~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
 |
DENVER—The Democrats! Like migratory birds they descend upon this swagless Western city, seeking warmth among the microbreweries. After years of dark political winter they are emerging into the light, peeking out of their Uber Black Escalades, giddy with the scent of opportunity. They have come to Set the Agenda, to Write the Narrative, to revel in their sudden ascendance. But like all gathering flocks, they are conscious that they must, before anything else, establish their new pecking order.
Their confidence drips from their strange and audacious plumage! This species, native to the sterile government buildings and imperial nighttime restaurants of Washington, DC has its own uniform—repugnant to outsiders, but a sign of beauty in their isolated culture. For these men, there is nothing more suave than neatly pressed blue jeans, a blazer, and sneakers. Sneakers! With a blazer? This is the devil-may-care rakishness they bring to their serious work, a way to allow their complex personalities to shine through during their dreary days of policymaking.
The rascals! Those blazers are not just blue. Some are checked. Some carry even more exotic and abhorrent patterns. Most men undo one or even two of the buttons on their shirts, exuding a studied casualness. And around their necks? Nothing at all! With their bold lack of ties, the modern Democrat strikes a blow against conformity. They retain the barest form of the business suit while remixing it with all of the cutting-edge style that DC is known for. This is a party of Regular Folks, not stuffed suits. Like all regular folks, they wear sneakers and blazers and lanyards and think about kitchen table issues like working hard to support their families as was promised to them by the American Dream.
Here we all were, in Denver, at the Mission Ballroom, for WHAT’S NEXT, an event that brought together the professional spine of the Democratic Party to try to lay down exactly what should and will be happening for the next two years. The wi-fi password was “NineDaysLater,” a nod to the midterm wipeout that had the hearts of all the attendees throbbing like a big shot of cocaine. The surface-level theme of the event was unity, coming together as one big tent, but make no mistake: This was the first organized effort to establish exactly which faction will control this party for the next term. The smiles and lack of ties and complimentary Brandi Carlisle concert did not mean that this event was not, in its essence, cutthroat.
The event was put on by Majority Democrats, a moderate-ish group that seeks to build a majority caucus inside the party. It explicitly distinguishes itself from those three apocalyptic horsemen, “The Gerontocratic Establishment,” the “Activist Left,” and “The Maga Right.” Majority Democrats is funded by a hedge fund billionaire, and you could really tell in the event’s production values. Get a bunch of the Activist Left together and you’re looking at janky PA systems and unruly stacks of fliers. But here at What’s Next, there was unlimited free snacks and professional execution and a wondrous lighting display on stage that looked like a sculpture of huge lamps of all colors turned on their side, hypnotizing and soothing the crowd as some Congressman drones on. If I were a billionaire dark money funder I would take a hard look at how much of my political money is being spent on lighting. I guess they can afford it, though.
The money also bought graphic design, and it was an atrocity. Any normal human would step back and clutch their chest in agony at the sight of the posters that adorned the hallways. They were all done up in the style of classic concert posters, like something you might see hanging on a telephone pole to advertise a Grateful Dead or Bob Marley show, except they featured the most aggressively uncool politicians in the United States. There was Hakeem Jeffries, wearing shades; there was an ad for Cory Booker & The Revolution; there was a four-peat of Josh Shapiro’s head in four different colors; there was a hand drawn picture of CIA agent-turned-governor Abigail Spanberger as a hippie with flowing blond hair holding a batch of flowers. Prowling the hallways between these posters were Majority Democrats staffers wearing custom-made Dickies jackets with “Majority Democrats” in yellow cursive and a sewn-on name tag like a genuine working class person somewhere might wear. (Or so they’ve heard.) Wherever you turned you would be faced with this sort of visual assault, physical manifestations of the way that culture is ingested and destroyed by capital. Like the cheeky blazers and the Adidases worn with suits, you can be sure that the people involved in this would wink and say that they were in on the joke, without knowing that their comedy is actually a horror film.
The public believes that politics is about politicians, and movements believe that politics is about people, but What’s Next was an event centered on the real heroes: the consultant class. This vision of politics is one in which good political decisions emanate from a small group of ultra-smart nerds immersed in data, who tell the party what it should be doing. Deviations from this path—whether to the right or (more likely) the left—are treated as verifiable errors, juvenile indulgences, refusals to face facts about what voters really want.
