Dems Take the House: What It Means

Ian,

I think you are probably right but I will play devil’s advocate for a moment and say that this time might be different from 2006 for a number of reasons.

First, there seems to be a lot more anger at Trump than at George W. Bush. As bad as Bush was he had a kind of folksy charm and was considered a “normal” president. He even had a little bit of remaining “war president” shine from 9/11 although that was clearly declining. Trump on the other hand is seen as a freakish boor and a potential dictator. His supporters are viewed as irredeemable fascists and not just greedy conservatives or backward religious voters. Public rhetoric seems more heated now than in 2006. People seem angrier and more stressed out. Social media has definitely enhanced the anger and radicalization factor.

Second, we are living in a post-Great Recession world and even though the economy has improved for ordinary people since the crash I think the fundamentals of the economy are weaker now than in 2006. Household debt is at an all-time high. New jobs are often unstable. Most of the new jobs created in the recovery are low-paying. Young people are saddled with atrocious amounts of student debt. Many people never really recovered from the Great Recession and there is likely a large pool of hidden unemployed people who are not counted in the official employment figures. I think we are likely to see a recession in the near future and this time the fallout could be worse because the fundamentals of our economy are weaker.

Third, social factors are much worse now than in 2006. Drug abuse and overdose deaths are up. Suicide rates are up. Alcoholism is up. Depression, anxiety and other mental health problems are up. Homelessness is up. Climate change is bearing down on us. In some areas crime and violence have gotten worse. Mass shootings are more common. The country is in worse shape now than in 2006.

All of these factors might push the Democrats to do more to oppose Trump and the Republicans this time around. I don’t think it will happen but I think it is possible because the problems of this country continue to mount and I don’t think we can just go back to 2000s-style neoliberalism. The Democrats will probably try but it might not work this time.

It is unfortunate that so many Clintobamaform Democrats have won House elections. There are many names for them, but I will suggest the name “Catfood Democrat”. They believe in destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid just like the Clintons and Obama believe in destroying these programs . . . so that the revenue streams can all be privatised and Wall Streetified.

They will conspire with the House Republicans and the McConnell Senate to achieve the Grand Catfood Bargain which President Obama conspired his hardest to achieve against Social Security. If one of those Clintonite Sh*tobamacrats had been running in my district, I would have voted against it one way or another.

Pelosi remains the same economic treasonist against America she has always been. She will try to support more Free Trade Treason Agreements. She will lead the effort to undercut Trump’s fitful sabotage of the International Free Trade Conspiracy. She supported NAFTA, MFN for China, and WTO membership “for” America. She will support TTP 2.0, TTIP, and every other Free Trade Treason agreement which anyone proposes.

I was hoping we would have begun a purification process against the Catfood Clintonites and begun disinfecting the Democratic Party down to a core of old legacy Social Security Democrats and new rising SanderSocial Democrats. I was hoping for the rise of a “Left Gingrich” Democratic Minority in the House which would use Gingrich methods against the Republican Majority. But it is not to be.

I think the Democrats will betray Lower Class Majority America so comprehensively that Trump will win his next election by a Nixon-in-72 landslide

By the way, these same Democrats are the anti-Russianitic racist anti-Russianites who blame Putin for spoiling Hillary’s coronation. They will definitely raise the pre-war and cold-war tension with Russia.

This Catfood Clintonite victory is a tragedy for Lower Class America and a disaster for what little is left of world peace.

@Plenue
The Democrats control the House, which has nothing to do with approving judicial nominees. That would be the Senate, which is still controlled by the Republicans.

One thing that will be different than the aftermath of 2006 is that this House will paralyze the nation’s governance with useless and divisive “investigations” into practically everything. Included will be a resurrection of the Kavanaugh debacle which, even if it managed to convict him of high school “sexual misconduct,” would not remove him from the bench.

Bill, if the agenda of the party which dominates the legislature is fascist, I’ll take obstructionism.

While I would have welcomed a Republican victory, such a victory would probably have reinforced Trump’s accommodation to the Republican side of the swamp. Now he will have to accommodate himself more to the Democratic side of the swamp. This might be a good thing in some areas, such as with healthcare, but I’m mostly dubious. Both sides of the swamp serve the plutocrats, first and foremost (see Gilens and Page).

Trump lacks vision, he has a low political IQ, he says a lot of stupid, alienating stuff, and trusted swamp creatures, especially of the Republican side, too much. Insofar as this election was a referendum on Trump, Trump basically got what he deserved. The country consists of more people than the rabid fan base that show up at his rallies, to hear basically the same speech that Candidate Trump kept repeating in 2016, and then kept repeating as President.

I think Trump HAS to get some of this, now. However, I’m skeptical that Trump will adjust radically enough to become anywhere near the sort of transformative figure he might of been. His rabid fanbase – who are as clueless as Trump is about expanding his base by fighting for a more populist agenda – are of no help. I expect them to put most all blame on Democrats and the media, perhaps a little bit of blame on Trump, and not blame themselves, at all. After all, didn’t they cheer ever louder at Trump rallies?

It’d be much healthier for them to channel Shakespeare:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

The Democrats don’t stand for anything and are willing to fight for even less. Well they will fight for the rich but that’s about it. They won’t fight for you or me.

