After the Future

Democrats and the Politics of Negation

Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative. Daniel K. Williams in NYT

I’m sure Ossoff is a nice person and everything, but in political terms it’s impossible to say what he was or is. He embodies a fundamental not-ness that has become the Democratic brand, despite its singular lack of market success over the past decade or so. Anyone who seriously believes that the road to victory in 2018 or 2020 or at any other time lies in not-ness, in appearing decent and competent and non-crazy and non-threatening while refusing to be pinned down or to promise anything specific, is still pretending that 2016 and You Know Who and all those people in the ugly red hats didn’t happen or didn’t matter or will soon be whisked away, if we wish hard enough, by the aforementioned Democracy Fairy, in her sensible but stylish DKNY suit that was right there on the rack at the Saks outlet and wasn’t really that expensive.--Andrew O'Hehir in Salon

I vote Democrat because the alternative has become an insane, white-supremacist, radical Libertarian cult, but I don’t identify anymore as a Democrat. There is no positive reason for me to vote for them except that they are not the other guys. They don't understand that what is in their eyes their chief virtue--their tolerance--comes across to people who are not them as a groundless, clueless, fecklessness that they understandably find repugnant. Secularist Democrats believe that everyone else's beliefs are sacred, but outside a few politically correct platitudes,  do they have any of their own? If they feel strongly about anything it's their aversion for anyone who has strongly felt beliefs. They are "for" negative freedom; they are against positive public expression of it. Strong beliefs are for private use only; don't be so impolite as to impose them on others. Check them in at the perimeter when you come into the public square.

Yuppies—who make up most of the top 20%—run the Democratic Party and set its secularist tone and agenda. While they make much of their tolerance, they are tone deaf to the concerns of believers who make up most of the bottom 80%. They have lost the bottom 80% of white people because this group sees them as Libtards--clueless, rootless careerists who scorn everything they hold sacred. These whites in the bottom 80% vote Republican, not because Republicans care about their interests, but because they talk their language, share their resentments about Liberals, and just seem more relatable.

Democrats have been counting on the Latino and Black voters from the bottom 80% to shore up their base. Democrats's are truly clueless if they expect these voters to support their candidates in the future. Those within these  groups who bother to vote, do vote Democratic because the Republicans are so openly hostile to their interests. But Black and Brown voters have come to realize, as so many blue-collar whites have, that the Dems’ leadership, beyond its message of tolerance, doesn’t speak their language and is not relatable. They don't understand or care about Black and Brown interests and beliefs.

I thought it ironic that during the primaries, BLM chose Bernie Sanders as their target to express their understandable frustration. Few people have better civil rights credentials than he, but I think his bet is that strategically it makes no sense to focus on the wedge issues that divide us, no matter how legitimate they may be. He was betting that he could articulate a message that would appeal to the bottom 80% across the black, brown, white political spectrum. 

Sanders is no Libtard. He's not religious, but I don't think you have to be in the traditional confessional sense. He has something similar, which are deeply felt, genuine convictions. I'm not sure it would have worked, or whether it can work, because it might be too late. But it would have been interesting to see if his experiment to appeal across the color spectrum could have mobilize enough people in the bottom 80% to effect the beginnings of a historic realignment.

I thought once he lost the nomination that it was an historic loss of an opportunity, but I didn't think Trump would win, and I thought that four or eight more years with Clinton would probably provoke the country to vote for someone smarter and more strategic than Trump some time in the next decade. I didn't think that Trump would be such an egregiously oafish national disgrace. I feared that Bannon's economic nationalism would work to capture enough people in the bottom 80% in right-wing populist realignment that would win for years to come. I didn't think that Trump/Bannon would allow themselves to be trampled by the the 1%-serving agenda of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and their radical Libertarian cult. In other words, it exceeded my most optimistic expectations that Republicans would serve up the possibility so soon for Progressives to try again as soon as 2018 and 2020.  

Now the only question is whether there Sanders 80% approach will get enough support from Democrats to be tried, or whether it will just be politics as usual and another blown opportunity. I am not without hope. While it may or may not work, it's clear that politics as usual is not a formula for future Democratic success. People want to  say Yes to someone, and until the Democrats produce candidates up and down the ticket whom voters see as having at the same time relatable, deeply held convictions that either connect with or awaken or legitimate the deeply held convictions in the voters they speak to, they will continue to fail.

It should be obvious that in any hard fight, with all else being equal, it's the group with the most deeply held convictions that is likely to win, even if those convictions are out of alignment with reality. But until someone steps forward with a compelling, deeply believed vision for an American future that is aligned with reality, then Republicans' deeply believed delusions win by default. 

 

 

 

Cultists vs. Careerists

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans are cultists, and the Democrats are careerists. The first are true believers, which can be admirable if what they believe in is true and noble, but it becomes cult-like when what they believe is fundamentally delusional. And what they believe is a kind of crude Ayn Randism, which merges with a traditional Calvinist scorn of the poor with a fear of big government. If they are not Christian fundamentalists, they are market fundamentalists, and in many cases they are both. Neither is true or noble. If there are any Republicans who actually try to engage with Reality outside the delusional bubble, they are primaried out of office. You don’t have a career as a Republican unless you are an unquestioning true believer in party-approved fundamentalist values. There’s no room for dissent.

So how to explain Donald Trump? Clearly, he is not a fundamentalist about anything, and if he is a cult member he's in the cult of his own personality. He is repugnant to orthodox conservative cultists. He has, however, been accepted as a useful fool by  Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc., who will support him so long as he doesn't get in the way of their implementing their cultish agenda to dismantle entitlement programs and reduce taxes as far as they can. Trump has been accepted by white people on the religious right and others with traditional values as someone whom they identify as sharing in their being despised by the power establishment. The rest of Trump's support comes from Americans who truly are deplorable--the racist, substance-abusing wife beaters who blame everyone but themselves for the mess they've made of their lives, and see Trump as a kindred spirit who managed some how to make good. 

To be successful, Democrat careerists don’t have to believe in anything except a fuzzy concoction of cosmopolitan platitudes. There are some liberal orthodoxies, but there’s room for dissent, and there are no strict dogmas about economic policy. There are many Democrats who are borderline market fundamentalists in a neoliberal key, which makes them kissing cousins with the kind of Ayn Rand Libertarianism that has metastasized in the GOP. But there are still a few New Deal-style social democrats, who though marginalized, might be playing a bigger role in the next decade.

Democrat careerists don’t despise the poor the way Republicans do, but they don’t really care about them either, except to the degree that the poor can bring some kind of pressure to bear on them that jeopardizes their careers. But since the poor are disorganized and don't vote, that rarely happens, and so Democrats cave to the pressures exerted on them by people who are rich and organized. They believe only in advancing their own careers, and that means that they put their finger to the wind, and vote rightward when their careers, i.e., their campaign funding, depends on it.

Since there is no cultish purity metric that governs Democrats or is likely to be used to primary them out of office, they are more vulnerable to pressures exerted by Reality. So they will vote Leftward when it becomes a 'thing', and there's an outside chance that it might if the Republican Party continues on its current self-destructive path. So while I no longer identify as a Democrat, I nevertheless think that as bad as most Democrats are, the country is better served when they are in the majority. There are a few, sane, thoughtful grownups among them, and I can think of no Republican on the national scene whom I would describe that way. Anyone who is decent has been primaried out, or quit.

 

Is This How American Democracy Dies?

Andrew O'Hehir lays out the situation in an interesting post last week:

But for the political and media castes allied with the failing two-party system — who have viewed the deluded and deplorable masses with a mixture of pity, contempt and anthropological curiosity — this decay must be denied or minimized, depicted as a transitory phenomenon that will soon be corrected through the application of politics as usual. In this sense, Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan are not on different sides. They are on the same side.

OK, wait, hold on. I’m not saying there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, or that it wouldn’t be preferable to have one group in power rather than the other. ...

What I mean by saying that Ryan and Pelosi are on the same side is that they share the same set of misguided assumptions. Ryan and the rest of the GOP leadership have desperately tried to spin Trump’s flukey, hand-of-fate election victory as a mandate for standard-issue right-wing Republican policies, which on some level they must understand is completely ludicrous. Pelosi and company, on the other hand, will argue that the remedy for Trumpism is to be found in exactly the same awkward, anti-ideological, coalition-management politics that have rendered the Democratic Party so hollowed out, rootless and demoralized over the past decade or so. (I stayed away from the negative buzzword “neoliberal” … except, wait, no I didn’t.) That’s not quite as ludicrous, but it’s close.

So if no realignment with reality is likely to come from either party, what's likely to happen? It's hard for me to believe that Trump can stay in office to finish his term. The chaos and incompetence is just too disruptive, and the power establishment in this country wants stability and will not tolerate chaos indefinitely. Sooner or later, its various factions will come together and find a way to push Trump out. Best case: By 2019 Mike Pence is president dealing with a Democrat-dominated Congress. Pence is a tool and will do as instructed. The Dems are mostly clueless, but they, unlike the GOP, are not an insane cult--they are vulnerable to the pressures brought upon them by reality, to which the GOP has proven itself invulnerable.

There is some reason to hope that pressures brought to bear on the Dem establishment willl move it more toward the interests of ordinary Americans and away from the Yuppie and cosmopolitan elite interests it now mostly  represents. Maybe the Warren/Sanders wing of the party can change the party dynamic. Maybe somehow the Democratic Party power structure shifts from hacks to progressive realists on the local level, and starts sending more people like Warren and Sanders to Washington, and maybe this slowly shifts the country back to political sanity and broad prosperity.

I know. Probably just wishful thinking. There's little reason to believe the Dem establishment has learned its lesson or that there is enough energy and commitment on the progressive Left to substantively shift the power dynamics in the Democratic Party establishment. I'm not completely without hope, but if you're a betting man, you put your money on the people who already have the power, and they have little incentive to give in to the populist Left. There will be a few cosmetic adjustments and symbolic gestures, but it will be back to business as usual serving the interests of the top 20%. It's not that these Liberal cosmopolitans think like the ogres on the Calvinist Right that the poor deserve what they get and worse. They feel really badly about the poor, but they care about their own interests more, and will not sacrifice them for the interests of people who are not like them. 

So the only realistic best case is that somehow or another we find a way to muddle through. 

So what is a plausible worst case?  I fear we will look back at the Trump election and the continued insanity of the GOP in the wake of it as the moment that American Democracy died. The rise of Trump and the inclination of aggrieved Americans to send ignorant if not moronic ideologues to Washington to represent them has rendered American democracy incapable of giving the country the national leadership it needs in a complex world. The power establishment in this country cannot suffer the possibility of someone insane like Trump or a group of hacks and morons like the Republicans or most of the Democrats to run things. The best case described above, i.e., returning the country to the old normal favoring top 20% interests, will not return the country to stability. It will aggravate the volatile conditions that brought Trump into power. And this power establishment is not likely to suffer another disruptive populist insurgency from either the Left or the Right.  

I believe that the challenge to elite interests is more likely to come from the Right. That's where the energy is most violently intense right now. I don't see the outrage about Trump from the Left surviving his removal from power, but the outrage and resentment that is driving the Right is not going away, especially if Trump is pushed out. The people on the aggrieved Right are a minority, but they are a significant minority, and they feel they have nothing to lose and will not go down easily or peacefully. Its energy source is essentially the same as that which drives Islamic terrorism--a sense of identity loss and humiliation in a complex, modern world that they feel seeks to destroy everything they hold sacred.

Their violent resistance can play out in a number of ways. I think the mostly likely will be intensified, organized Timothy McVeigh-style terrorism from the Right, and with this will come intensified state consolidation of power using the full force of its surveillance and police powers. Terrorism from the Right will ironically produce increasing levels of state authoritarianism, but it won't feel like a right-wing police state. American Liberals and Moderates will largely approve and submit to this increasing level of authoritarianism because they will see it as necessary to preserve peace and stability, and it will seem "liberal" because it is fighting right-wing extremism. The regime will be tolerant about feminist, LGBTQ issues, and clamp down hard on gun ownership in the name of preserving the peace. Do "liberals" really care passionately about any other issues? It won't affect the daily lives of most middle class people in the bubbles they live in, but over time more of these families will find their bubbles bursting as the basic dynamic in play drives increasing numbers of them into poverty. And so then their angry children will form or join right-wing terrorist militias. 

A less likely but quite plausible possibility would be a military coup that would favor the cultural values of the Right. It's more likely if there is an international crisis with China or Russia that justifies the hard-edged decisiveness of a "dictator" because of the ineptitude and gridlock that democracy promotes. Either way, we will slowly continue our morphing into a statist autocracy in which our democratic institutions will be mostly a charade as they are in Russia. Right/Left will become meaningless labels except insofar as they indicate hard/soft, and in that sense, the Right will prevail, because those who are "hard" usually win.