Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Election-Year Pessimism

Donald Trump is going to be re-elected. It doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate. Trump is going to win, because the Democrats are fragmenting and disintegrating, and the party’s more progressive base is going to be blamed.

We’ve seen this before, in 1972 (of course), but also in 2016. Democrats fight among themselves, turn on each other, and in the process leave the field to a more unified Republican Party. Then, as the smoke is clearing, party centrists and the party establishment look to their left for scapegoats.

Bernie Sanders already is being set up to take the blame if (when) Trump wins another term. The most high-profile effort comes from Hillary Clinton, who attacked Sanders in a recently released documentary and again in a podcast interview in January. Clinton, by virtue of her years as First Lady, Secretary of State, senator and party nominee, is seen as an elder stateswoman for the party, and her comments can be read as indicative of the party establishment’s thinking.

Clinton, as the New York Times reported, attacked Sanders and his supporters for not doing “enough to unify the Democratic Party after the prolonged 2016 primary.”

“All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third party, urging people not to vote,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview with Emily Tisch Sussman for her podcast “Your Primary Playlist.” “It had an impact.”

Perhaps. But Sanders was also Clinton’s most vocal surrogate as the 2016 campaign pushed toward its conclusion (see Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/bernie-sanderss-hard-fight-for-hillary-clinton)), offering a far more aggressive and full-throated defense of Clinton than anything Clinton provided in 2008 after her bruising primary loss to Barack Obama — despite her own rewriting of the history of Obama’s historic win.

Clinton, as the Times writes, then “warned against party disunity when facing off against an incumbent President Trump in 2020.”

“That cannot happen again,” she said. “I don’t care who the nominee is. I don’t care. As long as it’s somebody who can win, and as long as it’s somebody who understands politics is the art of addition, not subtraction.”

And yet, it is Clinton who is engaged in the scorched earth this time out, fueling the kinds of anger and recriminations likely to sow disunity among Democrats — and she was doing it in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses.

I want to be clear here. My critique is not of a vibrant discussion of the issues or the direction needs to take. That is and should remain the point of party primaries, which I also think should be rollicking and no-holds-barred battles. My issue is with the dynamic that has reared its head periodically with both the centrist and liberal wings, but which has much more of an effect when the party’s power structure steps in to protect its power — such as the awful 1972 landslide.

The 1972 election is rightly remembered by Democrats as the McGovern debacle. George McGovern, a South Dakota liberal, surprised the Democratic establishment by pulling together a coalition of young voters and reformers to snatch the nomination from front-runner Edmund Muskie and several other more mainstream candidates, before going on to lose in a historic landslide to the incumbent Richard Nixon.

This loss has spooked Democrats ever since, partly because Democrats misremember that race as being easily winnable. It wasn’t. Nixon’s approval rating was in the mid-50s, which meant that only the perfect storm would dislodge him from office (that would come).

But the ‘72 race is responsible for the accelerating the rightward shift that remade the party as the champion of technocrats and big donors it has been over the last few decades. McGovern was right about most of the issues, but the wrong man for the moment and proved to be a weak and inept general election candidate who found ways to sabotage his own efforts (i.e., Thomas Eagleton). He was going to lose and lose big.

But party leaders made it worse by engaging in a massive anti-McGovern effort leading in to the Democratic convention, an effort that spilled out into the final months of the race and tamped down support from traditional Democratic politicians and constituencies.

That was a different time, of course. The rules have changed. The players are very different, and the realignment that was taking place at the time has been set in stone. But human nature remains the same and people in power do not easily hand over their authority, which is why fears of an anyone-but-Bernie movement resonate. The Democrats cannot afford to fracture, cannot afford the kind of petty, reactionary rhetoric we heard from Clinton in January. Democrats must maintain unity. Donald Trump cannot be allowed to win a second term.

Hank Kalet is a pessimist and journalist in New Jersey whose predictions don’t have to turn true. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon, newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020

Populist.com