After a year of campaigning, campaigning, and still more campaigning by almost enough candidates to fill out the roster of a Major League Baseball franchise (hello, spring training!), we can now put the results of two caucuses and one primary in the books for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination in the books. And we have a front runner, in position to cement that status this weekend by way of the South Carolina primary, and all the more so by way of the results of the Super Tuesday primaries the following week.
So everyone on the Democratic side of the fence is happy, excited, raring to go for the fall election, and, above all, pulling together for the sake of party unity and the national need to end the nightmare that is the T**** Administration. Right?
Silly me. This is the Democratic Party that we're talking about. It wouldn't be the Democratic Party without a near-complete freakout over the results. And that's what we've got, with the emergence of Sen. Bernie Sanders as the front runner.
Sanders' ability to break out of the pack, and defy the conventional wisdom that the path to Democratic victory in November runs in the center lane, has understandably shocked a lot the people who mold the conventional wisdom, to say nothing of the majority of the voters/caucus-goers who did not support him. I try to avoid exaggeration in this space and elsewhere, but I've read a lot of the media reaction to Sanders' successes, and it's hard to view most of it (on the negative side) as being anything other than hysterical. One way of measuring the hysteria: for the first time in decades, the dreaded M-word--McGovern--is being used to describe a Presidential campaign.
It's easy to understand some portion of this intensity. One of the hoariest rhetorical cliches in electoral politics is "the stakes have never been higher." Well, this time around, the stakes truly never have been higher. Post-impeachment, T**** has been even more out of control when it comes to making the Federal government his personal plaything, and enlisting the aid of his Attorney General in making that happen. The risks involved in allowing this to continue without limit have, this past week, been exposed and heighten by the revelation, related to the coronavirus crisis, that T*** has fired the government officials responsible for handling pandemics.
But, as I counseled in my previous blog post about the virtues of our taking a deep, collective breath at this point in our national ordeal, it might be useful to walk through some of the objections to Sanders' candidacy, and see if they really require resignation to four more years of the Orange Nightmare and the potential collapse of the Republic (the latter being a real risk if the former becomes a reality). And we'll begin with the not-so-obvious one, in part because it drives me crazy that it's even advanced as an argument.
Whether the nominee is Sanders or anyone else, T**** is going to win because T**** has done a great job of handling the economy. Let me answer that one as unambiguously as possible: no, no, a thousand thousand times NO. He has taken an economy that was making the biggest comeback in American history since the Great Depression, and saddled it with debt and tariffs that have already begun an economic slowdown. In fact, under three years of T****, the economy has produced fewer jobs than it did during the last three years of the Obama Administration, with a Republican Congress fighting President Obama all the way during the last two of those years. Don't believe me? Well, then, believe Snopes.
And you might also want to believe one of T****'s favorite constituencies: farmers. They haven't got tired of winning yet; in fact, they haven't even started winning. Unless bankruptcies can be considered a form of winning.
Wage growth? It's happening primarily because of states that have (finally) raised their minimum wages. Consumer confidence? Up and down, but when it's been down (and it's been down recently), it's really been down. Industrial output? Same story. Business borrowing? Hitting a wall. In fact, there's reason to believe that we may already be entering a recession. In any case, there's no reason to doubt that the American Dream is, for the majority of us that want to have a family, effectively dead.
Oh, but what about the Dow? That's supposed to be--pardon the pun--the President's trump card (I'm spelling it out here because it's not his name). In fact, it's been the recipient of all those corporate tax cuts, the ones that were supposed to create the jobs that are now disappearing. That money is going into the repurchasing of shares, or investment in offshore tax havens (never to return to the U.S.). And, in the process, it's exploding the Federal budget deficit and the national debt, which is beginning to send interest rates in the wrong direction.
On top of all of this, there's the acid test every President must be able to pass: dealing with the unexpected. The coronavirus threat is a classic example, one that has already knocked almost 3,000 points off of T****'s beloved Dow. And that's likely to get even worse, if it's really the case that T****'s only plan for dealing with the threat is to wait until spring.
I vividly remember my assessment of the 2008 presidential race, up to the point at which the Wall Street meltdown began. Up until then, I genuinely believed that the race was John McCain's to lose. Despite the Iraq quagmire, the economy was still strong enough to support a vote for a Republican successor to George W. Bush, and Barack Obama was still a relative unknown whose electability as the first African-American nominee of a major party was still open to debate. This rationale went out the window with the onset of the financial crisis. The events of this week, and T****'s predominantly political response, going so far as to tell a friendly rally of paid attendees that the coronavirus is a Democratic "hoax," make think that we may be witnessing the beginning of a double-barreled meltdown, one propelled by economic weakness and a pandemic of epic proportions.
This is the bottom line: Under T****, we do not have a great economy. We have what remains of the Obama recovery, menaced by threats that T**** has either created or ignored. Any Democrat would do better, as the track record of the last two Democratic Presidents will attest, compared to the track records of the two Republicans that preceded them. And, in this case, "any Democrat" includes Bernie Sanders. And, on top of that, not only do we not have a great economy, we may not even have a safe society. This "President" is not politically bulletproof, no matter the events of the past three years. No President is. We need to stop letting his braggadocio and the mindlessness of his followers live rent-free in our heads and hearts. With one nominee or the other. If the majority of Democrats decide that Sanders should be the nominee, all Democrats and other progressives should get on board for him.
