The People, Yes! Let’s Crush the Woke Plutonomy! An Interview + Review Of "The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right And New Left Are Rising" By Krystal Ball And Saagar Enjeti

-by John Siman

As I reread in his book, Hate Inc. Matt Taibbi’s analysis of how the corporate media have worse-than-cynically divided our nation into mutually-despicable but highly profitable demographic silos, and as I await the publication of Thomas Frank’s forthcoming book The People, No!, which will, I believe, be about the grim suppression of Populism in American history, I have been utterly surprised by the sudden appearance-- as if out of nowhere-- of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s delightful YouTube show Rising, which every day now dispenses brilliantly produced, multiple doses of actual Populist conversation. Glenn Greenwald, who Krystal says is one of her heroes, calls it “the super-perky radical trans-ideological 21st-century subversive sequel to the Katie Couric/Matt Lauer morning Today Show in its heyday minus all that unpleasantness.” The People, Yes!

And, mirabile dictu, Krystal and Saagar’s Rising originates from within the most bubblicious confines of the D.C. bubble-- their studio is literally on K Street-- how is this even possible? How, that is, can their show even be permitted to air in the 21st-century USA, where next-level corporate control requires, as Taibbi has explained, the manufacture of media products as strictly standardized and aggressively dumbed-down as McDonald’s food products are, and in an eco-system even more deleterious to the nation’s health?

Perhaps Krystal and Saagar’s new right + new left friendship presages the actual rising up of a new Populist movement in the USA, out of the long-awaited ruins of neoliberal oligarchy. Well, that might be too much to hope for, but in any event their appearance on the political scene is good news coming at a time when I, for one, thought that good news had gone extinct.

And to top it all off Krystal and Saagar have just written a book, The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising. It’s a collection of thirty-nine of their YouTube essays (twenty written by the nominal Democrat Krystal and nineteen by the nominal Republican Saagar; all thirty-nine were broadcast between last July and this January), with some useful updates and analysis added. Their essays are arranged not chronologically, but according to four rather audacious themes:

Core Rot (the ugly result of the elites’ utter betrayal of the American working class)

Media (why most all Americans hate it)

Identity (understood as a woke intersectionalist weapon effecting societal division)

Theories of Change (Krystal and Saagar really are envisioning a working-class revolution)

Each of these four themes is introduced by a short, insightful, jointly-written essay. The whole thing weighs in at a very lively and readable 243 pages, and it’s a remarkable feat of modern publishing that so many of the essays in the printed-on-paper book had so recently been broadcast on the Internet -- about a quarter of them since Thanksgiving. Soon after its launch on February 8, Krystal and Saagar’s book made it into the top ten on Amazon’s list of new releases.

And while their book was selling so briskly on Amazon, their YouTube viewership continued its months-long increase: Rising reached 300,000 subscribers in February. (The now-venerable Jimmy Dore Show has about 700,000 subscribers.) “The runaway success of our show and of so many others on YouTube,” they write, “is a direct indictment of the mainstream media” (p. 82).

So then, if we really are witnessing the risingof a new Populist movement, it seems that it will be characterized by media content of sparklingly high production value and remarkably quick turnaround. Leonidas Lafayette Polk and William Jennings Bryan would be duly impressed.

Indeed Krystal is so TV-polished and camera-ready that when I first saw her electronic image on Rising a few months ago (I had never seen her in the three years during which she was a co-host on MSNBC), I instinctively assumed that she would be just another plastic mouthpiece of official Neoliberal opinion, another “super-perky” (pace Glenn Greenwald) robot for the National Security State. Saagar, similarly, who is a decade younger than Krystal, presents himself as a very cheerful, very well-adjusted, very well-dressed (awesome ties!) D.C. politics nerd and describes himself as a conservative Trump-supporter who vehemently opposes socialism. And yet, when they come together, they write and say things like this: “The old order will die. It is dying before our eyes. The only question is how long before a new order is born” (p. 23).





They are intellectuals, and they are writing from the gut. Here is a sentence from Saagar’s essay, “My Dire Warning for the American Right”: “[W]e need to turn an eye toward our decrepit city in Washington to highlight just how exactly we got to a point where polling indicates that almost half the American public wants to burn our institutions to the ground” (p. 194).

Both Krystal and Saagar, I should point out here, are fascinated with the mechanics of the New Deal, with all the details of how Franklin Roosevelt was able to engineer a revolutionary transformation of the federal bureaucracy. Krystal, in fact, has written a book in which she envisions a new New Deal, Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World, and Saagar gave us a mini-lecture about the insider political genius whom he calls “the chief architect of the New Deal,” Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran. Saagar’s point was to illustrate just how gargantuan a task it is to reinvent government. It’s something he obviously thinks about a lot.

Also salient: Krystal was born and raised and continues to live in-- and to commute to K Street from-- rural King George County, Virginia. She retains the good manners of someone who grew up in the South. Saagar, the son of immigrants, grew up in College Station, Texas. Flyover country. My point here is that they both have, in real life, rubbed shoulders with actual... deplorables.

