Is Republican-Lite Better Than Republican?

Two ass-sucking Blue Dogs, Collin Peterson (MN) and Jeff Van Drew (NJ)-- who is expected to quit the Democratic Party and join the GOP-- have already announced they're voting against impeaching Trump. Next week we'll find how many fellow Blue Dogs they're dragging along with them. The Washington Post's Rachel Bade and Mike DeBonis reported that the Democrats are expecting to lose as many as 6 of their members. "Predictions about some defections comes as a core group of centrists from districts Trump won in 2016 are having second thoughts. While many knew impeachment would never be popular in their GOP-leaning districts, some have been surprised that support hasn’t increased despite negative testimony about Trump from a series of blockbuster hearings last month."

On Wednesday, New York Magazine published an essay by Eric Levitz, The Democrats’ Love of Bipartisanship Is Dangerous... and is he ever right! "House Democrats," he began, "announced Tuesday that Donald Trump has become such a menace to American democracy, Congress has a constitutional obligation to remove him from office.

One hour later, Nancy Pelosi’s caucus returned to the podium to announce that they would help the tyrannical president pass his top legislative priority. To Nancy Pelosi’s champions, this one-two punch was a savvy demonstration of her party’s capacity to 'walk and chew gum.' Republican ad-makers had been savaging vulnerable House Democrats for putting their 'partisan witch hunt' above bipartisan legislation. Now, that line of attack is null and void. Pelosi has proven that her caucus isn’t out to destroy the president by any means necessary. When Trump backs policy changes that represent an improvement on the status quo, Democrats are willing to support it-- even if doing so means handing the president a “win” on a key campaign issue. Far from undermining the party’s message on impeachment then, rallying behind the USMCA strengthens that message by affirming its sincerity: Democrats aren’t impeaching the president because they’ll do anything in their power to weaken him, but because his high crimes and misdemeanors left them with no other choice."

Pelosi’s liberal skeptics take a different view. If Democrats truly consider Trump a threat to America’s constitutional order, affording him a bipartisan victory on one of his defining causes-- and thus, increasing his prospects for reelection-- is unconscionable. Even if Trump’s new agreement is an improvement on NAFTA, its changes are quite modest in the grand scheme of things. And there is no reason why a Democratic president couldn’t broker an even more progressive rewriting of North America’s trade rules in 2021. If House Democrats believe what they’ve written into their articles of impeachment, then they have a civic duty to prioritize Trump’s removal from office-- and the disempowerment of the increasingly illiberal party he leads-- above all else. The fact that they refuse to honor that duty indicates that the Democratic Party is unfit to serve as a bulwark against authoritarian reaction.

In my view, the substantive benefits of the USMCA appear to outweigh its political costs. Although it is plausible that fulfilling his promise to renegotiate NAFTA will endear Trump to Rust Belt swing voters, it is also possible that a bipartisan policy enacted 11 months before an election will have little influence on its outcome. The real problem with the Democrats’ support for the USMCA, however, can’t be seen when the trade deal is viewed in isolation. If the party had otherwise given every indication that it recognized the severity of America’s democratic crisis-- and was willing to buck bipartisan comity and institutional tradition to resolve that crisis-- then its position on Trump’s trade deal would be unconcerning. But it has indicated the very opposite.

Before saying more about the Democratic Party’s failure to meet the demands of our democratic crisis, it is worth outlining its contours. The crisis that I reference extends beyond Donald Trump’s lawlessness and the GOP’s apologetics for his abuses. Rather, it consists of (at least) three overlapping and mutually exacerbating trends: the conservative movement’s increasing hostility to liberal democracy, the Senate’s growing overrepresentation of white rural voters, and runaway inequality in the distribution of wealth and income. Taken together, these developments pose an imminent threat of awarding an illiberal GOP a hammerlock on the Senate and judiciary for a generation — and a tail-risk of enabling conservatives to entrench minoritarian rule over the entire federal government.

...In the immediate term, the combination of the GOP’s extremity and the biases of America’s governing institutions threaten to make it impossible for Democrats to govern at the federal level. In the longer term, they threaten something much worse.

