Rockets Red Glare

Okay, I finally watched President Biden’s spooky-lit speech and of course I have some thoughts on it.

Long story short, Joe Biden said some profoundly true and long overdue things which were nevertheless still pretty weak tea and dishonestly polite. As I’ve noted often before, the right’s racism and hostility to democracy are nothing new. True, Donald Trump embodies both, but he definitely didn’t invent them. I know Biden was trying to throw vanishing moderate Republicans a lifeline, but it's pointless at this point.

After all, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was the maiden voyage of the Southern Strategy, so Republicans have been stoking racist voters for longer than I’ve been alive and I’m now in my mid-fifties. Think about that. Roll it around in your head for a moment. And then ignore everyone calling Trump some kind of unprecedented aberration because they are historically illiterate imbeciles trying to ignore a half century of GOP bigotry. What is so often called “Trumpism” is just Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. I mean, you knew the Tea Party was racist, right? You recall the unhinged Militia Movement from the 1990s, right? Stop defending the indefensible. Consider your dignity – it's in danger.

And it's not just their love of racism. Conservatives have long loathed democracy too. In my 2014 book, Conservatism is Un-American, I argued that liberty, equality, and democracy are interdependent like the legs of a tripod – each leg supports the other two. Conservatives have always sought to shatter these three ideals. Usually, they concentrate their assault on equality, but they occasionally go after freedom or democracy too. “We are a republic, not a democracy” remains a favorite slogan of the racist John Birch Society which had opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and it has become a popular slogan with Republicans today. This incidentally illustrates how tightly equality and democracy are intertwined. 

Just look at this old Herblock cartoon is from 1965 and tell me that Trumpism is something new. It isn't.

Conservative crybabies predictably wailed that it was “divisive" of Biden to point out the obvious despite his relatively mild language. Equally predictably, some centrists whined too(1) and I'm not the only one who has noticed. Agreeing with Jonathan Katz, Jeet Heer tweeted, “Biden's speech was filled with all sorts of concessions to centrists and Never Trump conservatives but it still wasn't good enough for them.”

It's frustrating, but not confounding: The Never Trumpers do not truly want to confront the problem –they just want off the hook. And that's a less patriotic motive, centrist whitewashing notwithstanding.(2)

But I think we're actually seeing something positive in progress. It's nothing conservatives or their craven enablers can take any credit for, but something good is afoot.

I think centrist Democrats have two distinct wings with conflicting priorities and the gap between them is widening. The bipartisan wing loves Republicans and consists of conflict-avoidant pundits and politicos whose sole religion is pursuing Washington consensus at all costs. Or maybe they're just bought. Either way, they're the party's elite and they primarily attack progressives on talk shows. By contrast, the partisan wing largely consists of people who are functionally rabid sports fans with no real skin in the game who think in terms of teams and idolize moderate politicians.(3) They tend to attack progressives on Twitter. 

The partisans usually take their cues from the bipartisans and both wings like to think they’re objective policy wonks. But in reality, they both mostly go on vibes and shibboleths. And of course, there's a third hybrid category where individual members lean more one way or the other to different degrees. 

As I've frequently tweeted,(4) centrists have been having a terrible identity crisis lately because senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have spent the last year giving moderates a bad name by doing what moderates have always done – weakening desperately needed legislation. After all, it's what Joe Liberman did to President Obama.(5) So the partisans are understandably struggling to rationalize this situation and some are at long last discovering that “moderate" never meant what they thought it did.

It means Nancy Pelosi saying we need “a strong Republican Party" after the January 6th Insurrection.

In this current turbulence, many partisans are finally starting to see the light. But the bipartisans still fly on autopilot and continue to parrot GOP complaints because it's only “divisive" when Democrats punch back. Among the bipartisans, it’s an article of faith that Republicans are not responsible for their own emotions and that Democrats must therefore exercise extra self-restraint to compensate. Accordingly, Democrats must never attack and rarely defend. And if they do defend, they must still give something up anyway.

