After the Future

The Sacred Polity & the Loss of Our Better Angels

 

Some years ago, I read about Glenn Beck's complaining about the deportment of the athletes during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner before the Super Bowl: 

"Was anybody else offended by...can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song.

"I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on their jersey," Beck said.

"The country that gives them the ability to...pursue their happiness in peace and safety is not worth putting your hand on the heart."  (Source)

In a secular age, it's hard for most cosmopolitan types to understand why Glenn Beck gets so upset about things like this. I think I get it, but I'm going to give one of my long-winded explanations to provide some context to explain what I think is going on. Doing so also gives me a platform to talk about a couple of other things as well, one of which is why the secular left has become so anemic as a political force. In doing so I'm going to lean heavily on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, chapter 12--"The Age of Mobilization".

In the pre-Reformation Europe, the world still had an enchantment about it--some things were sacred and some very much were not. But it was a rather vertical, static sense of the sacred. The sacred was experienced in special times during the cycle of the seasons, in sacred places, and in sacred ritual actions. The sacred was sharply distinguished from the profane, and profane behavior in a sacred time or place was more than a breach of decorum--it was sacrilegious.

Today secular cosmopolitans and, I'd say, most believers have lost any sense of the intensity of experience that was associated with the sacred--or, for that matter, the sacrilegious. Comedians keep trying to push past the last vestiges of an old sense of taboo skewering what's left of any vestigial sacred cows, but it's all rather inconsequential. They think they are lion tamers in their imaginations of themselves, when in fact in a reversal of the Monty Python sketch, they are really dealing with anteaters.

And with Glenn Beck you have a kind of throwback: he's someone who articulates a nostalgia for the lost sacred--and that's the part I get, kind of, because I, too, feel that loss. But Taylor illuminates something that I as someone who grew up in a pre-Vatican Catholic world (I was born in 1950, graduated 8th grade in '64 and high school in '68) had very little sense of--the sacred rituals of American civil religion. We Catholics had our own definition and way of experiencing the sacred and the sacrilegious, and all the Protestant versions of it (with which I associated the rituals of civil religion) seemed rather pallid, a kind of wannabe sacred that really didn't cut the mustard. It was all so much going through the motions. The various rituals of American civil religion always seemed kind of silly and unserious to me, the way the Shriners play at being some kind of initiatory mystery cult--they're acting out a collective fantasy that has lost any real connection to the living spiritual forces that gave these rituals their original shape.

So here's where Taylor helped me understand something I didn't before. I had only a passing acquaintance with Robert Bellah's work on civil religion in the 70s--it didn't really interest me because it had little to do with what I believed to be a vital spiritual future. But that work is important if you want to understand what's going on in American society today, and I'm more interested in that now than I was then. I see now that there was a moment when American civil religion really had valid sacred power, where the rituals weren't empty or without reference to something noble.  And I understand how it functioned effectively to replace the experience of the lost sense of the sacred that pervaded the collective imagination in the ancien regime:

In an enchanted world, there is an obvious way in which God can be present in society; in the loci of the sacred.  And the political society can be closely connected to these, and can itself be thought to exist on a higher plane. Ernst Kantoriowicz tells us that one of the first uses of the term 'mystical body' in European history referred to the French kingdom. The king himself could be one of the links between the planes, represented respectively by the king's mortal and undying bodies. . . .

This is a description of what we'll call the old-school sacred polity. But this model began to crumble after the Reformation for lots of complex reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to write about here. But three very important factors were (1) the religious fragmentation of Christendom that broke apart its organic sense of modeling a hierarchical cosmos, coupled with (2) the post-Copernican understanding of the cosmos that supplanted the Ptolemaic hierarchical scheme, and (3) the project by both Protestant and Catholic counter-Reformation elites to purify religious practice and belief by purging the pagan vestiges of popular religion, which were essential for maintaining a sense of the world's enchantment. 

Educated ecclesial elites were among the most aggressive in trying to stamp out all that superstitious enchantment; nevertheless, it continued, even in the Protestant countries, well into the 19th Century. In Catholic countries there was what Taylor calls the baroque compromise, which allowed for a little of the old mystery and spiritual exuberance, but it was definitely 'new school'. I experienced as a child the last gasp of that baroque ecclesial mentality. The old-school practices of the heath, that had been largely accepted and reframed in the pre-Reformation Christian social imagination, were now taboo.

But despite the resistance to these changes by these heathen heathdwellers, a new notion of the sacred began to take hold of the imaginations of the educated elites, especially in the Protestant countries. Here's Taylor on this shift:

Now with advancing disenchantment, especially in Protestant societies, another model took shape, with relation both to the cosmos and the polity. In this the notion of Design was crucial. To take the cosmos, there was a shift from the enchanted world to a cosmos conceived in a conformity with post-Newtonian science, in which there is absolutely no question of higher meanings being expressed in the universe around us. But there is still, with someone like Newton himself, for instance, a strong sense that the universe declares the glory of God. . . . Now the presence of God no longer lies in the sacred, because this category fades in a disenchanted world. But he can be thought to be no less powerfully present through His Design.

So before getting to our more intensely late-20th century experience of secularism, there was an intermediary stage that was very much at the center of the American project. It was carried primarily by what I have written about here as the whiggish spirit for which the Puritans and other northern Calvinists were the chief bearers. The sacred wasn't something experienced in sacred space so much as it was experienced in a kind of sacred time--or perhaps more accurately in a sense of Providentially ordained historical purposes. This is what I'll call the new-school sacred polity. Its citizens belonged to a society that was developing, moving at the cutting edge history toward fulfillment of divinely ordained purposes.

One's experience of the sacred correlated with this sense of living one's life as a free individual, but in a free individualism that was attuned to the evolving effort to fulfill that plan, and in doing so to be on the right side of history:

The presence of God in the cosmos is matched by another idea: His presence in the polity. Here an analogous change takes place. The divine isn't there in a King who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society which plainly follows God's design. This can be filled in with an idea of moral order which is seen as established by God, in the way invoked, for instance, in the American Declaration of Independence: Men have been created equal, and have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The idea of a moral order which is expressed in this Declaration, and which has since become dominant in our world, is what I have been calling the Modern Moral Order. It is quite different from the orders which preceded it. Its members are disembedded individuals who come to associate together. The design underlying the association is that each, in pursuing his or her own purpose in life, acts to benefit others mutually. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others, and offers them mutual help of certain kinds.