And so it is altogether fitting that it is from Krystal and Saagar that I have learned the revolutionary word plutonomy. It looks like plutocracy, like a word from Ancient Greek, but it isn’t. It is, as we shall see, more badass than that.

Back in Ancient Athens, when Plato and Xenophon were recalling how Socrates had described the type of regime in which private wealth determines public power, Plato used the word oligarchy and Xenophon the word plutocracy. Two words, but a single outcome: the rich rule and the poor are disenfranchised. And so Plato in The Republic observes the fundamental political failure of oligarchy/plutocracy: it causes a city to be divided against itself, into a city of the rich and a city of the poor, which, though they continue to dwell together in the same spot, continuously plot against one another.

And what then becomes of these disenfranchised poor? In The Constitution of the Athenians Aristotle presents us with a worst-case scenario, but a historical one nevertheless:

[In the time before Solon, Aristotle writes] the Athenian regime was in all respects oligarchical, and the poor and their wives and their children were enslaved to the rich, and they were called Dependents and Sixth-part-sharecroppers, for it was under a sixth-part rent that they farmed the fields of the rich-- all the land was owned by the rich. And if they ever failed to pay their rents, both they and their children were liable to arrest...

So much for economic plight of the disenfranchised poor-- what of the ruling rich, the oligarchs /plutocrats? Well, they get richer and richer of course. And this is why plutonomybecomes for us an essential term of analysis: it denotes the economic arrangements that arise naturally from oligarchic/plutocratic political arrangements.

Plutonomy means that wealth grows only for the wealthy. It’s the economy of a plutocracy. And so plutonomy is not, as we have seen, an ancient word, but a modern portmanteau word, a fusion of plutocracy + economy.

And Krystal and Saagar describe the dynamic of plutonomy with vividness, as in this passage from their book:

Our entire economy has become increasingly oriented around the special flowers of Richard Florida’s so-called “Creative Class” [Thomas Frank uses the term “Liberal Class”; during our conversation Saagar used the term “Cosmopolitan Class,” and Krystal the term ”Professional/Managerial Class”; I am old enough to remember “Yuppie Scum”]. These are the lucky, mostly college-educated, types to whom the entire low-wage service community caters: the ones who came mostly from big cities or were identified as “special” in their small towns and put on the college track. They are the Pete Buttigiegs of the world, whose privilege and particular type of intellect gained them access to the elite world and all the stamps of elite privilege that come with it: the people who expect their sustainable [!] sushi to be available at 2 a.m. and for whom an entire army of exhausted and underpaid workers has been marshaled (p. 22).

Michael Hudson describes plutonomy with statistics: “[A]ll the growth in GDP has accrued to the wealthiest 5 Percent since the Obama Recession began in 2008. Obama bailed out the banks instead of the 10 million victimized junk-mortgage holders. The 95 Percent’s share of GDP has shrunk” (The Democrats’ Quandary-- In a Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy, Something Must Give). The rich get richer, and the poor get uninsured gig jobs serving the rich.

Krystal told me that she learned the word plutonomy in the context of Wall Street, from an analyst who communicated the message: “Look. All the money to be made comes from catering to the plutocrats-- with luxury goods, with luxury experiences, with luxury services. That’s where all the money is to be made because no one else has anything.”

She continued: “So our whole economy has become a plutonomy, where you have a small slice of people who are very fortunate, who have their credentials and their ticket to the elite class, and they can get their sushi on demand delivered to them by Uber Eats at 2 a.m., and the whole society is set up to cater to their every whim and desire. And they are the only people who in their workplace and in their life are actually treated like human beings.”

“The Meritocracy,” Saagar interjected.

“The Parasite Class,” I thought to myself.

Krystal resumed: “Which is why I responded so much to Andrew Yang’s message-- the core of his message-- which was very simple: that everyone deserves to be treated with humanity, like a human being. But that is the opposite of how our economy is structured.”

Plutonomy is so bad that Socrates and Plato and Xenophon and Aristotle didn’t have a word for it.

How in heaven’s name then is it being shoved down America’s throat? One way is by its being sugar-coated with a gooey layer of identity politics, of intersectional wokeness. Krystal and Saagar write:

There is genuine racism, sexism and hatred in this country-- bigotry of all kinds. But what animates American politics right now is not a true desire to make America a place free of the systemic legacy of racist and sexist policies: what animates American politics is the desire for elites to cling to power, engage in rent-seeking behavior and hog all the spoils of plutonomyfor themselves. Identity politics is the sop thrown to working class people to keep them in line [italics mine]. It keeps us all running around yelling: “Racist!” and “Sexist!” and “Un-American” at each other rather than noticing the way that we are all united in a shared struggle” (pp. 134-135).

With the phrase “united in a shared struggle” Krystal and Saagarget to the heart of the matter. For the most horrible of the many horrors of identity politics is its rejection of the very possibility of human solidarity. Oligarchy, as Plato described it, was bad enough, for it causes a city to divide against itself, to divide into two hostile factions, but woke identity politics divides and divides again, into as many hostile factions as there are countable identitarian intersections. And so, just as plutonomy arises naturally from oligarchy, so likewise does a truly anti-human viciousness arise from identity politics.

