320 Comments
Commenting has been turned off for this post
author

I forgot to mention - it is frustrating that so much of Democratic discourse is about how the system isn't fair (the Senate, the electoral college, districting), but when people point out that the primary process favors moderate establishment candidates (such as all the institutions of the party pushing hard for Hillary in 2016), the response is, hey, that's politics baby. Find a way to win. Not a really consistent attitude.

Expand full comment

'I think this is exemplified in the presidency of Barack Obama, who appeared to be doggedly attached to appearing to be more reasonable than Congressional Republicans, never seeming to grasp that there was simply no advantage to having that laurel.'

This is a core misunderstanding of American politics.

By appearing 'reasonable' Obama was able to reassure the PMC (media, social workers, educators, etc. etc. etc.) about everything that he sought out to do. As a result he had carte blanche to do what he wanted: he launched a catastrophic intervention in Libya, expanded drone wars over much Middle East, presided over a border crisis wasn't scrutinized ('kids in cages'), he let the banking industry get away with murder, expanded imperial presidential powers, etc. etc. etc.

There's a swath of Americans - an ersatz elite with some power - who want respectability and reassurance. Providing them with that gets you a lot.

Now that Obama's in his fat Elvis phase (to quote Matt Taibbi), partying with celebs, living in his mansion, planning the construction of his imperial mausoleum that will take the place of a park in Chicago, and generally not giving a fuck, we perhaps have a better view of who Obama is and what he was able to get away with.

Expand full comment
Sep 30, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

Maybe I’ve gone too far in thinking about this all as kabuki, but isn’t Sinema performing the function that she exists for? I cannot believe there is a contingent of power brokers saying “oh woe is me we can’t do this thing we really want to do!” It’s those darned obstructionists who always seem to conveniently appear at the right time.. just like all those votes that are narrowly lost and a few people vote present or don’t show up. Or oops we dithered forever and lost our majority and now we can’t do anything!

I can’t see this as anything other than things going exactly as planned.

Expand full comment

I don't really understand why the Left, who make up perhaps 10% of Americans, and perhaps a quarter of the Democratic Party, think that they should be directing policy.

The working class remnants of the Democratic Party and black voters are far more conservative, economically and socially, than Leftists as are the suburban voters who decide elections in purple states.

The burgeoning Hispanic population, who will likely be the most important demographic in deciding elections the next few decades is Catholic, working class, and increasing in wealth.

I agree that Leftists need a plan: It should be to convince the rest of us why we should go along with them.

Expand full comment

I'm sorry, but Joe Manchin is most certainly representing the will of his Democratic voters. That is how democratic systems work. The left has an essential role in every society, which is to speak for the interests of those dispossessed or neglected in the flawed but invaluable inherited order we call society. Progress ultimately depends on persuasion - moral and practical - which is not a strong suit of the modern Democratic party.

I am a libertarianish conservative. I read Freddie deBoer because he is one of the three or four most persuasive, intelligent and intellectually honest left wing voices in our culture. He speaks for those whom our system hurts rather than for the party which - in theory at least - claims to represent them. People who consider themselves "Blue No Matter Who" can learn a lot from his example and criticism.

Expand full comment

"If Democrats lurch rightward, as they have for most of my life, then “better than a Republican” gets worse and worse, and yet you are not permitted to consider not supporting them or supporting a third party."

This is simply untrue. The Democrats have shifted leftward on almost every issue in the last few decades. There are studies you can point to here if you want to show this mathematically, but it should be kinda apparent given that Bernie Sanders is a genuine power player in the party today.

Part of that leftward rise is a rise in progressivism, and part of this is that there aren't very Sinemas and Manchins left to complain about so the remaining average is leftier. Manchin will surely be gone in the next cycle. There were a lot of annoying moderate Dem senators to complain about in 2008. They're all gone.

Expand full comment

As the person this was written specifically to annoy, I say: I'm not annoyed. In fact I agree with about 90% of it.

