A Constitutional Tantrum

Donald Trump suggesting the Constitution should be tossed out if it doesn’t give him what he wants proves that conservatives don’t really revere the document and never did. Ditto with history, liberty, and everything else they claim to venerate. Their patriotism's fraudulent. They just want power.

It's what they always do. They mythologize the past and then weaponize it against the present. It's just authoritarian propaganda without even a mote of honest history in it. I talked about that in my 2014 book.

But let's not try to beat conservatives at their own game by cynically playing the patriot card and calling the Constitution “sacrosanct" as the Biden White House has. Trying to out-right the right never works and it's invariably pathetic. Moreover, the founders themselves never saw that document as sacrosanct.

To the founders, the Constitution was a compromise that nobody was entirely happy with. It was a contract and everyone fought to make sure the parts of it they liked got enforced. It was later generations which made it holy writ. The founders not only made the Constitution amendable, they talked of the possibility of future generations jettisoning it entirely – just as they had done with the Articles of Confederation. We see this in the papers of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other founders. This was their attitude toward constitutions in general, both federal and state: Everything is replaceable.

For example, in the Massachusetts state constitution, Adams proclaimed that, “[T]he people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity and happiness require it."(1) 

Likewise, Jefferson felt, “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation." Accordingly, he believed, “Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

Elsewhere, Jefferson opined, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."(2)

Therefore, original intent says “Forget original intent."

The Constitution has always had profound problems and it still does. It's saccharine historically illiterate gibberish to deny this. We need to fix these problems, the sooner the better. For example, we should abolish the Electoral College and the Senate for starters. Both are long overdue.

But allowing an orange authoritarian narcissist to stay in power after America had passed a mandate to remove him isn't among the legion of reasons we need to overhaul or perhaps replace the Constitution.

The proper response to Trump's comment is to point out that conservative love of the Constitution is either superficial or bullshit. It needs to be said. And it needs to be said for three different reasons: First, it's the truth and thus must told on principle. Second, it's politically smart because Democrats do not go on the offensive enough. And third, a functioning democracy needs citizens who think seriously about history.

Otherwise, we get to where we are now.

But bipartisanship-fetishizing centrists cannot see this. Their mythology obscures truth almost as much as conservative mythology does. Trump is the embodiment of conservatism, not an aberration from it. It's obvious in all his comments – including those on the Constitution.

We cannot afford to politely ignore this anymore.

_____________

1) John Adams, Article VII, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780.

2) Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Kickerbocker Press, 1904), 12:12.

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 weaponizing racism for longer than I’ve been alive and I’m now in my mid-50s. Think about that: Roll it around in your head for a moment.

No, really: Use this paragraph break as a break and actually think about that for a moment.

And then just ignore everyone calling Trump some kind of unprecedented aberration because they are historically illiterate imbeciles sadly 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 by painting the recent past as some halcyon era of comity. It's vomitsomely dishonest. You know better.

Seriously, consider your dignity – why risk it to bolster the rediculous myth that there was just recently a reasonable Republican Party to negotiate with? At this late date, it's long past time give up the ghost. Don't compose retroactive rationalizations. Resist the sinister temptation to fritter time away with silly centrist revisionism. Just adult-up and take the L so that you can finally move forward and begin winning again.

Remember winning? It doesn't come from sleeping with the enemy or making stupid excuses for them.

And it's not just conservative love of racism: They've 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. 

Timidity & Perfidy

The Supreme Court’s recent murder of Roe v. Wade re-revealed two ugly truths that most Democrats have long chosen to ignore: First, that the party’s centrist leadership has always been ambivalent about abortion. And second, that they see activists as pests to be patronized and stereotyped.

During the 2008 campaign, then Senator Barack Obama had promised Planned Parenthood that he would codify Roe v. Wade on day one. “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Of course, he didn’t. And when later asked why it had dropped by the wayside, he replied that it was “not the highest legislative priority" adding, “I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.”(1)

That sobering moment is the Rosetta Stone for understanding decades of self-sabotaging centrist politics. Obama was an enormous disappointment on a host of issues, but this is not about Obama: It’s about centrist ideology, it's hostility to the Democratic base, and the absurd political behavior it fosters.

Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorite slogan that there is “no litmus test" on abortion. She says that a lot, maybe even as often as she praises Ronald Reagan.(2) In May of 2017, Pelosi paradoxically said voicing alarm on abortion access was “hurting the party”(3) even though abortion was “fading as an issue." 