Thus, to mount any serious response to climate change, and forestall the worst-case scenarios for our republic, Democrats must do everything they can to make our government more democratic, and to minimize the GOP’s power (as nothing short of electoral devastation can plausibly shake the conservative movement’s grip over that party). In practice, this means that in the unlikely scenario that Democrats win control of the Senate, House, and Oval Office next year, they will need to (at a minimum) abolish the legislative filibuster and add several new states to the union.

Given the trends cited above, there is good reason to think 2021 will be the Democrats’ last shot at reforming the Senate. If urban-rural polarization continues to deepen, while ticket-splitting continues to decline, the party won’t have senators from West Virginia and Montana much longer. If the party is fortunate enough to win 50 seats in the upper chamber next year, they need to use that opportunity to rebalance the Senate before it is too late. A Democratic trifecta wouldn’t have the power to amend the Constitution. But it could add new states. Although this wouldn’t solve the Senate malapportionment problem at its root, it would mitigate its racial component. According to the progressive think tank Data for Progress, the voting-eligible population (VEP) of the U.S. is 29 percent nonwhite, while the VEP of the median state is just 23 percent. Fully enfranchising Washington, D.C.’s 633,000 Americans by awarding that city statehood is a worthwhile expansion of democracy in and of itself. But doing so would also have the effect of rendering the Senate a bit less biased toward white people, and thus, the Republican Party as currently constituted. And the same can be said for offering statehood as an option to the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and other U.S. territories that are currently subject to our nation’s quasi-colonial rule. Such moves would not guarantee Democratic or liberal control over the federal government. They would merely make it a bit harder for a white conservative minority to entrench control of the upper chamber.

But there is zero sign that Democrats would be willing to put fortifying democracy above performing bipartisan moderation in this manner. Forget adding new states to democratize the Senate; Democrats aren’t even willing to allow the existing Senate to operate on democratic principles. Only a tiny minority of Chuck Schumer’s caucus has evinced support for abolishing the legislative filibuster, which has established an automatic, anti-constitutional 60-vote threshold for all major bills. In fact, more Democratic senators have vowed to reimpose the judicial filibuster on their own caucus-- thereby ensuring that Republican senators have a veto over the next Democratic president’s judicial appointments, even as Mitch McConnell has denied Democrats any such input on Trump’s. As for D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood, Sheldon Whitehouse-- one of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats-- has rejected the former outright, while saying of the latter, “The problem of Puerto Rico is it does throw off the [partisan] balance so you get concerns like, who do [Republicans] find, where they can get an offsetting addition to the states.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s presidential front-runner has been actively encouraging soft Republicans who feel alienated by Trump to continue voting for the GOP in down-ballot races. “If you hear people on the rope line saying, ‘I’m a Republican,’ I say, ‘Stay a Republican,’” Biden recently told BuzzFeed News. “Vote for me but stay a Republican, because we need a Republican Party.”

In this context, it is reasonable for liberals to read House Democrats’ decision to award Trump a legislative triumph, on the same day that they hit him with articles of impeachment, as yet another confirmation that the party’s leadership is too comfortable and complacent to lead a genuine resistance movement. Whatever else the USMCA deal is, it is also a testament to the Democrats’ preference for projecting moderation over waging partisan warfare. In a healthy republic, that priority may have its virtues. But we aren’t living in one; and if Democrats continue guarding their bipartisan bonafides more zealously than our democracy, we may never.

Meanwhile (again), Norman Solomon asked a very salient question: Will the Democratic presidential election be bought by the oligarchs. And, don't forget, the oligarchs are spreading their money around; it isn't just Bloomberg and Steyer we're talking about, neither of whom is going to be the nominee. Solomon notes there are three different vectors showing the oligarchs on the march: one is Bloomberg spreading around his cash in a sick and decrepitly corrupt party, of course, but the other two are Mayo Pete's climb and Biden's last hurrah. "Those three men," wrote Solomon, "are a team of rivals-- each fiercely competitive for an individual triumph, yet arrayed against common ideological foes named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The obvious differences between Buttigieg, Biden and Bloomberg are apt to distract from their underlying political similarities. Fundamentally, they’re all aligned with the nation’s economic power structure-- two as corporate servants, one as a corporate master." Let's watch this Robert Reich video again:

For Buttigieg, the gaps between current rhetoric and career realities are now gaping. On Tuesday, hours after the collapse of the “nondisclosure agreement” that had concealed key information about his work for McKinsey & Company, the New York Times concluded that “the most politically troubling element of his client list” might be what he did a dozen years ago for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan-- “a health care firm that at the time was in the process of reducing its work force.”

