Unity As A Concept Is Neither Good Nor Bad... Though The Establishment Is Desperate To Unify Around Defeating Bernie And His Ideas

Beating Trump in 2020, as I've written before, is urgent-- if not existential-- but making sure we think long and hard about what we replace him with is just as important. The conservative establishment is not stupid. It senses Trump going down and the establishment does not want to see the kind of profound change America needs at this juncture. Jay Willis' GQ headline this week, The Republican Party Exists to Protect Millionaires and Billionaires, would be more historically accurate if it read "Conservatives exist to protect millionaires and billionaires. That's what conservatives are all about and have always been all about. The Republican Party is just the latest iteration in the U.S. "Other than 'downplaying federal crimes committed by the president,'" write Willis, "the modern Republican Party cherishes nothing more than finding innovative ways to lighten the financial burdens of the millionaires and billionaires who support it. This is most evident, of course, in its signature accomplishment of the 115th Congress: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for very wealthy people, propped up by the usual gamut of vague, Reaganomics-type assurances that the gaping new hole in the federal deficit would 'pay for itself.' During campaign season, after it became clear that this promise was a lie, Paul Ryan and company promptly pivoted to running ads about MS-13 instead.

An astonishing new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica, however, reveals that the party's most prominent display of corporate generosity is not necessarily the most lucrative one. Thanks to the GOP's decades-long war on the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government's ability to collect legally-owed taxes has reached a historical nadir, as deep budget cuts have hamstrung efforts to fulfill basic responsibilities-- like, among many others, hiring professionals to catch people who might be good at evading taxes.

And guess who stands to benefit the most from the agency's slow-motion failure?

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme-- and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

Investigations of nonfilers-- people who skip submitting their returns altogether-- have plummeted, from 2.4 million in 2011 to just 362,000 last year, and untold billions of dollars in uncollected tax debts expire each year after the ten-year statue of limitations runs its course. Nearly every statistic reeks of good old-fashioned American inequality: Audits are down across all income brackets, but the drop has been most precipitous among the wealthy, from 8 percent of those making more than a half-million dollars in 2011 to just 2.5 percent in 2017. During that period, audits of filers making less than $25,000 per year fell by just one-half a point, from 1.2 percent to 0.7 percent. Current and former IRS employees interviewed for the piece fear that the country could be on the verge of an era of brazen tax cheating from which it cannot recover.

This is, by any objective metric, bad: a catastrophic failure of law enforcement that deprives an already cash-strapped government of, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. (A properly-funded IRS, the article notes, is one of the few federal agencies that could actually operate in the black.) But as my colleague Drew Magary wrote earlier this year, conservatism is, at its core, a tool used to justify the continued exploitation of poor people. For Republicans, these strategic omissions are as important to their constituencies as the affirmative act of passing the tax reform bill. In public, the GOP delivers another long-awaited discount to the privileged; behind the scenes, it grins and winks-- a reminder that for them, in America, even paying that meager amount is optional.

The fact that a minority of Americans favor this fundamentally unjust arrangement is what drives literally everything the modern Republican Party does. Racists, bigots, and anodyne-sounding "social conservatives" have no inherent interest in kleptocracy, and vice versa. But the need to cobble together a coalition capable of winning elections has compelled the fiscal conservative establishment to make those groups' pet issues into key components of its political platform. The Venn diagram of climate change truthers and angry right-wingers consists of two concentric circles, because acknowledging science would create an undeniable moral obligation to do things that corporate benefactors do not want.

Even the aforementioned criminality denial is a pragmatic choice, because allowing a sitting president to break the law without consequences is, to Republicans, a less odious outcome than jeopardizing their power to enrich rich people, now and in 2020 and forever. The party of law and order always finds a way to forget about those things whenever remembering them might one day result in its donor class being held the tiniest bit accountable.

The idea of a Unity Ticket this year, was first floated as a way to get people to take the candidacy of conservative Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) seriously. Then to take the candidacy of conservative Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (D) seriously. Then Deval Patrick (D-MA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), Jason Kander (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Michael Bloomberg (?$?$?-NY)... Might as well thrown some more ground-up dried vomit into the kettle as well-- Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker... The latest: Biden Should Run on a Unity Ticket With Romney. Anything-- anything at all-- to grind down working people into the mud and pig shit. "It could actually work," chirped Juleanna Glover in Politico. "Here's How." First imagine how wonderful the world would have been had McCain picked Lieberman has his VP and they would have vanquished Obama-- "diverting us from the dangerous polarization now plaguing our political system." Juleanna wants Corporate Joe Biden to learn from McCain's regret (picking Sarah Palin instead of Lieberman).

