Clinton & Obama Gave Us Trump

when the far-right party and the center-right party both move right, guess what direction the country goes in?

lol

I have a new piece in The New York Times about superhero movies. Check it out.

Labeling Bill Clinton the “Me Too” president who steals Republican ideas because he lacks his own, GOP Sen. Bob Dole said Saturday that Americans will not be fooled again when they go to the polls in November.

That’s a quote from the Tampa Bay Times, June 2nd, 1996. Aside from the creepy flash-forward of combining “Bill Clinton” and “Me Too,” it says pretty much everything that needs to be said about Clinton and the party he led: by the end of his first term, his conservative Republican opponent in the presidential election was complaining, accurately, that Clinton had moved so far to the right that he had appropriated the Republican agenda. There was no more rightward space for Dole to occupy. Dole’s goofy tax plan looks, in hindsight, like the work of a man who could not find a way to separate himself from a Democratic president who had pressed a law & order crime politics based on mass incarceration, criminalized gay marriage, gutted the social safety net, signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, enforced ruthless child-killing sanctions on Iraq, and on and on. Bill Clinton was the apotheosis of an American “left” that fought the American right by capitulating to it on almost every conceivable issue.

There is, of course, no equivalent dynamic in the Republican party. It’s literally unthinkable that we might be in a position where, in 2032, Democratic challenger Gavin Newsom complains that GOP incumbent Brian Kemp has moved so far to the left that he has no space in which to run. And this reflects something that right-leaning Democrats simply refuse to understand about politics that the Republicans, as batty as they are, intuitively understand: if one side pulls the center hard in one direction, while the other side merely chases that new center, then the country heads in that direction even when the center-chasing party wins elections. And this indeed is the story of the past thirty or forty years of American politics; because Bill Clinton actively and intentionally moved the country right and Barack Obama was at best indifferent towards the rightward lurch, conservatives made up great ground even as Democrats have held the presidency for 20 years of the last 32 years. If, like me, you think the purpose of winning elections is to move our political system in your preferred direction, there has been very little meaningful choice. The argument has never been that the two parties are exactly the same. The argument is that both parties have been right-wing parties, leaving no left-wing choices.

I never know what to make of right-leaning Democrats here - can it possibly seem healthy for a country to have a far-right party and a center-right party, even if you’re a center-right figure? The bad structural tendencies of such a scenario seem obvious to me.

Matt Yglesias seems to do nothing these days but write paeans to the more aggressively right-lurching Democratic presidents of his youth. Here’s the latest. He conspicuously does not address the above dynamic, the dynamic that saw Clinton and Dole running on more or less the same platform, I suspect because he knows it would badly undermine his position, the usual neoliberal one. (For the record, the tendency of neoliberals to fuss about what that term means, and the woke tendency to refuse to adopt a consistent name for their own politics, stem from identical motivations.) Yglesias says, in common with decades of conservative economists, that the best good is done by tearing down almost all of the regulations and worker protections in the American system to maximize economic growth, which can then be redistributed to address all of the human misery you’ve created with that program to destroy regulations and the labor movement. As many people have pointed out, this is an inherently unbalanced equation: when you deregulate and dismantle unions, you will have the support of conservatives; when you then try to redistribute, you won’t, and you’re left just doing the devil’s business for them with nothing in return. That is the argument about political economy: even if we granted that the theoretical neoliberal bargain was a good idea, neoliberals cannot produce the redistributive element.

Yglesias disputes that neoliberalism has a political problem this by saying that Obama and Clinton were more popular than Joe Biden. (He also tries to rationalize away Al Gore’s failures, despite the fact that Gore was so inept as a candidate that he couldn’t win his home state of Tennessee, where he was part of a political dynasty, despite the fact that Clinton carried the state twice.) This is so specious on its face that I can’t believe Yglesias actually thinks it’s a strong argument. There are of course all kinds of dynamics that contribute to a given presidential candidate’s success and popularity that have nothing to do with policy. (I would argue, in fact, that policy is not the biggest part of success in presidential elections, which is buttressed by the inconvenient fact that swing voters simply are not political moderates as defined in the Beltway.) In particular, I believe you may have heard a thing or two about Joe Biden’s age lately! Looking at Biden’s recent polling struggles and concluding that the problem lies in his onshoring efforts and stances on green energy does not make a lot of sense to me, especially given that I doubt more than 5% of Americans know the first thing about his industrial policy at all. His problem is that he’s an old man who looks and sounds like an old man, and Americans care about vigor and looking presidential and all that jazz. Joe Biden’s approval rating in 2024 is not a public referendum on neoliberalism, sorry. That isn’t credible.