Thus, to the bipartisans, Joe Biden didn’t pull his punches enough and maybe shouldn’t have brought up the topic at all. As I had explained in my last two posts, centrists are perpetually terrified of angering conservatives. Never mind that conservatives are always angry and thus already angry.(6)

Bipartisan centrists lament political polarization, yet they act like they don't grasp that it's happening. The rift I’ve just described is the obvious byproduct of polarization. At some point soon, the partisans are going to lose patience with the bipartisans. And yet, as with their incompetent response to the loss of Roe v. Wade, the bipartisans have no plan prepared to deal with what they pretend to fret about. They think they can regurgitate gradualist rhetoric forever and everyone will remain patient with their poor performance. 

Yeah, no. Politics doesn't work like that. 

Let's not mince shit: They created this crisis. They’ve coddled conservatives for decades and spoiled them. And, of course, conservatives took advantage of that, pushing to see what else they could get away with. 

Were centrists being venal or lily-livered? It likely varied by the individual centrist. But either way, here we are now thanks to their chronic self-sabotaging political behavior which we cannot afford anymore. 

If we're going to beat the conservatives, we need to stop listening to their centrist apologists. The sports fans are going to have to dump the pundits and join the progressives who they’ve been scapegoating. There will be dense deadenders, of course. But I think most sports fans like to win more often than not.

Read the room. And by “the room" I mean the national mood.

____________

1) In his piece in The Nation, Jeer Heer later examined centrist hand-wringing in greater detail.

2) Don't even suggest that Liz Cheney (R-WY) being on the January 6th Commission refutes this. Her whole family had fanned the autocratic flames that got us here. Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney favored a sweeping interpretation of the Unitary Executive Theory which holds that the president can do anything with the executive branch without congressional oversight. Sounds pretty Trumpian, doesn't it? Her mother, Lynne Cheney founded a group to hound college professors who disagreed with her politics. I suspect the Cheneys are maybe just jealous of Trump enjoying the fruits of their labors.

3) Granted, there are constituencies for progressive programs and policies that need them and support the party accordingly, but very few of them identify as centrists. Instead, they are political hostages and most of them resent being taken for granted. Those hostages who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome may be hostile to progressives. However, those who don't aren't happy about being hostages and they're looking for some way to safely escape. They may be wary of progressives, but they are not hostile. Nor are they enthusiastically partisan. There's scant chance they will defect to the Republicans who they know are even worse, but if the Democratic candidate is functionally a Republican they may stay home. 

4) In light of Elon Musk stupidly buying Twitter and stupidly firing the programmers who keep the site going, I feel I should reproduce the thread here with links since the site's infrastructure seems to be already decaying. These were numbered tweets, but I'm losing the numbers to improve reading flow - especially since we are in the numbered footnotes here and I don't want to add to the confusion:

A lot of self-identified centrists and moderates are having an identity crisis here on Twitter. They don't seem to know what the terms mean. I'm trying to be kind and hold their hands through this situation. First, it's important to know that if you think you're a moderate, you probably aren't. The term is about your ideology not your personality. It has nothing to do with temperament and it's a statistical myth anyway. To political scientists, you are a “moderate" if your ideology defies the orthodoxy of both major political parties. Thus, Trump was “a textbook example of an ideological moderate" in technical terminology if not temperament. So if you're “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative" - as both centrists & libertarians claim to be - you're a moderate, according to the professional jargon. And if you got the opposite politics (socially conservative, but fiscally liberal) you're oddly ALSO a moderate. To pollsters, both types of voters are basically the same person - yet another “moderate" - even though they may agree on nothing. Indeed, they may very, very passionately disagree on everything! Not only does this lump people with the opposite politics together and mask their passion (and maybe even their degree of extremism), it greatly inflates the number of “moderates" because most people have at least one view that does not align with their party. Before I forget, I should mention that I've blogged about how centrists are just genteel libertarians in most cases. Differences exist, but they're outweighed by the similarities. “Socially liberal, but fiscally conservative" covers a lot of topics. But even when you add libertarians and centrists together, they only compose a small portion of the electorate. They're in the lower righthand quadrant. If this was an aerial crowd photo, we'd wonder if they all had horrible body odor. Note how that red mass of Trump dots overlaps the center line on economics. Who knew Republicans were such economic moderates! Apparently, the vast majority of Americans are pretty liberal on economics, including roughly half of Republicans. Also note that this 2016 chart is of course pre-Covid and the pandemic has made many people more socialist since. It seems the pundits of our socially liberal/fiscally conservative news media have not been entirely honest about what is and isn't ballot box poison. The chart comes from a study which made Jonathan Chait quip “libertarians don't exist." But some of those dots represent centrists, if that distinction matters. If it's 50/50 and we're counting centrists, subtract half those already sparse dots. I've been focusing on the “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative" sliver of the vote for a simple reason. It's because that political orientation totally dominates the news media and the Democratic Party establishment and decides what is considered “moderate." As David Broockman, the political scientist in the first article in this thread, bluntly put it, “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want." That's why headlines call Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin “moderates." Yesterday, many on Twitter were commenting on how incongruous it sounded, and I marveled that the press was still calling them that despite their growing radioactivity. Aren't they damaging the brand? That old Vox article at the top of this thread argued for retiring the M-word. Centrists may be forced to.

