The Judgment of Heaven
Michelle Cottle and Ben Rhodes are wandering in the wilderness, like most Democrats.
DARING TO DO Brave daring leads to death. Brave caution leads to life. The choice can be the right one or the wrong one. Who will interpret the judgment of heaven? Even the wise soul finds it hard.
| Tao Te Ching, 73, translated by Ursula Le Guin
In Obama’s Not Going to Save Democrats, but This Might, Michelle Cottle and Ben Rhodes are in too much agreement for this exchange to be called anything but a total convergence of opinion. What do they believe?
The Democrats and others -- like political academics -- are completely flummoxed by what has happened since November 2024, and there's mass confusion about what to do, the two say. Their advice, laid out bit-by-bit rather than a manifesto, is fairly anodyne in the final analysis because they themselves won't deconstruct how the Democrats have fallen to a 27% approval rating.
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Rhodes: 'Two problems that the Democrats have to confront. The first, which kind of counteracts the stand-back-and-let-them-destroy-themselves theory, which by the way, I think in normal political times would be absolutely right. Just do very little, they’ll crash the economy, and we’ll win some midterm elections in two years, and we’ll be back in the game. And I think Democrats underestimate just how profoundly loathed they are right now.'
The first is the acknowledgment that James Carville's 'Rope-a-Dope' strategy is attractive to a lot of status-quoists. The second is an acknowledgment of how far out of touch establishment DC democrats are.
Rhodes then makes one of his few substantive recommendations: Washington DC elected Dems 'need to get back out in the country where people are actually experiencing the things that the Trump administration is doing.' But that's not a strategy: it's a tactic.
Rhodes, going further, pleads for reinvention. '[The Democratic Party] need to reinvent themselves not as this kind of party of governing in Washington, but, once again, as kind of a movement party on behalf of primarily working people, but anybody frankly, that is being harmed by Trump, which is going to be a lot of people.'
But popular movements generally are not 'dreamed up' in strategy sessions by politicos, but instead emerge, like #MeToo, Occupy, or the Arab Spring. And today, the protests around the country at Tesla dealerships, (totally unmentioned). Musk is loathed more than the Dems and a movement has surged. But those spontaneous grassroots demonstrations are not discussed as something to build on.
Cottle mentions Jason Crow, a young congressman from central casting she's taken with, and highlights his observation that you can't be a defender of the government we have while arguing it needs a major reorientation.
Cottle slides back into a soft-soaped derision of ordinary people seeing the firing of white-collar Federal 'bureaucrats' as a payback: 'It’s my sense that there’s a lot of schadenfreude in certain parts of the nation about it finally being Washington workers’ turn to feel the sting of the economic downturn. And that’s just not really what the federal government is all about.'
She's wagging her finger at those who a/ believe the institutions have abandoned them, b/ and are now getting their comeuppance, and saying c/ those folks out in the hustings just don't understand how government works: she's implicitly supporting status-quoism.
Rhodes talks like a strategist, not an activist, when he speaks in the abstract about single issue 'movements', like veterans and their families protesting VA actions. If he was an on-the-ground activist, he would be talking about the reasons for one or more of these movements, not intellectualizing.
Rhodes makes a good argument, on the other hand, for what I call 'fluidarity' (as opposed to solidarity): ' If you’re trying to build momentum in places like that, you don’t need to make sure that everybody who shows up at your rally or your protest or your town hall — you don’t need to quiz them on the way in.'
Fluidarity means that Democrats don't have to agree on everything at all times. They just need to agree on who the enemy is.
Rhodes points to AOC as an exemplar of someone 'who has what it takes', which includes charisma, authenticity, and the life experience to connect with the Democrats and independents that got away. Other mentioned include Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna. Too many institutional Democrats 'don’t know how to talk to normal people and not sound like they’re running some kind of freshman seminar at some pointy-headed college.'
They lambaste the 2024 campaign's use of non-messages like 'How many times do we hear them talk about “building a middle class from the bottom up and the middle out?” What the hell does that mean? You know?'
But Cottle goes ahead and offers up another amorphous, hard-to-pin-down empty slogan: 'I don’t want them looking backward. They need to be looking forward.'
Rhodes vacillates: 'We are on a sinking ship here, people. So what needs to happen is, the party, through its resources, through whatever platform it has, just needs to be elevating the next generation of people and having them come forward. So I think we have to be open to anything and then everybody in this kind of emergency that we’re in.'
Is it a fucking emergency or not, goddamn it?
Rhodes can't seem to get into the heads of the people the Dems need to draw back in: 'And what voters know is that if Trump will fight his own party, he’ll fight anybody. When Democrats look afraid to even fight, tell Joe Biden he’s too old or tell Chuck Schumer he shouldn’t capitulate, it just makes it seem like: *These guys are weak. They can’t even stand up to each other. How are they going to stand up for me?*'
I don't think people pose that rhetorical question. They wouldn't articulate it that way. I think they are [[+disaffected|disaffected]], distrust the establishment elites, and reject those who are clearly in that caste. It's not that the Democrats are weak, per se, but because they are bound to the brokenness that underlies and screws up everything. Even his dissection of what ordinary people think about just misses the foundational worldview of those who have rejected the Dems.
Rhodes admits that what he, a strategist, is pushing is not a strategy: 'It’s actually not a strategy. Well, it is a strategy in the sense of it’s saying stop doing what you’re currently doing in Washington and just go out and essentially collectively protest.'
Less of a strategy than a tactic: a call to on-the-ground, across-the-country activism.
I'm certain that will be a necessary pre-condition, at any rate.
But we still will require new leaders who can distance themselves from the antiquated ways of the National Democratic Party and the blatant stupidities and lies of the Biden and Hillary Clinton years. Remember how surprised we were when she lost after the DNC screwed over Bernie Sanders?