Why Did The DCCC Fail So Spectacularly On Tuesday? Let's Ask 3 Really Smart Philosophic Types: AOC, Eric Zuesse And Anand Giridharadas

 

Today's most-talked about NY Times piece, at least in my universe, is Astead Herndon's post-election interview with AOC. Short version-- AOC: "People really want the Democratic Party to fight for them." If only Pelosi and Hoyer would tattoo that on their foreheads so they saw it whenever they checked the mirror! Their DCCC chair this cycle, Cheri Bustos, a protégée of centrist bankster Rahm Emanuel, aside from losing probably a dozen House seats while Biden won the election, nearly lost her own seat-- a D+3 district that was gerrymandered by the Democrat Party-controlled Illinois legislature to elect Democrats. With votes still being counted, the race was finally called for Bustos after a few harrowing days and it looks like she squeaked by with a 51.9-48.1% win over Esther Joy King, who enjoyed no significant help from the Republican Party (while Pelosi's SuperPAC used a late IE costing $1,044,002 to smear her). As of October 14 Bustos had spent $4,573,839 to King's $1,634,304. Bustos, in line with the DCCC, offered her constituents nothing at all to vote for her. Like her fellow New Dems and Blue Dogs, she opposes every popular systemic progressive initiative to ease the burdens conservatives have put on their lives. Yesterday, Politico noted that she is being considered for a Cabinet position.

Herndon began by affirming that AOC had been "a good soldier" for the party and Biden in the battle against the fascist threat. After Biden was declared the winner on Saturday, though, she "made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats." [Note: except that you may consider every seat "an important seat," not a single lost seat is even remotely important and the House Democratic caucus is MUCH better off without every one of the losers.] AOC put it differently, telling Herndon that some of the members who lost had made themselves "sitting ducks." Herndon's first question was to ask her for her macro takeaway. It certainly isn't what the pundits and high-priced consultants are saying to explain the abject failure of the DCCC last week. AOC:

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

Mike Levin and Harley Rouda were both elected in 2018 to represent adjoining districts. In Orange County, everything north of Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita in part of Rouda's district and everything south of Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano and Madera Ranch is part of Levin's district. Before their victories, both districts were occupied by odious Republicans, Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa. Levin is a moderate Democrat; Rouda, a former Republican, is a conservative Democrat. Levin's victory was quickly called-- 192,105 (53.4%) to 167,423 (46.6%). With 99% of the vote counted Rouda is losing to Republican Michelle Steel-- 196,208 (50.9%) to 189,235 (49.1%). Since being elected, Levin has been on the right side of crucial progressive roll calls 79.01% of the time. Rouda, on the other hand, is a New Dem and rates an "F" from ProgressivePunch; he's voted with progressives just 64.20% of the time. Progressives in his district know him as a DINO and he campaigned as a Republican-lite candidate.

Herndon pressed AOC on this tendency among conservative Democrats to shy away from issues that are important to Democratic voters: "Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?"

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the Year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

...These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party-- in and of itself-- does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

...If you are the D.C.C.C., and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.

The leadership and elements of the party-- frankly, people in some of the most important decision-making positions in the party [Note: Pelosi, Perez, Hoyer...]-- are becoming so blinded to this anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding themselves to the very assets that they offer.

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.

Herndon then asked her what her expectations are as to how open the Biden administration will be to the left? And what is the strategy in terms of moving it?

She responded that she don’t know how open they’ll be but noted that the Democratic establishment gets all lovey-dovey with the grassroots leading up to an election "and then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election. I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions-- and who was put in positions of leadership [Note: Rahm Emanuel, who Biden is already talking about giving a role to, as well as others from the bottom of the Democratic Party battle: Cheri Bustos, Heidi Heitkamp, Michele Flournoy, Antony Blinken, Tom Perez, Meg Whitman, Terry McCauliffe, Pete Buttigieg]-- that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

He followed up with the obvious question that all long-time Biden watchers are worried about: "What if the administration is hostile? If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

