"Matt Taibbi on centrism or the Third Way as a cover for supporting Republican issues and covering for a part of the financial elite. The Third Way is a total failure and nothing more than a ruse to refuse to accept Democratic Party's complicity with both supporting the financial elite and the Military-Industrial complex, but also paving the way for Trump. Remember Clinton's end of welfare policies and his adoption of Nixon's law and order horror show and Obama's endless compromises with the Republican zombies and his support for bailing out the financial elite or the neoliberal zombies he surrounded himself with. Larry Summers, please? How about his refusal to bring criminal charges against the CIA torturers or his defense of the National Defense Authorization Act and his use of drones to kill endless numbers of civilians. The Third Way is not the policy of caution and compromise, it is a policy of surrender to the worse dimensions of a cruel neoliberal form of capitalism and its culture of militarism and cruelty.
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| Frank Bruni attends AOL Build Series at Build Studio on May 10th, 2017, in New York City. (photo: Jenny Anderson/WireImage) |
By Matt Taibbi
‘New York
Times’ columnist Frank Bruni makes a case for … what, exactly?
Frank Bruni of the New
York Times, in scalding-hot-take mode while filling in for Tom
Friedman, wrote a piece this week called "The Center Is Sexier Than You Think."
Bruni’s screed is the latest in an increasingly comic (and
panicked, and over-blown) series of media reactions to the surprise primary win
of young Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist who worked on the 2016
campaign of Bernie Sanders. She espouses several political views – like abolishing ICE, favoring a
government jobs program and free college education – that make D.C.
thinkfluencers nervous.
Since she ousted ossifying Democratic Party lifer Joe Crowley in
the New York primary, pundits have been scrambling to explain her win as
something other than a symbolic rejection of insider politics.
They’re saying she won because of identity politics, because
of clever marketing and
because she’s a working-class local.
We’ve seen the Washington Post argue there was no
anti-insider meaning in her victory, because “the argument that there is a
Democratic establishment resisting the progressive tide is a straw man.”
If the existence of an obstructionist Democratic Party is one
fairy tale, Bruni now adds another: that the rise of “Democratic Socialists”
and “Justice Democrats” is a sexy story.
Actually, Bruni insists, it’s centrism that’s
really “dreamy.”
His argument is that you need centrist positions to win swing
districts, and winning with an incremental agenda is more exciting than losing
on a platform of sweeping change. Citing the special election victory of
centrist wonder boy Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Bruni writes:
“When Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat, triumphed in a special
election there last March, snatching a seat that had been in Republican hands,
he did so with a moderate aura and an opposition to single-payer health care.”
Lamb, whose aw-shucks handsomeness recalls a Band of
Brothers extra, is the wet dream of new establishment Democrats. He’s
ex-military, a father, flexible on guns, without a ton of political experience
and with a working class background (without the working class politics).
America’s high mullah of conventional wisdom, Jonathan Chait, even
breathlessly suggested Democrats “run the Conor Lamb strategy over and
over.” Noting there were plenty of “ridiculously wholesome” types to
choose from, Chait suggested (as if it were a new idea) that Democrats steal
the Republican electoral strategy:
“[The Republicans’] strategy can be hacked. The most powerful
Republican theme is that Democrats are not ‘one of us’: They aren’t tough, and
they don’t love their country. A candidate with a compelling biography —
especially those with a military background — can disarm these attacks pretty
easily.”
Lamb is what DCCC chair Ben Ray Lujan had in mind when he said
last year Democrats would run “candidates that fit the district.” Which,
as Rolling Stone’s Bob Moser wrote, was code for, “You
can hate abortion and Obamacare and love guns and run like a Republican, and
we’ll still support you if we think you can win.”
This, ultimately is the message: In order to win, Democrats need
to pull a fake-out by pushing squeaky-clean ex-vets without political
histories, and hope that right-leaning voters will project their backwards-ass
dreams onto these walking blank canvases.
The notion that Democrats need to look and act more like
Republicans to win elections has been practically a religious tenet in
Washington for more than 30 years. From the embrace of NAFTA to welfare reform to triangulation to repealing the Glass-Steagall Act to slobbering over Wesley Clark (instead
of opposing the Iraq war) to hiring infamous Republican media hitman
David Brock, this soul-sucking drift has been sold to voters as an
electorally necessary compromise. Now we’re supposed to understand that
it’s sexy, too?
This is the Democratic Party that lost the presidency in 2016 to a
crypto-fascist game-show host with near-record negatives – only
ex-Klansman David Duke in 1992 was
a more roundly-despised candidate than Trump – and legislatively has for a
decade now suffered mass losses on the national and state
levels.
Why? Because, as noted here previously,
“centrists” don’t really exist. There may be individuals who self-identify that
way, but the demographic is mostly a fiction. There’s donor money to be had
there, but not many votes.
When the Democrats abandoned their reliance on labor in the
Eighties, and began to be funded by the same big companies that backed
Republicans, our politics devolved into a contest between two
employer-supported factions. Neither really cared about the numerical majority
of poor or working-class voters, so they had to get creative with their
politics.
The Republican pitch was an open con: the CEO sect hoovering
Middle American votes by trotting out xenophobic Bible-thumpers who waved the
flag and pretended to love beer, chainsaws, snowmobiles and shooting
foreigners, while mostly just deregulating the economy.
Please
continue this article here: https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/51161-focus-no-the-mythical-center-isnt-sexy
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