The key to reconciling that apparent contradiction is the centrist myth that activists are out of step with ordinary voters. Translation: It's only those whacko activists who care about it and they don't really count. Centrists have adopted a favorite conservative stereotype that ultimately insults nearly everyone else: It posits that caring is crazy and the public is lazy and/or conservative – and it's all pure projection.

It's also a tread worn excuse that polls routinely refute. Indeed, centrists seem allergic to doing anything popular whether its passing Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college, forgiving student debt, or in this instance defending abortion rights. Centrists project their own disinterest onto the electorate.

Just two months ago, Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn supported anti-choice incumbent Henry Cuellar (D-TX) against pro-choice challenger Jessica Cisneros. The incumbent carbuncle is also anti-union and pro-NRA. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that later fact sort of stood out after two recent mass shootings. Pelosi may be ambivalent about issues her party cares about, but at least she’s consistently so.(4) Edit: Cuellar and his wife have now been indicted on federal bribery charges.

Pelosi's not alone. In 2019, Biden’s freshly-minted presidential campaign had to rapidly backtrack after the backlash to their confirming that he still supported the 1976 anti-choice Hyde Amendment. It was an awfully awkward reversal since it highlighted Biden’s lengthy anti-choice record in the Senate. In 1974, he said Roe v. Wade “went too far" adding, “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” And in 1982, Biden backed a constitutional amendment that would allow states to ignore Roe v. Wade. Getting snippy with pro-choice voters in 2019 probably didn't help.

Deadly Ineptitude

Just what the fuck does it take already?

That’s the boiling question people are asking a lot lately about many different recent events.

For openers, two particularly horrific mass shootings had happened not too long ago.

The first shooting was in Buffalo, NY where a white supremacist massacred grocery store shoppers in an African American neighborhood. His racist manifesto was filled with stock conspiracy theories he had copy & pasted from 4chan and he had targeted an area with a high concentration of blacks for his attack.

The second was an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, TX where the local cops did absolutely nothing to stop the carnage going on inside the school for over an hour. Instead, they tased, pepper sprayed, and handcuffed desperate parents who begged the cops to do their jobs.

And there were two mass shootings just this Fourth of July – one in Highland Park, IL and another in Philadelphia, PA. But there have been very many other mass shootings in between Uvalde and these. Mass shootings are like roaches in that regard: For every one that gets press, there are many more that don’t.

Nearly everyone’s exasperation is palpable. And that’s fueled in large part by the knowledge that nothing is going to change as a result of these infuriatingly familiar tragedies. We’ve all been here too many times before to entertain the cruel fantasy that this will actually change anything.

Our cynical politics regard concrete goals as “unicorns” and “ponies” so only posturing is considered “realistic.” Political pantomime is “adult,” but advocating actual action is “childish.” You can apply this to any number of issues – abortion rights comes to mind right now, but that topic's for my next post.

So let's discuss mass shootings a little longer before going into our country's incompetent Covid response.

Why the Right is Wrong on Property

This blog is long overdue for a new post. Moreover, this post itself is long overdue too.

I published my book back in the spring of 2014. Not long after, I posted a sample chapter on this blog. That chapter was about conservatives' insane Nazi analogies. I chose it because it was timely then, but I always thought the heart of the book was the chapter on economic equality. Many of America's founding fathers thought a rough economic equality was crucial for a republic to function. Therefore, the notion that socialism is un-American is nonsense and it is important for ordinary voters to know this.

I probably should have done this years ago.

So without anymore delay, here is another free chapter from my 99 cent ebook tucked behind the cut.

Chronically Dishonest

We keep having these distracting debates about whether Joe Biden is senile at the expense of examining his compulsive lying. I’m no clinician, but it's obviously compulsive because: a) He keeps doing it despite constantly getting caught and b) The lies are clearly not thought-out beforehand - and thus easily caught.

The scandal that sank his 1988 presidential campaign went far beyond plagiarism. He made all sorts of boorish Trumpian boasts. Academically, Joe Biden claimed that he got three degrees in undergrad and had graduated from law school in the top half of his class, winning accolades all along the way.

Whereas in reality: “Biden does not mention the moot court competition on his resume, and did not win the political science award at University of Delaware, where he received a single B.A. in political science and history.” Oh, and he actually graduated 76th in his law class of 85 students. Not the top.

Biden made these bogus boasts because he got into a tiff with a New Hampshire man in 1987. Biden said “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do.” It seems he hasn’t changed greatly. This cycle, he challenged a voter to a push-up contest and, yes, another IQ test. “You wanna check my shape on it, let’s do push-ups together here, man. Let’s run. Let’s do whatever you want to do. Let’s take an IQ test.” But back in 1987, this was how Joe Biden launched into a bombastic polishing of his academic record. 