All you need to know about Nancy Pelosi is encapsulated in her infamous 2007 dismissal of critics of her failure to seriously oppose the Iraq war: “We are leaders, they are advocates.” Pelosi embodies the contempt that Democratic officeholders have for their base. And at 78, she epitomizes the geriatric nature of the party. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care that she is 78. I care that her ideas are 78.

I think the Democratically controlled House will tie the Administration in knots by investigating the hell out of it. Trump is a crook and has been a not terribly clever crook all his life. And the class of people he attracts and has filled his Administration with are crooks too. Hard as it is to believe, even dumber than him. So it will be a target rich environment. And Trump-wise there will be a lot of Russian connections because he has been money laundering money from Russian oligarchs through his properties for years.

Our country, and the world, have real problems, existential level problems. What I don’t get is why so many people tie their hopes to, and believe in Trump or Pelosi, the Republicans or the Democrats, when far from solving these problems they, if anything, are only making them worse.

Not one but two comments in moderation. I’m on a roll.

A very bad outcome.

The status quo Democrats can now stifle any populist inklings and claim a mandate for doing so. And they can add some congressional investigations to get the idiotic “Russia! Russia! Russia!” chant restarted for another couple years.

The status quo Republicans can point to losses and try to strongarm out the populist portions of Trump’s agenda. And we can look forward to scores of prominent “serious people” on tv and radio telling us all how very bad he is and pointing to the very reasons that Trump won in these outposts of civilization that they still don’t understand at all.

In other words this election is an excuse to change nothing of substance. Gads…

The Ds will be unable to advance any positive agenda so we can expect some votes that are for show (e.g. $15 minimum wage that will go nowhere), hearings, and major wrangling over budgetary issues. The Rs won’t be able to do quite so many stupid and destructive things, that’s the best takeaway.

One thing I’m curious to see is if Trump decides to bomb somewhere in the next two years and whether the House will attempt to do anything about it. Congress has never shown a spine in the past in this regard but there is such animus against Trump that maybe this time they will.

The Rs will actually increase their Senate majority, which presumably means there will be less drama in getting reactionary appointees through, so that’s the good news from their perspective.

As Hugh pointed out: “The U.S. Senate was designed to over-represent small states, but only recently has that bias been a Republican advantage. During the mid-20th century, the GOP regularly elected senators from large states such as California, Illinois, and New York. But during the past half-century, as a result of the GOP’s dominance of small states and loss of big states, the party has consistently held a higher share of Senate seats than the share of American citizens who vote for its candidates.”
http://prospect.org/article/republican-structural-advantage

Willy : “If even Idaho, Nebraska and Utah voted to expand Medicaid, maybe Pelosi can figure out what the people want….”

Keep the faith brother, but I have my doubts.

joe6pac: “…..nancy p. is repug light.”

Hmmm. I’ve been hearing the terms repug light and RINO (and the like) for a long time. A long, long, long, long, long….. long time. Joe I’ve got a question: At what point do you just say “That is who the (insert the word Democratic or Republican here) Party is. Unfortunately that does not agree with the citizenry of the nation.”

I would offer that this would explain a lot. The fact that both parties routinely thwart the will of the average US citizen on a whole lot of issues in order to maintain their ~ahem~ shall we say economically strategic position.

Will

So we’re not being represented very well by those we vote for (the Pelosis are among the wealthiest of congressional families). She seems to hold a few progressive positions, seemingly, but also not enough fight against swamp creatures. By design? Who knows.

For the time being, it seems easier to go around these so-called elected leaders, the way they did in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, for at least some things.

Trump’s populism is fake. Populists don’t give two trillion dollar tax cuts to the rich and the corporations they own. They don’t kowtow to the whited sepulchres of the religious right. They don’t nominate reactionary judges who will defend the wealth of the few against the rights of the many. They won’t posture and then allow North Korea to go ahead and build more nukes and better rockets that can hit American cities. They don’t blather about walls instead of going after employers who hire illegal immigrants. And they don’t go around with majority negative approval ratings.

I”m starting to think that these people, regardless of colors, stripes, pet policies, rerun rallies or controversial tweets, will always protect the core business, oligarchic neoliberalism. Maybe that’s the point of all the noise they make. Distract the wee folks.

And now Sessions fired. An act of a political genius, or of a toddler-brained buffoon? I’m betting on the latter. What’s he up to now?

Never fear! Steny Hoyer’s here to take Nancy’s place: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142196352

Just shoot me now.

Though on the issue of Trump, yes, his populism is fake. Transparently so. And the reason he’s able to get away with it is because the Democrats have even less to offer on that front. In fact it’s clear they’re completely opposed to even the slightest form of genuine, left-wing economic populism that would completely pull the rug out from under Trump.

Saying Trump and the GOP are horrible isn’t saying much of anything. We all already know that. The answer isn’t do just blindly vote blue. Going that route you just get more gentile, slightly less repugnant Republicans. The wars and growing wealth inequality and stagnant wages and shit healthcare and looting banks etc etc etc, still keep happening.

On the bright side, three Catfood Democrat Senators lost their re-election bids. So the Democratic Party is just that little bit less polluted.