Thus, the consultants that took the stage in Denver delivered lectures to the assembled functionaries about What Voters Are Thinking. And what they are thinking is: Affordability. Affordability, affordability, affordability. The economy, stupid. Prices of things. They’re high, and they should be lower, for the sake of affordability. “I hope you’re very excited to hear someone repeat the phrase ‘cost of living’ for seven minutes and 45 seconds,” joked Charlotte Swasey, director of analytics for the Searchlight Institute. Searchlight is a sort of companion think tank for the Majority Democrats project, funded by the same billionaires, whose schtick is “we serve up centrism but from a guy with long hair.” That guy is Adam Jentleson, the bearded and man-bunned former Harry Reid and John Fetterman staffer who has now found himself a secure perch in the lucrative Telling The Left To Shut Up industry.
Jentleson is a fascinating figure. Besides his personal appearance, which is that of a bartender at a craft cocktail speakeasy in 2007, it is unclear to me what makes him so alluring to the political establishment. His ideas are standard, rehashed Clintonism. He’s not much of writer. He’s a workmanlike speaker. He glanced down at his notes continually while instructing the crowd about the “messy” political beliefs of Americans. “They want a stronger safety net, but also want fiscal discipline,” he revealed. “They think private enterprise is good, but also want to raise taxes on the wealthy.”
Gadzooks! Stop the presses! It is very hard to conclude that Adam Jentleson’s position of power is not due in large part to his haircut. It is exactly the sort of thing—like, say, a concert-style poster of Pete Buttigieg—that a billionaire might imagine would lend a rock-n-roll frisson to the project of producing a stable regulatory environment conducive to capital growth. Searchlight sponsored a welcome reception in an adjacent bar the first day of the event, and adorned the tables with QR codes that would allow you to take a quiz to determine your own “Political Neighborhood.” The first question was about how you feel about trans people in bathrooms. I clicked off at that point. There were free Searchlight-branded tote bags and hats that said “tax-and-spend liberal” available, but I left them there. Couldn’t think of anyone who would get the irony of the souvenir.
Amid all of the lectures from pollsters and consultants, two anecdotes stood out to me. The first was a remark from Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and former Republican who grew disgusted with Trump and founded The Bulwark, the center-right anti-MAGA news outlet. Longwell is very much a DC creature. (Earlier this year, she stopped the Bulwark from publishing an in-depth investigative story critical of Democratic fundraising practices because she couldn’t imagine what was wrong with fundraising spam.) She spoke enthusiastically of her desire to “Burn MAGA to the ground and salt the earth.” But as her speech unfolded, it became clear that all of her conclusions, all of her recommendations, all of her insights into What Voters Want, came from listening to focus groups. “I listen in the shower, and I listen on the treadmill, and I listen when I’m walking places,” she said of focus group recordings. “I have voters in my ear all the time, and the disconnect between what we talk about in rooms like this and the way they sound is enormous.”
 |
This was disconcerting. Here was a person who was paid to be an expert on what regular people want, and was invited to instruct the Democratic Party on what regular people want, whose own alleged expertise on what regular people want was not drawn from actually knowing any regular people. Not at all! Regular people were convened to sit in rooms and be questioned and recorded by professionals, and this woman listened to those recordings while on the treadmill, and from these data events she is now prepared to declare herself an expert on the will of regular people. Equally disconcerting is the fact that when this group, the “Majority” Democrats, went to seek out an expert on regular people for its big event, it did not to think to invite any regular people, nor even anyone who personally associates with regular people, but rather a political consultant who listens to a lot of focus groups that are presumably made up of regular people.
The second, and related, remark that struck me came from Daniel Squadron, an intellectual liberal consultant who gave an interesting talk on the long, pernicious influence of right wing thinkers like Ayn Rand and Carl Schmitt. He was making the point to the audience that Democrats will need more than a catchy slogan to succeed. “You can’t ask what your slogan is until you ask a different question: What do you believe?” he said. “Why are you doing this? It’s a question that I bet many of you have never been asked in a real way.”
Squadron, a man who has spent his entire career in Democratic politics, was speaking to a room full of professional Democratic functionaries, and he casually voiced that it was his working assumption that these people—the people who were there to determine the future of progressive politics—have never been asked the question, “What do you believe?” This smart and experienced man, a man intimately familiar with this milieu, took it for granted that this audience of thousands had probably never encountered a question so tawdry, so elementary, as “What do you believe?” For the hardnosed, data-driven consultants in the room, such a question would, I guess, be a waste of time.
