The People Who Created The Milieu That Made It Possible For Trump's Ascendency HATE Bernie

Hillary and Zerlina

As we saw on Tuesday, Bernie-- tied with Elizabeth Warren-- is leading the pack for the Democratic nomination is the 3 early states. That's a tight race but the DFA straw poll wasn't. Bernie is way ahead with 32.16% with Elizabeth Warren at 25.78%, Kamala Harris at 11.81% and Status Quo Joe continuing to sink among Democratic voters who are paying attention (under 10% now at 9.53%, but full ahead of Andrew Yang and Mayo Pete). Another poll showed Bernie as the Democrats' favorite candidate.

What makes all this astounding is that the mainstream media tends to either ignore him or disparage him. The other day we talked about another one of MSNBC's multimillionaires, creepy Mimi Rocah from Scarsdale, who decided to announce that Bernie makes her skin crawl, without a word of pushback from the anchor. MSNBC is lousy with conservative #NeverTrumpers and other conservatives. Its harder and harder to find a progressive voice on what many people consider the voice of the DNC.

On Thursday, reporting for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic wrote that "The fact that MSNBC-- a network, owned by union-buster and habitual labor rights violator Comcast, that one of its own journalists has criticized for turning into a propaganda arm of the national security state-- is hostile to Sanders is not a surprise. If you’d tuned in to the second Democratic debate in June, you would’ve been treated to a pre-show featuring Claire McCaskill (fresh off losing her Senate seat by turning sharply right and alienating and ignoring traditional Democratic voters) running Sanders down and, together with Chris Matthews, making excuses in advance for why Joe Biden would perform poorly (credit where credit’s due: Biden did indeed do horribly). And, if you watched it to the end, you would’ve seen someone at the network audibly scoffing as Sanders made his closing statement. So MSNBC’s dislike of Sanders is nothing new. What’s significant about Rocah’s statement is that it perfectly sums up the attitude of much of the centrist Democratic establishment when it comes to Sanders."

While in the real world, Bernie Sanders-- a politician with a 100-percent Planned Parenthood lifetime rating who’s spent a career speaking out and fighting for the rights of women and other working people-- has been preparing this presidential run since 2016, shadowing him has been another Bernie Sanders. Unlike the real Sanders, who was once dubbed an “honorary woman” by feminist Gloria Steinem, this shadow Sanders is an unreconstructed misogynist, and an egomaniac to boot. He’s also a dangerous, authoritarian demagogue, the mirror image of Trump, and just as beholden to Vladimir Putin. Oh, and he’s deeply racist, too.

For the most part, this alternate reality exists solely on Twitter, where self-identified Democrat, liberal, and centrist users routinely vent their rage at the antics of the sinister, online-only Sanders they’ve willed into existence like a cyber Candyman. From time to time, however, it bleeds into the real world.

Just consider some of the idiotic Sanders-related “controversies” we’ve already had to sit through during this election cycle. In February, online outraged erupted because Sanders, for the third year in a row, delivered a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address, this time after the official Democratic rebuttal by Stacey Abrams. This was construed by the anti-Sanders online space as a way for him to “upstage” and silence a black woman.

That outrage was fanned by former Clinton campaign alum Zerlina Maxwell-- the same Zerlina Maxwell smiling and nodding as a former prosecutor declared her evidence-free claim that Sanders didn’t care about women. When Kamala Harris-- whose actually unsavory record as a prosecutor Maxwell, speaking on MSNBC in 2017, declared off-limits for criticism because “we need to give her a chance to shine or not shine”-- turned out to be doing her State of the Union rebuttal before Abrams, Maxwell helpfully clarified: “Pre speech is fine. Post speech or after Abrams is not.” Maxwell would later issue a drearily predictable criticism of Sanders’s announcement, claiming he didn’t mention race or gender until twenty-three minutes into his speech, which turned out to be an easily disprovable lie. She later clarified that “talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as talking about race and gender.” (In fact, Sanders did both).

This was just one element of a constant parade of dishonest, sometimes mutually contradictory attacks on Sanders. Former Clinton campaign staffers complained to Politico about “his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders” using a private jet during 2016 . . . to campaign in as many places as possible for their candidate. Others complained he didn’t campaign for Clinton enough-- a widespread belief in online anti-Sanders fantasyland.

When a woman accused Joe Biden of inappropriate touching, some speculated the accusation was orchestrated by Sanders. Commentators would habitually parse his words in the most uncharitable way possible to suggest he was a bigot. He was said to have hired an “attack dog” and a “bully”-- aka an award-winning journalist-- as his speechwriter, with one Atlantic piece suggesting a secret arrangement blending campaign work and reporting that had gone on for months, a story that quickly fell apart. The list could go on and on. All the while, Democrats and their boosters demanded party unity and ferociously objected to even the softest critiques of other candidates’ actual voting records.

“I’m not necessarily an anti-Bernie guy, especially not when it comes to his policies,” one ex–Clinton staffer told Vox. “But he has this self-righteous attitude to himself.”

These have been only marginally less desperate than the bog of innuendo, half-truths, and lies anti-Sanders zealots wallow in in extremely online spaces like Twitter. One user edited a video of Sanders telling schoolkids about the history of bigotry in the United States to make it seem like he was uncritically feeding them racist stereotypes. His quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass was “cultural appropriation,” and offensive because he (i.e., Douglass) didn’t explicitly mention race. And did you know Sanders once used the word “niggardly,” a Middle English word that has nothing to do with the racial slur? Let’s not forget, he’s also a Russian agent.

Something curious has happened here. In their visceral dislike of Sanders, whose record and words they cherry-pick and distort, whom they imbue with sinister motives and conspiracies, and whom some can’t even fully explain what it is about him that sets them off, liberals and centrists are, ironically, aping the very same hatred the Right has long held for a different set of politicians: the Clintons.

Throughout the Clinton years and beyond, conservatives were driven into a frenzy by the occupants of the White House. The Right associated them with all manner of outlandish conspiracies, such as the supposed “murder” of Vince Foster. Just as Sanders’s “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union-- actually an official mayoral trip as part of a sister city program Sanders had set up with a Russian city-- is constantly trotted out today to attack him, the Right tried to make hay of the fact that Clinton once traveled to the country in the 1960s. Right-wing columnist George Will opined that Clinton wasn’t “the worst president we ever had, just the worst person who was ever president.”

“I openly admit that I just don’t like the man, and my disgust is both personal and political,” wrote Trent Lott, one of Clinton’s congressional nemeses.