The horrors of identity politics and woke anti-capitalism can perhaps best be fought by means of satire, as Andrew Doyle has been doing with his Twitter character, Titania McGrath, an imaginary “radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest.” He and his colleague Douglas Murray are the two greatest heroes of the war against woke in the UK, and I have often wondered who has risen up to their level of moral and intellectual valor here in the USA. In an important way, Krystal and Saagar’s critique of identity politics is even more powerful than Doyle and Murray’s, for while the two Englishmen write from a sensibility that is at its core literary-- Doyle has a doctorate in Elizabethan literature from Oxford and Murray wrote a major biography of Oscar Wilde while still an undergraduate there-- Krystal and Sagaar have politics in their bone marrow. They are therefore able to analyze the monstrosity that is the woke corporation, to unveil the intersectionof identity politics with plutonomy. “So the big insight I got from your book,” I told them, “is that Woke is the next level of union busting.”

“I agree,” Saagar said, “I think it’s a pernicious attempt... I don’t think it started out this way, [but now] corporations realize that they can buy off key elements of the left by sponsoring critical race theory and identity stuff, and by using that they can basically not answer for any of the structural and economic damage that they have caused to American workers. I don’t think it started out this way... I don’t think these critical race theorists-- [for example] I don’t think the founder of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was ever like, Yeah, I’m gonna get funded by the Shell Corporation, but, because she thinks that race is the fundamental divide amongst Americans, taking that money is fine... 1619 to me encapsulates all of this: the New York Times telling a bunch of upper-middle-class white liberals that they’re actually fundamentally racist from the very beginning, and that race in and of itself-- and not class-- is the primary dividing line in this country.”

Saagar continued: “And what I would say is: ...This is the worst possible thing you can actually do to a lot people of color in this country … who are disproportionately affected by class-based policies, which destroy unions, which go after wages. I mean, who do you think is affected when we have union-busted jobs or low-wage work, which is fundamentally catering to an upper class, to a Cosmopolitan Class which is diverse in name only?” (The contrived diversity of what Saagar here calls the “Cosmopolitan Class” is one of Adolph Reed’s most insightful observations-- I asked about this, and of course Krystal and Saagar admire Reed’s work, and of course they’ve had him on the show.)

“Yes,” Krystal agreed, “it’s a way to keep the working class divided so they do not accumulate power-- because there’s many more of them than there are of the elites. But the Republican Party uses white identity, and the Democratic Party uses: Look, at least we’re not racists like those guys!-- to be able to keep people in the tent so they can center the party around the interests of the Professional / Managerial Class.”

Krystal paused and continued: “Identity politics to me means taking something that is real... bigotry... and weaponizing it to maintain the status quo.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Back to Krystal: “To say: Look, if we have a gay millennial mayor, we’ve made progress, even when he’s pushing the same status quo politics. Or-- having the first black president. We have made progress. And I don’t want to say that that’s nothing. It is something. It does matter for children to be able to look up and see a black man as our president. But does it really make you feel better if it’s like Kamala Harris prosecuting you as a single parent for your kids being truant or possessing marijuana? Does it matter to you if it’s black woman who did that? No! Personally, my aspirations are much greater than changing the gender ratio or racial makeup of, of...“

“...of the Fortune 500!” Saagar interjected.

“Great!” Krystal said, and we all laughed, “We have our first female CIA torturer. Fantastic!”

Ha! What fun it is to visit K Street! The People, Yes! When, a year or so ago, I met Thomas Frank at a similarly bubblicious location and told him that I had travelled there from West Virginia, he entertained me with an anecdote about a trip he had once made westward across West Virginia: each time he crossed a mountain ridge, he told me, the only station he could pick up on his car radio would be broadcasting the Rush Limbaugh Show. Then he’d be crossing over the next ridge, and the station would fade out … only to be replaced by a successor station broadcasting the same episode of Rush on the same schedule. So up and down, up and down, again and again, over a couple hundred miles, Thomas Frank was able to listen to an entire episode of Rush Limbaugh virtually uninterrupted from a half a dozen or more West Virginia radio stations, operating a sort of aural relay race.

Maybe the Thomas Frank Phenomenon works in reverse too, for as I headed home from the bubble, before I crossed back over the mountain and into West Virginia, I heard a broadcast of a new NSO recording of Dvořák‘s New World Symphony. As I listened I thought of Thomas Frank progressing happily up and down those West Virginia mountains, and then I thought, Yes, I am hearing an intimation of a better post-woke American futureand this future will be like Dvořák‘s music moving seamlessly back and forth between echoes of Beethoven and echoes of old slave spirituals. Dvořák, I was thinking, had seen what could go wrong in America, but he also had seen what could go right: pure beauty set free from social class or caste or race. America was-- is-- the place where that can happen. Maybe, I thought, Dvořák‘s symphony could be the theme song for a new, a rising Populist movement. A half century ago Neil Armstrong took a recording of it to the moon, you know.





