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.

28 Comments

  1. gracchibros February 10, 2019 at 3:04 pm | #

    Just before I found this, I had emailed some friends backing off my preference, which is for the all New England abolitionist reminding ticket (by temperment at least) of a Sanders-Warren team. I’ve been a Sanders backer wondering if he has the same power as expressed in the famous Iowa commercial with the Simon and Garfunkel sound track. In terms of grasp our situation, economic and ecological, the rise of Green New Deal, they are the policy team. But Sanders is losing polling power, Warren has high dislikes, and I don’t think the constituencies I see as making up the Democratic Party would stand for an all New England all white ticket. Van Jones would have to be scraped off the ceiling. The Dreamers would say what about us, despite Warren’s compelling setting and citing of the 50 ethnic groups making up the Lawrence textile strike, and its hoped for resonance with the AFL-CIO – if they have any resonance resilience left (I’m so tired of that second R word which has so often meant adopting to the deterioration that the Bidens of the world haven’t done anything about.)

    I could also make the argument for this Sanders -Warren team, aside from the good insights of Corey here, that it is the answer to Steve Bannon and Trump’s prayer that the Dems go cultural-racial rather than economic and ecological ( and despite liking the Green New Deal very much, that fourteen page resolution doesn’t read like, in “flow,” a Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine document. It’s all there, except a CCC, Second Bill of Rights by name, and the words fossil fuel industry which was there in the draft language for the standing committee.)

    To put it modestly, this is a very fluid situation. I’m for a Green New Deal and waiting for the eloquence to match the breadth of the ideas and the good ideological history behind it. I must add that AOC has what can’t be taught, as Bannon has noted, charisma, on her feet or in her seat, and if you watched her five minute quiz game in her new committee role – on money and corruption – this is the genuine expression of charisma. But she’s to young for the national ticket.

  2. Dan Sisken February 10, 2019 at 3:04 pm | #

    (Coming via Twitter) I like this. If you haven’t read it yet, check out George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage in which he says that a story can only be replaced by another story. Trump has a story. To truly defeat Trumpism, that story needs to be replaced by another compelling story (although he may still be defeated in 2020). Hence your analysis of Warren and Sanders.

  3. Jason Stahl February 10, 2019 at 3:09 pm | #

    Good post. Wondering where you’d place Sherrod Brown in this analysis?

  4. mmcl February 10, 2019 at 3:27 pm | #

    Spot on. Policy proposal doesn’t equal political analysis, especially when it is couched in terms of “love trumps hate” or I believe in “universal love.” Cast the wonks and bean-counters aside. They have killed deliberative politics.

    I think Sherrod Brown belongs on the Sanders and Warren track as well. I also thought it interesting that Harris’ first economic proposal is a tax cut–she is still using Reagan language to forward a working class agenda. Apparently, she (and others) is the last to get the memo that the Reagan party system is dying

    • jonnybutter February 10, 2019 at 4:07 pm | #

      Brown was clueless enough to come out frankly against Medicare for all. He is more identifiably on the left than (I think obvious) opportunists like Booker, Harris, and Gillibrand, but he has a trapped-in-amber quality…

  5. gracchibros February 10, 2019 at 4:53 pm | #

    Hey jonnybutter, from Naked Capitalism postings, how are you? Your Sherrod Brown comment “encapsulated” him perfectly.

    I took a deep dive into an enormous policy document, like the Encyl. Britannica of left economic policy that his staff did a few years back when when we were all wondering how Trump happened. I’m sorry, but the Green New Deal and AOC are leaving him in the dust, and Warren’s speech too.

    He may be solid and sincere, but he is falling behind in both the depth and intensity factors. I just don’t see him rising to the occasion demanded by these times, “In These Times,” forgive me.

  6. jonnybutter February 10, 2019 at 5:45 pm | #

    Hi gracchibros, you probably know me from here.

    Sherrod Brown is always an incipient liberal savior like Brazil is (was?) always The Future. Keyword is ‘always’! He has a whiff of ‘Bobby’ fetishism too (not as much as Beto but still).

    He’s been around for a long time with his scruffy gruff cracker barrel-whatever it’s supposed to be-appeal. Nothing ever happens. eh. Coming out against M4A is weird. Maybe in true Ohio political genius fashion he zigs while others zag.

  7. Chris Morlock February 10, 2019 at 6:13 pm | #

    I find it disturbing that this conversation had no mention at all of one of the most progressive candidates that has been crafting a purposeful and extremely sharp foreign policy backed by a compelling personal narrative: Tulsi Gabbard. The smears came from both the right and the left recently, despite a strong showing of support from many progressive news sources. The smears were quickly debunked but continue to fester in neo-liberal circles.