Of course, failing a class for plagiarism was part of his actual academic record. He was generously allowed to retake the class. That ignominious moment should have scared him straight, but he kept on plagiarizing and lying after he got out of law school. Like I said, it’s a compulsion. And it’s life-long.

That brag about his class ranking was spontaneous and defensive. But Biden’s lies are not always concieved in the heat of passion - not that being easy to rile into lying is okay in a presidential aspirant. Biden frequently repeats lies quite casually when he is not under pressure and that is quite likely compulsive as well - especially if you keep telling it after repeatedly being asked not to by your staff. Joe Biden has a rather Reaganesque love of to retelling the same tall tales.

For example, in his '88 campaign, Joe Biden had also claimed he marched with the Civil Rights Movement - much to the chagrin of his long-suffering aides: As the New York Times noted last year, “More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood - and kept telling the story anyway." Again, that’s a compulsion.

Atrocity Propaganda

In his famous essay “Notes on Nationalism," George Orwell wrote, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Call me crazy, but I think that the same dynamics apply to partisans of every description. 

And I think that atrocities include mean tweets.

Recent data analysis has confirmed what most sober observers have already guessed a long time ago - that Bernie Sanders supporters do not act any worse online than any other candidate’s.

I’m dropping a line to let you catch your breath, in case you need it.

That’s right: They are no worse - which also means their opponents are no better. Most campaign supporters do not cross lines in their passion and the few poop-tossers who do can be found on all sides. If you doubt that, you can consult the Orwell quote above or the data findings below.

Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist and graduate student at Harvard University, looked at negativity on Twitter expecting to find more on the Sanders side. Instead, he found “Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower.” The only difference is “Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers" suggesting this may help perpetuate the Bernie Bro myth.

Why did he expect to see more negativity from Sanders supporters?

I believed that Bernie's followers are more likely to like him because they are more likely to experience the very negative life circumstances that Bernie Sanders wants to fix. People in a negative situation are more likely to interact negatively with people, particularly those anonymous online people that they have no in-person relationship with. So I had anticipated that Bernie's followers on average would have a much higher chance to be negative. This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV.

I can honestly say that I have seen this specific negativity online. It is raw and it is real. When some callous centrist pompously snarks that Sanders supporters are asking for “ponies,” many may well say, “Fuck you, my [loved one] died from rationing [his/her] meds” or “Fuck you, my [loved one] lost a limb in Iraq” or “Fuck you, my [loved one] got killed by a cop who got away with it.” Etc.

These people do not want others to suffer as they and their loved ones have suffered. They lack that reactionary attitudinal defect that dictates others should struggle needlessly too - that it is somehow “unfair” to improve things. They don’t want to watch society make the same stupid mistakes and they are willing to make a noise and inconvenience themselves and others to prevent it from reoccurring. 

That is a noble sentiment that should never be maligned or marginalized. It’s basic civic decency and the cynical self-anointed “realists” who seek to stifle it are poisonous to participatory democracy. These “realists” are, at best, oblivious to how change takes place. But that ignorance eventually festers into defensive hostility. Democracy is messy and common, so genteel people are always profoundly uncomfortable with it. The privileged don't like to listen - which is how we got here.

The deploring of rude Sanders supporters is essentially tone-policing writ at large. These people have righteous grievances, but how they express them becomes the dominant press narrative which coincidentally conveniently eclipses those grievances. Of course, that's how tone-policing works - it's a silencing tactic. It’s how the guilty party and/or its wealthy sympathizers change the subject and blame the victim. It’s a ridiculously shitty reflex that is quite common among civility fetishists.

But the so-called “abuse” by the victims almost never goes beyond that much deserved “Fuck you.” It doesn’t escalate to harassment, stalking, or doxxing - at least no more so than it does for supporters of any other candidate. And yes, every candidates’ - including even Elizabeth Warren’s.

Incidentally, comedian Kate Willett wrote a moving account of losing her boyfriend because he could not afford the care he needed. It doesn’t contain any Fuck you-s, although she is certainly entitled to use them. Her stand up is outstanding and definitely has clear feminist sensibilities. You can hear more here.

I don’t think most people really appreciate just how insanely hateful anti-Sanders attacks have been or the extent that they have been normalized. This is important, because when attacks against a particular person or group become normalized, they cease to be noticed.

Recently, two separate MSNBC hosts have used two separate Nazi analogies against Bernie Sanders (who incidentally is Jewish) within only two weeks of each other. Not long afterwards, a white supremacist snuck into a Sanders rally and dropped a Nazi flag in the stands. Yet for some reason, no network covered it. I suppose it would hamper to their "just another old white guy" narrative.