Remarks like these are a little unnerving, because if you are a more or less regular person who holds unforgivably childish ideas like “I believe we must help the working class break the power of capital,” you start to realize that you are in a big tent that is owned and controlled by a whole other set of people who don’t have time to think about stuff like that because they are too busy listening to recordings of focus groups of people like you saying cute things like “my rent is too expensive.” You are supposed to take your marching orders on political action from these people. These are the majority Democrats. What that makes all the rest of us, I do not know.
*******
Spending some time in this setting will help you understand why the Democratic Party is so perpetually frustrating. In this consultant-centered model, the politicians themselves become little more than actors, sent out to convincingly perform the script that the consultants have devised. The best politicians are not the ones who have their own ideas but rather the ones who can sound winning and likable while repeating back to voters the things that voters themselves have said in various focus groups just a short time ago. Listening to the parade of national politicians take the stage at What’s Next, it was hard not to notice that most of them—the brightest stars of the non-left wing of the Democratic Party—did, if you paid attention to their actual words rather than their charming faces and aw-shucks jokes, seem to be doing exactly this.
“We must bridge the divide between us,” said James Talarico, in jeans, a blazer, and no tie. “We must repair the ties that bind us.”
“Working hard every day. Building a home, starting a family, sending their kids to a good public school,” said Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse, in a blue suit and no tie. “That type of opportunity is what makes me believe in America. It’s why I refuse to abandon my bone-deep commitment to expanding opportunity.”
“I tell people the political system is broken, because it is,” said Iowa governor-elect Rob Sand, sporting the impassive face of the male model he used to be. “I tell them, too often it feels like two private clubs who are more interested in beating up on each other than they are in solving anyone’s problems.”
“For too long, we’ve been afraid to talk like normal people,” said burly Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. “Big-ass truck politics is what unites Democrats like never before.”
“Affordability. That’s what we ran on,” said New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill.
“Affordability,” said Colorado governor-elect Phil Weiser.
“Affordability,” said Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger.
“Affordability is front and center,” argued Alaska governor-elect Jonathan Kriess-Tomkins, by contrast.
Presented in this rapid-fire manner, the impression that all of the elected officials are just reading their lines is unavoidable. Nobody embodies that robotic discipline like Hakeem Jeffries, the man that leftists in the party fear is about to become Speaker of the House. Jeffries has the gift of moving his mouth without moving any other portion of his face, which gives him a flinty, imperturbable air that serves him well amid chaos. When he sat down for a chat on stage with Fox News token Democrat Jessica Tarlov, he was quickly interrupted by not one, not two, but three protesters, each of which who stood up and started shouting at him as soon as the one before had been escorted out by police. They yelled that he didn’t listen to young people, that he had aided genocide in Gaza, that we need a Green New Deal. Jeffries sat still, totally unmoved, for a few seconds of this, and then proceeded to just carry on with his applause line about the Knicks winning the championship (the very same line that he used in a video clip played during his introduction).
The final protester, as he was being pulled past me, burst out in frustration, “Fuck you all!”
“Fuck you too, bitch!” hollered an older black man who was sitting in front of me, purely out of reflex. On stage, Jeffries continued talking about how he enjoyed seeing himself portrayed on Saturday Night Live recently. Tarlov, on the other hand, was flustered. “I’m nervous, compared to like, The Five,” she sputtered.
Jeffries immediately began talking about the need to get permitting reform done. This is his power. He may be corrupt, and an obstacle to true progress, but he has achieved total unflappability. He cannot be disturbed, and he also cannot be made to answer a question with truth or clarity, two qualities which are effectively superpowers for a man in his position. He would say things like, “We have to get dark money out of politics,” without defining it in a way that might get him into trouble. When asked something he didn’t want to answer at all, like whether he supports term limits, he would say, “It’s the right conversation to have.” He would say things that are vaguely reassuring to people of all political persuasions, like, “We’re going to be guided by the Constitution.” If you didn’t press hard, he can leave thinking he agrees with you on everything. If you do press hard, he slips out to the side, like trying to snatch a quick fish underwater. Even if you don’t like him, you must admit that he is a perfect leader for the Democratic Party: a human bowl of Jell-O, capable of holding a shape for a while, but always ready to ooze into any new container as necessary.
The one firm claim that everyone at What’s Next hastened to make was that the Democratic Party is not divided. Is this billionaire-backed convention of centrists somehow a sign that there is a divide between the left and the centrists in the party? Not at all! Nothing could be further from the truth, the officials invited to this gathering proclaimed.