Biden has declared himself the "most qualified person in the country to be president," which Chirpy-- who lies about his standing in the polls, accepts on face value. (I beg to differ.) Chirpy worried that "in a Democratic primary [Biden] could be cannibalized by his own kind. Other Democratic candidates with more ambition than ability to win a general election against Donald Trump will inexorably and gleefully erode his standing by rehashing the Anita Hill hearings, pushing him to the left on domestic policy and endlessly reminding voters of his support for the Gulf War. Biden is the clear front-runner now-- with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at 13 percent-- but plenty of early favorites have ended up as also-rans (i.e. Jesse Jackson in 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Howard Dean in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008). Running in a Democratic primary could deeply damage Biden’s legacy." LOL... yes; Idiot finally got something right.

She calls Biden "one of our most esteemed and admired leaders." That's true as well-- IF we're talking about inside they Beltway establishment corporate shills like Chirpy. They've been pushing Corporate Joe Biden for President since the 1980s. He always their favorite candidate, and always utterly rejected by actual humans. He has never-- if any of his multiple campaigns for president-- most still-born-- gotten beyond single digit polling, usually around 1%. But the Chirpies of the world love him. "[H]ere’s what Biden should do next," she confides in us: "Pick a Republican running mate in a 'trans-party' third-party run for the White House." Does that make your leg tingle?

Should Trump run again, this could be a “break-the-glass” moment for many Americans, creating an opening for a radical departure from our malfunctioning two-party political system. By injecting some ideological innovation into the process, we can break the hidebound precedents of two narrow parties running their ceremonious and illogical nominating process to select a candidate. (Why do Iowa and New Hampshire play such outsized roles? Why do independents, who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, have only a binary political choice?) The system certainly suffered a critical failure in 2016, with both parties producing terribly flawed candidates in a race to the bottom.

The Democratic primary is shaping up to be cacophonous and chaotic. Biden should capitalize on his status as one of America’s most popular politicians, skip the risk and potential indignities of running and losing in what will be a vicious and mulish, leftward-lurching primary, and slingshot straight to the general election debate stage on a third-party ticket. Biden may not know it, but he is already well-positioned to win a three-way election outright. Here’s how:

Biden could run as the major third-party candidate with a principled conservative by his side (Lieberman, a one-time Democrat, technically categorized himself as an independent at the time McCain ran for president). A number of Republicans stand out: Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich and newly minted Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Many past third-party bids have failed because they came from the lunatic fringes-- think Jill Stein and Ralph Nader of the Green Party or Ross Perot with his quirky North American Free Trade Agreement obsession. Biden, by picking someone from the principled wing of the GOP, would instantly signal that he intends to run from the center.

Aside from being the most repulsive writer who has ever done a column for Politico, who, exactly is Chirpy? "Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush. She is on the Biden Institute Policy Advisory Board." She also worked for Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, Dan Quayle and Phyllis Schlafly and made a bundle as a lobbyist and was a senior advisor to the 2000 Steve Forbes presidential campaign. The New York Times once described Chirpy as "the consummate political insider.” Getting the picture? Anything and everything Chirpy chirps should be instantly ignored or, better yet, the opposite would always be something to consider. (One more thing, she seems to have played some kind of role in the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, working for Bill Browder, an investor in Russia who gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes and later became famous for his part in passing the Magnitsky Act.)

Please consider helping to defeat Biden, Romney, Kasich, Hickenlooper, Cheney, Quayle, Chirpy, Bloomberg, Giuliani... here.

Isn't Preserving The Status Quo The Definition Of Conservatism?

Establishment Democrats— then definition of losers— don’t want to hear it but the other day Bernie, the most popular political figure in America (the mention of which drives them into a frothing-at-the-mouth rage), offered the some free advise in the form of an OpEd in the NY Times: How Democrats Can Stop Losing Elections. “In 2016,” hd reminded them, “the Democratic Party lost the presidency to possibly the least popular candidate in American history. In recent years, Democrats have also lost the Senate and House to right-wing Republicans whose extremist agenda is far removed from where most Americans are politically. Republicans now control almost two-thirds of governor’s offices and have gained about 1,000 seats in state legislatures in the past nine years. In 24 states, Democrats have almost no political influence at all.”

I doubt Bernie would agree with me but my own experience tells me that those driving the broken down Democratic Establishment jalopy hate progressives more than Republicans, more than right-wing extremists, more than Trump. Over the years I’ve seen the DCCC try— sometimes successfully, sometimes not— to sabotage progressive candidates who won primaries against their crappy corrupt conservative candidates, the way they did to Tom Wakely, who dropped out of his rematch with Lamar Smith yesterday. The mainstream media can almost never jump in quickly enough to back the establishment in their defense of the status quo, no matter how blatantly absurd the premise. Bernie on all that Democratic Party losin’:

If these results are not a clear manifestation of a failed political strategy, I don’t know what is. For the sake of our country and the world, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction. It has got to open its doors wide to working people and young people. It must become less dependent on wealthy contributors, and it must make clear to the working families of this country that, in these difficult times, it is prepared to stand up and fight for their rights. Without hesitation, it must take on the powerful corporate interests that dominate the economic and political life of the country.

There are lessons to be learned from the recent campaign in Britain. The Conservatives there called the snap election with the full expectation that they would win a landslide. They didn’t. Against all predictions they lost 13 seats in Parliament while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party won 32. There is never one reason elections are won or lost, but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers. One of the most interesting aspects of the election was the soaring turnout among voters 34 or younger.

The British elections should be a lesson for the Democratic Party. We already have among the lowest voter turnout of any major country on earth. Democrats will not win if the 2018 midterm election turnout resembles the unbelievably low 36.7 percent of eligible voters who cast ballots in 2014. The Democrats must develop an agenda that speaks to the pain of tens of millions of families who are working longer hours for lower wages and to the young people who, unless we turn the economy around, will have a lower standard of living than their parents.

A vast majority of Americans understand that our current economic model is a dismal failure. Who can honestly defend the current grotesque level of inequality in which the top 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90 percent? Who thinks it’s right that, despite a significant increase in worker productivity, millions of Americans need two or three jobs to survive, while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent? What person who claims to have a sense of morality can justify the fact that the richest people in our country have a life expectancy about 15 years longer than our poorest citizens?

While Democrats should appeal to moderate Republicans who are disgusted with the Trump presidency, too many in our party cling to an overly cautious, centrist ideology. The party’s main thrust must be to make politics relevant to those who have given up on democracy and bring millions of new voters into the political process. It must be prepared to take on the right-wing extremist ideology of the Koch brothers and the billionaire class, and fight for an economy and a government that work for all, not just the 1 percent.

Donald Trump wants to throw 23 million Americans off health insurance. Democrats must guarantee health care to all as a right, through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program.

Mr. Trump wants to give enormous tax breaks to billionaires. Democrats must support a progressive tax system that demands that the very wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations begin paying their fair share of taxes.

Mr. Trump wants to sell our infrastructure to Wall Street and foreign countries. Democrats must fight for a trillion-dollar public investment that creates over 13 million good-paying jobs.

Mr. Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Democrats must take on the fossil fuel industry and accelerate our efforts to combat climate change by encouraging energy efficiency and the use of sustainable energy.

Mr. Trump has proposed deep cuts to higher education. Democrats must make public colleges and universities tuition free, and substantially lower student debt.

Mr. Trump has doubled-down on our failed approach to crime that has resulted in the United States’ having more people in jail than any other country. Democrats must reform a broken criminal justice system and invest in jobs and education for our young people, not more jails and incarceration.

Mr. Trump has scapegoated and threatened the 11 million undocumented people in our country. Democrats must fight for comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship.

This is a pivotal moment in American history. If the Democrats are prepared to rally grass-roots America in every state and to stand up to the greed of the billionaire class, the party will stop losing elections. And it will create the kind of country the American people want and deserve.

This might be a good time to segue right into Matt Taibbi’s excellent essay for this week’s Rolling Stone: Goodbye, and Good Riddance to Centrism. Let’s put it like this, Taibbi’s a lot more encouraged about Jeremy Corbyn’s triumph over the Conservatives and the Conservative wing of his own Labour Party than Mr. Status Quo, David Frum, is.

Corbyn's strong showing came as a surprise to American readers, who were told repeatedly that Britain's support for the unvarnished lefty would result in historic losses for liberalism.

The status quo line on Corbyn followed a path identical to the propaganda here at home about liberal politics. Whenever Washington pundits in either party talk about the progressive "base," you can count on two themes appearing in the coverage.

One is that "progressive" voters make decisions based upon their hearts and not their heads, with passions rather than intellect. The second is that such voters consistently choose incorrectly when forced to choose between ideals and winning.

The New York Times perfectly summed up this take a few days after the Corbyn result, describing the reaction of the American left: "Democrats in Split-Screen. The Base Wants it All, The Party Wants to Win."

This has long been the establishment line both here and in Britain. In the U.K., the once-revered Blair's support among European progressives tumbled after he supported the Iraq War efforts of Frum's former boss George Bush. Blair years ago warned that Corbyn was leading his party over a cliff toward "total annihilation."

  The former PM played a lurid riff on the heart-head propaganda line, telling Britons whose "heart is with Corbyn" to "get a transplant."

In December, Barack Obama said he wasn't worried about the "Corbynization" of American politics because "the Democratic Party has stayed pretty grounded in fact and reality."

The idea that British liberals had failed the "wanting versus winning" test and elected to live in loserific "unreality" has been everywhere in our media for years.

