The Chris Moeller Archives

The more-or-less fast-approaching defeat of Trumpism

Jonathan Chait and Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine are still all in for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. From the cold, dead hands of the agents of the party's defeat, I guess.

Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard was a bigger cheerleader for Hillary Clinton last year than was Chait. He opposed Bernie Sanders' call for a $15 federal minimum wage, and called Sanders' campaign against free trade "more ignorant than Donald Trump's." My favorite among his criticisms of Sanders that were, in retrospect, an unintentional indictment of the Clinton campaign instead is that last year's Democrats "risk losing the presidency" by nominating a candidate who has been "shelter(ed).. from necessary internal criticism."

For his part, Kilgore, during that period of the campaign just before WikiLeaks exposed to voters the anti-Sanders machinations inside the DNC, argued that Clinton should "offer Team Sanders the fool's gold of platform concessions and maybe the promise of a look at primary laws and procedure" rather than actual concessions and, it would seem then, the basic courtesy of respect and consideration. Kilgore also opined last May, more than half a year ahead of the Rust Belt Revolt, that "the actual working-class voters Sanders claims to represent view Clinton as the devil isn't borne out by the numbers."

So when these two cats lean in to tell you that Donald Trump's political death is imminent, grab a pen and a college-ruled, spiral-bound notepad and form a Lotus-position at their feet because they're most certainly hooked to something big.

Chait's editor has chosen for his latest cheer routine the headline "Republicans Are Going to Wish Hillary Clinton Won." This is New York Magazine politics at its finest. Give the people the reality they want. Reinforce their most strongly-held beliefs about the purity of their own motives and the wisdom of the electoral choices that they make. Though there are some odd comic elements to the article, Chait seems legitimately convinced that Republican Party is (again) on the verge of collapse. In fact, I could have put that phrase "verge of collapse" in quotes. He writes that exactly-- even as he then follows that immediately with an acknowledgement that the nation's dominant party is about to add a Supreme Court justice, "a host of federal judges, and a wide array of deregulation."

Kilgore's April 5th offering is titled "Trump will Help Dems Solve Their 'Midterm Falloff' Problem." He's already predicting big gains for the Dems in the 2018 mid-terms, something that-- if it happens as he suggests-- would be a historical rarity indeed as Democratic turnout is typically horrendous in off-presidential years.

Where can all of this optimism be coming from unless they're still unmoored from reality? Few other details are offered by either man. Where are the candidates of opposition? What will they look like? What will their message be? They've got a live one out in Montana, but they're ignoring him. There's no evidence that anything has changed at all in the mindset of the leadership of this party that is now relegated to minor status-- controlling neither the White House, nor the Senate, nor the Congress. Only 16 of 50 state governors are Democrats. The party was obliterated at the local level during the Obama presidency, experiencing a net loss of 1,000 seats in state legislatures during the last eight years.

Have they changed their message? Are they reaching out to the disaffected working-class voters in Rust Belt states that handed Clinton her defeat and helped send an overwhelming majority of Republicans to Washington for 2017? You tell me. Do you hear any of them, or their surrogates, talking about jobs? About trade? About a living wage? We might claim different news sources, but all I hear from them is xenophobic shit about Russia. Their only apparent strategy for combating what Chait refers to as Trump's "power of ethnonationalism" is a little ethnonationalism of their own. If only they aped his rhetoric of economic populism instead.

What we're getting instead from Chait and Kilgore, and from Democrats in general, is a doubling-down on a strategy that has already face-planted-- a rigid focus on their hopeful perceptions of a "Trump hate" existing among the populace, and still refusing to develop a populist message of their own despite the gaping vacuum Trump has created for a version of the real thing. Trump has indeed exuded an extraordinary incompetence during his first two-and-a-half months on the job, but the Democrats are still gifting him with the same antidote for his defeat.

posted by CM @ 11:21 AM