Especially this: “I voted for Joe Donnelly for Senate, violating a commitment to never vote for pro-life politicians for any reason, because the Senate seemed so important. Donnelly rewarded me by generally being a drag on any progressive agenda and getting his ass thrown out after one term, but I would probably hold my nose and vote for him again.” And this: "Perhaps there is some better path where you can acknowledge the importance of voting as a tool and of partisan politics as a seat of power, and believe that voting for the Democrats is usually the best decision, while also recognizing that supporting someone no matter what is fine if they’re your children, but not if they’re politicians."

I don't support Democrats "no matter what". If there is a further-left candidate with a decent chance to win the general election, I support that candidate. But in at least 99% of US elections, there is no such candidate. Then I support the Democrat. What I object to, very strongly, is walking away from that vote as not important, or refusing to vote for the "lesser evil" on some general principle.

Concerning Sinema, you say "If you could go back in time to fall 2018 and talk to the Democratic voters of Arizona, but believed in voting blue no matter who, you’d have no chance to change anything." I assert that you'd have no chance to change anything, period. Sinema was the first non-Republican to win a Senate seat in Arizona in three decades. You think you could have gotten someone further left than her elected? Dream on bro! Sinema was simply the best possible outcome in Arizona in 2018.

The problem is that Sinema now perceives Arizona voters to be drifting right, and so she's tacking right. Her assessment is probably correct. To change her mind, you need to convince her that a primary challenge from the left is a bigger threat to her re-election than is the Republican she'll face in the general election. At the moment, this is not remotely close to true. Polls show only 30% of Democrats in Arizona are unhappy with Sinema.

How do we fix this? The simplest solution is to ELECT MORE DEMOCRATS to the Senate from other purplish states. If there were 52 Democrats instead of 50, Sinema and Manchin could peel off when they need to without endangering the larger agenda. As it is, we can still count on them to support quite a bit of that progressive agenda, and far more than we would get from the Republicans they defeated to win their seats.

Right now I am far more annoyed with the "liberals" (as the wapo terms them) who are holding the infrastructure bill hostage. Unlike Sinema and Manchin, they don't have an existential reason to do what they're doing. It's pure tactics, it's not going to work, and it's going to further empower the right (who will be able to complain about "do nothing" Democrats).

If you can get people to the left of Sinema and Manchin elected in Arizona and West Virginia, do it. If you can't, you have to go with what they are willing to support, which will be more and better than what any Republican would support.

My whole schtick is: get the good shit done that can be got done. If you want better shit done, first you have to build the coalition in Congress that will vote for it.

Expand full comment

Holy crap! A post written specifically to annoy ME!

I am absolutely not kidding when I say that my immediate reaction is to feel honored.

I haven't even read the post yet. I see there are already 161 comments, so apparently it's annoyed others as well (or perhaps provoked wild applause, I suppose that's more likely).

OK, I gots some reading to do here, but alas the next couple of hours have to be devoted to my day job ... (I did already click the "like" button though.)

Expand full comment
Sep 30, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

We need some communists in this comment section—everyone taking as a given that our electoral system is worth engaging with is giving me hives. Dual power sloganeering is obnoxious in dank meme groups but would be legitimately radical discourse here.

Expand full comment

Agree that "blue no matter who," which used to be my own philosophy, is counter-productive for anyone hoping for alignment of thought in congress. What worries me about this situation and the pressure on Joe Manchin is just plain old stupidity. They are clinging to their barely there majority. Both are in states that really want republicans. Arizona will be red before too long. The pendulum is swinging away from the left, at least in government. So is the idea to get this passed just before the red wave? Isn't democracy supposed to be about accepting different points of view and not pressuring or bullying people into going along with something? That is what I thought it was. But I see authoritarianism rising in its place on the left. I have even seen her called a racist by a major publication, just for disagreeing. I could never belong to any party that went along with this kind of thing, not in a country with so many different kinds of people. That is why I am not longer a democrat.

Expand full comment

Sorry one last quibble:

I think it's hard to make the point in 2020, even if you're progressive, that Democratic foreign policy is better than Republican foreign policy.

We don't know the counterfactual, but I think Trump's foreign policy was likely better than what Hillary 'We came, we saw, he died' Clinton's - who was sabre rattling against Russia and planning for 'humanitarian corridors' in Syria - would have been.