Thank God for small bright sides.

I agree with different clue. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri lost. Bill Nelson in Florida probably lost. Jon Tester in Montana and Joe Manchin in West Virginia won. Angus King in Maine also won. All of these are essentially Trump Democrats, except King who is independent but caucuses with the Democrats. So I guess he would be a Trump independent. They are all a waste of skin. But they are indicative of the Democratic party’s preference to run the most conservative candidate possible even when in many of these states a Bernie Sanders type candidate probably would have won. Even if these guys had all won and the Democrats had taken control of the Senate, they would have sabotaged any progressive agenda, and the Democratic party leadership would cheerfully have let them.

Last night I talked to a die hard Trump supporter. It gave me a headache. This is someone who is being screwed over by Trump as much as anyone. To say that his world view is incoherent and fact free would be charitable. The thing that is scary about him is that Trump doesn’t have to lie to him. He can screw this guy over with impunity. He could even tell this guy he was screwing him over and this guy would invent explanations and defenses to excuse Trump and blame Obama or even Clinton (Bill or Hillary). He is a Trump dream. He self-propagandizes.

This guy is white, working class, and getting older. I couldn’t help thinking what goes around, comes around. Our political system is highly undemocratic. The Republicans are increasingly older, more rural, and beneficiaries/exploiters of this lack of democracy, but the demographics really are against them. And they have seriously pissed off a lot of people. So when the demographics start kicking in, and we can already see them coming in places like Georgia, Florida, and Texas, they won’t manifest as a tilt but as tipping points. As gerrymandering and voter suppression are reversed, as urban areas even in rural states increase, the ways that a minority party and a minority group (rural white males) have managed to retain disproportionate political power will be stripped away, and there will be no recovery from that. Rather than build an alliance with the current and coming majority, they have done their utmost to disenfranchise it. In the near future, that majority won’t need them, they will have gained nothing from Trump and the Republicans, and they won’t just be feeling isolated and marginalized, they will be isolated and marginalized. What goes around comes around.

I’m also glad to see people are happy for Republican dominance in the Senate because the “moderates lost” and therefore Social Security and Medicare are safe, as if they would have agreed to pass such cuts (they wouldn’t). Good luck, we are going to need it, particularly when the the courts begin to rule Social Security and Medicare, minimum wage and child labor laws, and environmental laws unconstitutional. But you get to feel good for your purity. Just another flip side of the Trump coalition: ritualized hatred of people you hate in the minority. Except we don’t have counter-majoritarian institutions to prop you up like the rural white racists.

Hugh’s Trump Supporter sounds like every Obama, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan supporter I’ve talked to. Pretty much any partisan who has been sold on the Red or Blue team dynamic doesn’t care what their candidates do, or what the facts are. As soon as some one identifies with a political party, reason and decency go out the window.

Why in the world would a mass murdering psychopath save your Social Security? Obama had a kill list, but we were told it was all part of his 11th dimensional chess strategy. Now he’s collecting on his work for Wall Street and Middle Eastern Despots, there’s, surprisingly, no talking about how all that worked out for us. But Trump isn’t a real populist! So what, none of them are populists! The same people that “see through.” Trump were head over heals not two years ago for someone who decided that murdering American’s without trial, based on mere suspicions was a good idea. He set the precedent, now its Trumps to use (ok it started with Clinton but its not like assassination is new, we just have better tools).

Do you really think that’s the Party (corporate party) a reasonable individual would want in charge of environmental law, child labor, medicare, and social security? There isn’t a decent person who will be persuaded to support one group of lieing, murdering asshole’s over another group of lieing, murdering assholes. Decent people don’t support lieing, murdering assholes no matter the color of their tie.

Make no mistake, its the partisans of both parties who got us into this mess by not holding to account their own politicians even the base standards of decency. Those arguments no longer hold any water. That’s why more people are independent than identify with a political party. How about proving to the world just what great guys and gals your tribe is, THEN, complaining when we don’t fall in line.

@Willy

Respectfully, partisanship is not a Necessary Evil. According to Gallop 41% of people identify as Independents which is greater than those who identify as either Democrats or Republicans. Logically, if 41% of people can survive without being part of either political party, then partisanship cannot be necessary.

“I disagree that all partisans are blind tribalists devoid of reason. Most people really do project whatever has worked for them personally, out onto the rest of the world.”
Projecting what has worked for you personally onto the world is not reasonable. My personal finances do nothing to prepare me for the intricacies of a Brexit for instance. I’d agree with you that humans do simplify things, often too much, to easier hold the idea in their heads. That doesn’t make it necessary nor desirable. Some issues can’t be solved that way. It’s like using your bathwater to forecast global climate change on deep sea streams.
If we define tribalist as someone who identifies strongly with a particular group, and blind as irrational then blind tribalists, irrational adherence to a particular group is exactly what partisans are.
In the case of the Koreans crying for a dictator is not irrational (necessary for survival), neither is a political party apparatchik kowtowing to special interests that will benefit them monetarily. Those guys aren’t actually partisans, they are actors of various degree’s performing for their self interests. It’s the people voting for Democrats or Republicans, based on party lines, without getting anything in return and never holding anyone to account that are the problem.

