a candidate of either party to go hard on local problems in the campaign isn't unusual. And certainly not a bad idea in itself.
He concludes by stating what people who have been following the Democratic establishment's approach to the 2018 campaign will recognize as a sensible concern:
But if the past is prologue, Beltway Democrats are going to get the wrong message from whatever happens on Tuesday. The worst plan for moving past the Trump nightmare would surely be to lead a flock of “Lambs” into November, some of whom will surely be slaughtered at the polls.
This is why ousting Trump, either by impeachment or election, depends on a sufficiently reinvigorated Democratic Party to actually stand for something in people's eyes besides not-being-Trump.
You can almost taste the flopsweat from the elite political media. They’re warming things up in case there really is a Democratic wave in the fall. Experience tells us that, if that happens, the elite political media will immediately engage the dampers on anything a Democratic majority might want to do that is in anyway Democratic or (horrors!) liberal. Expeditions to the Trumpish hinterlands will depart immediately. Appeals to “bipartisanship” will deafen the gods. This is what happened in 2006, when the country revolted against George W. Bush and his many crimes and failures. This is what will happen next fall, too.
You’re seeing it with the hilarious contortions of [the New York Times'] James Bennet regarding how he’s putting together his Opinion staff, and this obvious ratings extravaganza is another indication that all the old tracks are being set down again. In 2006, this phenomenon helped with the efforts to toss the Avignon Presidency [Cheney-Bush] down the memory hole so that people wouldn’t notice how it was the logical end to 30 years of conservative politics. It’s going to take even more of an effort to do that with this disaster. No wonder they’re starting early. [my emphasis]
Michael Tomasky looks at the prospect of big Democratic gains in the 2018 elections (The Blue Wave Is Real, and It Looks Really Big—Provided Democrats Don’t Block ItDaily Beast 02/28/2018) Tomasky is a good analyst and always worth paying attention to. And he gives a good description of why the prospects for a Democratic "wave" are good.
But at the very end, he puts in the ritual preliminary surrender mantra of the Thanatosis Democrats:
If national Democratic money doesn’t deliver for Lamb for these reasons, that’s stupid and short-sighted. You want the Democrats to win 50 seats? Great. You know how many of those 50 are going to have to run as squishy on guns and anti-Pelosi? Surely half of them if not more. It’s the only path to a majority.
Democrats have a lot going for them this year. They just can’t let ideological purity get in the way. The time for determining the party’s ideological direction will be the presidential nomination battle. For now, the tent needs to be as wide as possible.
Things are going our way. So let's surrender in advance!
And the Democrats think all they need to do to recover from the massive losses in 2016 is ... blame the Russians!
Nothing the Russians could do would disadvantage the Democrats as much as their own compulsion to roll over and play dead.
All of us trying to pay attention to the Trump-Russia scandal by following the evidence are constantly challenged to be able to do the same thing. I wrote about this a month ago in Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018.
It's also very clear that establishment Democrats are now trying to smear progressives as Russian dupes. This might seem counter-intuive, since the Putin regime has the greatest ideological appeal to rightwing nationalists and white supremacists. But it's happening. Here's Hillary Clinton last fall: "And now that some of the potential 2020 candidates are starting to get public attention, they're getting hit, from both the left and the right, and sometimes, when it comes from the left, you're not sure if it's a Russian pretending to be an American on the left or not." (my emphasis) (Russia-gate, then and now 12/21/2017)
It was the Clinton campaign immediately after the election that took the position of blaming the results of the 2016 Presidential election on Russian interference. And, if anything, establishment Dems are even more insistent on that now. But if the Russian were not only determined to get Trump elected as President but succeeded in doing so, aren't the Hillaryites stepping on their own message by making the left particularly to blame for reflecting Russian propaganda?
But accusing opponents of being suckers for hostile foreign powers is a deeply-ingrained habit in American politics. In some cases, it's even been true. In the case of Russia, the accusation of collaboration and foreign sympathies usually fell onto the left and center-left. Jackson Lears in What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian HackingLondon Review of Books 40:4 01/04/2018 describes the current round this way:
A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.
