“The people” refers to the common people, the regular, overlooked, ordinary people. In the United States, these are the “real Americans.” The kind who gather in rural diners. It is not always explicit, but for many they are usually white, and at the very least they would never kneel during the national anthem. “The elites,” on the other hand, are the powerful forces who rule society. The rich. The influential. Hollywood. The media. Cosmopolitan, folks in big cities on the coasts. Pointy-headed academics. The kind who make up the “swamp.” Again, not always explicit, but for some they are non-white and often Jewish.
In this framework, the role of the populist leader is to champion the people against the elites. The leader may be rich themselves, but they are on the side of the people and represent the will of the people. The leader loses elections only because the elites thwart this will, and when they win elections, the populist leader embodies the popular will. Small-r republican checks on the power of the leader are simply attempts to subvert the popular will.
This is the argument that dominated Trump’s 2016 campaign and his rallies since election. It also will dominate his 2020 campaign.
And being impeached is perfect fodder for this campaign.
This has been the playbook for Republicans’ defense of the president. The elites (Democrats) have been out to get the president from day one. In doing so, they subvert the will of the people. This is why they continue to invoke the 6.3 million voters who support the president.
One possible difficulty for successful populist leaders is that once they are in power, it is hard to rail against the institutions that they now themselves control. But impeachment gives Trump the perfect way to do so.
Many have said that if Trump is not removed by the Senate, he will consider this vindication. But in a real way, being impeached itself is vindication. It shows that the elite does view him as a threat, and that they have not been vanquished. I don’t think Trump wants to be impeached, but he will use it.
This does not mean, necessarily, that impeachment was a tactical blunder for Democrats. Trump would have used this rhetoric regardless. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ campaign strategy will be in part to depict Trump as corrupt and authoritarian, unfit for his office. His reaction to impeachment gives them a lot of fodder for that argument. And there are principled reasons to decide to impeach.
But the impeachment does make stark the strategy Trump will use in 2020. Trump’s rhetoric is often described as airing his grievances. It’s more. He wants to make his grievances your grievances, and this is the perfect one to do that with .
It’s that time of year, when most luckier-than-me journalists are on
vacation and your news is filled up with 2019-in-review articles about
the Top 10 music releases you’ve never heard (what exactly is
Afro-Malaysian fusion surf punk, anyway?) and the Top 10 movies you
haven’t seen yet. But when the going gets tough, the tough don’t look
back, they look forward. I’ve already been thinking ahead for 2020
because the daily dreamland surrounding our impeachable 45th president has helped us avoid contemplating the worst that’s yet to come.
You might remember the phrase annus horribilis, which Queen Elizabeth once invoked
to describe a horrible 12 months for the royal family, and which I’m
pretty sure is Latin for “miserable pain in the butt." Despite my grim
headline, I’m still hoping 2020 won’t be America’s worst year -- I saw the horrific assassinations and chaos of 1968 through the eyes of a child, and I also hear 1861
was no picnic -- but there’s real reason for concern. Here’s a scenario
for the coming 366 days that’s both a worst case and all too plausible.
Jan. 31:
After a cursory impeachment trial that lasted just four days, President
Trump is not removed in a 46-54 vote, with West Virginia Democratic
Sen. Joe Manchin joining every Republican in rejecting the two articles.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- under pressure from moderate House
Democrats -- had transmitted the articles
to the Senate with few real concessions from Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, who refused to allow the Dems’ impeachment managers to call
any witnesses. Even GOP senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins voted
against removal, although Collins said the president’s conduct had “concerned” her.
Feb. 2: The Dallas Cowboys edge the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIV because I warned you everything will be horrible.
Feb. 3:
Pete Buttigieg narrowly wins the Iowa caucuses in the closest four-way
race in Democratic history, with each major candidate claiming some sort
of “victory.”
Feb. 4:
Declaring “the great national hoax of impeachment is over,” Trump stuns
the nation with a State of the Union address that lasts for two hours
and 13 minutes -- promising “the swift sword of sweet vengeance” against
his rivals and announcing that new aid money approved for Ukraine will
be diverted to build border wall in Arizona.
Feb. 5:
Instead of Trump’s speech, the morning papers are dominated by two
scoops -- the Washington Post obtaining a previously withheld scrawled
June 25, 2019 note from Trump to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney ordering
last year’s Ukraine aid held “until Biden,” while the New York Times
uncovers a shocking quid pro quo involving Trump and the Saudi
royal family. A frustrated Rep. Adam Schiff shrugs at a gaggle of
reporters. “We already tried impeaching the guy,” he said. “You tell me how to stop him.”
Feb. 29:Black voters
in South Carolina’s Democratic primary deliver Joe Biden his first win,
sticking with the former Barack Obama vice president even after he lost
not only Iowa but New Hampshire (where Elizabeth Warren rallied women
voters) and Nevada (won by a labor-backed Bernie Sanders). This sets the
stage for a Super Tuesday where Biden will sweep the South while
Sanders pulls off a big upset in California.
April 17: High schools and college campuses are shuttered across America and around the world for a massive climate strike,
dedicated to the victims of Australia’s wildfires and spring’s record
flooding in the Midwest. An alliance led by the Sunrise Movement and
Extinction Rebellion vow to shut down summer’s Democratic National
Convention in Milwaukee unless the party endorses the Green New Deal.
May 16: Two days after state officials in Illinois report that Russian hackers again successfully breached their voter-registration rolls, the Senate’s McConnell yet again blocks a vote on a massive federal election-security package, claiming the matter is one of “states’ rights.”
