This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Democratic Party
The best way for the US to help Ukraine is to have a functioning Biden administration-and preventing that is the primary goal of the GOP. Therefore, doing the domestic and policy work must be at the center of Biden’s efforts to support Ukraine in this war.
The biggest challenge is to persuade a significant proportion of those who now support the authoritarian movement that is almost entirely indistinguishable from the Republican Party that democracy is a better solution. If the GOP is recaptured by conservatives who believe, generally, in the idea of democracy, or if it is defeated enough that fewer than about 30% of the American people support it, democracy will have a chance in the US. However, if neither of those unlikely events come to pass, the crisis will endure for a while.
Ultimately, the recent Virginia elections tells us much less than we would like to think about what will happen in the 2022 or 2024 US elections, but they provide a roadmap for both parties. Much of what happens in those elections will depend on how well the parties can follow those roadmaps.
The multiple sexual harassment allegations against Governor Cuomo and the detailed report substantiating these allegations and providing a fuller picture of the extent of Cuomo’s abusive and depraved behavior should disqualify him from continuing to hold public office. However, the entirety of Cuomo’s career, not just what appears to be its final inning, is a model for how the Democratic Party should not do politics in New York, or anywhere else.
The election was a clear victory for the Democrats, but while the electoral college made Biden’s victory seem bigger than it was, the senate map and the way many states are gerrymandered, benefited the Republicans. This is significant, because it points to the intuitive conclusion that voters responded to this campaign by hardening their partisan positions and, in the huge majority of cases, voting a straight party ticket.
The recent months of the Covid-19 pandemic have made Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses and mental instability, as well as the cult-like loyalty of his of his followers, even more apparent. In the last few weeks, even in the last few days, as Donald Trump has asserted his “total” authority while continuing to suggest that, in so many words, universal suffrage is prima facie election fraud, the acceleration of democratic rollback has increased substantially. Queries and earnest commentary about whether the US is in the beginning of a Constitutional crisis seem positively quaint now. We are not at the beginning of that crisis, nor, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, are we at the end of the beginning. We are in the middle, or perhaps more alarmingly, approaching the end of that crisis-and democracy is losing.
Sanders is now at a key decision point. While he still has a chance at being the nominee, and therefore any calls for him to get out of the race are way too premature, he must carefully consider his options. 2020 will end in one of three ways for Sanders. Either he will get elected President of the United States, will have moved the party significantly leftward but still be stuck in the US Senate, or will be held responsible by many for helping elect Donald Trump-twice. The only reason this is a difficult choice is that Sanders seems to think that he can only achieve the first option, if he allows the third one to be possible. Sanders’ ongoing, and by now foolish, battle with what he calls the Democratic establishment has created this problem and led to the real fear and possibility that Bernie’s most ardent supporters will stay home if Biden is the nominee. The smart move for Sanders would be to do whatever is he can to ensure that does not happen.
Every four years a subset of pundits and political junkies speculate about a brokered convention where no candidate comes into the convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot, thus leading to discussions, multiple ballots and deal-making before a nominee is finally chosen. For much of American history this was common, but in the last half century or so that has changed. The last genuinely brokered Democratic convention was 1952 when the eventual nominee was Adlai Stevenson. Early opposition to Donald Trump among many Republicans led to speculation that the 2016 Republican convention would be brokered, but it didn’t work out that way.
Now that primary season is underway we are again reminded of just how flawed the current system is. Every four years the political class and some scholars raise questions about why we choose our presidents this way, but after the election these questions fade away as more seemingly pressing and urgent issues take over, so while we tinker with the rules changing them slightly for every nominating season, we never address the underlying problems.
Bernie Sanders has been running for president essentially nonstop for almost five years now. For much of that time the question that has been the subtext of his candidacy has been can he win-first the Democratic Party nomination and then the general election. With the Iowa caucus, the first contest of the 2020 nominating season, less than a month away, it may be time to rephrase that question-at least the first half of that question-and ask if Bernie can lose the Democratic Party’s nomination. That is an overstatement, but a confluence of recent events and developments in the race have bolstered Sanders’ chances.
The decision by the non-Trump leadership of the Republican Party to cast their lot with Russia and Trump rather than with the US, and indeed with traditional conservative, even right-wing policies is baffling, but only if one ignores the corrosive influences of bigotry, ignorance and anti-democratic sentiments in the GOP since long before spring of 2015.
