Howard Schultz and Twenty First Century Mugwumpism

I did not even know who the CEO of Starbucks was until he abruptly decided he would do his best to re-elect Doughface Donny by running as an independent centrist candidate for president. Every buzzword phrase has already been deployed to try and dissuade Howard Schultz from doing this. I've heard 'if you really want to set fire to a bunch of money there are easier ways.' And the President of the Center for American Progress  will call for a boycott of Starbucks to make sure that none of her money is going to re-elect Trump. Even perennial mugwump independent centrist extraordinaire Michael Bloomberg said that it was a bad idea. Not because he didn't love Schultz' positions of ultra anti-progressivism one would assume, but because the electoral college makes it an impossibility.

Now, panic might be too strong a word for real world reactions to this hypothetical two years out spoiler, but this quixotic scheme and all others like it need to be squashed as hard as possible by as many voices as possible. We have enough trouble with every Democrat with more than 1% name recognition throwing their hat in the ring already to worry about how the elite business class will sabotage the restoration of the republic. This is serious business, not something for businessmen with no political experience and ideology that only fellow CEOs could love to jump into on an insane vanity project. I am normally pretty grumpy and gloomy about politics, civilization has enough to deal with from the enemy (republicans). This third party bid feels more like sabotage, especially when Schultz makes the same inane quip that Reagan did about the Democratic Party leaving him.

I mean goddamnit! Schultz has the same stupid positions that were all in vogue during the '90s with Bill Jeff and the DLC ragamuffins. We as a country and as individuals are kind of past the flirtations with propaganda like "this is a center-right country" when it has finally become so difficult to get by that no one can intentionally have a family. Seriously, it may have flew under the radar but the CDC report that fertility has dropped below replacement levels for the country at large made my local ABC affiliate. Other things we are done with, "tax cuts spur growth", "we can't afford medicare for all", or "free college or government guaranteed jobs will kill incentives to work hard." I am done with anyone not taking climate change seriously, or espousing any of the business-friendly positions that have skyrocketed inequality and poverty beyond gilded age levels.

The fertility report is also important in another respect, beyond finally putting the lie to any scumbag republican talking about "family values", is that business has finally broken Friedrich Engels' dictum that capitalism will always have a floor for wages at replacement levels. When workers cannot have enough children to replace themselves we have finally hit the ultimate short term gain, eat your seed corn period of late stage capitalism. It is the essence of mugwumpism that Howard Schultz embodies here, his main position seems to be not wanting to pay any more taxes. He apparently likes to label progressive ideas as un-American. Josh Marshall at TPM wrote that this supposed "lifelong Democrat" is basically running as an anti-Democrat and on an anti-Democratic Party platform.

Schultz embodied, not the non-ideological centrism he claims, but the left wing of what Anand Giridharadas called "Marketworld" in his book Winners Take All. Perhaps Marketworld is the home of 21st century mugwumps, refusing to join in the messy world of politics to tinker with market-based solutions to social problems. Schultz very consciously states that he wants to run "outside the two party system" because to acknowledge that real people and their lives are affected by what happens in the dirty world of partisan politics would be to admit that his canopy view of America is completely out of touch. Oblivious to the fact that they have caused most of the problems they purportedly want to solve, modern mugwumps operate inside the fantasy that any attempt to raise taxes on the rich will cause the economy to collapse and life as we know it to end. Much better to massively cut Social Security and Medicare, thus ensuring that life will end for millions of non-millionaires. Claiming that the massive national debt (run up almost entirely by republicans and their legacies) is our greatest threat was the standard threat of republicans only a decade or so ago. You need look no further than this scolding from Investors Business Daily to understand that these are internalized ideals of the Marketworld set, completely detached from life as most of us know it.

Howard, as someone who has drunk a few Starbucks coffees and isn't fundamentally hostile to the company, please take Bloomberg's advice.

Whose Populism is it Anyway?

So, you're an eternally boyish right winger whose increasing slips into espousing white supremacist propaganda has caused advertisers to start fleeing your show, what do you do? Why, turn to economic populism of course! Just as republicans flocked to the banner of a no talent hustler and failed reality TV star who promised them a herrenvolk democracy where their white families and communities would be protected from the hell he would rain down upon the darker-skinned Americans, Tucker Carlson unleashed a monologue recently that would make Bernie Sanders or William Jennings Bryan proud (if they only glanced at the non-conspiracy theory side).

“Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

Vox posted an extensive in-depth article about the heresy to the free market faith that utterly and absolutely defines what it is to be "conservative" in America posited by Carlson and some of the debate sparked on the right by his statements. It is worth reading in full and I will try to highlight some of the salient points but you should really go check it out for yourself, because I could be completely wrong in my analysis.

My first thought was, "has Tucker Carlson ever expressed a populist thought in his preppy, bowtied life?" But I guess "the people versus the elites" is kind of his schtick.

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

 My, my, does this remind you of anyone?

In [Thomas] Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. “It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor — only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary’s face,” he writes. Today, polite circles tend to describe this as the issue of “inequality.” Frank prefers an older formulation. “The 19th century understood it better: They called it ‘the social question,’ ” he writes, defined as “nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.”

As Frank notes, today some people are living much better than others — and many of those people are not Republicans. Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism, including private universities, bike paths, microfinance, the Clinton Foundation, “well-meaning billionaires” and any public policy offering “innovation” or “education” as a solution to inequality. He spends almost an entire chapter mocking the true-blue city of Boston, with its “lab-coat and starched-shirt” economy and its “well-graduated” population of overconfident collegians.

I guess Carlson's is a perfect corollary to Dr. Frank's scathing analysis of the technocratic elite liberals who:

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

But of course, Tucker Carlson is not a populist. He is at most like Otto von Bismarck, sniffing the warning smoke of impending revolution and enacting paternalistic Prussian social programs to cool the socialist ire of the people. Or maybe just an outsider, desperately trying to get his well-bred republican colleagues to cool it with the destabilizing class warfare. I don't expect this "most interesting debate in conservative politics" to actually amount to anything. We Americans could not work up the energy to mount a rebellion against the Koch brothers or Doughfacedonny that would actually cause them to worry. Carlson is inadvertently telling the truth, the MAGA hat-wearing proles really did want a Caudillo to put them back at the front of the line and put the brown people back in their place. But that 25-33% of Americans is so brainwashed at this point that they cannot connect dots, they will write Doughfacedonny off the same way they powered up the Bush-Off machine (h/t Driftglass). After all, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. The next wannabe Caudillo will not be as stupid as donny.

So what the hell is populism anyway? And who owns the genuine version? Even a cursory study of revolutions in history supplies a great deal of evidence that radical change doesn't come from the bottom. It confirms Orwell's theory that revolutions are simply the ambitious middle displacing a calcified upper class. In America race is always at the heart of reaction. So the New York Times can quote a republican secretary, the kind who would really benefit from Bismarck-style social insurance programs (the kind that can really only be done in the public sector), as saying:

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

But, "conservatism" as understood by these reprogrammable meatbags who fall for every authoritarian trope in the book, is much more informed by John C. Calhoun than Bismarck. Thus the absurdity of tea party republicans demonstrating in the streets in favor of deregulating the banks and against decent health insurance.  That was passed along by serious media commentators with straight faces as "populism" too.

Is it easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission?

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, as he was wont to do, about presidential history in times of crisis. In particular he cited Abraham Lincoln and the extraordinary measures he took during the opening months of the Civil War. That was a real state of emergency, the slave states organized with incredible speed and moved quickly to steal Federal buildings and property. Slave power propagandists in the border states printed wildly seditious stories about the North and the newly elected president. It was not a time for careful deliberation and the slow wheels of government to take action. Schlesinger wrote that it was easier for Lincoln to do what needed to be done and explain his actions later.

