Beer Track, Wine Track, Get Me Off This Fucking Train
Yesterday, on Twitter, I tweeted a version of this claim:
Beto, Harris, Klobuchar, Biden, Gillibrand, Booker: The basis of their candidacies is ultimately them, their person. That’s what they all have in common.
Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates whose basis is a set of ideas, well worked out over the years, about the economy and the state.
The tweet was one part of a much longer Facebook post, in which I elaborated the point. Here’s a short excerpt from that post:
Among the many reasons that I have no time for the first set of candidates is that I’m so tired of these quintessentially American campaigns that are so wrapped up in the personality of the candidate, tied up in a bow of banalities—Biden as the white working class Joe! Harris as a woman of color who’s a prosecutor for the people! Beto as the white man on a horse! Klobuchar as the abusive boss (maybe she’s hoping to give Trump a run for his money)! Booker as the man of love—as opposed to mounting a comprehensive political argument about our world.
One of the things I’ve always found so strange about liberals and Democrats is how much they make fun of Ronald Reagan as an intellectual and political simpleton—when the slightest review of his speeches and writings (many of which he wrote himself) would show just how intense was this man’s worldview, how slowly and carefully he worked it out over the years and decades of his move to the right—while running to embrace candidates almost entirely for their charisma (or putative charisma; I’ve never understood how people could persuade themselves to fall in love with a John Kerry or a Biden or a Gillibrand) and life story.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: the last successful Democratic candidate who had an actual story to tell about American politics and the economy, about where we were and where we were going, was Bill Clinton. I hated that story, but it was an analysis. Even Obama, whose speeches I’ve been reading so closely, didn’t really have much of an analysis of American politics and the economy, despite his populist nods throughout the 2008 campaign.
Without the larger context of my Facebook post, however, some Twitter Democrats were angered by the initial tweet. And let me know in no uncertain terms.
So let me try to set out a broader account of what I’m getting at here.
I think some part of the pushback I got on Twitter (where people rushed to assure me that Beto or Booker or Gillibrand has a long list of serious policy proposals under their belt or on their website) reflects the larger parlous state of our political discourse and analysis. When it comes to presidential elections, people seem to have only two ideas of how it is that a candidate runs. I’m going to borrow from one of the more irritating usages from the 2008 Democratic primary and call it the beer track analysis and the wine track analysis.
The beer track analysis holds that politics and elections are above all about personality. Voters, in this theory, respond to some elusive notion of who the candidate is, is she like me, can I identify with her, is she likable? (As if Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter were likable. And if you’re thinking of Habitat for Humanity Jimmy, you need to go back to Christian scold-y Jimmy of the 1970s. He really wasn’t likable.) It’s basically the “Would I like to get a beer with this person” that we heard so much about during George W. Bush’s first presidential run in 2000.
Now the people who proffer this kind of analysis never think of themselves as being motivated by such jejune considerations. No, personality and likability are just how the rubes and masses respond to politics. It’s unfortunate, of course, but rubes are going to rube.
No, the people who proffer this analysis think that they’re interested in a different, more sophisticated, set of considerations. They’re part of the wine track, you see, and what they care about is that all-important, Ivy-League-credentialed, wonk-mystical and stat-esoteric concern called “policy.”
Got that? The beer track cares about personality, the wine track cares about policy.
Despite what I’m sure is a case of massive self-deception on their parts, the wine track folks really do believe that they, rational beings that they are, spend hours on end researching carefully all the policy planks and proposals of the various candidates. And that they only reach a determination of which candidate to choose based on their close reading of a meta-data study they found on J-STOR that confirms the viability of said candidate’s toolkit of policies.
These are the types of people who will tell you, after much careful study, and with no apparent sense of irony, “I really think that Klobuchar’s tax-advantaged savings account proposal is the sweet spot of this campaign: it’ll do more than anything for poverty alleviation but it’s got real electoral juice.” They’re the people who’ll tell you, when you say you don’t understand why candidate x is running, go to their website. And think they’ve done something in doing so.
What I think both accounts—the personality and the policy, the beer track and the wine track—miss is the role of ideology, of political argument, of collective story-telling.