It seems pretty clear from what's in the public record so far that the Russian government or people working for it hacked the DNC. But the Lears' assertion that the Democrats have been making a clumsy effort effort to suppress criticism - especially "when it comes from the left" in Hilary's words - as being tainted by Russian deception and/or sympathy.
If the corporate Dems weren't so intent of fighting the Democratic left - about the only case in which they show a real willingness to fight - they were drop the Russia-determined-the-election bit and instead treat the Russian collaboration in which the Trump campaign indulged to some degree as one part of the mind-blowing brand of corruption and lawlessness on which the Trump Administration operates. The Trump-Russia collaboration is serious. The Russian direct meddling in the election is serious despite the invalidity of claiming it affected the outcome. Illegal Russian campaign funding is serious. Obstruction of justice is serious. the over-the-top corruption of running the White House as the holding company for the Trump family business.
How many of those serious issues turn out in (further) criminal charges remain to be seen. Nor is the scope of the problems. The point is the real story on all of those things needs to be told on a reliable basis for the public record.
Al Jazeera's Inside Story has an episode discussing the current level of corruption in the Trump Administration, Conflicts of interest in the White House? 03/04/2018. YouTube now dutifully notes below its videos that "Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government." Something I've known from the time I first started hearing about Al Jazeera. But if you're worried a 30-minute video will hypnotize you with subliminal programming that will turn you into a Qatari cutout, I would recommend skipping the video.
Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel make an important point in Stop Blaming Russian Bots For EverythingBuzzfeed 02/28/2018, specifically relating to the social media bots that the Democratic are gnashing their teeth over:
The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund. ...
The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.
We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring. (The reasons they give for secrecy include worries that the accounts would then change their behavior and concerns over identifying accounts that are not, in fact, linked to Russian influence efforts, aka making a mistake.)
The action of bots - not just Russian ones = is also a legitimate concern. But for people trying to follow the evidence, retaining a critical perspective on the claims is important.
Jackson Lears takes an obviously different perspective that I'm using here. But he gives numerous reasons for a skeptical and critical approach to claims about Russian interference with reducing his point to a claim of a Deep State plot against Trump. I want to highlight one of his judgments here, "it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society." I worry that writing off the claims about Russian mischief and crimes around Trump and his Presidency campaign as a cynical power play by the "Deep State" risk validating the Republican/FOX News/Breitbart perspective that the whole thing is purely partisan politics. It's not. There are serious national security issues and concerns about the integrity of American elections involved. And those need to be clarified and adjudicated in the courts where appropriate.
The following section in Lears' piece feels to me uncomfortably close to saying that there is nothing especially heinous about the Trump Administration and his demagogic politics:
It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials. [my emphasis]
But I can't really argue with that particular comparison. The Cheney-Bush Administration practiced a horrifying degree of lawlessness, from the criminal invasion of Iraq, to the torture program, to the Valerie Plame exposure, and on and on and on. "Halliburton" became a political synonym for stunning levels of corruption. The Iraq Provisional Government, aka, Young Republicans Abroad, was a caricature of incompetence in government. Karl Rove became the poster boy for exceptionally sleazy authoritarian politics.
And the Obama Administration with its self-selected goal of creating Bipartisan harmony gave the Chenyites the one thing they couldn't give themselves: a subsequent Administration of the other party that would refuse to prosecute the most serious crimes of the previous Administration.
This is one point where I'm consciously out of step with the prevailing Democratic attitude, reflected also in the prevailing assumption of mainstream media, that legal action against former officeholders is inappropriate and inherently a symptom of authoritarianism. If people really did commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. The failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush Administration has always been my primary criticism of the Obama Administration. Purely political prosecutions are wrong and illegitimate. But where real and serious crimes were committed, the perpetrators should be held legally accountable. The idea, and too often the reality, of Presidential impunity before the law is a poisonous assumption, incomparable with democracy and the rule of law.
The foreign policy aspect of the anti-Russian rhetoric is also important. From a realist perspective, it should be possible for Russia and the United States to compete in some areas, even on an adversarial basis, and cooperate on others like nuclear arms control and climate change. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time is also a very practical attitude in foreign policy.
