Franklin Foer on why the Democrats need to tweak themselves, but just a little bit (according to him)

"The presidency was everything," is how Franklin Foer describes the practical attitude of the Democratic Party in the years prior to the 2016 election. (What’s Wrong With the Democrats? The Atlantic July/Aug 2017)

I'm cautious about the rest of his argument in that piece. But it that comment does get at the problem of the Democrats having seriously neglected building the state and local parties for years. And he's also right in judging that approach, "Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness." And he also describes the results this way, "On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s."

Foer describes Bernie Sanders with the Yiddish word "luftmensch," which Mirriam-Webster defines as "an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income."

Foer describes the Bernie-Hillary primary contest in a corporate-Dem-friendly way:

To win the Democratic presidential nomination, it helps to secure the African American vote. But another path to victory involves rallying white voters with a populist bent. This can create an uncomfortable dynamic in presidential primaries, where race vies with class to become the defining concern of the party. Politicians rarely vocalize the tension. But the socialism of Bernie Sanders—which hindered his efforts to explain the centrality of race to American life—made this split less subterranean than usual.

Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to avoid an argument about the primacy of race versus class. But African American voters provided her the surest path to primary victory. They gravitated to her, in no small measure out of loyalty to Obama. Where Clinton posed as the president’s anointed successor, Sanders questioned Obama’s legacy and called for revolutionary change. He never dedicated himself to making meaningful inroads with African American or Latino voters, and so Clinton doubled down. After she lost New Hampshire in February, she began traveling with the grieving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other African American casualties of violence. Criminal-justice issues became an elevated feature of her standard pitch.

The corporate Democrats understandably want to frame the New Deal Democrats as more-or-less white racists, who don't prioritize the needs of African-Americans. For those with longer memories and/or history buffs, that general position tries to picture progressives as George Meany laborites. Although we always need to be careful with historical analogies. Although Meany's enthusiastic support of Cold War 1.0 would set well with Democratic advocates for the New Cold War.

Foer also takes the corporate Dem position that Sanders' "campaign did real damage to [Clinton's] chances in November."

And, in a sadly common failing of mainstream reporting and commentary, Foer talks a lot about the "white working class" without any clear definition, much less any explanation about what might be distinct about the white part of the working class. In practice, this usage of "white working class" seems to imply that white workers are the real working class. At best, it's a lazy habit.

In line with this, he speaks admiringly of Obama's Mugwump no-red-America-no-blue-America bipartisanship because in his view it served "to reassure whites, particularly those past middle age and with an acute sense of cultural and economic anomie." It also meant we had a President for eight years who accepted Republican framing of economic issues.

Foer also describes Clinton's support as "a coalition of the cosmopolitan." Here I'll refer to Charlie Pierce's The Historical Significance of 'Cosmopolitan' as an Insult Esquire Politics Blog 08/02/2017.

Foer sets up a framework in which he calls the corporate Dems the "cultural left" and the progressives as the "economic left." At least he doesn't used the term "Cultural Marxism," which has its own obnoxious status as a concept on the right. (See my post "Cultural Marxism": a far-right conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School 07/30/2011)

Foer also provides a reminder that Hillary's 2016 primary strategy against Bernie "was an inversion of the 2008 primary campaign. Desperately attempting to forestall Barack Obama by collecting wins in Appalachia, Clinton posed then as the tribune of 'hardworking Americans, white Americans.'” That phrase was one of her bloopers in 2008. Or deliberate dogwhistle, depending on your perspective.

Foer's description of the "economic left" sounds like damning with faint praise: "While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters—clustered in the upper Midwest ..." A coalition of the despondent?

And he presents Cory Booker as a exemplar of the establishment Dems ("cultural left") and Elizabeth Warren as that of the New Deal wing ("economic left"). Foer's admiring treatment of Booker gives a hint of Foer's own preferences, if any more were needed at that point in the article. Even his favorable commentary on Warren seems calculated as much to raise questions about her left credentials and emphasizing her supposed differences with Sanders than at arguing for the value of her economic positions.

The following sounds like a sneer of the "even-the-liberal" type:

A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. But Warren’s brand of populism could help cool white-working-class hostility toward the Democrats ... Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo. And liberal populism would take the party beyond ineffectual arguments about Trump’s temperament. A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy.

And the article gives a strong hint of trying to define a "liberal populism" that could be serviceable as a corporate Democratic marketing position that need not disturb Wall Street. His example of this kind of approach? Chuck Schumer, Mr. "Bettter Deal," a slogan that makes "Stronger Together" sound edgy.

Foer obviously thinks that the Democratic Party's real problem is that they need to tinker with the advertising a bit: "The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map." And he observes hopefully, "does not require the abandonment of any moral principles," i.e., does not require much discomforting the most comfortable. One could be forgiven for failing to see how that's any different than the standard corporate Democratic approach.