June 6:
After the Virgin Islands stage the final Democratic caucus, pundits are
stunned by a four-way virtual tie that leaves no candidate even close
to the 1,919 pledged delegates needed to claim the nomination. Experts
blame the party’s proportional allocation of delegates, a heavily
front-loaded schedule, and divergent visions among the party’s diverse
voting blocs on how to defeat Trump. An AP survey gives Sanders a
five-delegate lead. Mike Bloomberg, who won just 37 delegates, announces
$150 million ad campaign to urge the convention to pick him as a
compromise.
June 7: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard leaves the Democrats
and announces she will accept the Green Party nomination for the
presidency, vowing to focus on college campuses and support for a Green
New Deal. Her campaign immediately gains 500,000 new social media
followers, most brand-new to Twitter. Meanwhile, Rep. Justin Amash
agrees to run on the Libertarian ticket, creating a third-party dynamic
similar to 2016.
July 13:
Two days after Hurricane Hillary ravages the Gulf Coast, nervous
Democrats (is there any other kind?) descend on Milwaukee for what’s
certain to be the first “brokered” political convention
since the mid-20th century. They are joined by thousands of youth
climate protesters, a contingent of Bikers for Trump, and 11 long-haired
Friends of Jesus in a chartreuse micro-bus.
July 15-16: As expected, Sanders has the most votes on the first ballot yet falls short of the nomination. That allows 758 so-called superdelegates
of party elites to vote on the second ballot, and their overwhelming
preference for Biden propels the former vice president into the lead.
Before the next day’s third ballot, Biden announces a deal in which
Buttigieg becomes his running mate and Bloomberg agrees to spend $500
million on the fall campaign. Denouncing “the billionaire’s bargain,”
Sanders delegates storm out and merge with furious climate protesters in
the streets of Milwaukee, clashing with both a pro-Trump mob and with
police trying to quell the riot. The mayhem stuns the nation and draws
immediate comparisons to the violent 1968 Democratic convention that cost the party that election.
Aug. 26: After most GOP primaries had been canceled,
Trump is nominated in Charlotte on a voice vote. Despite the Democratic
chaos and strong support for Gabbard among bitter Sanders supporters
and youth climate activists, Trump is dragged down by an unexpected
economic downturn that falls hardest on Rust Belt battleground states.
Polls show a virtual tie between Biden and Trump going into the fall.
Oct 6: With Trump refusing to debate, the election is largely fought through a flurry of dubious postings and ads on Facebook -- which passively stays on the sidelines
even as the site is flooded with untraceable dark money -- and a sea of
Twitter bots. Black internet users are inundated with ads attacking
Biden for comments on school busing and race in the 1970s -- some are
so-called deep fakes to invent even more outrageous quotes -- and urging
them to stay home. College voters are overwhelmed by Gabbard videos.
Running mate Buttigieg is attacked with vicious homophobia. Trump is
leading by two points.
Oct. 27: The
New York Yankees win the World Series and Kanye’s “Lord Donald” is at
No. 1 for the ninth week because remember I told you that everything is
terrible.
Nov. 3:
A rattled America goes to the polls. The president has been brought
back to earth by a 1,500-point drop in the Dow on the Friday before
Election Day, release of a 2007 tape showing a purported elevator
assault, and a last-minute collapse in Gabbard support. A record turnout
is dampened by voter-roll errors in predominantly black precincts in North Carolina and Florida that create massive lines, discouraging many.
Nov. 3-4:
Exit polls showing a Biden victory are discarded as results pour in
that look remarkably similar to 2016. Although the Democratic ticket won
five million more popular votes than Trump and narrowly claimed the
battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the president goes
over the top when the networks call Michigan for him at 3 a.m. A
disconsolate Democratic strategist tells MSNBC: “This didn’t have to
happen. We had four years to see all of this coming -- the Russian bots,
the “fake news” on Facebook, the ability to hack into our election
system, the dirty tricks and third-party treachery that divided Trump’s
opponents. In the end, we all chose this outcome -- because we chose to
do nothing.”
Nov. 7:
A CNN panel discussion on Trump’s second-term cabinet is interrupted by
a shocking breaking news report. The Intercept has obtained a massive
cache of leaked Russian communications and computer logs showing -- in
painstaking and indisputable detail -- how a military unit stationed in
St. Petersburg and reporting directly to Vladimir Putin deleted
thousands of mostly black voter records in North Carolina and Florida
and, even more shockingly, altered vote tallies in and around Detroit,
changing the outcome in Michigan.
A CNN national security expert on the panel, noting that Russia has
been massing troops on the Ukraine border, said, “I wonder if Putin
decided his interests would be better served by utter chaos and the
implosion of the United States than by another term of Trump.” As he
spoke, darkness was descending on Washington, Trump was tweeting about
“fake news,” and a crowd of several thousand outside the White House was
growing larger every minute ...
Welcome to The Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.
As 2009 ended, the editors of this magazine at the time took their measure of the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and declared it, with some reservations, a modest success. “All of this might not exactly place him in the pantheon next Franklin Roosevelt,” they said of his major domestic achievements (the stimulus package, primarily, as the Affordable Care Act had not yet been signed). “But it’s not a bad start, given all the constraints of the political system (and global order) in which he works.”
That was the broad consensus of American liberals at the time, ranging from nearly the most progressive to nearly the most neoliberal. Over the ensuing years, that consensus would crack and eventually shatter under the weight of one disappointment after another. The story of American politics over the past decade is that of a political party on the cusp of enduring power and world-historical social reform, and how these once-imaginable outcomes were methodically squandered.
