An Enlightened Moderate

Chris Hedges is possibly the gloomiest leftist to darken our political discourse I have yet encountered. I was working on some articles by David Dayen and Matt Stoller to show a better way to look at the Democratic Party establishment than a dismissive hand-waving conspiracy theory when this one from Hedges came to my attention. Subtitled "The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage" this jeremiad from gloomy Chris has every unhelpful far left conspiracy I have yet seen and to top it off, takes Bernie Sanders off the pedestal as barely acceptable in his mind. He starts out decently enough:

...there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives.

Okay, I'm on board with this sentiment. It is definitely in keeping with this blog's mission of renewing our knowledge of past truths, this one being central to those memories.

 Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity—the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests — are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life.

Yup, those are really bad things. We should remember how hard our ancestors fought to rein in company towns, Pinkertons, blacklists, monopolies, and their modern equivalents that keep the majority down.

There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other.

Oh, that's where we're going. Okay, please continue, I would like to hear all about how the Democrats launched wars of aggression and tore babies from their mothers while having a beer party to celebrate taking healthcare away from millions of Americans.

Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic — class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.

Right. No substantial differences. A Democratic president will certainly keep Stephen Miller on to terrorize immigrants and will further dismantle the pandemic response team at the CDC. Consolidating tyranny and inciting violence, those are two qualities I totally ascribe to Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Now Hedges turns to that ultimate of intellectual laziness, quoting himself:

“Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for ‘Medicare for All,’ abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.”

Nope, no substantial differences there.

...Most importantly, [Sanders] believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate.” [emphasis mine]

Belief. There's the word I've been waiting for. What else can it be called when you state in no uncertain terms that:

The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination.

Then cite as your evidence a NYTimes interview with less than one seventh of the superdelegates who stated they would not support Sanders on a theoretical second ballot at the convention if he did not have a majority of pledged delegates. I don't have a subscription to the NYTimes so I can't easily check if that is what the article truly says or not.

Now, just to provide some contrast I wanted to post something Ed Burmilla (the bountiful wisdom of Gin and Tacos and an actual political scientist if such a thing truly exists) wrote about the Democratic Party, and if you've watched any of his social media you know he's no fan of moderates or elites controlling it:

Inevitably, there are already conspiracy theories everywhere. Party coordination is not a devious or underhanded activity, and in fact it is a thing political parties are *supposed to do*. Pete & Klob dropping out together and everyone (including Beto, who I forgot existed) coming out to endorse Biden the day before Super Tuesday is not just a bunch of stuff that happened coincidentally.

I wrote weeks ago that, if the Not Sanders democrats wanted to stop him, they needed to coordinate around one candidate. The problem is I think they picked the worst one to coordinate around, not that Coordinate means Devious Conspiracy to Cheat.

Noel et al "The Party Decides" is a useful and accessible book on this subject. Parties are not obligated to be neutral observers of their own nomination processes. "Some power players apparently decided it's time to throw everything behind Biden and they talked some other candidates into withdrawing" is...not only is it not a conspiracy, it's just kind of what parties try to do.

It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party is just one party that encompasses all legitimate political factions in the United States instead of a coalition of parties representing the center-left to the left as in many parliamentary systems. So there are only so many leadership positions and a lot less jockeying for position as smaller parties would do to coalesce into a governing alliance. But we have to work with what we have, something that seems entirely lost on Hedges. It is the condescending attitude with threadbare evidence to back it up in broad generalizations like this that piss me off:

 The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process. The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the world’s prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the world’s population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy.

The leaders of the Democratic Party—the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez—would rather implode the party and the democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the party’s nominee, will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.

 Ugh. I can't even deal with this.

Go buy one will 'ya!

Driftglass and Bluegal actually sell bumper stickers and other merch that says "Both Sides Don't" and spend a considerable amount of time demonstrating this fact. The late Christopher Hitchens developed a theorem often referred to as "Hitchens' Razor" that states "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" so can we dispense with the grand conspiracy theory that "The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy."

I know Hedges has written several books about this stuff, it can basically be boiled down to "both sides are bad". I tried reading American Fascists but it was so obtuse and arrogant while not making a well supported argument that I had to give up on it. Maybe you had a different impression of him.

You have to wonder what kind of candidate Gloomy Chris could support? What sort of thing would make him happy? Apparently only the kind of violent revolutions that went so well in places like Russia and France. No thanks.

I'll stick with the enlightened moderate. If that fails, I'll support whoever makes it to the nomination. Because both sides are not the same.

America Rarely Faces This Kind of a Threat

The title of this essay by Mark Sumner really caught my attention.

America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should never be a for-profit business

I first saw it on Crooks and Liars and have linked back to Kos where it seemed to have been first published. It is a very strong indictment of all that wonderful "efficiency" and "disruption" that has been imposed on America by profit-maximizing corporations for decades now. Especially our ramshackle healthcare industry has taken cost-cutting and productivity enhancement to such an extreme that the system is running at near capacity in normal times because that is how to maximize profits. Needless to say it is extremely fragile and operates with almost no margin for error.