The Democratic Party's position toward the Soviet Union suggests a concern that they are making similar mistakes to those the party made in the 1950s. John Kenneth Galbraith in his signature dry, ironic style describes that position in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). The Secretary of State under Eisenhower was John Foster Dulles. Galbraith recalls that Dulles successfully defined the Cold War as a semi-religious mission for the United States, "The Cold War was a moral crusade. It was also a religious crusade. And it came close to being a Christian crusade. There was more than a hint that a strong, even militant policy, so long as it avoided 'brute power,' would have the endorsement of Jesus." (This, by the way, is something to remember when anti-militarists point to Eisenhower as pragmatic advocate of peace.)
Galbraith proceeds to describe the Democratic opposition to Eisenhower's policies:
The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic socie ty, every important action of the state should be subject was almost comple tely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings [Truman's Secretary of State Dean] Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. [my emphasis]
Establishment Democrats have already gone a long way down that same reckless road in the current situation.
Brian Faler explains what can happen when you just cobble together a bunch of lobbyists' submssions and pass them as a tax bill without any kind of minimally reasonable legislative vetting.'This is not normal': Glitches mar new tax lawPolitico 02/24/2018.
The sentence that jumped out at me is, "Democrats may also decide to wait, figuring a good showing in this fall’s midterm elections will only increase their leverage when it comes to demanding changes in the law."
Except they usually don't get around to the "demanding" part. It was pretty obvious in the DACA/shutdown confrontation that was their underlying plan, to just cruise and let the Republicans roll over them until November and hope for a wave election in their favor. So with the DACA thing, they did a head fake toward actually fighting over mass deportation. Then after a couple of days, they threw in the towel and said, well, gee, that fine fellow Mitch McConnell promised he would do something nice for us.
Then they rolled over and played dead. Which unfortunately is all too often their default approach. The clinical name for that is "thanatosis." For the tax changes, the Dems' Thanatosis approach is likely to be: complain and grump in public about the unfairness of tax bill, then pick just enough Democrats to vote with the Republicans on the items the most influential business lobbyists want fixed. Then: roll over, play dead, repeat.
This is what Democrats think of as Resistance.
This cute-pet video is a pretty good illustration of the corporate Democrats' reflexive response to Republican initiatives. Particularly since most the animals look like they may be enjoying the game. Animals Playing Dead Supercute 10/28/2012:
Also, it may be time to park the "this is not normal" mantra. Trump is the normal for the Republican Party now.
Tim Alberta writes in Trump’s Takeover of Conservatism Is Complete and TotalPolitico 02/25/2018. She opens her piece with an account of conservative think-tanker Mona Charen speaking at this year's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), who drew the CPACers wrath by saying things like this: "I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an ‘R’ next to his name we look the other way."
And she even criticized Nazis!
Actually, to say something that she must have known would sound, uh, counterintuitive to the CPAC crowd, I have to wonder if she isn't setting herself up for a new gig as a convert from the conservative cause. Or maybe she really is becoming a convert. The conservative stalwarts responded like this:
By the time Charen had finished, boos and taunts drowned out the applause. “You’re a disgrace!” another man shouted.
Waiting for Charen afterward in a hallway inside the Gaylord National Resort, I was surprised to see her surrounded by three security officers. She was surprised, too. Charen told me the detail had suddenly appeared backstage, “seemingly nervous,” having been assigned to protect her on the way out. As we talked, and the detail marched Charen briskly toward the front doors, a few people tried to approach her but nobody got close. “They were acting as if I were in real danger,” she texted me afterward, “which I didn’t feel at all.”
Faler's report focused on CPAC, whose attendees understand themselves as "movement conservatives" or the like. But CPAC is not a sectarian outlier in the Republican Party:
These days, [former Reublican National Committee Chairman Michael] Steele said, “the sideshow is on the main stage.” This has meant a blurred line between patriotism and nativism. It has also meant provocation over policy: On Friday morning, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch said that “many in legacy media love mass shootings,” adding, “Crying white mothers are ratings gold.” A bit later, before Trump spoke, Fox News host Laura Ingraham quipped, ”Liberals are kind of like herpes. Just when you think you have them beat, they come back again.”