It is easy, and not entirely inaccurate, to describe the US has a deeply polarized country and to argue that the impeachment hearings demonstrate this as the Democrats and Republicans in the relevant congressional committees have such radically different understandings of the events in question. This explanation is insufficient because it glosses over the critical reality of the state of American politics as demonstrated during the impeachment hearings. The issue is not so much one of political polarization but that the Republicans in Congress, reflecting the position they share with the White House and the right wing media and punditry, are deeply committed to constructing and inhabiting a fantasy world built on a foundation of deliberate lies and held together with support from the Kremlin and almost solely dedicated to keeping Donald Trump, and those around him, in power and out of prison.
Because they have chosen simply to exploit the least democratic elements of the Constitution, the Republicans have no incentive to broaden their party’s appeal or expand that appeal beyond their base. Therefore, there is no reason why the most deluded, angry and narrow parts of the base cannot take over the party-and that is exactly what has happened. The result of this is that a primary opponent to Trump, even somebody with the wealth and resume of Bloomberg, would not only lose, but would be subject to the attacks, threats and slander that is now the way the Republicans respond to all perceived threats to Trump’s power.
In addition to using the presidency to pursue his twin goals of enriching himself and his close family while staying in power, Trump has emerged as a kind of gadfly in chief. His Twitter feed and public appearances frequently include criticisms of other elected officials, observations about how bad various problems are, crackpot theories about who is to blame and speculation about what might happen in the future. In this regard, Trump sounds much more like an outsider, albeit a cranky, angry one with a tenuous relationship with reality, rather than a president who has the ability to address these problems. In an odd way, Trump has responded to being one of the most powerful men in the world, by retreating to a self-imposed powerlessness.
As the impeachment inquiry heats up it still remains unlikely that Donald Trump will be removed from office by the Senate, but the motivations and goals of some of the major interests are becoming clear. Donald Trump, as has been the case for much of his presidency, is in survival mode. The crisis might be more acute now, but the basic framework is the same. Trump must, and will, fight with all his power to stay in office because removal by the Senate leads to humiliation, a lifetime of legal hassles and very possibly jail time for him and several members of his family.
On Thursday night, ten Democratic candidates will gather for the third official debate of this primary season. This debate will only be one night and include only ten candidates, so it should be smoother and more useful for potential voters. However, it is still likely that much of the debate will be taken up by detailed discussions of policy proposals on issues like health care, gun regulations or the environment. These discussions are worthwhile, interesting and give a good sense of what the candidates believe, but the emphasis on details belies the reality that presidents don’t make policy. They are merely part of a process along with congress and in many cases the states and the courts. These detailed discussions of policies seem like the right subject for the debate, but there are other bigger picture questions that are probably more important. Below are three questions that Democratic voters should be asking their candidates, but that might not be raised on Thursday night.
When told that Biden, or any other candidate, is electable, we should remember that while some broad trends about electability, such as the danger of Democratic insider resume candidates, can be discerned, electability is often a very slippery concept, that usually also falls victim to intellectual laziness and tautology. Candidates are electable because they win, so once a president is elected a backstory about electability is filled in. For example, we now “know” that Hillary Clinton was unelectable, but if 80,000 or so votes in a few key states had gone differently in 2016, the pundits would have explained that Hillary Clinton was electable because of her experience, centrist policies and calm temperament and that Donald Trump’s bigotry and mental instability scared off too many voters and made him unelectable. The problem with this approach to electability is that it is not predictive. It is not a theory; rather, it is essentially just political kibitzing both before and after the election.
In the last few weeks, Seth Moulton, John Hickenlooper, Kirsten Gillibrand and Jay Inslee have dropped out of the Democratic primary campaign for president. Hickenlooper and Inslee both had resumes that in previous elections could have made them frontrunners for the nomination, but their campaigns never got any traction this year. Both also immediately turned their attention to other elections. Inslee will seek a third term as governor of Washington while Hickenlooper will run for the Senate in Colorado against Republican incumbent Cory Gardner. Moulton, like Eric Swalwell a few weeks earlier, has decided to run for his safe congressional seat rather than continue a presidential campaign he had almost no chance of winning. Gillibrand will return to the Senate.
The Democratic presidential debates on Wednesday and Thursday nights were without precedent. Twenty potential nominees, which did not even represent the full field, debated with each other over the course of two evenings. This field of twenty will be winnowed in the next months with a nominee emerging somewhere between April and mid-July of 2020. The debates are only one component of what will be a long campaign, but they are the most important and high profile to date.
It may be that in 2016, it was not Sanders who consolidated the anti-Clinton sentiment, but Clinton who consolidated the anti-Sanders sentiment. As the primaries went on voters who found Sanders too far left, did not like his inability and seeming unwillingnessto connect to non-white voters, or chafed at the sexism of many in his campaign, had nowhere to go but to Clinton. In 2020, according to this view, the vote that went to Clinton will be dispersed among all the other candidates while Sanders will hold his base. If that happens, Sanders will be in a very good position to win the nomination.