In any case, just imagine seeing any of that and thinking that “Bernie Bros” are the real problem. One host, Chris Matthews, finally got fired after a pattern of odd historical hyperboles, but the other, Chuck Todd, kept his job. It was not because his analysis was in any way more accurate or measured, but because he lacked Matthews’ avuncular flair. You can slander if you’re bland. That’s apparently the rule.

And these are professional broadcast journalists for fuck’s sake. Imagine how amateur assholes act online - probably not terribly professionally. I’m going to go out on a limb and say somewhat worse. Why, you might even call them rude - even the blue check marks.

Twitter is littered with little unhinged Chris Matthews clones who are sexist toward any women who support Sanders. And many are even far, far worse than Matthews. Their rape rhetoric is pretty threatening. It’s not hard to imagine it and you don’t have to imagine it.

And of course, if you are a Person of Color who supports Sanders (and over half of Sanders’ base is PoC), you get plenty of racist attacks from supposedly “moderate” Democrats.

NEWS FLASH: Moderate politics do not make moderate temperament. Indeed, they do not even make moderate politics because how pollsters categorize moderates actually masks extremism because moderation is conflated with not following party orthodoxy.  But I digress.

The point here is it should not surprise anyone that the “Permit Patty” types who phone the police on blacks for simply being nearby also address grown men of color as “boy” online. And if you are a Woman of Color, you get the sexism and the racism - often combined. Imagine tweeting this: “Picture Nina Turner acting the part of the surly housemaid on The Jefferson’s except it’s The Sanders lake house."

Don’t flinch, centrists: These are your people. Acknowledge your offspring because it is even less dignified to deny them. Denial is both obvious and ridiculous. Acknowledge your bastards at long last. 

And I've only shown a few examples of hateful centrists, but they certainly ain't rarities. You can find an exhaustive catalog in this Twitter thread. Also in this thread. Oh yeah, you have no idea.

So why aren’t there also lots of articles about them? It’s almost as if the corporate media does not actually care about online civility and is just trying to stop Bernie Sanders any way they can. Huh.

I’m hardly arguing that obnoxious Bernie Bros don’t exist - quite the opposite. I’m saying that every candidate attracts grotesque supporters and that Sanders’ worst ones don’t even remotely represent his movement and they are no worse than other candidates’.

When some people say “Well, I’ve never been attacked by X candidate’s supporters” I always ask if they have ever critiqued that particular candidate’s policies. For example, have you spoken about Kamala Harris’ pretending to be a “progressive prosecutor" with one of the K-Hive? As the name suggests, they will swarm you - and not politely. That’s Twitter. Expressing a political opinion in a public online forum draws vitriol. Who knew? But the point here is it’s easy to think a particular faction is well-behaved if you have never angered them. And for the very same reason, it is even easier to be oblivious to your own faction’s insane nastiness. After all, you haven’t attacked yourselves.

It is also worth noting that not all mean tweets are created equal. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." Nobody enjoys being told they are wrong, but that is hardly abuse. Yet Sanders surrogate David Sorita is routinely called “toxic" for tweeting links to The Congressional Record and C-SPAN even as he is the target of actual toxic content. Nina Turner sparked an odd outcry for rather accurately calling Michael Bloomberg an “oligarch.” Personally, I think “plutocrat" is more precise, but oligarch certainly works.

Perhaps this tweet sums up the absurdity best. "I called @briebriejoy Bernie's Goebbels and all the berniebros are like omg how can you compare a Jewish candidate's spox to a Nazi. Then they turn around and accuse another Jewish candidate of being an oligarch. You can't make this shit up."

No, I suppose you cannot. That last daft tweet is almost adorable. The other stuff, less so.

Orange on Orange

Fun Fact: Within 24 hours, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump had mixed up the locations of recent mass shootings. It's easy to dismiss this as trivial coincidence, but both do this sort of thing a lot.

The two Orange Ones are pretty similar. Both old boys are gaffe-prone, handsy, senile false populists with hair issues. They're both obsessed with IQ scores and crowd sizes. They're so similar that it's difficult to distinguish their statements from one another, hence there is a Trump or Biden quote quiz. 

They make absurd boasts about their abilities, support, or accomplishments. Trump trumpets that he has a “great relationship with the blacks,” while Biden brags he has the “most progressive record of anyone running.” Time after time, they say strange things that would make a cat laugh.

Also, both seem loath to make sincere apologies, which is often a non-issue because angrily doubling-down (frequently incoherently) is their favorite response to criticism so it rarely gets to the non-apology point.