The bulk of that unsigned New Republic editorial in 2009 was dedicated to Obama’s foreign policy, specifically the question of whether he was waging enough war. The conclusion: He was. The editors praised “the escalation of the war in Afghanistan” as “the most consequential action of the first year of his presidency,” even though it “offended the base of his party and possibly injured his future political prospects. On strategic grounds, we believe he made the right choice. But the thoroughness and logic of the process by which he arrived at this decision double our confidence in that choice. The is exactly the type of pragmatism and non-ideological policymaking that sentient humans have craved after the Bush years.” (Sure, escalate the endless wars—but for god’s sake, please do it non-ideologically.)
In December of this year, The Washington Postobtained thousands of pages of documents from a government oversight project called “Lessons Learned,” which included interviews with more than 600 people involved in the war in Afghanistan at some point over its 18-year history. An interview with a National Security Council official described, according to the Post, “constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.” Nearly every piece of data used over the last decade to try to convince Americans that the war was going well, or even going according to any sort of coherent logic or reason, was phony or meaningless.
“I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” Obama reportedly said in 2009, as he struggled with the decision to escalate the war. The president, and his closest advisers, were determined to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam. Since then, overwhelmed by billionsin U.S. “aid,” the country has sunk into kleptocracy. Last year, according to the United Nations, was the single deadliest year of the war for Afghan civilians. Today, around 13,000 American service members remain in Afghanistan. The Trump administration is attempting to negotiate a peace with the Taliban that would leave them in charge of the country, just as they were prior to America’s invasion. The war Afghanistan may finally end, but not before the close of this decade that began with that oh-so-carefully-considered decision to escalate it.
“We Are All Socialists Now,” Newsweekdeclaredon its cover in early 2009, when it was still part of the prestige press (it is currently run by a different sort of cult). Editor Jon Meacham, elucidating the usual historical and political amnesia of airport bookstore historians, justified the claim by writing that “for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether we should have one.” A mixed economy run according to Keynesian principles was, you may recall from reading slightly more rigorous historians, the primary alternative to socialism on offer in the West throughout the twentieth century.
The stimulus had been large (if not large enough), but with $288 billion of it dedicated to tax credits and incentives for individuals and businesses, it scarcely resembled socialism. Indeed, rather than giving Americans a greater hand in managing the economy, much of it was designed to be almost invisible. This was intentional. In the May 6, 2009, issue of The New Republic, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber described Obama’s “Nudge-ocracy,” a belief, inspired by behavioral economics, that the best way for the government to create good outcomes for the people was not through “heavy-handed market interventions,” but via technocratic attempts to change the behavior of individuals and the incentives of market actors.
The problem with an unseen stimulus is that no one thinks it’s helping them. Obama provided tax relief for nearly every working American, but instead of sending citizens a check, as George W. Bush had done, his economists decided to structure it as a payroll tax cut, subtly increasing the size of everyone’s paycheck. The administration then intentionally did not advertise the fact that they had given nearly every working American a tax cut, in the hopes that people would be nudged into spending, rather than saving, that extra cash. Predictably, in 2010, one poll showed that only 12 percent of Americans believed they’d received a tax cut; 24 percent thought Obama had raised their taxes.
The flaw in this strategy was apparent to another author at this magazine. In late 2009, John B. Judis foresaw a presidency in serious political trouble, because Obama’s fortunes were tied not just to the state of the economy, or even economic trends, but to people’s perceptions of the state of the economy. Noting how Roosevelt “dramatized the New Deal’s contribution to the economy” by creating “colorful new agencies,” thereby “ensuring that Roosevelt was given credit for the rise in employment,” Judis called on Obama to “introduce programs that provide jobs and capture the public’s imagination.” He also suggested the president “turn a deaf ear to those who are calling for fiscal responsibility. He should keep pouring money into jobs and into the pockets of people who will spend until the unemployment rate begins going down and wages begin going up.... And, whatever he does to try to mend the economy, Obama should never stop loudly trumpeting his efforts—so that he is able to reap the credit when improvements occur.”
What Judis didn’t consider, though, was that Obama didn’t want to do any of those things. The president, along with economists who worked for him like Austan Goolsbee and Tim Geithner, all pointedly rejected comparisons to Roosevelt, based in part on a seemingly inaccurate understanding of the history of his first term, but also seemingly based on aesthetics: Roosevelt liked to wrestle his enemies in public, and Team Obama preferred to be above it all. It’s hard to remember now how wise everyone made it sound that the president and his team intentionally avoided doing things they worried would be too popular, but there would not be another New Deal.
By far the most effective part of the Affordable Care Act, in terms of helping Americans get care, was simply expanding Medicaid. But what many Democrats and liberals were most excited about were the bill’s many experimental and technocratic attempts to “bend the cost curve”—reduce costs without price controls—and “improve quality,” mainly by encouraging insurers, with incentives, to strive for outcomes that market forces alone weren’t incentivizing them to aim for. The signature example of this may be the “Cadillac tax,” which was designed to nudge companies to force employees onto cheaper insurance plans with greater cost sharing—a tax built on the belief that one of the primary drivers of health care cost inflation was people taking advantage of their too-generous employers and greedily consuming more health care than they needed. The tax never went into effect. The individual mandate, similarly designed to force the healthiest young invincibles to enter the market to bring down costs, is equally dead. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce America’s absurd healthcare costs would simply be a single-payer program.