Corporate Dems: they just can't help themselves

George Lakoff has spent years advising the Democrats to stop adopting Republican framing of political issues. He talked about it in this interview with Paul Rosenberg, This Is Why Conservatives Win Salon 11/22/2014. He talks there about some of the scientific and philosophical ideas behind his theory.

But what I consider most important in his advice to Democrats is that they need to stop framing issues in Republican terms. Here's how Lakoff puts it in the interview:

The reason for that is that in the brain, there’s a hierarchy of frames, which is there in neural circuitry. When you strengthen something lower in the hierarchy that implies strengthening things up higher in the hierarchy, which is the way that neural system works. So that is why conservatism has come as far as it has in the last 30 years. The conservatives have been using their language, getting it out there on all the issues, and progresses have done the opposite.

The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guy’s language. You’ve got to speak their language for them to understand it. It’s exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. [my emphasis ]

A classic example is the long-time habit of Democrats framing the right to abortion by saying they are personally opposed to it, but what protect women's right to choose. For Hillary Clinton, that meant for years that she said that "abortion should be safe, legal and rare." Those formulations play to the conservative frames, because they are an obvious Mugwump way of saying, "I agree that abortion is wrong but I want people who want to do that wrong thing to have the right to do that."

All the while the conservatives have been arguing that abortion is murder, people who do abortions or have them are "baby-killers," and America since Roe v Wade in 1973 is worse than Hitler Germany and the Holocaust because of all the "unborn babies" that have been aborted since then. This bit from Pat Robertson in 1992 was unfortunately all too typical of what respectably Republican Christian Rightists still say (Robertson Letter Attacks Feminists New York Times 08/25/1992):

A fund-raising letter written by the television evangelist Pat Robertson in opposition to a proposed equal rights amendment to the Iowa Constitution suggests that feminists want women to kill their children and practice witchcraft.

The equal rights amendment, on which Iowans will vote Nov. 3, is a broadly worded measure that would bar sex discrimination.

But Mr. Robertson's letter, distributed late last month to supporters of the evangelical organization Christian Coalition, described the proposal as part of a "feminist agenda" that "is not about equal rights for women." Claims of 'Anti-Family'

Instead, the letter said, "it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." [my emphasis]

There was definitely a lack of symmetry between the two parties on that issue. Hillary stepped up her game on the abortion issue during the 2016 Presidential campaign, straightforwardly defending the right to abortion.

But the old Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) with which the Clintons were closely identified was all about framing moderately liberal positions to sound like conservative ones. And Hillary had a bit of a present-day relapse here (Emma Gray, Hillary Clinton: ‘There Is Nothing Elitist About Fighting For Women’s Rights’ Huffpost 05/04/2017):

“For a lot of women, it stung to realize that perhaps our country hadn’t come as far as we hoped; that not only are sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia still with us, but they run deep,” Clinton said. “And a lot of troubling ideas have been elevated in the weeks and months that followed, including the ridiculous, insulting notion that we only care about women’s rights in certain parts of our country ― not in what some in the press call ‘real America.’” ...

“Women’s issues aren’t minor issues,” she continued, firmly. “They’re not luxury issues to address after everything else is resolved. They are central to human rights to economies to our national security, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. There is nothing elitist about fighting for women’s rights, equality and opportunity.” [my emphasis]

The first part sounds like the current rhetoric in the ongoing corporate Democrats' attack on Sanders- and Warren-style economic progressives. The accusation that Hillaryites "only care about women’s rights in certain parts of our country ― not in what some in the press call ‘real America’" is one that I literally haven't encountered anywhere.

Her comment, “Women’s issues aren’t minor issues,” is also part of the current corporate Democratic attacks on progressives. But, more than that, it falls into exactly the trap that Lakoff emphasized in the title of one of his books, Don't Think of An Elephant. That's one of his favorite examples, because if you say "don't think of an elephant," it immediately makes the listeners think of an elephant.

So in that formulation just quoted, Hillary could have made the same points by saying things like "women's issues are central concerns for working class and middle class women and men, as well." But instead she invoked unnamed parties who think such issues are "minor" or "elitist." Instead of, for instance, criticizing "the elite" for not paying attention enough to critical women's issues or outright opposing them.

She knows how to do that, because she went on to talk about the health-care debate in a more straightforward mode:

Clinton was particularly critical of the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and roll back funding for women’s health care both domestically and internationally. ... “Over the last 100 days, this Congress and administration have been working really hard to turn back health care ― to turn back health care for 24 million people, but it would affect 180 million people,” she said. “Even today, they’re trying to force through that health care plan.”

Despite their loyalty to corporate elites, the corporate media have never been especially friendly to the Clintons, and their reporting is inaccurate or openly hostile. So we always need to be cautious about jumping to conclusions about reports like this because they may report them in a way that doesn't necessarily convey the actual context and tone of a speech like that. (As of this writing, I haven't located an online transcript or video of the speech.)

But it certainly seems like the establishment Dems are continuing their approach during the primaries in 2016 of trying to paint Democratic progressives as "Bernie Bros" not sufficiently committed to women's issues. Politics is politics.