But in the earlier days, when the plan was understood as Providential and the order seen as Natural Law, which is the same as the law of God, building a society which fulfills these requirements was seen as fulfilling the design of God. To live in such a society was to live in one where God was present, not at all in the way that belonged to the enchanted world, through the sacred, but because we were following His design. God is present as the designer of the way we live. We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as "one people under God".

This is the basis for American exceptionalism that was felt especially strongly in the 19th century. Lincoln was an exemplar in his sense of the nation's providential mission, and his vision and his prodigious ability to articulate it have made him the architect of America's second founding. He articulated what so many Americans came to believe--that America was  the world's "last best hope". Not because it was flawless, but because in the American soul there were these better angels working to accomplish in a more perfect union a providentially ordained design. Lincoln--who was no churchgoer--more than any other prominent American I can think of had a profound sense of America as sacred polity in the new school sense. He was the St. Paul, so to speak, of American civil religion--not its founder, but its most eloquent evangelist.

So this sense of higher national purpose comprised two elements: first, the sense that there was something providential in the American project to the degree that it was progressively moving toward a greater realization of this higher purpose or design, that it was in this sense a project of the nation's better angels; second, a collective sense that while we are a self-reliant, freedom-loving people, we are also good neighbors, that we have as individuals a vested, mutual interest in the welfare of the whole society--that we all have a shared hope for a better American future.

This idea of moving toward a more perfect realization of a divine order was was not a possibility in the collective social imagination of the old-school sacred polity. The order was already established, and people lived virtuous lives in conformity with it, or they lived dissolute, disordered, sinful lives out of conformity with it. But in the new-school sacred polity it became a commonplace, especially for the more "whiggish" factions in the new American republic, that the American providential purpose was to realize more perfectly over time the ideals articulated in the Declaration, and in doing so to be a light to the nations. And to a large degree, and for a long time, America was that.

Sure, the nation had its dark side. There has always been a  violent, rapacious aspect to the American character, but it was balanced by this other side, these better angels, this feeling for a providential destiny, and for the hope of a society ruled by decency and a spirit of mutual help. This sense in those who bore the nation's better  angels empowered them with a zeal that is hard for progressives today to imagine or embrace. Just read the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to get a feel for it if you need some reminding.

It's hard to think of American evangelicalism as being a force for progressive change, but it was. The last time we saw it was in Martin Luther King's rhetoric that drew deeply and powerfully from this now submerged sense of the new school sacred polity. And that's the last time we saw any real significant change in this country. I'd argue that without an appeal to the new school sacred polity, nothing significant gets done. I'd like to say that if Lincoln was the American sacred polity's St. Paul, then MLK was its St. Augustine. Augustine's imagination of the world and God's relationship to it dominated Europe for over a thousand years--would that MLK's did so as well.

But for most educated Americans now it's too hard to believe that America has a providential role to be at the cutting edge of history, or to think of America as Lincoln did as the world's last best hope. People mouth the words from time to time, but it doesn't resonate. That's what was different, though, about Obama. When he used the language of the sacred polity, it resonated, and it awakened what Lincoln called our better angels.

I think this was the key to Obama's mystique during his campaign, and is the reason why for so many of us he is now such a crushing disappointment. During the campaign, he awakened that latent sense of America's sacred providential calling, he roused those better angels. But when they reported to work the day after his inauguration, he told them to go home. He told them that America is a game played by insiders, that it was back to business as usual and that he would govern in a way that was in its substance, if not its style, in continuity with everything decent Americans hated about what had happened to the country since the invasion of Iraq.

That, IMO, was Obama's great failure--not to recognize the opportunity that was afforded him, that these angels with his leadership could have accomplished significant progress toward the change we all long for, whether we consciously recognize it or not. But Obama so far has disregarded them, and he has given new life and restored legitimacy to the forces of regression, which were on their heels in 2008. That's what's so infuriating--this sense of missed opportunity. And so now we're told by all the jaded types that those of us who believe in those better angels were foolish ever to think they exist. I insist that we were not. And I insist that nothing changes until those angels are roused and put to work. 

***

The culture war in America since the 70s is a war between two competing forms of nostalgia--between those nostalgic for a sacred, providential sense of America's purpose--the cultural right--and those nostalgic for the lost, collective spirit mutual help--mainly progressives on the cultural left. The odd thing about this culture war is that both sides need the aspects in the other they oppose. It's as if the American soul were riven in two, and in its division cannot stand. They each in their way flip and flop impotently, gasping for breath like fish on a dock. We're left with impotence, stalemate, frustration--the best people at best mustering a kind of diffident goodwill, and the worst a barbaric ferocity that commands the field.

The cultural right is all about a longing for this static sacred with little sense of what I described above as the national project of our better angels--it is on the whole remarkably mean spirited and small minded. And the cultural left is all about social progress without any sense of history's having a sacred or providential dimension. And that's why, I'd argue, progressives are so weak. They lack the force of deeply inspired conviction. They don't really believe in the better angels, except maybe as a quaint, air-quoted metaphor, so they would never think to call upon them.

Progressives on the cultural left don't "get" what Lincoln and MLK "got". They don't understand that in order to resist the enormous power of the barbaric forces that now dominate in our political and economic sphere, there has to be a deeply felt spiritual counterforce that resistance can draw from.

So what's the takeaway here? Someone like Glenn Beck recognizes on an unconscious level that something is missing--a feeling for the sacred that all of us whether we realize it or not deeply long for, but he doesn't know where to find it. He looks vainly for it in a preservation of dessicated forms rather than in a recovery of the broad-minded generous spirit Lincoln helped us to imagine. These forms without their originating animating spirit are zombie forms, possessed in his case by paranoid demons and the delusional thinking that follows from such a possession.

This kind of extremist right wing conservative embraces a fantasy sacred, one that has no existence or force except to reinforce his delusional thinking. By their fruits you will know them. Progressives, on the other hand, reject any possibility for experiencing the sacred, and so don't, and so on the whole lack the collective will to oppose the barbarians except to write nasty things about them in their blogs. And so we're at this impasse. And the barbaric forces rule until somehow or other the better angels find their footing in some kind of social movement that understands the power they have to make the difference.

