“Politics is the art of the possible.” This insightful saying nudges us gently away from a variety of pathologies on display in the barrage of scorn I received a few weeks ago for Let Bernie Make Appointments. It contains lessons that Democrats and Daily Kosers need.
How to unify the Democratic Party was the subject of my story. Personnel is policy, and some progressive appointments will be essential to unifying. The furious response to this mild suggestion illustrates the greatest threat to uniting our party: political tone-deafness among Democrats.
I’m going to dissect this tone-deafness into the several political pathologies that cause it. Politics is the art of the possible, and these pathologies lie at the root of our party’s repeated failures to achieve what is possible for the last thirty years. More immediately, the Clinton campaign and the DNC are showing worrisome signs that they will blow it again, both at the convention and in the general election beyond.
Only the weak negotiate
“Screw the left. We don’t have to give them squat. They have nowhere to go.” This very close paraphrase of a Democratic Party official captures a centrist axiom. (I so wish I’d kept the citation; it sounds like Rahm Emanuel, but I don’t think it is.) Swagger is not the problem but blindness to political reality, because this official spoke a few years after enough Democrats went to Ralph Nader to lose us the 2000 election.
Hostility to negotiation is the first pathology the saying pushes against. To achieve what is possible, a group must negotiate. In a few weeks, 4765 delegates to the convention will try to set our party on a winning path. About 1900 or 40 percent of those will be Bernie Sanders’s delegates, a reality the party needs to deal with artfully. But my suggestion that the Democratic Party needs to negotiate personnel with Bernie and his movement met unbridled outrage. One commenter actually called it “blackmail.”
(All quotations except “Screw the left…” above are from comments to my earlier story, linked at the start of this one. Daily Kos does not like “call outs,” so they are unattributed. Short ones are in the text, two longer ones in block quotes.)
In real politics, negotiation is routine as well as essential. Let me remind everyone that Obama appointed his defeated rival Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, fourth in line to the presidency. Don’t pretend there was no negotiating. The VP slot is usually chosen for balance; in 2016, the balance the party needs is between left and center – this is the gap it needs to bridge – more than it needs geographic or identity group balance.
Winner-take-all politics
A modesty about winning is implicit in “Politics is the art of the possible.” You win what you win – and can hold – nothing more. A second pathology on display by the commenters is a sort of idolatry of winning. “The losers get what the winners want to give them.” Though the media relentlessly present who wins as the only issue, it is up to us to be smarter than that.
Here is a deafened-by-winning test: Will Bernie speak at the convention? Most commenters said some variant of Hillary won and gets to do what she wants, and Bernie lost and gets nothing; “Hillary is the party,” and Bernie, “he can get sent back to backbench Siberia.”
The idea that the LOSER of the primary is even going to be allowed to speak at the convention, if it’s to say anything except how much he respects, admires and ENDORSES Hillary Clinton is ridiculous.
The correct answer is that of course Bernie will speak at the convention, and he will say what he wants. This is arithmetic, not opinion. The very purpose of the convention is for the delegates to hear from and then vote on all viable candidates for party nominee. Despite the bluster, rhetoric, and bullying of the mainstream media (and some on Daily Kos), all Hillary has won so far is 55 percent of the pledged delegates. Yes, she will win the nomination, presumably, but in the future, when the superdelegates vote at the convention, after both she and Bernie have spoken.
This is a beautiful example of politics in action. One reason Bernie does not acknowledge defeat now is because his right to speak at the convention is absolute at this point, but would be questionable if he dropped out of the race. So, if the party wants him to drop out before the convention, it must negotiate terms that benefit both sides, meaning it must guarantee Bernie a prime speaking slot and more. Politics is the art of the possible.
My guess is Bernie will endorse Hillary soon, and when he does you can bet money it means a deal over the convention agenda has been worked out, and a lot of other things. But the fact that it is taking so long is a worrisome sign, because it suggests the party establishment, gripped by winner idolatry, thinks it does not have to negotiate.
Not much, anyway. In fairness to the establishment, some members do recognize limits to winning and the need to negotiate. Concessions to Bernie are already transforming the party platform, as this Vox.com piece describes. We’ll see at the convention whether negotiations were dominated by big-tent centrists or screw-the-left centrists.
Follow the script, you despicable cretin
Moralizing is the next pathology. Nobody has to do what you want them to do. Bernie’s supporters do not have to vote for Hillary. But the commenters on my earlier story seem to see everything through a lens of rights and entitlement: Hillary is “entitled” to make all decisions and receive the unquestioning support of all decent people; Bernie is not “entitled” to influence personnel decisions; and I, too, they assume, must be seeing through their lens (“The entitlement in this diary is really astonishing”). Politics, though, is about what we have the power to accomplish, and moral indignation does not wield much power. Focus on the possible, not the perverse pleasure of outrage that your failure is someone else’s fault. We want to win this election, not groom scapegoats for when we lose it.
I proposed an answer to the question, How can Hillary secure the votes of Bernie supporters? (i.e. unify the party). Everything rides on this question. Everything. Trump will turn out a more formidable opponent than you think. And yet the commenters on my story puff and pomp at the very question’s cheek, its insolent hint that Hillary’s win hasn’t already settled her absolute moral right to an obediently unified party. The time to get over your moral smugness would be now.
I see right through you
A closely related pathology is psychoanalyzing your opponents. Unless it will help you win them to your side, speculating about their motives is self-indulgence. You know nothing about their motives, so your speculations are just for your own pleasure, unengaged with the world outside yourself. Many commenters aggressively asserted that it is only because Hillary is a woman that I would ask that Bernie have a say in personnel. When Hillary ran against a black man, was it racist to ask Obama to accommodate Hillary’s half of the voters and give some of them – such as Hillary – positions in his administration? No. And Bernie supporters today are no more sexist than 2008 Hillary supporters were racist.
Several analyzed me as in some stage of grief over Bernie’s loss (“Stage: denial”) or otherwise mentally ill (“These folks need a Dr. and quick”; “you are delusional”). They dismiss Bernie in similar terms: “He’s earned crazy uncle status”; “Secretary of Delusions?”; “department of the flat earth.” The purpose of psychoanalyzing is to disengage from real discussion, to reduce your opponent to a powerless object of study rather than a worthy adversary. You have limited only your own ability to hear and learn. But that’s the point, to close your ears, to close your eyes.
Doomed to repeat it
These pathologies work together to create an attitude of “Never negotiate if you think you can win,” and flavor that conquering attitude with a heavy dollop of self-righteous condescension (since moralizing and psychoanalyzing turn the other person into a misbehaving child). From sneering sarcasm – “I am laughing. Literally laughing”; “don’t fall and hurt yourself holding your breath”; “While you’re at it…”; “My morning guffaw!”; “WTF is this BS” – we slide easily and lazily toward ‘Screw the left. We don’t have to give them squat. They have nowhere to go.’ And that brings us to where we are today, a few weeks from the Democratic Party convention.
All of these pathologies work against the political art of the possible. And they permeate the tone-deaf, ineffective, centrist Democratic Party establishment we have today.
Before you quip that I have moved from denial to the anger stage of grief, some history. Many of you need to find out what the 2016 election is really about. Stop thinking of Bernie supporters as naïve and histrionic college kids. I was at UC Berkeley when Reagan became president, and I remember professors there brought to tears of rage at his name, remembering Governor Reagan’s campaign to destroy the finest public university in America.
The history you need is the Democratic response: in disarray after Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection, the party fell under the control of the Democratic Leadership Council (the centrists, later known as the Clinton faction). The DLC approached the rest of the party with the aforementioned conquering attitude, which even then they called “pragmatism” and “realism.” We were enemies to be defeated, not partners in a cooperative venture.
To put a complex story crudely, the Democratic Party has been in decline ever since. Before 1994 (Bill Clinton’s first mid-term), the Democrats had held the House of Representatives for over sixty years (except two brief two-year periods). In the twenty-two years since, we have held it four. Same party decline in control of state legislatures and governorships.
These cold numbers are the tip of the iceberg. Since demographic changes have massively favored Democrats, and since the Republican Party has meanwhile devolved from plausible adversary to criminally wacko, the real decline is both much greater and bizarrely unexpected. Thank our Democratic Party leadership.
The recent history of left versus center every Democrat should know, but others tell it better than I can. Thomas Frank’s terrific new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? tells a surprising and insightful version. For the quick intro, read this interview with Frank (April 26, 2016). That interview alone will tell you more about the meaning of 2016 than all your echo chamber social media has.
