Apology for the length. Tuesday’s diaries frequently mentioned recent comments by Hillary Clinton. Many of her fans excused or applauded the comments with a number of often-used rationales: “She’s entitled to her opinion, why is she being silenced?,” “She’s gone through so much for so long, so she just had no more f*cks to give,” “Finally someone willing to tell the truth about the divisiveness and lack of respect she has been getting.”
It occurred to me that maybe this is a way to understand some of this divide. Why? Because these sentiments pretty much perfectly capture what the Bernie Left has been feeling for the last 3 decades. It is my theory that Hillaryland and Bernieland are treated almost exactly the same way, just by opposite ends of the base, and once we realize and address this, maybe there won’t be so much mutual anger.
The Left constantly feels silenced, from our values to our commitments to our candidates. Most of you know my comment-writing content, so you know that I bring up many examples of this. Kara Eastman, a great Progressive, could have won a purple seat in Nebraska, thus dispelling the myth that Progressives cannot win outside Pelosi’s “glass of water with a D” districts (a good indication of what she thinks of us). However, when Eastman beat an Establishment Democrat in her primary, the party largely abandoned her in the general, and she lost by 2 points. Marie Newman, a great Progressive, ran against arguably the worst Democrat in Congress, Dan Lipinski (who is vicious to the pro-choice movement and does not even support ObamaCare). This is in Chicago, so there’s no fear of a Republican winning the general, but the party clearly just didn’t WANT Newman, a strong Progressive voice, they preferred Lipinski, who also won by 2 points. They’re still supporting him in THIS cycle. They’re supporting Henry Cuellar, who in a D + 9 district in Texas voted with Trump about 70% of the time in the last Congress. Some of Chuck Schumer’s most lauded Senate hopefuls include Cal Cunningham, who doesn’t know if he would impeach Trump, Amy McGrath, who laments that Trump hasn’t been enabled enough in the Senate--because McConnell is obstructing him too much, and John Hickenlooper, who drank fracking fluid to show how clean and safe it was. In short, there appears to be no bridge Rightward that the party will not eagerly cross in service to courting a tiny number of center-Right independents and disaffected Republicans.
Meanwhile, not only is there no bridge to the Left, there is utter and absolute condemnation of the Left. “Divisive.” “Aren’t team players.” “Naive.” “Bigoted.” “Violent.” “Don’t represent the values of Real America, beyond the Glass of Water districts.” As AOC said this week, “we can’t even get a vote on Medicare for All. Forget about not winning the vote, we can’t even get a vote.” Think about this. Democrats control the House committees, so they could pretty much bring anything they want to the floor. McConnell will pass nothing, so it’s a completely free vote to take. Just lump it in the pile with the other 400 dead bills, just for the symbolic purpose of wanting to excite the activists and show that the party does care about moving forward on this issue someday. Nope. Pelosi talks about having a Single Payer poster in her basement from the 80’s, but now at the end of her career, as one of the most powerful Speakers ever, she won’t even hold a vote on it symbolically, even if she is free to release the Red district Democrats to vote against it. So when was she ever going to fight for this thing she claims she has wanted for her whole career? Never. It’s not even a slowly-moving bridge, there’s no bridge. There was never going to be a bridge.
In 2006, Progressive Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in a primary. Many Democrats determined that Lieberman needed to be re-elected anyway, as an independent (“But He’s Not Even A Democrat” was never uttered), and so Connecticut Progressives that had worked incredibly hard to nominate Lamont would soon see the re-election of a (literally) pro-McCain public-option-killing Senator Lieberman anyway. Voices were silenced, votes were made irrelevant. It sure seemed to become apparent that it just never mattered what the Left wanted, voted for or even WON A PRIMARY on, we were just always going to get screwed and betrayed. While Lieberman was then wreaking havoc with the ACA in 2010, the Left was appeased by Democrats saying “don’t worry—we’ll get our foot in the door and then soon the arrow will bend toward Single Payer, which is what we really want—look—Obama in 2006 said he was for Single Payer!!—this is just the way to get there. Don’t hurt your own cause by voting against incrementalism.” A decade later, have we inched toward Single Payer, even in the minds of Democratic leadership (if not in the realities of governance?) Not only is the answer “no,” but the ACA is now being used as a cudgel AGAINST M4A (“we can’t have another healthcare fight because we’ll lose what we have.”) So when is the party going to embrace Single Payer, to pay off the loyalty of Progressives who begrudgingly settled for a half-loaf? Never. There’s no bridge.
Our opinion is silenced again and again. Sister Souljah’ed. Biden’s “Gimme a Break about how tough kids have it these days” attitude. Hillary has been disparaged for 30 years? Progressives have been disparaged for my entire lifetime. It doesn’t matter if the Left plays ball or doesn’t, it is blamed regardless. Bernie was blamed for “not smiling enough” at the convention, as he did 39 events for Hillary. She is at best tepid on even endorsing him as the nominee, and said so just before Iowa, in order to cause maximum hard to Sanders (and obviously anger his supporters), but “she’s entitled to her opinion.” But Progressives must always smile as big as possible. After all, upcoming elections against Trump mandate that we must smile and have unity. But this only applies to him and not her.
