What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Berkut]

I am pleased that the discussion has at least settled on agreement that the 1619s project attempt to cast the American Revolution, and hence the American founding, as just an attempt to protect slavery was incorrect.

[Sheilbh]

Without addressing each point by point:

+ Two old sayings about the Democrats are the Will Rogers line about "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat" and the saying about candidate selection that "Democrats fall in love, Republican fall in line". These capture certain truths - because Republicans tend be more deferential to authority, their messaging tends to be more disciplined (and simplistic). 

This made me thinking of the recent (new?) New Republic review of a history of the Democrats. The opening:

The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once tried to convey in global terms the sheer potency and resilience of American political parties. "The Democratic party, for example, is truly venerable," he noted.
    Its history is substantially coterminous with that of the Republic, making it the senior of all but three or four of the governments among the original signatories of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Its vitality is proved by the fact that it survived the Civil War when the Republic itself was torn apart and organizations as viable as the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Baptist Church were split by the conflict between the North and the South. The Democratic Party is therefore one of the most tenacious governing organizations in the world.

Schattschneider wrote those words in 1942. And here, 80 years later, the battered and battle-worn Democratic vessel still beats on—even holding unified control of the federal government, albeit tenuously, as it had in the year of Schattschneider's musings. The party's durability, borne of ruthless adaptability more than consistency of cause, may indeed be its one enduring trait across two centuries of electoral life. "Tenacious" is an apt descriptor for the Democratic Party in much the way it is for a weed, or termites.

The title of Michael Kazin's very fine new history of the Democrats, What It Took to Win, likewise captures that hard core of pragmatism embedded in what he notes is "the oldest mass party in the world." By useful contrast, when historian Heather Cox Richardson published a history of the Republican Party in 2014, she called it To Make Men Free. If an edge of zeal, whether in revolution or reaction, has colored the GOP throughout its life, it's the coalitional instinct that is most deeply imprinted in the Democrats' DNA. Long the party of religious, regional, and ethnic outgroups, Democrats made a virtue of necessity by turning bargaining and practical-minded teamsmanship—the back scratched, the favor returned—into bedrock ethics of politics. Lyndon Johnson invoked that spirit in his frequent admonitions to fellow pols to "follow the prophet Isaiah ... 'come now, let us reason together.'" And, to lift a different, less high-minded axiom from LBJ, the Democratic Party has always thought it better to have people inside its big tent, pissing out, than to keep them outside, pissing in.

In the US context and given that line - article (the book sounds interesting) - what I wonder is whether the current Democrat coalition is durable and capable of governing? This is a particularly real risk for Democrats given the way hispanic voters are trending. If it's not, what is and what does it look ike to create that.

More generally - is the coalition building model still a relevant one? There are fewer and fewer split vote, there's fewer regional divides in voting - though obviously race is still a huge split. There's maybe something around rural/urban that is replicated within states and nationally. But generally there is more "national" swing which reflects what's happening on national news - but also fundraising. I always admire but wonder the effectiveness of Democrats running in a very safe Republican area who go a little bit viral and raise millions.

In that environment is the GOP's more ideologically driven approach (a coalition of various ideologies rather than interests) more workable in that context? Especially when all of those ideological variations - libertarian conservatives who want low taxes, religious right who want certain social policies and some form of nationalism - are all basically minority pursuits comfortable with the US system's power for political minorities.

+ That said, in the American context of deliberately divided political institutions and blocking points, an excess of passion leads to paralysis.  This was deliberate design, the professional revolutionaries who designed the US constitution knew the uses of passions but feared its excesses.

What do you mean by excess of passion leading to paralysis?

Edit: I now also think there's a book or an essay comparing and analysing the Dems and the Tories together. Both political survivors who shift and adapt with the times. In our case they're not just one of the most tenacious governing organisations but one of the most ruthlessly effective (190 years of history - only three leaders fail to become PM, all of them opposite Tony Blair). Both parties also face off against more ideologically driven parties, who have a more of a role for party activists/militants, are susceptible to sudden storms and deep currents - for example both recently had populist leaders with a fanatical support base outside the party establishment, who took positions that under another leader would be heresy, routinely attacked the press, have a fondness for overseas authoritarians and who were either bigoted themselves or tolerated a lot of bigotry on "their" side. Though ours is less successful - in 116 years of history and eighteen leaders, only six have become PM.

[The Minsky Moment]

What do you mean by excess of passion leading to paralysis?

Concretely, American federal institutions are designed such that a single political faction, even with strong popular support, will find it challenging to get legislation through without some compromise with an opposing faction.  When one party has an excess of militancy, it makes it difficult for legislators to forge the necessary compromises.

[grumbler]

I am pleased that the discussion has at least settled on agreement that the 1619s project attempt to cast the American Revolution, and hence the American founding, as just an attempt to protect slavery was incorrect.

