Etcetera (&c): Democrats in Disarray, Republicans in Ruins - By Jonathan Chait

Democrats in Disarray, Republicans in Ruins

Let’s do away with the fallacy that the opposing party has everything together.

 

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

 

During the 2016 election, Russia took two major steps to help Donald Trump win. The first was to support Trump through its propaganda network, which included domestic Russian programming, international programming (mainly RT), and disguised social-media posts attacking the Democrats. The second method was stealing Democratic emails and strategically releasing them to sow discord within the Democratic Party and provide a well-timed distraction from one of the worst moments Trump faced (the release of recordings in which he boasted of sexual assault).

The propaganda campaign had much less impact than the hack-and-leak campaign, for obvious reasons: There was already plenty of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messaging out there, but the hack and leak provided something that the marketplace didn’t already have. The stolen emails were news, and they generated a fair amount of coverage in organs consumed by people who were open to voting Democratic. Conveniently, they had the same shorthand — “emails” — as what the media was treating as a major Clinton scandal, thus reinforcing to low-information voters the notion that Clinton had done something seriously wrong.

This week, a study confirmed that the Russian social-media operation had little impact on the outcome — the bots, unsurprisingly, were a drop in the bucket. The anti-anti-Trump right treated this finding as if it negated the entire Russian operation to help Trump:

Photo: @ByronYork/Twitter

 

National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry wrote an entire column on this premise. “The idea that Russian disinformation on social media influenced or even decided the 2016 election has gained such purchase, even though a new study finds, unsurprisingly, no evidence for it,” he writes. The entire piece goes on in this vein, never once even mentioning the hack-and-leak operation. Even a close reader of Lowry’s column would assume the social-media bots accounted for the entirety of Russia’s pro-Trump efforts.

The Russian social-media campaign is still notable for what it revealed about Russia’s intent. Vladimir Putin saw Trump as a friendly candidate over whom he had some influence (including having dangled a licensing deal with several hundred million dollars, which Trump had denied). That line of influence, which would have been a completely disqualifying scandal for any normal candidate, was always the main import of the Trump-Russia story. The effect of Russia’s efforts to elect Trump was a smaller line of the story. And within that corner of the story, the hack and leak turned out to be much more important than the bots. The people pretending the bots comprised the whole scandal are, as usual, covering for Trump’s misconduct.

One of the beliefs shared by committed partisans on all sides is the premise that the opposing party is always united, while their own party is hopelessly divided. Wall Street Journal columnist (and former editor) Gerald Baker regurgitates this familiar complaint in his latest:

Today, the Democratic Party may be the most ruthlessly organized and efficient political entity in the world — and I include the Chinese Communist Party … The Democrats took a 50-50 nation in 2020, after a contentious election won by the narrowest of margins primarily because just enough voters saw them as the lesser evil, and seized the opportunity to advance one of the most ambitious agendas of any government in recent history: trillions of additional dollars in federal spending, expanded regulation, the steady erosion of the national border, accelerated conversion of the nation’s energy production to costly green sources, and a relentless, intensifying war on traditional culture and values.

We can denounce the activism and deplore the outcome, but we can only marvel at the political efficiency with which it has been achieved.

Ruthlessly organized? Efficient? Did Baker pay any attention whatsoever to the meandering, death-defying fate of Biden’s domestic agenda? The president had to abandon most of the programs he campaigned on before ultimately salvaging a small fraction of his agenda while ditching such elements as universal child care and pre-kindergarten, a higher minimum wage, a public option, and most of the new taxes on the rich.

Actually, Baker did pay at least some attention to Congress when Democrats were scuttling most of these programs. A year ago, he wrote a column gloating about Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to scale back the filibuster, thus “dealing the long-expected fatal blow to President Biden’s legislative ambitions.” Baker gloated extensively over this rebuke:

Consider what it says about the standing and authority of the 46th president as we mark the end of his first year in office. Has there ever been a figure a year into his term reduced to such impotence that his aides are impelled to whine to friendly media about the “disrespect” shown him by a first-term senator?

Historians will have to figure out what exactly impelled Mr. Biden to go for broke — and keep going, until he was duly broke — on the two main Democratic legislative plans of his first term: first, Build Back Better, and now the so-called voting-rights bills.

And now the passage of time has elevated this pathetic gaggle of squabbling losers into a terrifyingly efficient legislative machine — just in time for their unity to serve as an example for Baker’s Republicans to follow.

Most left-of-center analysts beholding the spectacle of Republicans struggling to organize the House of Representatives, before finally capitulating to a list of demands by their most hardened fanatics, saw a display of weakness and disorganization. But not all. Some progressives view the political style of the conservative movement not as a cautionary tale but as a model. One of them, Max Berger, proposes in a Politico op-ed that Democrats create their own version of the Freedom Caucus.