For example, when Corey Booker said Joe Biden should apologize for waxing nostalgic about the “civility" of segregationist senators, Biden shot back that Booker should be the one to apologize(!) As with Anita Hill, Joe Biden tried to smooth things over with a phone call - but of course no apology was part of that. As a New York Times headline explained “Joe Biden Called Cory Booker. But Apologize? It’s Not the Biden Way." Eventually he did, but it took a lot of push back, which does not bode well if being a decent adult decision-maker still matters after Trump.

The fact that the two Oranges ones got in a silly tiff over who would win in a schoolyard fist fight tells you all you need to know. Mixing up cities is their least significant similarity, but it adds to the total - and more importantly draws attention to it.

To clarify, I'm not saying Biden is as bad as Trump. But what I am saying is the less like Trump our candidate is, the better. And we can do much better and thereby improve our odds.

Some centrists don't get this. They see these dismal similarities as advantages for Biden that will “win over” Trump voters. Their argument is both shallow an amoral. It puts personality over policy. To them, the above litany of defects are actually assets because they think both candidates come across a genuine guys who bluntly say what they think. In short, they both talk like Archie Bunker.

These centrists think that's all the populism we need - the persona, not the policy. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk of breaking up the banks, Joe Biden has spent his political career promoting the banking industry's interests. Biden wrote the draconian bankruptcy bill that made it easier for creditors to squeeze and hound borrowers. Vocally opposing that vicious bill is in large part what put then Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren on the political map when she famously clashed with him in the 2005 Senate hearings on it. But that's not the form populism centrists feel comfortable with. They want a candidate who says “malarkey" but defends billionaires. And so they support Joe.

And of course, these timid centrists think Biden being a straight white guy is also important. At a Biden rally, HuffPost reporter Brain Marans discovered, “Everyone here who I have spoken to who is firmly in Biden's corner cited electability. Two women said they thought a woman is too risky for that reason; a man said Buttigieg being gay might turn off some voters too." Of course, “electability” is in the eye of the voter so myopically pursuing it as a strategy might actually backfire.

Portraying racial and social conservatism as political prudence has been a centrist standby since the late 1970s - hence Biden's anti-busing stance then and his Nixonian “law and order" focus on crime thereafter. He personifies the centrist effort to conspicuously disown the 1960s and the 1970s.

These are not just poor judgment calls or personal failings: This is longstanding centrist strategy. Their professed faith is that “liberal overreach” caused conservative ascendance, so veering right is their knee-jerk response to every setback - and every advance. Advances absolutely terrify them.

It’s political motor memory: mollycoddle bigotry and befriend big business (which means betraying labor). Prior to his infamous Sister Souljah Moment, Bill Clinton's top advisers had told him he “must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” Well, Joe Biden had been distancing himself from liberalism for far longer.

This is all not a little ironic when you consider Biden hitching his wagon so tightly to being President Obama's Vice President. We all saw an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama weather insane barrages of racism and Islamophobia and still crush his Republican opponents, yet centrists still think we need an old school white guy to win.

Biden’s target audience loves Obama without realizing what Obama’s presidency proved was possible. I wrote about this some before in a blog post entitled “Omitting Obama.” Eight years of “O” have had zero effect on their thinking.  It's as if they had not happened.

Whether you see class in purely cultural terms or just want others to, Joe Biden sounds like a plausible populist - and even better, an acceptable one. And centrist “realism” makes Biden’s awkward racist record acceptable as well. They want to take any talk of class or economic equality off the table, but a little light racism is fine with them and always has been.

That's not hyperbole. If any comfortable conventional pundit has recommended that Biden go on the offensive with his own Sister Souljah Moment, I have not heard about it. But I am pretty certain they are thinking of it. [And it happened. See second edit below.] There is no credibly denying this when apologists paint his disadvantages as advantages. Because how are they advantages? And you cannot portray Biden’s racist past as irrelevant if you think it is an advantage today.

And if you are rationalizing that Joe Biden is cleverly fooling people, ask yourself if Amy McGrath’s disastrously dishonest campaign roll-out fooled anyone. Then ask yourself how anyone so utterly befuddled as Joe Biden can be an agile mastermind.

Low-key racism will not peel away any votes from Trump. Those who voted for Trump out of racism are overwhelmingly already Republican and not gettable. Those Reagan Democrats left the fold long ago. Do not confuse them with Obama-to-Trump voters.  The two subgroups are not the same.