“This isn’t about middle, left, or right. It’s about up versus down,” said former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. “Insiders who take everything, and leave everybody else out.”
“There is no so-called moderate Democratic Party. There is no so-called progressive Democratic Party,” said former attorney general Eric Holder. “There is one Democratic Party.”
“We need to think bigger now,” said New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, channeling a preacher. “We need to call left and right together to show them that the lines that divide us are not nearly as strong as the ties that bind us.”
“The new generation is not gonna be defined by progressive versus moderate,” said Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin. “That new generation is, quite simply, are you on team fight, or team flight?”
Notably, the one genuine left winger who spoke on stage, Congressman Ro Khanna, struck a different tone. He knew he was in the minority here. Unlike almost every other speech, his contained actual policy prescriptions. He called for Medicare for All (not to be confused with “universal health care,” a term that sounds kind of like Medicare for All but is not the same, and which was in widespread use among newly elected Democrats here). He called for a wealth tax. He called for a $25 minimum wage. He called for an end to aid for Israel, and no more foreign wars. These are all common things to hear when you are at leftist events. But among the Majority Democrats, Khanna’s directness only served to highlight the absence of real policy positions from most of the other speakers.
Let me try to be fair. Let me try not to piss on the parade. Democrats just won their biggest midterm victory in decades and they seem to agree that they need an agenda that they can act on, which is certainly better than no agenda. By listening to the moderates here and combining it with what we know the left wants, you can begin to see the outline of some agreed-upon things: Building more housing, ending gerrymandering, some modest expansion of Medicare to either the young or the old, a ban on stock trading for members of Congress, more green energy, some sort of AI regulation, aggressive investigations of Trump administration crimes. These things have broad appeal, and could well get passed quickly. They would be good. Sure. They would be an improvement from what we have now. They would live up to the underlying tone of the Majority Democrats platform: Big, Bold, and Moderate.
The truth is, though, that no matter how big a tent you put over the Democratic Party, it will still be divided. Why? Because that is the nature of politics. Factions are not inherently bad. They exist because people genuinely disagree on substantial things. You can say “let’s all come together in unity,” but when we propose a wealth tax and you say no, there is no unity there. There is just a fight. When we ask for Medicare for All and you say no, there is not common ground. There is a fight. Policy differences matter. Party unity is important in general elections, but when it comes to governing, it is more instructive to think of politics as a battle. The left has more common ground with the moderates in Denver than it has with the fascists in Trumplandia, yes. But what the moderates and the fascists have in common is that they are both trying to ensure that the left does not gain power. The hand of friendship that centrists extend to the newly ascendant left wing of their party comes with a tacit agreement that the left will remain the minority partner in this coalition. If you are on the left and you actually want to change the structural problems that brought us to this point, the holes in the big tent are easy to spot.
The morning of the last day of What’s Next, about 20 protesters gathered a couple of blocks outside of the venue, holding signs for a Green New Deal and chanting about dumping Chuck Schumer. In response to this small crew, the Denver police deployed dozens of riot cops in full tactical gear, helmets, and body armor. They even sent an armored SWAT team vehicle that would have looked far more appropriate navigating the IED-strewn streets of Fallujah than parked on the curb just down from the Chubby Unicorn Cantina. The whole scene would have been laughable, were it not for the presence of so many heavily armed men. Majority Democrats staffers stood out there looking worried, thanking the police for their work. I spoke to one older man holding an Indivisible sign who had come to protest. He was jealous of my press pass. “I wish I was in the press,” he said. “Getting into that event costs five thousand bucks.”
That afternoon, Georgia Senator and rumored presidential hopeful Raphael Warnock took the stage. He is a real live preacher, a gifted speaker, a man who knows how to call forth the spirit of the civil rights movement. He told a story about watching his grandmother chop the head off of a snake in her garden when he was a child. “As I witnessed the traumatic and menacing movements and convulsions after she decapitated it, I thought we were really in trouble. What I didn’t understand as a six year-old kid is that that snake was moving not because it was living, but because it was dying,” he said. “This is now the last gasp of an old order that knows it is on its way out!”
It is a neat metaphor—the snake, as evil, writhing in its death throes. Yet the other quality of snakes is that they shed their skin. They change their outer appearance and are reborn. Sometimes, they slither right inside of your big tent, curl up beside you, and try to make friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment