What About Bernie Sanders/Stacey Abrams?

In a column over the weekend, Max Boot noted that Trump has as yet been unable to adjust "to the brutal reality of dealing with a Democratic-controlled House. When Republicans were in control of both chambers, he could plausibly threaten lawmakers because of his cult-like hold on 80-plus percent of Republican voters. But his base is only 35 percent or so of the entire electorate, and Democrats are not intimidated by him. His aura of invincibility has been cracked-- and, with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III scheduled to report, the worst is yet to come. Two painful, punishing years loom."

"Democrats are not intimidated by him." Well... Nancy Pelosi obviously isn't. Nor is Ted Lieu. Ro Khanna isn't. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have made it apparent that they're not afraid of him. As far as I can tell, most congressional Democrats aren't. But what about the freshman members from the red-leaning districts? Some of the New Dems and Blue Dogs, in fact, have been nearly as obsessed with Trump's supporters as Boot's cowardly Republicans are. As we've seen, some of the worst of them-- take Michigan New Dem Elissa Slotkin (the hot dog heiress)-- who was already warning that Democrats had to compromise with Trump on his vanity-wall when Pelosi shut Trump down. Others were whining that $15/hour is too high for a minimum wage, using failed Republican arguments nearly a century old.

If preserving Elissa Slotkin's seat becomes a greater priority than passing a minimum wage that real Democrats, who are not hot dog heiresses. had campaigned on, someone needs to tell Ms. Slotkin she's in the wrong party.

Over the weekend, likely Bernie running mate, Stacey Abrams (D-GA) told Britni Danielle of Essence that during her race for governor she "focused on expanding the electorate, not simply on trying to convince disaffected Republicans to join her team. Because of this, she not only turned out more Black and white voters than former President Barack Obama, but she also massively increased Latinx and Asian turnout as well. How? Throughout her campaign, Abrams focused on the issues people cared about most, including education, healthcare, and poverty, which she called 'immoral' and 'economically inefficient.'" That's the way to win in 2020, not by emulating the hot dog heiress.

"Democrats," Abrams told Danielle, "win by telling our story, by engaging communities early and authentically, and by fighting for every vote that shares our values. But too often on the Democratic side of the aisle, the ones who share our values are the ones who least likely to be asked to share their voices... what my campaign demonstrated… is that if you go into communities and treat them with respect, regardless of race, they will vote if we tell them we trust them. So I want us to have 2020 candidates who are actually doing the work of expanding the electorate, not trying to convince people who’ve already told us they don’t like us to change their mind just this once."

Disclaimer: although I once tried-- and got through almost half an episode-- I never watched The West Wing. I had this idea that it was all about what was wrong with the Democratic Party and why we were stuck with Bush, rather than a viable-- even if fictional-- alternative to Bush. So I ignored what "everyone" called the greatest TV show of all times and missed out on so many conversations it was the center of. Last week I found someone who agrees with me: Luke Savage at Jacobin and his excellent little essay Aaron Sorkin’s Road to Nowhere. "Aaron Sorkin wants to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advice," wrote Savage. "Yet The West Wing creator’s worldview remains a vision of liberalism at its hollowest and most ineffective." Savage was offended that Sorkin was on CNN lecturing "the new crop of young people who were just elected to Congress" about growing up and the "need to stop acting like young people."

It says a great deal about the state of American liberalism that a screenwriter best known for crafting middlebrow dramas famous for their circuitous dialogue remains a house intellectual-- none of it good.

Perhaps better than any other cultural artifact, Sorkin’s The West Wing chronicled the moral and intellectual decline of a post–New Deal Democratic Party, reveling in its shift to a vacuous center characterized by deficit hawkishness, technocratic proceduralism, and smirking, credential-obsessive Ivy League pretension. Serving as a morale booster for Bush-era liberals, the saga of the fictional Bartlett administration ultimately reflected and informed the politics of the Obama presidency and the world views of some of its most influential partisans and operatives.

Its absurdity notwithstanding, the West Wing creator’s patronizing intervention is yet a further illustration of how deeply embedded the discredited politics of the 1990s remain in the liberal imagination, even-- especially-- amid the ongoing nightmare of the Trump presidency. In no more than thirty seconds, Sorkin’s flourish managed to evoke virtually everything wrong with DNC liberalism in the twenty-first century: from its reflexive condescension toward the young and the vulnerable (note the pejorative reference to “transgender bathrooms”) to the various ways it fetishizes personality over program, delights in punching left, and elevates intelligence over ideology.

Indeed, just like the real-world liberalism it has channeled and shaped, Sorkin’s politics have always been concerned more with aesthetics than any specific or programmatic impulse towards reform. The West Wing universe, after all, is one in which an idyllic, two-term liberal presidency warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan “balance”-- all the while making no observably transformative changes to American life. What matters most is how politics look and feel and whether the briskly striding people who staff the corridors of power possess diplomas from the right schools. Idealism, such as it is, has more to do with an abstract faith in American institutions and their inherent greatness (as in, “America is already great”) than any particular desire to make the world a better place or see a coherent set of values reflected within them. In Sorkin’s parochial fantasy, politics at its noblest and most high-minded consists mainly of wonkish sophistry and elegantly crafted speeches designed to offer vague comfort while saying nothing.

If this sounds at all familiar (putting aside the actual plot lines of the show’s seven-season run) it’s because the liberalism that defined the Clinton and Obama eras very much cleaved to a similar script, rooting itself in charismatic yet technocratically minded figures behind whom the elite brokers and corporate actors that dominate American society largely carried on business as usual-- even as millions lost their jobs and homes, saw their wages stagnate, and were crushed by the collective avarice of banks, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical giants.

Challenged by the Sanders insurgency in 2016 and rattled by Trump’s victory, the liberal intelligentsia might have taken stock and reflected-- if only out of pure self-interest-- on their own failures and the deficiencies of their worldview. With a few exceptions, this has not been the case. If anything, Sorkin’s condescension towards progressive lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez suggests that the only thing many elite liberals still know how to do is double down, demand deference, and preach the feel-good platitudes of presidencies past.

No one is going to mistake the Sanders-Abrams White House for Josiah Bartlet's and John Hoynes'-- of that we can be certain. As Matt Taylor predicted at Vice this month, The 2020 Presidential Race Will Put Capitalism's Evils on Full Display. Even with the Warren G. Harding of the Democratic Party-- Biden, the "Back to Normalcy" candidate of an establishment that paved the way for Trump-- still popular, "it's clear," he wrote, "even a year out from the Iowa caucuses that the 2020 contest will be a once-in-a-generation battle over what democracy should look like, over how much the system can be tweaked or just destroyed, and whether Democrats can continue to function as a liberal and progressive party-- or need to become more of a distinctly anti-capitalist one."