This rage and delusion was particularly aimed at Clinton’s first lady, later senator from New York. Conservatives distorted and took out of context her academic writing to claim she wanted kids to be able to sue their parents and that she hated the American family. They projected a variety of negative traits onto her personality: that she was angry, aggressive, a Lady Macbeth figure. Her comments that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies” were construed as anti-homemaker, even as Barbara Bush got a pass for saying pretty much the same thing. One right-wing columnist called her the Democratic equivalent of Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Communist Party’s secretary of ideology. A New Republic writer who later became a Trump supporter declared her a “false feminist.” It was all part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Clinton complained was out to get her and her husband.

It’s hard not to read evaluations from the first lady’s 1990s detractors without getting a hint of déjà vu.

“A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,” complained Arianna Huffington, then a fervent Clinton administration critic.

“There’s just something about her that pisses people off,” said Sally Quinn, another longtime critic. “You don’t even know why you hate her.”

“People can’t really articulate what it is that they can’t trust,” Clinton-enemy-turned-ally David Brock complained in 2016. “Unfortunately, it’s a mythology that’s part of the culture now.”

The Right’s hatred for the Clintons was rooted, sometimes consciously but often not, in their perception of the couple as the embodiment of 1960s counterculture liberalism-- the decade, in the eyes of conservatives, where everything went wrong. Of course, in reality, the Clintons were anything but: Hillary had been a Goldwater girl, they crossed a picket line on their first date, and, as president, Bill was a “wild, drunken Republican dream,” as Time magazine memorably put it. Clinton desired many of the same things the Right did, but they felt a deep, internalized hatred for him and his wife anyway, which they sometimes openly acknowledged they couldn’t explain. It’s a striking parallel with Sanders, who has fought and continues to fight lonely battles for virtually everything Democrats and liberals say they want, yet is now the target of never-ending hatred from those same quarters. It wasn’t always like this. Sanders used to be beloved by many liberals and Democrats, even establishment ones. MSNBC’s Joy Reid was once a fan of Sanders, calling him “the great clarion voice in the Democratic Party,” before transitioning to attacking him full time, even claiming in 2017 that he mistreated his wife. In fact, the network loved having him on during the Obama years to serve as the voice of ordinary progressives, offering him unqualified praise as late as 2014 for being a “bipartisan dealmaker” and securing “genuine progressive victories” as a senator.

What happened? One answer is that many prominent Democrats and liberals don’t actually want the things they say they want-- whether it’s because it might alienate their donors, hamper their future money-making prospects, or both. Another answer is that, until 2016, Sanders wasn’t considered a threat to Democratic politics as usual.

The Democratic establishment was fine with Sanders when he was just a lonely voice fighting for progressive values, as long as the gravy train for consultants, lobbyists, donors, and former politicians kept on running. But once he went from just a voice in the wilderness to the head of a movement that threatened to upend this arrangement, something had to be done. This was why the prevailing media narrative around Sanders swiftly changed as his chances increased over the course of 2016. Where he was at first a rumpled wonk whose support consisted of “aging Grateful Dead hipsters, environmentalists and professors,” he quickly became a charismatic yet empty demagogue who lacks understanding of policy and is backed by an army of naive, misguided youth.

It seems that Democrats in the age of Trump haven’t just adopted the playbook of the Right to attack the Left. They’ve also taken on the conspiratorial, frenzied style of antagonism that drove conservative hatred of the Clintons, too. Establishment Democrats may not be able to put their finger on what they don’t like about Sanders, but it’s pretty clear to the rest of us.

Six signs you're backing the wrong candidate:

• Conservative MSNBC hosts are pushing them;
• Right of center Democraps like Joe Lieberman, Rahm Emanuel and Claire McCaskill gush over them;
• #NeverTrumpers claim they're the only way to beat Trump;
• Wall Street banksters are showering them with cash;
• Their agenda sounds too much like your father's Republican Party;
• They are hostile towards young people with policy solutions to fix the problems they were part of creating.

Does Elizabeth Warren Support Medicare for All?

Elizabeth Warren's Issues page from her campaign website. Do you see anything about Medicare for All, or even about health care?

by Thomas Neuburger

Does presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren support Medicare for All? I mean this as an actual question. I don't know the answer — or I think I know and I'm not sure — and I'd appreciate it if someone pinned her down on this. In the meantime I've been seeing articles like this one from Jacobin, "Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Everything — Except Health Care," which suggest that she may not.

Let's start with the Issues page at Warren's campaign website. Unless I missed it, I found nothing about health care (see image at the top). The "Rebuild the Middle Class" topic includes strong proposals for antitrust enforcement, her Ultra-Millionaire Tax plan, universal childcare, and a plan for housing. Nothing though about addressing the health care crisis.

"Latest Announcements" lists 21 proposals ranging from "Economic Patriotism" and green manufacturing to the aforementioned "Ultra-Millionaire Tax." The only topic that seems to touch health care is this one:

Tackling the Opioid Crisis Head On: Every day, 130 Americans die from an opioid overdose. This is a public health crisis – and we need to start treating it like one. That's why Congressman Elijah Cummings and I are rolling out the CARE Act, a comprehensive plan that invests $100 billion over the next ten years in states and communities that are on the frontlines of the epidemic - to provide prevention, treatment, and recovery services for those who need it most.

An important proposal to be sure, but it's not a health care plan. The website appears to have no stated comprehensive health care proposal at all.

Her campaign appearances are not more clarifying. As Jacobin writer Tim Higginbotham observes:

Warren had several opportunities in the [March 18 CNN] town hall to address the health care crisis. Instead, she avoided the topic almost entirely. Even when discussing issues directly related to health care like repealing the Hyde Amendment and improving access to hearing aides, she neglected to propose a comprehensive policy solution. ...

[This] continues a disturbing trend with the Warren campaign ... you’ll hear the usual platitudes (“health care is a human right;” “everyone deserves access to care”), but you won’t hear her endorse a specific policy.

The March 18 CNN Town Hall is an excellent example of Higginbotham's observation. Below is Warren's complete response to a Medicare for All question. Note first that the questioner starts by worrying that the Medicare for All bill, which Warren cosponsors and presumably supports, would eliminate private insurance plans. Then noe that the question is succinct — "Can you explain how Medicare for All would be better for workers than simply improving the Affordable Care Act?"

I don't see an answer to that question in her answer (emphasis mine throughout):

QUESTION: Senator Warren, thank you so much for being here this evening and your tireless advocacy for universal health care. As a supporter of universal health care and an advocate for organized labor, I do worry about the current bills' elimination of private health insurance...

WARREN: Oh, yeah.

QUESTION: ... that would eliminate the private health employer-based plans that so many unions have advocated for. Can you explain how Medicare for All would be better for workers than simply improving the Affordable Care Act?