    You haven't looked very closely at the 1619 Project, it is clear.  Your claim about its objective is false. Maybe your victory lap is premature.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, that's what makes history so interesting to me. Historical events usually have several different forces pulling in lots of different directions, with historical actors of varying degrees of agency and of various different beliefs and motivations. And whatever survives as source material are all that we have to parse out those events, which we then fashion into narratives that we think best explain what happened. And of course what doesn't survive, or what is left unrecorded by contemporary historical people, are things we may never know about. Fascinating stuff.

And it's even more interesting to read different interpretations of the same event that argue diametrically opposed things, especially arguments that exist outside the historical consensus. That is the nature of historical inquiry.

Yeah same. I also love a fairly strident argument for someone's case, because I never know enough to pick up on scholarly subtlety. The other thing is the occasional flash that illuminates that isn't recorded - I've just been reading The Common Wind which is an extraordinary book that uncovers communication networks between slaves and other marginalised groups in the Caribbean in the run up to and during the Haitian revolution. It's just incredible because it's the sort of thing that you think is almost impossible to recover now but the you discover there are these records that shine a brief light on, say, an urban underground in Jamaica that would hide escaped slaves or, in this case, runaway musicians. For me it all makes sense but it's a revelation.

I feel the same when I read a really good, well-argued interpretation I've not come across - even if I end up disagreeing as I read more. The Marxist take on things is normally assimilated into general histories now, but the shock of the first Marxist histories must have been incredible.

[Oexmelin]

I've just been reading The Common Wind which

Julius! 

He was a lovely man.

[Berkut]

I am pleased that the discussion has at least settled on agreement that the 1619s project attempt to cast the American Revolution, and hence the American founding, as just an attempt to protect slavery was incorrect.

   You haven't looked very closely at the 1619 Project, it is clear.  Your claim about its objective is false. Maybe your victory lap is premature.

I did not say that was its objective, I said it made the attempt to make a specific claim, and there isn't much doubt that they did so.

They did a lot of other things as well, and as I stated, I am broadly supportive of its objective overall.

[viper37]

I am pleased that the discussion has at least settled on agreement that the 1619s project attempt to cast the American Revolution, and hence the American founding, as just an attempt to protect slavery was incorrect.

We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery. Versions of this interpretation can be found in much of the scholarship into the origins and character of the Revolution that has marked the past 40 years or so of early American historiography — in part because historians of the past few decades have increasingly scrutinized the role of slavery and the agency of enslaved people in driving events of the Revolutionary period.
 
That accounting is itself part of a growing acceptance that the patriots represented a truly diverse coalition animated by a variety of interests, which varied by region, class, age, religion and a host of other factors, a point succinctly demonstrated in the title that the historian Alan Taylor chose for his 2016 account of the period: "American Revolutions.
 
 If the scholarship of the past several decades has taught us anything, it is that we should be careful not to assume unanimity on the part of the colonists, as many previous interpretive histories of the patriot cause did. We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists. A note has been appended to the story as well.

An update to the 1619 project

I don't really see how this can be in dispute:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

That line right there.  It's about the freedom offered to the slaves by the Virginian governor.
The original text is here:
Original text

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation's first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

It overstates the opposition to slavery in Britain and slightly exaggerate the importance it had in the American colonies, but the basic facts are true, slavery was a major cause for independence for many Americans in Virginia and other colonies.

And it's hard to find fault with that, which we already discussed elsewhere.
On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation's highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy's behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their former "masters." But Lincoln worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a "troublesome presence" incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. "Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?" he had said four years earlier. "My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not."[/quote]

[Berkut]

Thanks for showing that they decided to back away from their absurdity.

[grumbler]

Thanks for showing that they decided to back away from their absurdity.

Are you going to follow their example, or just keep digging?

[Eddie Teach]

Does this obsession with digging holes come from your experiences in the Great War?

[grumbler]

Not so great, akshully.

[OttoVonBismarck]

As someone who still calls himself a conservative (I think the GOP has gone into reactionary extremism, and have little real association with classical conservatism now), and votes Democrat as a "party of refuge" specifically with a mind to protecting democracy--I strongly agree with Oex's take.

I'm probably a lot further away from someone like AOC's politics than Berkut is, but I think the way AOC operates, message, organizes etc is basically a pretty good example in political competency. Now, we still live in a country that just isn't very open to what I would call traditional leftism or socialism, and for that reason I do think there are limits to where she individually can be successful--and note she is serving as sort of a representative of the far left in general.

I also think we need to be careful of structurally equating the Democratic far left and the Republican far right. If somehow the Dem far left as exemplified by people like Ro Khanna, AOC, etc won a majority in the House, 60 Seats in the Senate, and the Presidency...our democracy would not be remotely at risk. In fact I suspect a number of election issues would become considerably more democratic, and I could see major reform to anti-democratic elements of our system like gerrymandering (which was prohibited under Federal election laws from 1900 to 1930, and could easily be so again), the Supreme Court (which has always been entirely subject to the legislature for its structure), the filibuster, access to the polls etc.