At the Strategic Culture Foundation blog on Friday, investigative historian Eric Zuesse wrote a somewhat more in depth look at the struggle between progressivism and traditional liberalism, pointing to a partially flawed recent piece by Philip Giraldi, . Zuesse pointed out that Giraldi "criticized-- and very correctly so-- the U.S. Democratic Party’s mischaracterization of America’s main problem as its (supposedly) being a conflict between ethnic groups (religious, cultural, racial, or otherwise), and Giraldi unfortunately merely assumed (falsely) that the Democratic Party’s doing this (alleging that inter-ethnic conflicts are America’s top problem) reflects the Party’s being 'progressive,' instead of its being 'liberal'; but, actually, there are big differences between those two ideologies, and that Party-- just like America’s other major Party, the Republican Party-- is controlled by its billionaires, and there simply aren’t any progressive billionaires; there are only liberal and conservative billionaires. America has a liberal Party, the Democratic Party, and a conservative Party, the Republican Party, and both of those Parties are controlled by their respective billionaire donors; and there are no progressive billionaires... Giraldi was actually attacking progressivism by confusing it with liberalism."

Though the Democratic (liberal) billionaires blacklisted Bernie-- and only Bernie, "had the most-passionate supporters, and vastly more donors, than did any other candidate in the contest; and, the polls throughout the Democratic primaries showed that he was virtually always either #2 or (occasionally) #1 in the preferences of all of the polled likely Democratic primary voters. But, Sanders got no billionaire’s money. He got as far as he did, only on his mass-base. He was running as the lone progressive in the field. And, unlike any of the others, he focused on the class-conflict issue, instead of on the ethnic-conflict issue-- he focused against the money-power, instead of against “racism” (which was his #2 issue). All of the other candidates placed the ethnic-conflict issue (in the form of anti-Black racism) as being America’s most important problem."

Sanders was the only candidate who blamed America’s billionaires (the people who control both of its Parties) for being the cause of America’s problems and the beneficiaries from those problems. He was the only progressive candidate in the entire contest. Sanders’s competitors were blaming the public (as if the majority of it were anti-Black bigots)-- not the aristocracy (not the super-rich-- the few people who actually control America). So: all of Sanders’s competitors had billionaires already funding them; and, still more billionaires were waiting in the wings to do so for whomever the Party’s nominee might turn out to be-- except if it would be Sanders (who would get nothing from any of them). (And, even if Sanders had won the Democratic nomination, what chance would he have had to win against Trump if even the Democratic Party’s billionaires were donating instead to the Trump campaign?)

Back in 2016, the two most-heavily-funded-by-billionaires candidates were Hillary Clinton (#1) and Donald Trump (#2). And they became the nominees. In today’s America, the billionaires always get their man (or their woman). It’s always a contest between a Republican-billionaires-backed nominee, versus a Democratic-billionaires-backed nominee.

What Giraldi blames on “progressivism” is instead actually “liberalism” (which accepts being ruled by its billionaires) but there are more ways than only this that Giraldi misunderstands the difference between these two ideologies.

...Giraldi writes as a conservative who uses the falsehoods that are intrinsic to liberalism as cudgels with which to attack progressivism. He doesn’t understand ideology-- especially progressivism. Clearly, it’s not within his purview; and, therefore, his intended attack against progressivism misses its mark, and doesn’t even squarely hit its intended target, which is actually liberalism.

Throughout history, the aristocracies have been of two types: outright conservatives, versus the “noblesse oblige” type of aristocrats, which are called “liberals.” The main actual difference between the two is that, whereas the self-proclaimed conservatives boldly endorse their own supremacism, liberals instead slur it over with nice and kindly-sounding verbiage. Whereas conservatives are unashamed of their having all rights and feeling no obligations to the public (even trying to minimize their taxes), liberals are ashamed of it, but continue their haughty attitudes nonetheless, and refuse to recognize that such extreme inequality of wealth is a curse upon the entire society. Progressives condemn both types of aristocrat: the outright conservatives, and the hypocritical conservatives (liberals). Progressives recognize that the more extreme the inequality of wealth is in a society, the less likely that society is to be an authentic democracy, and they are 100% proponents of democracy. Liberals talk about ‘equality’, but don’t much care about it, actually. That’s why aristocrats can support liberalism, but can’t support progressivism. Progressives recognize that the super-wealthy are the biggest enemies of democracy-- that they are intrinsically enemies of the public. Progressives aren’t bought-off even by ‘philanthropists.’