WARREN: OK, so it's a good question. Let's start with our statement that we should make every time we start to talk about changes in our health care, and that is health care is a basic human right and we fight for basic human rights.

(APPLAUSE)

And then let's put these in order, because I appreciate that your question starts with the Affordable Care Act. Let's all remember when we're talking about what's possible, let's start where we are and the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Right now, Democrats are trying to figure out how to expand health care coverage at the lowest possible cost so everybody is covered.

To interrupt for a moment: This is not an accurate statement of what Medicare for All is about. Medicare for All is instead an implementation of what she said earlier in this exchange, that "health care is a basic human right." Finding the lowest-cost solution among a suite of solutions is a neoliberal approach, not an FDR-style social insurance approach. But to continue:

WARREN: Republicans right this minute are out there trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They've got a lawsuit pending down in Texas where they're trying to roll it back. What they couldn't do with a vote, they're trying to do with the courts. HHS every day is doing what they can to undermine the Affordable Care Act.

So when we're talking about health care in America right now, the first thing we need to be talking about is defend the Affordable Care Act, protection under the Affordable Care Act.

(APPLAUSE)

Then part two. Let's make the improvements that are what I think of as low-hanging fruit. For example, let's bring down the cost of prescription drugs all across this country.

(APPLAUSE)

We got lots of ways we can do that. We can import drugs from Canada where the safety standards are the same. That would cut costs dramatically. We can negotiate the prices under Medicare. That would cut costs dramatically.

And I've got a proposal to help bring down the cost on generic drugs, which could be about 90 percent of all prescriptions. So let's get those costs down.

And then you know what you're going to hear from a consumer advocate, and that is we need to hold insurance companies accountable. And that means no tricking and trapping people on those insurance contracts.

(APPLAUSE)

And then when we talk about Medicare for all, there are a lot of different pathways. What we're all looking for is the lowest cost way to make sure everybody gets covered. And some folks are talking about let's start lowering the age, maybe bring it down to 60, 55, 50. That helps cover people who are most at risk and can be helpful, for example, to the labor's plans.

Some people say, do it the other way. Let's bring it up from — everybody under 30 gets covered by Medicare. Others say let employees be able to buy into the Medicare plans. Others say let's let employees buy into the Medicare plans.

For me, what's key is we get everybody at the table on this, that labor is at the table, that people who have to buy on their own, everybody comes to the table together. And we figure out how to do Medicare for All in a way that makes sure that we're going to get 100 percent coverage in this country at the lowest possible cost for everyone. That's our job.

Does "everyone at the table" include the health insurance companies? Note, by the way, that of this list of options, none receives her endorsement; they are presented merely as possibilities. What would a President Warren actually do? We still don't know.

About this exchange, Higginbotham says: "Taking this answer at face value, it seems Warren sees herself pursuing an incremental approach that expands public coverage while preserving the private insurance industry should she be elected president. This would likely surprise many of her supporters, who might view her cosponsorship of Sanders’s Medicare for All bill as an endorsement of single-payer health care."

Apparently, Jake Tapper didn't see an answer in her answer either, so he follows up by re-asking the question:

TAPPER: If I could just follow up a little on Jay's question, so you are a co-sponsor of Senator Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill, and I understand there are a lot of different paths to universal coverage, but his bill that you've co-sponsored would essentially eliminate private insurance. Is that something you could support?

WARREN: He's got a runway for that. I think we get everybody together. And that's what it is, we'll decide. I've also co-sponsored other bills, including expanding Medicaid as another approach that we use. But what's really important to me about this is we never lose sight of what the center is, because the center is about making sure that every single person in this country gets the coverage they need and that it's at a price that they can afford. We start with our values, we'll get to the right place.

(APPLAUSE)

TAPPER: So, theoretically, though, there could be a role for private insurance companies under President Warren?

WARREN: There could. Or there could be a temporary role. Even Bernie's plan has a runway before it gets there, because it's — look, it's a big and complex system, and we've got to make sure that we land this in a way that doesn't do any harm. Everybody has got to stay covered. It's critical.

Quite simply, I don't hear in any of those words the support for Medicare for All that's widely assumed to be her position.

What is Elizabeth Warren's actual plan for addressing the health care crisis in America? Is it anything like the Sanders and Jayapal proposals, or is she shielding with words and options her actual preference, which sounds suspiciously like a free-market-with-regulation plan?

If the latter, she should say so, because currently it looks like she's obfuscating, a dangerous approach for someone with her otherwise progressive credibility. I think it's time Elizabeth Warren announced her actual position.
 

"Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery"-- Or Did Wilde Get That Wrong?

Luke Savage has a very good question for Jacobin readers this week: Who Will Be the American Justin Trudeau? "With a restless Democratic base leaning left," he wrote, "party centrists are looking for their Justin Trudeau-- a candidate who will seem progressive while preserving the status quo." I offered 4 pretty obvious possibilities in a twitter poll yesterday:

The question wasn't who's as good looking as Trudeau, but it was always a neck and neck race between Beto and Kamala anyway. A friend of mine was making fun of Trevor Noah Monday for referring to Julian Castro as "a progressive candidate." I almost defended Noah, explaining to my friend that although Castro's record shows him to be nothing more than a garden variety establishment Democrat, he is running as a progressive. All those popular Bernie ideas and Elizabeth Warren ideas just floating around out there, makes it much easier for clueless political hacks to redo themselves as "progressive," progressive-lite or progressivish.

Luke Savage is no fan of Prime Minister Trudeau's. Trudeau may look dreamy to some and especially awesome in contrast to the lump of stinking crap sitting in the Oval Office but... he and his Liberal Party made a deliberate decision before the 2015 Canadian elections to "embrace left-leaning rhetoric around taxes, spending, the economy, and social policy. Unlike other recent efforts from the political center (notably Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential run), Trudeau made a professed desire to tax the rich and fight inequality a central theme of his campaign, and reaped the electoral rewards. When examined in detail the Liberal program was in fact fairly modest and has only grown tamer in government. Yet by embracing the language of redistribution and activist government, albeit in vague and qualified terms, Trudeau successfully convinced large numbers of Canadians that they were voting for a progressive, left-wing agenda-- a narrative that came to be channeled in media coverage both during and after the election."

Savage seems certain "some centrist Democrats will very likely look to Trudeau’s charade as a model to be emulated." It's too late for Biden, Bloomberg, McAuliffe, Frackenlooper or that Starbucks guy to pretend to be anything but right-of-center, but just take a look at the ultimate political opportunist, Kirsten Gillibrand if you want to see someone turn on a dime.