@Mallam

Since the polling shows that things like Medicare for All have majority public support, yeah, I expect Sander’s type candidates would do well, provided the Democratic Party would actually give them support and not fight them every step of the way.

Of course, since you completely refuse to engage with the idea that people voted for Trump based on economics, the notion people would vote for a left candidate on the same thing is like water off a duck’s back to you.

Also, fear-mongering about how Republicans want to destroy Social Security and Medicare is rather undermined by the fact that both Bill Clinton and Obama attempted to privatize SS via deals with the GOP. And Obama actively sabotaged even a public option in the ACA, to say nothing of Medicare for All, which ObamaCare was intended to cockblock.

Did no one watch Nancy Pelosi at the press conference yesterday? That performance should have set off major alarm bells. She repeatedly drifted into silence in the middle of a sentence, paused with a blank stare into the camera, then resumed with an “Oh, yes” once she recaptured the thread of what she was talking about. Except that a couple of times she resumed with a different topic than she had started the sentence with.

Hugh, others, is that Represent.Us video any good?

Would it be a worthwhile experiment to have our nutball friends/family watch that Represent.Us video and then discuss their reactions?

@NR

“Let’s hear it more for preexisting medical conditions!”

I very much suspect there is something literally wrong with Nancy Pelosi’s brain. Dementia or something.

Pelosi is 78.

Bernie is 77.

Steny Hoyer is 79.

Joe Biden will be 76 in a couple weeks.

Donald is 72, Hillary 71.

This really is not “normal”.

National leadership requires physical energy and a degree of intellectual acuity that is simply not available to people over 70. Over 60 in most people.

A healthy politics is performed by people in their forties and fifties.

Hugh’s “Trump voter” sounds suspiciously similar to Thomas Friedman’s fictional cab driver…

Cab Driver: “is war with Iran a good idea..yeah..sure mister…that’d be the perfect fix for our nation crumbling infrastructure…oh yeah..that’ll be thirty bucks…you can quote me on that”

Thomas Friedman: “Thanks buddy, I always appreciate putting words into somebody’s mouth so I won’t sound like I pulled it out of my posterior….here’s few extra for the trouble”

Hugh: agreed there are some who are reachable. They’re not ALL lost, but it depends on the state. When Manchin retires, West Virginia is gone from the Senate unless you run Theodore Bilbo. Montana can be reached, but it requires a specific type of candidate like Jon Tester. The current governor there would likely win in 2022. But those really rural states with no anchor of urban/suburban areas are gone. Ohio is a red state and it ain’t coming back if Sherrod Brown leaves (who is NOT moderate but still got destroyed in rural areas) because it’s dying and the cities and suburbs can not overcome rural turnout that swamps at 75-25% with 50% turnout. Kansas might be reachable because it’s been governed by far right ideologues who have destroyed the state, but any change wouldn’t be permanent and voters have short memories. Michigan hopefully can start trending back after it passed a massive voting rights referendum which automatically registers voters. Pennsylvania looks strongest, but again, the rural areas are trending the wrong way — it has Philly and Pittsburgh with lots of suburbs to anchor it. Missouri can be won if you run a candidate like Jason Kander, but it’s trending away. Indiana I don’t think is sprinting red like some places, but it’s not hopeful. Wisconsin BARELY got rid of Scott Walker, and after he destroyed their university system and unions will need to be rebuilt. The reason Texas and Georgia are trending Democratic is because they are growing and have a lot of college educated people.

The best chances for winning any of these rural areas back is establishing satellite colleges and universities to revitalize dying rural areas and bring in some commerce. Spend money on rural electrification and broadband, build hospitals and schools. Ideally, you’d also want a lot of immigration to help their economic situation, but that’s what’s causing them to vote Republican. Hard to thread that needle. But it can’t be done with “economic populism, kill the rich” like idiots here want. You will lose and lose badly, completely turning off suburban voters you now need to counter the racist rural areas. It’s a balancing act and you can’t take any part of the coalition for granted or it falls apart to a racist demagogue who has no shame.

Trump is making the Republicans more like him.

Not all of them course, but this offers some proof of what Hugh’s talking about. The more “principled” conservatives, such as Will, Mueller, Kristol, Steele… wind up discarded by the loyal base, even vilified. You’d almost think they view all of this as being like a fantasy politics game or something. Well, except for that part with all the blind faith reasoners in their ranks. Maybe fan pol games should include Jesus.

“They are literally the worst people in the world….”

I can’t think of a reason in the world why rural voters would vote for someone who thumbs their nose at people like you. Can you?

Will

It’s looking more and more like the Democratic wave/tsunami was real this time around, and it would be even yuuuuger if it weren’t for gerrymandering, voter suppression, counting anomalies and all sorts of systemic issues that bedevil US elections. We do not have free and fair (and verifiable) elections in this country and never really have had. They are designed to be jiggered, to favor wealth and privilege, to ensure that the Rabble never rise far enough to rule on their own account.

The Dems may be sclerotic, but the Rs need to have their plug pulled, as they’ve been on life-support long enough (Thanks Obama! who literally revived an all but dead R party in 2009 and subsequently).

We, the Rabble, should not see the D party as the hope and home of a leftist/progressive future –because it’s not and it won’t be, Nancy Pelosi running the House or not. No, the D party is conservative, always has been (why do you think it was the Slavery Party back in the day?) and will remain so till the end of time, “Democratic Socialists” in their midst or no.

They will most often favor wealth and privilege over you’n’me, no matter what. Sometimes that can work out OK for the Lower Orders, but often it will not. The Party will fret very little or not at all over it.

What they have long sought to do is establish some sort of rational order that can/will endure through thick and thin (cf: the Roosevelt era) and ultimately allow for — if not provide — a better future for most people. The way they have gone about it lately has been counterproductive, however, by basically enabling a crabbed, exclusive club to rule, dominated by Rs (many of whom became Ds of convenience) who see the “better” future in the narrowest terms possible.

You can call it neo-liberalism but what it’s meant on the ground is “complexification” of everything to the point of exasperation. Complexity with no perceivable benefit for most people, and for too many, it’s complexity for the sake of eliminating benefits, reducing living standards and trapping the Lower Orders in permanent debt and despair.

The complexity of the ACA is a prime example, but complexity runs through practically everything we are expected or forced to live with today. Dems have been prime movers in that direction, and to hear Nancy yap about the future, hey, it’s just going to get worse.

On the other hand, the R vision of the future is extinction, pure and simple.

The voters chose complexity over that, at least where they had a choice and their votes were counted.

If we really want something better than this, we need to think beyond the current parties and systems.

Voting should be seen as only one tool in your political toolbox. Voting matters but it is not everything and should be seen as strategic, not something you put your heart and soul into. That is why the “lesser of two evils” argument makes a certain amount of sense when you only have two realistic options. Think of it as a form of self-defense and as a way to buy time to develop your own forces.

The only way we will get out of this mess is if ordinary working people build their own institutions outside of the control of big plutocratic donors, elite professional class do-gooders and the two major political parties. There was a time when the United States was covered with civic organizations. They didn’t always uphold humanistic values (see the KKK and other nativist/racist organizations) but these institutions did provide vehicles for ordinary Americans to put pressure on the elite class.

As Robert Putnam and others have noted, American civic life has largely collapsed. The American population is atomized and powerless. We increasing limit our activism to occasional protests and posting on social media. This is not enough. In order to have power working people need to rebuild a culture of solidarity and organizational power. Unfortunately, I am not sure if modern Americans are capable of self-organization. We are much more individualistic now and I don’t think many Americans have the right attitude or values to develop countervailing institutions.

I would note that Mallam doubles down on his Nazi Racist Deplorables theory. I would also note that Mallam carefully dodges my-and-others’ mention of the fact that the difference-making margin of victory for Trump came from two-time-Obama-voting people in Wisconsin and Michigan as well as the negative-default margin of victory reverse-conferred upon Trump by virtue of numbers of black citizens who had voted for Obama, seen themselves betrayed economically, and decided ” been there, done that, no more” when promised more-of-the-same by Clinton.

The DemParty Leadership is devoted to the theory of the “Obama Coalition” of ethnic and gender Identy Groups who will default-award victory to the Democrats by growing their populati0ns more and more and more. It is Mallam’s devotion to this theory of how to proceed which makes me think that he/she is a Clintonite Obamazoid.

Here is a prediction from a Naked Capitalism commenter who predicts what the NeoLiberal wing of the DemParty will do based on this theory.

Livius Drusus
November 10, 2018 at 8:50 am
Re: The 2018 Map Looked A Lot Like 2012 … And That Got Me Thinking About 2020.

The Rust Belt will definitely be the most important region in 2020 and it is the best route to victory for the Democrats as Silver points out. This is good news for left-populists because it means that their issues will be front and center in 2020. Democrats will have to deal with the trade issue, for example, if they hope to beat Trump in 2020. Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate to win in 2020 because he would likely beat Trump in the Rust Belt states.

The neoliberals in the party are big on the Sunbelt strategy become it reflects the “demography is destiny” theory and their preference for well-educated, professional-class voters who are congregating in Sunbelt cities to work in fields like research and development. Unions are also much weaker in the Sunbelt. The region is pretty much a neoliberal dreamland. It reflects the upstairs-downstairs nature of modern center-left politics represented by a coalition of impoverished minority groups and affluent professional-class liberals.

The 2020 Democratic primary could be the big showdown between two visions of progressive politics. One a cross-racial alliance of working-class people represented by the Sanders wing of the party and the other the kind of upstairs-downstairs coalition that most neoliberals want. I expect 2020 to be an extremely contentious primary, maybe even more contentious than 2016 since the factions have hardened considerably since then.

* * * * * * * * * *

Social Justice Poseurs will continue to undermine and obstruct SanderSocial Democrats in favor of their own Identy WokeWashing politics. We will see how that plays out.

And we WILL see, too. Because the DemParty Leadership remains devoted to Identy Group WokeWashing as a cover under which to advance by stealth their Catfood Agenda against our survival benefits as now exist, let alone attempting any genuine New Deal Restoration.

A “boom in the rust belt”?? Ha ha. Dream on. What’s happening is a worsening of structural conditions, not an improvement. Instead of a repudiation of neoliberalism, there’s been an acceleration toward the economic and political goals of a tiny elite whose interests never have and never will align with those of the discarded and dispossessed.

