Bragman writes as a progressive, including this piece for the social-democratic journal Jacobin, Does Joe Kennedy Still Believe Austerity Is the “Right Blueprint Forward”? 08/26/2020, in which he criticizes Congressman Joe Kennedy's advocacy of austerity economics in the context of his losing campaign against progressive Democratic Sen. Jeff Markley. Nancy Pelosi made a point of endorsing Kennedy in that campaign to attempt to strengthen the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in the Senate. Or "establishment wing," if you prefer.
Bragman reminds his readers in that piece about an aspect of the Obama-Biden Administration that Democrats would prefer not to flag in an election year:
In August 2012, just three years after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression up to that point, Kennedy was a first-time congressional candidate. During a debate hosted by the Martin Institute at Stonehill College, Kennedy told moderators that something had to be done about the debt and deficit and that the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan had gotten it more or less right. That plan — which came out of a White House commission touted by Vice President Joe Biden — proposed cuts to Social Security, along with Medicare and Medicaid. [my emphasis]Obama in his 2008 campaign against John McCain, and to a large extent in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, presented a more progressive image than the way he actually governed. From the perspective of 2020, there's a good argument to be made that the 2008 crisis (the recession in the US technically started in 2007) represents a turning point where the neoliberal model of both parties that dates back to the 1978-80 period had run out of steam. Without going off on that particular tangent here, the Cheney-Bush model of governance on the Republican side, of which Trumpism is a direct if bizarre successor, and the Clintonite model of "bipartisan" centrism on the Democratic side, had hit their practical limits within the liberal democratic system.
The 2008 Democratic primary and the feminist/antiracist dichotomy
It requires a bit of effort now to recall, but Obama in 2008 was widely seen as the insurgent progressive candidate opposing the more conservative Hillary Clinton. The late Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent figures on the American left in the second half of the 20th century, evidently found himself torn about the diverging political currents in the Democratic Party. In 2008, he endorsed Obama over Clinton in the primaries. But in 2016, he endorsed Clinton over Bernie Sanders, as Miles Mogulescu describes in an obituary memory, My Last Visit With Tom Hayden and Why He Endorsed Hillary Over Bernie HuffPost 10/25/2016 (updated 12/06/2017).
But his perspective didn't necessarily take such a drastic turn as it might seem on the surface. In Obama’s Position on Iraq Could Put His Candidacy at Risk Huffpost (07/12/2008, updated 05/25/2011), he wrote:
Call him slippery or nuanced, Barack Obama‘s core position on Iraq has always been more ambiguous than audacious. Now it is catching up with him as his latest remarks are questioned by the Republicans, the mainstream media, and the antiwar movement. He could put his candidacy at risk if his audacity continues to shrivel.So he recognized from the get-go that Obama's progressive image was far more style than substance. And he treated that as a practical pragmatic choice. The "identity" aspects of the 2008 Democratic primary had to do with the Hillary campaign trying to emphasize the feminist value of having a female President while trying, relatively discretely, to use Obama's race against him. The "Bernie Bros" label her supporters used in 2016 was proceeded by an "Obama Boys" label in 2008. Rebecca Traister wrote in Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Salon 04/14/2008:
I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, I believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements.
And of course, there is the need to end the Republican reign that began with a stolen election followed by eight years of war and torture, corporate gouging, environmental decay, domestic spying and right-wing court appointments, just in case we forget who Obama is running against.
I received e-mails and phone calls from women voicing various strains of frustration: They told me about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends; some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women. Others had to find ways to call me out of earshot of their Obama-loving boyfriends.Actually, Traister's article doesn't really work the racial implication of the phrase "Obama Boys" in the title. And it's a useful real-time account of the antiracism-vs.-feminism theme of that primary.
What we might call the "economic identity" or "class identity" aspect of that 2008 campaign was actually blurred by the dreary conditions of the economy and the general failures of the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a safe assumption during the primary season that a Democratic Administration would be more proactive in stimulating the economy than the Republicans. And also they would handle emergencies like Hurricane Katrina better.