The Liberal campaign of 2015, for all the hype it generated, was anything but radical in tone. Nevertheless, a carefully crafted platform incorporating language about taxing the rich, spending more on public goods, and rejecting austerity gave many ordinary Canadians a different impression while simultaneously reassuring elites they had nothing to fear.

For one thing, it promised to raise taxes on “the wealthiest 1% while cutting them for the middle class” and closing loopholes benefiting the rich. In the realm of social policy, Trudeau championed the Canada Child Benefit-- a means-tested cash transfer-- as a way to help low-income families. The platform’s biggest theme was arguably deficit-financed investment in “social infrastructure,” supposedly signalling a break from prevailing economic orthodoxy and (for some commentators) a bold embrace of activist government.

Parts of the plan were mostly illusion from the get-go. While the language of the “1 percent” vaguely hinted at Occupy-inflected class rhetoric, the corresponding policy actually amounted to a net reduction in income taxes. Though the government did create a new bracket for incomes over $200,000 a year at a marginal rate of 33 percent, its “middle-class tax cut” also lowered taxes on incomes between $45,282 and $90,563, a move whose biggest beneficiaries were ultimately those in the top 10 percent of incomes-- hardly the “middle class” as most people understand it, and certainly not the poor. Tax loopholes, such as one that allows compensation earned through stock options to be taxed at half the regular rate (mainly used by lushly paid corporate executives) have remained open despite the Liberal commitment to close them. Late last year, supposedly in response to Trump administration policy, the government also unveiled billions in corporate tax cuts-- hardly the behavior of a left-populist administration.

With childcare widely inaccessible and cripplingly expensive across the country, the Canada Child Benefit was a particularly resonant campaign promise. While it is indeed a cash transfer to low-income families and an improvement on the Conservative-era benefit it replaced, Trudeau advanced the policy in explicit opposition to the universal public model being championed by his rivals in the NDP, declaring, “When it comes to child benefits, fair doesn’t mean giving everyone the same thing, it means giving people what they need.” While this no doubt sounded intuitively correct to some voters, it in effect meant leaving Canada’s inefficient, pricey, and market-driven childcare model intact while offering subsidies to some families worth a maximum of a few thousand dollars a year (childcare in Canadian cities outside Quebec can easily cost $1,000 a month or more).

Trudeau’s supposed embrace of deficits and Keynesian economics employed a similar sleight of hand. While the government is indeed running deficits and pursuing an infrastructure program, it has channeled billions into an infrastructure bank designed to attract private capital and even hinted at the mass privatization of public assets. The once-promised “social infrastructure” and stimulus spending that enabled Trudeau to rhetorically repudiate austerity has therefore taken a back seat to an effectively neoliberal model of public spending.

What was innovative about this strategy was the way it channeled widespread concern about poverty, inequality, and an economy rigged towards the rich while ultimately offering little to meaningfully address those problems. For some, it appeared to reflect the same priorities as the NDP platform-- which included among other things the creation of national childcare and prescription-drug benefit programs-- allowing the Liberals to absorb and neutralize competition to their left. (The NDP, for what it’s worth, needlessly compromised its own program and created space for the Liberals by promising balanced budgets).

After more than three years in government, Trudeau’s Liberals have done little if anything to alter the economic fundamentals of the country or significantly improve material conditions for most of its people. Nevertheless, the prime minister has made a regular habit of issuing pronouncements about inequality at international conferences that seem deliberately choreographed to maintain his 2015 brand. In a similar vein, his government has also introduced rather misleadingly titled “national strategies” for both poverty and housing that are far less grand in scope than their labeling suggests (essentially amounting to a series of small subsidies and new metrics).

A combination of superficial gestures, bad-faith promises, skillful branding, and political sleights of hand, Trudeau’s inequality scam has proven a resounding success.

How might an opportunistic Democratic politician looking to win over the base while reassuring corporate America launch their own phony war on inequality in the 2020 primaries and beyond? Justin Trudeau’s strategy offers us some clues.

Instead of simply ignoring or rendering poverty, inequality, and public goods secondary to his brand, Trudeau has made them central, even faintly invoking the language of class to that end. But despite going to great lengths to show how much he recognizes people’s problems he has always remained assiduously vague about how he intends to solve them and adopted a decidedly nonconfrontational posture towards corporate Canada and other powerful interests in the process. While appearing to embrace core progressive concerns, particularly around taxes and social policy, he has quietly doubled down on all-too-familiar neoliberal shibboleths and policy thinking-- rejecting universality and leveraging a phony language of activist government.

With potentially transformative proposals such as a Green New Deal and Medicare for All on the table in the US ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and an anxious donor class tugging in the opposite direction, it’s all too easy to imagine centrist Democrats looking to Trudeau’s example. If the American left, broadly defined, wants to avoid a repeat of Canada’s experience it should be vigilant about the prospect of phony wars on inequality-- and settle for nothing less than the real thing.

Politics-- The Art Of The Possible? Please, Give Me A Break

-by Valley Girl

"Politics is the Art of the Possible."

Hearing that phrase always makes me grind my teeth. One person on a college email list I am on (all Democrats) likes to repeat this phrase. Sanctimonious Bullshit I say.

On his twitter stream, Howie posted a link to a Jacobin article, which I read with great interest. And having read that, I went off to Google and found an excellent, thoughtful article from 2010 about “the art of the possible.” I will use an edited version of this first here, because it sets the stage for the more recent Jacobin article. [my additions are bolded]

The problem with “the art of the possible.”

Whenever a commentator declares that "politics is the art of the possible," I'm on my guard. What I'm being told, I suspect, is to accept apparent present conditions as immutable facts of life, and to trim my goals accordingly. I'm being told to let injustices stand.

Like all banalities, the familiar dictum contains an obvious truth. To be politically effective, you have to be able to distinguish between your desires and realities on the ground, between aspirations and resources.

But like most banalities, it begs more questions than it answers. How is "the possible" defined? Where are its limits drawn? Who draws them? Theoretically, the possible is an elastic and speculative category. But the dictum draws no distinctions between the immediately unlikely and the ultimately impossible, takes no notice of the infinite and shifting gradations between them, and of the impact of human agency in shifting an outcome from one category to another.

What's usually meant when politics is pronounced the art of the possible is that politics is a calculation of the probable, an exercise in the pragmatic, the expedient or the opportune.

The adage implies forcefully that minimal improvements or lesser evils are the only realistic aim--and any demand for more is self-indulgence. It's an injunction not only to compromise, but to get your compromise in first. To placate hostile forces in advance, as Obama tried to do with health care reform.