By the way, there’s this:

Yglesias says “Faster growth is also the thing that will make it easier to sustain Social Security and Medicare.” But it’s one of the most-discussed dynamics of macroeconomics in the history of the field, the fact that American growth started slowing in the second half of the 20th century and hasn’t returned to the levels previously seen. Longtime readers are aware of my gloss on what’s going on here: despite what most people think, we’re now in a half-century-plus long period of technological stagnation where improvements to information technology, as impressive as they seem, simply cannot match the massive practical improvements driven by advances seen in the preceding hundred years - indoor plumbing, electrification, the internal combustion engine, germ theory, modern manufacturing technologies and principles, flight, vaccination…. Any one of those developments, I would argue, is more consequential than all of the technological growth of the 21st century. And even if you don’t agree, the fact that growth has slowed significantly over time means that the growth-above-all mindset has a clear vulnerability. What happens when growth slows to the point that you can’t expect to generate enough new wealth to redistribute without pain in the upper classes? What happens when you actually have to acknowledge that the only way to help those at the bottom survive is to really take from those at the top? I’m very comfortable with that. Some people aren’t. Either way, gradually declining growth rates mean that at some point you have to confront zero-sum choices.

Yglesias allows that the decade-long soft job market that unfolded under Obama, which he and his administration did almost nothing to address, was a “substantive failure.” I should hope so! After all, the collective negative humanitarian costs of that job market were truly staggering. But why did that failure occur? It occurred because the people empowered by the political model Yglesias is championing had no interest in stimulating the economy to fix the slack labor market. The people who love slashing regulations and destroying the labor movement don’t like using government funds for stimulus! Who did you think you were working with, exactly? Did you think that you’d rope in congressional Republicans for your deregulate-then-redistribute scheme, and they’d actually play ball with the half of that they don’t like? Did you think John Boehner was going to help you keep that bargain? My god. This is what we mean by political economy, not the short-term vicissitudes of presidential popularity but the basic underlying structural elements of the bargain Yglesias prefers. He still hasn’t addressed the basic question. Hey Matt: in a country in which the reactionary party is very happy to deregulate and crush unions, but is very much not happy to participate in redistribution for those who are struggling, how can you have so much faith that you’ll consistently be able to pull off both halves of the equation? Isn’t it much more likely that you’ll just get deregulation and a gutting of unions with no redistribution? What’s hard to understand about this?

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Jon Chait is, if anything, an even more vociferous supporter of having a two-right-wing-party system in the United States; in almost any other country, his policy positions would land him comfortably in the conservative party. He has advice for Kamala Harris. This advice amounts to standard-issue Clintonism, politically - “When they go right, we go right!” Substantively, it involves repudiating Joe Biden’s muscular interventions into the economy, along with some other vague argle bargle about how you have to ostentatiously hate anyone to the left of David Broder, as Chait himself does. Instead, he thinks Harris should (of course) revert to triangulation and once again pursue an American political system comprised of two right-wing parties. In order to bolster this argument, Chait makes a lot of unsupportable arguments and misleading observations.

It is not yet clear if Harris or her allies recognize the full scale of the political devastation she actually inherits. Gallup measured President Biden’s approval rating at under 36 percent before he ended his reelection campaign, lower than any other president at this point in their term going back decades. A Pew survey pegged him at 32 percent, a level just a few points higher than Donald Trump’s standing after January 6, 2021.