First, the Blue Wave is real. It is not a large as some may have prophesied or hoped, in no small part because Trump made a successful pushback against it, upping his approval rating very quickly. (The president’s approval rating matters in mid-term elections.) Nonetheless, the Democrats flipped at least 35 House seats more than the Republicans flipped, a record since Watergate, and produced a number of close calls.

The pendulum of US politics, which began a swing from Left to Right some four decades ago, has begun to swing the other way. Maybe the swing back began around 2012, maybe in 2017. The swing may be comprised in small flips, but the overall swing is more gradual. It is likely to pass through the center instead of leaping over it. Pelosi is right-center, maybe the Democratic Party is now left-center, I can’t say.

Perhaps a right-center House is more of a threat to Trump than one that is more to the left. A more left-leaning House would give Trump more to push back against. A centrist House that emphasizes law and order and aims to undermine Trump, starting with his cabinet and former cabinet members, may be more successful against him than one that launches a frontal assault. Trump has made Washington more of a swamp instead of draining it. Independents may compare an unhinged rightist Trump with a reasonable centrist Democratic Party and opt for the latter in 2020.

Trump is not a fascist, merely a fascist admirer who slept with Mein Kampf on his bedside table, and kowtows to dictators. He is perhaps close to Mussolini, but Mussolini was a better politician. Trump certainly understands the fascist cult of loyalty to the leader and has adopted the Nazi tactic of frequent rallies of the faithful. He has also adopted the dictatorial tactic of attacking the free press.

Aligning one’s self with the Democratic Party as it exists, or aligning one’s self with the Party as we might wish it to be while not acknowledging what it is, requires an otherwise decent person to make themselves blind to the political reality. This is what ideology does, I suppose: it expresses a an otherwise reprehensible class interest while keeping those self-interested motives hidden from our moral sense behind socially-validated rationalizations and narratives. Being an expression of class interest, we do get support from others for socially-constructed “views” of this kind. The unwisdom of crowds?

There is a lot of pressure from the political news media and the journalism of opinion to adopt ideological narratives of our current politics that make little to no sense. Disturbingly, many of these senseless narratives are being fed to people who make up the self-identified centre-left.

The Russia, Russia, Russia narrative of a Watergate Redux was always a transparent (well, I thought it was transparent) attempt to gin up teevee ratings without talking about the substantive reasons Clinton lost the election in states where status quo policy on trade and financialization have done so much damage, or the details of Clinton’s deliberate circumvention of campaign finance laws that did so much damage to the Democratic Party as an institution, et cetera. The narrative of unreacheable deplorable racists, beyond all reason, serves a similar purpose of psychological projection and deflection.

The American news media is concentrated in a system of advertising-support and corporate networks that place very heavy filters on what any of us see and hear in the way of news reporting and opinion. And, as Herman observed above, we don’t have the bottom-up social networks that might give social support for resisting the flow.

If anything, it may be getting worse. Facebook and Twitter are using such right-wing stalwarts as the Atlantic Council and the Weekly Standard as fact checkers and gatekeepers on authenticity.

I, personally, do not find Trump fascinating, so I am a bit detached from the addictive nature of Trump news. I actually do not find him much more repulsive than I often found George W. Bush or Barack Obama in his smugly superior lying and rhetorical vacuousness. But, the tendentious narratives built around support for Obama (e.g. 11-dimensional chess, Republicans made him do it, etc) never seemed to me as reckless and irresponsible and ignorant of precedent and norms as the narratives built around hostility to Trump. Bill Maher the other day affected outrage that Trump congratulated Putin on his re-election and complained that Trump met Putin in secret. (me: and this is different from past practice how?) Maybe that’s our end-of-empire era when no one seems to have any perspective on how things work or what is going wrong, because so much of the establishment is feeding off their interest in monopolizing control so as to profit from the going-wrong part. E.g. perpetual war, financialization of everything.

Still, I am actually shocked on the now rare occasions I see CNN just how unrelentingly hostile they are to Trump.

Some powerful faction of corporate America really, really hates Trump. I understand why I hate Trump, but I am not sure I quite grasp why they hate him. They don’t hate Trump because he fails to deliver for the formerly working “working class” with immigration reform or trade war. That is an aspect of American politics and realignment that I would really like to understand better. Not being a corporate apparatchik or plutocrat myself, I cannot investigate by introspection.

I am wondering if other commenters here have any insight??? I know the current line is that journalists are under attack because journalists are professionals and Trump is a fascist, but, here in reality, what is going on on the actual CNN? The reality where CNN that barely has any journalistic standards beyond avoiding libel suits.

Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million to one of the worse Democratic candidates in history. Since then he has pissed off a lot more people a lot, including a fair number of Republicans. A majority of Americans have a negative view of him. So the one thing we should stop talking about is Trump’s “popularity”. The only way he won the first time was due to the highly rigged, anti-democratic nature of our political process, and again against a dreadful candidate. The chief argument for Trump winning a second term is, however, that. That as improbable as it was the first time, in a political environment as corrupt and decayed as ours, it might happen again.

