It is a very, very bad day when I have to wonder about Sherrod Brown, whose loss two weeks ago is incalculable. But he gave an interview to Tiger Beat on the Potomac and, well, his analysis was acute and—thank you, Jesus—he avoided TBOTP’s Eugene Daniels’s attempts to blame the Democratic party’s commitment to universal human rights for the fact that the country has turned once again to a vulgar talking yam.
“I mean, what we have in common is work. And there’s no reason why you can’t focus on the dignity of work and human rights. I’ve spent 32 years in Washington being that person, being one of the people that does that. It’s clear to me. My mother was always troubled by racial issues, both in the South as a small-town girl and in the North as a grown woman in a medium-sized city. And she got very involved. She founded, with another woman, the Ohio Council of YWCAs. And the YWCA’s mission for 100 years has been to eliminate racism and to empower women. That’s where I come at this from. So that makes my focus on the dignity of work deep and extensive and life-changing, or at least life-setting. So I don’t know why you can’t be both, why you can’t be supportive of civil rights and human rights in every iteration. Because I think of worker rights as a civil right and a human right.”
That answer is why Brown was an important public servant, and why we will all suffer for the fact that he will be replaced come January by a used-car dealer without an original thought in his head and whose mental odometer keeps resetting itself to 2016. But I have to wonder: If even Sherrod Brown can’t see the obvious problem, then why do we expect anyone else to do so? The problem is neither the medium nor the message. The problem lies with the people to whom the message is directed—an electorate that swings between vengeance and apathy with an occasional side trip to weaponized ignorance. And that is a problem that no politician can solve.
So, no, Adam Jentleson, the problem is not that the Democrats
“remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party. Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.”
Which of their “interest groups” does Jentleson prefer that the Democrats abandon in order to create his “supermajority” thinking? (Don’t bother guessing. I’m pretty sure I know.) How one creates a “supermajority” by abandoning some of their most loyal voters is not for small minds like mine to ponder. And Jentleson is one of the clearest thinkers the Democratic party has. If he’s that far at sea, it’s no wonder that so many other members of the party have fallen off the edge of the world.
Anticipatory obedience—pace Timothy Snyder—is the order of the day for too many of them. From Politico:
“I do think there’s this whole sentiment that we just went too far out there on identity, and it allowed the Republicans to really attack us at every turn as a result, and that we just essentially did not focus on just the everyday issues of Americans,” said one DNC member from California, granted anonymity to speak freely. “I’m not interested in anyone who is moving further away from the center,” said Cindy Bass, a Pennsylvania committee member from Philadelphia. “The center is where we have to be.”
What “center”? Where? By an admittedly ever-shrinking margin, the American people voted for a campaign based on nothing that materially affects their lives. No, Haitians are not going to eat your dog. No, the school nurse is not going to turn Edward into Elizabeth or vice versa. No, vaccines will not give your children autism. No, tariffs are not paid by the countries against which they are arrayed. And since returning a vulgar talking yam back to the office he so deeply disgraced is a more than tacit admission that you yourself believe nothing about a presidential campaign materially affects your life, there is no political answer to that situation.
We went through this once before, when the Democratic party was scared witless by the 1980 presidential election and decided to run against its most loyal supporters. This was the Democratic party of “Sister Souljah moments,” and a renewed enthusiasm for the death penalty, and deregulated derivatives. This was the party of the everlasting crouch and the permanent flinch. It was so deeply ingrained in the party that when the political order actually did reorient itself in 2008, the beneficiary of that reorientation, a once-in-a-generation political talent, spent most of his first term trying to walk through a wolverine enclosure in a meat suit, and the permanent realignment was never permanent nor was it much of a realignment.
And, frankly, the current recommendations of the remnants of the Bernie left are equally vain. The Biden administration was the most progressive administration since that of Lyndon Johnson, and Biden did it without the gales of the monstrous tailwind LBJ had behind him from a country still mourning his murdered predecessor. He walked a picket line, which even Johnson never did. He provided jobs with a massive infrastructure program. He protected pensions. (Thank you, Sherrod Brown.) If you were a working stiff with diabetes, he capped the cost of the insulin that keeps you alive. If that wasn’t enough to convince an electorate drunk on lies and dark imaginings to elect his vice president, do you really believe that a Green New Deal or Medicare for All would have? Please.
All weekend, the signs of a new capitulation were everywhere. President Biden pretended that the vulgar talking yam was up to the job that the yam had failed at so spectacularly the last time around. Jack Smith is folding up his tents. The Democratic members of the House Ethics Committee are tying themselves in knots over whether the country needs to know what the committee learned about the incoming nominee for attorney general and his alleged involvement in underage sex trafficking and drug abuse. Just put it out there. Stop giving a damn about norms that no longer exist. Just do it, and let the chips fall.
That would be a start. Then fight with every weapon, fair or foul, to prevent the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from presiding over the agencies of the executive branch. All of them, not just one or two. None of them are legitimate candidates simply by virtue of who nominated them. And remember: There are no votes to be had in “the center” because there is no “center” anymore. On Friday, the once and future president demanded that Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer be investigated because of the poll she published shortly before the election that said Vice President Harris was leading in that state. (Pro tip: She was not.) Selzer has since resigned, but that isn’t enough of a consequence for the once and future president.
“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing. Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!”
(Pro tip: Trump’s fifteen-point win in Iowa broke no records. In 1964, LBJ beat Barry Goldwater by thirty-four points, In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower won by nineteen over Adlai Stevenson, whom he’d defeated four years earlier. FDR beat Herbert Hoover by eighteen in 1932. Four years earlier, Hoover finished twenty-four points ahead of Democratic candidate Al Smith. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge won by twenty-seven points over two badly split Democratic-Progressive opponents. Hell, Warren F*cking Harding won Iowa by twenty-five percentage points. So, in an act of Christian charity, I will award to the president-elect the title of the Biggest Margin of Victory of the Twenty-first Century In Iowa by a Convicted Felon.)
There is truth and there are lies. There is reality and there is fantasy. Right now truth and reality have an inadequate constituency to affect public policy. But there is no center. None at all.