This devastation has been almost fully reversed into a coin toss election that if anything Harris now leads, in a matter of weeks, without any conspicuous repudiation of Biden like Chait wants. (Psst, I’ve got a secret: presidential elections are not about policy.) The immediate gains of a policy-vague Democrat who isn’t a million years old seems to cut against Chait’s most essential claim.

It is a point of dogma advanced for a well-defined political project to change the Democratic Party. The operation to repudiate the Obama legacy has been spread by a lavishly financed propaganda campaign, and its precepts have hardened into conventional wisdom. It brought the Democrats to the brink of catastrophe, from which they have pulled back in the nick of time — without quite understanding, however, how they got there in the first place.

The catastrophe already happened, in 2016. The usual suspects told the Democrats that they should abandon the working class by embracing a neoliberal agenda and turning the party into a vehicle for affluent brownstone liberals. This was all made explicit when Chuck Schumer said the quiet part out loud, saying in 2016 “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Whoops! It turns out that after Bill Clinton shanked labor by passing NAFTA, casting millions of people into economic devastation in crumbling Rust Belt towns, and Obama spent his presidency doing nothing for those people so that he could better embody the tony cosmopolitanism of advisors like Jon Favreau and Penny Pritzker, the people in those crumbling Rust Belt towns weren’t too keen on rewarding the Democrats with their votes. They watched their communities slip into poverty and addiction thanks to a “pro-growth” economic plan and total indifference from big shot Democrats, who like Schumer were eager to trade blue-collar voters in favor of the upper crust. Trotting out Bill Clinton’s wife as the candidate and having her treat her campaign as her own personal Eras tour, stuffed with self-mythologizing and never-ending celebrity glitz, was the icing on the cake.

Now conservatives have a six-three majority on the Supreme Court that may last for decades, among many other leftovers of the Trump years that will haunt us. That was the catastrophe, Mr. Chait. And the party adjusted because that was what had brought it to ruin - not Joe Biden’s willingness to return to New Deal liberalism but the Clinton-Obama indifference to any American citizens without fancy college degrees. When your political movement pulls off a political debacle of the scale of 2016, you pay a price, and you should. Stop whining.

Obama was elected and reelected as president by decisive margins.

Obama was elected in 2008 because he followed a president who had dragged us into Iraq, fiddled while thousands of people drowned in New Orleans, and utterly failed to predict or prevent the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression; he also ran as a figure of transformational ambitions, hope and change and all that, and then very conspicuously governed as one of the most timid and anxious presidents in American history. He was able to survive in 2012 because we largely pulled out of Iraq (which we would have done anyway) and because following 2009 the economy could hardly do anything but improve. Also, a lot of Americans secretly harbor prejudice against Mormons, which didn’t hurt.

Most people remember Obamacare, though few realize what a massive conglomeration of reforms were encompassed in that single law. It turned the market for individual insurance, which was small and virtually useless for anybody with less than perfect health, into a subsidized and regulated exchange that provides affordable coverage to more than 20 million people. It expanded Medicaid to cover an additional 25 million Americans. It closed the “doughnut hole” in Medicare’s prescription-drug coverage, which had forced millions of senior citizens to shell out thousands of dollars for their medicine.

Obamacare was a disaster in a very direct way: it did not establish a legal right to medical coverage, as is the law in more than half of the world’s countries, and by instead adopting a piecemeal reform it made it even harder to get an actual functioning medical system in place. Almost 30 million Americans still don’t have health insurance. Among those who are nominally covered, millions are underinsured, as Obamacare’s actual regulatory power over what insurance has to cover is tattered and insufficient. (You see, Matt, sometimes you need regulation, otherwise the programs you do pass are toothless and broken.) Saying that someone has coverage because they have an insurance card in their pocket is the height of sophistry, when what really matters is what healthcare can be practically accessed. Democrats outside of the Bernie Sanders wing have no interest in shoring up that huge weakness in Obama’s law. Meanwhile, as Chait is certainly aware, a number of states have steadfastly refused Medicaid expansion, and the uninsured and poor in those states are fucked - because, again, the only healthcare reform that is truly transformative is a legally-guaranteed right to care.