Perhaps most manifestly, the shift at CPAC has made hyperbole and alarmism the norm. No one bats an eye when a video message from the Tea Party Patriots warns that America is doomed unless its patent system is strengthened. Every head nods when former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka—who shoved one reporter at the event, and threatened at least one other—says Trump must finish two full terms, followed by two for Pence, because, “We need a minimum of 16 years to get back our republic.” It’s par for the course when radio host Mark Levin says the nation is “at a precipice” and warns that the left is going to defeat Trump “over our dead bodies.”
All of this fits “a broader pattern of a party that has lost its way, lost its moorings,” Steele, a frequent critic of his party, told me. [my emphasis]
The Arkansas Blog tweeted ironically over the Charen incident, poking fun at the WATB baby act on the right of The Mean Libruls Are Pickin' On US:
Claire Conner wrote this past December, "While Trump tweets, insults, and attacks, the GOP is getting exactly what they’ve always wanted. This is their big chance." (What Trump & the GOP Are Really Doing and Why 12/31/2018)
A number of considerations are shaping my understanding and expectations of the this midterm election year:
Democratic primaries are critically important for the direction of the party and whether or not the intensity gap with Republicans will be reduced. If progressives do well and a few conservative Dems like Diane Feinstein in California lose to progressive challengers, that will be an excellent sign on the policy and intensity fronts.
The "out" party that does not hold the White House typically loses Congressional seats in midterms.
October will almost certainly see a flood of sexual harassment allegations of varying degrees of substance against Democratic candidates as a result of the Senate Democrats' hasty defenestration Al Franken under the Gillibrand Standard ("We should not have to be explaining the gradations between sexual assault, harassment and unwelcome groping.")
Ginning up a war can give a President a burst in popularity. (See: Iraq, Invasion of, 2003)
Even aside from the unique features of the current occupant of the Oval Office and his professional wrestling style, Republicans are terrible and governing but good at campaigning.
The Democrats have some well-established bad habits. Chief among them an instinctive conservatism on economic issues and a bad habit of distancing themselves from "the left," aka, their voting base. Let's recall The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the LeftFrumForum 08/10/2010)
Establishment Democrats will be sorely tempted to look at the current situation this way: We have a big possibility of cruising to a win in November. So we have to be cautious not to offend any Republican voters who would never vote for us anyway. Our base voters have no place else to go! And we need to keep courting big donors and stick to our strategy of relying heavily on the same media consultants who we're used to losing with. So we'll complain a lot about the deficit, which gives us something to complain about even though no actual voters care about it. And we certainly don't want to disturb any rich people by loose talk about rolling back Trump's bandits' tax cuts. Or talking about Medicare for all. Or, Lordy no, we can't talk about bloated military budgets because that would step on our Russia-Russia-Russia talking points and might disturb military-contractor donations.
David Dayen has an excellent essay on the politics of the deficit. And how badly the Democrats played it during the Obama Administration, although the title maybe isn't the best for it, The Big Budget Deal Isn’t IrresponsibleThe New Republic 02/13/2018:
[Fred] Hiatt [of the Washington Post] longs for the halcyon days of 2012–2013, when [Republican] House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama came togetherin a bid to slash Social Security and other domestic spending, nearly destroying the country’s full faith and credit in the process. While Social Security survived, the Republicans’ failed attempt to hijack the debt ceiling to cut the deficit led to the sequester, a painful, mindless policy that capped discretionary spending automatically across the board, regardless of whether the program was useful or not.
This unquestionably denied work and prosperity to millions of people, simply to feed the irrational desires of people like Hiatt. Public sector jobs sagged under Obama more than any president of the past 40 years. And because public spending disproportionately assists poorer and more vulnerable Americans—an inverse of a tax code which largely benefits the rich—the historic cuts fueled income and wealth inequality. [my emphasis]
The Democratic Party paid dearly for Obama's bipartisan obsession and his economic conservatism.
And the establishment Democrats haven't given up those habits, as Cenk Uygur reports, Democrats: Progressives KEEP OUT 02/12/2018:
