Working beside Ed Kilgore for several years was enjoyable because he’s super-smart and has a much different life experience from my own, so I felt like I learned things from him every day that helped flesh out my own view of American politics. Even when I disagreed, I felt like I needed to explore my assumptions and I usually found some benefit in that both for my thinking and for my writing.
His take on the risks the Democrats are taking at the presidential level is predictably unique, but it has many echoes to what I wrote earlier today. The main distinction is that he is focused on whether or not the Democrats can actually beat Trump if they maintain their present course and I was looking at what might happens if the financial elite decide that they’d rather have a second term of Trump than deal with a real left-wing populist in the White House.
The commonality is the idea that there’s some limit to what the system will tolerate in the way of progressive or socialistic policy. Neither of us chose to focus on the actual merits of those policies, presumably because they certainly won’t be implemented if the Democrats lose and almost certainly won’t be implemented even if they win.
Kilgore wants to remind you that the Rovian politics of the last decade can still be devastatingly effective. I don’t dispute that, but think the even greater threat is that we lose the very shape of our system through a confluence of right-wing poplulist thuggery and elite acquiescence. For me, this is close to assured if Trump wins a battle against a really progressive candidate like Warren or Sanders. The danger is potentially greater if one of those candidates win, although the reckoning day would be put off in much the same way as Obama delayed the rise of Trumpism but also inadvertently made it more potent.
I am undecided between wanting progressive change while is still has a chance to do some good and wanting to build, instead, the greatest possible consensus against Trumpism even if that means that some worthy ambitions wind up on the cutting room floor.
For you, the reader, I just want you to take this choice as seriously as I do.
Is there something naive at the heart of this? Rovian politics–especially as honed into Trumpian politics–are devastatingly effective, in large part, because they represent a rejection not only of norms but of truth. If Biden loses (which strikes me as almost inevitable if he’s nominated), he will absolutely be accepted to have been ‘a really progressive candidate.’
I think you said you think that these attacks are most effective if they’re based on some kernel of truth. Well, here’s a kernel: he’s a Democrat. Some Democrats are progressive. Done. Now he represents whatever Trump and Hannity and the NYT’s pet authoritarian opinion writers say.
And if the danger is even greater if a progressive wins? I don’t know, Martin. Then we’ve already lost. Then there’s no changing direction, just the slow march to ever-more-institutionalized kleptocracy and climate death.
What’s the best case scenario in your mind? We hold on until demographic change saves us? But it never will; they’ll unwind voting rights too fast for that.
If we are to believe that progressive policies in their most extreme form have almost no chance of being implemented even if a progressive Dem wins, then why are our candidates seemingly willing to die on that hill to win the primary? It sounds like a platform of Bernie or Liz’s policies would have no chance of becoming law and at the same time would doom any Dem candidate in the general. Meanwhile, losing in 2020 would likely bring full-on fascism to the US. Tell me again why policy purity is a good thing? Wouldn’t it be smarter to run on a set of policy proposals that are poll-tested to be the most popular, and then to unleash the world’s slickest marketing effort to sell them? At this point if cynicism will help us win, then I’m willing to endorse cynicism.
Charles Pierce set off a lot of talk about the financial elite talk about Warren on Twitter about a double digit dive in the stock market and otherwise evil doings from her. It is really quite the spectacle how one woman can so upset them all. Maybe she is the one we need. Cause you know fuck those assholes.
Showing the hollowness at Trump’s core while putting forth a compelling alternative seems like the way forward to me.
Our ideas are evidence-based and popular in the abstract. We always fall down at translating them into concrete policy that helps people. Having a nominee who has solid policy chops and is seen as a compelling figure is possible this time around.
And if we lose with all that, we truly are beyond redemption as a country.
Yup. This is basically the last stand of the Framers, their (now-sclerotic) constitution and their “Marketplace of Ideas”. A digitized citizenry composed of 45% National Trumpalists cannot exist as any form of democracy. Authoritarianism, dissolution or revolution will comprise the only remaining options.