Obama's election was in itself a vivid display of the eruption of the supposedly impossible into the realm of the ordinary. The slogan "Yes we can" evoked a defiance of assumed limitations. Now Obama's supporters are being lectured for expecting too much from the president, for not understanding that "politics is the art of the possible." Here, as in so many instances, the "possible" is a code word for what vested interests will permit.

...When people speak of politics as the art of the possible, they imply a world of unexamined assumptions about the limits of the possible-- a world that embodies only the limits of their own experience or imagination. In its unreflective way, the dictum treats the superficial conditions of the moment as unchangeable realities. In effect, it serves as a denial of possibility, a closing of the aperture into the future.

It also urges us not to feel the urgency of injustice. The dictum is cold comfort to the oppressed, the victims of poverty, discrimination and violence, who are asked to continue suffering while distant arbiters decide what is or is not "possible" in their case. It sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the desperate on the altar of a self-serving pragmatism.

Impatience, in fact, is a necessary political virtue. Without it, even the most gradual change is inconceivable. And a politician who is not impatient with injustice, with needless death and destruction, is worse than useless.

Those who dispute the dictum are accused of utopianism, which is condemned as an intellectual and emotional error--not just a mistake, but a danger. Of course utopias are no substitute for the practice of politics, and can serve as an evasion of present responsibilities. But a practical politics stripped of serious ideas about what would constitute a just human society is a greater and more common menace.

…Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be examined, from which familiar social arrangements can be revealed as unjust, irrational or unnecessary. They are a means of expanding the borders of the possible.

You can't chart the surface of the earth or compute distances without a point of elevation--a mountaintop, a star or a satellite. You can't chart the possible in society without an angle of vision, a mental mountaintop that permits the widest sweep. The pundits championing the art of the possible are the flat-earthers of today, afraid to venture too far from shore lest they fall off the edge.

It's striking how often pundits of "the possible" rest their case on all kinds of gross improbabilities.

In insisting that there was no alternative to neoliberal economics, many assumed, in defiance of obvious objections, that speculation had no limits, that wealth-making could be severed from productive activity, that private interests would magically coagulate into public benefit, that industrial growth could be limitless on a planet with finite resources. Here, the art of the possible has been revealed as a dismal pseudo-science, its certainties built on foundations of sand.

It is very much the vice of the center-left. The right is bolder, more confident, more reckless and strongly driven by their own utopian visions (which would be dystopias for the rest of us). In contrast, liberals advise each other to trim their ambitions, to sacrifice their goals in order to remain politically viable.

In the wake of 9/11, liberals in the U.S. largely signed up to the Afghanistan invasion--because to fail to do so would place them outside an apparently immutable pro-war consensus. Those who kept their nerve and set about building an antiwar movement proved the more farsighted.

Of course, if your politics is about personal aggrandizement, then it will be "the art of the possible" in the narrowest sense. But for those who seek in politics a means of changing society for the better, it must be the art of redefining the possible. The art-science-craft of coaxing from the present, with its complex mix of possibilities and limitations, a just and sustainable human future.

Now back to the Jacobin article Howie posted on Twitter, The Midterms’ Winners, Losers, and Double-Losers. Keep in mind the first article above while reading below, because they mesh perfectly.

By running to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory.

In the throes of an identity crisis and scrambling to recover ground lost in 2016, Democrats tried a wide array of tactics in this year’s midterm elections. Some tacked left, others tacked right. Both strategies yielded mixed results. But the major difference between the two approaches is that the Democrats who parroted conservative talking points ceded politically to the Right, even when they won their elections. Those who articulated a bold progressive political vision claimed a crucial victory for the Left, even when they appeared to go home empty-handed.

When Democrats compromise on left-wing values to win office, that’s a draw for the Left at best. This is because the task of the Left in the political sphere isn’t simply to prevent Republicans from gaining majorities-- it’s to defeat the right-wing agenda, in all its forms. If that’s your goal, incorporating conservative positions and rhetoric into your own campaign is an unsound strategy, destined to undermine you in the long run.

Not Whether, But How You Win

Consider the case of incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Donnelly tacked way right-- touting his collaboration with Trump and voicing support for the proposed border wall, promising to “cut regulations that cost jobs,” positioning himself as the more reasonable of two pro-life candidates, and warning that Medicare for All would pass “over my dead body.” He calls his brand of politics “Hoosier common-sense middle,” but the word he’s looking for is “conservative.” [editor: or opportunism and inauthenticity, long the mark of Donnelly's political career, both in the House and then the Senate.]

Donnelly lost. Even with an incumbent’s advantage and the ringing endorsement of Barack Obama [Proponent of the “The Art of the Possible,” “President Pre-compromise,” who visited Indiana for a last-minute rally with the senator, [Donnelly] was unseated by Republican challenger and Trump acolyte Mike Braun. Braun is an aggressively pro-corporate multi-millionaire businessman and free-market evangelist who exploited a man’s death against his widow’s wishes in a campaign ad designed to spread fear about undocumented immigrants.

[Bernie] Sanders did something even more important than defeating his opponent on the political stage: he gave millions of people permission to take their innate disgust with economic inequality and exploitation seriously as a political framework.

There are two main reasons to be leery of Donnelly’s approach. First, it doesn’t work.

When Democrats tack to the right-- often on economic issues, less often on social ones-- they justify it as a shrewd stratagem, even a prerequisite for victory. But the idea that Democrats stand a better chance at winning office if they posture as Republican-lite is baseless. Ordinary people, whose living standards are declining as their wages stagnate and their safety net disappears, are increasingly attracted to distinct and explicit political agendas and proposals for bold change.

Not even the very worst Democrap running for president

So when a Republican puts forth a brazen (if dystopian) vision of the future, and a Democrat responds by proposing a watered-down version of it, the Republican has the advantage. This is clearly what happened in Donnelly’s case. It’s also the reason that arch-centrist Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Indiana.

Second, politics isn’t just about whether a candidate wins. It’s also about how they win, and on whose terms.

Elections are a unique opportunity to speak to people on a mass scale about the principles and values that should order society. Political candidates have a chance to say whatever they want to thousands and sometimes millions of people at a time. The choices they make about how to wield that power shape the popular conception of what ideas are admissible, what policies are desirable, and what social transformations are achievable.

Political campaigns are always either expanding or constricting the imagination of the public. For a candidate whose sense of political purpose extends beyond selfish careerism-- someone who wants not simply to improve their personal station, but for their political ideas to become ascendant in the long-term-- a campaign is an opportunity to educate and inspire constituents with a positive, unambiguous plan for a better society.

When a Republican like Braun stokes the fires of xenophobia and racism, and a Democrat like Donnelly responds by reiterating his support for a border wall to keep immigrants out-- promising that he won’t let the “[menacing voiceover] radical left” abolish ICE and asserting that we must do “whatever’s necessary to protect our border”-- this entrenches rather than challenges the conservative worldview. It’s a political victory for the Right, no matter who wins office.