But as Traister noted with this quote from Mia Brunch, who "points to healthcare as an area in which 'Hillary's policy is the more politically progressive one, but this has somehow been ignored, and Obama was projected upon as the progressive redeemer. It's a political fantasy.'"
In addition, Obama's criticism of the Iraq War when he was a state senator in Illinois contrasted dramatically in the minds of antiwar voters with Clinton's vote for the Iraq War as a US Senator. And that was a really big deal in the 2008 primary.
Tom Hayden in the piece quoted above also referred to "the transforming nature of an African-American presidency." The very fact that enough voters were willing to get enough beyond the still deep-seated white racism to vote for an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama for President was certainly a sign that lots of them were in a mood for a transformative Presidency after the Cheney-Bush years. And his presence in the White House as a competent, popular President was a living example of the falsehood of still deeply-ingrained racial prejudices.
But Obama presided over a transactional Presidency, not a transformative one. Hayden's caution about how much Obama's actual policy priorities would be progressive and antiwar were well founded. Obama's conservatism in economic policy, symbolized as Bragman rightly observes by the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles austerity plan that Obama and Biden supported, did not become associated with the anti-sexism/anti-racism-vs.-economic-progressivism in 2008 they way it did in 2020.
The 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and "identity" politics vs. "class" politics
Liberal New Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who in the 1990s found themselves in company with the neoliberal Clintonian version of globalization optimism found themselves by 2009 ringing the alarms over the reactionary nature of the austerity politics. Krugman started talking about the destructive effects of the media and establishment economics deference to those he mockingly labeled the Very Serious People. He named Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as being emblematic of the VSPs, who he defined as "someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence." (Faithocrats New York Times 07/14/2015) He quoted the following observation of John Maynard Keynes in that connection, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."
By 2016, Bernie Sanders was able to make a effective primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, campaigning as a "democratic socialist" who put forth an unapologetic New Deal type program emphasizing the need to create jobs and strengthen labor unions while also taking a strong stand on civil-rights and civil liberties. Sanders himself had strong roots in the civil rights movement. But as the representative of the very white state of Vermont, he had not been so prominently identified with civil rights causes over the years as some other leading Democrats. He stressed populist appeals to bring new voters into the active electorate and to shore up Democratic support in traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states where Republicans had gained considerable ground.
Hillary Clinton's campaign, heavily favored by the Democratic establishment controlling the Democratic National Committee (which should by their own rules have been neutral in the primary contest) emphasized civil-rights issues of combatting racism, sexism, and immigrant rights along with a continuation of VSP, Simpson-Bowles type economics, stressing the historic value of having a female President. Their campaign popularized the term "Bernie Bros" to dismiss Sanders and his supporters as racist and sexist, or at least weak on those issues.
Tom Hayden explained his reasons for endorsing Hillary over Bernie in the California Democratic primary in 2016 in I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind The Nation 04/12/2020. It's a nuanced piece, which as I read it essentially argues in that moment that he going along with what he took to be a more-or-less inevitable Hillary win for the nomination. I voted the other way in that California primary myself. But he clearly was not expecting Hillary to govern as a flaming progressive.
Starting then and continuing to the present day, an establishment Democratic narrative became established which treated left-populist appeals and programmatic goals as inherently sexist and racist. Given Vladimir Putin's demonstrated fondness for the Trump campaign in 2016, Russian interference in American politics inevitably became an issue. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment tried to package their criticism at times in what strongly resembled stereotypical and superficial Cold War rhetoric. And to a certain extent, that included an effort to smear left-populist Democrats like Bernie as at least vaguely un-American, as well. In one of the Democratic debates in 2019, Joe Biden interrupted Sanders while he was making a pitch for Medicare For All, aka, national health insurance, by injecting, "This is America!" (Biden shrugs off health-care costs when Sanders brings up Canada: 'This is America' The Week 09/12/2019)
That was at least factually true. The kind of national health insurance that is standard in Europe and much of the rest of the world and which produces much better overall public health results than the US private-insurance-based system is something that the United States has never had.
Dancing with the angels on the pin
The Democratic Party definitely has a progressive wing and corporate (more-or-less conservative) wing. The actual voters in the two Democratic camps are not themselves at this moment deeply divided over issues. But the corporate donors are deeply divided from the majority of the base that does want national health insurance, a Green New Deal, a revived labor movement, nuclear disarmament, and a genuinely peace-oriented foreign policy. The corporate donors want their corporate-deregulation international "trade" treaties and, massive subsidies for Wall Street with minimal restraint, and freedom for billionaires from the awful burden of paying taxes to support their country and their communities.
But they are happy to have the Democrats use mostly symbolic positions to show voters they are "woke" on issues relating to racism and sexism. Nancy Pelosi clapping sideways at the State of the Union address doesn't cost Democratic corporate donors a dime.
All this is a way of positioning the political rhetoric around these issues in the present-day US context. The multiple identities of even individual voters is obviously a compliated factor in politics. The notion of "intersectionality" emerged as a way to think about the multiple social identifications that voters have.
Here's where Bragman's tweet put him in the Twitter crossfire on an issue that is not very well suited for clarification on Twitter. (To put it mildly!) He was making reference here to the hardcore radical right. Journalists and political analysts are inclined to roll their eyes at what looks like a superficial "economic circumstances" argument to explain radical-right politics.
For one thing, looking at sociological trends is different than looking at individual motivations of highly engaged political activists. A child of an oligarchical family like Franklin Roosevelt can wind up as a "class traitor" who defended the rights of workers, farmers, and labor unions against the Economic Royalists of the 1930s. A kid from relatively modest circumstances like Paul Ryan who depended on public social insurance (i.e., Social Security) to get through college can winded up as an advocate for the Koch Brothers who wants to force grandmas everywhere to make catfood their principal nutrition.
Economic factors like employment, income levels, extreme of inequality all do affect voters political behavior and attitudes on politics and public policy. So do race, gender, national origin, region, religion, family political allegiances, employment, education, personal traumas like illness and divorce - the list goes on. Then there are psychological factors, like those described by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer in their new book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020).
Especially after Trump's election, it became a dreary ritual for the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to send reporters out into the exotic heartland diners and interview conservative white people about why they voted for Trump and then did faithful stenography of their complaints about how all the city slickers and Mean Libruls looked down on them and that's why they found Trump's p****y-grabbing and xenophobic ranting about Mexican rapists so attractive.
A scholarly version of this misguided approach is Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). She did a kind of participant-observer study of white people in Lake Charles, Louisiana in which she listened to their stories of how they were being picked on by them thar Mean Libruls and uppity black folks. And then she reported it out apparently without adequate inquiry into the factual basis of the claims they were making and also without putting their favorite narratives about the world into the long narrative tradition of Southern white-supremacist assumptions.
What we now calls issues of "intersectionality" are nothing new in left-leaning politics. Just Google German Social Democratic Party and "woman question" or "national question" to discover some of the abundant historical examples with just that one party. Or dig a bit into the history of the American anti-slavery movement to find many examples of how racial assumptions crossed class lines and also how wealthy interests have deliberately used white racism. The pre-Civil War slave patrols in the South are one historical example, which I discussed in a 2016 post (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 3: Slave patrols and ... "false consciousness"? 04/03/206):
The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that searched for blacks who were not on plantations. Plantations had their own plantation patrols, as well. The slave patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. The slave patrols gave free whites who might be inclined to political and/or violent anger against wealthy slaveowners the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free. And that's a key reason that participation was mandatory.Yes, racism, sexism, and xenophobia, and authoritarianism are all phenemena that are not purely dependent on immediate economic conditions or class identity. But they also exist within economic systems that both shape them are are shaped by them. The details of "intersectionality" will always present particular complications that will get translated into political rhetoric in a variety of ways.
The fear of slave revolts was widespread and ingrained into daily life in the South prior to the Civil War. It was accompanied by periodic panics over them, most of which existed only the in the fevered, guilty imaginations of white people. Though slave resistance and the occasional slave revolt really did occur, too. John Brown fanned those fears with his plan to set up a guerrilla army in the South to free slaves in the years immediately before the Civil War.
The slave patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan is the most infamous.
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