Scientific studies (such as this) have documented that the more wealth a person has, the more conservative that person generally becomes. Furthermore, the richer a person is, the more callous and lacking in compassion that person tends to be. Moreover, the richer and more educated a person is, the likelier that person is to believe that economic success results from a person’s having a higher amount of virtue (and thus failure marks a person’s lacking virtue). And, studies have also shown that the wealthiest 1% tend to be extreme conservatives, and tend to be intensely involved in politics. Consequently, to the exact contrary of Giraldi’s article, the higher levels of politics tend to be filled with excessive concerns about how to serve the desires of the rich, and grossly deficient concerns about even the advisability of serving the needs of the poor. Such attitudes naturally favor the aristocracy, at the expense of the public. Confusing liberalism with progressivism advances the conservative, pro-aristocracy, agenda, at the expense of truth, and at the expense of the public, and even at the expense of democracy itself.

Furthermore: throughout the millennia, aristocracies have been applying the divide-and-conquer principle to set segments of the public against each other so that blame by the public for society’s problems won’t be targeted against themselves (the aristocrats), who actually control and benefit from the corruption that extracts so much from the public and causes those problems. Thus: Black against White, gay against straight, female against male, Muslim against Christian, and immigrant against native, etc. This divide-and-conquer strategy is peddled by both conservative and liberal aristocrats, and has been for thousands of years. Giraldi’s focusing on that as being instead generated by progressives, is not only false-- it is profoundly false. It is a fundamental miscomprehension.

So, the popular confusion between progressivism and liberalism is beneficial to the aristocracy, but harmful to the public.

Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, is not confused and his Friday OpEd for the NY Times, Biden Can’t Be FDR He Could Still Be LBJ. On one level that scares people who lived through the "Hey, hey, LBJ, How many boys have you killed today" era. Giridharadas wrote that "if this election is to have lasting meaning, we cannot see a Biden campaign victory as license to cast away politics as a presence in our daily lives. We cannot succumb to the liberal temptation parodied by the comedian Kylie Brakeman to 'vote for Biden so we can all get back to brunch.' However effective it might have been at closing this race, this restorationist fantasy would be a terrible governing philosophy. Because the pre-Trump world-- in which voting rights were being gutted and 40 percent of Americans couldn’t afford a $400 emergency bill -- is no kind of place to go back to. Mr. Biden himself seemed to concede this point by tempering his restoration message with the slogan 'Build Back Better.'"

Giridharadas spoke with Schumer the day before the election-- when he still was tying to decide on whether to have diamonds or rubies in his Majority Leader crown-- and he wrote that Schumer, like Biden, "is an institutionalist and a moderate." He asked him about this idea of restoration versus transformation. "Almost as soon as he heard me say the word 'normalcy,' he began, for lack of a better term, to filibuster: 'No, no, I don’t buy that. My view,' he told me, 'is if we don’t do bold change, we could end up with someone worse than Donald Trump in four years' What passed for change in the past two decades (including during the Obama years) had not, he acknowledged, been 'big enough or bold enough.' When I asked if Democrats bore some responsibility for that, he deflected: 'There’s plenty of blame to go around.'"

Even if, improbably, the Senate is on Mr. Biden’s side in 2021, he and his advisers will have to pull off a grueling balancing act: pushing federal policy to reflect popular will so that people’s lives can measurably improve, while making fundamental changes to the workings of American democracy and managing to heal rather than inflame the cultural resentments, racial hatred and party polarization that still imperil the Republic (and that the Republican Party thrives on).

...If Democrats win the two presumed Georgia runoffs, Senate Democrats will represent roughly 41 million more people than the Republican half of the chamber. If Mr. Biden is to meet this moment, he can’t let his cautious temperament and deep hankering for civic comity stop him from making the policy changes families need.

...For tens of millions, the economic traumas of the pandemic have come on top of decades of stagnation and precariousness. Since 1989, the wealth of the bottom 50 percent of Americans has fallen by $900 billion. Before Covid-19, 44 percent of American workers were being paid median annual wages of $18,000. And the evictions now surging are coming in the wake of a housing market that has long been unaffordable. Even if high unemployment were reversed, it would hardly repair our increasingly classist and Uber-ized labor market.

And if Democrats do win the Senate? Senator Schumer told me he envisions a first 100 days filled with a raft of measures on the virus and economic relief, mixed in with policies that address inequality, climate change, student debt, immigration and more. A Biden administration’s early days “ought to look like F.D.R.’s,” he said. “We need big, bold change. America demands it, and we’re going to fight for it.”

