Ross Goes Bannon

Via Medium.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, deeply concerned about the Democrats, as always, and showing some weird sentimental attachment to Bernie Sanders and the politics of class struggle ("The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders"):

Three months ago, Bernie Sanders lost his chance at the Democratic nomination, after a brief moment in which his socialist revolution seemed poised to raze the bastions of neoliberal power. But the developments of the last month, the George Floyd protests and their cultural repercussions, may prove the more significant defeat for the Sanders cause. In the winter he merely lost a presidential nomination; in the summer he may be losing the battle for the future of the left.

It's the usual story of the Democrats abandoning the "working class" and economic issues in favor of "elites" with their "social" concerns, except Douthat's refusal to believe that the working class has any black and brown people in it, or women, for whom racism and sexism are in fact serious economic issues, is getting really deafening at the moment:

If identity politics exists it's probably not that bad. Explain your disagreement in detail.

Via Boston Review.

In Saturday's post-mortem on the Bernie Sanders campaign, contemplating the idea of the Sanders strategy for winning as a kind of bona fide and sort-of-Marxian theory (that certain classes of oppressed voters will respond to a certain kind of economic analysis of their situation and this is the way to get them to vote in greater numbers than they normally do) that has now been definitively shown to be false, I found myself wandering into some very big topics without adequate preparation, perhaps, and saying some things that maybe sounded more adventurous, or horrifying, than they actually were, and because I'd like to keep using these thoughts, I thought I'd spend some time pulling back to couch them in a more traditional political-science discourse.

Excruciatingly traditional, in fact, with the help of the trusty old Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and beginning with old Aristotle, who named the subject, πολιτικη επιστημη, politikē epistēmē, the science of things related to the polis, city stuff, by analogy with (say) physics, φυσικη επιστημη, physikē epistēmē, the science of material bodies, and so forth.

Politics

The idea of "politics" has a bad reputation, going back a ways, used, as Jordan was saying in the comments,

How Socialists Vote

As you know I've had my issues with Senator Bernard Sanders over the years, but his guest star appearance on Twitter TV this afternoon made me feel all kinds of warm.

I think I've talked about my dear dead communist friend Wayne in this space before, and tried to explain what he taught me about being a socialist, but I can't remember exactly how I did it. This time I'd like to put in in a way I just thought of, that it involves perpetually thinking on two distinct levels: one about what a truly just society would look like, and the other about what you're going to do right now, at whatever moment in the history of capitalism you happen to be located in. For example, when it's time to vote.

When it came to voting, and door-to-door canvasing, Wayne was a Democrat, with a preference for "reform", but a nostalgia for city bosses, because, as he said, everybody in Richard J.Daley's Chicago could get a good city job. He wouldn't talk about the "lesser of two evils" but rather about the marginal good. He'd frame the question in terms of whether your candidate might do any good at all, for working and poor people.

That's what I saw Bernie doing today with Joe, in their different Covid-world stay-home screens. I'm sad that these guys don't have more room for women in their mental world, but I'm still glad they're friends, and are able to attend to and show some appreciation of their differences. I found it endearing that the thing was scripted kind of like an amateur radio interview, with the awkward asking-each-other-questions format that ensured they'd get in the essential things but made sure it wasn't going to be smooth in production values.

But mainly I saw Bernie judging that Joe was going to try to take an opportunity to make life better for working and poor people in our country, and could use some help (and pushing, obviously), and it would definitely be on the marginally good side, starting, obviously, with getting rid of the dreadful ascendancy of the Trump Republicans but going well beyond that, and he's going to vote—and campaign—like a socialist.

Note on ideology

A little outdoor Joe.

I like this insightful piece by Zack Beauchamp/Vox, though at first sight it's just validating something I've been trying to say for years:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s theory of victory was simple: An unapologetically socialist politics centering Medicare-for-all and welfare state expansions would unite the working class and turn out young people at unprecedented rates, creating a multiracial, multigenerational coalition that could lead Sanders to the Democratic nomination and the White House.