Maybe the Thomas Frank Phenomenon works in reverse too, for as I headed home from the bubble, before I crossed back over the mountain and into West Virginia, I heard a broadcast of a new NSO recording of Dvořák‘s New World Symphony. As I listened I thought of Thomas Frank progressing happily up and down those West Virginia mountains, and then I thought, Yes, I am hearing an intimation of a better post-woke American future, and this future will be like Dvořák‘s music moving seamlessly back and forth between echoes of Beethoven and echoes of old slave spirituals. Dvořák, I was thinking, had seen what could go wrong in America, but he also had seen what could go right: pure beauty set free from social class or caste or race. America was-- is-- the place where that can happen. Maybe, I thought, Dvořák‘s symphony could be the theme song for a new, a rising Populist movement. A half century ago Neil Armstrong took a recording of it to the moon, you know.

Grim Reaper by Nancy Ohanian

Biden's Campaign Is Confusing Name Recognition With Electability-- Don't Take The Bait

Remember what Chris Hayes said about looking at the 2020 candidates as the cycle kicked off? I saved the video to remind you. Let's use it as a quick lens to look at Status Quo Joe. Who will he fight for? What will he fight for? Well, who has he always fought for? His own career, his family, his family's lobbying clients, Big Banks, Wall Street, corporate America, the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. Can he be trusted to do what he says? According to PolitiFact, 84% of Trump's checked statement have been lies. No one can compete with that... but Biden comes closer than any other politician. PolitiFact finds 60% of his checked statement to be lies. Trump is worse but, that bar is too low and it doesn't excuse the fact that most of what Biden says is a lie, some of it said to mislead and some of it said because his brain no longer functions adequately. So, no, Joe Biden's conflicting promises to various groups cannot be-- should not be-- trusted.

Grace Panetta, writing for Business Insider over the weekend, warned that it would be a mistake to buy into the hype that Biden is the most electable of the 2020 candidates. It's the narrative his creaky campaign is pushing, but he isn't the most electable at all. His big poll numbers come from name recognition among voters who are least likely to be following the primary carefully and from two important cohorts of Democratic primary voters that prioritize defeating Trump above all else: African American voters and voters in their 70s and 80s, much of the same coalition that decided Hillary was the most electable candidate.

When his wife tried to make a case for him last week, she didn't claim his pathetic healthcare plan was any good on the merits-- it isn't-- she just said issues don't matter and we should defeat Trump. In effect: just sign on the dotted line and we'll work out the details later. In general, that approach appeals to people whose educations didn't go beyond high school more than it does people who went to college. Like many rich people, Biden doesn't understand Medicare and doesn't understand Medicare-For-All. He opposes Medicare-For-All and has offered to compromise away Medicare benefits in order to lower budget deficits. If he is-- God forbid-- elected president, that is exactly what he will do.

Biden's wife, reported Panetta, "acknowledged that even if Biden's plan isn't the best one and voters don't like it, they should hold their noses and vote for him anyway." Addressing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie supporters, Mrs Biden said, "Your candidate might be better on healthcare than Joe is, but you have to look at who is going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say 'I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.'" That's all they got... but is it enough?

Nope. His policy stances across the board are basically nothing but tepid, conservative, ineffective and incrementalist approaches to healthcare, Climate Change, immigration, Wall Street, criminal justice, wealth inequality and everything else. And his putrid record will haunt the primary campaign and if he wins, will give Trump all the weapons he needs to defeat him.

The electability argument has always been bogus. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were seen as the least electable when they first ran. Jeb Bush, then Scott Walker and Marco Rubio-- and then Hillary Clinton-- were seen as the most electable in 2016. Panetta: "As political scientist Seth Masket pointed out, hypothetical Quinnipiac University general election polls from February 2016 showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton handily defeating Trump by five percentage points, tied with Sen. Ted Cruz, and losing to Sen. Marco Rubio by seven percentage points. But Republicans nominated Trump anyway, and won."

In her argument for why Democratic primary voters should pick Biden over other candidates, Jill Biden cited the head-to-polling showing Biden leading Trump as the main reason undecided primary voters should back him over other candidates.

"You've got to look at the polls... and if they're consistent and they're consistently saying the same thing, I think you can't dismiss that... if your goal is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him," she said.

Most recent poll-- last week-- for the first primary (New Hampshire) shows Biden trailing Bernie by a wide margin

Not only has the conventional wisdom on electability been wrong many times before, but hypothetical general election polls, like the ones Biden's camp is relying on, haven't historically been a very good predictor of who actually wins elections, as FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out in June.

At this point in the 2016 election-- late August 2015-- head-to-head matchups showed, on average, Clinton beating Trump 50% to 39%, a margin of victory of 11 percentage points. In the end, Clinton defeated Trump 48% to 46% in the popular vote and lost the electoral college.

In 2016, FiveThirtyEight also conducted a broader analysis of general election matchup polls from every presidential election from 1944 to 2012. They found head-to-head matchup polls conducted a year before presidential elections were, on average, 11 percentage points off the final result.

For example, former President Bill Clinton hardly seemed electable in the later months of 1991 when he was 21 percentage points behind George H.W. Bush in the polls, but ended up beating Bush by 5.6% in the popular vote after the US went into a recession.