Much, however, could still get in the way. First, Mr. Biden’s own instinct toward caution-- which can easily end up enabling paralysis at a time when Democrats’ window for proving the promise of an active government could be closing. Any measure of success is likely to be determined by how seriously a Biden administration takes the inevitable calls for fiscal conservatism and austerity (despite historically low interest rates).

...And there are early warning signs: Ted Kaufman, who is leading the Biden transition team, recently told The Wall Street Journal that because of Trump-era deficit spending, “when we get in, the pantry is going to be bare.”

A Biden administration could also perceive itself as owing a political debt to the most influential and visible center-right elements of his sweeping, unwieldy alliance of supporters. Young leftists of color from cities in major swing states are arguably more responsible for his win than Republican defectors like former Senator Jeff Flake and the former Republican operatives turned media darlings of the Lincoln Project. But who will have more of a voice in Washington?

On various matters of policy, Mr. Biden could find himself in an awkward fox trot with wealthy donors in liberal power centers like Silicon Valley and Wall Street-- the kind of people who may love hanging “Black Lives Matter” signs in their yards more than they love Biden proposals like a Section 8 expansion that would allow more working-class Black families to live in their midst.

...The growing sense, among both the party’s technocrats and its populists, is that their midterm fate lies in whether voters give Democrats credit for improving their lives-- not on the processes used or norms violated to do so.

“A public health and economic crisis is not the time for incremental steps, small ideas or meekness,” Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a leading Democrat in the House Progressive Caucus, told me. “Joe Biden can deliver on this from Day 1 with executive orders and administrative actions that cancel student debt, lower drug prices, strengthen workers’ rights and cut emissions.” The American Prospect recently published “277 Policies for Which Biden Need Not Ask Permission,” based on the results of the Biden-Sanders unity task force.

Mr. Biden has an opportunity to seize on policies that, thanks to the heterodoxy of Trumpism, now have surprising resonance in both parties-- but not for the traditional reasons of being milquetoast or appealing to corporatist moderates. A wealth tax polls surprisingly well among Republican voters. Using the Department of Justice to crack down on monopolies and threats from China has some bipartisan support. As does actual infrastructure investment and, to a limited extent, raising the minimum wage.

Mr. Biden also does not need Mr. McConnell’s permission to build a down-ballot pipeline. One of the failures of the Obama years was the attrition of the Democratic Party beneath the president: By 2017, its Senate seats had dwindled to 48 from 59, and it lost 62 House seats, 12 governorships and a whopping 948 seats in state legislatures.

Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, a progressive group that grooms candidates for office at all levels, proposes this corrective: “Bring back the 50-state strategy. Invest in all state parties to build grass-roots infrastructure,” she told me. “Set the direction and tone: No office is too small, no community too unimportant. Then raise money for all of it.”

To the extent that, for the next two years, divided government severely limits the sort of public action that progressives dreamed about in their 2020 primaries, Mr. Biden could use his office to create task forces that normalize and build a public consensus for more significant small-d democratic changes to American politics achievable only down the road.

...In the end, a basic choice may stalk Mr. Biden: What matters more, the radiation of personal decency or the pursuit of structural fairness?

There are some reasons to hope that he could be a bolder president than anticipated. He is that rare candidate who tacked toward the party base rather than the center in the general election. In certain areas, such as climate change and student debt, he has shown a willingness to have his initial policy view revised by others. He is less motivated by ideology than by the path of least resistance. Whether that path aligns with donors, the Beltway consensus or organized popular movements, he takes it.

The example of Lyndon Johnson-- a longtime senator and a vice president less charismatic than the president he served and succeeded who, nevertheless, became more consequential-- provides a possible historical analogue. Mr. Biden could turn out to be an improbably deft salesman for progressive priorities, using his disarming, folksy, median-voter-friendly patois, that “C’mon, man” Americana vibe, to make major changes seem like common sense.

“Joe Biden’s magic is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable,” Andrew Yang, once Mr. Biden’s rival for the Democratic nomination, told me. “He has shown the ability to move the mainstream of the Democratic Party on issues before. As president, whatever he does, he will bring the whole center with him.”