But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.
Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.
At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
In this Facebook post of 12/13/2020, Dan Rather writes:
But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.
For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.
Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:
Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:
But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]
[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".
In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)
But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:
Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.
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