“When we bring millions of working people, people of color and young people in the political process, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders wrote in a February 2 Facebook post....

In the end, this approach failed. It was former Vice President Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders, who assembled a multiracial working-class coalition in key states like Michigan — where Biden won every single county, regardless of income levels or racial demographics. Sanders had strong support among younger voters, but they did not turn out in overwhelming numbers. In at least some key states, they made up smaller portion of the primary electorate than in 2016.

But where I'd just have said Sanders was misled by his fear of alienating the "white working class" into putting economic issues up in front of race and gender, and ended up courting a working class that didn't exist, Beauchamp brings out some other thoughts that might lead to some more positively helpful conclusions, starting with bringing Marx into it:

For the Record: A note on passion and politics

Captain Picard in genuine fake bronze, $74.87 from Amazon. 

I'm a passionate Democrat and believer in democracy. I don't believe in personality cults and Great Men but in broad political movements. There are reasons the party majority is choosing this guy I haven't been crazy about and I'm starting to understand them. It's a good choice.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 2, 2020

That godlike charisma thing that John Kennedy and Barack Obama had is a valuable thing in electoral politics, and of particular interest to the young male voter (the same population sector that lets itself get recruited into war fighting), and apparently Senator Bernard Sanders has some of that too, though it's hard for me to see, since I've been around people like him all my life, as I've pointed out before, but it has its limits, especially, in the American system, in the way it doesn't carry over into those midterm elections like 2010 and 2014, if only because the young male voter really can't be counted on to remember to vote. And it's not the only effective way of rousing politically effective emotion.

Biden has that ability to convey the impression that, as James Clyburn said, "He knows us," or he really does know us, as the case may be. Either way, he worked it brilliantly in two presidential elections as Obama's deputy, and he seems to have been working it pretty well in this year's primaries up until the appearance of the plague brought it all to a kind of standstill where we feel too shaken to understand what's going on.

Horse race stuff

First horse race in North America, New York 1655, painted sometime in the 1960s by Frederick Elmiger, via George Glazer Galleries.

As the Big Tuesday results started flowing in last night, a thing that happened earlier was starting to take on some iconic experience for me: the pearl clutching when candidate Joe Biden visiting a Detroit auto plant has a run-in with a misinformed young gun nut and tells him he's "full of shit":

It’s almost like liberals hate the working class.

— Heshmat Alavi is a Cop (@Punkrawkpersian) March 10, 2020

It's almost like Berners have never met anybody from the working class in real life, or possibly never met anybody at all. The idea of Joe Biden being some kind of lordly figure unable to repress his contempt for the simple (white) working stiff will not work.

You know to what kind of person you can always say, "You're full of shit"? Your brother.

Republicans in Democrats' Clothing?

Henry A. Wallace. Photo by D.N. Townsend, 1940, via Wikipedia. 

Harry Truman: “Given a choice between a Republican & a Democrat who acts like a Republican; the voters will pick the Republican every time.”

Moderates are convinced that we have to compromise our progressive values to win.

They’re wrong.

We have to fight for our values to win.

— Ryan Knight 🌹 (@ProudResister) March 8, 2020

Like everybody else around here, I've heard that quote dozens of times and possibly used it myself, but this started me off wondering what Democrats Truman might have been talking about, and whether it was a genuine quote at all, a question Dr. Google doesn't seem to have heard recently, but it turned out to be not too hard to find the source, an address Truman gave at a dinner of the Americans for Democratic Action, 17 May 1952:

Angry and Putrid

Satan in Council, from Gustave Doré's illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, via Wikiart. Jeet Heer, a wonderfully gifted writer who's getting unrecognizably performative in the course of the campaign, or the Nation's editors, chose the image to represent the Democratic Establishment conspiring to stop Sanders, but I'm not taking that seriously.

David Brooks  seems truly elated at the Biden ascendancy, and at the same time kind of apocalyptic ("Biden Gives the Establishment One Last Chance")—on the one hand suggesting the gods have finally blessed him with that Democrat he's going to be able to vote for

The angry and putrid shouting that has marked the last four years — and that would mark a Trump vs. Sanders campaign — might actually come to an end. Suddenly we got a glimpse of a world in which we can hear each other talk, in which actual governance can happen, in which gridlock can be avoided and actual change can come.

(though I'm not quite seeing how the presence of Biden on the stage will stop Trump from being "angry and putrid" during the campaign—Biden seems to goad him into his absolute worst behavior, as we've seen through the work of the Giuliani Irregulars and the impeachment) but on the other hand more fearful than before of some kind of revolutionary turmoil:

Performativity

Biden's elevator pitch in the New York Times building. 

Last week, the black news website The Root published a kind of magisterial overview of every remaining Democratic presidential candidate's "black agenda", based on a survey of policy, legal, and journalists experts, all of them black, and looking at a list of ten criteria (economics, criminal justice, education, voting right issues, comprehensiveness, blind spots, feasibility, candidate's history, candidate's intentionality, and programs' impact) and ranking all eight (including Tom Steyer, who dropped out last night) on a 100-point scoring system.

It's clarified some things that have been tormenting me for a while in a way that extends beyond the black agenda to the whole campaign, alongside yesterday's results in South Carolina, and might clarify for you some of the discomfort I've been having with the traditional left-right axis and its application in the current situation (and uses some terminology I've been using, which is gratifying, because that means I'm using it right). It's also entertainingly written, by Michael Harriot, and designed for suspense, so—spoiler alert—you might like to go read it before you look below the fold here.

David Brooks Joins Cancel Culture

Ilya Salavskiy, right, at a protest action in Oxford, May 2016. Euromaidan Press.

David Brooks ("No, Not Sanders, Not Ever"):

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years.

Actually, no. As Brussels-based deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1990 to 1994, Brooks got his byline on exactly four articles mentioning the Soviet Union, suggesting two visits to Moscow (and none after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991):

• A puff piece ("It's too late for a party congress", 2 July 1990) extolling Ilya Saslavskiy, a Ukrainian Oxford graduate and member of the National People's Congress, calling him a "combative intellectual" and "New Soviet Man" representing the "real action" in the Communist Party. Saslavskiy became an American and was working for BP's Russian operations when he and his brother Oleksandr were arrested for spying on behalf of the US and Ukraine in 2008—not because they were actually spies, but because Putin found it useful in his campaign to turn BP into Rosneft. I'm glad to report the brothers (who were sentenced to two years probation) seem to be OK, see photo at top. The Soviet Union, of course, had no future.
• A review ("The Soviet Reality: Murder, Apathy, Dishonesty", 17 July 1990) of Stanislav Govorukhin's 1990 documentary We Can't Live Like This which, Brooks notes, was applauded by the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
• A lengthy opinion piece ("In USSR, possession is better than the law", 16 May 1991) illustrating the collapse of rule of law with the case of an astrophysicist, "Maxim Hlobov", who succeeded in stopping the KGB from stealing his new apartment. He got the name wrong (should be Khlopov—he's in France now, working in the Astroparticles and Cosmology Laboratory of the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique de Particules). 
• A travel piece ("An American in Moscow: Hard-currency god", 21 May 1991).

Handicap

Via League of Legends.