"A cult is destroying a major liberal political party," insisted CNN's Michael Weiss. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, a quasi-official weathervane of mainstream Democratic Party opinion, declared in January, "Corbyn has been a disaster for Labour."

In April, the Washington Post ran a piece saying that swooningly "rigid" leftists in Britain would pay a high price for supporting a man in "cuckoo world."

The idea that people who want expanded health care, reduced income inequality, fewer wars and more public services are "unrealistic" springs from an old deception in our politics.

For decades pundits and pols have been telling progressive voters they don't have the juice to make real demands, and must make alliances with more "moderate" and presumably more numerous "centrists" in order to avoid becoming the subjects of right-wing monsters like Reagan/Bush/Bush/Trump.

Voters for decades were conned into thinking they were noisome minorities whose best path to influence is to make peace with the mightier "center," which inevitably turns out to support military interventionism, fewer taxes for the rich, corporate deregulation and a ban on unrealistic "giveaway" proposals like free higher education. Those are the realistic, moderate, popular ideas, we're told.

But it's a Wizard of Oz trick, just like American politics in general. There is no numerically massive center behind the curtain. What there is instead is a tiny island of wealthy donors, surrounded by a protective ring of for-sale major-party politicians (read: employees) whose job it is to castigate too-demanding voters and preach realism.

Those pols do so with the aid of a bund of dependably alarmist sycophants in the commercial media, most of whom, whether they know it or not, technically inhabit the low end of the 1 percent and tend to be amazed that people out there are pissed off about stuff.

In the States, the centrist Oz has maintained its influence in large part thanks to another numerical deception. We've been taught that our political spectrum is an unbroken line moving from right to left, Republican to Democrat, and that the country is split in half between the two groups.

Propaganda about the pitched battle between the two even "sides" has seemingly been reinforced by election results. In 2000, with Bush and Gore, we even had an episode involving a near-perfect statistical tie.

As noted at the time by Noam Chomsky— like Corbyn, much loathed by Quo-Nothing types as a hygiene-averse whiner who poisons young minds with unrealistic ideas— you'd normally expect a vote involving over 100 million people to end in a statistical tie only if they were voting for something meaningless or fictional, like the presidency of Mars.

For Americans to be split right down the middle on an issue of supreme importance, Chomsky observed, something had to be a little bit wrong with the voting model.

And there was. The half-versus-half, left-versus-right spectrum has always been a goofball myth. The true divide in the population has never been between Republicans and Democrats, but between haves and have-nots.

Whatever you might think of the Occupy movement, it succeeded in pulling a lid back on some of these illusions by popularizing terms like "the 1 percent" and "the 99 percent." Occupy described the numerical majority as dupes of a tiny oligarchy, which allowed the disaffected population to choose occasionally between two parties that are funded by the same tiny group of super-wealthy donors.

Of course some will vigorously object to any characterization that tries to morally equate Democrats with what is now the Party of Trump (I can already hear the cries of "both-sidesism!"). But Occupy was surely correct in saying the economic picture of America doesn't fit a 50-50 narrative. Their 1/99 picture was a lot closer to reality.

If we're going to be exact about it, in fact, the billionaires who still dominate the political donor class mainly reside in the top tenth of a percent. Even in the most conservative possible interpretation of economic data, a general picture of haves and have-nots in the voting population would still be something like 20/80 (20 percent of Americans own 89 percent of privately held wealth, while the bottom 80 percent owns just 11 percent).

The danger implicit in these numbers to the "broadly satisfied with the status quo" types is obvious. If 80 percent of Americans ever realized their shared economic situation, they could and probably should take over government. Of course, they wouldn't just be taking power for themselves, they'd be taking it from the big-dollar donors who own such a disproportionately huge share of wealth in our society.

Such people of course have many very good reasons to embrace the status quo. The problem is, they're not terribly numerous as a group, which unfortunately for them still matters in a democracy. It's one of the unpleasant paradoxes of exclusive wealth. If you live in a democracy, you're continually forced to manufacture the appearance of broad support for the regressive policies underpinning your awesome lifestyle.

In the 2016 presidential election, voters in both parties were more willing than ever to say they felt alienated from the "center." They were also more likely to view big-city media figures like Frum and myself as agents of a phony system out to sell them a fake version of "reality."

Here and abroad, voters in other words stopped deferring to politicians and media figures and began making their own decisions about what is and is not realistic.

The results have been mixed to say the least. But let's not pretend that the election of Donald Trump is the same as support for Jeremy Corbyn, or that either of these things are the same as a Catalonian separatist movement, or Brexit, or whatever— just because all these developments may be equally horrifying to "those broadly satisfied with the status quo."

If those of us in the media spent less time lecturing about the wisdom of the status quo, and more time treating disaffected voters like the overwhelming majority they are, we might at least stop face-planting on our election predictions. We're not the center anymore, and we have to stop acting like we ever were.