We must at some point retrieve this sense of a sacred national purpose in the way that Lincoln and MLK understood it. And to recognize once again the difference between the sacred and the sacrilegious, and that there is nothing sacred about markets; they are profane neutral. Nevertheless there are some market behaviors, like the kind of thing we've seen done by Wall Street, that are downright sacrilegious--deep, appalling, abject affronts to what in our collective sense of decency and common national purpose. If there is anybody on the current political scene today who eloquently articulates his disgust at that sacrilege, with the loss of the spirit of mutual help that should be the throbbing heart of a renewed sense of our sacred polity, it is the secular Jew, Bernie Sanders. 

I fear that if a movement inspired by the nation's better angels does not arise, we will eventually be thrown into a dialectic of barbarism, one barbarian faction seeking to supplant the reigning barbarian in an endless cycle of political king of the hill. We were supposed to be better than that--and at times we have been, but we're in a part of the cycle now in which we have no sense of our national purpose because we have no sense anymore of our better angels and of the spirit of mutual help.

I guess the question is whether the game is lost or whether we can at some point recover what we've lost. I'm pessimistic, but not without hope. 

[Ed. note: This is a repost, with some light editing  of the original that appeared February 11, 2011]

Trump and the Koch Money Party

From Chapter 12 of Mayer's Dark Money, "Mother of All Wars, the 2012 Setback":

While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own voter data bank, commissioned state-of-the-art polling, and created a fund-raising operation that enlisted hundreds of other wealthy Americans to help pay for it. They had also forged a coalition of some seventeen allied conservative groups with niche constituencies who would mask their centralized source of funding and carry their message. To mobilize Latino voters, they formed a group called the Libre Initiative. To reach conservative women, they funded Concerned Women for America. For millennials, they formed Generation Opportunity. To cover up finger prints on television attack ads, they hid behind the American Future Fund and other front groups. Their network's money also flowed to gun groups, retirees, veterans, antilabor groups, antitax groups, evangelical Christian Groups, and even $4.5 million for something called the Center for Shared Services, which coordinated administrative tasks such as office space rentals and paperwork for the others. Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, organized chapters all across the country. The Kochs had established what was in effect their own private political party.

Mayer's Dark Money is essentially the story of how the Kochs and others have in fact created their own extremist political party that masquerades as the GOP. (See also this article "The Koch Effect", by Harvard's  Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez that makes the same point.) Its ideology is at its core the same as the fringe, deeply whacko John Birch Society, for which the Koch brothers' father was a founding supporter and Charles Koch was for a time a member. Their money bends all GOP candidates, even relatively sane, moderate ones, to their ideology or they get primaried into oblivion. This doesn't work every time, but it works more often than not.  

When we talk about how the GOP establishment doesn't want a Donald Trump nomination, we are essentially talking about how these extremist ideologues fear losing control of their party. Charles Koch is a control freak, and Trump is, if nothing else, uncontrollable. He cannot be bought the way, for instance, the more pliable Scott Walker could be or shaped the way the shallow Rubio can be. In addition, Trump is too unorthodox. He's not right-wing enough. He's a loose cannon. Nobody on the establishment Right wants to deal with him.

But that doesn't mean they won't get behind him if he goes on to win the GOP nomination. I assume that's why the Kochs and Adelson haven't jumped in to try to stop him, and they probably won't unless he starts to show a weakness he hasn't shown yet. They don't want to burn bridges. They want to be able to work with him and shape his presidency once he's elected. Trump might be a maverick, but he's captured the base--and the Koch Money Party is nothing without the base--and Trump is, after all, a member of their brotherhood of billionaires. Trump's and their interests align more than they diverge, and once elected, Trump will have to build alliances with former opponents and with the Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are almost all members in good standing of the Koch Money Party. The Kochs have $889 million to commit the Republican presidential beyond what the RNC will provide. From the NYT January 26, 2015:

The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history.

The spending goal, revealed Monday at the Kochs’ annual winter donor retreat near Palm Springs, Calif., would allow their political organization to operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican Parties. It would require a significant financial commitment from the Kochs and roughly 300 other donors they have recruited over the years, and covers both the presidential and congressional races. In the last presidential election, the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million.

Trump will find a way to work with that, even if he doesn't publicly admit it. 

I think the main concern of the billionaire-run GOP establishment is whether Trump is electable in the general. I think Rubio or Kasich probably are more electable than Trump. They are at least safer bets, the way HRC is the safer bet in the thinking of conventional Dems. But as I've written here in other posts, I question whether the safe bet this cycle is really the safer choice. There is a way in which the educated, culturally liberal types who make up the Democratic Party are in their own echo chamber and are as out of touch with political reality as their right-wing counterparts. Something else is going on this country that cannot be explained within a conventional politics frame, and I suspect, without being able to prove it, that the safe choice this cycle is really the riskier choice.

That being said, it doesn't look good for Sanders, the unsafe bet, at this point. The outsized shaping role of Iowa and NH on the primary process is pretty ridiculous to begin with, but It seems equally ridiculous that solid-red, southern states should play such an important role shaping in the Dems' race so early in the primary process. Who cares about S.C.? It will play no role whatsoever in helping the Dem nominee to win in November. Why, then, should SC voters' choice be an indicator of any significance regarding what the party needs to win then?

But analysts are quite right to point out that if Sanders can't win on Tuesday in Massachusetts, where he's behind now in the polls, it's probably over for him. If MA goes for HRC, it will be a solid indicator that timid Dems want to go with the safe choice. Everybody on the Left will go back to sleep, and the real excitement will be with Trump. In 2012 the GOP put up a candidate that was so clueless and mediocre that no amount of money could save his candidacy. That will not be true this year. Trump is a vain, silly ignoramus with the emotional maturity of a middle schooler, but he is neither clueless nor mediocre in his politics. He will be a formidable opponent in the general. And while I hope I'm wrong, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the populist excitement for him coupled with the big money that will inevitably come his way from his fellow billionaires will blow the rudderless Clinton out of the water. Hillary might very well turn out to be the Martha Coakley of 2016. 

The Disaster of 2010

From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010"

Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race now seemed a promising dress rehearsal for even more outside money, which the Court had ennobled as free speech. So as the self-described "investors' came together to plan for the 2010 midterm elections, they were in a buoyant mood.

... Even before the Citizens United decision, Gillespie has been busy. While many other conservatives were despondent during the early months of the Obama administration, when the president's approval ratings were stratospherically high, Gillespie hadcome up with an ingenious plan to exploit the only opening he could see. With Obama dominating Washington, Gillespie looked to the states. He knew that 2011was a year in which many state legislatures would redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts based on anew census, a process that only took place once a decade. So he put together an ambitious strategy aimed at a Republican takeover of governorships and legislatures all across the country. Capturing them would enable Republicans to redraw their states congressional districts in order to favor their candidates.

... Gillespie called the plan "REDMAP", an acronym for Redistricting Majority Project. ...All he needed was enough money to put REDMAP into action. By the end of 2010, with the help off million-dollar donations from the tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds, as well as huge donations from Walmart, the pharmaceutical industry, and rich private donors like those at the Koch summit, the RSLC [Republican State Leadership Committee] would have $30 million, three times its Democratic counterpart.

...On November 2, 2010, the Democrats suffered massive defeats, losing control of the House of Representative. Just two short years after he soars to power amid predictions of a lasting realignment, Obama's party and his hopes of prevailing on any ambitious legislation were crushed. 

...The Democrats' setbacks were huge at almost every level, Republicans picked up half a dozen Senate seats at the state level, the Democratic losses were even more staggering. Across the country, Republicans gained 673 legislative seats. They won control of both the legislature and the governor's office in twenty one states; the Democrats had similar one-party rule in only eleven. The map looked red, with small islands of blue. 

As a consequence of their gains, Republicans now had four times as many districts to gerrymander as the Democrats. By creating reliably safe seats, they could build a firewall protecting the Republican control of Congress for the next decade. 

In the middle of all this, in March 2010, Obama got his one signature victory, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Two cheers for Obama. But Obama and his people were apparently unaware of how the GOP was going about developing the infrastructure for obstructing anything else he might ever want to do:

By July [2010], Democratic strategists began to feel a strange undertow, as if an offshore tsunami were gathering force. One operative put together a chart compiling the ledger of midterm expenditures by ten Republican-aligned independent groups and was appalled to discover that this slice of the total spending alone would likely reach at least $200 million, Americans for Prosperity had pledged to spend $45 million. Karl Rove's group American Crossroads had pledged $32 million. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had committed to spend $75 million. Countless other groups, including an unknown number of dark-money organizations loaded with secret funds were lined up to spend millions and millions more. A Democratic operative who saw the chart, which was passed around like samizdat within the party, admitted that it was "one hell of a wake-up call."

The numbers caught the Obama administration off guard. The former White House aide Anita Dunn admits, "It was clear that Citizens United was going to open the floodgates and it would be bad for the Democrats. But it exploded in 2010. The amount spent in those midterms probably surprised everyone."

As late as May, Axelrod had barely known who the Kochs were. When a reporter asked what he knew about them, he seemed unsure. Later, the Koch public relations team would suggest that press coverage of them was initiated by the White House. In truth Obama's political team was almost clueless. Only after Noble's team, working undercover, began launching attacks on Democrats all across the country did some in the White House start to sense something odd. As Axelrod recalls, "We began to wonder, where is all this money coming from?"

History will judge as to what degree the Obama administration's being blindsided by all this was unavoidable or was political malpractice. I don't have an opinion on that right now. He can't be blamed for Citizens United. But I blame him for playing the insiders' game once elected and thinking he could win it rather than looking for ways to mobilize outsiders' support from the electorate that so enthusiastically supported him during his campaign. He just didn't have the people around him who could even begin to imagine how to do that. 

Part of the reason the Democrats got shellacked by the GOP in the 2010 midterms lies in the way that Obama's playing the insiders' game in his first two years dismayed the base, especially young people, who went back to sleep when it became clear that Obama was not offering a real change, that he was just playing the insiders' game. Mayer's book makes clear, though, not just that the Right in this country has a lot of money to work with, but that it has far more talent and resourcefulness in playing the insiders' game. The Democrats have a chance only if they find a way to mobilize the outsiders, the people in the base that Obama's administration showed so much disdain for. 

Do I think that a Bernie Sanders-led team will do any better? I don't really know for sure. it could be that it's already too late to do anything. But he at least understands that the insiders' game is a losing one for Democrats and the Left. HRC presents herself as someone who knows how to play the insiders' game, and I just don't see her as having the imagination or moral resources to anything different than to play that losing game. Maybe I underestimate her--I hope I do--but I just see her as  too enmeshed in the decadent system to be able to offer an alternative to it. I also fear that we are now in a populist moment, and if the Democrats don't offer the American electorate a genuine populist on the Left, the country will choose the one from the Right. HRC represents at best a murky prolonging of the agony, and at worst a delivery of the country to a classical demagogue who with the support of the mob destroys what's left of our democracy. 

Bernie and Wishful Thinking

Chris Matthews had a fairly aggressive interview with Sanders last night, and Sanders did ok, but I was disappointed that Sanders had an opportunity to answer an important question, and he really didn't, at least in terms that didn't come across as wishful thinking: How is he going to do a better job than Obama in mobilizing his support into pressure that will effect real change?

Sanders stays on a theoretical level in his answers about how change happens. He's right when he says that real change is bottom up, not top down, but why then should electing him president matter? People like Matthews and other Sanders skeptics are right that he won't be able to get anything done with the existing arrangements in congress. He has to make a robust case that electing him president will somehow be different from having elected Obama president, and he seems unwilling to make that case. He just asserts it supporting it without any evidence beyond hoping that it will be so. 

I'd like to believe that Sanders could be the Lech Walesa of American politics, the unlikely guy who takes on the big powers and succeeds because the timing is right and the grass-roots support for him is viral. I fear that unless a sane, decent, constructive populist alternative is presented to the American electorate, it will move toward the indecent, destructive alternative represented by Trump. America needs somebody like Sanders to succeed. Nominating HRC is rear-view mirror, complacent thinking. It's the safe, timid choice of those who think that things will continue to plod on the way they are plodding now. I don't think they will. I think we are at a critical juncture, and something has to give. 

I agree with Sanders that you need viral, bottom-up pressure on entrenched power to get real change, but the 'viral' thing has yet to happen for Sanders, and he won't get nominated and elected unless it does. Sanders has some energy, but he has to take it to the next level, and it's not clear to me that he will be able to do that. His campaign, at this moment anyway, seems to be stalling. But maybe it would go viral if he explained how he would channel all that viral energy once he's elected. I think more people would be attracted to his campaign if he gave them a reason to think that there was more to it than wishful thinking. He needs to get more concrete, not about what policies he wants to see enacted, but about how he would mobilize the American people to enact them. 

It's Primarily about Judgment; Secondarily about Experience

The American Conservative ranks the candidates in terms of foreign policy sanity:

Mayer's Dark Money

I'm three or four chapters into reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Mayer is the Ida Tarbell of our generation, and to her we owe a huge debt of gratitude. If Tarbell exposed how the trusts work at the turn of the previous century, Mayer is now exposing how enormous amounts stealth money are working to bring into the mainstream extremist ideas that would remain at the fringes if there were not enormous amounts of money buying their legitimacy. It's one thing to suspect this kind of thing is happening; it's another to see it well researched and sourced.

This isn't just about the Kochs; it's about the Scaifes, the Olins, and many others in their networks that have found ways through their foundations to reshape American political culture in their image since the 1960s. It's just not their think tanks (like AEI, Heritage, Hoover, Cato, etc.), and the bought politicians, their infiltration of state legislatures with ALEC, and the funding astro-turf movements ; it's their concerted efforts to change the judiciary through  Law and Economy programs they have used to bribe law schools (starting with Harvard and then imitated everywhere) into introducing ideological indoctrination programs masquerading as dispassionate intellectual inquiry. It's their effort to change the judicial culture by providing lavish two-week junkets for federal judges over the last several where it's explained to them why environmental regulation and labor laws impinge Liberty. It's about their lavish funding not the Federalist Society. There is nothing like it on the Left.

I'll probably have more to say about this as I read on, but read Bill McKibben's review in NYRB to get a better overview now, and then go and read the book.

Here's an excerpt from near the end of McKibben's review:

As for Sanders, if every American were to somehow decide to devote the coming months to reading Mayer’s book, it seems a safe bet his argument about “the millionaires and the billionaires” would find even more adherents.

...In any event, the lasting contribution of the Kochs to our history will almost certainly be the introduction of truly huge money into the political process, vast funds coming from the tiniest sliver of the population. With each election cycle the resources they’ve assembled have grown, and this year, as I’ve said, they’ve announced plans to spend $889 million. About $300 million of that is slated to go directly into campaigns; the rest will pay for get-out-the-vote operations, their voter data project, and the like. “We’ve had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it’s mind-boggling,” Fred Wertheimer, the longtime head of Common Cause, told Mayer. “This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this.” Thanks to Mayer, we are, at least, fully warned.

The Obama-Clinton Status Quo

Obama campaigned as a Progressive, but governed as a Neoliberal in economic policy and as a Neoconservative in national security matters. Bill Curry reminds us about what he said and what he actually did in an article today. In recalling the 2008 election--

Voters knew the problem wasn’t “partisan gridlock” but a hammerlock of special interests. They could abide politicians’ incivility but not their corruption. Obama added some policy meat to the metaphorical bone of his message. He called whistle-blowers heroes and vowed to strengthen freedom of information, to let C-SPAN cameras film healthcare negotiations, end no-bid contracts, close revolving doors and never hire lobbyists to handle matters of special concern to their ex-clients. By late fall, nearly every speech he gave ended in a rousing call for reform.

Breaking those vows was the original sin of the Obama administration. No C-SPAN cameras ever filmed a meeting. He didn’t treat whistle-blowers as heroes; he broke records prosecuting them. He didn’t end no-bid contracts; he increased them. He didn’t ban lobbyists; he recruited them. (Healthcare industry consultants drove that team; he even hired a defense lobbyist to oversee Pentagon procurement policy.) Revolving doors kept swinging; every ex-Obama staffer you ever heard of now sits on some comfy corporate perch.  Republicans didn’t kill the reforms. Obama had the power to implement each one by executive order, but chose not to.

In 2008, Obama raised more money from big business than any candidate in either party’s history and in 2009 he hired the most conservative economic team of any Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. He then sided with insurers against a public option, with banks against rescuing homeowners and with business against raising the minimum wage. If you’re highly educated and care more about cultural than economic issues, you may not have noticed. If you’re financially pressed, you may be torn between Sanders and Trump, or have given up on politics altogether.

There are so many other things to talk about as well. So within the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Beltway consensus, Obama is less right wing than many than hardcore economic libertarians and national security hawks, but he is very comfortably situated within that consensus, and so is Hillary. 

Bernie clearly is not. And one has to wonder, if elected, how the establishment, both the plutocratic extremist Right and the security-obsessed Deep State types in the CIA and NSA would react to his taking over. They could live with Trump, but Sanders would be extremely hard for them to accept, and there is enough real power in both those sectors to push back in ways we might not want to think about.

For a long time now I've wondered if we've been living in what has become essentially a ceremonial democracy, and that no real power resides with the people we elect and send to Washington. But that's another reason I'd like to see Bernie elected. I fear that unelected entrenched power is too deeply entrenched, but I would like to see somebody like Bernie take it on if for no other reason than to see whether things are too far gone. His election would bring, if nothing else, a moment of clarity. 

The Trump Phenomenon

Over and over again, when asked to explain what they like about him, Trump supporters exclaim, “He knows what I’m thinking!” And what these people are thinking is that he’s making it safe for them to be “politically incorrect” again, giving sanction to publicly express their resentment toward people who don’t look and act like them. There are certainly reasons why these voters feel that way, but they are not due to populist anger toward the 1 percent. After all, the man they are cheering on with such enthusiasm is a man who spends half his time on the stump bragging about his vast wealth and explaining that it’s perfectly normal for businessmen like himself to bribe and cajole politicians to do his bidding. He’s never promised to change that system, not once. And his fans have never once asked him to. 

This is excerpted from Heather Parton's longer piece on Trump, which you can find here, but this is the crux insight that explains the Trump Phenomenon: He validates the darker impulses in the American psyche, impulses that mainstream American culture (outside the Fox News bubble) has come to see as primitive and regressive. For good reason: These impulses are primitive and regressive.

It's one thing to feel these impulses--nobody can help what they feel; it's another thing to act on them. A Trump presidency would give Americans who feel these impulses permission to act on them. Theirs is the mentality of the lynch mob--they feel authorized to do things in a group that they would feel immoral to do alone. The only thing that holds them back is fear of social sanction, but there is no negative social sanction if the president of the U.S. says it's ok.

That's what makes the Trump Phenomenon pretty scary. He dismisses whatever tentative taboos we might have on violently hateful attitudes as political correctness. Hatred of Muslims and Hispanics is ok. Torture is ok. Mass deportation is ok. But hatred of Muslims and Hispanics isn't the end of it. For these Americans whose darker impulses Trump channels, hatred of any "Other" is ok, and the Other is everyone Sarah Palin says is not a 'real American'. 

I don't think Trump is going to be elected president, but stranger things have happened. And a perfect storm could be a brewin' that could possibly blow him into office. For instance, if there was another significant terrorist attack, I could see him demagoguing it well enough to get elected. 

Never underestimate the timidity of the American people. When they are scared they look for the strong leader to compensate for their feelings of impotency. And neither Clinton nor Sanders will be seen to measure up to counter the sense of threat that they feel. And besides, while Trump will be vicious toward America's enemies, he's at heart a nice guy, and a good Christian. He says so himself, and he doesn't lie. No worries.  

De-legitimating the Right's Freedom-Fighter Fantasy

Interesting article by Paul Rosenberg in today's Salon about how and why Conservatives play constitutional hardball not as a tactic of last resort, but as guerrilla warfare tactics that are their fundamental m.o. in day-to-day politics. The phrase "constitutional hardball" comes from Mark Tushnet, who wrote an article in 2004 with the same title. Rosenberg quotes Tushnet here:

 “...constitutional hardball is the way constitutional law is practiced distinctively during periods of constitutional transformation,” such as that which occurred during the New Deal. Constitutional transformations replace one constitutional order with another one, each involving a set of assumptions about fundamental institutional arrangements, “the relations between President and Congress, the mechanisms by which politicians organize support among the public, and the principles that politicians take to guide the development of public policy.”

As one illustrative example, Tushnet notes:

[P]rior to the New Deal, Congress initiated legislation subject to modest review by the President, whereas after the New Deal the President initiated legislation subject to modest review by Congress. And, during the transformative period when Franklin D. Roosevelt was attempting to construct a new constitutional order, his efforts to seize the legislative initiative were understood to be challenges to settled pre-constitutional understandings about the relation between President and Congress–and, as such, revolutionary.

While constitutional transformations may often occur relatively rapidly, this need not be case, Tushnet argues.  In fact, he believes, “the concept of constitutional hardball does seem to describe a lot of recent, that is, post-1980, political practices. The reason, I believe, is that we have been experiencing a quite extended period of constitutional transformation.” The result is an “extended period in which political leaders played constitutional hardball. Indeed, it might come to seem as if constitutional hardball was the normal state of things rather than a symptom of the possibility of constitutional transformation. Transformation might seem like an ever-receding light at the end of the tunnel, and constitutional hardball the way politicians play day-to-day politics.”

Then toward the end of the article Rosenberg explains why these days conservatives have made it their day-to-day politics:

This begins to get at one of the ways in which both sides are not mirror images in this fight. Millhiser is right to point out that structural, systemic features of our political system can have generally symmetric destabilizing effects—in a similar vein, Tushnet points out that either side (ideology) or party can engage in constitutional hardball. But there are reasons why conservatives and Republicans are far more likely to engage in it, with a much deeper passion and long-term commitment. The broad popularity of the New Deal vision is one underlying factor. It causes conservatives to rely on a great deal more indirection and deceit in their politics, and it makes them far more conscious of how tenuous their hold on power is, making them all the more ferocious in hanging on to it. Although Tushnet uses a different language, one could make the same point in terms of his observation about how the GOP/conservative constitutional transformation remains in limbo.

As the nomination debate swirls, there have been immediate calls in several quarters—from liberals like Rachel Maddow as well as from centrists—for Obama to appoint a moderate, centrist “consensus” candidate. Millhiser rightly shows that such hopes are ill-founded, if this is supposed to make matters easier, but it does reflect a genuine difference between the two sides. There is a consistent constituency for moderation and compromise on the Democratic side, a view commonly held in contempt by Republicans. They have concluded that Roberts is a traitor, to be used in attacks on one another on the campaign trail, because he failed the talk-radio zealotry test on Obamacare.

In other words the GOP Right sees itself as guerrillas fighting what it understands to be an asymmetrical battle with a monstrous Liberal establishment. It's as if they are animated by a kind of Star Wars fantasy: They are the intrepid lovers of freedom doing whatever it takes to push back against the godless Liberal Evil Empire, and they have the Force with them because they are fighting God's fight. It doesn't matter that this fantasy has little basis in reality; there's just enough evidence to support it so that any evidence that contradicts it can be dismissed. And it's important for sane people to understand that when you are dealing with collectively deluded people who  believe that they are fighting for their survival against the forces of Evil, then anything they do to survive is justified. Ted Cruz is their standard bearer of the moment. 

It's hard to see a way out of this impasse. The only way things change is if the delusion is burst somehow, but it's self-reinforcing in a way that makes that virtually impossible. If I have reason to hope this can be resolved, it's that I'd estimate that only about about a quarter of the American electorate is possessed by this delusional complex. This delusional twenty-five percent has more power in the political system than its numbers warrant because the people in it have a robust political fantasy that keeps them engaged in a way that those in the center or on the Left just don't. They are therefore purpose driven in a way that factions to their left are not. 

But here's one imagined path out of the impasse: I'd rough estimate that another quarter of the American electorate leans right, especially when it comes to customary or traditional values, but this conservative-ish sector is not infected by this delusional Star Wars freedom-fighter fantasy. It is culturally conservative because that's the kind of world the people in this sector grew up in. But they are hurting economically, and establishment politicians of either party have not given them a reason to think either cares about their interests, so they vote Republican because they feel more comfortable with cultural conservatives. These are the so-called Reagan Democrats: urban ethnic Catholics, Appalachians, the ex-urban and rural working poor everywhere. We find a route out of the impasse by finding a way to realign the American electorate by peeling off the non-delusional twenty-five percent from the coalition they loosely form now with the delusional twenty-five percent. It's this coalition that wins so many elections for the GOP. But you need to do more than peel them off: you need to mobilize them, and to mobilize them, you need to get them excited.

If we have learned anything over the last twenty years or so, the establishment Democratic Party does not excite this sector of the electorate. It doesn't excite anybody, really, even so many people who vote Democratic (most Democrats?) because it's the lesser evil. If Democrats have won, they've won with personalities not with policies. And the problem with Hillary right now is that she doesn't have that winning personality. She's not her husband, she's not Obama, she's not Elizabeth Warren. She's not Bernie. She's just annoying. If she wins, we remain in the impasse until 2024. The ideal scenario for me would be for Bernie to win, step down after his first term for age reasons, and hand off to Elizabeth Warren. 

So does Bernie offer a route out of the impasse? Or does he just create a bigger one? Is the socialist label a deal breaker for too many in that non-delusional twenty-five percent? I don't know for sure, but I do know his message, his personality, and his biography are all capable of getting people who have felt alienated from the political process mobilized. How far that excitement extends to those in the non-delusional twenty-five percent, I'm not sure, but I think he has a better shot at reaching them in an energizing way than Clinton does. Whether once in office he knows how to direct a broad, mobilized electorate to de-legitimate the delusional twenty-five percent is an open question, but he at least understands that's the challenge.

Trump and the Pope

I think that there are some criteria that can be used to determine whether certain statements and behaviors are indeed aligned with the Christian "ideal",  Christianity at its heart does not lead to ideological thinking; it leads rather to a disposition of the heart that Donald Trump, at least in his public behavior and statements, has shown that he knows little about. The same can be said about the nativism that infects some right-wing Christians. 

The Christianity of the right is really more about tribalism and tribal identity than it is about the spirit of the gospels. Tribal Christians are afraid; they fear identity loss in a changing world. I get it, but that doesn't mean that they have a right to say that something that is clearly un-Christian isn't because they call themselves Christian. They are speaking from a disposition of the heart that is shaped by fear rather than from the disposition of the heart that is shaped by the gospels.

Anybody can claim to be a good Christian, but hardly anybody is because it is very difficult to be one. The most serious Christians understand that, and few serious Christians would call themselves good Christians. Serious Christians understand the ideal as it is presented in the gospels, and they understand that they usually fall far short of living it. Donald Trump being Donald Trump is incapable of thinking that he falls far short of anything.

The pope being the pope has a prophetic responsibility to call out behavior and attitudes that are not aligned with the gospels. Everyone struggles and fails, and we have no right to judge the quality of anyone's struggle to live the Christian ideal. Each of us struggles in our own way. But I think we can use our common sense to determine whether someone even understands the nature of the struggle to begin with.

A Couple of Questions for Bernie

Many people criticized Obama after his election for not mobilizing the support he got during his campaign. Instead he pivoted to an insiders game where the concerns of his base were mostly irrelevant for both shaping and supporting  his agenda. Assuming that you generate the same groundswell of support that Obama did in 2008, how will you keep it mobilized and engaged to support your agenda after you are elected?

It would appear that the only way to break the gridlock in Washington is if the American voters elect the same party to both legislatures and the White House. If nominated by the Democrats, what is your strategy for winning back both houses for the Democrats? Do you have a voter mobilization plan for the midterms in 2018?

Tweaks You Can Believe In

What is the establishment? It's the existing power arrangements and the conventional thinking that comes with it. If you are an establishment figure, you are fundamentally comfortable with the existing power arrangements. There are problems of course, and the establishment system needs tweaks, and so if you are an establishment political candidate you run as one who will be most effective in effecting the tweaks. You can claim in that sense to be a change candidate or even a progressive candidate: "Tweaks you can believe in." 

In contrast, a transformational politician is fundamentally uncomfortable with and deeply frustrated by the existing power arrangements. Such a politician could be an insider like Gorbachev or FDR, or he could be an outsider like MLK or Hitler. You can be either on the right or the left--someone like Reagan was pretty fringy and outsiderish in the '70s, but he disrupted the New Deal establishment consensus, and replaced it with what became the Neoliberal establishment consensus. So the mission of the transformational politician is to fundamentally disrupt the establishment, its power arrangements, and its basic habits of thinking regarding what is legitimate discourse, what is possible to achieve and what is impossible.

Bernie Sanders is more of an insider than an outsider because he's been working in Washington for twenty-five years, but he's clearly an anti-establishment transformational politician, or at least a politician who aspires to be transformational. If elected, he may or may not succeed in his transformational project. No one will know if he's a transformational figure until he has the chance to try. In the meanwhile he remains an anti-establishment politician running against Clinton, who, like Obama, is an establishment politician.

Obama ran as a transformational candidate, but governed as an establishment politician. We gave him the chance to be transformational, but he governed as a 'tweaker'. The ACA is at best a tweak, the best that was posible within the Neoliberal establishment framework. It's not just that he didn't fight for the public option; it's that his acceptance of the Neoliberal frame was something he never even tried to challenge.  

And that's why so many people, including Sanders, are disappointed in him. He didn't do badly as a tweaker. He got some tweaks done in a fairly hostile environment, but he didn't try to transform or disrupt the establishment. He might go down in history as one of the better tweakers, but he was elected to be transformational. Maybe at one time he sincerely aspired to become transformational, but at some point he became convinced that it wasn't possible for him. But I don't think it was ever in his nature to be anything more than a tweaker. 

Clinton clearly doesn't believe that's it's possible to be anything more than a tweaker.  It's outside her imagination to be anything more. Obama's presidency if anything reinforced it for her. She thought Obama's transformational messaging during the primaries in '08 was a con, that he was selling the country a bill of goods that he couldn't deliver on, and it looks like she was right about that. But I'd say that it wasn't that Obama couldn't, but that he wouldn't. He hadn't the will to do it.

And now Clinton is trying to tell us the same thing about Sanders. I'm sure she sincerely believes that Sanders' campaign is essentially the same con as Obama's, and it's driving her crazy that she finds herself in this position once again. But while her competency argument for herself attracts a certain kind of sober, conventional voter, it doesn't energize the electorate the way a transformational candidate can. She lost to Obama for that reason, and there's a very good chance that she will lose to Sanders for the same reason.

Is she right? Is Sanders conning the electorate the way Obama did? No, and here's the difference: Obama ran as a transformational candidate, but once elected he governed as a disappointingly conventional establishment politician. All the absurdity about seeking to be bi-partisan with a congress that wanted only to obstruct. He lost the congress in '10 not because he wasn't bipartisan and reasonable, but precisely because it became clear to the electorate that he didn't represent the transformational change that they elected him to effect, that he didn't even seem remotely interested in being such a change agent, that we were back to the same old, same old. He didn't give the electorate a reason to vote in a congress that would work with him to disrupt the establishment status quo because clearly had no desire to be a disruptor. He came to embody the essence of the establishment at a time when people wanted it disrupted. Young people who elected him in '08 went back to sleep in '10. If Bernie is elected, I think the congressional elections in '18 will have a very different dynamic.

So in '08, while there was the opportunity, Obama didn't seize it. When push came to shove, he was too timid to attempt it. Sanders is not timid. It's not about whether he would, but about whether he could. He will try. He may fail, but he will try. He's energizing the electorate in a way similar to the way that Obama did in '08, but while Obama was an empty screen onto which many Americans projected their hopes, Bernie is no empty screen. He's for real. He's more than simply his positions or his democratic socialist label. He's a mensch who will govern as he campaigns. Whether or not he can succeed remains to be seen, but he deserves to get the chance to try.  And we shouldn't allow fears about his electability to prevent us from supporting him. He's not George McGovern, and this isn't 1972. It's more like 1932 or 1980. 

Clearly it's better to elect a tweaker than a disruptor like Trump, but I'd argue that the country is in the mood for anti-establishment disruption, and if they don't get a choice for a disruptor on the Left, they are very likely to choose one from the Right.

 

If We Undivide, We Become Unconquered

Bernie's new ad:

 

For years I've been writing about how the culture war has been the strategy of the political and economic elites to keep us divided and conquered. Bernie gets that. My solution was to agree to disagree about culture war issues and focus instead on how we are all in the same boat in the way we're impacted by political and economic inequality. Bernie gets that, too, but he goes a step beyond it. He doesn't just say, Let's not talk about divisive issues, he embraces all the differences and in doing so transcends them in a way that celebrates our common humanity. It is the anti-Trump vision of a future America, and it's pitch perfect and deeply moving. It's a message that will if embraced by most Americans truly make us a great nation in the best sense of the word great. 

Bernie & Hillary Face Off

The issue for Democrats is not who is the more progressive candidate, but which style of leadership they think will be more effective. Sanders presents himself as a transformational leader and Hillary presents herself as an incrementalist. FDR was a transformational leader, and so was Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary are, or were, incrementalists. FDR and Reagan were transformational because during their presidencies the fundamental rules of the game were changed. They were changed in very different ways, but neither accepted the status quo as normative, and both changed the rules that dominated the American political ethos for several decades following their presidencies.

That's the main difference between Bernie and Hillary. Bernie believes that you need to change the fundamental rules of the game, and Hillary believes that the basic rules are ok and that "progress" can be made within their framework. That's why Bernie in the debate tonight wasn't attacking Hillary so much as he was attacking the system. His "artful smear" wasn't to insinuate that she's knowingly corrupted by the money she takes from the banks, but that she's comfortable working in a corrupting system in a way that he's not. That's what makes her the more establishment candidate.

It's obvious that she is the more establishment candidate, and most progressives understand that no matter how strenuously she tries to defend her progressive bona fides. Obama isn't a real progressive, either, even if Bernie isn't allowed to say it because to do so would be to shoot himself in the foot. Both Hillary and Obama are more Neoliberal than they are real Progressives, or they both at least accept Neoliberalism as normative. Neoliberals sometimes do progressive-ish things, but they are not real progressives precisely because they accept Neoliberalism as the framework for doing business. They seek to mitigate its harsher symptoms, but not to cure the underlying malady. 

So I think this plays out for either Bernie or Hillary depending on which leadership style--Bernie's or Hillary's--most Democrats think is more likely to have a positive progressive impact. I suspect they'll play it safe and go with Hillary. But I would argue that  a transformational leadership style with the right transformational leader has the potential to get significantly more done, or at the very least to lay the foundation for something to get done in the next decade or so. Bernie might not get much done in the way of concrete policy, but he will change the underlying political infrastructure in a way that will  prepare the ground for someone like Elizabeth Warren to succeed him, and it might be she who builds on what Bernie started, and Bernie would give her far more to work with than Hillary would do. 

So while I have yet to be convinced that Bernie has what it takes to be more than a wannabe transformational leader, I probably never will be convinced beforehand. We can't really know beforehand. But conventional wisdom about potential transformational leaders is almost always wrong. It was wrong about Ronald Reagan, and what I learned from Reagan (and W too) was that it wasn't important to take him seriously as an individual, because it wasn't he so much as the people who came with him that made things happen. And so that will be true of Bernie, too. He's not going to work with the Rahm Emmanuel or Larry Summers types that Hillary is more likely to work with. So you're not just choosing Bernie or Hillary; you're choosing the people who will come with them, and the differences there are likely to be very significant.

One of Bernie's better lines was to concede that he doesn't have Hillary's experience in foreign policy, but also that he doesn't have her bad judgment. Experience is important, but good judgment is more important. And when push comes to shove, on all the broader issues, whose judgment do you trust? That's the real question Democrats have to ask themselves. Electability is, imo, a chump criterion. Bernie is as electable as Hillary against the current crowd of GOP crazies and empty suits. The 'socialism' thing is something I think he will be able define on his own terms, despite what the GOP will try to do with that. It's part of the way he's gong to change the rules. The bottom line is that he makes sense, he's consistent, and he's for real. That's what Americans will want to elect, for a change.

His candidacy is still a long shot. But I think it's possible that he could be the kind of seventy-something leader for the next decade that Reagan was for the eighties. Although I'm not completely persuaded he can be, I'd rather give him a chance at it than just have a politics-as-usual leader like Clinton and her crowd running things.