Remember that James Clapper and the generals loved Obama. And per Glenn Greenwald's point, there's no evidence that Democrats aren't any less enmeshed in the national security/military/contractor blob than anyone else. Wasn't the whole point of Assange that he pointed out that war in Afghanistan had become a cynical grift during Obama's presidency?

tl/dr; Foreign policy should evaluated on a politician-by-politician basis, not by party.

Expand full comment

Good post, though I wonder about your assertion that the party's gone right. I would have said that's true up through, say, Clinton or George W. administrations, but that it's gone left since then, particularly on economics, and one reason Biden has been so good, overall, is precisely because the party's been trending left. He and the party leadership have been responsive to the impact that some of these big primary wins (AOC, e.g.) have had on the dangers of totally ignoring the left wing of the party. I think there's some fear among the centrist establishment, though not enough, that if they totally ignore the left base they'll get seriously primaried. Isn't that the strategy? One problem with Sinema and Manchin is that it's not at all obvious that a more left wing candidate would be able to win in those states, so it's a less plausible threat to them in particular.

Expand full comment

This last election took a lot out of me. I'm obviously a radical feminist, as I've demonstrated in previous comments. But every time I expressed discomfort with Biden's - let's call it "weirdness" - around women and young girls - if I even dared to suggest that *maybe* Tara Reade isn't lying - I was accused by even my female friends of "not seeing the whole picture" and "basically supporting Trump." Listen, I would never vote for Donald Trump. Ever. And I ended up voting for Biden, purely out of guilt. But a betrayal of my ethics does haunt me.

Expand full comment

I like this newsletter but I'm by no means a FdB stan. I disagree with a lot of his arguments (including large parts of this!) and even sometimes how he makes them. He is not perfect.

But that moment after reading the headline, thinking "is he writing an entire piece to annoy MarkS?", and then clicking open and reading the sub heading is exactly why I'll keep paying to subscribe as long as he keeps writing. Best laugh I'm going to have today.

Expand full comment

I'll caveat my post with the note that I always vote Democrat, but I'm a bit of a neoliberal shill and used to be more so. (Now I'm an anti-imperialist neoliberal shill, because that makes a ton of sense!)

I really want to say that it makes sense for hard Lefties to vote third-party when faced with, say, Obama v. Romney, where Romney is way too conservative but would have been a perfectly competent leader. The marginal difference between Romney and Obama would not be so great that one couldn't reasonably decide to accept the long-term gain of increasing the power of the Left over the short-term loss of having Romney in office.

But in actuality, there are two problems with this attitude: one structural, one contextual. The former: the Supreme Court has such outsized importance in our legal system and the changes to it are so permanent that a vote for a Romney doesn't just determine how the next four years of the government will go but the next thirty. It's a stupid way to run a country, but that's what we've got.

The latter: the Republican Party has thrown itself over the cliff of anti-governance entirely. Sadly, the marginal difference between the two parties has grown massively, not because the Democrats have become that much better (though Biden's labor appointments and agenda are just about enough to turn this union rep into a single-issue voter--i love him SO MUCH), but because the Republicans are effing nuts these days.

So to answer the implied question of Freddie's "Perhaps there is a better way" statement... I don't think there is. A voting pattern that empowers people like Sinema and Manchin does the least harm to the country. Everything is terrible and is going to be terrible for a good long while.

Expand full comment
founding

I know it’s not a satisfying answer given recent outcomes, but the only option is to fight it out in the primaries. It didn’t work for the presidency, but sometimes it works for Congress (AOC is the most famous recent example). If you could go back in time and show Arizona primary voters the future, things might have gone differently.

For the presidency, Bernie has won states—it’s not impossible. The left has to persuade enough voters, and so far we have not. That’s not to say it’s a fair fight, but it’s the only fight we could ever win. ‘First past the post’ means a protest in the general will always fail.

Sinema benefits from the fact that voters assume women and minorities are more liberal than they actually are (because most voters use shortcuts to judge candidates). I’ve seen research on this for female and Black candidates, and the same probably applies to LGBTQ candidates.

One data point: I recently explained to my wife that Manchin and Sinema are holding up the infrastructure deal, and my wife furrowed her brow and said, “I thought Sinema was bisexual.”

I said yeah, she is, but she sucks. After some discussion, we decided her deal is that she loves attention and possibly has a personality disorder.

Expand full comment