That is not to say that the ACA did not end up having the significant long-term political ramifications its drafters promised it would. The primary non-Medicaid structure of the ACA, with its means-tested subsidies to purchase private insurance, had the predictable effect of convincing some of its beneficiaries that Obama and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with the government assistance they weren’t sure they were getting. Then, as costs rose and rose over the decade, that structure also had the predictable effect of making people who receive partially subsidized private care resentful of those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
Much of the decade we have just endured has shown how the Democratic addiction to dispensing benefits through the tax code in complicated, indirect ways—combined with the usual insufficiency of these benefits—was nearly perfectly designed to foment mass resentment of others, imagined or not, who might secretly be getting the Good Benefits. The political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the term “the submerged state” in 2010 to refer to the jungle of hidden government “programs” designed not to call attention to themselves, often perpetuated not because they are still helping the neediest, but because they are lucrative to the finance, insurance, and/or real estate industries. One of her illustrations of the effect of the submerged state is a graph showing how many people who used particular government programs admitted so only after first telling researchers they’d received no assistance.
That nearly 40 percent of people on Medicare claimed this is likely attributable to ideology (and the fact that it, like Social Security, was designed to make retirees feel like they had “paid into it”). But when 60 percent of people who used tax-advantaged higher education savings accounts claim they received no government benefits, as they did in her study, it’s probably because tax-advantaged savings accounts are wholly inadequate to the problem of higher education costs. Now combine this with a persistent belief (memorably describedby Ashley C. Ford a few years ago) that minorities—black kids in particular—get to go to college for free by default, and stir in the rise of tuition costs and other expenses due to cutbacks in state investment in education. The result of this cocktail of ignorant biases and inadequate solutions might look something like the year 2019.
In January 2009, Glenn Beck moved from CNN Headline News, where his show averaged367,000 nightly viewers, to Fox News. By the following March, Beck’s Fox show was averaging 2.8 million viewers, according to the Post’s Howard Kurtz. Kurtz was reporting on divisions within Fox over Beck, who had inspired an advertiser boycott after saying Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” By the next year, Ailes had had enough and severed ties with Beck, while Kurtz bemoaned that the broader media atmosphere that had produced Beck would live on. “It’s a short distance between Beck’s nuttier theories,” he wrote, “and Donald Trump, celebrity businessman and alleged White House aspirant, jumping on the birther bandwagon.” Kurtz would join Fox News in 2013, where he remains today, alongside colleagues like Tucker Carlton and Sean Hannity.
In October 2009, Michelle Goldberg invitedNew Republic readers to “meet the next Glenn Beck.” It was none other than Alex Jones, at the time best known (besides to Richard Linklater fans) as a prominent 9/11 “truther” representing the fringe of the fringe. “Until recently,” Goldberg wrote, “Jones’s search for mainstream allies has been less than fruitful.” Goldberg noted that even the conservative firebrand Michelle Malkin—an extreme figure, to be sure, but a thoroughly mainstream one at the time—had castigated then-Representative Ron Paul for appearing on Jones’s show and argued that doing so should disqualify a Republican from appearing at primary debates. But with Obama in office, things were already changing. Fox News’s “senior judicial analyst,” one Andrew Napolitano, had just done a joint broadcast with Jones, boosting his new anti-Obama documentary. Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas had just appeared on his show as well.
Naturally, given his belief that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, Jones had been anti-Bush while Bush was in power, making Jones and his audience useful only to legitimate outsiders like Paul. With Obama in the White House, though, he and the conspiracies he generated could help the conservative movement win back power, and so it was no longer considered beyond the pale to associate with him. As for Malkin, she was fired, in November of this year, by a conservative group for publicly supporting a Holocaust denier, and earlier this month she appeared on a white nationalist YouTube channel and applauded young “alt-right” activists.
The Democrats’ fecklessness, in other words, did not flourish in a partisan vacuum. It has been, at every juncture, inspired and influenced by complete failure of the right to self-police. The American right, like the housing market and the banks and the hedge funds and the health insurers and providers, simply could not be induced to check their basest instincts in the face of an opponent that staked its entire political credibility on the promise that it could make Republicans fall in line with realigned incentives or One Weird Trick. If liberals want to get the next decade right, after the previous one in which we repeatedly failed to save the world while telling ourselves we were doing so, we will need to stop nudging and begin fighting.
Media fail: The press keeps covering impeachment through the eyes of the Republican Party
Eric Boehlert
6-8 minutes
December 18, 2019
The political press corps may have hit peak impeachment failure on Sunday when Meet the Press
host Chuck Todd introduced a segment in which voters from a toss-up
district in Michigan were interviewed about the House proceedings
against Donald Trump. Touted as a way to take the temperature of
everyday voters outside of the "Beltway," the sit-down with six voters
from Kent County, Michigan, offered a chance to hear from America's
heartland and if its denizens "care" about impeachment. Except there was
a slight problem: Every voter interviewed was a Republican, and every
voter interviewed opposed impeachment. ("I don’t even care. It's just
noise.") Even more stunning was the fact that the Michigan county highlighted by Meet the Press is represented in Congress by Justin Amash who made headlines earlier this year when he left the Republican Party because of Trump's corrupt behavior, and who has since come out in favor
of impeachment. Yet network news producers looked at that backdrop, and
the fact that 54% of Americans support impeachment according to the
most recent Fox News poll, and thought the best approach would be to
only ask Republican voters how they felt about impeachment? If that doesn't pull back the curtain on today's coverage
and how it's being told literally through the eyes of the Republican
Party, I don't know what does. Wedded to the Republican narrative that
impeachment has put Democrats back on their heels and is boosting
Trump's standing, the press in recent weeks increasingly resembled a
soft landing spot for GOP spin. On Tuesday, when Trump released an incoherent,
paranoid diatribe in the form of a petulant, hate-filled six-page letter
in an attempt to answer his impeachment accusers, some observers
likened the screed to a would-be Unabomber manifesto, only not as well-written.