And here's the aforementioned (and much shorter) Twitter thread I posted the previous day:

I loathe both Sinema and Manchin, but at least everyone else does too. Perhaps this will sour more people on “moderates" because that's what corporate press headlines are still calling them. Why do they stick with this word choice? Force of habit? Are they trying to make Sinema and Manchin seem reasonable or likeable? Or do they stick with it because they are stuck with it? All of the above? Supposedly, President Herbert Hoover's handler's came up with the phrase “Free Enterprise System" because the term “capitalism" had become so widely despised. Let's hope “moderate" has the same problem and has to lay low for a bit while some clunky euphemism fills in for it. And before anyone takes issue with my calling NPR corporate, decades of budget cuts has made them and PBS increasingly dependent on “underwriting." It's advertising by another name and has impacted content the same way overt advertising does. Anywho, since the mid 1970s, centrists insisted that Democrats should act more like Republicans. Both Senators have certainly taken that strategy to heart. This isn't simply a personal character defect, it's what centrism is and always has been. Footnote: I've been resisting the temptation to abbreviate “Sinema and Manchin" to “S&M." The community doesn't need that grief. Tardy amendment: Remember when they denied the term “neoliberal" meant anything?

In retrospect, the FAIR article that I had originally linked to does not support my point as directly as I had remembered, but it links to ones that do (this one in particular). But the one I linked to is much funnier and proves that PBS appreciates the power of advertising dollars to express approval or disapproval.

5) As Politico had noted “Joe Manchin is to Biden's White House what Joe Lieberman was to Obama's." Lieberman, once a longtime Democrat, was such a centrist turncoat that he had endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008 and even went so far as to speak against Obama at the Republican National Convention that year. He's also the main reason Obamacare lost the public option. Of course, Lieberman was hardly the only “moderate Democrat" who had undermined Obama.

I'd like to highlight just how doomed centrist politics looked at this point. After winning 2008 nomination, Obama snubbed the Democratic Leadership Council (DNC) that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Biden had helped found. Both Obama's campaign and the DNC were headquartered in Chicago and the DNC had invited Obama to their convention. Instead, he chose to shoot some hoops and get a haircut only three blocks away! Then Joe Lieberman pulled all of his aforementioned nonsense and Democrats' anger at him was palpable. In 2011, the DNC closed its doors for good. Good riddance.

A lot of the optimism of the early Obama years was tied to the impression that centrism was finally dying. Centrists were exposed as pro-war and anti-labor, and nearly everyone had had enough of them. Alas, on top of moderates' obstruction, Obama proved to be something of a centrist himself. Gaslighting by and for politicians continued, but gaslighting by and for moderates had stopped. At least it did until 2016.

6) I'm not exactly Joe Biden's biggest fan, but his speech was a step in the right direction and it deserves at least a golf clap. And if you're protective of Joe and therefore offended by my words, try to remember that your bipartisan tastemakers think he went too far. Get mad at them instead of me.