Brand new polling from Colorado shows Bernie ahead of Biden and this graph shows them doing equally well against Trump

As one Hillary mouthpiece admitted: "Aside from the logic, telling us to settle now is way too early. There is no need to settle." And remember, Biden inspires no one. "Much like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden’s Democratic primary campaign has thus far cloaked itself in an aura of inevitability," wrote Bhaskar Sunkara Friday. "You might not like Joe Biden. He might say racist or sexist stuff from time to time. His gaffes might be occurring at an alarming rate. He might have uninspiring policy ideas. But he’s going to win the primary anyway, so you better get used to him." That's how many interpret his wife's case for voting for him.

The states that matter most in 2020 are not red Biden bastions like South Carolina; they are in the industrial Midwest, where Bernie is shown to consistently beat Trump by around 10 points

Sunkara reminds his readers that "Biden’s fundraising picture also looks less rosy than it did back in May. He’s still the preferred choice of big party donors, but grassroots enthusiasm is receding. After raising an impressive $4.6m online on this first day of his campaign in April, things have slowed to a trickle. As Politico reports, Biden’s median online daily fundraising by the end of June was just $67,000 a day, considerably below Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is an especially important benchmark for Biden. They seem to be competing over much the same base-- working class, diverse, not college educated-- and either would benefit from the other’s downfall. Despite a narrative earlier this summer of campaign dysfunction and imminent collapse, recent polls have showed that the Vermont senator in a steady position within striking distance of Biden. Sanders has a rabid base of volunteers, superior online fundraising infrastructure, and his existing support may even be undercounted by most polls.

Yet the media narrative continues to paint Sanders as a fringe pariah and Biden as the inevitable 2020 candidate. It’s reminiscent of the 2016 Republican primaries, in which Donald Trump was considered an unserious candidate whose support was continually underestimated. The serious commentators kept waiting for an establishment wave of moderate Republicans to make first Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, and then even Ted Cruz happen.

The case for Biden’s invincibility is especially baffling-- he’s been running for the Democratic nomination (and losing) since the 1980s. It simply boils down to Obama coalition supporters (particularly black and brown voters) going with the most familiar face to rid of Trump era upheavals.

But electability is just one element of what voters are looking for, and Biden is running on nothing else. He has failed to adequately address his past positions in favor of Medicare and Social Security cuts, his engineering of loathed free trade deals, or his opposition to important desegregation measures.

While other candidates are galvanizing people around Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and calls to redistribute wealth and power from the 1% to working Americans, Biden is offering nothing. Poke one hole in his electability bubble and his campaign looks ready to implode.

This early in the race things are constantly changing-- many people are still undecided and won’t start paying attention until much later on-- so we would do ourselves a lot of good not to live and die with every poll. However, if there is one lesson from the 2016 general election worth remembering it’s this: most people might have not liked Donald Trump, but he gave those who did a real reason to turn out on Election Day. He was a candidate with very obvious convictions running against someone who seemed to focus group and triangulate her every position.

Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton 2.0. Perhaps Trump’s time in office has been enough of a disaster that idea-avoidance will work this time. But if voters want to be inspired, they’ll turn elsewhere or just stay at home again.

One more thing on Biden this evening: his toxic brand of bipartisanship has always meant one thing: the Right winning... every.single.time. Branko Marcetic, noting that "if worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship is its holy sacrament," reminded us that "For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. 'This nation cannot function without generating consensus,' Biden said in May. 'You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.' But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, 'It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.'"

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

... Joe Biden's political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North... because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (NC) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Nancy Kassebaum (KS), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress.

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship.

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”

The Anti-Sanders Press Influenced the 2016 Primary. Will It Do the Same Again?

How will these people respond if they think Sanders was cheated again?

by Thomas Neuburger

Like many I watched the 2016 Democratic primary carefully, and like many I was appalled by what looked like rampant cheating of varying types and degrees by national party leaders, state officials and local functionaries. So I'm going to publish an occasional series on what went down in 2016 as a sort of inoculation against the same occurring again.

I have another goal as well. Last time the Sanders campaign was surprised by its popularity, and I suspect it took some time for its leaders to adapt to what it was starting to accomplish. I also suspect that the cheating, the tilting of the playing field, the attacks from the wings by actors not even in the play also surprised the campaign, and it found itself scrambling to respond, or scrambling to decide even to respond at all.

After all, if you're polling at 5% against a shoo-in opponent, you're seen as a gnat, barely worth swatting at, and the occasional "slings and arrows" are not meant to wound or kill, just keep you at bay. Not so when, to everyone's surprise, the gnat grows large, grows a following, and starts filling football stadiums when the shoo-in candidate still can't fill a gymnasium.

Then the "slings and arrows" become bazookas and howitzers, and no one in the suddenly large upstart campaign has a plan for that.

This Time People Can Prepare

Not so this time around. The events of 2016 offer plenty of fair warning. To that end I'd like to document just what some of those bazookas and howitzers were, so not only the campaign — but you and I, the voters — can be prepared, can know what we're looking at.