    Her anti-interventionist policy is both new and further to the left than Bernie, who has essentially went with many establishment policies on Venezuela, Syria, etc. Gabbard has lead with a strong, clear headed, and practical advocacy. She exists as the ONLY dem candidate that supported Bernie in the 2016 election at great personal cost, and is endorsed by Our Revolution and has solid legislative record. She is also a woman and person of color.

    Yet she is always out of the conversation. The best combination I can see is a Sanders and Gabbard ticket, one in which she also plays wingman in the primaries (to help control the super delegates and the new Dem rules) that gives Bernie (the FDR man) a focus on domestic policy and Gabbard as the leader on foreign policy.

    Warren is a distant third for me, and the bad blood between her and Bernie continues. Warren herself is worthy of consideration, but her constant politicking and her “story” about being working class and struggling has been unfortunately overshadowed by bad choices in ID politics. I foresee enough people rejecting her as a “inter-sectional identitarian” to make the fight against Trump unwinnable.

  8. jonnybutter February 10, 2019 at 6:34 pm | #

    No go on Gabbard. She’s islamophobic and much more militaristic that your post credits. She also was a professional homophobic person as per her father and family’s Hindu-ish..cult or whatever it is. But anti-Islam zealotry is the most obvious deal breaker, particularly in view of her friendliness with the odious Modi (say THAT three times fast). Her islamophobia is no worse than weird cultish Christians’, but why would we want either?

    • Chris Morlock February 10, 2019 at 7:12 pm | #

      I think this is just more of the same smearing. Firstly, please read or look at Glen Greenwald’s assessment of Gabbard. She has a 100% approval rating from the Human Right Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy in the world. She published an apology video detailing her involvement (at age 19) with her father organization.

      The “Islamophobic” allegation is particularly difficult to address since it doesn’t seem to exist. It’s part of her involvement in Modi’s political circles, which she has drastically cut down over the last three years. People confused her support and involvement with Hindu groups in general with a specific interest in Hindu nationalism. This is a bizarre connection and in and of itself worthy of some skepticism as racism because most journalists who painted this picture failed to make a distinction between any Hindu groups.

      Again, this is a candidate endorsed by Sanders and Our Revolution. She also will play a crucial role in the primaries to help prevent a repeat of what happened in 2016.

      • willibro February 10, 2019 at 9:20 pm | #

        Nothing bizarre about the Islamaphobia smear. There are no Hindu political groups, here or in India, without some strain of Islamaphobia: virulent, dormant, or sub rosa. If you know of one with a core tenet that involves active repudiation of Islamaphobia, pray correct me; I’ll be quite surprised. But much like politically active US Christians and sexism, it seems to go with the territory. So it’s an easy, obvious smear to use in trying to separate Gabbard from progressives. Only question is if Gabbard actually shares that attitude, and I’m willing to reserve judgement on that till I see some active moves in that direction. So far, I’ve seen just the opposite from her. I’m worried about her military background, actually.

        But all beside the core point Robin makes about ideology, story and analysis. “A story” by itself is meaningless; so are sincerity and “authenticity” (whatever TF that means today). Does the story embody an analysis? Is the analysis rooted in an ideology? Are all three coherent, credible and compelling to get you to vote for the storyteller? I’m honestly not hearing it yet, from anyone except Sanders. And he’s too antique.

    • Steve Smith February 10, 2019 at 9:58 pm | #

      Right-o on Tulsi. Yeah, she recently repudiated her anti-gay past. Wake me up when he repudiates the RSS.

      Oh, and per Corey? Warren’s got one foot with the rest of the crowd. I wouldn’t lump her with Sanders.

      This is speaking from outside the duopoly tent.

      • SpaceMtn February 11, 2019 at 5:08 pm | #

        Time to wake up from your slumber I suppose. Tulsi stepped down as Chairman for the World Hindu Congress 2018, after it was announced that RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat was a keynote speaker. Moreover I’ll include an excerpt from an interview with Gabbard had which brought up this RSS sympathizer issue —

        QZ: A report in The Telegraph, an Indian newspaper, referred to you as the mascot for the right-wing RSS in India. How do you respond to that? Do you think that is true and would you like to be associated with the RSS?
        TG: Both in India and here in the US, I have held meetings with members of both the BJP and the Congress Party. As a member of the US Congress, my interest is in helping produce a closer relationship between the United States and India, not just between the United States and one political party of India.
        I have no affiliation with the RSS. Sometimes people on both sides, for their own purposes, try to say I somehow favor, or am part, of the BJP or take photos of me at Indian events and circulate them for their own promotional reasons. But the fact is, I’m not partial to BJP, the Congress Party, or any other particular political party in India.”