As for farm subsidies to soften the effects of Trump’s unthought through trade wars, it was an election year ploy. It’s a one off and won’t replace the markets American farmers are afraid of losing permanently.

And yes, I now begin to think there “may” be a House Impeachment against Trump. Why? Because Trump the Troll will keep trolling and baiting and insulting and waving his “Richard” in Congress’s face to the extent that Congress will be driven to attempt an Andrew Johnson impeachment against Trashy Trump. Which will of course lose in the Senate.

And he will run on that failed Impeachment in 2020. ” Behold! You see how the Enemies-of-the-People RRRRRA-dical PeLOsi Democrats tried to topple my Administration. Show them how much you hate them by showing them how much you love America by giving me a Nixon Landslide in All Fifty States!”

Yes, if the Trumpster can get the House Democrats to Impeach him, they will discover that they have him . . . right where he wants them.

@Hugh

Yes, it was a ploy. one that he will use again in 2020. And one that undermines the meme that dumb rural racists are only voting because of racism. No, they’re voting for the guy giving them money.

@different clue

Pelosi already said months ago that impeachment was off the table: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/385015-pelosi-impeachment-push-a-gift-to-gop It’s fun to watch liberals smear other people as ‘low information voters’ while they themselves parrot memes that that the Dem leadership have already explicitly said won’t happen.

As for her speech, seriously? She lurched from one bland cliche (our values, land of the free, etc) to the next, while of course expressing the need for ‘bipartisanship’ (so much for the threat of fascism; now we’re right back to the usual West Wing principled cooperation nonsense).

Also, yes, I’m totally sure the woman worth 100 million smackers is scared. I could actually somewhat see why someone unfamiliar with her would think she was scared of something. But the incoherent, shaky voice style is how she *always* speaks.

@bruce wilder,

Elite hatred against Trump is based on the fact that Trump is a populist and has brought certain aspects of the globalization/neoliberal consensus under fire. Even if one finds Trump’s brand of populism to be mostly hot air Trump does oppose the neoliberal consensus on trade and immigration. Trump is seen as part of the populist wave sweeping the West that has the potential to upset the neoliberal applecart.

Elite opposition to populism is not just limited to right-wing populists like Trump or Matteo Salvini in Italy. Elite opposition also extends to left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders. During the 2016 Democratic primary the mainstream media was mostly opposed to Bernie Sanders. The media implied that Bernie’s supporters were mostly sexist, white male dudes hence the infamous “Bernie Bro” meme. The media also argued that Sanders’ opposition to free trade agreements made him an enemy of the world’s poor which also slyly implies that he is a racist.

See Dean Baker’s critique of that line of argument: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/bernie-sanders-enemy-of-the-world-s-poor

If Bernie Sanders runs for president again in 2020 I expect not only Fox News and Breitbart to oppose him but also CNN, MSNBC, Vox, the New York Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the rest of the MSM. The wealthy do not want any populist to upset the neoliberal applecart whether they are coming from the right (Trump) or the left (Sanders).

@Herman

MSM will absolutely smear Sanders (when they don’t just outright ignore him), just like they did last time https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/

However, I don’t know what impact this will have. People increasingly don’t pay any attention to mainstream sources, especially young people. In 2016 Sanders had to be cheated out of the primary, and to this day is still consistently the most popular national level political in the United States. The media is to a large extent an insular bubble. In can lie and scream all it wants, but that will have zero effect on people who simply ignore it altogether.

You can’t fight something, even a bad something, with nothing. Which is exactly what the Dems have. Who are they gonna run? Biden? Kamala Harris? I think after eights years of being backstabbed by Obama there is nowhere near the appetite among the public for Obama-in-a-dress that the DNC might imagine there is.

The thing with Trump is that in two (or six) years he’ll be gone. But what comes after him? Because the populist genie isn’t going to go back into the bottle. Sooner or later someone else is going to be the smart version of Trump; they will capitalize on populism and actually do something with it.

@Plenue

I wish the Sanderistas could and would take over the Democratic Party, but I acknowledge that they have not so far. Establishment Democrats are the establishment for sufficient reasons: they have a “business model” that works and allows politicians to survive. It is not a business model that allows politics to do many of the things I think ought to be done. It is perverse in many ways, encouraging expectations that problems will be solved while working against such solutions. But, it may more realistic than I am usually willing to concede. When I see how unrestrained news coverage of Trump is on, say, CNN I cannot help but think any populist from the left would face enormous pressure. Ian has commented on how unfair and unprincipled news coverage of Corbyn has been, even from the BBC and the Guardian.

The economic dissatisfaction that gives rise to the possibility of populist revolt is not going away because producing that economic dissatisfaction is very profitable for some. I am not sure that actually ameliorating that economic dissatisfaction can be made profitable enough for people who count, profitable enough that anything actually gets done.

@ Plenue

I admit I tend to think the politics of the guillotine is looking good, but is it looking likely?

The statements “racism was not responsible for Trump’s victory” and “racism was solely responsible for Trump’s victory” are both equally untrue.

Agree with many of the thoughts above. The Democrats stand for nothing. Pelosi is the walking, talking epitome of this. Schumer is not far behind. Trump is the example of being for something, even something bad, is better? OK, more effective than standing for nothing at all, a lesson the Democrats haven’t or have refused to learn.