Who anticipated, for example, that California Democratic Party officials at the precinct level would misinstruct election workers, or hand out provisional ballots instead of ballots appropriate for "no party preference" voters (independents) so that much of the (pro-Sanders) independent vote would be disenfranchised? Who anticipated that voters in select precincts in New York, and many other states, would discover on election day that their party registrations had been changed without their knowledge?

This time around we can anticipate all of that, and call it out in real time if it occurs.

The Heavy Thumb of the Anti-Sanders Press

But let's start with a national problem in the 2016 election — the role of the press in trying to make sure, to the extent it could, that Bernie Sanders would lose to Hillary Clinton. One of the best sources of information for this is Thomas Frank's long-form examination "Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform," written for the November 2016 issue of Harper's Magazine. (Unless you're a Harper's subscriber, the article is paywalled. An archived version can be found here.)

Frank states his goal: "My project in the pages that follow is to review the media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. By examining this recent history, much of it already forgotten, I hope to rescue a number of worthwhile facts about the press’s attitude toward Sanders. Just as crucially, however, I intend to raise some larger questions about the politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers."

His examination of the "press's attitude toward Sanders" produces a striking discovery:

I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval.

This shocked me when I first noticed it. It felt like the news stories went out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which of course don’t pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing my candidate. A New York Times article greeted the Sanders campaign in December by announcing that the public had moved away from his signature issue of the crumbling middle class. “Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality,” the paper declared—nice try, liberal, and thanks for playing. In March, the Times was caught making a number of post-publication tweaks to a news story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa headline, hillary clinton made history, but bernie sanders stubbornly ignored it.

Frank marshalls much data to support his claims. I'll leave you to examine those details for yourself.

"Defining Sanders Out"

Frank then turns to the question of why this occurred (emphasis mine below):

I think that what befell the Vermont senator at the hands of the Post should be of interest to all of us. For starters, what I describe here represents a challenge to the standard theory of liberal bias. Sanders was, obviously, well to the left of Hillary Clinton, and yet that did not protect him from the scorn of the Post—a paper that media-hating conservatives regard as a sort of liberal death squad. Nor was Sanders undone by some seedy journalistic obsession with scandal or pseudoscandal. On the contrary, his record seemed remarkably free of public falsehoods, security-compromising email screwups, suspiciously large paychecks for pedestrian speeches, escapades with a comely staffer, or any of that stuff.

An alternative hypothesis is required for what happened to Sanders, and I want to propose one that takes into account who the media are in these rapidly changing times. As we shall see, for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed.

That threat was to their own status as insider Ivy League–educated friends-of-people-with-power, especially Democratic Party power, which had aligned itself with the upper 10%, the professional class, against the lower 90%, the great unwashed.

In Bernie Sanders and his “political revolution” ... I believe these same people saw something kind of horrifying: a throwback to the low-rent Democratic politics of many decades ago. Sanders may refer to himself as a progressive, but to the affluent white-collar class, what he represented was atavism, a regression to a time when demagogues in rumpled jackets pandered to vulgar public prejudices against banks and capitalists and foreign factory owners. Ugh.

Choosing Clinton over Sanders was, I think, a no-brainer for this group. They understand modern economics, they know not to fear Wall Street or free trade. And they addressed themselves to the Sanders campaign by doing what professionals always do: defining the boundaries of legitimacy, by which I mean, defining Sanders out.

And it wasn't just bias in the way the news was written; the editorials and op-eds were also brutal. As Frank points out, "the Post’s pundit platoon just seemed to despise Bernie Sanders."

Four Year Later

It's been four years since 2015, when the upstart first reared his head and showed himself a viable threat. The forces arrayed against him have had time to reflect, as have the forces on his side.

Will the the leaders of the present Party do all they can to extinguish the threat of Sanders' "political revolution"? It's clear they've already started. Will the press do their part to stem the tide? The jury's out so far. Some coverage has been remarkably bad (also here), while other coverage is surprisingly fair. We'll see.

In those four years the voters have also had time to reflect. Many took note of the 2016 sabotage, as they would call it, and many are ready, their remembered anger just waiting to be rekindled. Party leaders are aware of this. As a former vice-chair of the DNC said recently, "if we even have anybody raising an eyebrow of ‘I’m not happy about this,’ we’re going to lose [the general election] and they’ll have this loss on their hands," meaning the DNC.

It won't take much to make a martyr of Sanders in the eyes of his supporters, especially after 2016. The only questions are:

• Is the fear of Sanders and his political revolution, which would send many of them scrambling for other work and start to cut Party ties to the donor class, enough to make their opposition turn to obviously illegal means?

•  If Sanders is indeed made "a martyr," as the party official quoted above fears, what will be the response of the independent voters who swell those stadium appearances?

The stakes were high in 2016. Given our greater nearness to looming catastrophes, climate being just one of them, the stakes are exponentially higher today. We do indeed live in interesting times.
 

Was Dana Milbank Always This Stupid?

Still wrong

Milbank got just what he wanted-- a lot of attention for his poorly reasoned anti-Bernie diatribe in the Washington Post on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Donald Trump of the left. I certainly agree with his first line-- "In politics, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Hence, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s emergence..."-- and I often use it to explain why it makes sense that America elect the best president in history after having just gone through the absolute worst. But that isn't where Milbank was taking this. That second line of his ended with "...as the Donald Trump of the left." Jesus! What an imbecile!

