Paul Krugman And Bruce Dixon Address The Scourge Of Beltway Politics: Careerism

Steny Hoyer and Al Wynn, a couple of good ole boy Maryland crooks

Actually, Krugman was only addressing right-wing careerism-- and it's role in the real-time unraveling of movement conservatism-- but much of what he says can be applied to the political hacks on both sides of the aisle. Patently dishonest Republican Party strategy has led to the recruitment, increasingly, of "apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction," he wrote. And that m.o. certainly fits the corporate Democrats-- led by Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Steve Israel, Ron Kind, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (practically the entire post-Pelosi House leadership)-- who lure voters with progressive stands on social issues-- the polar opposite of what Krugman says the Republicans do-- only to sell out their economic interests to their corporate donors… exactly the way Krugman says the Republicans do.

That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.

It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.

And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry-- he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street-- the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.

Raul Labrador (Tea Party-ID)

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

In the long run-- which probably begins in 2016-- this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.

Meanwhile, the transactional Beltway Democratic leaders have learned how to play a nasty little game of identity politics, while not heeding the essential interests of the Democratic grassroots as fully as they can get away with. We just heard from Paul Krugman in the NY Times railing against the Republicans. Now let's hear from Bruce Dixon at the Black Agenda Report-- a post he published last week: Black Lobbyists, Black Legislators Leverage Their "Brands" For Banksters, Military Contractors, Corporate Interests. "When black politics emanated from the streets, not the suites," he wrote, "it was a force against imperial war, for full employment, better housing and public education. But now, black politics is a hollowed out brand, an empty signifier deployed by black lobbyists and congresscreatures to cover whatever their corporate donors want, while the black political class ceaselessly celebrates the civil rights era to renew its own legitimacy.

Ever wondered what the staffers of Congressional Black Caucus members do after their stints on Capitol Hill? The answer, according to a Huffington Post article by Ryan Grim and Zach Carter, is they do the same thing most of their white colleagues do. They go to work for the big corporations which fund the careers of their former bosses. They become lobbyists for giant telecoms, for greedy banksters, for military contractors, for agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Pharma, big gentrifiers and the rest, all of which are finding their black faces and their ties to the Congressional Black Caucus, and the CBC itself especially useful these days.

With Republicans controlling the House and Democrats the Senate these days, Grim and Carter explain, the appearance of bipartisanship is everything. Any measure that passes the House with exclusively Republican support will go nowhere in the Senate, and whatever sails through the Senate on the votes of Democrats alone is guaranteed dead on arrival in the House. But when particularly nasty pro-corporate measures-- the HuffPo article cites as examples bills to allow certain kinds of banned derivatives trading, and laws to aid for-profit schools and colleges-- when legislative turds like this are passed with lots of Republican votes and a smattering of Democrats, especially black Democrats, the moral authority of the Congressional Black Caucus protects those measures from attacks by white liberals in the House, the Senate and among pundits, reporters and policy advocates as well.

Nobody nailed the sense of it better than Breaking Brown's Yvette Carnell, a black former Capitol Hill staffer herself, with the title of her piece riffing on the HuffPo revelations, Revealed: How the CBC Leverages Blackness to Work as a Tool for Wall Street.

…Politicians who consistently stand up for the poor and oppressed in the halls of power do not attract big campaign contributions, because everyone knows how they'll vote. Without big campaign contributions they cannot rise to legislative leadership, and their ambitious staffers will not rise either. To be a player, you gotta play, and to get the big money you've got to command a respectable price when you sell out. Many CBC members and their employees want desperately to be fixers and players, like those on the TV series House of Cards, and they've learned exactly how. CBC members, goaded by black lobbyists, have been so eager to cross the aisle and make deals that they have often been leading co-sponsors and supporters of odious measures attracting few other Democrats. Carter and Grim show that when CBC members jumped on board with Republicans, these measures become law, or influence regulators. When CBC members hang back, most other Democrats do the same.

As the Huffington Post article says, the moral legitimacy of the Congressional Black Caucus, and by extension that of the entire black misleadership class is nothing but a hollowed out brand. The article is full of quotes from staffers and lobbyists about this or that CBC member's “brand.” In plain English, brands are purposeful, deliberate, manipulative lies. Branding is a marketing strategy intended to evoke a given response in a target audience, summoning real or imagined memories, tastes, feelings or desires in order to get a response from the target audience which could not be obtained by appeals to fact or logic. When political players proudly admit among themselves that they are mere “brands,” black politics as a progressive force in these United States is over.

There was a time not so very long ago when black America was where the left lived. Black politics emanated from the streets, not the suites. This kind of politics from the bottom up projected demands to end unjust wars, for better housing, more aid to public education, public transit and the public sector in general, and for voting rights, so that a class of black elected officials might look to the interest of the black masses. Now that a prosperous, empowered and ambitious class of African American officials and lobbyists has been called into existence, it has flipped the script and turned black politics into a top-down affair. Black elected officials, from state and local level to the CBC and its staffers-turned lobbyists has become the hinge swinging the politics of the Democratic party and the nation ever rightward.

We said it a while back-- black politics as we have known it is over, because black politicians and the black political class no longer believe justice or peace or full employment are possible. They haven't been working for us for a long time now.