There Are Democrats... And Then There Are Democrats-- They're Not Interchangeable

Rolling Stone's politics guy, Matt Taibbi welcomed the new version of the Weekly Standard (RIP), The Bulwark by noting that "Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears."

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.

The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

Using this strategy, this self-appointed “handful of sages” rode the mule of Republican politics all the way to the White House. By the early 2000s they achieved such status that David Frum, the speechwriter who coined George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” felt confident in publicly calling for the excommunication of libertarians, isolationists, nationalists and all sorts of other breeds from the Church of the GOP.

“Antiwar conservatives” had “turned their backs on the country,” Frum wrote. “Now we turn our backs on them.”

Having alienated big chunks of the Republican coalition, the group then sank the mainstream GOP politically with the idiotic prosecution of the Iraq war.

Because they started this Middle East disaster on a lie and even bragged about doing so-- “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”-- they undermined faith in a smorgasbord of American institutions, from the news media to the presidency to the intelligence community to their own party.

This was a huge reason for the rise of Trump, who ran against “elites” and capitalized on voters’ loss of trust in institutions like the press. Conveniently, neocons had already begun tacking back to the Democrats by then.

...[L]ongtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party’s own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original “Third Way” Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives.

This overlaps nicely with neocons’ efforts to stake out the same turf between Trump and Sanders.

This is becoming a little like watching two people pretending not to be attracted to one another even though everyone knows they make each other horny. I’d say the Bulwark neocons and their Democratic allies need to get a room, except they already have MSNBC (as noted by recently resigned reporter William Arkin, who complained the network had become a forum for a “single war party”).

As Glenn Greenwald noted in the Intercept last year, the “most extreme and discredited neocons” began uniting with Democrats “long before the ascension of Donald Trump.”

These two groups came together over a common enemy: the insufficiently bloodthirsty Barack Obama. In July 2014, in “The Next Act of the Neocons,” New York Times writer Jacob Heilbrun predicted the future union:

“Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Democracy Journal ran a similar piece in 2015, in which Robert Kagan talked about a union with Democrats, hoping to replace the term “neoconservative” with the less-infamous-sounding “liberal interventionist.”

The union achieved formal expression in 2016 with groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is backed by neocons like Kristol and Jamie Fly as well as former Joe Biden and Clinton campaign security adviser Jake Sullivan. These are the same people advising Facebook about which sites to zap (last week, Revolutionary Left Radio was the latest alt media voice to get the axe).

Both groups praised Trump’s early missile strikes on Syria (Kristol, echoing his dad, said Trump had been “mugged by reality”; Kagan said the strikes should just be an “opening salvo”). Both were horrified by Trump’s recent tweet about withdrawing from the Middle East.

The neocons are trying to create with Democrats a true political movement of shared goals and common adversaries. Apart from “liberal interventionism,” they’re emphasizing stridently anti-populist leanings, making little distinction between Trump and “mouth-breathers” like Rep. Steve King on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other.

Onetime neoconservative icon Max Boot even went so far as to compare Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin, bemoaning the fact that she has more Twitter followers than Nancy Pelosi-- more evidence of democracy’s imperfections!

Both groups get starry-eyed around generals and spooks and mourned the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis like music-lovers after the death of Prince (“I am shaken,” said Nancy Pelosi). There were even shared fantasies about a presidential run by the Nosferatoid ex-Defense Secretary, whose greatest achievements to date had been grimacing with military severity while standing next to Trump, and clamoring for an increased role in the bombing of Yemen.

If you’re not concerned about undead neocons making a comeback while Trump is in office, that’s understandable. Many people will take allies against Trump from wherever they can.

Just don’t be surprised if “liberal interventionists” are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who’ve been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there.

OK-- time for an OpEd from The Guadian by Bhaskar Sunkara on one of my favorite topics: These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don't be fooled by their progressive veneer. I've been dealing with this in a series of posts called Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. So we have Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Jeff Merkley on the one hand and then a bunch of others who are running as conservative Democrats (Bloomberg, McAuliffe, Delaney, the Starbucks guy, Biden, Klobuchar) or who are conservative but have decided to run as progressives or progressive-lite candidates (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Beto). I'm guessing Gillibrand's focus group testing isn't complete but she'll get back to us what mix of right and left she "is." And everyone's running on an anti-Trump platform, of course, hoping that's all that's needed to make it over the finish line and then "be" the president.

"[M]ainstream Democrats, such as the likely presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand," wrote Sunkara, have "been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare. Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren’t everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late-- on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC’s story about Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take “no corporate Pac money.” But what’s most telling isn’t that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street’s money, it’s that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn’t take their contributions, she’s signaling that she’s just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

...Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don’t have a labor-backed social democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It’s telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper’s recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: “We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors.”

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn’t take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don’t really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn’t a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn’t going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it’s going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders. It seems likely that he will run for president, but he’s been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team’s experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn’t afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It’s afraid of the Democrats who will take them on-- and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.