Like so many other champions of the status quo, Milbank, husband of Democratic Party pollster Anna Greenberg, currently working for one of the more conservative-- and least popular-- presidential hopefuls, John Hickenlooper, is worried that Bernie is raising too much money from too many small donors and that he "remains untouchable, in a Trumpian way." Keep in mind that Milbank has admitted that he voted for John McCain in 2000, Chuck Hagel in 2004, and Michael Bloomberg in 2008, none of whom were on the ballot but each of whom he saw as a potential great president. Total doofus-- a contrarian for the sake being an asshole and getting attention. "Sanders," he conceded, "isn’t Trump in the race-baiting, lender-cheating, fact-avoiding, porn-actress-paying, Putin-loving sense. But their styles are similar: shouting and unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking boogeymen (the '1 percent' and CEOs in Sanders’s case, instead of immigrants and minorities), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past."

Skip Kaltenheuser, the first of a dozen people who brought Milbank's latest idiocy to my attention noted: "Sanders scapegoating billionaires as if they’re immigrants being chased by Trump; imagine that. How could anyone sketch out such a grotesque comparison? I suppose it helps if one works for the richest guy in the world, on the off-chance he has self-interests other than it would be fun to run a newspaper. Own one, anyway."

I spent Monday at a cattle call for eight Democratic presidential candidates hosted by labor unions, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood and other progressive groups. Sanders was easily the least charismatic, hoisting his trousers by the waist, tugging at his socks, hunching over the lectern, sitting stiffly and awkwardly greeting questioners. But the reception among liberal activists, which had ranged from tepid (Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand) to enthusiastic (Warren) was, for Sanders, rapturous. “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” they chanted, standing when he appeared and when he finished. In between, they applauded a routine full of Trumpian flourishes.

He simplified and blamed: “The crisis that we are facing today is not complicated... We have a government that ignores the needs of the working people... yet works overtime for wealthy campaign contributors and the 1 percent.” He mocked those who questioned ideas such as Medicare-for-all (“the establishment went crazy, media went nuts, still is”), and he celebrated his prescience. He channeled rage at the “vulgarity” of a “grotesque” and “corrupt” system, the “absolute hypocrisy” of Republicans, corporations that “lie” and billionaires who “buy elections.” Of the wealthy, he said, “Many of them are bandits,” and he said if Republicans “don’t have the guts to participate in a free and fair election, they should get the hell out of politics.”

Like Trump, he railed against companies moving jobs to China or Mexico, and he harked back to simpler times: “Forty, 50 years ago, it was possible for one worker to work 40 hours a week and earn enough money to take care of the whole family.”

It’s less hateful, perhaps, to blame billionaires than immigrants or certain “globalists” for America’s troubles, but the scapegoating is similar. So is Sanders’s “socialist” label (worn as defiantly as Trump wears the isolationist “America First”), and his Democratic credentials are as suspect as Trump’s Republican bona fides were. Most Republicans opposed Trump, but the large field of candidates prevented a clean matchup.

A similar crowd could likewise prevent Democrats from presenting a clear alternative to Sanders’s tempting-- if Trumpian-- message that a nefarious elite is to blame for America’s problems. Universal health care, higher education and child care are within reach, Sanders said to cheers, if only “we stand up and tell this 1 percent that we will no longer tolerate their greed.” In real life, it’s not so simple. But in our new politics, maybe it is.

Anyone recall Thomas Frank's November, 2016 essay, Swat Team-- The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform, for Harpers? Or how about this much passed-around passage? "Extra credit is due to Dana Milbank, one of the paper’s cleverest columnists, who kept varying his angle of attack. In February, he name-checked the Bernie Bros-- socialist cyberbullies who were turning comment sections into pens of collectivist terror. In March, Milbank assured readers that Democrats were too 'satisfied' to sign up with a rebel like Sanders. In April, he lamented Sanders’s stand on trade on the grounds that it was similar to Trump’s and that it would be hard on poor countries. In May, Milbank said he thought it was just awful the way frustrated Sanders supporters cursed and 'threw chairs' at the Nevada Democratic convention-- and something close to treachery when Sanders failed to rebuke those supporters afterward. 'It is no longer accurate to say Sanders is campaigning against Clinton, who has essentially locked up the nomination,' the columnist warned on the occasion of the supposed chair-throwing. 'The Vermont socialist is now running against the Democratic Party. And that’s excellent news for one Donald J. Trump.'" Frank wasn't finished with Milbank and the other status quo ass-kissers at The Post:

What can we learn from reviewing one newspaper’s lopsided editorial treatment of a left-wing presidential candidate?

For one thing, we learn that the Washington Post, that gallant defender of a free press, that bold bringer-down of presidents, has a real problem with some types of political advocacy. Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect or misguided, in the paper’s view: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy, they might have a long and distinguished history, they might be commonplace in other lands. Nevertheless, when voiced by the people in question, they become damaging.