Trump is a faux populist. Real populists don’t give the rich and corporations a $2 trillion tax cut, when they already have all the money. They don’t slash regulations that limit the power of corporations or protect the environment from them. They don’t talk about idiot walls. They penalize corps that hire illegals. And when disaster strikes, they don’t leave people twisting in the wind like T

One of our friends here in New Mexico (Trump voter, of course) comes from a mass shooting/fire area of California (Thousand Oaks) and she’s shocked at the horror of what she’s been witnessing on the TeeVee from her former home town. She says she doesn’t share Trump’s ridiculous victim-blaming about it all, but her plan is to carry a gun at all times now because, well, you never know when you might need it, OK? Her nephew, after all, frequented the Borderline Bar and Grill, and if he’d had a gun on him that night, pow, he might have taken out the killer before too many others died. Right? And the fires, you know, you’ve got to protect your own property, and if you’ve got to evacuate, you’ve got to make sure you’re protected when you do. You might have to pass through sketchy areas, and you might have to fend off panicking neighbors. You never know.

And I thought this is probably the mindset we’re inevitably headed toward. All against all, fight it out to the death. Everyone have at it and let the survivors — if there are any — rule the wreckage.

Most everyone around here is armed with various weapons and some ostentatiously open-carry so as to demonstrate their self-protective instincts, bless their hearts. So far, there’s little need, but that can change and might in an instant.

All you need is the catalyst — which could come at any moment from any direction.

A nation on edge and riven with fear and festering animosity. Much of it driven by media and politicians, but some is inherent in the conditions we face daily. Very few and very little serve as counterweights.

@Hugh

The Democratic ‘alternative’ set Puerto Rico up for the disaster with the PROMESA coup, does effectively nothing after every mass shooting, and is actively counter-productive on the issue of fighting the climate change that is partially driving all these forest fires.

@Willy

Looking to identity politics isn’t going to save us. Gina Haspel and Hillary Clinton are women, after all.

@Hugh,

In general, and without giving anything away to hostile lurkers, where in more-or-less general do you live; sorta-kinda basically speaking?

Are the people who are paranoiding out in your area paranoiding about things that could possibly happen? Or about things which are near-impoosible at best?

@Hugh,

Would the paranoia be from Blue City people afraid of the Red State Country crowd coming to town and doing an Interahamwe Hutucaust on the people of Blue City?

Or would it be something else?

Dodd-Frank was mostly an empty shell. The toxic derivatives and financial instruments that took out the financial system in 2008 weren’t banned. Glass-Steagall was not re-introduced. The bill kicked most of the substance to the regulatory process where it could be gamed by industry insiders. It says a lot that even this weak tea was too much for the financial sector and that said conservative Democrats duly lined up to kill most of what little was there.

Re paranoia, it’s not political. It’s more in the air. The way strangers act around each other. In the past, people would just “Hi” and move along. Now there is more looking at each other with suspicion.

Antitrust law would be even easier to bring back. It’s still on the books, it just has been mostly not enforced, thanks to Raygun and all his successors.

Thanks to Hugh for the “Catfood Coalition” moniker. I have worn out “Basket of Deplorables”

Econ 101 is at its weakest when contrasting “monopoly” with “perfect competition” and the oversimplification serves to mislead. As Billiken said, Posner and Bork and others in the conservative law and economics movement did devastate antitrust with a critique, though that critique was broader and more sophisticated than the point about price Billiken cites. The economic theory previously used by the FTC and the Justice Department to administer antitrust policy was ill-conceived and a soft target for the conservatives to attack.

The left needs an economic theory, but does not have one, does not even have an interest in one, save for an antiquarian interest in Marxism.

What is needed is an interest in the economics of administrative management and control and the relation of control to economic structure and legal ownership.

The problems that Glass Steagall addressed, it addressed in a context in which G-S complemented a range of other laws (eg 1956 Bank Holding Company Act) to structure the financial sector into, yes, smaller firms but also firms with a narrow focus and strategic interests in conflict with other firms. Savings and loans (aka savings banks or thrifts) were in conflict with commercial banks and stock brokers and life insurance and so on, and geographical restrictions further limited the size and scope of some categories. A variety of other specialized firms, some government sponsored, like Fannie Mae, made the ecology of many small and disparate firms work efficiently.

This kind of elaborate structuring of an economic sector is very foreign to the Econ 101 reasoning that underlies neoliberalism. You cannot get there by simply railing against monopoly conceived of as a “single-seller” (the textbook definition). Centralizing strategic control of disparate business types (or a whole ecology of commerce as in Amazon) is a game scarcely conceivable within the structures of mainstream economics. But that kind strategic control play is at the core of Media and Banking today and has everything to do with how those sectors behave and perform. And how they dominate politics! (Back in the days of G-S a Congress critter could play the banks off against the insurance companies against the credit unions, with many representing purely local constituencies. Now the lobbyists come from universal bank holding companies global in scope and the purely local bank or thrift is nearly extinct.)

A new wave of antitrust reform will have to address the law of property ownership, and particularly the creation and registration of corporations. The kind of seemy underside of politics and economics revealed in the Panama Papers and similar scandals is not yet being addressed even in theory.