The other day, one of Jim Pauwel's gurus, David Leonhardt of the New York Times, suggested that the Democrats would do well to take deep drafts of moderation in preparation for the 2020 election festivities. The estimable James McCrea passed the column along to his email list. I usually agree with Leonhardt, but in thiscolumn I sensed the Victorian Gentleman at work and at his worst. I briefed my disagreement, Gene Palumbo thought it would make a good subject here. And so here it is.
First, a quick summary of Leonhardt for those who wonder if they should bother. He sees a drift to the left in the early Democratic contenders and proposes that they should run more toward the center, like Clinton (check!) and Obama (check!) and Trump (??). That , he says is what polls show voters want to see. And it is what worked in the past.
Everything about his argument rankled me one way or another. So where to begin?
Let's start where everything has to begin these days. Donald J. Trump. He ran toward the center, Leonhardt says, "as a defender of Medicare and Social Security." Izzat so? The crowds chanting "build the wall" and "lock her up" voted for him because he said he would defend Medicare?
I must have missed that.
Let's continue to those polls that Leonhardt says show voters want to see a centrist Democrat. In 2015 did any poll show voters wanted to see an egomaniacal liar with a weak understanding of government but a sincere devotion to international thugs? I must have missed that poll.
The fact is, voters may say they want anything, but they will choose between what they are offered. And they are not notably inclined to choose whoever checks the most boxes on a hypothetical list of Good Government ideas sponsored by the mainstream media, which Tom Wolfe memorably and accurately characterized as Victorian gentlemen.
Yes, the newspapers (and other media) of the great and good want candidates who will pull everyone into an emollient cocoon where we can all get along. They always want the non-controversial centrist who will keep the ship of state on a steady keel while participating in a grand international understanding of what is just and profitable.
Since Leonhardt, Young Douthat has chimed in to say the Democrats need to revive their (Robert) Rubin wing that made the Clinton era so fiscally Republican. If they did, Young Douthat wouldn't like it any better than he did then. And, anyway, the Trump Republicans have given up on fiscal responsibility now.
Clinton tried to find the sweet spot in the middle and got impeached. Obama was blocked from the middle by a major economic crisis not of his making and then got Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi!
Ah, yes. We cannot all get along.
A few inches from where Leonhardt opines, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute recently reminded the Victorian gentlemen that "political scientists have found that our nation is more polarized
than it has been at any time since the Civil War."
So where is that great, loving middle toward which Leonhardt thinks the Democrats ought to move? At the moment, it is way over on the statist right, where the Republicans who used to revere the Constitution don't care what happens to it so long as the guy who is trampling on it (while making love to a flagpole) doesn't get mad at them personally.
Please don't disturb the Victorian gentlemen. They think we are in the Era of Good Feelings.
Well, I guess I must be a Victorian Woman. Because being a fallen-away, non-practicing Republican doesn't make me a Bernie-ite. I'm under no illusion that we are in any era of Good Feelings. But is someone who "...will keep the ship of state on a steady keel while participating in a grand international understanding of what is just and profitable" such an unreasonable wish? We sure haven't had anything like that lately.
ReplyDeleteAnd about Clinton's sweet spot that got him impeached, I didn't think it was in the middle of politics.
Middle of the road means pro-corporate. The corporations are not our friends. Check out Big Pharma. I'd rather have a candidate lose who was trying to fix our problems than a winner who will sleepwalk for eight years. We don't have eight years. Perhaps the best candidate would be a flaming socialist disguised as a milquetoast centrist. Maybe Ollie Hopnoodle is the guy.
ReplyDeleteI see that HuffPost is piling on Biden now, worse than they piled on Klobuchar last week. So we know who they can't stand. Waiting for the drum roll; who are they going to anoint? Not that it makes a difference to me. Their id is showing.
ReplyDeleteAccording to CNN, the Dems are up to 12 announced candidates, including spiritual writer Marianne Williamson. Two more have announced "exploratory committees". There are eleven more considering running, and several that have considered but already dropped out.
ReplyDeleteWill the Dems end up with the worst of the bunch as the GOP did in 2016?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/politics/2020-democrats-running-for-president/index.html
That remains a distinct possibility. On some days, I make it odds-on.
DeleteYour link is broken; or maybe I am. I keep getting a message that says I don't have the clearance to look at it.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. The worst threat to our nation isn't where the Democrats align on the political spectrum (there was a handy graphic on the NewsHour last night to illustrate) or what a crooked liar Trump is, but the fact that the electorate is dumb and apathetic.
I think I fixed the link. If I didn't, it is here:
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/opinion/2020-moderate-democrats.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
maybe pasting will help.
When the candidate first sits down with his or her staff to plan a strategy, does he or she say, "so how do we get all these fn idiots to vote for us?"
DeleteNo,I think they sit down with their staffs and say, "So how do we get these fn idiot DEMOCRATS to vote for us?"
DeleteGotta be pro-life, have some good give-away programs, stand in front of a wind or solar farm for photo ops, and make sure there's a nice diversity of celebs ready to stand on stage at fundraisers. Charm the late night hosts. Maybe appear on SNL.
Remember to loosen your tie and roll up your sleeves in the Rustbelt. Extra points if you commandeer the coffee carafe in a Heartland diner and serve "the folks" yourself. Don't waste a lot of time in the Deep South, but attend some black church services.
Don't get too cozy with Jews or Catholics, but make the obligatory pilgrimage to a Holocaust remembrance event and find a few feisty nuns who'll about poor people, immigrants if possible.
