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 both 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.

Early Vetting is Vital

Okay look, I get that folks are afraid. But remember your Dune - "Fear is the mind-killer."

I’m hearing a lot of vacuous angsting about “circular firing squads” from people who should certainly know better. Many otherwise smart people seem to believe that early vetting is bad. Both Matt Bors and Matt Lubchansky have done cartoons on this irrational anti-democratic "loose lips sink ships" panic. Bors’ was in 2016, and Lubchansky's was just last February, thus nothing has changed. 

So take a deep breath and pick your thinking caps up off the ground because this is important.

First and foremost, early vetting is how we avoid getting stuck with a terrible candidate whose weaknesses gets revealed after it is too late. That situation is demoralizing to our side and alienating to the electorate. 

Now, I don’t mean to kink shame, but almost nobody enjoys having to make constant dubious excuses for their candidate. Moral scolds will certainly seize on the word “enjoy” and lecture that elections are not entertainment. I suspect they secretly enjoy making excuses. Maybe they see it as testament to their cleverness. In any case, the rest of the electorate does not share their particular kink and finds it somewhat off-putting. They don’t enjoy feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. They are funny like that. And guilting them to the polls only adds insult to injury. Guilt-triped hostages tend to get resentful - especially with repetition. Moral blackmail gets old. Who knew?

Any “serious realists” who cannot acknowledge this dynamic are neither serious nor realists.

Second, early vetting gives campaigns time to debunk slander against solid candidates. Fact-checking takes time. Conservatives play dirty and they love last-minute bullshit. Muting early criticism is a huge gift to them – particularly when you consider the Streisand Effect which dictates that trying to suppress information only gets it more attention. Incidentally, the Streisand Effect didn’t start with the Internet. Everyone has always known that the most effective way to advertise anything was trying to censor it. A century ago, authors loved their books getting "Banned in Boston" because it meant they sold more copies everywhere else. So nobody has any excuse for not understanding this long-established dynamic. 

Suppressing information also looks dishonest. As with the Streisand Effect, it is maddeningly sad that anyone needs this simple thing explained to them.

Also, is once again demoralizing to your troops who don’t enjoy polishing turds. Moreover, it loses potential allies – i.e. undecided voters – and those folks are sort of important to winning elections. Weird how hard it is to win voters’ trust when you are always trying to hush people up. 

I want to expound more on this point before going forward to the next one because it is so important. 

It's a cliché to say "It's not the crime, but the cover up." But what doesn't get said as much is that this rule applies even if there is no crime. It lends credibility to the flimsiest accusations. It's the surest way to make your candidate look guilty, even when innocent. Don't do that.

Any campaign or party operative, official or otherwise, who does so is guilty of political malpractice, if not conscious sabotage. Yet many people seem to sincerely believe that Republicans are incapable of doing their own opposition research and therefore if Democrats can just mute or not mention any uncomfortable information about each other the Republicans will have nothing to use – as if Joe Biden’s creepy behavior had not already been the subject of a 2015 “Daily Show” segment entitled "The Audacity of Grope." 

Ignoring the elephants in the room is not a strategy. Come on. You are smarter than that. 

Additionally, it's ridiculous to expect the press to participate in any cover up. It would not only be professionally unethical, it would defy the media's built-in monetary incentive to generate constant controversy and conflict. You may as well expect a candy company to stop using any sweeteners in their sweets. In short, it's never going to happen and trying is always going to backfire. It makes you look stupid and dishonest at the same time. At best, it makes you look pathetically naïve.

Even considering suppressing dissent to achieve unity is simply ludicrous, which is why it is absolutely bat shit insanity for the DCCC to blacklist any entity that donates to primary challengers. To mix metaphors, it is tin-eared and ham-handed. Jen Sorensen had done a great comic on how utterly dumb this is. The DCCC's move makes the Democratic Party look profoundly undemocratic.  

It’s bad enough that they are overtly opposed to primary challengers: It is worse that they are taking concrete action to discourage them – particularly when it comes on the heels of sabotaging progressive candidates in the 2018 midterms. Indeed, they have a history of this.

After being called-out on such shenanigans, you would think centrists would behave themselves – at least until the outrage blows over. But they cannot cleanup their act even temporarily. Yes, people are creatures of habit and this applies to institutions as much as individuals. But the Democratic Party establishment isn’t even pretending to be on their best behavior. Indeed, they seem to be striving to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions. The only thing missing is mustache twirling and an evil laugh.

And you know what? That behavior is demoralizing. But you knew I was going to say that.

Third, early vetting renders silly, trivial criticisms and micro-sandals stale by election day. This is highly related to the previous reason, but nevertheless separate. Communication is both sending and receiving: Fact-checking takes time, but the electorate needs time to digest corrective information as well. Perspective needs time to sink-in. Non-controversies are strongest when they are fresh and unfamiliar. They then fade when weighed against real issues and the big picture. Last minute fact-checking isn’t as effective as last minute slander. As the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Therefore, the truth needs to get out of bed sooner.

Getting this out of the way early is obviously the smart way to manage any imperfect blemishes. Postponing airing problem areas is obviously irresponsible. We should be proactive rather than reactive and a perpetual defensive crouch is not a good look. Especially not this early.

Suppressing information is a form of procrastination because eventually everything gets out – often shortly before Election Day. And hoping to postpone it past Election Day is not only dishonest, but strategically stupid. After all, how legislatively effective is a president going to be if he or she gets elected but enters office under a cloud of public distrust and resentment? Of course, centrists are not intent on passing any sort of progressive agenda, so I suppose that scenario is actually ideal for them.

The takeaway across all these reasons is that surprises are bad - hence why early vetting is vital and the sooner the better. But there is also a fourth important reason which I have already alluded to a few times: 

Democracy is good.

Criticism is the engine of politics and participatory democracy. Without it, nothing gets fixed. Almost nothing happens without immense public pressure. Yet centrists are temperamentally allergic to any criticism and agitation - both inside the party and out. Remember their bipartisanship fetish and their aversion to protesters making their conservative colleagues uncomfortable in restaurants. And both Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke boosted Republicans during the midterms, thereby undermining the Blue Wave.

Yes, primary-ing incumbents is a direct threat to the chummy establishment power, but they would still disapprove even if it weren't. Whether they are corrupt or not, they just don’t get democracy.

In my book, I write a lot about how conservatives are anti-democratic. Well, so are covert conservatives. Primaries are democratic safeguards. They are performance reviews by the party's rank and file just as general elections are ones by the general public. So, of course well-heeled Hamilton fans are going to oppose primary-ing establishment Democratic incumbents - especially when part and parcel of that process is unflattering intra-party criticism. It all ties together quite tightly.

Election Day is over a year and a half away. Air everything out now for maximum advantage. Revelations are inevitable: We cannot possibly prevent them.

But the longer we postpone them, the worse things will be.

Monstrous Moderates

It probably sounds like hyperbole to say that cartoonist Jules Feiffer nailed today’s insane politics back in the Johnson years, but he did. Across two pages of the collection Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan – 110 to 111 – he analyzed the twin specters of Trumpism and centrism while simultaneously teaching us how to read a respectable mainstream newspaper.

Obviously, Feiffer was not trying to be a soothsayer. He was trying to describe the underlying currents in the politics of his day. But the attitudes and rhetoric he portrayed are undeniably deep in the saddle today.

As I wrote before, Trumpism is just conservatism without apology or subtlety. To deny this is to studiously ignore not only the Tea Party (which I called “warmed-over Goldwaterism” in my book) but over a half century of the GOP’s cynically using Southern Strategy. Seriously, outside of Birtherism, the bulk of their conspiracy theories originate with the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. Their stupidity and bigotry have a long pedigree. You cannot omit this history and retain any credibility as an informed commentator.

Another facet that is impossible to credibly deny or ignore is the fact that the rhetoric of moderation has historically been the respectable face of reaction. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King professed his profound disappointment with white moderates, who he felt might be an even greater stumbling block to racial progress than the Klan.

Jules Feiffer also criticized the unreconstructed middle; but where King saw pampered ignorance, Feiffer also saw selfish malevolence. Of course, as a cartoonist, he has no incentive to pull punches.

The strip directly below shows the tone of establishment political opinion whatever the tactics of activists – nonviolent or otherwise. As you can see, each panel shows a newspaper cartoon clipping in which a Klansman shakes hands with a black protester and the caption “Thanks, partner.” Note that the protesters are labeled provocateurs whether they are violent or not. In fact, the March on Washington protesters are labeled “nonviolent provocation.”(1) This may explain why King found white moderates so frustrating.

Of course, moderate opposition to anything that upsets the apple cart or causes any sort of inconvenience or discomfort is predictable. Seeing concern trolling used to preserve the status quo is nothing new. As I wrote before, concern trolling is “the essence of centrism.”

In the very next strip, a reporter interviews an unnamed spokesman for the “Radical Middle.” That man-on-the-street blasts, “Too much spending on the poor, not enough spending on us!(2) Too much freedom for Negroes, not enough freedom for cops!” Again, this was during the Johnson years. Richard Nixon later called such voters “The Silent Majority.” Still later, they would be called “Reagan Democrats” (assuming they were actually Democrats to begin with). Each incarnation was frequently portrayed as “hardhats” to fit the familiar “hippie vs. hardhat” narrative, yet here in Jules Feiffer’s version the unofficial spokesman is clearly a businessman with his suit and briefcase. Funny about that.

In the next strip after that, Feiffer has another reporter interview another businessman in a suit. This one, a Mr. Whitey Backlash, is less thuggish and more polished. While the previous one is blunt, this one insists on discretion about his cynicism. He starts by saying, “Negroes are going too far with their protests.” But he does not want that quoted. Off the record, he cops to all sorts of awful thoughts. When finally asked for a quote they can print, he concern trolls, “For the record, Sonny, you may say that in my opinion extremist tactics are losing the Negroes their many moderate friends.” (emphasis original)

It echoes the second panel of the first strip I mentioned almost word-for-word. 

Both strips vividly illustrate how respectable opinion is routinely packaged. Both show concern trolling. But the first strip shows how quickly any activist tactic is maligned and the third strip teaches you how to read between the lines – how what is on the record relates to what is off of it. It's a decoder ring.

To those who swallow that horseshit known as Horseshoe Theory, the interviewees must seem completely incomprehensible. The first interviewee represents the “Radical Middle,” which must strike them as an oxymoron, but it actually fits perfectly. Trump is a textbook example of what political scientists call an “ideological moderate.” I learned this in a WaPo article entitled “Donald Trump is a textbook example of an ideological moderate.” The second interviewee, Mr. Whitey Backlash, says “On the record, you can even say I am for Democracy, Sonny.” This squares with a study that discovered that centrists are even less favorable towards democratic institutions like freedom of the press than conservatives are(3)

And, again, both are businessmen rather than hardhats. This shouldn't surprise anyone anymore.  In 2010, it was revealed that Tea Party supporters were not predominantly blue collar voters. Instead, they were the same suburban professionals that have always preferred the Republican Party. Therefore they were not voting against their economic interests. The same turns out to be true for Trump supporters. No shit: They are the same people. I guess betraying labor to make a play for their votes is a stupid gambit.

Again, none of this should surprise anyone because both businessmen are precisely the types of voters that New Democrats have always fruitlessly sought to woo – the type the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was founded to lure. I’d say there is a vast paper trail proving this, but it is more like a five-lane highway with overpasses and suspension bridges.  

The evidence is immense. Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment was not just a personal nadir: It was classic centrist strategy. To make extra certain that he would not get Willie Horton-ed, Clinton left the campaign trail to conspicuously attend the execution of a mentally impaired black man. Describing the original DLC in Listen Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, Thomas Frank wrote, “As the DLC saw it, whenever Democrats lost an election, it was because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities.” (pg. 57)

You cannot feign disbelief or shock at Jules Feiffer's prescient characterization after decades of centrist arguments courting this type. Mr. Whitey Backlash and the reactionary Radical Middle are all too real.

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1) In the very last panel, the black figure is hilariously labeled “Booker T. Washington fanatics.” This added another layer to the humor because, apart from the fact that Booker T. accommodated segregation (“as separate as the fingers on the hand”), he was active in the 1910s – suggesting that the cartoonist in the cartoon had held his post for over a half century and was still mired in the same mindset. I grew up with anachronistic comic strips that were founded in the 1920s, so it is interesting to see political cartoonists like Feiffer already skewering this in the 1960s. I always thought mocking such fossils started in the 1980s.

2) The spokesman's perception was grossly incorrect. As Stephanie Coontz pointed out in The Way We Never Were: American Families in the Nostalgia Trap:

It is important to note that the most dramatic growth in government social expenditures since the 1960s has been in social insurance programs such as worker’s compensation, disability, and Medicare. Most benefits from these programs go to members of the white middle class. Although the programs are very important for the poor they do reach, even at the height of the Great Society antipoverty initiative, between 1965 and 1971, 75 percent of America’s social welfare dollars were spent on the non-poor. The proportion going to the poor has decreased substantially since then. (pg. 79-80)

Coontz’s book was published in 1992 - just before Bill Clinton signed “Welfare Reform” into law. Today, “substantially” would be a titanic understatement.

3) Speaking of the horseshit known as Horseshoe Theory, the first "Thanks, Partner" strip suggests that moderates and the establishment saw Klansmen and black activists as equally bad or nearly so - two sides of the same coin, hence their shaking hands as allies. Centrists despise protest (however non-violent) because it is disruptive, inconvenient, and makes people uncomfortable. In every era, they are less mad at injustice than at the people pointing it out because the injustice did not directly affect them.