Obama-to-Trump voters who defected over economic issues such as NAFTA are gettable. After decades of contempt and neglect by the Democratic Party establishment, Obama's presidency seemed to reverse this distressing self-sabotaging trend. His actions did not always align with his soaring populist rhetoric (and his 2008 language was almost Sandersesque), but Obama did save Detroit with the auto industry bailout. That's why the Blue Wall never failed him. 

By stark contrast, the Clinton name brand was so tightly tied to the betrayal of NAFTA that the party might as well have run Mitt Romney instead of Hillary Clinton. When Hill defended Bill's economic record, it was like Mitt saying we should let the Motor City go bankrupt.

Many working class voters wrongly rationalized that Trump didn't really mean his racist rhetoric and was just doing it to get attention. Now they know better and are gettable, but we can still fuck it up in a number of ways. Naturally, centrists have advocated or already practiced all of them.

Scolding them for staying home, voting third party, or voting Trump will fuck this up. Scorning or slandering economic populism will fuck this up. And finally, embracing racism will also fuck it up. It's not only morally abhorrent, but strategically senseless: Racists are not going to vote for racist-lite when they have the option of voting full-throated racist. They will predictably stick with Trump.

Trying to woo those voters will fail as spectacularly as trying to woo conservative suburbanites did in 2016. It will also demoralize the base, which also happened in 2016. Yes, demoralizing your base with infidelity is definitely an immense liability. Enthusiasm determines turnout. Who knew?

The point here is the racists are not coming back and we should not even try to get them back. They're solid Republicans now and hopelessly lost.

But by contrast, those Obama-to-Trump voters are gettable. Thus, the key to winning is fighting against inequality across the board - racial, sexual, economic, etc. It's good politics because it's not awkwardly hypocritical and it promotes crucial coalition-building.

Let’s revisit that infidelity analogy. If your current partner sees you still trying to seduce their bitter enemy (who you incidentally have zero chance of bedding anyway), how forgiving is your sweetie going to be of your fruitless pursuit? But winning back someone you had lost by now behaving yourself seems a lot more likely - provided you prove you are truly serious. Picking Biden doesn't signal seriousness, picking Sanders does. Biden is more malarkey, Sanders is no bullshit.

So what does your fed-up partner want to see and hear? Not more gas-lighting guilt trips.


EDIT 09/10/19:

Consider this brilliant Twitter ridicule the Cliff Notes version of my post.

Second EDIT 09/12/19:

CALLED IT!  Today on “Morning Joe," Bill Maher advised “This race is begging for someone to do a kind of a Sister Souljah moment with that far left.”

The Second Edition is Out Now

It is available here on Amazon as an ebook or paperback copy.

Stealth Bomb Run

A few years ago, I saw some little kids playing in the park. I wasn't really paying attention, so I don't know exactly what game they were playing. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of running around in my immediate vicinity. Suddenly, one of them screamed at his peers:

"I'M SNEAKING UP ON YOU!" 

Um, that's not how you do it, kid. 

And yet this is centrist strategy in countless elections: Step One: Loudly and publicly tell Republicans you are actually kinda conservative and tricking those crazy/silly liberals. Put it in ads. Step Two: Loudly and publicly tell Democrats you are actually very progressive and tricking those dumb/thuggish hicks. (Bonus stupid points if you attack the left for acting "more progressive than thou" and in the same breath insist you are more progressive than them.) Step Three: After alienating everyone across the political spectrum, ludicrously conclude that having critics on both sides means "I must be doing something right!"

Yeah, shredding your credibility by announcing how you are going to betray everybody is genius strategy - especially since conspicuously dissing constituencies has been in the centrist playbook since 1992.

Nobody will see it coming.

Rise & repeat - ad nauseam.

Take retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath of Kentucky who announced Tuesday she is taking on Senator Mitch McConnell by disastrously packaging herself as a pro-Trump Democrat. The campaign roll out was so atrocious that it makes Beto O'Rourke's look masterful by comparison. In short, she bombed.

She opened well, looking like she was going to call out Donald Trump's false promises and campaign on economic populism, but then she put the blame on Mitch McConnell for supposedly frustrating Trump's noble efforts when Mitch has actually helped Don a lot. Yes, they initially said mean things about each other, but that was long ago and they have been in sync ever since. Indeed, Trump himself has already tweeted his support for McConnell against McGrath. Again, she began well:

"If you think about why Kentuckians voted for Trump, they wanted to drain the swamp, and Trump said that he was going to do that," McGrath said during an interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "Trump promised to bring back jobs. He promised to lower drug prices for so many Kentuckians. And that is very important."