  9. jonnybutter February 10, 2019 at 7:50 pm | #

    I think your post speaks for itself Chris. People can read the public record and make up their own minds.

    She certainly is an interesting character. If we lived in a novel (or a better novel, depending on your outlook) that would be something else.

    • jonnybutter February 11, 2019 at 9:49 am | #

      Just one more on Gabbard: something in her favor (in the context of the OP) is that she seems both aware of the phenomenon Corey is talking about, and capable also of developing a story. I would definitely not support her, but she is a more gifted politician than many of her higher profile rivals. She is all the more scary for that talent, IMO.

      • Donald February 11, 2019 at 5:32 pm | #

        I don’t know what to make of Gabbard because I haven’t read enough about her in detail to make up my mind about the validity of the attacks on her.

        I very much like her current stances. No idea if she can be trusted, but I understand her antiwar appeal. Taking her at face value , she is the very best of the pack when it comes to anti interventionism.

  10. Phil February 11, 2019 at 5:29 am | #

    As an observer from elsewhere, I’ve got nothing to say about specific candidates; by a fortunate coincidence, I also think it’s more useful to look at the broad lines of Corey’s argument. So, there are three sets of oppositions: realigners vs non-realigners first, with the understanding that what we need right now is quite definitely a realigner; then beer vs wine, personality vs policies, Joe Sixpack vs pencil-necked urban sophisticate, “cutting through” vs “adding up”, etc. This approach to politics isn’t new at all – in fact it’s so old, it began as an approach to religion: the idea of there being two forms of Catholicism is a very old trope (one consisting of straightforward answers for the ordinary believer, and one with the questions left in for the priesthood’s own use).

    What is new-ish is the idea that what you’re selling to the crowd isn’t a watered-down version of the real political thing, but personality and ‘story’ alone, something distinct and entirely spectacular; no steak (and no hamburger), just the sizzle. This relates to Corey’s third opposition – which this post never quite defines, but it’s something to do with having “policies” (and/or a personality) vs having a project, a “comprehensive political argument”. This in turn is something that all realigners have, as well as some non-realigners.

    /continues

    • Phil February 11, 2019 at 5:30 am | #

      The key point is that, to a large extent this does the work that “personality” is supposed to be doing: the coherence of the project backs the coherence of the story and makes the personality seem believable and trustworthy. You believe they’re going to do what they came to do – which may or may not be what they promised to do, or the reason you voted for them – because you believe they’re a person with a coherent plan/project/story. (Incidentally, this explains those Trump supporters saying “yeah, I never thought he was really going to [build the wall / bring steel back to the Rust Belt / etc], nobody can do that…”, but still supporting him; they see Trump as somebody who definitely stands for something & is going to get something done. (And if that something turns out to be no more than “saying ‘fuck you’ to Obama, HRC, Warren, everything they stand for and everyone who supports them, every day for four years”, I think that’ll get him quite a long way.))

      The question then is, why can’t the Dems see that a project is what they need, and that you can’t built a project out of individual policies plus an America’s Got Talent backstory? On the other hand, you could say that the question is, how did we get from Reagan (folksy, charming born-again union-buster and anti-Communist) to GWB (folksy, charming rich kid and nonentity) – and how did the latter get two terms anyway? How did US politics get so broken – and how come the GOP, but not the Democrats, can work it anyway?

  11. David Fitts February 11, 2019 at 1:43 pm | #

    Excellent analysis. It explains perfectly why I keep gravitating back to Bernie and Warren. At this point, I’m more inclined to support Warren because she’s a woman and little younger than Bernie.

  12. Brondo February 11, 2019 at 3:49 pm | #

    “Analysis” as used here, means an over-arching assessment of the history and problems of the society; once you have an analysis, you can decide whether and what policies are appropriate to remedy the problems in the society. It’s obviously helpful to have a coherent metric to assess your policy choices, but to me an intellectual analysis is not where most people come from and is not what powers them to do political work. It also doesn’t tell me what someone else is likely to do in future endeavors or whether they can be trusted with power.

    Not mentioned here is the vital need for a *vision* for the society. What kind of society do you want to build, and what aspects of the society do you value? Unless and until you can answer that question, you can’t do worthwhile political work. You can’t assess new policies or weigh tactics. It’s like driving a car but not knowing where you want to go. Once you *have* a vision, everything snaps into place. We should expect this of ourselves, and we should expect it from political candidates.

    My vision? I want a society where every single person has the material conditions and political power to lead a decent life.