Similarly, when a Republican calls for “market-driven health care solutions” as part of a larger program to pad corporate pockets at the expense of working people’s health, and a Democrat responds by aiming his indignation at the segments of the Left seeking to attain universal public healthcare, the Democrat has thrown the match. He’s wasted his opportunity to lay the groundwork for long-term left-wing victory by proposing an alternative to the right-wing capitalist vision of a world where people are subordinate to profits.

Winning on those terms is far from guaranteed-- and it’s hardly a victory at all.

A Widening Split

Donnelly’s a somewhat extreme example, at least on social issues. Though many Democrats agree with him on the need to cater to large businesses and the impermissibility of Medicare for All, most are pro-choice and oppose Trump’s border wall. But Donnelly’s strategy is not as anomalous in the Democratic Party as you might think.

Barack Obama could have gone anywhere in the country in the days before the midterm elections. He chose three, and one of those was Indiana. There, he stumped for a man who decided to campaign against a racist capitalist by shadowboxing with imaginary “radical left” opponents. Obama threw his weight behind Donnelly-- who openly opposes amnesty for immigrants and refugees-- by saying, “We need leaders who will actually stand up for what is right.”

Politics isn’t just about whether a candidate wins. It’s also about how they win, and on whose terms.

Thus we saw how the Democratic Party establishment is fully on board with this strategy of Thus swapping political conviction for what they assumed would be partisan victory.

Mostly this manifests as a fetishization of compromise. The Democrats recovered a majority in the House yesterday. Instead of taking the occasion to claim a victory for the Left over the Right, Nancy Pelosi promised that Congress would now function as a “bipartisan marketplace of ideas.” Even in their wildest political fantasies, basking in the glow of victory, Democrats see themselves sharing governing power with Republicans rather than defeating Republicans’ ideas.

This obsession with combining left and right politics, instead of simply pushing against the Right from the left, is the same strategy that for more than thirty years has kept Democrats busy mastering the art of compromise while Republicans pursue their high-octane austerity, privatization, and reactionary social agenda without any pretense to bipartisanship. Not only is it pathetic to behold, but the payoff is supposed to be electoral victory. That victory has been elusive.

Meanwhile, concessionary centrism from the Left matched by zealous ambition from the Right have combined to produce a rightward drift in American policy, especially as pertains to corporate empowerment and evisceration of the public sector.

But there is a split widening within the Democratic Party, and not every candidate in the midterms struck a centrist pose. Quite a few Democrats tacked left instead, contra Obama and Pelosi.

National Nurses United found that in 52 percent of congressional races, Democratic candidates supported Medicare for All or single-payer health care. This surge in candidate support for Medicare for All is pretty astonishing considering that two years ago Hillary Clinton, then the face of the Democratic Party, assured the public that single-payer healthcare will “never, ever come to pass.”

Candidates have changed their tune because the national conversation has shifted dramatically-- and that’s happened because Bernie Sanders has a different conception of the political value of an electoral campaign than mainstream Democrats do.

In 2016, when he went head-to-head with Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, his goal was not to simply beat his opponent by whatever means necessary-- though, tellingly, he did come much closer to winning than anyone expected, given that party elites reviled and actively restrained him. Instead he acted like a candidate acts when they have a clear political vision, and their goal is to popularize that vision and inspire a new constituency that will fight for that vision for years to come.

To this end, Sanders put forward a bold platform that tested the limits of what Americans thought was possible, while remaining achievable on the condition that Americans could muster the political will. He unflinchingly campaigned on ideas that would transform working people’s lives but that few Democrats had the guts to publicly propose, including Medicare for All to tuition-free college and student-debt forgiveness.

Putting this platform before a mass audience not only established new norms of legitimacy in the political mainstream-- it also worked to rewrite the narrative about the balance of power in American society. Sanders’ platform told a story about America with a new protagonist, the non-affluent majority, and a new antagonist, the ruling-class minority that profits from everyone else’s hard work and desperation.

As a result, even though he lost the primary election, Sanders emerged over the next two years as the most well-liked politician in America. Popular support for Medicare for All shot up from 21 percent in 2014 to a whopping 70 percent this year. Popular support for tuition-free public university reached 60 percent, up from an idea so obscure that pollsters didn’t even inquire about it.

By treating his campaign as an opportunity to reset the terms of the debate and raise the expectations of the ordinary people who comprise the broad working class, Sanders did something even more important and long-lasting than defeating his opponent on the political stage: he gave millions of people permission to take their innate disgust with economic inequality and exploitation seriously as a political framework. A majority of Americans now want to eliminate the private insurance industry and replace it with a single public alternative, and more than half of Democratic congressional candidates ran on the issue this November.

Candidates who backed Medicare for All and other progressive policies sustained a combination of defeats and victories. But they had in common a willingness to walk through the door that Sanders opened and use their campaigns to raise ordinary people’s expectations for what a good society can look like.

In an era dominated by unhinged Republicans and equivocating Democrats, running a widely observed campaign aimed at generalizing progressive and democratic socialist principles is a victory for the Left, whether or not the candidate defeats their opponent. When the Left runs as the Right and it loses, as Donnelly did, that’s a double loss. When the Left runs as the Left and it wins, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, and Franklin Bynum did this midterm season, that’s a double victory. And even when explicitly left-wing candidates don’t win office, their losses aren’t complete if they’ve dedicated their campaigns to articulating and popularizing progressive and democratic-socialist ideas on a mass scale. Let’s build more of those kinds of campaigns, instead of insisting on losing twice.

Kirsten Gillibrand, another would be Democratic presidential contender

Closing note: I (VG) graduated from college in 1969. It was a time of great social upheaval. I found an email I wrote to someone on the college list, back in Feb. 2013.

Our conversation happened to remind me of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I remember coming to this view back in college or thereabouts. Probably arose b/c of observations re: women's lib, and more general political protest that included violent actions (Weathermen, etc) and to a lesser extent very radical views from women's libbers. Even though what they did and said went beyond what I might have done myself, I was NOT willing to condemn them, privately, or especially in political conversations, of which there were many at that time. As best as I can recapture my thoughts, I felt that those on the extreme left were the ones driving political change in a positive direction, and I applauded their courage and commitment. Seemed to me that those who would take the "let's be reasonable" stand-- "those radicals are nuts"-- didn't do much to change things. My view was that those who pushed the boundaries way way beyond the comfort level of most people were essential to change. They pushed the boundaries such that what was considered acceptable middle ground, or whatever, moved to the left also. That was my own untutored analysis, based on my own opinions and observations at the time. I remember quite well coming to this point of view, and it seemed rather obvious to me at the time.