YES! Bread and butter issues! Call out Trump! But then she nose-dived right down into the toilet:

"And you know what? Who stops them along the way? Who stops the president from doing these things? Mitch McConnell. And I think that that’s very important, and that’s going to be my message – the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done. He’s not able to get it done because of Senator McConnell."

No, they're not getting done because Trump never had any fucking intention of ever helping anyone. 

Unfortunately, McGrath's strange framing is complicated by the existence of video of her comparing Trump's election to the 9-11 attacks. And lest anyone accuse me of letting the cat out of the bag and undermining the party, that video is in the Courier Journal article above. I think the CJ has quite a few more readers than I do and I profoundly doubt the GOP does opposition research by reading my blog.

McGrath's statement was transparent pandering and will surely backfire. Lying is always a risky strategy. People dislike being lied to. It's insulting - especially when it is so sloppy. Her apologists are already openly saying, "Keep your voice down! It's a good strategy. We have to fool the rubes." Maybe these apologists are the true rubes and need to keep their voices down.

Constantly saving self-sabotaging candidates from themselves is exhausting and demoralizing. Election day is still a long way away, so maybe she can still pivot from this shitty strategy and people will eventually forget it. But if she sticks with it and doubles-down, it will be yet another boring, slow motion fiasco.

And she has kinda already done so. The next day she did it by explaining how she intends to drive a wedge between Trump and McConnell. (Um, maybe don't do that in public?) In doing so she said she would probably have voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice. Constituent outrage instantly intensified and she walked it back hours later acting as if she had not really thought about Kavanaugh much before. If true, this is also damning because senators should think about things like Supreme Court confirmations. Of course, it's not true because she lamented his confirmation in tweets last year.

In short, she pin-balled between very different positions and explanations. Individually, each of them made her look terrible - either stupid or dishonest. She just kept ringing her own bell: Supporting Trump is not a good look. *DING!* Getting caught lying about it is not a good look. *DING!* Her strategizing out loud on the air is not a good look. *DING!* Supporting Kavanaugh is not a good look. *DING!* Saying you had not really thought that much about Kavanaugh is not a good look. *DING!* And then there is the infuriating pin-balling itself on top of all those individual things which establishes a pattern.

And - I cannot stress this enough - campaign launches are things that you plan in advance. They are the one thing in the campaign that you have the most control over. After that, everything gets way dicier.

Amy McGrath's two-day campaign trainwreck is easy to critique, but I am not writing this to duplicate other people's efforts. I'm saying this shit-show illustrates a bigger issue, which is that this is a chronic problem with centrists who are paradoxically honest about being dishonest. A least when Hillary Clinton spoke of the necessity of having “both a public and a private position,” she did it behind closed doors. (Then it leaked.) But pundits and other unofficial surrogates are not quite so discrete.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is stupid to call voters stupid.

Centrism's fundamental assumptions about voters and government invariably lead to lying and betrayal. It's baked-into their ideology. There's no denying that when their strategists and pundits stupidly trumpet it on talk shows and op-ed columns. "This is how we win," insist the experts who are almost always wrong and candidates who take their advice routinely lose.

Again, lying is a bad strategy to begin with. It's not just unethical, it's stupidly ineffective - especially when you tell the same lies for decades. People see a pattern and start to distrust you. Go figure. You can gaslight your party's hardcore loyalists for a long time, but it rapidly drives away everyone else.

Centrists lie like alcoholics and drug addicts - impulsively, passionately, desperately, and unconvincingly. Any glance at their past or their logic totally torpedoes their story and pointing it out only provokes their anger. Witness their behavior on Twitter. Centrism is a hell of a drug.

Compare this with Bernie Sanders' approach: He's blunt and most people love it. He is an unapologetic democratic socialist and still solidly popular. He must be doing something right. And that something is being honest. He passes the breathalyzer test and that's why we should let him drive - or perhaps pilot. Sanders stands for things and is very direct about it.

We see identical directness in the rising stars of the Squad - Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. We should let them drive because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi certainly isn't leading anything resembling "Resistance."

The little kid yelling in the park was cute, but it's not so cute when centrists do it. And keep doing it.


UPDATE EDIT - 4/15/20: 

If you think this post is an unfair generalization about centrists, think again. Despite Amy McGrath's spectacularly disastrous campaign launch, she is the candidate that the national Democratic Party establishment has chosen to throw its weight behind in the Kentucky primary. Why?

Needless to say, they should stay neutral in the primary and not put their thumb on the scale for anyone. Outside help should wait for the general election against the Republicans. But even if they did have a legitimate role to play locally, the obvious responsible move would have been to pivot their support to another, more competent candidate as soon as possible to bury past embarrassment.