The newspaper reported that “his work appeared to come at about the same time the insurer announced that it would cut up to 1,000 jobs-- or nearly 10 percent of its work force-- and request rate increases.”

This year, Buttigieg’s vaguely progressive rhetoric has become more and more unreliable, most notably with his U-turn away from supporting Medicare for All. Meanwhile, wealthy donors have flocked to him. Forbes reports that 39 billionaires have donated to the Buttigieg campaign, thus providing ultra-elite seals of approval. (Meanwhile, Biden has 44 billionaire donors and Warren has six. Forbes couldn’t find any billionaires who’ve donated to Sanders; he did receive one contribution from a billionaire’s spouse-- though that donation was later returned.)

Not surprisingly, the political orientations of the leading candidates match up with the spread of average donations. The latest figures reflect candidates’ proximity to the class interests of donors, with wealthier ones naturally tending to give more sizable amounts. Nearly two-thirds (64.9 percent) of Biden’s donations were upwards of $200 each, while such donations accounted for a bit more than half (52.5 percent) of the contributions to Buttigieg. Compare those numbers to 29.6 percent for Elizabeth Warren and 24.9 percent for Bernie Sanders.

The B Team-- the worst the Democrats have to offer

Buttigieg’s affinity for corporate Democrats—and how it tracks with his donor base—should get a lot more critical scrutiny. For example, Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeted in early November: “Asked Buttigieg if he agreed w Pelosi that PAYGO should stay in place if a Dem wins. ‘We might want to look at a modification to the rules, but the philosophical premise, I think, does need to be there... we've got to be able to balance the revenue of what we're proposing.’”

But the entire “philosophical premise” of PAYGO amounts to a straightjacket for constraining progressive options. To support it is to endorse the ongoing grip of corporate power on the Democratic Party. As Buttigieg surely knows, PAYGO-- requiring budget cuts to offset any spending increases-- is a beloved cause for the farthest-right congressional Democrats. The 26 House members of the corporatist Blue Dog Coalition continue to be enthralled with PAYGO.

As for Joe Biden, since the launch of his campaign almost eight months ago, progressives have increasingly learned that his five-decade political record is filled with one repugnant aspect after another after another after another. Any support for him from progressives in the primaries and caucuses next year will likely come from low-information voters.

In sharp contrast to Sanders and Warren, who refuse to do high-dollar fundraising events, Biden routinely speaks at private gatherings where wealthy admirers donate large sums. His campaign outreach consists largely of making beelines to audiences of extraordinarily rich people around the country-- as if to underscore his declaration in May 2018 that “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble... The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

One of those folks who presumably isn’t a “bad guy” is Bloomberg, who-- with an estimated net worth of $54 billion-- has chosen to pursue a presidential quest by spending an astronomical amount of money on advertisements. Writing for The Nation magazine this week, Jeet Heer aptly noted that Bloomberg “is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”

More powerfully than any words, Bloomberg’s brandishing of vast amounts of ad dollars is conveying his belief that enormous wealth is an entitlement to rule. The former New York mayor’s campaign is now an extreme effort to buy the presidency. Yet what he’s doing tracks with more standard assumptions about the legitimacy of allowing very rich people to dominate the political process.

Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir summed up the BBB approach this way: “Today, Joe Biden’s super PAC went on the air with a massive television ad buy. Mike Bloomberg is blanketing the airwaves almost everywhere with the largest ad buy in primary history. And Pete Buttigieg is taking time off the trail for a trio of private, high-dollar fundraisers in New York City.”

Thanks to grassroots low-dollar donations, Warren and Sanders (whom I support) have been able to shatter the corrupt paradigm that gave presidential campaign dominance to candidates bankrolled by the rich. That’s why Bloomberg has stepped in to save oligarchy from democracy.

As Frederick Douglass said with timeless truth, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Continual denunciations of anti-democratic power are necessary and insufficient. It’s far from enough to assert endlessly that the system is rigged and always will be.

Power concedes nothing. Fatalism is a poison that gets us nowhere. Constant organizing-- outside and inside the electoral arena-- is the antidote to powerlessness.

With the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination up for grabs, this chance will not come again.