Biden, the Tara Reade story, and the "poisoned chalice" problem

I've been reading lately about the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, which was the immediate precursor of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In March 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made a long speech to the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress, which included careful diplomatic signals that the USSR was seriously considering a diplomatic tilt to cooperation with Hitler Germany. In the speech he commented, "Politics are politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say."

I've thought of that line while following the Tara Reade story. Reade is a former staff member in Joe Biden's Senate office who has made an allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her in the early 1990s. Here is a report by Ryan Grim, who first broke this story: New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade's Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges The Intercept 04/24/2020.

The relevance of the Stalin quote is not to compare Joe Biden with Hitler or anything ridiculous like that. But it's a colorful reminder that politics has never been and will never be a contest between divine beings. (Well, human politics, anyway!) As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist #51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." But of course that's not our reality.

In our reality, the only two people with a credible possibility of being elected President in November are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. For most Democrats, for most people who consider themselves on the left, for most feminists, Biden is clearly the preferable candidate. He's "the best we can do" right now, a fact that gives current relevance to Steve Earle's protest song, Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do). Supporting Biden over Trump, even enthusiastically supporting him (if that's possible!), is entirely valid and does not mean his supporters endorse or condone the conduct that Tara Reade alleges.

From the reporting I've seen, Reade's allegations are substantial and deserve to be treated seriously. At the same time, we know that the Republicans will use them as a political club, that the Democrats are unlikely to make an aggressive case against Trump over the various credible accusations against him for sexual misconduct, and that most Republicans voters apparently really don't care about Trump's personal misconduct. Or his public misconduct either.

Rebecca Traister examines the political dilemma that creates, particularly for the woman Biden chooses to be his Vice Presidential candidate, The Biden Trap The Cut 04/27/2020. She also summarizes the history of Reade's claims:

[P]art of what’s sickeningly clear is that if Biden remains the Democratic nominee, whichever woman gets the nod to be his running mate will wind up drinking from a poisoned chalice. Because the promise to choose a woman ensures that whoever she is, she will be forced to answer — over and over again — for Biden’s treatment of other women, including the serious allegations of assault leveled by Tara Reade. ...

And make no mistake, if Biden loses, regardless of his running mate, even as feminists are being criticized for hypocrisy in not condemning him more swiftly, it will also be feminists and women who are blamed for his loss, for encouraging an environment in which claims of sexual harm are taken seriously enough to damage a politician. [my emphasis]

Shaunna Thomas, the head of the feminist group Ultraviolet, posted on Facebook:

Krystal Ball reports on the story in Bombshell Joe Biden Tara Reade story forces liberal feminists to reckon with silence Rising/The Hill 04/28/2020:

I've followed Krystal Ball's commentry for a while and she is generally solid. At the same time, that clip above illustrates the tricky nature of a left-right comentators' pairing like hers with Saagar Enjeti. As the left side of the duo, she's here taking a position that, principled though it may be, is negative for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

While Saagar can and does use the same story in this clip to blast Democratic feminists for hyprocrisy, also making a point of dismissing their criticism of Brett Kavanaugh as having been transparently insincere. The "left" member of the due gets to be principled in criticizing her own side, while the "right" member also gets to criticize the left side while using the story to defend Republicans for their stance on the Kavanaugh case, as follows:

If you're one of those people who is ignoring this, or any of that, this cognitive dissidence in order to make a political choice and push a political outcome in order to get what you desire, and all that stuff you said during Brett Kavanaugh and all that other stuff when everyone was a Republican politician and not a Democratic one, sorry, you're a liar! And you always were! And that was the thing. We all, a lot of us knew that. .

I have found their reports informative and their discussions useful in teasing out thier implications. But this clip is also an illustration that his arrangement can be a kind of "poisoned chalice". Because the choice in November is almost certainly going to be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

In other words, politics are politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say.

The Democratic Party and the real existing American left

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti use the example of Viriginia, which has a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature, as a warning about how anti-labor the establishment Democrats have become, Previewing the hellish future of a Biden administration Rising/The Hill 04/16/2020:

So far as I'm aware, Krystal Ball has a solid progressive record. And she does good analysis from a left-progressive perspective. The setup of their show Rising is to have a dialogue between her and the Republican-libertarian position of Saagar Enjeti. Or, as he puts it in another segment, "a mission of this show is to put the populism in dialogue with [the] populist right."

I think that may have been a Freudian slip, because he probably meant to refer to her position as "populist left". Instead he called it "the populism" versus the "populist right", which is actually more accurate because the "populist right" is demagogic against immigrants, minorities, and women, but definitely not pro-labor. Some of the European far-right parties make a somewhat better pretense of being in favor of pro-labor positions on economic issues.