If the current Republican far right won that much political power I genuinely think we'd be Orban's Hungary in five years and Putin's Russia in fifteen, or we'd devolve into some form of civil war. So let's not equate "letting" the far left take over with the Republican far right. The Democratic far left has a lot of policies that I think are really bad ideas, but it is no threat to our democratic system--the Republican far right is literally an autocratic movement inside of our political system. No different than seen in other democracies in which such movements emerged--democratically, and eventually succeeded in subverting democracy so much that they could impose a new system where their power could not longer be taken away in fair elections.

The idea however, is not to promote that the Democrats become far left, it's that the meat of the party learn how to fight like the far left fights--and maybe that's being suggested because the far lefties are at least in the party, so maybe if they know how, they can teach the Pelosi and Schumer class? That may not actually be the best way to teach them, but I think people like myself who aren't really Dem party loyalists just see a gravely dysfunctional centrist party that doesn't understand the way Republicans are winning, the reasons things like geography and Federalism specifically enshrine rural and suburban white power, and understand that what we're doing simply doesn't work.

We had to trust to a lot of good fortune for Trump to lose in 2020, and Democrats were lucky that the typically message-strong GOP proved in 2018 they really didn't know how to defend a majority, because the Democrats did a good job of running on the GOP's efforts to take people's health insurance away--and showed message discipline to almost laser focus on that issue. I'm not convinced the GOP will do that next time, and to be honest the new GOP is frankly more prone to give away social welfare benefits anyway, to some degree the repeal Obamacare movement was awkward in the context of the new GOP because it dealt with a real policy issue and not a cultural grievance. But since a lot of the Freedom Caucus made their bones off being anti-Obamacare, I think they felt a sense of weird obligation to go after it, also just out of incredible spite of the black President.

The new GOP in my opinion will no longer make such easy missteps, their administration will be daily battle after daily battle waging culture wars, often with legislation that addresses non-existent problems or that does very little (but sounds big), and they'll keep the outrage stew rolling cycle after cycle to maintain power if Democrats can't learn how to fight it.

I'll say again--I don't know the answers, but this ain't it, and the people running the Democratic party, Schumer, Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Joe Fuckin Biden--this is supposed to be their job and they ain't doing it.

[Berkut]

I agree with all of that part of what Oex says as well though. Nothing you've said there contravenes anything I've said at all.

I think AOC is awesome, actually. 

This is a bit frustrating for me, because I think I am failing at communicating in some fundamental fashion.

Let me try to summarize an important point I am trying to make.

• I do not at all equate the current far left with the current far right. Given a choice between Bernie Sanders and AOC running the country and Trump and McConnel and Gaetz, I will take Sanders and Friends anytime. There is no comparison.
• But that is not at all what I am trying to get at. I am looking the the history of what happened to the GOP. Trump did not drive them crazy - they drove themselves crazy, and Trump came along and made himself at home. The turn to radicalism started a couple decades ago, with the co-opting of the Tea Party, and pledges to never raise taxes, and moderate after moderate after moderate Republican being primaried out of office by the crazies, and then those crazies being deemed not crazy enough and getting replaced by even crazier crazies.
• THAT is what I don't want to see happen on the left. Would I take Sanders and AOC over Trump today? Of course. But I don't want to have to choose between Trump  and some Trump equivalent on the left after it spends a decade or so purging the party of people like Biden or Buttigieg for not being sufficiently woke, and then purges AOC as well when she refuses to go along with something bonkers. And then what is left? 

I think there is an element of intolerance on the left, and it looks a lot like that same element of intolerance on the right around the time when Obama was elected. That narrative that the GOP ran where they looked at why they lost, a bunch of them concluded that they lost because they were not inclusive enough, but the party mass said "FUCK YOU! WE LOST BECAUSE WE WERE TOO INCLUSIVE!" and embraced racism and bigotry and raised up their Trump or their Ted Cruz (lets not forget that absent Trump, it's not like the GOP had some sane people to elect instead - it would have been Cruz, who is possibly actually worse then Trump). 

Most of everything else I agree with your take. The Left does need to figure out how to fight these culture wars. But I don't think they should start that by going after the moderates in their own party in the way the right did.

[OttoVonBismarck]

To a large degree the moderates own positional weakness is why they are being "gone after." I don't think this is a particularly new problem, going back to the history of Democratic successful Presidents--Obama, Clinton, LBJ, JFK, FDR all had significant differences with the furthest left wings of the Democratic party. All of them were able to create a simple messaging strategy, largely ignore the far left and make them irrelevant by making themselves big, and get things done politically. Obama I am specifically referring to his winning the 2008 election and for Clinton I mean winning in '92, I think their records get more complicated after that because governing became more complicated in the 90s on (the unusual era of cooperation between the two parties that had gone from the 1930s to the 1990s had ended, and this made the Presidency a different job in some respects than when LBJ or JFK were President.)