Other presidents have taken questionable actions in times of crisis as well, Andrew Jackson's bank war and Indian removal, John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, Wilson's roundups and deportations of revolutionary aliens, and so on. In each case, it appeared to much of the public to be a real crisis. Okay, maybe not with Jackson because he was just an asshole, but most of the time action was at least perceived to be necessary. The constitution was bypassed, the crisis resolved and officials took responsibility for their actions, most of the time anyway. It was easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. This idea isn't limited to presidents, military commanders, police chiefs, businessmen, and even parents who need to take their children to the doctor all occasionally take action and answer for it later. This has also been a core tenet of all the torture porn films and television shows, "do we torture the shit out of the guy with the location of the bomb now and take our chances on punishment later?"

I'm no leader and I hate these kind of hypotheticals but we are rapidly approaching a turning point in American democracy. Another republican president is about to declare an emergency to get some awful thing they want, as has happened at least informally, for the last half century. Let's think about a few. Nixon's operatives went on their merry way bugging opponents, blackmailing and intimidating activists, planting provocateurs in anti-war groups and others, and generally acting above the law until they finally got caught. And even then,they would have walked away laughing had it not been for the courage of democracy's defenders holding their feet to the fire. Reagan's basement conspiracy in Iran-Contra likewise just ran their clandestine operation to sell arms to one enemy so they could supply an army of terrorists in Nicaragua. A few of them got caught and did their time as just the cost of doing business. Most just laughed all the way to the bank though, including the doddering old man himself. The list of authoritarian monstrosities of George W. Bush's administration is incredibly long and would make for many posts and book fodder. Sure, there was a real attack on America, although in hindsight it is fairly clear that it could have been foiled if that band of republican hacks had tried. But the cynical opportunism of denouncing opponents as traitors, and blasting out terror warnings that most likely were exaggerated in the extreme to fearmonger and drown out news of their myriad failures certainly fits this pattern.

Doughfacedonny is widely expected to declare a state of national emergency as outlined in an Act passed by Congress after Watergate that was and is supposed to stop the pattern of doing this very thing during his TV time tonight. Why the networks are still falling for his shit is a mystery we will never fully know the answer to. No one in their right mind would give this orange disgrace permission to do anything, or forgive him afterwards. Not that he would care. He already stole the presidency with the help of monsters at home and abroad. He stole two supreme court seats now and blew up the deficit with his corporate welfare tax giveaway. Has he asked for forgiveness for any of those things? No, of course not. He and Mitch McConnell have not asked permission to reopen the damn government that they run and aren't exactly trying very hard to be forgiven for the latest mess they caused.

It has made the rounds, in liberal commentary circles anyway, the idea of a Reichstag Fire moment coming from this crowd of traitors and imbeciles. And as the meme so often points out, "it's no longer whether trump has any decency, but whether we do." Are the networks, "the enemy of the people" as doughfacedonny so often calls them, really going to go along with this? Maybe he will just go out and feebly rant and lie about immigration and walls and other such nonsense. Nothing will come of it and we can all go back to our regularly scheduled resistance. There certainly is a national emergency but it's not on the border with Mexico. It isn't a legitimacy crisis, all the evidence of Russian meddling has rendered the occupant of the Oval Office illegitimate. It isn't an economic crisis either, the stock market is tanking because of the real crisis though. It is that one major political party in the United States is a death cult of human suffering and that about 40% of the electorate supports that cult.

There may come a time when the American people are finally pushed so hard that they must collectively ask whether it is easier to ask forgiveness for destroying the death cult after the fact, or whether we sit back and civilly wait for permission from the Democrats to defeat them. If doughfacedonny does indeed declare a national emergency and fumble around stealing enough money to build the stupid wall, it won't stop there. I suck at predicting the future, I really expected death squads on day one, but this time might prove more dangerous. Donny's back is against the wall, it is no longer a whisper that he should resign and bolt while he still can. The previous crises of Republican malice gave the criminal-in-chief a path out of danger, therefore they left when their time came but will donny? You can almost trace a line in the escalation of authoritarianism in republican governance since the late 1960s, pushing but never quite closing the door on democracy. Tonight the trap might spring shut. Stay tuned.