But the Beltway press? They scrambled to normalize Trump's appalling
behavior, describing the shocking display of pity and lies as "resilient" and "fiery." Meanwhile, the dominant theme in recent days—and it reads
like it's straight from the Republican National Committee—is that
Democrats from closely divided districts face a looming backlash if they
vote to remove Trump from office. But there continues to be virtually
no evidence to support that.
Keep in mind Democrats just won 40 House seats last year
in what many observers saw as voters rewarding the party for vowing to
stand up to Trump. Additionally, Republicans under Trump have lost control
of the Virginia legislature, lost 435 state legislative seats
nationwide while losing control of chambers in Colorado, New York,
Minnesota, New Hampshire, Washington, and Maine, and lost the governor
mansions in Louisiana and Kentucky. Yet the media narrative today
regarding impeachment is that Democrats standing up to Trump are in
danger of … upsetting voters? It doesn't make sense. But many
journalists and news organizations have adopted that hollow “Democrats
in Disarray” storyline. Stressing "the quiet hand-wringing" that consumed Democratic leaders, TheWashington Post last week insisted
the party was "bracing" for Democratic defections when the articles of
impeachment are soon voted on by the full House. The clear message was
that the Democratic strategy was failing and might soon unravel as
internal dissension set it, specifically among moderate Democrats who
allegedly feared a voter backlash. Yet in the end, it looks like one
Democrat out of the party's House caucus of 233 members will vote no on
impeachment. So much for the "bracing" for defections storyline, and
how moderate Democrats were running scared. (Hint: The fact Trump
publicly admitted to pressuring a foreign government to investigate his
political foe has made the impeachment vote a pretty easy one for
Democrats.) In an ironic twist, it turns out the only Democratic member
of Congress who clearly faces a looming backlash back home over
impeachment is Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who has vowed to vote
against removing Trump from office. After polling from his district
showed Democratic voters furious over such a move, Van Drew is reportedly considering switching to the Republican Party. And talk about viewing impeachment only through the eyes of Republicans: Last week TheWashington Post published a long article
on Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, examining what the political
fallout from impeachment has been for the "moderate" Republican. To
determine that answer, the article quoted three Republican officials
and zero Democrats. The article quoted Stefanik, but not her Democratic
opponent. The Post also interviewed the owner of a local diner
who had "set up a shrine to the president—complete with a framed
portrait, Trump books and a Trump doll." And guess what? After hearing
mostly from Republicans, the Post concluded that impeachment has been working out just fine for the Republican congresswoman. Funny how that works. Even when reporting on Democrats and impeachment, the
framing has consistently been through a Republican prism. "On Verge Of
Impeachment Vote, First-Term, Moderate Democrats Weigh A Political
Risk," read a recent NPR headline,
the type of which has been reproduced by scores of news outlets in
recent days and revolves around GOP spin: It's Democrats who find
themselves in a bind over impeachment, not Republicans. (Keep in mind,
it's a Republican president being impeached.) By the way, one reason why journalists aren't profiling
first-term Republicans from swing districts to examine what the
impeachment vote will mean for them is because there virtually are none.
Why? Because Republicans got wiped out in those districts in 2018. And
why did they get wiped out, especially in the suburbs? Because Trump
remains deeply unpopular. Yet against that backdrop, the media claims
it's Democrats who are on the defensive? Half the country supports removing Republican Trump, the
most consistently unpopular president in American history, and the press
scrambles to explain why that's a problem for Democrats. January will
feature the impeachment trial in the Senate. That means journalists
still have time to stop telling the impeachment story through the eyes
of the GOP. Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author ofLapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for BushandBloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter@EricBoehlert. This post was written and reported through ourDaily Kos freelance program.
Peter Thiel is Big Tech’s most prominent Trump supporter. He is an unabashed enemy of the free press, having covertly funded a lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker three years ago. He has become one of the most vocal pro-monopoly advocates,
taking a lonely stand in defense of Silicon Valley’s much-maligned
mega-corporations. He has channeled his immense wealth into projects
that promise total surveillance of everyone and immortality
for the super-rich. And he has become Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg’s most trusted adviser during the most turbulent period in
the social network’s history.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported
that Thiel, a longtime Facebook board member, had become Zuckerberg’s
consigliere. With the company’s leadership under fire for its refusal to vet political advertisements’ veracity or limit advertisers’ ability to target ads—in contrast to Google and Twitter,
which have taken steps to crack down on misleading content—Thiel has
encouraged the embattled Facebook CEO “not to bow to public pressure.”
The Journal noted that Thiel was “extending his influence while the company’s board and senior ranks are in flux.” Once
quiet, Thiel’s influence over Facebook has grown louder as the company
has tried to navigated a succession of scandals and seen its popularity
plummet. His values are driving Facebook as the company doubles down on
policies that empower demagogues and despots and disempower the rest of
us.
Hauled before the House Judiciary Committee
earlier this year to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuckerberg
made the case that his company cared deeply about making the world a
better place. “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,” he said.
“For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting
people can bring.” Zuckerberg and his allies then went on a public
relations blitz to convince an increasingly skeptical public that
Facebook had learned its lesson.
The rebranding campaign made a warm and fuzzy appeal:
Facebook is where you look at pictures of puppies and babies. It’s
where you can stay connected with loved ones, wherever they may be. But
in private, the company was embracing Thiel’s conservative values.
Much
of this has come out via the company’s shifting relationship with the
media. Last year, Facebook empowered former Republican Senator Jon Kyl
to investigate the conservative claim that Facebook, like other Silicon Valley tech companies, was suppressing speech from the right. Like a similar partnership
with the Heritage Foundation, the move may have been intended to
bolster the company’s credibility with conservatives. But it backfired,
with Kyl blasting the company for not taking conservatives’ concerns about speech seriously, even though those concerns had little to no basis.
Then,
in October, Facebook launched a partnership with a number of news
outlets. Facebook had become synonymous with the “fake news” problem,
and its response was to empower legitimate outlets by launching Facebook
News, a tab on its mobile app. But one of Facebook’s new partners was Breitbart, the alt-right hub that regularly publishes racist stories. As The Verge’s Casey Newton noted
at the time, “Breitbart was included in the tab precisely for
ideological reasons. … Certainly no one at Facebook seems to be
suggesting that Breitbart is a reliable producer of high-quality
journalism—the argument seems to be rather that it would be poor form to
exclude them just because they once (for example) tagged relevant
stories with the label ‘black crime.’”
Meanwhile,
Zuckerberg’s public rhetoric has gotten more MAGA. He now makes a
nationalistic argument on behalf of Facebook: Empower us, or cede ground
to China. Defending the company’s digital currency Libra before
Congress this summer, Zuckerberg said,
“I believe that if America does not lead innovation in the digital
currency and payments area, others will. If we fail to act, we could
soon see a digital currency controlled by others whose values are
dramatically different.”
As it happens, Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s leading anti-China voices, arguing
in August that Google was helping the country “gain an intelligence
advantage” and “penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of
cyberwarfare.”
In October, Zuckerberg delivered a new
manifesto for Facebook. While he continued to claim the company was
about bringing people together, he also made a free speech absolutist
case in defense of his life’s work. “I am here today because I believe
we must continue to stand for free expression,” he told
an audience at Georgetown University. Facebook, in this telling, could
not police its platform out of principle. It could not rid itself of
hate speech and manipulative political advertisements aimed at promoting
right-wing candidates, even if it wanted to. “I don’t think it’s right
for a private company to censor politicians in a democracy,” he said.
For
years, Facebook’s public relations team have tried to present Mark
Zuckerberg not as the ruthless billionaire he is, but as a compassionate
and curious young man seeking to understand the world around him. That
has changed over the past year and a half. Facebook has, as many have
noted, always been a covertly right-wing company, “hostage to
conservative ideas about economics and speech,” as Jacob Silverman wrote in The Baffler. Thanks to Thiel’s influence, it has increasingly become an overtly right-wing one.
In an excellent recent piece in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja urge for a strengthening of parties’ abilities to vet potential nominees. The decline of parties’ power for “peer review” helped to produce Donald Trump as a nominee and invites further threats to American democracy and a weakening of presidents’ ability to govern.
In the piece, Rauch and La Raja describe the evolution of the American party nomination system, from the direct primaries of the early 20th century to the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the early 1970s to the recent changes in campaign finance that increase the power of individual candidates at the expense of party “filters.” They aren’t the first political observers to suggest that the party system has become too democratic.* But there tends to be a fatalism among such diagnoses: how do you turn the party back to elite control? Can you ever put the democratic genie back in its bottle?
We have some recent research suggesting you can. This is an ongoing project to understand when and why state parties change their rules to affect presidential nomination contests. We’re still working on the why part. But an important finding so far is that party nomination rules don’t just move in one direction. State parties change their rules frequently, and they make their rules less “democratic” almost as often as they make their nominating contests more so.
In our research, we’ve been examining every state party’s changes in its presidential nomination contest rules since 1976. It turns out that state parties change these rules quite often. Nevada alone has amended its rules after nearly every election of the past 40 years, sometimes switching to a caucus and sometimes to a primary, sometimes making the contest earlier in the season and sometimes later, sometimes allocating delegates proportionally and sometimes employing a winner-takes-all system, etc. This year, Nevada Republicans have joined their co-partisans in several other states in just canceling the contest altogether and declaring that all their delegates will go to Donald Trump.
State parties change their rules frequently, and they make their rules less democratic almost as often as they make their nominating contests more so.
We categorize all changes in presidential nomination rules by whether they make the state contest more “open” or “closed.” If they switch from a caucus to a primary, that makes participation in the contest easier and increases turnout, making the contest more open. If they move from allowing independents to vote to limiting participation just to registered party members, that makes the contest more closed.
Combining our measures of caucus/primary rules and participation rules, we develop a measure of whether a party is opening or closing its nomination contest. We depict this in the graphs below. For each party, we ignore the years that the party was fielding an incumbent president seeking reelection, as parties tend to keep rules constant during those periods or simply change them to protect the incumbent.
The rate of change is pretty stunning. In any given four-year cycle, often between five and ten state parties will shift from primary to caucus or vice versa. And over time, the shifting is roughly equal across directions, even though caucuses or primaries may become fashionable in any given cycle. The shifting is also roughly equal across parties. We also typically see five to ten state parties go from open participation rules to closed ones, or vice versa, in any given cycle. The Democrats are somewhat more prone to allowing independents to vote, while the Republicans have switched back and forth at equal rates.
Again, the big takeaway here is that in each party, there is movement back and forth, with states switching in both directions. On occasion, we see larger swings in one direction: thirteen Democratic contests were opened up between 1980 and 1984, ten were opened up between 1984 and 1988, ten were opened up between 2000 and 2004. Eight Republican contests were opened up between 1976 and 1980 and another thirteen were opened up between 1980 and 1988. The largest shift toward closing the contests occurred on the Republican side between 2012 and 2016, with nine states closing off the Republican contests.
We tend to view party nominations as having become more “democratic” over time, with the parties seeking greater input on major decisions and rank-and-file voters assuming a larger role in nominations. The findings shown here offer a more nuanced depiction of the past four decades, showing that while more state parties have opened up their contests than have closed them, parties making them more closed is far from uncommon. Both Democratic and Republican state parties will make participation in primaries and caucuses more difficult -- essentially, making their parties less democratic -- with some regularity.
If party reformers wish to make parties more “closed” to voters to give party elites more vetting power, that would likely be met with considerable pushback. But it’s also hardly unprecedented. State parties do this sort of thing all the time, and voters don’t seem to have rebelled against it.
*We recognize that describing parties with greater participation as "more democratic" is imperfect terminology, as party systems can be quite democratic without allowing much rank-and-file input. A more technically appropriate term might be something like "plebiscitary."
When San Francisco voters elected Chesa Boudin, a public
defender running on a platform to end mass incarceration, as district
attorney in November, their decision was swiftly heralded as the end of an era. Boudin’s vision
of criminal justice reform hit familiar points, but ones still scraping
at the outer edge of the mainstream: declining to prosecute offenses
like prostitution and sleeping on the street, ending cash bail, holding
police accountable when they kill or use excessive force. At Boudin’s
election-night party, a member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors started a chant of “Fuck the POA! Fuck the POA! Fuck the POA!” joined by the crowd, middle fingers raised.
The San Francisco Police Officers’ Association, the city’s police union, had spent more than $700,000—exceeding Boudin’s own fundraising efforts—in
an effort to defeat him, pulling cash from police unions in Los
Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and New York. The San Francisco Deputy
Sheriffs’ Association shared a John Birch Society video calling Boudin a “communist radical” and a son of “terrorists.” Boudin’s
parents were jailed for their role in an armored-car robbery, in which
two police officers and a guard were killed—something even Boudin
supporters thought might be used against him in the race. But San
Franciscans, it turned out, voted him into office despite objections
from the police and far right. This
sort of counter-campaign has become more common in the Obama and Trump
eras. Police have panicked as calls for criminal justice reform have
moved to the center of American politics, fueled by decades of popular
movements against police brutality and prisons. Just as conservatives,
going back to the Nixon era, have used debates over the lawfulness of
abortion, homosexuality, and pornography to portray themselves as
besieged by a liberal elite, police unions, too, now claim they are on
the losing side in an ideological struggle. It may appear strange to see
police alongside anti-contraception crusaders, transphobic employers, and Evangelical cake-makers on the supposed front lines of a national clash over values. But it also represents a return to the culture war’s origins.
The
very idea of the culture war was born out of policing. Though the
phrase didn’t come into common usage until the 1990s, anxiety over law
and order helped usher Nixon into the White House in 1968. Where today
police unions cast Black Lives Matter activists as their persecutors,
conservatives under Nixon pointed to black power activists and the
anti-war left. With James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, the term “culture war” entered the popular lexicon. Hunter says he was inspired
after reading a news story about the arrests of clergy from a range of
sometimes warring faiths at an anti-choice protest. He saw the struggle
emerging out of 1960s social change as a matter less of specific issues than of something much broader: “progressivism” versus “orthodoxy.” Throughout
the 1990s, many who were at odds with one another when it came to other
issues, such as abortion or gay rights, were largely in agreement on
defending the power of police—whether that meant uniting against Ice T’s
“Cop Killer” song and gangsta rap or more sweeping policy
proposals. While governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton rejected the
clemency petition of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man who shot and killed a
white police officer before shooting himself, leaving him mentally
incapacitated. Clinton took a break from campaigning in New Hampshire in
1992 to return to Arkansas and oversee Rector’s death by lethal
injection. Rector asked for part of his last meal to be set aside for
later—a sign that he did not fully understand how severely he was to be
punished. Yet for backing the execution, Clinton was lauded for being
tough on crime. As president, Clinton would go on to
be forever linked with his signature 1994 crime bill, putting more than
$9 billion into prisons and adding 100,000 more cops on the streets. The
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 also defined 60
new death penalty offenses. Even as the crime rate declined sharply
during and since those years, the majority of the American public
continued to believe crime was getting worse each year. The Obama years saw the start of a profound shift. First galvanized by the death of Trayvon
Martin in 2012 and his killer’s acquittal in 2013, activists across the
country returned to the streets in protest after police killed Eric
Garner in New York City and then Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In
demanding accountability from police who kill, the Black Lives Matter
movement highlighted the ways in which the system of policing makes such
accountability nearly impossible. Police unions, they argued, are
critical in shielding
police from discipline for brutality and violence. When the officers
who killed Brown and Garner were not indicted, activists pointed to the
power held by district attorneys—who rely on police to help them win convictions—in convening and persuading grand juries. It
was these activists who helped shift the line marking the acceptable
edge of law enforcement critique, and by the 2016 election, Democrats
had noticeably backed off from the Clinton-era consensus. Contenders in 2016 made abolishing the death penalty
part of their platforms. By then, it was more common to hear that
criminal justice reform was a bipartisan issue—albeit in a limited
sense, with centrist overlap on a few modest reforms like creating
alternatives to pre-trial detention. Meanwhile,
perceptions of crime numbers were falling. Eighty-seven percent of
Americans polled in 1993 believed crime had increased from the prior
year. In 2018, that number was down to 60 percent. In an administration
of “lock her up” chants, accompanied by flagrant and likely illegal
presidential abuses of power, tough-on-crime stances have proven hard
sells in liberal circles. 2020 Democratic candidates have pledged unprecedentedly progressive criminal justice plans.
As
consensus on the power of law enforcement was fracturing, some
political observers declared the more classic culture-war issues
resolved: “Culture War Is Over,” The American Prospect optimistically proclaimed in 2012.“Same-sex marriage is a non-issue in American politics,” one CNN piece announced
in 2014. At the same time, liberals were growing more comfortable with
the prospect of criminal justice reform, pushed from their left by
grassroots activists. In response, the right—and especially police unions—grew more vocal and vehement in denouncing activists and defeating reform-minded candidates. In
San Francisco this year, police unions opted for a core alt-right
conspiracy theory, depicting Chesa Boudin as a puppet of George Soros,
who has emerged as a leading donor in prosecutor races across the
country. In 2018, San Diego prosecutor Summer Stephan similarly attacked
progressive challenger Geneviéve Jones-Wright by promoting
an attack website juxtaposing images of antifa and Black Lives Matter
activists with a Soros portrait—one of many such attempts to link Soros
with anti-police sentiment. The site went offline in 2018, one week after Soros was mailed a pipe bomb. In
November, an elected member of the school board in Corvallis, Oregon,
Brandy Fortson, started receiving death threats after two of their
tweets were circulated by the official Twitter accounts of the Fraternal Order of Police (the nation’s largest police organization) and the Oregon state Republican Party. “Hey kids, always remember that all cops are bastards,” read one of the tweets, which Fortson said was in response to Texas police arresting a man for allegedly
stealing a shopping cart to take his groceries home. “Sex work is
work,” read the other tweet Fortson’s critics offered as evidence that
they should be removed from office. “You should not be involved in the development of our nations [sic] children,” the FOP tweeted,
also attempting to lecture Fortson, who is queer and nonbinary (using
the pronouns they/them) and already a likely target of harassment, on
tolerance: “Mx. Fortson, as a society, we raise our kids to accept, not
hate, people from all walks, regardless of race, sexual orientation,
gender or career choice. Your values clearly do not reflect this.” As
might be expected when a national group targets a nonbinary school
board member in a town of 55,000, the results were swift and frightening. One caller, Fortson told
a local reporter, said “he was looking forward to shooting my child in
the head at school and watching her brains get strewn about on the
sidewalk while he laughed and I cried.” Even after Fortson resigned, the
threats continued. Andy Ngo, who uses his Twitter account to share the
names and photos of activists he claims are violent, directed his
followers to Fortson. Within 15 minutes of Ngo’s tweets, Fortson said,
they received “10 or 11 death threats.”
Police
unions may engage in such aggressive tactics in part because they
accurately perceive their powerful allies to be slipping away. In 2019,
no realm of politics remains a criticism-free zone for cops. Michael
Bloomberg’s tardy entrance into the Democratic primary came with an
acknowledgment that his tough-on-crime turn as New York City mayor—like
his pride in the unconstitutional police practice of stop-and-frisk—was
perhaps a liability. “I got something important really wrong,” Bloomberg
said from the pulpit of a black megachurch in Brooklyn. “I didn’t
understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black
and Latino communities.” Even if the apology is insincere—Bloomberg still defended the policy earlier this year—the fact that he feels he has to make this kind of statement illustrates how the lines in the police culture war have shifted. In her run at the 2020 Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris, a former
San Francisco district attorney and California state attorney general,
struggled to square her prosecutor past with the new political reality
for Democrats. Previously, Harris had portrayed herself as someone who
is neither tough nor soft but “smart” on crime. At times, she tried to depict herself as a reformer,
though that is not how she was regarded as a prosecutor. With her
campaign in disarray, her poll numbers slipping behind the front-running
white candidates, Harris announced her withdrawal from the race on
Tuesday. Once, cops could count on establishment and even liberal media to back them—to point out, for example, that Michael Brown, as The New York Times printed in 2014, was “no angel.” That, too, has changed: In November, when the Times
editorial board criticized police and prosecutors’ attempts to block
modest bail and discovery reform measures, they were blunt and
prescriptive, calling the efforts “A Sad Last Gasp Against Criminal Justice Reform.” The
less taboo it has become for anyone with some modicum of power to
critique the police, the more law enforcement and their backers have
moved to police the boundaries of permissible debate about their power.
This Tuesday, Attorney General Bill Barr even suggested
that those who don’t offer “support and respect” to cops could be
deprived of police protection. Despite police and their advocates’ assertions of victimhood,
police are far from marginalized targets, oppressed by reformers,
abolitionists, or even prosecutors: They still have the full force of
the state behind them. And that’s precisely why police are so invested
in this war—to keep the state out of the hands of reform-minded public
officials and those who seek to elect them.