Talk about honoring commitments to our global allies and extol the U.N. Be "saddened by Brexit" but cautious about international trade deals and decry foreign theft of intellectual property and interference in elections.
It's OK to say you smoked dope in college, but lament the opioid crisis and blame it on the hopelessness engendered by your Republican opponents.
A family dog is good, but golden retrievers are for Republicans unless said goldie is winningly misbehaved or you can say you got it at a shelter.
I thought the Arthur V. Brooks article that Tom linked is good. He names the problem as comtempt. Which is also the problem that marriage counselors name as the indicator of how they know a marriage is in real trouble.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I thought about starting Brooks up over here, but instead I sent it to my wife's born again as a prolife nephew because he has contempt for all the lefties but me.
DeleteThe most remarkable part of this should-the-Democrats-tack-to-the-center conversation is a tweet (series of tweets?) by Brad DeLong, who (according to Douthat) is a center-left economist. Douthat found it interesting enough to quote it in full. Here it is:
ReplyDelete"On the center … those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party — so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins — have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition. We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them, but shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead."
Here is Douthat's column where it is quoted. Pretty interesting in its own right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/democrats-liberals-socialists-cultural-left.html?emc=edit_ty_20190305&nl=opinion-today&nlid=8740796120190305&te=1
I thought this paragraph was worth thinking about: "In this sense the story of the Democrats’ struggles over the last 15 years is a story of a party that has consistently moved leftward faster than the also-changing country, and consistently overread victories — on same-sex marriage above all — as a template for how every cultural battle should play out. It’s a story of a new feminism that’s pushing the party ever-further from the center on abortion, of a new cohort of white liberals who are actually to the left of many African-Americans on racial issues, of an activist base that brands positions that many liberals held only yesterday as not only mistaken but bigoted or racist or beyond-the-pale."
DeleteWhat this seems to be saying is that the identity politics isn't doing the Dems any good, and I tend to agree.
Here is another take, from the latest issue of Commonweal: The Coming Populist Showdown by Sam Adler Bell. He believes that the contest is between two different versions of Populism.
ReplyDeleteFrom the article: "The contest of our moment is not between populism and something else. It is between inclusive, multiracial populism, and a populism which reserves the benefits of economic redistribution to white and native-born Americans.
If we don’t embrace the former, the latter may prevail."
Not sure I agree with everything in the article, but it is worth reading.
Tom wrote:
ReplyDeleteA few inches from where Leonhardt opines, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute recently reminded the Victorian gentlemen that "political scientists have found that our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the Civil War."
Tim Wu takes issue with that view in an op ed in today's N.Y.Times:
"We are told that America is divided and polarized as never before. Yet when it comes to many important areas of policy, that simply isn’t true... The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like [Wu names them; see article]... Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/oppression-majority.html
"Let's start where everything has to begin these days. Donald J. Trump. He ran toward the center, Leonhardt says, "as a defender of Medicare and Social Security." Izzat so? The crowds chanting "build the wall" and "lock her up" voted for him because he said he would defend Medicare?"
ReplyDeleteTom, I think your take on this is pretty much right: nobody voted for Trump specifically because he promised to preserve Medicare and Social Security. They voted for him because he demagogued immigration and promised to nominate conservative judges.
There is this, though: it's kind of strange to note this, but up until some point in late 2015 or early 2016, we were in a different political era, before Trump and Bernie Sanders knocked their respective parties out of their old orbits and into the new orbits which they're still settling into.
The leading Republicans of that late era took Paul Ryan as their philosopher king, and Ryan absolutely was about making changes to Medicare and Social Security, pursuant to saving those programs (which still is a worthwhile program, whether or not Ryan's specific policies are the right approaches - but I'm an old-orbit guy, so what do I know?). Plenty of the 15 or so Republican candidates whom Trump eventually mowed down in the 2016 GOP primary thought that Ryan's ideas were the way to win the Republican nomination. So Trump the rat-smart politician gets some credit for understanding what his populist base actually wanted. This is of a piece with his views on jobs protectionism.
Had 2016 run the way the Victorian gentlemen expected, it would have been a real snoozer between Clinton and Bush, or maybe Cruz (who, for reasons I don't understand, turned on some of the devout. The devout will sing Wesley's songs, but they won't follow his method, as Hillary does). Trump channeled the R's inner Id and turned it into whatever it was. Bernie touched the D's inner Id, but with too little money, too late, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Russian meddling. (Don't forget that.)
DeleteA part, possibly a huge part, of this country has an inner Id that tells them (correctly) that them as has keep getting more. The rich are sopping up all the gravy. If the D's give that only lip service while again seeking Kumbaya with Wall Street and the Victorian gentlemen, they will lose again. And they will deserve to.
Jean implies above that the D's are invested in giveaway programs. But qui bono? Food stamps and now TANF made the Waltons billionaires by making up for the substandard wages they paid their serfs, and now NPR reports that most of the disaster relief goes to fairly wealth white Zip codes, not to poor folks without land ownership or insurance. And why am I not surprised? The Victorian gentlemen will deplore that. And urge more of the same.
Tom, I thought they were called "associates" not "serfs". I'm sure the Waltons deduct $10k a year just for the nice title.
DeleteMan, do I hate it when the language gets debased by corporate-speak. I've spent I don't know how many hours I'll never get back trying to teach employees to write clear, succinct and jargon-free emails.
Delete