Only later did I learn, via internet reading, (20-30 years later) that this had been codified as a principle-- the Overton window or window of discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton. His political aims were quite different from mine. Nonetheless, his stated theory is seemingly identical to what I at arrived at on my own. And, right now (2013), the ultra die hard religious right, and the ultra conservatives, and the neo-cons are pushing the Overton window firmly in a rightward direction. Way back when, in college, of course, I saw the radical lefties pushing the window to the left.

Back to the present: We have to keep pushing the window of discourse to the left. The ideas that Bernie champions, which after all are supported by a majority of voters, need to be put front and center. Read this from DWT.

The Man in The Middle lost-- and now we have a fascist in his place

What's Up With The Democratic Party? They Rolling Towards Big Wins?

Don't expect the video above to be played at the "left-leaning" (NOT) Democratic Party conference today. "Voters," wrote Will Bunch (more below), "understood that a vote for Bernie was no guarantee they'd actually get single-payer health care or free public tuition the day after inauguration, but that really wasn't the point. The point was that someone understood their problems with seeing a doctor, or getting their 21-year-old son out of the basement. Somebody listened...and understood."

If you're unaware of DWT disdain contempt for the DCCC and the DSCC you must be new to the blog. Welcome! With a caveat: if you're a yellow dog Democrat-- much less a Blue Dog or a New Dem-- you may not like what you find here. We've been enthusiastic about helping heal the wounds left over between Hillary and Bernie factions from last year's campaign. We have been urging wary Bernie activists to not act vindictively towards Hillary supporters who have adopted Bernie's platform. In fact, Blue America has been endorsing congressional candidates who backed Hillary in 2016 and are campaigning-- sincerely campaigning-- on Bernie's issues now. We've found examples of candidates who endorsed Hillary in 2016 being much better qualified to run than candidates who backed Bernie. Of course, there are plenty of candidates who endorsed Bernie who are much better than candidates who were the Hillary backers. Examples: in TX-21, Berniecrat Tom Wakely is a million times better than the creeps from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who supported Hillary. Ditto down in CA-49, where Doug Applegate is far and away the better progressive candidate than Hillary bundler and establishment puppet Mike Levin. Here in CA-34, Jimmy Gomez backed Hillary and not only campaigned on Bernie issues, but wrote and passed cutting edge type legislation in the state Assembly that was enacted it into law-- probably why he's been endorsed by so many Bernie delegates over several well-meaning-but unaccomplished Bernie volunteers in the race. In IL-13 and OK-05 we're behind Berniecrats David Gill and Tom Guild and we feel just as strongly about Kim Weaver, who backed Hillary and who is running against Steve King in IA-04 on an aggressively populist and progressive platform. As Brianna Wu said when she jumped into a primary race against conservaDem Stephen Lynch in Boston, "[T]he contentious primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton revealed a deep divide that must be reconciled. There is a disconnect between those marginalized and our party leaders who vote too often as moderate Republicans. I personally supported Hillary Clinton in the primary, but today I see the vision of Bernie Sanders for America is one we must bring to pass. I believe today’s Democratic party is ill-equipped to fight the Trump administration’s assault on women, on people of color, on the poor, and on the LGBT community. We do have true progressives, but too often they don’t have the support of the party establishment."

I was surprised this past week at the vitriol on line from the Clinton die-hards towards Bernie. (Or maybe what I'm seeing online are the left-over Putin-bots from Albania and Macedonia.) But when Bernie was in the heart of Hillary country a few days ago (Maddow's MSNBC show) and explained the inability of progressives to effectively take on and defeat reactionaries like Mitch McConnell-- although he could have easily been referring to Devin Nunes-- by saying that "The Democratic Party is feeble and unable to fight back," clueless Hillary supporters exploded into a frenzied rage on twitter.

The context to see this in is a report from Newsweek's Lachlan Markay that Democratic donors are gathering in DC this week to plot their version of the Resistance, a version, it's safe to assume, is shared with the Clinton Machine, with Schumer and with Pelosi (all of whom worship at their alter).He reports that the heads of the DNC, DCCC and DSCC "will huddle with activists, operatives, and deep-pocketed Democratic financiers at a biannual conference hosted by the Democracy Alliance, a leading left-wing donor collaborative at Washington’s ritzy Mandarin Oriental hotel." You know how the media refers to arch-conservatives as "moderates?" They call actual moderates "left-wing." One of the things they will discuss-- and excuse me if I doubt that many "activists" will be among the throng of scumbag lobbyists and fat-cats-- is "laying the groundwork for Democratic campaigns in next year’s midterm elections." That could-- as it has over the past decade-- spell DOOM. Let me give you an example. One of the worst and slimiest of the fat cats is a rich slob from Virginia, now living in San Diego, Ira Lechner. He's a huge donor and Pelosi basically lives up his ass. Lechner decided that the only candidate who ever took on Darrell Issa and nearly won-- Doug Applegate-- should be "pushed" out of the race by Pelosi to make room for a Hillary fundraiser and crony of Lechner's, some Orange County attorney named Mike Levin. Pelosi's response was, "leave it to me; I'll push him out of the race." Sure...

The Alliance brings together high-dollar liberal donors—individuals, labor unions, and charitable foundations—that pledge to give at least $200,000 annually to a suite of left-wing organizations. Through its “partners,” as the donors are known internally, the Alliance in 2015 raised $75 million for its supported organizations, an annual record for the group.

...On Wednesday, conference attendees will mingle at a welcome reception with Rep. Keith Ellison, the new vice-chairman of the DNC, and Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

At a reception the following day, attendees will hear from former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, the DNC’s new chairman.

And on Friday, the Alliance will host what it describes as “the first in a regular series of off-the-record dialogues between progressive political donors and Democratic Party officials about the future.”

That event will feature the chairs of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, respectively—and the executive directors of both groups.

Those officials will be on hand to answer donors’ “questions about the Democratic Party’s plans for winning in 2018 and beyond,” according to the conference agenda.

Donors in attendance will include Michael Vachon, a top aide to billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros; health care technology mogul Paul Egerman; Dallas philanthropist Naomi Aberly; Susan Sandler, the daughter of subprime mortgage pioneer Herb Sandler; and Ian Simmons, the husband of Hyatt hotel fortune heiress Liesel Pritzker Simmons.