Krystal is walking a difficult line right now with her stance. The Republicans have an interest in publicizing left criticism of Biden and the dominant corporate wing of the party. But on the other hand, if the pro-labor left wants to push the Democrats more toward that position, they have to advocate for those positions. On the other hand, there's a risk that a well thought-out left position like hers can give undeserved credibility to more dubious partisan plugs from the "right" half of the dialogue. But then, politics is about differences between positions.

Part of politics is also the "convert" posture, and of course the conversion is sometimes sincere. The NeverTrump Republicans are the most prominent example right now. The mainstream media love apparently "counterintuitive" positions, like Republicans criticizing Trump. Ronald Reagan worked that "counterintuitive" angle for decades after he had switched from a vaguely left-leaning Democratic position to hardcore rightwinger. One of his most famous lines was, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me."

An undated Time article on Reagan, who formally became a Republican in 1962, as one of the "Top 10 Political Defections" recounts this bit of history:

An F.D.R. fan, the Gipper [Reagan] campaigned for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her fruitless 1950 Senate race against Richard Nixon and encouraged Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for President as a Democrat in 1952. While he was working as a spokesman for General Electric, however, his views shifted right. "Under the tousled boyish haircut," he wrote Vice President Nixon of John F. Kennedy in 1960, "is still old Karl Marx." [my emphasis]

Yes, rightwing Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists and communists for a long time, no matter what their actual positions were.

Since the right tends to support the power of large corporations enthusiastically , there's generally more money and career opportunity in switching from left to right than vice-versa.

The part of the American left that identified in some way with the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 - and that basically includes everybody who sees themselves as "left" - have a general if vague understanding that the current Democratic establishment is basically conservative, although more committed to classical liberal small-d democratic values than the Republicans (a very low bar), but far from being a labor party or New Deal party any more. At the same time, there seems to be a general recognition that the American election system with its winner-take-all districts creates heavy pressure for a two-party system.

Which means that building an actual left majority requires takeover of the Democratic Party, which in turn requires an inside-outside strategy that requires building a left infrastructure from media to stronger labor unions to cultural institutions.

There's always a temptation to expect that crises will bring about some kind of political realignment. But there's nothing automatic about it. The Great Recession that officially began in December 2017 did produce an historic rejection of the Bush-Cheney administration. But it's hard to disentangle the effects of the financial crisis from the mess of the Iraq War and the spectacularly bad handling of the Katrina disaster. Obama was very much the favored candidate of the Democratic left in 2008. That was partly because that's how he pitched himself, especially the fact that he opposed the Iraq War prior to beginning his Senate career. It was generally assumed, I think it's safe to say, that an African-American Democratic President would be inclined to lean left. But Obama kept his public profile famously in his no-red-America-no-blue-America conciliatory posture. When he became President, he immediately adopted essentially the same neoliberal economic policies of the Clinton Administration, tailored of course to the economic crisis of the moment. And he literally turned foreign policy over to Hillary Clinton as his first Secretary of State.

But the Republicans had no use for Obama's fantasies of Bipartisan Harmony and the party continued its self-radicalization. Which meant they treated the Obama Administration as a radical left entity to be bitterly opposed. Perhaps ironically, the shift of the Republican Party after the Great Recession was far more dramatic. The Democratic Party staged a restoration of the Clinton Administration complete with the ridiculous celebration of austerity economics. The Republican Party became the openly authoritarian party of Donald Trump. Who, by the way, is our current President and Obama's successor in the White House.

Obama himself as President identified himself explicitly and publicly as aligned with the corporate, neoliberal wing of the party early on in his first Administration (Carol Lee and Jonathan Martin, Obama: 'I am a New Democrat' Politico 03/10/2009, less than two months after his Inauguration):

“I am a New Democrat,” he told the New Democrat Coalition, according to two sources at the White House session.

The group is comprised of centrist Democratic members of the House, who support free trade and a muscular foreign policy but are more moderate than the conservative Blue Dog Coalition.

Obama made his comment in discussing his budget priorities and broader goals, also calling himself a “pro-growth Democrat” during the course of conversation.

The self-descriptions are striking given Obama’s usual caution in being identified with any wing of his often-fractious party. He largely avoided the Democratic Leadership Council — the centrist group that Bill Clinton once led — and, with an eye on his national political standing, has always shied away from the liberal label, too.

"Resistance" Democrats are fond of quoting Maya Angelou, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time," at least when they are using it to refer to Trump. It would have been a good concept for more Democrats to keep in mind back in March, 2009. Digby Parton was paying attention at the time, and was already calling attention to Obama's pronounced conservative bent.

So it's a good thing that progressives this days are paying closer attention to what the actual Democratic leadership is about.