Centrist ideologues ready to bombard the progressive Democratic candidates

Jonathan Chait seems to be carved out a 2020 niche for himself as a reliable bellwether of corporate centrism. His piece Tulsi Gabbard and the Return of the Anti-Anti-Trump Left (New York 12/23/2019) is a good example:

Left-wing anti-anti-Trumpism played an important role in the bizarre 2016 outcome. Die-hard Bernie activists, fired up with anger at the release of DNC emails stolen by Russians that purportedly showed the party had rigged the primary, demonstrated against the party outside its convention hall and tried to drown out the speakers inside with boos. Stein attacked Hillary Clinton from the left, then audaciously staged a grift-y fundraising scheme supposedly to hold recounts in the states she had labored to flip to Trump. Trump’s election appeared to deliver the same shock of reality that had vaporized Ralph Nader’s 2000 support.

But Gabbard’s emergence is another indication that the disaffection that drove these events has not disappeared. Anti-anti-Trumpism has maintained a small but durable intellectual infrastructure. The sentiments that first registered as dissent from the Russia investigation transferred to impeachment, and a chorus of left-wing voices is attacking the effort to remove Trump from office as at best a misguided diversion and at worst a deep-state coup.

This is mainly a tacky attempt to stigmatize any Democrat to the left of Biden or Buttigieg as not very desirable people to be associated with. This year is going to be filled with many flights of fancy and propaganda like that one. Trying to refute columns like this point by point would be mainly a waste of time, because their persuasiveness is how well they resonate within Democratic faction fights and the chronically lazy habits of the corporate press.

But keeping a grip on reality is also a good thing.

Tulsi Gabbard has always been hard to place. She endorsed Sanders in 2016 and for the next several years tried to portray herself as a progressive in the Sanders-Warren "lane". In the course of 2019, she moved far enough to the right that she voted "present" on Trump's impeachment. But she's always been disturbingly well-disposed toward Hindu nationalism and has supported the kind of Islamophobia connected with it and with a lot of far-right politics generally. She has always taken a simplistically hawkish position on the War on Terror. That "present" vote along with not contesting her Congressional seat may be signs she's setting up for some kind of third party gig.

I know that Chait's handwringing about third parties is part of a narrative that is deeply embedded in Democratic Party rhetoric. It's not entirely wrong. For instance, if Joe Biden has a majority at the Democratic convention but then has all his delegates instead vote to draft Mitt Romney as the Democratic Presidential candidate, the handful of Republican NeverTrumpers will be having verbal orgasms about it for the rest of their lives. But that would produce a big third party candidacy with candidates able to pull enough votes to have a real shot at the White House. So it's possible.

The point, of course, is not that Biden will actually do exactly that. But he did say he might consider a hypothetical Republican as his Vice Presidential running mate. Ticket-balancing used to me picking a politician from one's own party as the VP candidate who would bring additional strength geographically or from a competing party faction. Ticket-balancing by picking a member of the opposing party as the VP nominee would be a new approach!

So Biden and the corporate Dems should have to worry about how reckless acts of pathological centrism might drives voters away from the Democratic Party.

There will always be some minor third party entries, and some tiny percentage of the vote will go to one or two of them. In practice, it's almost impossible to measure the effect of most of those, because a large portion of the tiny number who vote third party are none-of-the-above voters. Who they might have voted for otherwise basically has to be estimated from exit polling. In 2016, it's by no means clear how the absence of the candidacies of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson would have affected the Presidential election outcome in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. (But please don't anyone tell Neera Tanden; the poor woman might have a stroke.)

It's been hard for Americans to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to Russia since well before the First World War. So that's nothing new. But there are a group of people who think of themselves as left who desperately want to believe that somehow Trump is pursuing a peace policy toward Russia, when he's actually just stumbling alone from one dirty deal to another. But Trump's total indifference to nuclear proliferation - except when he's using it as an excuse to threaten war with Iran - is the opposite of a peace policy.

Chait uses Glenn Greenwald as an example of a sinister leftie. Greenwald usually comes down on the left side of the issues with which he publicly engages. And in Brazil, where he lives, he's been very much an advocate for the center-left leader Lula de Silva, and good on him for that. But Greenwald has always been kind of a doctrinaire libertarian, so he opposes campaign finance spending limitations, for instance. Dave Neiwert has been pointing out his occassionally disturbing libertarian position for years. This recent post of his sums up some of it. Michael Moore on Trump, 2020 & Why “the Old, Angry White Guy” Doesn’t Represent the Working Class 12/30/2019:

Michael Moore was on Democracy Now! the other day and said that in Michigan in 2016, there were districts that went heavily for Democrats in which 90 thousand ballots were cast with no vote for President. I've never dug into those partiular results, and it might be hard to make a reasonable guess of the impact of those, either. But it's a way bigger number than what Jill Stein pulled in Michigan.