The family dined in Chinatown last night, standing by our conviction that we're no more likely to catch Covid-19 (or Trump Flu, as Misfit, via Ten Bears, via Bethesda71 is calling it) there than anywhere else in town (for the moment—we are not adopting President Chucklehead's position that there's nothing wrong, or that the virus is just a CNN trick to make him look bad), and I had the opportunity to miss the entire debate—didn't even look at my phone until we were on the way home, and I'm pretty happy about that. Judging from the clips it was awful, though I'm glad in principle that Elizabeth Warren said the things she said about Michael Bloomberg, whom I continue to consider to be a danger to the country, and about Bernard Sanders, in terms I'd like to have used myself:

“Bernie and I agree on a lot of things, but I think that I would make a better president than Bernie. And the reason for that is that getting a progressive agenda enacted is going to be really hard, and it's gonna take someone who digs into the details to make it happen,” Warren said. “Bernie and I both wanted to help rein in Wall Street. In 2008 we both got our chance, but I dug in, I fought the big banks, I built the coalitions and I won. Bernie and I both want to see universal health care. But Bernie's plan doesn't show how we're gonna get there, doesn't show how we're going to get enough allies into it, and doesn't show enough about how we're going to pay for it. I dug in, I did the work, and then Bernie's team trashed me for it.”

As I mentioned in my angry note of 17 February.

I have the funniest feeling at the moment of really seriously not knowing what's going on in this election at all, and of nobody really knowing. Some of the less obnoxious class of Berners on my Twitter feed were going on about what Bernie would do if Bloomberg were to win the nomination (of which fivethirtyeight estimates the chances at about 4%), betray his following by keeping his promise to support the nominee, or split off and lead the Revolution on some kind of outside, you couldn't tell whether in an independent candidacy or a mass people power movement or what, and everything about this scenario seemed so implausible to me that I stopped reading, but I didn't have a more probable one myself.

For the Record: Is Sanders a Russian tool?

Do Popes shit in the woods? More relevantly still, is the Bear Catholic?

Via.

Whether Sanders ends up being the nominee or not, if you don't like him it would be better not to dislike him on the basis of fake news: I was really annoyed by this:

That's not quite honest. The 2017 measure was a Republican bill including a poison pill meant to sink the Iran deal. pic.twitter.com/ItYsCA8Rrk

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

In 2014 Sanders supported Obama's executive action to sanction Russia over Ukraine. Rightwing noise machine spread the idea that he didn't https://t.co/KDxG3E1zAU

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

By all means oppose Sanders if you want--he's not my candidate either--but not with falsehood and rightwing propaganda.

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

Update 3/1/2020: Wrong on that last item: Sanders and Whitehouse both voted against the second bill implementing Magnitsky sanctions as well.https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=2&vote=00223

What brought it on, obviously, is the Washington Post story on Russian efforts to "help" Sanders, of which he was apparently informed by national security officials a month or so ago. I don't see why anybody should be surprised to hear about these Russian efforts, by the way—they did the same thing in 2016, for the same reason, to foment quarrels and disaffection in the Democratic party and eventually as part of their strategy to boost Trump, not out of any desire for a Sanders presidency, as old Boot noted in the original tweet up there, and it's not a secret:

Tragic: The Gathering

Via Viz.

Sanders opponents can take heart: David Brooks thinks he's going to win ("Why Sanders Will Probably Win the Nomination"):

My takeaway from Wednesday’s hellaciously entertaining Democratic debate is that Sanders is the only candidate telling a successful myth. Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar all make good arguments, but they haven’t organized their worldview into a simple compelling myth. You may look at them, but you don’t see the world through their eyes.

He's partly right here: Sanders really does do something the other candidates haven't been doing very well (Biden has shown a lot of skill at it in the past, but somehow never as a presidential candidate, only when he was running, brilliantly, for vice president). It goes beyond Brooks's somewhat limited concept of what a myth is—

Now they tell us

Premature anti-fascists, via The Typescript.

Not sorry to see they're aware of the magic wand problem, but kind of annoyed that they let Elizabeth Warren take all the heat for acknowledging it first, then start admitting it weeks later.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 18, 2020

In fact downright pissed off, as I start to think about it, given that the heat was coming primarily from them, and has gone on for the whole three months since 15 November, when Warren finally explained, after tons of pressure to which the Sanders camp was never subjected, that her method for achieving Medicare For All was going to take some time to implement,

beginning with passing a bill at the start of her presidency that would create a new government health plan that would cover children and people with lower incomes for free, while allowing others to join the plan if they choose. It’s a particularly expansive version of a public option.