Another excellent book is Matt Bai’s 2008 The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, specifically about the left versus center argument.
This history is what produced the Sanders campaign, not millennial angst or Bernie’s personality or anti-Hillary conspiracy theories. And the need to change the course of this history is what the left wants honestly aired at the convention.
A second worrisome sign, then, is the bogus conceit that Hillary is “a progressive who gets things done,” no different in substance from Bernie, so nothing really needs to change; it is hard to negotiate seriously while pretending you are already in perfect agreement.
The logic of winners losing
But why the decline? Why does the single-minded pursuit of winning lead to losing? Herein lies the lesson of our thirty-year losing streak that the tone-deaf center cannot learn.
My own take is a “size of the pie” story, with power or engagement as the metric. The central idea of democracy is that power is widely distributed. I bring my share to the table, and my influence is proportional to the number of people who share my views. This is the negotiation picture. In the competition picture, I go to the tournament and hand my power to the winner.
Now, we can tell a nice story about how these theoretically amount to the same thing in a representative blah, blah, blah. But that story is not true. Most of my power is not really transferable in that commodity-like way. Most of it is my attention, my commitment, my engagement, which must be doled out continuously. All I really hand the winner is my vote. If my side lost, and my influence is zero rather than proportional, my attention, commitment, and engagement go home to the closet. The pie shrinks.
The thing is, this winner-take-all model seems worth it to the winners: they get all the power left at the table, and good riddance to the power that went home; it didn’t agree with me anyway. A smaller amount of better-behaved power seems just fine, until you try to do something with it, like beat the Republicans.
So, another worrisome sign is the Democratic Party leadership’s apparent wish that Bernie and his little revolution would just go home, as long as they give us their votes. Unifying the party by driving the losers away, instead of negotiating an inclusive compromise at the convention, will continue our decline. This stay-the-course, secure-Obama’s-legacy, party-of-stability strategy is tone-deaf that there is something big going on, for the dominant political reality of this moment – from Trump to Bernie to Brexit – is that people everywhere, overwhelmingly, don’t like where we are and where we’re going.
The lesser agenda
Seeing politics as a winner-take-all sport rather than the art of the possible – which means negotiation and proportionality – has countless bad consequences besides a shrinking power base. If all you need from the losers is their votes, not the rest of their power (commitment, enthusiasm), then being the lesser of two evils is a perfectly reasonable strategy; as long as Hillary is better than Trump, we’re golden! No one likes to say it, of course, but that has been the centrist strategy all along: since we are less evil than the Republicans, ‘Screw the left. We don’t have to give them squat. They have nowhere to go.’
The corollary of lesser evil being sufficient to win is that the two evils, lesser and greater, can drift any distance away from the people; nothing tethers them to the public interest. They can both serve big money, for example, while competing to be less evil on the rights of gays or fetuses. And this is what has happened. (The correct and permanent solution to this problem is instant run-off elections, but that’s for another day.)
I have not given the naysayers some ready target yet, so let me offer something more daring than the plodding, humdrum truths I have given you so far. Here it is: what the 2016 primaries reveal is that both parties are far to the right of the American people. Many have known this for decades, as we watched the Republican Party race toward the right-wing lunatic fringe, with the Democratic Party gleefully racing after them (Score! We’re way lesser evil than they are!). But this year, finally, everyone can see it.
Except some of my commenters: “LOL… Do you realize that Sanders LOST the nomination?”
Hillary Clinton’s agenda has been endorsed by a strong majority of primary voters and she has shown herself to represent a much more diverse and lasting coalition of voters.
There is too much to learn here, so I will just give one more deafened-by-winning test, an exercise in how to read what the primary really says about the centrist agenda.
Before I do, though, let’s remember the big picture: Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist with little name recognition, no money from the powerful institutions that dominate our elections, active opposition from the party leadership, facing a disgracefully biased and hostile mainstream media (here is my favorite) as well as a series of dirty tricks and rules manipulations from a vicious DNC, received 45 percent of the votes. That’s extraordinary.