But what about the fact that Bernie isn't a complete "progressive"? His positions on guns, immigration, and civil rights sound more like things a Republican would say. On the other side, he's lavished praise on Communist dictatorships that not even the most liberal of Democrats would make. These are completely fair criticisms, and it's entirely on Sanders' shoulders to figure out how to deal with them. From listening to some of his recent speeches, he seems to be dealing with the former dilemma in much the same way past candidates in similar positions have dealt with it: the "Darwinist" approach, in which you talk about how much you've "evolved" in your thinking. (See, e.g., George H.W. Bush in 1980 on the subject of abortion.) Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. It's pretty much all he can do.
And the latter dilemma? Well, that's a much bigger rhetorical hill to climb. Thus far, he is trying to explain it by saying that even bad dictators do good things. In other words, he's effectively praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time. I don't think that's going to fly. He's going to have to hope that people really hate T**** a lot. He may not be far-fetched in nurturing that hope.
Okay, but what about the word "socialism"? Bernie wears the label "socialist" proudly. Isn't that all by itself the kiss of death for any American politician. Don't the recent election results in the United Kingdom reinforce that point? Let's unpack this carefully, starting with the point about the U.K..
Jeremy Corbyn's loss, and the losses of his Labour Party, to Boris Johnson and the Tories, was not about socialism versus capitalism. One simple way to illustrate that point is simply with the commitment Johnson made to support a number of positions that are essentially pro-Labour positions, including and especially additional money for the National Health Service. There was one and only one issue on the ballot in that election: Brexit. And Corbyn's position on that issue was not fundamentally different than Johnson's. For what it's worth, I believe that, had Corbyn decided to make a determined, coherent argument for the Remain position, he might have had a shot of winning, or at least seeing his party lose fewer seats. Even then, however, the anti-Semitism he has unleashed within Labour may doom the party's chances for years, even with shifts in the larger political climate. I think, by the way, that we will not have to wait long, but that's a post for another day.
But what about socialism itself? Isn't that an ideology that's just too far left for a center-right country? Even if you qualify it as democratic socialism, where the concern is with building an effective social safety net rather than having the government take over the economy? Don't we pride ourselves on having more rugged individualism than our European forebearers?
Well, that's the thing about the nation's demographics. They are simply not as "European" as they used to be, just as they are not as male as they used to be. There are more women and people of color than ever before, and they are both victims historically of discrimination. They are, for that reason, more open to various forms of government assistance, and less inclined to see it as a source of oppression; if anything, it's the capitalists that have historically oppressed them.
Beyond that, however, we are at the end of a 30-year worldwide run of untrammeled capitalism, and, for most people, the results are in: lower wages, more dangerous jobs, a planet being pushed toward the far end of its existential rope--and the rewards for all this going only to 1% of the total number of people. Even if you accept the idea that, in politics, stability can be most commonly found in the ideological mean, if you want to get to that mean, there's only one way for all of us to go, and that's to the left.
One thing I will say in favor of the Never T****ers: even they seem to be able to get this, to a much greater degree than the MSM seems able to do. Here's Bruce Bartlett, for example. And isn't it interesting that, in the news story he references, you see a prominent conservative member of the T**** Administration advocating government purchases of corporations? Gee, isn't that the kind of socialism everybody hates?
And it's not just the Never T****ers. If you look at the positions of the current (and former) 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on a number of issues, especially health care, it's painfully clear that the "moderate" positions are much farther to the left than they were 20 or even 12 years ago. Who would have thought, back in 2009, that the "public option" would become the middle-of-the-road position in the health care debate? Back then, advocating it made you a "dangerous lefty." For that matter, this was also true of many of the "moderate" Democrats who helped the party take back the House in 2018. I believe that Sanders can and should take a great deal of credit for that shift.
And this is why, whether or not I think Sanders would make a successful President--and I have doubts on that point, based on his temperament and lack of legislative trophies--it would be utter folly to try and stop him, should he win the nomination. At that point, there is no viable alternative. You may, like me, have wished for a nominee that better reflected America's diversity. But, at that point, the best thing to do is to advocate, through the process of selecting a running mate, a ticket that does indeed reflect that diversity. We need to let the process run its course, a course that every candidate committed to in advance, regardless of any imperfections it may have, and choose the candidate that the people want to choose.
We need to do this because, if politics in this country is ever going to regain the dignity that it deserves in a democracy, it needs to reverse a 50-year trend of focusing on personalities, on resumes, on alleged questions of character, and once again focus on ideas. America is, and always has been, as much of an idea as it is a nation. And that idea depends on related ideas that support it, that sustain it, that advance it, and that makes it matter to everyone. I think that's what the youth movement that has supported Sanders cares about most. They aren't burden by the boomer-based battles over who is the most telegenic candidate, or who can do a more effective job of smearing their opponents. They understand what matters about politics the most, and that is what politics can do for all of us, and not just what it can do for one party or another.
Can Sanders beat T****, if he wins the nomination? Honestly speaking, I don't know. I pray with all of my heart that, whoever the Democratic nominee is, I pray that he or she will beat the living daylights out of him. I'm not sure that Sanders can do that.
I do know that, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all of my resources, and with all of my hopes for those I love, and for the nation I love, I will do all I can to make it happen.
And I don't hesitate to add that, if you give a damn about the future, you'll do it, too.
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