    I don’t think it has to be a lot more complicated than that.

  13. Kellandros February 11, 2019 at 4:06 pm | #

    I think what you are discussing is less about Reagan (or particular candidates), but about eras of politics. The Reagan era led to a big shift in the country, as did FDR. Both were preceded by periods of crisis and a loss of faith in the status quo, meaning the general public was looking for something different to make the old economic problems go away (the Great Depression, Stag-flation). Both were able to repackage ideas as things people were willing to support- things that appealed to the self-image of voters. Both were also able to aim conflict outward at external threats, giving more room for unity.

    Without a major crisis and a strong and obvious external enemy, it is much harder to shift the political discourse of the nation. This is made even harder by the current media landscape- the intermediaries between candidates and voters have many ways to shift or filter the message. Media is a for-profit enterprise, so they want excitement and conflict, not depth, nuance, or policy details. The best any candidate can do is to try and pre-package their message as sound-bites, or be so outrageous as to attract extra coverage (and unfavorable comparisons to Trump).

    ——————–

    I think we’re also applying a lot of hindsight bias here. Republicans have spent decades working to promote and improve Reagan’s reputation- what we see looking back now is not the same as what people saw at the time.

    We can look back and see that Reagan’s election was driven by several specific events (Iran hostage situation and their delayed release, high inflation/oil crisis, several others). Even without a strong story, Reagan had a strong tailwind behind his campaign (often engineered behind the scenes by operatives and dirty tricks). His successes were then applied to give a shine to the ideas he championed, rather than the other way round.

    Bill Clinton was the response of the Democratic Party reorganizing, pushing for centrism and policy triangulation. His election and success is also tied into weaknesses of George HW Bush (base alienation over tax hikes, who wanted him to simply be a clone of Ronald Reagan) and Ross Perot’s turning the election into a 3 way race and peeling off more Republican voters than Democrats.

  14. Stephen Saperstein Frug February 11, 2019 at 8:51 pm | #

    This analysis is very important, I think, because it gets at the heart of some of the problems Democrats have with elections. But it also sheds light on some other issues:

    First, why it’s always so dissatisfying when the media responds to complaints about personality or horserace driven coverage by tackling “the issues”. What they do is analyze POLICY. Their analysis is never about, never contains, ideology. What we need from the media is an analysis of—or just honest reporting of—ideology. From both sides! For Rs this mean describing how odious their actual ideologies are. But re Ds it means that we, the Ds, have to actually show up with one.

    Second, one reason that the Ds are hesitant on ideology is because they’re hesitant on enemies. We want to be ‘big tent’ers! This is especially so because the actual enemies Ds would call out, rich people, have been solicited as donors now. A lack of enemies is how you get pabulum like “America is already great”. It also leads to an excessive focus on the current R candidate—especially easy to do for Trump. But that becomes vulnerable to “both evil” arguments. Candidates that work are candidates who identify where the problems are coming from. Rs do that (falsely but powerfully); we need to do that better. When people (eg at Vox) used to claim it was silly to say Bernie was a populist and Hilary wasn’t, look at their programs, they were falling for this problem. Bernie had an ideology—and he named ENEMIES. That’s what populism does; that’s what makes it populist. Hilary simply had policies.

    Third, ideologies allow for both a more flexible response to changing circumstances and a more generous interpretation of records. If circumstances change, then an ideological analysis will suggest new responses, but a list of policies just becomes outdated. And in the former case it’s clear why you are changing — it LOOKS like response to events, not inconsistency & poll-driven politics. Also, with an ideology, if you get less than all you wanted, you have an answer as to why (enemies). And half is good anyway, since you are addressing the ideological problems. With policies, if you don’t get them, you broke a campaign promise; and you did half of what you said. Since it wasn’t about the goal, it was about the technique.

    Fourth, the reason that most of the Ds currently running are so lukewarm is, as Corey said, they don’t have ideological analyses. But they also formed within the context of a long-past-its-staledate, triangulating, defensive-crouch centrist liberalism most identified with B. Clinton. (e.g. Harris’s “tough on crime” record, which nowadays looks bad, not good.) Warren and Bernie don’t—but they’re both a lot older than I’d like to see, and Bernie especially has become a divisive figure in the way that others espousing his ideas (e.g. AOC) haven’t.

    Finally, the only ideology worth pursuing these days is the democratic socialist analysis: analyzing the problems of capitalism (economic, social and environmental) as a group, and proposing joint and radical solutions to them. The ideology of AOC. This is not only because it is (I believe) correct; and it’s not only because it is the only politics existent that is capable of addressing the overwhelming threat of climate change with anything like the proper urgency. It’s also because all of the left-wing energy comes from people, mostly young people, with this ideology. No one is going into the streets for Biden. If we’re going to defeat Trump, if we’re going to keep a livable biosphere in place, we need that energy to win. Democratic socialist ideology is the only way to tap it.

