Monday, July 29, 2019

The "Existential Battle" Is for Control of the Democratic Party

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Steve Kornacki, MSNBC's so-called "numbers guy," visually misrepresents Sanders' strength against Trump, then lies about the erroneous graphic: "Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points." The graphic shows that Kornacki is obviously wrong. Warren is in third place, and Sanders' margin against Trump is greater than Warren's.

by Thomas Neuburger

Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.
     –Matt Taibbi

We've been hearing quite a bit about how the 2020 election is an "existential battle" for control of the nation's future, and that Trump's re-election poses an "existential threat." For example:

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: "we are in a fight for our democracy and our decency; we are engaged in an existential battle to defend objective reality".

Chauncey DeVega, Salon: "Trump is promising an authoritarian "national renewal" to his white supporters through a fake populism that nurtures feelings of grievance and victimhood -- feelings that can only be remedied through loyalty to the Great Leader and Dear Father. Political violence will be necessary -- and is already taking place across the country -- because TrumpWorld and its members believe that they are in an existential battle for survival."

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, reporting from Iowa: "In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an 'existential threat.'"

That 2020 existential battle, of course, is always cast as between the Democrats and the Republicans.

But there's another existential battle going on, one that will occur before the main event — the battle for control of the Democratic Party. In the long run, that battle may turn out to be more important than the one that immediately follows it.

Matt Taibbi, from the same article:
[T]he undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.
Before mainstream Democrats can begin the "existential battle" with the forces of Trump and Republicanism, they have to win the existential battle against the force that wants to force change on their own party.

They're engaged in that battle today, and it seems almost all of the "liberal media," sensing the existential nature of the threat, is helping them win it. Katie Halper, in a second perceptive piece on the media's obvious anti-Sanders bias, "MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous," writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) said that Bernie Sanders 'made [her] skin crawl,' though she 'can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,' she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network."

Halper then documents instance after instance of this bias, from graphics that show Sanders in fourth place in a poll in which he placed second...



to Steve Kornacki presenting a different misleading graphic from a different poll, then reinforcing the visual error with a verbal lie (see above), to political analyst Zerlina Maxwell (and former Clinton staffer, though this was never mentioned) blaming Sanders on-air for not mentioning race until 23 minutes into a speech, when in fact he mentioned it at the five-minute mark.

Maxwell corrected her misrepresentation later when challenged about it...



...but only on Twitter, and only while reinforcing her scorn for Sanders.

MSNBC is clearly acting as a messaging arm of the Democratic Party mainstream in its battle with progressives in general and Sanders in particular, and Zerlina Maxwell, who's been variously employed by that mainstream, from her work with Clinton to her work on MSNBC, is an agent in that effort.

Let me repeat what Matt Taibbi wrote: "[Sanders'] election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector."

Before this election becomes a referendum on Trump, it will be a referendum on the Democratic Party, on whether voters in the Democratic primary, as many of them as are permitted to participate in it, will choose to continue the Party as currently constituted, or force on it sudden, radical and transformational change.

If the nation wishes true deliverance, not just from Trump and Republicans, but from the painful state that got Trump elected in the first place, it will first have to believe in a savior. 

Will it choose as its savior a radically overhauled Democratic Party? Or will it trust its salvation to a Party that, in the words of the Onion's fictional, but accurate Nancy Pelosi, offers as "our core 2020 argument" that "we are infinitesimally less objectionable than our opposition."

Welcome to the Democratic primary. In the long run, if mainstream Democrats win the first existential battle of 2020 and enter the second unreformed, how much of the nation will truly rally to their side and help them defeat the current Trump, or the next one, or the next one after that?

Will the nation still seek delivery from their pain, even after Trump is defeated, if indeed he is? And if they do, will they find it in an unreconstructed, money-driven Democratic Party, or go looking elsewhere again, perhaps to an elsewhere worse than the elsewhere the current Trump emerged from?
  

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6 Comments:

At 10:21 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Will the nation still seek delivery from their pain, even after Trump is defeated, if indeed he is?"

The needs of the people aren't being met by either party, therefore those needs will still exist even if Trump wins next year, which it's clear the Democrats will do nothing to prevent. IF somehow Biden wins, he's already on record to do nothing about anything.

"And if they do will they find in an unreconstructed, money-driven Democratic Party . . ."

THAT isn't going to change any time soon! The recent Hollywood fundraisers for Sleepy Joe and Mayo Pete alone are proof that the Democrats are as on the take as Republicans from other sectors of the economy.

"[Will Democrats be] the solution they need, or go looking elsewhere again, perhaps to an elsewhere worse than the place the current Donald Trump emerged from?"

Republican voters are clearly headed off in this direction, considering that the False Profit$ (sic) are already out there calling for Xtian jihad "in defense" of their "religious beliefs".

I don't yet see anything resembling a political darkness drawing in non-Republican voters, unless one wants to include the current leadership of the Democratic Party. Then such voters are already at that place, or Biden's numbers would be much smaller.

 
At 10:54 AM, Anonymous ap215 said...

There's a reason why MSDNC is the strongarm of the democratic establishment Comcast they get their marching orders from them they're pathetic.

 
At 12:11 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

And Bernie's poll numbers will more than likely never match his actual support levels. Independents will break for him in a big way along with (I suspect) large numbers of folks who haven't voted in the last few elections (ie: progressives who've grown increasingly exhausted/disgusted with the Democratic Party).

 
At 12:57 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The "Existential Battle" Is for Control of the Democratic Party"

Here we diverge, Mr. Thomas. There is no battle. The money owns the party and shall always own the party. The democrap party is controlled by the money and its hand-picked, thoroughly vetted proxies. There are long rosters of corrupt sociopaths in succession for both chambers and each action committee (DNC, DSCC snd DCCC). Should one fall, another his/her equal (in odiousness) shall eagerly take up the banner. Each committee is engaged in tactics/strategery meant to keep their ranks pure(ly corrupt). Only DWT, as far as I can see, even mentions it. But never fear, when the rigged noms and candidates are slated, DWT will always beg its zombie readers to 'hold down their lunch and vote blue... ANY blue'.
What's more, voters have never mustered an erg of resistance to any of this for 5 decades. Each election has the left electorate re-affirming the corruption bwo re-electing the same corrupt money proxies. If 2016's unanimity in endorsing the greatest whore in history, Pelosi, for speaker doesn't sink in... you truly are a lefty voter -- intellectual/emotional flora.

"Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020." –Matt Taibbi

Normally I agree with Taibbi, but here he refuses to see the truth kicking him in the balls. Sanders only TALKS like a revolutionary to get attention. He's been in congress for decades now, during which everything has gone to shit. The best thing you can say for him is he is ineffective.
The worst you can say is he's playing charades. That he endorsed the bankers' whore in '16 proves he's only acting like that 'revolutionary'.

His insincerity is irrelevant, however, as the money's official election-corruption body, the DNC, has put the fix in (rather than FOR someone, AGAINST Sanders). Bernie is not going to win the nom. you can take that to goldman-sachs and invest it in fraudulent MBSs guaranteed by the FED.

 
At 4:18 PM, Blogger Skeptical Partisan said...

Complete speculation on my part:

Republican Party will offend so many groups, the sum total of consumer boycotts against their money sponsors will force them to repudiate the GOP... end of GOP.

Conflicts within the Democratic Party, the establishment eager to accept the sponsorship and call of former GOP supporters versus more public minded lefties, will splinter the Party in two. The resulting Neo-Democratic Party will consist of current establishment Democrats and 'Reagan' Republicans; a 'Progressive' Party will take the liberal counterpoint.

 
At 3:43 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

SP, interesting speculation. It might be valid but for one thing: American lefties have shown zero capacity for anything more complicated than the binary, black or white meme. If the democraps bisected into two pieces, 60 million of $hillbillary's 65 million would scatter dormant grey matter as their heads 'sploded all over theirselves.

 

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