Sumner contrasts the "super-lean, infinite-sigma healthcare system, absolutely dependent on every cog remaining in place" operating principle of corporate medicine with NASA's joke about "all the components being built by the lowest bidder" but notes that spacecraft have redundant systems built in all over them while hospitals walk a tightrope of "just-in-time" deliveries and nurses worked to exhaustion. It's a system designed to fold up with the smallest amount of stress on it. Somehow republicans claim that our healthcare system is the best in the world and people don't want to change their plan. No amount of protest or lobbying by mere mortals who get sick seems to penetrate the corporate armor or into Congress.

Previous outbreaks of disease allowed some sporadic improvements and plans to get through in public systems but the private healthcare industry balk at any attempts to increase their costs for such silly reasons as people dying or emergencies that might never materialize. Digby made a note that doughfacedonny and the other cynical bastards made real hay out of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 that had my mother-in-law so worried.

From all reports, the president is extremely unhappy with this turn of events, primarily because he believes it could interfere with his re-election. It’s easy to see why he thinks that: He and his Republican friends worked hard to gin up the Ebola outbreak into a national panic in 2014, and there’s good evidence that it had an effect on the outcome of the midterm elections that year, when the GOP made major gains.

But this time we don’t have a competent administration in charge to deal with the actual crisis while gadflies like Trump and Fox News play political games. Just as he has corrupted the DOJ and the director of national intelligence’s office, purging the ranks of experts and professionals by any means necessary, so too he has degraded the nation’s public health system, first and foremost by firing the White House pandemic response team and cutting the CDC’s efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks by 80%.

As I understand it, cutting CDC funding and the pandemic response team was a priority because President Obama had those things and everything the black guy did has to go. Besides, there are corporate tax cuts to pay for. Public health be damned. Digby also linked to this article in the Pacific Standard magazine that found correlation between republican fear-mongering over Ebola and their election gains in 2014. The research found that fear made people more likely to vote for conservative candidates. If there is anything I want for Christmas, it is the fact that republicans are not conservative to go mainstream. These are authoritarians, an actual conservative would not be interested in corporate "disruption" and "efficiency" that lead to instability. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

Another thing an actual conservative understands is that disasters happen, and when you are entrusted with public office it is your responsibility to serve the public to the best of your ability. I just saw a comment, "does anyone else get the feeling that the trump administration isn't taking the Coronavirus seriously?" in response to Mick Mulvaney the chief of staff whining about how the media was portraying doughfacedonny's shortcomings. What an understatement. Digby noted in her article that donny's primary concern is his reelection and money. CNN's Matt Egan relayed Goldman Sachs "concerns" that Coronavirus might endanger that reelection and money but now that Bernie Sanders has the premature triumphalism of being the frontrunner that all the capitalists can rest easy. So while donny has been working hard finding excuses to visit his properties on your dime, spending an entire third of his term there, the rest of his henchmen are hard at work censoring experts who could inform the public.

Unlike the rest of the world, America has been relatively insulated and privileged to have avoided invasions of either foreign soldiers or pathogens. This is why, in my opinion, our corporate and republican elites take such a cavalier attitude towards preparedness. A nation that was aware that outside threats are more varied than a terror attack would not run a trillion dollar deficit in a "peacetime" and "full employment" economy. It never fails to amaze me how much tunnel vision our corporate executive overlords have. On the one hand every management buzzword traces back to "disrupt!" but this seems to only pertain to causing as much insecurity and instability as possible for workers and families. Stretching supply chains all over the world, leaving deliveries to the magic of "just in time" manufacturing, and concentrating so much power in the hands of monopolist companies that don't really compete and therefore don't care about real disruption is a recipe for disaster. The American system of manufacturing used to be about interchangeable parts, logical progression of assembly on moving lines, and precision machinery. Now it is, as Mark Sumner wrote extensively in his essay, all about running things at the edge of failure with no margin of error on purpose because that is how investors can maximize profits.

Running heathcare like this is absolutely ludicrous. If hospitals and clinics are stressed to the breaking point in normal times, the smallest disruption will cause cascading failures at every point. Real disruption, like an epidemic or concerted terror campaigns, will in short order completely collapse American society. The executives know this and run their calcified, unwieldy monopolies lean and fragile anyway. Why? Partially because they have to answer to that shady group of a$$holes called "investors" who always push for more. Catastrophes are unusual, rare occurrences... and someone else's problem. When Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street parasites collapsed the housing market in 2008, someone else became the American taxpayer. They screwed us all both ways and got away with it, Uncle Sam came to their rescue and asked for nothing in return. Executives as a class expect the same pampering every time they collapse the economy but what happens when Uncle Sam has been hollowed out and sabotaged by republicans?

Wash your hands, avoid crowds, take vitamins, and do everything you can to protect yourself and your family because we're on our own.