Just what the Democratic Party needs to appear even worse than Trump-- more children of subprime mortgage pioneers and more Pritzkers! Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch offered a good antidote to the DC shillery this week in a column entitled He's America's most popular politician. Why won't they listen? "While the grand poobahs of a Democratic Party that Sanders has circled but never joined during his long unconventional life in America," he wrote, "were back in Washington, still clucking about Hillary's loss, headless chickens in a topless organization-- the Vermont senator ventured into the belly of the political beast for a remarkable town hall that was broadcast that evening on MSNBC."

The setting was McDowell County, West Virginia-- a remote part of the Mountaineer State that's been particularly hard hit by the slow death of the American coal industry. It's a county with an iconoclastic tradition that-- defying stereotypes about white Appalachia-- went for Barack Obama when he was elected the first black president in 2008. But in 2016, McDowell fell hard for Trump-- a bombastic billionaire xenophobe who promised to bring coal back by denying climate change. There are certainly a few similarities between the 45th president and the Vermonter-- rejection of trade deals, a pitch tailored to the "forgotten" men and women-- but their differences on most major issues are quite profound.

Yet by the end of the hour, Sanders had most of the audience in Trump Country eating out of his red democratic-socialist hands, and he did it not by pandering but by simply stating what he believes-- that all American citizens have a right to health care, to education and political and economic fairness.

The much-maligned Trumpcare/Ryancare legislation certainly gave Sanders an opening for political truth-telling. "At a time when we have a massive level of income and wealth inequality, this legislation would provide, over a 10-year period, $275 billion in tax breaks to the top 2 percent," Sanders told them. "So when people tell you we don't have enough money to invest in McDowell County or rebuild our infrastructure, nationally... don't believe them."

A retired miner thanked Sanders for supporting a bill to restore health care benefits for coal miners that Republicans would allow to lapse. "I never dreamt that I'd get to thank you personally for the bill that you are co-sponsoring," he said. "I'm one of those miners that will lose his health care at the end of April if they don't pass that law. I think it's kind of ironic that a senator from the Northeast takes care of my benefits better than someone like Mitch McConnell." Another woman hugged Sanders, because he supports fighting the big polluters in Coal Country.

Since November, we're heard so much angst from Democratic leaders wondering how the party can connect with its lost voters in the Rust Belt and in Appalachia and win back those states-- including Pennsylvania-- that gave Trump his narrow Electoral College victory. And we're going to hear so much more clueless angst from them between now and 2020-- even as Bernie Sanders goes to blood-red places like McDowell County and Canton, Mississippi, and makes it look easy.

How easy? A poll taken the other day, even before all the shouting from five months ago has fully died down, made the case that Bernie Sanders is right now the most popular politician in the United States. Sanders-- who as a younger man was getting 2 percent of the vote as a 3rd-party candidate in a tiny rural state and sleeping on his friends' sofas-- now has a 61 percent national approval rating, according to the latest poll by (wait for it...) Fox News. He's more popular than Planned Parenthood (57 percent), Obamacare (50 percent), Donald Trump (48 percent, a lot better than the president has done in other recent surveys), and the lowly GOP (29 percent). Ho-ho-ho, but then Sanders is also nearly twice as popular as the Democratic Party (32 percent).

Remember, this dude is a kind of a socialist, and the word on the streets was that-- if Sanders had defeated Clinton for the Democratic nomination-- Karl Rove and company were going to destroy him with ads about all the hippy-dippy things Bernie said back in his more radical youth. In reality, the current meme is almost certainly right: Bernie would have won.

...The national Democratic Party-- most of them, anyway-- doesn't understand. They don't see how the dumpster fire that is the Trump presidency gives them the chance of a lifetime to sell real alternatives for the middle class like single-payer health care or a massive infrastructure jobs program that could boost wages. They can't even get it together to fight the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch, who doesn't even try to hide his judicial contempt for the little people who live in places like West Virginia or Mississippi. Sanders is America's most popular politician because he stands for something. The Democratic Party-- afraid that truly connecting with the party's base will alienate its millionaire donor class-- stands for nothing.

This weekend, Paul Heideman, writing for the far-left Jacobin, published what I thought was one of the best political essays of 2017, arguing that Democrats will never get anywhere without a coherent platform for the working class and by merely offering themselves as Not Trump. It starts with a stunning quote from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, that, "We don’t have a party orthodoxy-- they [the Republicans] are ideological.” Heideman argues that an orthodoxy is just what the Democrats need:

And despite the resulting disaster, this desire to have a politics without politics-- this strategy to build a coalition bereft of any clear values or principles-- has continued to animate liberals’ opposition to Trump. Democrats really believe, it seems, that they can subdue the reactionary right without articulating any alternative political vision beyond prudent governance.

The irony here is twofold. First, in clinging to an obviously failing strategy, elite liberalism reveals itself to be an ideology every bit as impervious to contradictory evidence as the reactionary Republicans it defines itself against. And second, for all of the Democrats’ paeans to pragmatism, they are just as committed to their own version of neoliberal capitalism as the Republicans, and just as unwilling to brook dissent with it. In fact, only a few days before declaring the Democrats free of orthodoxy, Pelosi responded to a student’s question about socialism by effusing, “We’re capitalists. That’s just the way it is.”

When attacking the Right, the Democrats are non-ideological and pragmatic. As soon as a challenge from the Left is sighted, however, the party suddenly stops being coy, and declares itself forthrightly in favor of capitalism. The result is an ever-rightward-moving political landscape that ends up abetting the very forces and figures that Democrats oppose-- including Trump.

The author makes a strong case that leading Democrats and the progressive media-- what's left of that, anyway-- are so convinced that Trump can be destroyed over a scandal or hypocrisy, or over his frequent lies, or not releasing his income taxes, that they're shunning the hard work of pitching a real alternative vision to middle-class voters.

I could not agree with this critique more-- maybe because I lived through Watergate, the scandal that's back in vogue these days (including a joint appearance last night on CNN by Carl Bernstein AND John Dean, thrilling this one-time teenage Watergate geek.) And yes, Watergate took down Richard Nixon, and there's definitely a chance that Russiagate could be every bit as bad for Trump. But Watergate only briefly slowed the broader, backward forces of reaction that claimed victory, with destructive long-term effects, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And will the factors that gave us Trumpism in McDowell County, Youngstown and Erie-- the working-class anger and the despair-- won't disappear even if Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn go to jail and Trump himself gets impeached.

And stop framing this as about 2020-- that's light years away. My sense is that Bernie has barely thought about the next presidential election (when he'll be 79, if you're curious). He's out there listening to people and thinking about what can he do to sell people on a more progressive vision for America, right now. Today. If the national Democratic Party doesn't jump on this train, and quickly, they could be standing on the platform, dazed and dumbfounded, for a long, long time. The only thing that's worse than Trumpism is Trumpism without a real alternative.