Why doesn’t Obamacare involve such a right? Probably because as Obama himself bragged, his healthcare policy was cribbed from one of the most influential far-right policy organizations in the United States, the Heritage Foundation. I’m gonna tell ya, I wouldn’t be thrilled if Democrats started stealing gun control policy from the NRA, either!

Obama inherited the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression and, in response, passed a $787 billion stimulus, which was one of the largest enacted in American history, almost equal in size to the stimulus in the New Deal. Obama nearly doubled its size with an additional $700 billion, though that spending was pulled out of Congress in small chunks that attracted little attention.

… which, as Yglesias concedes, was entirely insufficient to save the country from a weak labor market that lasted the better part of a decade, leaving many millions of Americans unable to find work that would allow them to feed their families. Not impressed.

What people most remember about Obama’s record, other than Obamacare, is that he bailed out Wall Street. Except he didn’t. They’re remembering the bailout that occurred in October 2008 under the Bush administration. The “Obama bailout” has been repeated so often it has become canon in the public memory — for example, Semafor’s recent claim that “Barack Obama and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner bailed out the bottom lines of banks and financial institutions.” In truth, Obama’s main contribution to the Bush-era Wall Street bailout was to use the leftover funds to rescue the auto industry. The move not only saved the industry, its suppliers, and quite likely the entire upper Midwest from economic collapse, it also saved the U.S. government $100 billion in pension bailouts and health subsidies it would have had to shell out had it let Detroit go bankrupt.

A bailout that was necessary because NAFTA devastated domestic manufacturing, leaving the industrial base entirely at the whims of the auto industry, which labor leaders had warned Bill Clinton would happen. (A growth-maximizing strategy can’t help people in those locales that can’t take advantage of the growing, you see, but details details.)

allowing gay people to serve openly in the military

Obama waited until it was absolutely politically safe to declare his support for gay marriage, which is kind of the whole problem with the “move slowly and never piss anybody off” approach to politics - you leave groups like gay people bereft of support and hope.

Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs once referred dismissively to “the professional left,” reflecting the administration’s notion that their criticisms did not express the views of a major voting constituency but instead that of a small clique of progressive elites they felt free to ignore.

Again, contrast with the Republicans, who not only don’t repudiate their right wing in this way, but actively court that right wing, understanding that in politics the extremes move the center. To repeat myself, if you have one party that constantly caters to its extreme right flank, and one party that constantly forsakes its extreme left flank, where does that leave the country? If the Democrats abjure the loony left while Republicans pamper the radical right, the country will inevitable change to be more like the radical right wants it to be. Not complicated.

Other [criticisms] were related to his use of drones to strike suspected terrorists.

Which, in hindsight, was a humanitarian nightmare for no positive gains whatsoever. Nobody even pretends to care about terrorism now, not even Republicans. 23 years after 9/11 there has been no meaningful attacks on America soil by terrorists, reflecting the fact that Al Qaeda took advantage of a unique vulnerability in our civilian aviation system and now have no such vulnerabilities to exploit. So Obama blew up a lot of weddings in order to pursue a purely symbolic assault on an enemy that no one prioritizes anymore, for good reason.

Obama is also incorrectly remembered for embracing austerity in a series of painful budget negotiations with Republicans in Congress. In 2010, Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for extending a payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. (Bernie Sanders made a famous long speech denouncing this deal, but here the Sanders position of raising taxes on the rich faster would have meant more austerity.) Obama then later tried, unsuccessfully, to strike a deal with Republicans to reduce the long-term deficit, while also agreeing to onerous automatic spending caps. But these efforts were not a pivot to austerity; rather they were an attempt to neutralize fears of a long-term debt crisis to unlock even more short-term stimulus.

But this is exactly the problem with Obama: his lunatic desire to be seen as the most reasonable man in all situations, his clear fixation on being the Adult in the Room in Chief, left him constantly negotiating with people who were never going to negotiate with him. Again and again and again, he reached out to congressional Republicans in a completely misguided effort to reach a supposedly pragmatic adult compromise. This is another big problem with neoliberals: they fetishize compromise in and of itself, to the detriment of their party’s interests, because they think that’s how Serious Politics is done.