So, here is the exercise: what does it mean that 92 percent of superdelegates support Hillary, and eight percent Bernie, when the popular split is 55 to 45? If it meant that 92 percent of the party leadership supports the centrist agenda, that would confirm that the party is far to the right of the people. But that’s not the answer, because even you Hillary devotees know that the 92 is not true. Part of the real answer, the part we all know, is that the superdelegates cannot simply vote their consciences, because their careers are on the line; they are under great pressure to vote the party line, and Hillary is the party establishment flag-bearer.
If you learn nothing else here, apply the same skepticism to the 55/45 popular vote that the 92/8 superdelegate split spontaneously arouses in your mind. Wonder how many voters did not really vote their conscience, and why.
Before you say, “It doesn’t matter! The vote is the vote and Hillary won!” remember that the issue here is what should happen at the convention. I am not arguing that Bernie should get the nomination. He lost the vote. Duh. (And Bernie knows that better than you do.) I am arguing that politics is the art of the possible, and you cannot practice that art well if you do not understand what the votes mean. Bluntly, the party is going to blow it if they don’t look honestly at how little beef and how much grade inflation is in Hillary’s 55 percent (to mix my metaphors).
The exercise is to think skeptically about the commitment of some of the following voters to Hillary’s agenda: those not very into politics often automatically vote the party’s choice (these are the people polls showed streaming from Hillary to Bernie as they learned who he was in the final weeks before almost every state primary); independents are mostly party voters, not swing voters, and Bernie won almost every state that allowed them to vote (because two Bernie-leaning groups foolishly tend to register independent: leftists disgusted with the Democratic Party, and fashionably anti-political millennials); identity group voters are often risk-averse and loyal to party leadership, a dynamic analyzed by a number of black writers (whereas if “white, male privilege” means anything, it means white men feel free to express personal preferences and casually expect institutions to respond to their preferences, not vice versa); many people, surprisingly many in this age of cynicism, believed the mainstream media’s dishonest coverage of Bernie’s campaign (and don’t believe DNC officials would actually lie, cheat, and fix voting rolls). So, thinking about why Hillary won, let that lopsided 92 to 8 nag at you with what it means about institutionalized power.
Choosing to unify
I have described four bad habits of mind – that I call “pathologies” – ways of thinking about politics that undermine our ability to practice it well. These habits have been much on display in the later stages of the Democratic primaries. The short, honest comments of 46 Daily Kosers on a story of mine provide wonderful examples, because they are clear, direct, unmasked, and so consistently display these bad habits that the one reasonable response was presumed by another commenter to be sarcastic.
The issue of political tone-deafness is important, and I believe it is urgent with the convention approaching. The party establishment has behaved as badly as ever throughout these primaries. Where Bernie has said, This campaign will stay civil and positive and we will have a conversation about what our party stands for, the establishment has replied, We will not have that conversation unless you are strong enough to force us (pathology 1); we will win by any means necessary, and when we do the party will stand for whatever we say it stands for (pathology 2); and anyone who refuses to support the winner is a whiny, childish, sexist, self-important, delusional sore loser (pathologies 3 and 4).
People don’t like to be treated unfairly. It wears them down. I won’t rehash the primaries, but will point out one example that dominated this primary season. The idea of superdelegates is not necessarily bad. But instead of being the safety valve against populist fervor that justified their creation, superdelegates were used as a club to bully challengers to Hillary out of the race, and then to drive a phony media narrative of She’s won! She’s won! The race is mathematically over. Go home! The arm-twisting that got 23 superdelegates to declare for Hillary in the week before California, so AP would call the race for Hillary the day before Californians voted, was particularly reprehensible.
The left is tired of it. Just by the hard numbers of this primary, we are 45 percent of the party. I have outlined reasons to think we may actually be a much larger percentage than that. Some Bernie supporters will not vote for Hillary this November. I disagree with them, and think they should. But for those who don’t, their reasons (mostly) are not silly, or petulant, or delusional; they are products of a long and bitter history. We have watched a reckless, unprincipled, and politically tone-deaf party establishment use every dirty, manipulative tool of incumbency to stay in control of our party, even as it drives the party from failure to failure.
No one can say how many Bernie supporters are close to the last straw. It may depend how many straws they see piled on at the convention. I think it would be a mistake for our party leaders to swagger into that convention and tell 1900 Sanders delegates, “We won and we’re here to tell you our plan, so shut up and listen!” We can, if our leaders are willing, negotiate among ourselves a better party and a winning general election campaign. It can be done. Politics is the art of the possible.