Who's Looking Out for You? [View all]

by D.R. Tucker

Are they going to whine four years from now, too?

Let’s say that in 2020–four years after Donald Trump has used the Constitution as a placemat, ignored incident after incident of police brutality, gutted every last element of President Obama’s carbon-cutting efforts, proclaimed that Vladimir Putin was virtuous and pure, and allowed corruption to contaminate the country–the Democratic presidential primary comes down to another contest pitting a perceived “establishment Democrat” against an undisputed progressive. Let’s say that, due to missteps, gaffes, lack of coverage from the mainstream media, or just plain old bad luck, the progressive hopeful fails to secure the Democratic nomination.

Will the same folks who went on and on about Hillary Clinton’s alleged flaws, her supposed cautiousness, her “uninspiring” nature, and her ties to the “Establishment” resurface to again assail the Democratic nominee as “not progressive enough”? Will they again exaggerate the nominee’s perceived policy flaws? Will they again suggest that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic nominee and the demagogic incumbent?

As I noted in February, back in the summer of 2013 I was horrified by the rhetoric of progressive radio host Sam Seder, who chased after then-Democratic US Senate aspirant Cory Booker with a rhetorical chainsaw. Seder was repulsed by the prospect of Booker defeating then-Rep. Rush Holt in an August primary to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg in an October special election. I also preferred Holt’s vision, especially his strong advocacy of a federal carbon tax to combat climate change, but it was fairly obvious that Holt was not going to win the primary–and I could not figure out why Seder kept on promoting the idea that Booker was only marginally better than Steve Lonegan, the Koch Brothers-backed Republican contender for Lautenberg’s former seat.

The same reasoning Seder used in that 2013 New Jersey Senate primary was on display during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary–and beyond. How many times did you have conversations with nominally progressive acquaintances who insisted that Clinton was a crypto-Republican, that her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a hoax, that she couldn’t wait to sell out to Big Fracking and Big Pharma and Big Ag and Big Big?

If a Democrat who has, by some odd metric, been deemed “not progressive enough” wins the presidential primary in 2020, we’ll likely hear this same rhetoric again. Nothing will have been learned.

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Read More: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/12/11/whos-looking-out-for-you/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+washingtonmonthly%2Frss+%28Political+Animal+at+Washington+Monthly%29

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D.R. Tucker sure nails it here.