We hear a lot these days about the dangers to speech posed by political correctness, about those insane left-wing college students who demand to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. What I am describing here is something similar, but far more consequential. It is the machinery by which the boundaries of the Washington consensus are enforced.

...What The Post is saying here is that the American system, by its nature, doesn’t permit a president to achieve anything more than “incremental change.” Obama did the best anyone could under this system-- indeed, as the paper pointed out, he had “no other option” than to proceed as he did. Therefore he should be exempt from criticism at the hands of other Democrats.

The board explained its philosophy slightly differently in the other editorial, battle of the extremes. Sanders, like Ted Cruz, was said to harbor the toxic belief that “the road to progress is purity, not compromise.” Again, his great failing was his refusal to acknowledge the indisputable rules of the game. Heed the wisdom of our savviest political journalists:

Progress will be made by politicians who are principled but eager to shape compromises, to acknowledge that they do not have a monopoly on wisdom and to accept incremental change. That is a harder message to sell in primary campaigns, but it is a message far likelier to produce a nominee who can win in November-- and govern successfully for the next four years.

The reason The Post pundits embrace these tidy sophistries is simple enough. Knee-jerk incrementalism is, after all, a nifty substitute for actually thinking difficult issues through. Bernie Sanders ran for the presidency by proposing reforms that these prestigious commentators, for whatever reason, found distasteful. Rather than grapple with his ideas, however, they simply blew the whistle and ruled them out of bounds. Plans that were impractical, proposals that would never pass Congress-- these things are off the table, and they are staying off.

...[N]o group knows the story of the dying middle class more intimately than journalists. So why do the people at the very top of this profession identify themselves with the smug, the satisfied, the powerful? Why would a person working in a moribund industry compose a paean to the Wall Street bailouts? Why would someone like Post opinion writer Stephen Stromberg drop megatons of angry repudiation on a certain Vermont senator for his “outrageous negativity about the state of the country”? For the country’s journalists-- Stromberg’s colleagues, technically speaking-- that state is pretty goddamned negative.

Maybe it’s something about journalism itself. This is a field, after all, that has embraced the forces that are killing it to an almost pathological degree. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy internet thinkers than journalism schools. We are all desperately convincing ourselves that we need to become entrepreneurs, or to get ourselves attuned to the digital future-- the future, that is, as it is described for us hardheaded journalists by a cast of transparent bullshit artists. When the TV comedian John Oliver recently did a riff on the tragic decline of newspaper journalism, just about the only group in America that didn’t like it was-- that’s right, the Newspaper Association of America, which didn’t think we should be nostalgic about the days when its members were successful. Truly, we are like buffalo nuzzling the rifles of our hunters.

Or maybe the answer is that people at the top of the journalism hierarchy don’t really identify with their plummeting peers. Maybe the pundit corps thinks it will never suffer the same fate as, say, the Tampa Tribune. And maybe they’re right. As I wrote this story, I kept thinking back to Sound and Fury, a book that Eric Alterman published in 1992, when the power of pundits was something new and slightly alarming. Alterman suggested that the rise of the commentariat was dangerous, since it supplanted the judgment of millions with the clubby perspective of a handful of bogus experts. When he wrote that, of course, newspapers were doing great. Today they are dying, and as they gutter out, one might expect the power of this phony aristocracy to diminish as well. Instead, the opposite has happened: as serious journalism dies, Beltway punditry goes from strength to strength.

Yesterday a response to Milbank on The Post website by "danrev" totally nails it. "This article, like many of Dana Milbank's, is hopefully some great farce because if these are his actual opinions, and the editors of WaPo allow this level of bullshittery, I really have to just abandon WaPo entirely, again. I get that this is an op-ed with zero journalism involved or evidence, but ew. This is the same old, washed up hits: a one issue candidate (yes, the most important issue: inequality), he's old (you got him), he's white (guilty), he's socialist (oh no, get in the bunker), tax returns waaahhhh. He always releases his tax returns, he addressed the campaign harassment issues from the 2016 campaign and apologized directly for actions of others because he holds himself accountable, he fired a bunch of guys, and has the most diverse and female campaign team in the D race."

The problem here is that a bunch of commenters (and therefore readers), are just saying 'hey, yeah this Milbank guy is on to something.' This being despite the support from 525,000 individuals, who donated ~2x each in the first quarter, and his dominance in polls with younger voters.

'Screw old white men' am I right? ...because nothing they say, do, believe, or propose as law that would be disproportionately more beneficial for women, POC, veterans, or even the elderly makes them anything other than 'an old white man.' Bernie has the groundwork, the money, and the votes from broad constituencies to enact legislation that would provide the drastic changes the working poor have been asking for (unfortunately they did so from a billionaire liar in 2016 to their own detriment).

Oh, and those places with 'disaffected Trump voters in key states' you ask. Many of them voted for Bernie in 2016 (WI, MN, MI, WV, IN, ~IL, ~MO, ~KY). These are all wins or 50/50 states from a then no-name socialist from Vermont. Those disaffected voters HAVE BEEN destroyed by the ultra-wealthy (Ds and Rs) for decades...and Bernie, unlike Trump would actually work for those people rather than against them.