Rachel Maddow in May or so of 2016 asked Hillary how she would reach out to Bernie’s supporters, now that she was essentially the presumptive nominee. Hillary, the “Progressive” (as she had made a big point of clarifying to Chris Matthews a couple of months earlier) could have spoken about her Progressive agenda (you know, the one that everyone insists was on her website the entire time, just never emphasized at all during the general election for some reason). She could have made connections Leftward, she could have shown she had real interest and respect for the frustrated, demoralized Bernie warriors now at a crossroads after such an emotionally-invested battle. Instead her answer was “I won. They’re supposed to support me.” No offers of any policy, any pitch, any vision. No outreach, no bridge. No f*cks to give. “Oh, but she was upset at how she had been treated by them.” Ok, but she was also trying to win the f*cking presidency, and should have recognized that she still needed to woo those voters, like any adult politician has since the beginning of time, until her. And maybe Martha Coakley.
When the nominee has no f*cks left to give, why is it shocking that voters aren’t motivated to support her? Maybe it’s their fault for being selfish. Maybe it’s her fault for being a terrible politician who didn’t even try to sell her brand to appeal to the people she needed in order to elect her. A restaurant that refuses to sell food that people want to eat is rarely considered blameless in why they lose patronage. But guess which one of my two postulates (blaming the voters or blaming the politician) draws absolute outrage within the Democratic Establishment. It is not the job of voters to be loyalists, it is literally the job of a politician to go out and get votes. (And that includes getting enough votes in the states that count).
This is not an isolated pattern. Said Hillary to donors in 2016: “There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free health care, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.” In other words, she dismissed half of the movement as ignorant right off the bat (a basket of “dep-Left-ables,” as it were), condemned the idea that we as a nation could aspire for basic Leftwing goals that exist in other places in the world, and clearly didn’t care even enough to determine the details of what the Left wanted, let alone why, let alone giving any pretense that she was actually going to fight for any of these things. Publicly, Hillary spoke about being so Progressive that she was to Bernie’s Left, while privately she mocked and patronized the very idea that the Left were even knowledgeable enough to have an agenda. No f*cks to give.
I voted happily for Obama in 2008. Buoyed by the rhetoric of “hope and change,” “we will be the people that cause the ocean waters to stop rising,” etc., I figured he might be a transformational president. About a week after his election, I was biking up a big hill to get home from a party. My legs were exhausted and I badly wanted to get off the bike and walk up the rest of the hill, but I said to myself “If I’m going to be the change I need to be, there’s no way I can stop biking up this hill.” I persevered, inspired by Obama, and nodded with determination the entire way as I cleared the rest of the hill on my bike. Within a bit over a year, Robert Gibbs had called me the Professional Left dismissively, Rahm Emanuel had called Progressives like me “F*ckin’ Retarded,” Obama had looked forward and not backward on both war crimes and financial crimes, ignored the Left’s advice on the stimulus package, supported offshore drilling, downplayed the importance of a public option, began to expand several aspects of our military and surveillance footprint, called for austerity in his first SOTU address (the Simpson-Bowles commission), and started working with Larry Summers Tim Geithner to substantially weaken banking reforms and frustrate the creation of the CFPB, including calling Warren things like “a condescending Narcissist, a professional critic and sanctimonious.”
Failing the idea of Obama being a Progressive, I at least had expected him to be as far Left as a doctrinaire loyal Democrat in opposition to Bush. More and more it seemed like his policies were eerily not that different from Bush’s. A few were, but on war? Trade? Immigration? Pot? Bailouts? Spending cuts? Kinda ...not. Certainly not enough. I voted for change, not “11-dimensional chess,” chess that just as often seemed to be played AGAINST US ON THE LEFT as against Republicans, who Obama and Biden would soon start trying to cut Social Security with in their Grand Bargain.
There’s always some perceived gain in 11-dimensional chess—a belief that there is some new swath of independents and Republicans that can be brought into the fold, in order to eventually increase the party’s power. However, implicit in this framing is “people already on the Left don’t need to be pandered to at all, they’re safe, they have nowhere to go, the chessboard must only be a laboratory for how to appeal Rightward.” Nancy Pelosi’s legislative strategy is so geared to appeasing the 20 Reddest districts in her caucus, in order to hold the majority, that she’s basically the Speaker Of The Red Districts. Ideas from the Blue Districts need not apply, lest maybe they offend a few people in the Red Districts, and this is never acceptable. Regardless of whether a Democrat is trying to keep those seats or gain those seats, they can always point to what some Progressive says and how this has spooked some mythical chunk of voters, and so the party has to make sure those Progressives aren’t encouraged to say those things, and are disavowed if they do. Ergo, for the sake of coddling those 20 districts, the other 200 are basically irrelevant to the Democratic brand. And that “extra party power” leads to nothing, because they won’t use it to fight for anything bold. 11-dimensional chess. But smile anyway, Progressives, or it’s all your fault.
“Finally someone willing to tell the truth about the divisiveness and lack of respect we have been getting.” Demoralized by Obama’s (and the party’s) lack of interest in pursuing Leftwing goals, even with a SUPERMAJORITY IN THE SENATE for a while (and, sorry, having “only” 59 Senators was still far more than Bush had when he rammed through nearly his entire radical agenda), there was a loss of turnout in 2010. Again, instead of blaming the party, everyone blamed the Left—they’re STILL blaming the Left for 2010. Heck, they’re still blaming the Left for 2000 also. So the Left took to the streets in 2011 (Occupy), and were promptly ignored again. Now Democratic Establishment favorite Michael Bloomberg was one of the people that threw us out of the parks. Whispers of Bernie Sanders possibly primarying Obama in 2012 was met with screaming condemnation and blame (of course), and he was blamed as a rabble-rouser even as he decided not to do it. Then when the Left did decide to stay loyal to the party and vote for Obama in 2012, within 2 months they were stabbed in the back AGAIN, as Obama and Biden made most of the Bush Tax Cuts permanent, against the expressed opposition of Harry Reid. Hillary is maligned? Please. The Left receives Kurds-level perpetual betrayal.
So no one likes Bernie? In the last approval rating poll of her (December 2018), Hillary had a 36% approval rating. That’s several points lower than Trump’s is. Despite the country seeing him be our president for two full years, he was still more approved of nationally than she was. Bernie isn’t a team player? She wouldn’t commit to endorsing him IF HE WERE THE NOMINEE. She feels she was a victim of media coverage in 2016? Look at Bernie’s media coverage. Half of the columnists seem to want to put him onto an ice floe and push him into the ocean. Why is this person more worthy of respect than the person she is criticizing?
Hillary is misunderstood? How often do any of the anti-Bernie comments on this site ever delve into the actual reasons that his supporters have no f*cks left to give? There’s a lot of “they better not stay home,” and there’s a lot of “I’m not going to vote for Bernie because of them, look how angry they are,” but the only thing that tends to matter to people who say these things is “are they going to vote for us?,” not “What do they want? How can we reach out to them? Do they have a point? Is there some way that we could make them actually want to support our candidates?” When people are treated as commodities and statistics, while ignoring their hopes and dreams, how do we think that’s going to work out? How does it work out when it happens in a corporation? Are there a lot of smiles, like Bernie was expected to smile?
The Bernie Left is told “we don’t care what you want, we’re never going to support candidates similar to your worldview, we’re never going to push for the policies most exciting to you, and we will scream if you criticize us. But you must always vote for us anyway, because we’ll scream even louder if you leave the party, or primary our beloved members, or stay home. By the way, it’s all your fault. And SMILE MORE, damnit!!”
The divide in our party is not too wide to be overcome, it is just that the people in power don’t WANT to overcome it, they want the Left to simply vote and then shut up for 4 years. At any time, the party COULD do real, meaningful Progressive outreach (not just triangulation as the goalposts are always moved Rightward). The DCCC COULD go all in on some percentage of Progressives every year, just to test whether those policies can sell in Purple and Red areas if given real support by the party brass and sympathetic media. If Progressives still couldn’t win in those areas, then that might mollify voters who are constantly enraged at never being given a real chance by the party (a party that, according to the leaked audio of Steny Hoyer in Colorado in 2018, chooses and massively advantages their hand-picked candidate months before the primaries occur, while publicly claiming that it’s an impartial process). And if those Progressives did win, where other Democrats typically lose, it would be a wonderful new window into how to perhaps gain more seats.
But they don’t do any of this. Obama didn’t reach out to the Left before Republicans took over, and he didn’t reach out after they took over either. Hillary didn’t reach out to the Left. Biden proudly defies the Left (when he isn’t comically pretending to be one of us), Pelosi doesn’t reach out to the Left, Hoyer doesn’t, Schumer doesn’t, the DCCC doesn’t, NONE of them do. So we’re left with a segment of the base that frankly has no f*cks to give as they contemplate another in a long line of Democrats that are going to treat them like garbage. Ergo, the idea of “unity,” which only goes one way clearly, is far less meaningful to the Bernie Left than revolution is. When there’s no seat at the table for us, and there never will be because everyone at the table hates us, the desire grows stronger to flip over the table, not to nicely place our votes on the table with a big smile.
The party had better start respecting the Left, or there won’t be much of a party soon. Or much of a country left to save.
For the record, I will support the Democratic nominee. But I believe very, very strongly that Biden will lose to Trump and Bernie will beat Trump. And I’d like to win for once.