The hostile environment in which Obama fought for his agenda was forgotten when he left office. That the context changed is itself evidence of his success — his critics’ hysterical arguments that the U.S. was heading into hyperinflationary fiscal crisis or that Obamacare would collapse have been so discredited that they’ve disappeared completely. Now, though, he has been relegated to a mere appendage of the Reagan era with a 2022 Times story asserting that the neoliberal model of Reagan and Thatcher had been the “guiding mind-set” for both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

One of the most annoying tropes in Obama defense is the tendency to insist that he had never represented himself as a transformational figure, that he was always a cautious incrementalist. This is horseshit. Go back and watch his 2008 speeches; there’s a reason that “Hope and Change” were the defining cliches of his presidential campaign. All those people didn’t make out in that park in Chicago in November 2008 for no reason. I saw a speech Obama gave at Wesleyan University when he was in the teeth of the primary fight against Hillary Clinton, and he did little else than pledge to be a transformational president. When you tell people you’re going to achieve radical change, they have a right to be pissed off when you don’t even try!

(Setting aside Obama as the matter of core contention here, is the suggestion that Bill “the era of big government is over” Clinton was somehow not a part of the neoliberal tradition? This Bill Clinton?)

When Donald Trump surprisingly won the 2016 election, pundits widely predicted that he would erase Obama’s legacy.

Trump’s election is not some parenthetical in the Obama story. Obama muscled aside Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in 2016, probably to satisfy some quid pro quo with the Clintonite machine. Joe Biden absolutely would have beaten Trump in 2016; he was four years younger than in 2020, when he won, and enjoyed good favorability ratings, unlike the candidate Obama anointed. Any generic Democrat would have beaten Trump. It took nominating the historically unpopular Hillary Clinton to screw that race up. That’s on the whole rotten apparatus of the party, which cared more about maintaining the standing of its dynasties and navigating its bizarre and toxic internal dynamics than defeating Trump. Nobody bears more blame for that world-historic blunder than Obama, and yet he has paid almost no price reputationally for committing it.

Biden knew Clinton could lose because the public harbored a deep distrust of her personally dating back to the 1990s, and even though Obama had exploited these same suspicions to defeat her in 2008, he seemed to forget how vulnerable that made her.

Very dumb! But, again, understandable when you realize that Obama’s principle ambition has always been to be Mr. Reasonable, Mr. Wise Wonk Sage. Anointing Hillary probably looked like great symmetry to him after he had snatched the nomination from her in 2008. Unfortunately, it turns out that swing voters in Michigan and Ohio didn’t care much about symmetry and did care a lot about Hillary’s arrogance and the consequences of the political dynasty she belonged to.

Obama made winning elections look so inevitable that Democrats started thinking they no longer needed the precautions that had enabled those victories in the first place.

For the record, this is just revisionist history; Obama meaningfully struggled in the Mitt Romney election. Headline from this Pew poll: “Romney’s Strong Debate Performance Erases Obama’s Lead.” 2012 wasn’t some walk in the park.

Her strategy to fend off Sanders involved partially co-opting his left-wing economic platform and outflanking him on race and gender with the explicit identity-politics rhetoric that Obama had avoided, exciting activists and left-wing academics by using phrases like “systemic racism” and “intersectional.”

Trump’s 2016 victory, they believed, was a long-brewing backlash against the neoliberal regime.

This belief is hard to rebut, largely because it’s true.

The economy had grown too slowly because neoliberalism placed too much weight on holding down inflation. “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” argued a 2020 Hewlett strategy memo urging governments to increase their deficit spending “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

I guess this is supposed to be grimly ironic given the inflationary problems of the last few years, but then again we know that supply chain disruptions are seriously underweighted as causes of inflation and that Covid, the war in Russia, and instability in the Middle East wreaked havoc with supply lines that are far more fragile than we wanted to believe. And stopping a catastrophic shock to the economy in its tracks, as had to be done during Covid, allows for a little overshooting of targets. Erring in the other direction would have been disastrous for the country and ensured Republican victory.