  15. Roquentin February 11, 2019 at 10:59 pm | #

    The smear campaign against Gabbard really grinds my gears. It’s not that some of the criticism of her doesn’t hit the mark, because some of it does, it’s how desperate and over-zealous a lot of people on the left are to find some detail, hell anything at all, that would mean they could ignore her trenchant critiques of US interventionist foreign policy. The whole thing is so transparently phony. The feigned concern is almost unbearable at times. I also find it fascinating that the fact she’s a female person of color, all that cherished identity politics grandstanding of centrist liberals, goes straight out the window the moment she starts advocating for anything except for their brand of politics. I don’t even think she’d be that great a candidate, but that isn’t the point. Not unlike Sanders, albeit for different reasons, she exposes the bulk of the Democratic party for the pack of grifters and opportunists they actually are, which is exactly why they can’t stand her.

    Gabbard running has been good, if for no other reason. than to expose just how narrow the bandwidth of acceptable political views on the left in the US actually is. I think the battle between those who loudly oppose “humanitarian intervention” and regime change and the rest of the Democratic party might be the next big brawl after the social democrats vs liberal capitalist fight is over.

    • Chris Morlock February 12, 2019 at 5:25 am | #

      “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.”

      Yeah, he also set back economic justice to pre WW2 levels and did as much if not more to promote corporate policies over economic justice as any Republican. To say Clinton was anything but a Ronald Reagan clone is pushing the limits of sanity. In fact, since Carter, what American president hasn’t been a Reagan clone? I agree with Corey that the collective attitude that he was an idiot was extremely unfortunate for those that underestimated the power of his ideas, so much so that we live in his world and continue to pretend that the American establishment hasn’t been collectively channeling him since 1988.

      Gabbard represents a non-traditional leftist that has genuine cross cultural appeal and most importantly appeal in the working class, outside of the upper middle class. I think this actually instills fear in many on the left, who have come to fear working people since, coincidentally, 1980 and the age of Reagan- which seems to be impossible to escape.

      • Roquentin February 12, 2019 at 11:24 am | #

        Clinton may have been a blue version of Reagan, as were all the New Democrats/Democratic Leadership Council politicians who have run the party since then, but at least it was a vision. I think Corey Robin is right, it may have been recycled Reagan, but at least it was an ethos (allusion to the Big Lebowski totally intentional). I still think the main reason we view Clinton favorably is because he got really lucky, happened to be president during the dotcom boom. A bag of Doritos would have looked like a good president during that boom. He got out the door just before shit hit the fan, and he never had to suffer the consequences of things like repealing Glass-Steagall.

        I think the Dems are having so much trouble precisely because the Reagan playbook is no longer working and they’re even more tightly welded to neoliberalism than the GOP because of people like Clinton and Obama. At least the GOP has old school nationalism and petty bigotry to fall back on when they run out of ways to sell the interests of the ruling class to voters. I mean, the Dems could market themselves as “neoliberalism with a human face” the social justice wing of capitalism and most of the time they do, but these aims are way more contradictory and obviously undermine eachother. They just end up looking like total hypocrites who talk out of both sides of their mouths. Even that might work, given the changing demographics of the US, but they just don’t know when to say enough is enough. Rather than simply saying something like “treating LGBTQ folks as human beings is something any decent person should do” the rhetoric is often “you’re a bunch of bigots and shitty people and even if you make attempts to be more accepting we’ll move the goalposts so we can still tell you that.” Do that often enough and even the sympathetic will eventually just throw their hands in the air and say “to hell with it.”

        In a weird way, the Dems and liberals are more invested in the current toxic political situation than anyone. They’re addicted to the inflated image of themselves, of playing the Quixotic hero defending the downtrodden. I often make the claim that Don Quixote is the definitive text of Western Civilization and it’s because the story never stops being relevant. Even centuries later, it still rings true.

      • Roquentin February 12, 2019 at 12:32 pm | #

        Also, to bring it all back home, I think The Big Lebowski is actually a much better representation of political discourse among your average US citizen than any kind of nonsense about “beer track and wine track” could ever hope to be. It’s at once high minded and absurd, vulgar and occasionally erudite, foolish but with firm principles all the same. A movie which quoted VI Lenin, Theodor Herzl, contains ruminations on pacifism, nihilism, the use of guns/violence to enforce rules, etc which most people in the US adored.

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