Alas, the problem there is the other two top candidates are genuine progressives and the national party would rather lose to McConnell yet again than see either of these progressives get the seat. Charles Booker is a charismatic African American state legislator. Watch his ad. It is honest and heartfelt - the opposite of McGrath. Former Marine Lt. Col. Mike Broihier is another Democratic candidate. Watch his ad too. Both ads look professional, but not artificial. They put compassion in front. By contrast, Amy McGrath's latest stiff ad opposes Medicare for All and free college - two things a poor state like Kentucky could truly use.

But the ad has fighter planes in it and that's all that really matters, right?

My Facebook feed is constantly flooded with sponsored PAC ads for McGrath that act as if Kentucky has already held its primary and she is the party's nominee. Unlike McGrath herself, they don't lie outright: Instead, they simply frame it as a contest between McGrath vs. McConnell. There is no mention of the primary whatsoever. So of course, well-intentioned out-of-state Democrats donate to McGrath.

I think both Charles Booker and Mike Broihier are great candidates who are far more deserving of your dollars. Donate to them. They are honest, competent, and compassionate. Those things are important.

After all, we actually want to beat McConnell this November, right? Rank and file Democrats do anyway.

ADDITIONAL EDIT - 4/26/20:

Mitch McConnell has held his Senate seat since 1985. In every election since, the Democratic Party has run a moderate against him and lost. So save any "This is How We Win" lectures for never.

We are a poor state with dismal voter turn out because we don't offer voters anything to show up for. "Stop the Incumbent" is not a platform, so it rarely performs. It admittedly helped narrowly eject two terrible Republican governors - Ernie Fletcher and Matt Bevin - but they were extraordinarily horrible. But it has yet to eject Mitch McConnell despite his being widely despised by Kentucky Republicans. Nobody actually likes him, yet he has been ridiculously difficult to get rid of because the Democratic Party still has yet to figure out that you have to show up for people if you want them to show up for you.

A THIRD EDIT YET - 05/31/20:

Oh shit. This is a McGrath Facebook ad idiotically drawing attention to her fiasco campaign launch. Her team just cannot stop screwing up. This goes beyond doubling-down on dumb - It's reanimating dumb. When I wrote this blog post almost a year ago, I suggested she might live it down in time. Um, not if she is going to bring it up herself! Thank goodness Charles Booker had since entered the primary.

BELATED FOURTH, POST MORTEM EDIT - 08/04/20:

Alas, Amy McGrath narrowly fought off Charles Booker's primary challenge 45.4% to 42.6%, averting an upset. The national party backed McGrath, but much of the state party surprisingly (but belatedly) backed Booker after he began to surge. The two biggest papers in the state, the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, both endorsed Booker. It was close.

Initially, there were no publicly available polls on the Kentucky primary. There were internal polls commissioned by the campaigns themselves of course, but for the longest time the only public one showed Mitch McConnell narrowly leading an unnamed generic Democrat in the general 47% to 44%. Towards the end, there finally was a public poll on the primary that showed Booker eight points ahead of McGrath, but unfortunately the pandemic, early voting, and tardy support made the deciding difference. 

That poll was not wishful spin: It soberly showed both Democrats losing to McConnell in the general, but with Booker losing by a narrower margin - a six point improvement over McGrath's performance against McConnell. Digging into poll explained why. McGrath's popularity was abysmal - only 24% favorable vs 59% unfavorable with 18% unsure. By contrast, Booker was 33% favorable vs 29% unfavorable with 38% unsure. Those undecideds showed that Booker had potential to improve that McGrath did not. Voters had already made up their minds about her and she has nobody to blame but herself.

The latest poll shows McConnell has a huge seventeen point lead over McGrath - 53% to 36%. That's slightly better than the previous poll predicted. This dismal result is utterly unsurprising, not just for the reasons I gave above but because McGrath's campaign was always founded on the crazy fantasy that she could flatter Trump into endorsing her over McConnell or at least not commenting on the contest at all.

Not bloody likely. That fantasy was shattered immediately when Donald Trump tweeted his support for McConnell after her campaign launch fiasco. The best she could possibly hope for would be that Trump would then ignore the race, but that was never going to happen either. She was/is running as a Trump-friendly Democrat. His vanity would not allow him to ignore it. Trump has a clear preference in the race but it ain't her. And when has Trump ever kept quiet about anything, let alone something he wanted?

Her strategy was a house of cards from the start and to win she would have to keep it standing for a whole year. She could not keep it standing for 24 hours. It was shockingly irresponsible to continue her campaign after the cat got out of the bag and scattered those cards everywhere.