Corey Robin, thought-provoking as ever - and Trump's hysteria against the Democratic Party

Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila in their Weekends podcast for Jacobin interviewed the historian Corey Robin in their weekend segment, Trumpism After Trump with Corey Robin 12/05/2020 (his interview begins just after 56:40:

Corey Robin is someone I have found to be consistently provocative in a constructive way.

I tweeted a dissent from one of Robin's points about Thomas Jefferson:

I don‘t how we can meaningfully project the fascism concept into the late 18th or early 19th century. TJ may not have possessed saintly (or even bourgeois) moral consistency. But how we can write him out of the history of democracy without indulging some Charles Beard fantasy?

— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) December 5, 2020

Robin in the Weekends interview mentions that his entered left politics via the labor movement. I was also involved in labor issues and organizing in my early 20s and have always throught that a strong labor movement - including effective unions, just to be clear! - so it was interesting to hear Corey Robin mention that as part of the grounding of his political perspective.

Having spent decades on the left side of the political spectrum, I do periodically feel the need to define myself in relation to current left positions and controversies. Because, hey, it wouldn't be the left if we weren't fighting over what are the True Left positions.

The Weekends interview is one I found useful without necessarily being in total agreement with all the points he makes. I did a four-part review of his best-known book starting here, Corey Robin’s "The Reactionary Mind" (2011): (1 of 4): classical liberalism in the US 01/09/2012. That one goes into more detail on the topic of the tweet above, which is how to understand the Revolutionary generation in the US while not falling into the problems of Charles Beard's capital-p Progressive analysis of the American Revolution and the politics of the Constitution.

It starts off with his own story of a strange interaction he had with Neera Tanden, Biden's pick to head his Office and Management and Budget. He then gives a broad overview of the development of the present-day Republican Movement Conservatism. He talks about the relatively dominance of an increasingly conservative mainstream narrative after the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972. "Their real achievement was to transform the Democratic Party," he says, referring to how the Democratic Party in response to the rising strength of Movement Conservatism embraced a neoliberal ideology that contributed heavily to the vast increase in wealth and income inequality over the last 40 years in the US. It also left them with a political message that blurred any distinct political branding for the Democratic Party.

It produced the current situation of chronic asymmetric political polarization that Andrew Hacker argues became particularly dominant beginning with the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994. In his book with Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005), they describe a situation that to a large extent still exists today, only hyper-charged with even more of the money-in-politics problem they identify here:

Although the two parties have both become more cohesive, there remains considerable truth to the old Will Rogers joke about the Democratic Party’s basic organizational deficiencies. (“I am not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”) In crucial areas, from fundraising to congressional leadership to the fervor of the base, the Democratic Party is both less centralized and less networked than the contemporary Republican Party. Individual Democrats, when they have enjoyed power at all, have much more jealously hoarded their autonomy than have the Republican rank and file—a reality on display repeatedly in Clinton’s two terms. Moreover, big money is a strong unifying force for Republicans, but it introduces considerable cross-pressures for Democrats. Important elements of the standard Democratic agenda, especially on economic issues, coexist awkwardly with the realities of contemporary political finance, which require that Democrats seek support from deep-pocketed business contributors. As we will see in the Conclusion, there are exceptions to these generalizations. But they are just that: exceptions. Democrats still have a hard time escaping the Tower of Babel. [my emphasis]

Fortunately, since there have been positive developments for the left along with setbacks, including some of the changes in public opinion and activism that Robin goes on to discuss (along with important historical reflection on the left and the courts in US history). Not least of those is the emergence a much stronger independent left media environment that was still metaphorically in the toddler stage in 2005. The Weekends show is a good example.

For anyone who panics at the thought of any association of Democrats with an avowedly "democratic socialist" media like Jacobin's print and online operations, I would suggest that it's time to get real about what the Republican Party of 2020 is. Their Dear Leader Trump - whose defeat in November's election most Republicans in Congress still refuse to publicly acknowledge - spoke Saturday in Georgia, telling his public COVID superspreader rally attendees that the Democratic Party led by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi is "the lunatic radical left." He said, "Very simply, you will decide whether your children grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country. And I will tell you this: socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism, they want to go into a Communistic form of government. And I have no doubt about it." (after 11:15 in the video of the entire speech, full of flatly false claims, from NBC News, Trump Holds Rally In Georgia Ahead Of Senate Runoff Election 12/05/2020.)

He proceeds to describe the two Democratic Senate candidates, centrist Jon Ossoff and center-left African-American minister Rafael Warnock this way: "radical John Ossoff and Rafael Warnock. Ossoff and Warnock are the two most extreme, far-left liberal Senate candidates in the history of our country."

In urging Georgia Republicans to participate in the dual Senate election in January, the Dear Leader said (after 46:15), "If you don't vote, the socialists and the communists win." (Evan Semones, 'Don’t listen to my friends': Trump encourages Georgia Republicans to vote Politico 12/05/2020)

So, no, Republicans are not going to stop calling Democrats socialists and communists. There are only two ways Democratic candidates can avoid that. They can decide not to run for office. Or they can become Republicans. Otherwise, they're going to call you a commie.

Conservatives have been attacking their opponents as "socialists" since, oh, 1865 or so, as Heather Cox Richardson explains in Marx is Not Around the Corner Moyers on Democracy 10/28/2020.