“The Freedom Caucus has been an incredibly effective tool for the conservative movement because it has shown it will use its leverage during tough negotiations with leadership,” he writes. Oddly, Berger treats this premise as self-evident and offers no evidence for it whatsoever, ignoring the vast majority of conservative opinion that deems the Freedom Caucus to be a pack of destructive poseurs causing the party to forfeit its leverage by losing votes, and using its influence to demand they take votes on their most unpopular issues. The Freedom Caucus forced Kevin McCarthy to stage a vote on a national sales tax, which would raise tax rates on the vast majority of the public while giving the rich a huge break. There’s a good reason Republicans don’t want to hold a vote on it!

Berger thinks the Democrats have been hampered by too much efficiency, and sees the Justice Caucus as a way to blow up the leadership’s plans. “If Democratic leaders are making concessions to the corporate wing of the party, or to the Republicans, the left will have a chance to kill or modify any deal.”

Berger’s essay cites the conservative movement’s long march to dominance within the Republican Party. And if your assumption is that everything the conservatives did worked, then you see anything the right possesses that lacks a counterpart on the left as a problem to be remedied.

But if, on the other hand, you see the Republican Party’s capture by an ideological faction as having paralyzed its capacity to govern effectively, then you don’t want to copy everything it’s done. And that is my view: Democrats becoming more like the Republican Party would mean becoming more impervious to evidence, more intent on substituting will-to-power over appealing to voters’ authentic desires, and more tolerant of corruption.

I’ve written extensively about the rise of semi-fascist thought in the Republican Party, and how Ron DeSantis’s blunt exertions of state power follow from this new thinking. It is important to understand that this is not a critique I am imposing on the right. The right’s illiberal thinkers and activists embrace both the notion that they need to use dramatic new forms of state power — forms they would see as repressive if used against them — and that DeSantis is pushing the envelope.

Rod Dreher, an enthusiastic backer of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, touts DeSantis’s moves to impose conservative ideological control over the schools in his state. Like me, Dreher sees these moves as following Orban’s playbook:

Here in Hungary, where I live, the left screams bloody murder when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán does things like this. But Orban understood a long time ago that the left exercises dictatorial power through private and semi-private networks, like NGOs and academic institutions, and that the fundamental task of fighting for the common good against an ideological power clique demands making bold moves like DeSantis has done here. …

What conservatives in 2023 have to understand is that the only source of institutional power left to us is the state. Everything else is in the hands of people who more or less hate us. Ronald Reagan is dead. This is a new situation. Ron DeSantis knows what time it is. 

Dreher laments that some conservatives have yet to get onboard with these illiberal maneuvers because they still believe in the old ideal of fair play. (“These conservatives do not understand how power works in the postliberal environment.”) But from my vantage point, the conservative dissidents against DeSantis are very few and very quiet.

A couple months ago I came across a small passage that seems revealing enough to still merit discussion. It comes from a short column by A.B. Crowder in Compact, a journal dedicated to fleshing out the red-brown Tumpist alliance into something resembling serious thought. The organ’s animating premise is that the cause of true populism, both economic and social, lies in supporting the forces arrayed behind Donald Trump and opposing his enemies.

Here was the passage that struck me:

Consider [Trump’s] boast that ‘I love the poorly educated!’ (The elite horror at this last utterance was telling. After all, shouldn’t we love the poorly educated, as we love all our neighbors? No, we surmise. We must hate and pity them.)

Here is a nugget of thinking that combines several interestingly bizarre assumptions. It is true that Trump’s liberal critics mocked him for touring the support of “the poorly educated.” But this was not because liberals believe it’s wrong to win the votes of people without a college degree. This was because it revealed the cynicism of Trump’s appeal to those voters. Much like his synthetic and ham-handed efforts to present himself as a genuine ally of the religious right (“Two Corinthians”), his description of those supporters as “poorly educated” reveals not affinity but contempt.

Trump believes deeply, and reveals constantly, his snobbish love of private-education credentials. He cheated his way into an Ivy league school and as president could not stop touting the Ivy League pedigree of his nominees. Not to mention the fact that Trump filled his cabinet with billionaires and focused on a domestic agenda of shoveling more money into their pockets. Trump’s career was largely devoted to bilking his fans out of their money with a series of scams, and I can promise you that he does not see their devotion as anything other than contemptible stupidity.

Compact is devoted to the construction of an alternative world in which literally none of this is true. But Trump’s invocation of “the poorly educated” is a window into his belief that people without the benefit of a college education are suckers, and the fact he has been able to use them for financial and political profit means he is smart.