Breakfast Links/Open Thread, 11/5/17

Filed in National by on November 5, 2017

If you read only one story today about the Democratic Party civil war, make it this essay by Andrew O’Hehir of Salon. He is firmly in the Jason330 School of finding the Democrats lost, hopeless and likely to blow the ’18 midterms, but I agree with him that this split is not about Hillary and Bernie, and that both sides in the fight hold unrealistic ideas about the party’s future path.

In recent polling a majority of white people said whites are discriminated against. A black writer talked to several white people to try to determine why. Summation of his findings: White people are strange and confusing. I can’t disagree.

The Caddyshack view, that golf courses and cemeteries are the biggest wastes of prime real estate, never stops being true. The owners of the former Three Little Bakers course in Pike Creek have launched a new assault on the deed restrictions that keep the land open. Lex Wilson of the News Journal has the details.

I try to ignore the daily crop of Trump hypocrisy stories because they’re so numerous and ultimately not important. But this one stands out: Trump is hiring 70 foreign workers because hey, watch this drive.

There’s more out there. Add anything you find interesting, but seriously, read that O’Hehir piece.

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  1. jason330 says:
    November 5, 2017 at 10:48 am

    Alby is right about that Salon article by O’Hehir. There can’t be Democratic Party unity, because for all intents and purposes, there is no Democratic Party.

    Both sides in the Democratic Party’s current faction fight, as I see it, are in denial about the true nature and scope of the problem. Sanders-style progressives long to purge the old guard and build anew, rebranding the entire party as a social-democratic enterprise dedicated to single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage and higher taxes on the rich. Clintonite moderates, meanwhile, maintain that the Trump presidency, Republican hegemony in Washington and widespread social discord are rogue events that perhaps didn’t really happen and in any case do not reflect on their strategy of policy-wonk triangulation or their record of repeated and humiliating defeat.
    Both responses are essentially utopian: They rest on the premise that the Democratic Party is still a functioning political organization and that the United States is still a functioning democracy. We ought to know better by now. It does no good to pretend that the Democratic (and democratic) crisis — which is not just ideological and political but also moral, philosophical, financial, institutional and other adjectives besides — does not exist or isn’t important. Numerous social-media observers have already suggested that Donna Brazile should not have aired her party’s dirty secrets because we face a national emergency and need party unity at a time like this, etc.
    Nonsense: What unity? And for that matter, what party? The Demo-catastrophe cannot be swept under the carpet in the name of winning a House majority in 2018 (which isn’t going to happen anyway), although that’s a fair description of the party’s official strategy. That way lies madness, or at least the form of liberal derangement represented by Jon Ossoff, the guy who spent 30 million bucks, more money than any congressional candidate in history, to get exactly the same number of votes as the previous Democrat to be defeated in his suburban Atlanta district. (I was angry about it at the time and am angrier now: The demoralizing effect of the Ossoff debacle will have a long tail.)
    Now here we are, in the still-unbelievable conditions of 2017, with an erratic, vindictive and thoroughly incompetent president who finished second in the voting and is widely despised by the public. He sits atop a hollowed-out zombie version of the Republican Party, which has forged an especially noxious and nonsensical coalition of predatory capitalism and resurgent white nationalism. (I can hear my colleague Chauncey DeVega reminding me that that particular combination has a name.) That party’s base of support is nowhere close to a majority, yet somehow it controls all three branches of the federal government and 38 (or so) of the 50 states.
    How in God’s name did that happen? Well, we’ve all spent too much time blathering on about that and coming up with halfway plausible explanations: It was sexism and Russian meddling and racial resentment and “economic anxiety” and the marginalization of the white working class. It was a flood-tide of right-wing fake news and Jim Comey’s October surprise (remember, we were supposed to hate him before we were supposed to love him). It was voter suppression and depressed turnout and bearded millennial snowflakes who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. Given how flukish the 2016 election was, it’s fair to say that all those factors played a role, and that if any one of them could be adjusted just a little, the outcome might have been different.
    Even at their most grandiose and Putin-enriched, those are granular explanations of what happened last November — a uniquely traumatic and damaging event, to be sure — which completely ignore the near-total meltdown of the two-party system that got us there in the first place. Hillary Clinton’s bizarre defeat-in-victory was an event so unlikely it seems like a metaphor. So does the fact that the Democratic Party was so broke and so cynical it literally sold its soul for rent money. But those things happened. Until we face them honestly there will be no Resistance, no victory, no political renewal and no democracy.

  2. Dave says:
    November 5, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    So it was nothing by itself. Rather all of the above. Lingchi. And so here the party is, with 2018 looming and most of its factions continue to play “my way or the highway.” Gone are the grand coalitions (even if in name only). Now it’s tear it down and start all over as if that is a realistic option.

    2018 is here and the only apparent leader of the party is not even a registered Democrat. When it’s time to pull the lever next year, all you have is the anti-Trump meme. Honestly, it’s pretty depressing and I’m not even a Democrat.

    I’ve been thinking that for the first time in my life, I’ll just stay home, but then I realize I have to vote for Carper to avoid any more losses in the Senate. But, then I think, what’s the point?

  3. Alby says:
    November 5, 2017 at 1:17 pm

    The energy around Bernie is around his platform, not Bernie. Elizabeth Warren attracts the same enthusiasm, but for some reason her public approval rating is not nearly so high as his.

    The only way forward that doesn’t involve going back to ground zero is convincing the old guard that they must embrace the more progressive path. Sadly, they just don’t have it in them. They loves them the sweet life that corporate cash brings. A lot of Republicans make the cash first, then go into politics. Democrats tend rather to go into politics to make the cash.

  4. Homesteader says:
    November 6, 2017 at 9:09 am

    Wbo do you guys consider the best examples of “old guard” Democrats, besides the Clintons?

  5. Alby says:
    November 6, 2017 at 9:56 am

    Carper.

  6. El Somnambulo says:
    November 6, 2017 at 9:58 am

    And Ed Freel. Freel is the guy who decided who the D’s would prioritize through the coordinated campaign. If you were progressive, you weren’t prioritized.

    In fact, what bothers me most about the Carper takeover of the Delaware Democratic Party isn’t so much that it meant the Third Way domination of the Party, but rather that candidates who did not fit that mold were routinely dismissed by the self-described adults.

    In addition, Carper and Freel created John Carney and Sean Barney, neither of whom would ever have had political careers were it not for Carper and Freel foisting them upon us.

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