The parties did agree on free trade, and they often overlooked the harm it did to communities that relied on manufacturing.

Which was especially prevalent and meaningful in the Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which Hillary famously marginalized in her campaign (not sexy enough) and which handed the presidency to Donald Trump, and this entire discussion lies in the shadow of that failure. Robby Mook should be in jail.

The premise that they have been joined in a neoliberal consensus can’t explain why Republicans and Democrats have fought in increasingly vicious terms over everything, especially the role of government.

This is strange. The argument is not that there is a permanent Democrat-Republican neoliberal consensus per se. 21st-century Republicans are too unstable to maintain a permanent consensus about anything. The argument is that there is an elite neoliberal consensus, that the apparatus of power is neoliberal to its core. The Republicans have devolved into a bizarre protofascist lumpen party, driven not by any coherent ideology but by fealty to one man, Donald Trump. When he dies, the current version of the party dies with him. But the GOP still hosts many elites who are committed to the vision of deregulation and destroying unions, and so when Democrats - who have been, in my lifetime, the actual doctrinaire neoliberal party - say “Let’s destroy the labor movement and demolish regulations, and then maybe some redistribution please?,” the Republicans say “Sure,” and then participate in the pro-capitalist part but not the redistribution part. But I’m repeating myself.

The surge of anti-neoliberal thought transformed conventional wisdom within the elite ranks of the progressive movement. It rendered Obama’s legacy an orphan and created the expectation that the Democratic Party was racing into a bold new era in which the political and fiscal constraints that he had operated within had disappeared completely.

The conventional wisdom and Obama’s legacy and expectations within the Democratic Party may have changed, but that rhetorical evolution has had very, very limited expression in policy. What makes Biden’s domestic policy record exciting, despite its modest achievements, is that it actually amounts to a real pragmatic step against the neoliberal consensus enacted in policy. The inability of all of this anti-neoliberal sentiment to actual cohere into a further-left Democratic party is a vestige of my broad point here: neoliberalism is the philosophy of elites, and elites can opportunistically exploit the supposed trade-off between deregulation and redistribution to ensure that we get the former and not the latter. Which leaves us, again, with a far-right party and a center-right party and an inevitable destructive drift to the right over time even when Democrats win elections.

Economist Brad DeLong, a former Clinton-era Treasury staffer, captured the defeated mood of the party’s deposed center-left vanguard. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong tweeted. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

It’s worth noting that, in addition to being a Democrat who has voiced far more contempt for those to his left than those to his right, Delong was one of the most aggressive in ridiculing anyone who asked hard questions and tried to count the costs of globalization. One of the architects of the 1990s bipartisan financial deregulatory effort that made a lot of bad stuff possible, Delong has been famously aggressive in attacking anyone who lamented the negative social costs of jobs being outsourced; as I pointed out in 2016, this is easy when you’re one of the people who knows their own job will never be outsourced, even though I’m sure Berkeley could hire a Chinese grad student who could match 80% of Delong’s output for 20% of the cost. What’s good for the goose, professor!

Obama’s personality and identity created an authentic wellspring of excitement in the Democratic voting base.

It’s hard to say what Obama’s reputation in the base is like, given that the media that reports such things is overwhelmingly made up of Obama Democrats. I’m sure he has a good deal of support, but it’s also true that Obama’s reputation is based on the opinions of Brown graduates who drop the kids off at Kumon before they go to Pilates.

But, flush with victory over his more progressive rivals, Biden made a peculiar decision. Rather than pivot to the center, as nominees traditionally do, he instead pivoted away from it. Biden agreed to a “unity task force” to adjust his platform in the direction of Warren and Sanders. The new Biden platform endorsed the “recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities,” a rollback of immigration enforcement, jobs programs like those effectively used during the New Deal, and other elements that borrowed from his vanquished rivals. He proceeded to staff his administration with officials loyal to Warren and Sanders.

Because decades of total neoliberal control of the Democratic party had left our country with two right-wing parties and with Donald Trump in the White House. The Hillary Clinton approach of “fiscal politics of the UChicago economics department, social politics of the UChicago faculty lounge” had failed utterly in 2016. The party had broken, Obama had stood around with his hands in the pockets of his Costco khakis “Well folks, I think we all need to slow down!” while the Republicans promised a new Reich, everyone could see that simply giving rich people whatever they wanted while twerking on the campaign trail was a failed approach to Democratic politics. So people changed. That’s what’s progressive about progressives, after all. They change.

Both Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias strike me as Rockefeller Republicans, but since they signed the card at the DMV they get to make their own statements about what the Democrats should do. I’m not much of a Democrat either. But the broader anti-left tendency they represent within the Democratic party leaves the party bereft of direction. In due time Trump will die (inshallah) and the GOP will reconsolidate around some rapacious fiscal ur-conservative who’s smart enough not to use slurs and isn’t significantly cognitively impaired. Ideally if you’re a Republican, he’d be Hispanic, but even if he’s just another white guy he’ll be a white guy who doesn’t offend elite niceties regarding race and gender, has never grabbed a woman by the pussy. He’ll say the right things with the right lingo while promising to gut the social safety net, and a lot of well-heeled Democrats will quietly move over to that camp in pursuit of their own best interests - that is, in pursuit of lower taxes, which will then cause humanitarian devastation with attendant slashing of social programs. Many people hunger for a genteel and respectable conservative leader, the devil with a pretty face, including a lot of people who wouldn’t be caught dead voting Republican right now. It’s déclassé, you see. When it stops appearing low-rent, I assure you that a lot of people who stuffed themselves into Obama fundraisers will switch teams.

The Democrats can do one of two things. They can become an actual left-wing party, which means no longer pandering to the TNR welfare mother cover wing of the coalition and instead reconstituting their base in the working classes, who are large in number and who cannot achieve financial stability without government intervention. The working classes are also multiracial and multicultural, despite the way the elite media has worked to cast them as all-white. (Deindustrialization is treated as a “white issue” despite the fact that it devastated the Black middle class; go drive around the hollowed-out auto industry towns up there and see what kind of people live in them.) They can devote their political efforts to revitalizing the labor movement, reversing the way that Democrat and Republican collusion resulted in essentially criminalizing unions in the latter 20th century. Doing so would be morally right and politically wise, as labor has always enjoyed the natural organizing capacity to make a political party strong. Or the Democrats can simply slouch back into being the party of the affluent and further abandon the parts of the country where poor people can’t get out of poverty by going to Stanford. They can battle for the elite sensibilities Yglesias and Chait represent, moving back to the place they were in 1996, when no one could perceive any distance between the Republican and the Democratic candidate. It will not surprise you to hear that I suspect they’ll do the latter. But I hold out hope that the profound failures of the Clinton-Obama center-right movement are not forgotten.

Yglesias coined the term “pundit’s fallacy,” which is funny because he’s relentlessly guilty of it, thinking that his own preferred policies are the true political winners, and Chait is guilty too. I’m afraid that I don’t know that a Democratic return to the working class would succeed; the wealthy don’t want to spread their wealth to address the systemic depravations of capitalism, and in a society where some people have votes and no money and others have votes and money, you can guess whose will is done. But I knew who and what I am. Most countries have more than two political parties, and I suppose that Yglesias and Chait and I are suffering from the same problem - forced into a club with members we’d rather not socialize with. In a more sensible system, we’d have a bunch of options, and I could be in a far-left party, and they could be in a center-right party, and we’d all try to pull the rope in our preferred direction. But that’s all that politics is - pulling the rope. That’s it. You pull as hard as you can in the direction you want to go, or else you lose. And what I’m here to tell you is that the long era of Democrats fretfully following the center of the rope where it moves, while Republicans gleefully pull as hard as they can to the right, has failed. That vision of politics has failed, must fail, and will fail again.