Only later, in her third year in the White House, does Warren say she would pursue Medicare-for-all legislation that would actually prohibit private health insurance, as would be required for the single-payer program that she says she, like Bernie Sanders, wants.

Which I loved, of course, as evidence that she really did have a plan for that, that she meant to achieve it, not just represent it, like a totem animal, as a branding element, the way the other guys did, with Sanders's preposterous assertion that all it would take to pass the bill would be staging rallies in Kentucky, and the total absence of ideas on how the nation would transition into the new system. Not only did Warren chart a timetable for getting to the single-payer ideal, she had staged it in such a way as to ensure that even if she failed at any given point, the nation would still be better off in terms of healthcare accessibility than it had been at the time of her inauguration.

But not everybody loved it. Like Krystal Ball, writing for The Hill:

Horse race stuff

Caucus race, by John Tenniel. No allegorical interpretations of who Alice and the Dodo respectively represent, if you don't mind. Via Wikipedia.

Molly Jong-Fast at Washington Post has what looks initially like a hot take on the miseries of the current Democratic presidential nomination contest: that it's all Biden's fault for screwing up his assigned role.

After a fourth-place finish in Iowa and a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, it’s time to take a good, hard look at former vice president Joe Biden, the once-dominant, now-floundering Democratic “front-runner.” Not to get too technical about it, but I would like to postulate that the Democratic front-runner should be, you know, in front....

With all respect—she's a very sharp writer—I think she's misplacing the blame, if blame is due, in not asking who appointed Joe; who failed to give him that good hard look ten months or so ago, when he obtained that front-runner label though he'd been running unsuccessfully for president for OVER THIRTY YEARS and had a history of alienating the very voters he was going to have to depend on the most, from backing agitators against school busing to patronizing Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" (although this seemed to have greatly improved starting in late 2008).

Big Structural Change in Small Packags

Via.

Ezra Klein ("Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and America's politics of epiphany") usefully points out something that may come as a bit of a downer: no Democratic presidential candidate is going to be able to carry through much of their program, and it's perfectly possible they won't be able to carry through any at all. Biden expecting "an epiphany among many of my Republican friends" is every bit as delusional as Sanders with his project of recruiting the masses to do it, the way Woodrow Wilson forced Republican senators to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League of Nations:

“You go to Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, which is a state where a lot of people are struggling, and you say to those people, ‘Okay, this is my proposal,’” Sanders replied. “We’re going to lower the age of Medicare from 65 to 55, and we’re expanding it to cover, as I mentioned, dental care and home health care and eyeglasses and hearing aids.

“What percentage of the people do you think in Kentucky would support that proposal? My guess is 70 percent, 80 percent of the people. And my job then as president is to rally those people and tell their senators to support it. I think we can do that.”

For the Record: Debate

Via The Log Cabin Sage, who retails a great story from the 1858 Senate campaign of how Douglas snidely noted that Lincoln had managed a grocery store in the course of his career, and showed himself to be "a very good bartender". Lincoln came back to it in his response: “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and I did sell cotton, candles, and cigars, and sometimes whiskey; but I remember in those days, Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side; but the difference between us now is this: I have left my side of the counter, but Mr. Douglas still sticks to his as tenaciously as ever.”

Touché, gentlemen.

Candidate Yang made a couple of really annoying historical errors, when he suggested that folks in the ancient times when they used to debate socialism and capitalism never anticipated how economies would be transformed by automation

https://t.co/dY8d7cU1h2 pic.twitter.com/uZq9kDFokI

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

and claimed the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his silly "universal basic income" program

Dear Andrew Yang, Dr. King's MINIMUM guaranteed income pegged to the median wage was a very different animal from your $1000 universal handout, a lovely present for somebody like me but not close to a living income for those who need it.

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

Other than that, the candidates were on their best behavior, and I was impressed:

A little depressed

I'm calling BS on the authenticity of #NeverWarren.

Go ahead and search it. I haven't seen any *real* prominent progressive accounts pushing it. It started taking off between 5:00 am and 7:00 am EST when all of you MFs were sleeping.

Have we really learned nothing from 2016? pic.twitter.com/VnSMvB36Qx

— Devin Nunes' Alt-Mom (@NunesAlt) January 15, 2020

This is for the fam here, and stuff I'd rather not be talking about at the moment, but it's weighing on me too much.

It looks to me, for starters, like Biden won the last debate and will get the nomination. Or, if you prefer, like Sanders won it for him, with the dramatic murder-suicide of Warren's and his own campaign, when he made her angry enough to break the pact that had helped them create a kind of left coalition that had a kind of a chance.

That is, they'll try to repair it, perhaps, but I don't think it will work; as in 2016, when Sanders's officially expressed support for Hillary Clinton came too late to have an effect on his enraged and WikiLeaks-propagandized young stans in crucial places like Detroit and Milwaukee and Madison and they decided not to vote (reporting has clarified that few Sanders supporters voted for Trump or fringe candidates, but as ever it mostly fails to consider nonvoters, who obviously don't show up in exit polls). Sanders may well win in Iowa (caucus state) or even, less likely, New Hampshire, but he never had a chance of getting the nomination (though as I've said he could win the election if he did somehow get nominated), and Warren (who I think, disclosure, would make a much better president than Sanders and a somewhat better candidate) won't be able to win it in the toxic atmosphere the stans are busy creating in the debate's aftermath. It was already pretty terrible in recent weeks, and this has made it a lot worse.

Yes, I'm sorry to say I think he's been lying. That is:

Yes, Bernie can win. And he's not the only one.

Annette Nancarrow, portrait of a young Mexican girl and mirror, no date, via Rosemary Carstens.

Who is Mr. Bret Stephens warning, or threatening ("Of Course Bernie Can Win"), as the case may be?

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

Is he talking to readers? Is he talking to his colleagues in the panditry? The general problem of confusing your desire with your forecast—you could call it the Bill Kristol problem,  because he's the one who made it the cornerstone of his thinking—is mostly more widespread among readers, I think, while typical pandits are more interested in realizing interesting or contrarian "takes" that they don't necessarily believe at all, like this one, which is interesting because the Very Serious People are united in believing Sanders is unelectable.

Is he talking to the staid conservative readers in The Times's audience, trying to spread panic so early in the season, and for what? What does he expect them to do about it? Register as Democrats and work for Biden or Bloomberg to nip the nightmare in the bud?

He's arguing against those who say that Sanders is doomed because he can't get enough votes:

Hi it's Stupid: Britain

Hi, it's Stupid to say the Conservative Party didn't win its election because the Labour Party was too far left, or because the Labour Party was anti-Semitic, but rather because everybody hates Jeremy Corbyn. He's just not likable.

As in Hillary Clinton was, as Obama put it, "likable enough", if just barely (the press could never tolerate her, perhaps because she couldn't hide her low expectations of them, but ordinary people mostly could, if they had a chance to judge for themselves), and he isn't.

This is why there are so many Brits who are willing to believe he's an anti-Semite: they're working under the assumption that anybody they know who's an anti-Semite is probably a pretty unpleasant person, not like that dotty prime minister Johnson, who looks like the Earl of Emsworth thinking of nothing but his prize fat pig, and who is self-evidently a jolly good fellow if not entirely reliable. They wouldn't lend Boris Johnson £50, and they're not crazy about having him for prime minister, but they can't imagine he'd be anything so reviled as an anti-Semite. Unpossible!

Boris Johnson has invoked some of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic stereotypes in a book he wrote when he was a Conservative shadow minister. He describes “Jewish oligarchs” who run the media, and fiddle the figures to fix elections in their favour.