Now just so I’m clear: When I say ideology and argument, I don’t mean a candidate needs to channel Rawls. I mean, does she have a story about the American polity, about how we’ve come to the impasse we’re in (Trump, rampant inequality, rampant incarceration, a party of unadulterated nativism and racism and misogyny, the 1%, non-existent unions, winnowing voting rights, growing strike waves, impending extinction of the planet, etc.), about who is responsible for it (not just a villainous Republican Party but also a larger political economy and set of social actors), and how we’re going to reverse and undo this development.
The great realigners had such a story. Read FDR’s Commonwealth Club speech. Read Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. What you take away from those speeches is not a list of policies but a narrative, an ideologically-laden narrative, of the last however many decades of American politics, and how those years need to be brought to an end. Above all, they locate a variety of social ills (in Lincoln’s case, not just slavery but also winnowing democracy, constitutional decline, and so on; in FDR’s case, the end of the frontier, the Depression, reaching the limits of capitalist expansion) in a socially malignant form: the slaveocracy, in Lincoln’s case, the economic royalists, in FDR’s case. Again, they didn’t give you a laundry list of issues (sexual harassment here, taxes there, voting rights over there); they wove the whole thing into a single story, a single theory, locating each part in a larger whole.
Some non-realigners also have such an analysis. I’m not a fan of these, but you could definitely say Bill Clinton had such a story, Richard Nixon had such a story. And I would say that Obama had such a story in his speech on Jeremiah Wright.
So to bring this back to my original post: I don’t doubt that all of the candidates in the Democratic primary have their itemized list of policy proposals (many of them, of course, responses to Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the subsequent take-off of AOC and other Democratic Party politicians), as a lot of their supporters on Twitter rushed to point out to me. But policy is not ideology; a list of issues is not a political analysis or argument; a website is not a story. I don’t hear from most of them what I’m talking about here. So I stand by what I said: only Warren and Sanders have the kind of analysis I’m talking about, the kind of analysis that can mobilize voters to do what must be done.
Now it is possible, as my friend Alex Gourevitch pointed out to me in an email, that a candidate like Harris has a story. We saw a version of that story in a couple of the speeches she’s given over the last decade in which we she celebrated her work in prosecuting the parents of truant schoolchildren. As near as I can tell, these are, to date, her most elaborated narrative of how she thinks about the state and society. They’re clear, coherent, and tell you exactly how she thinks about the world—where the problems lie, where the solutions lie—and what policies go with it.
The problem, of course, with that narrative is that it is now in bad odor. It may express the truest version of what Harris thinks, but carceral capitalism is not a winning platform, the way it was under Bill Clinton. This isn’t Harris’s fault; like a lot of other candidates of her generation, she came up as a politician under the hegemony of the Clinton New Democrats. They had developed a once-in-a-generation political story or analysis, and now that story/analysis is not acceptable. Hillary Clinton found herself in a similar boat. So Harris can’t run on the one story we have some reason to believe she really believes. So she’s got to get another one, or failing that, a laundry list of platform items, or failing that, a compelling story about herself.
But that’s the thing about stories and ideologies and analysis: unlike Medicare for All, or some other issue you’re willing to support (at least rhetorically) because it polls well or because Bernie has shifted the discourse, an ideology or analysis is not something you come by over night.
Lincoln, Reagan (I’m less certain about FDR on this, I’ll confess) worked their way over the years to what they said. We mistake that point for authenticity; I don’t think that’s the significance here. What I’m talking about is not the authenticity of a candidate’s positions, how anciently or recently she’s adopted those positions (FDR’s, of course, changed radically over the course of his first and second term) but the credibility and depth of their analysis. Voters will forgive all sorts of adaptations and policy revisions; they find it harder to accept the idea that yesterday you thought this—where this is not support or opposition to a healthcare policy, but something more fundamental about the relationship between states and markets and society—and today you think that.
Developing a story or analysis or ideology takes time; it’s not something you crib and adapt in response to polls. It doesn’t mean a candidate needs to be as ancient as Sanders (Bill Clinton, of course, was quite young, but he nevertheless had a whole analysis of the problem). But it does mean that her political voice has to have some sense of continuity, and if she’s changed her positions or policy (as Reagan did, as Warren has), that she has a credible story about how she came to that new position.