2020 Presidential Election

[C0LLETTE]

I believe that the liberal centre should and must hold. Without it we collapse into a chaotic gaping vacuum and the apocalyptic end that the extremes on both the Left and the Right seem so gleefully and confidently to predict becomes our fate.

The Centre IS Populst. That is where most of us are... in the middle, not wanting to be thrown into the flames of other people's extreme political and religious philosophies...the" Far This " and the " Far That ". The centre is a relative place, not fixed and it does move ( albeit slowly )to reasonable, agreeable positions.

I believe that the "liberal centre" is the well-spring of human and humane sanity.

[Martina]

A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...ft-brad-delong

The rise of the Democratic left, personified by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has raised a serious question: Should Democrats lean away from market-friendly stances and get comfortable with big government again? Should they embrace an ambitious 2020 candidate like Sanders and policies like the Green New Deal, or stick with incrementalists like former Vice President Joe Biden and more market-oriented ideas like Obamacare?

One of the most interesting takes I’ve seen on this debate came from Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley. DeLong, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration, who is one of the market-friendly, “neoliberal” Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is “Rubin Democrat” — referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Yet DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

It’s not often that someone in this policy debate — or, frankly, any policy debate — suggests that their side should lose. So I reached out to DeLong to dig into the reasons for his position: Why does he believe that neoliberals’ time in the sun has come to an end?

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Zack Beauchamp
I want to start with your notion of “Rubin Democrats.” What does that mean, exactly? What was the movement you identify with?

Brad DeLong
I would say it’s largely neoliberal, market-oriented, and market-regulation and tuning aimed at social democratic ends. It also involves taking a step in the direction of appeasing conservative priorities. The belief is that if you have a broad coalition behind such policy, it will be much more strongly entrenched in America and much better implemented than if it were implemented by a narrow, largely partisan majority.

And Rubin Democrats believe that you should prioritize economic growth. Once you have economic growth, electorates want to become a lot less Grinch-y and less likely to feel that redistribution to the poor is coming out of its hide, making them positively worse-off. Economic growth first, redistribution and beefing up the safety net second.

Zack Beauchamp
What you’re describing is a broad theory of political economy, in which a vision for what economic policies are best is intertwined with a particular view of what makes policies popular and sustainable. You say something about this is wrong — do you think it’s the political part, the economic part, or both?

Brad DeLong
We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics.

Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and company say they poll well.

And [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and company say we’ve got to build bridges to the Republicans. We’ve got to let Republicans amend cap and trade up the wazoo, we’ve got to let Republicans amend the [Affordable Care Act] up the wazoo before it comes up to a final vote, we’ve got to tread very lightly with finance on Dodd-Frank, we have to do a very premature pivot away from recession recovery to “entitlement reform.”

All of these with the idea that you would then collect a broad political coalition behind what is, indeed, Mitt Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy.

And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years?

No, they fucking did not. No allegiance to truth on anything other than the belief that John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are the leaders of the Republican Party, and since they’ve decided on scorched earth, we’re to back them to the hilt. So the politics were completely wrong, and we saw this starting back in the Clinton administration.

Today, there’s literally nobody on the right between those frantically accommodating Donald Trump, on the one hand, and us on the other. Except for our brave friends in exile from the Cato Institute now trying to build something in the ruins at the [centrist] Niskanen Center. There’s simply no political place for neoliberals to lead with good policies that make a concession to right-wing concerns.

Zack Beauchamp
Let’s talk a little bit about the intra-Democratic fight. When you say “pass the baton to the left,” does that mean give up on substantive policies where you — meaning Rubin Democrats — disagree with the left?

Brad De Long
No. It means argue with them, to the extent that their policies are going to be wrong and destructive, but also accept that there is no political path to a coalition built from the Rubin-center out. Instead, we accommodate ourselves to those on our left. To the extent that they will not respond to our concerns, what they’re proposing is a helluva better than the poke-in-the-eye with a sharp stick. That’s either Trumpist proposals or the current status.

Zack Beauchamp
So the position is not that neoliberals should abandon their policy beliefs. It’s that you need to reorient your understanding of who your coalition is.

Brad DeLong
Yes, but that’s also relevant to policy beliefs, right?
A belief in cap and trade — rather than the carbon tax plus huge, honking public research — was both a belief that the market really ought to rule here, plus a belief that stakeholders who are producing carbon energy can be bought off with cap-and-trade: that the Koch brothers would rather be selling their carbon allowances than having to actually burn coal to produce things. Plus, a belief there were Republicans who would actually think that global warming is a menace, and be willing to argue strenuously within the Republican coalition that something needs to be done about this.

A bunch of policies that depended on there being a political-economic consensus to support them, as part of a broad agreement about America’s direction, are a lot worse as policies if that political-economic underpinning is not there. There also are a bunch of lessons about how policies that we thought are going to be very effective are rather less effective.

Zack Beauchamp
The response you hear from conservative and Democratic centrists, those Blue Dogs that remain, is that they are the partners that you need to appease, not the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left. The Democratic coalition depends on winning in red states.

Brad DeLong
The first lesson is the Gingrich lesson: If you’re in a swing state, you lose your seat if the president of your party is perceived to be a failure. The highest priority for Blue Dogs in red and purple states — in 1994 and in 2010 — ought to have been making it clear the president of their party was a great success.

If there is a good state of the world in 2021 — the Lord willing and the creek don’t rise — everyone and all Blue Dogs in office needs to recognize that and act on that.

That’s the political level and on the policy level. We tried to do health reform the Republicans’ way ,and what’s now clear with a Republican Supreme Court and with a lot of Republican governors, any attempt to do it the Republicans’ way is going to get shredded. We tried to do climate policy the Republicans’ way, and got nowhere.

Until something non-rubble-ish is built in the Republican center, what might be good incremental policies just cannot be successfully implemented in an America as we know it today. We need Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of UBI rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies.

That’s the best policy given the political-economic context. If the political-economic context were different — well, I’m fundamentally a neoliberal shill. It is very nice to use market means to social democratic ends when they are more effective, and they often are.

If you can properly tweak market prices, you then don’t just have one smart guy trying to design a policy that advances an objective — you have 30 million people all over the country, all incentivized to design a policy. That’s a wonderful thing to have.

Zack Beauchamp
But despite that substantive view, you think that instead of freaking out about the leftists at the gates, it’s smarter to side with them — to treat them as political coalition partners.

Brad De Long
Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side.


That’s especially opposed to the people on the other side, who are very, very strange indeed. You listen to [Never Trump conservatives] like Tom Nichols or Bruce Bartlett or Bill Kristol or David Frum talk about all the people they had been with in meetings, biting their tongues over the past 25 years, and your reaction can only be, “Why didn’t you run away screaming into the night long ago?”

Zack Beauchamp
I don’t know if what you’re describing is a long-running reconfiguration of American politics, an emergency alliance with the left to stop an out-of-control right, or both. How would you describe the conditions that have pushed you toward a more-left oriented position than you had before?

Brad DeLong
I’d say we learned more about the world.

I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole.

It’s much harder to believe in those things now. That’s one part of it. The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years.

The other part is that while I would like to be part of a political coalition in the cat seat, able to call for bids from the left and the right about who wants to be part of the governing coalition to actually get things done, that’s simply not possible as of now.

We shouldn’t pretend that it is, or that it’s going to be. We need to find ways to improve left-wing initiatives, rather than demand that they start from our basic position and do minor tweaks to make them more acceptable to their underlying position.

[Martina]

From a Washington Post editorial commenting on the above interview:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.60fd189140fd

There’s a lot of chatter about an interview that center-left Democratic economist Brad DeLong just gave to Vox, in which DeLong argues that it’s time for centrists like him to make peace with the left. The core insight that DeLong offers is that the animating idea driving many centrist Democrats for years has proved to be a failure, and as a result, it’s time for them to rethink their approach to both politics and policy in accordance with this new reality.

As DeLong puts it, on one issue after another — from health care to climate change — centrist-minded Democrats have modulated the party’s priorities in hopes of striking a political deal with the center-right. But that deal has never been forthcoming, because there is no functional center-right in U.S. politics.

DeLong notes that centrist Democrats like himself have been driven by a genuine belief in the superiority of market-oriented or (as they’re sometimes called) “neoliberal” policies, but also a theory of political change. That theory held that striking broad bipartisan deals on policy might be worth doing, even if the result is somewhat less progressive, because it would result in them being “more strongly entrenched in America and much better implemented than if it were implemented by a narrow, largely partisan majority.”

But as DeLong points out, this hasn’t paid off . . . .

The reward for adopting Mitt Romney’s health-care plan in hopes of getting bipartisan support for it was unremitting scorched-earth opposition to Obamacare, including a failed effort to repeal it entirely, which Republicans undertook while pretending they were maintaining people’s protections.

The reward for Obama and Democrats reaching deals to cut spending and treading lightly in response to the worst economic crisis in 70 years, and keeping full-blown economic populism at bay, was President Trump’s massive deficit-exploding corporate tax cut that showered enormous benefits on top earners, which Republicans passed while pretending their plan was pro-worker.

The reward for Obama and Democrats embracing market-oriented “cap and trade” climate policy was that Republicans blocked it with a wall of intransigence and fossil-fuel-industry-funded climate change denialism. Now Republicans are all-in with Trump’s even more explicit climate denialism and a full-scale effort to roll back everything Obama did to combat global warming, including Trump pulling us out of a painstakingly negotiated international deal in a manner that is enraging our allies.

I would add one more to this list: immigration. As I’ve noted, on immigration, the Democratic Party for many years embraced the idea that supporting maximal enforcement would lure Republicans into supporting legalizing undocumented immigrants. But GOP intransigence has revealed this as a fantasy. After Democrats passed comprehensive immigration reform embodying that bargain through the Senate in 2013 by a broad bipartisan majority, the GOP-controlled House simply refused to vote on it. Now Republicans have gone all-in with an even more virulent form of xenophobic anti-immigrant nationalism, as well as with imaginary solutions like mass deportations and Trump’s wall.

So now we’re seeing an increasingly emboldened left making the case for much more progressive taxation and much more aggressive efforts to rewrite the rules of the market, for dramatically ambitious health care and climate policies in the form of various iterations of Medicare for all and the Green New Deal, and for a move away from an enforcement-for-legalization paradigm on immigration, and toward a much more pro-immigration stance as a matter of basic values. And the party as a whole is much more open to these aggressive postures.

It’s important to stress that the party has been pushed toward these positions by grass-roots movements and by the changing nature of the Democratic base, which is more diverse, younger and better educated than it was the last time Democrats held a House majority. But another thing driving these changes is that in many of these areas — from soaring economic inequality to climate change to the need for reforms to our immigration system that don’t retreat on our humanitarian commitments — there’s an increased recognition that the Republican Party is basically going to sit out the process of addressing these major challenges of our time, as most Democrats understand them.

This, combined with the fact that some of these challenges are simultaneously growing more urgent, is pushing Democrats toward more ambitious solutions and away from a futile, accommodationist effort to chase the mirage of consensus with the center-right.

[cathexis]

So, simply put, the current political clime is fulfilling the prophesy prevalent in the 1980s, a time of recession and great fear as we had hostages held in Iran. Analysis of the minor political partys' results of 1980 is quite intriguing. Thus was my grad thesis in Marxist Studies/Political Philosophy.

On the Far Left were CP-USA, various Trotskyist parties, moving toward the top of a large circle was the Green Party moving to Dems with Jimmy Carter and across to Reps with Ronald Reagan. As the circle moves right and down one finds Lyndon LaRouche then David Duke. As the circle nears the very bottom, the Libertarian Party meets the right wing Anarchists-followed by the left Anarchists. This is where the circle meets.

The Right Wing was overwhelmingly extremist with KKK and conspiracy theorists like Lyndon LaRouche followed by the American Nazi Party with Right wing Anarchists backed up to the Left Anarchists with political positions almost imperceptibly different. Then up the curve were the Trotskyists and Stalinist Communist Parties.

The parties formed a political circle that comes together rather than the traditional line view of the political spectrum.

Coming election, it will be interesting and informative to look at the percentages these small "Alt-Right" and Libertarian. We could get a glimpse of what might be in store.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by cathexis

So, simply put, the current political clime is fulfilling the prophesy prevalent in the 1980s, a time of recession and great fear as we had hostages held in Iran. Analysis of the minor political partys' results of 1980 is quite intriguing. Thus was my grad thesis in Marxist Studies/Political Philosophy.

On the Far Left were CP-USA, various Trotskyist parties, moving toward the top of a large circle was the Green Party moving to Dems with Jimmy Carter and across to Reps with Ronald Reagan. As the circle moves right and down one finds Lyndon LaRouche then David Duke. As the circle nears the very bottom, the Libertarian Party meets the right wing Anarchists-followed by the left Anarchists. This is where the circle meets.

The Right Wing was overwhelmingly extremist with KKK and conspiracy theorists like Lyndon LaRouche followed by the American Nazi Party with Right wing Anarchists backed up to the Left Anarchists with political positions almost imperceptibly different. Then up the curve were the Trotskyists and Stalinist Communist Parties.

The parties formed a political circle that comes together rather than the traditional line view of the political spectrum.

Coming election, it will be interesting and informative to look at the percentages these small "Alt-Right" and Libertarian. We could get a glimpse of what might be in store.

You're talking about Horseshoe Theory and there are very few two-word phrases that will get leftists online as riled up as that one.

I just feel like capitalism is totally fine when it comes to discretionary consumption items, but it never should have been applied to staple items, justice, health, education, warfighting, or politics.

And it seems willfully obtuse to insist capitalism has to be all or nothing. To insist that if we take profit out of life-or-death matters then the next thing you know we'll all have matching government haircuts and uniform scrubs, is disingenuous to the extreme, but we fall all over ourselves trying to disprove it..

The "mistake" of the mainstream dems (mistake in quotes because it is applied with the benefit of the doubt) was in believing that conservatives actually wanted the outcomes they claimed to want. Dems believed conservatives would work with them if they could get to a result that lay somewhere within the scope of what they could find tolerable.

This was never going to be the case, as conservatives don't actually want any of the things they talk about. They just want wealth and power. So dems compromised themselves making a good faith argument to a bad faith premise.

As i said, "mistake" gives the benefit of the doubt. Wealthy people are wealthy people first and foremost. To me it seems like the past 30 years have been "capitalism with patriarchy and white supremacy" vs "capitalism with ladies."

"Capitalism with ladies" is the lesser of two evils, by far (freedom from forced birth is still a pretty good deal), but neither party wants equality.

[cathexis]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

You're talking about Horseshoe Theory and there are very few two-word phrases that will get leftists online as riled up as that one.

I just feel like capitalism is totally fine when it comes to discretionary consumption items, but it never should have been applied to staple items, justice, health, education, warfighting, or politics.

And it seems willfully obtuse to insist capitalism has to be all or nothing. To insist that if we take profit out of life-or-death matters then the next thing you know we'll all have matching government haircuts and uniform scrubs, is disingenuous to the extreme, but we fall all over ourselves trying to disprove it..

The "mistake" of the mainstream dems (mistake in quotes because it is applied with the benefit of the doubt) was in believing that conservatives actually wanted the outcomes they claimed to want. Dems believed conservatives would work with them if they could get to a result that lay somewhere within the scope of what they could find tolerable.

This was never going to be the case, as conservatives don't actually want any of the things they talk about. They just want wealth and power. So dems compromised themselves making a good faith argument to a bad faith premise.

As i said, "mistake" gives the benefit of the doubt. Wealthy people are wealthy people first and foremost. To me it seems like the past 30 years have been "capitalism with patriarchy and white supremacy" vs "capitalism with ladies."

"Capitalism with ladies" is the lesser of two evils, by far (freedom from forced birth is still a pretty good deal), but neither party wants equality.

Actually, my assertion was that the Horseshoe Model failed to accept that the Right Anarchist and Left Anarchist extremists had very little ideological difference. I maintain that it is a full circle.

Looking at the public response to those tiny factions is one of many variables that can give one an idea of the current and possibly predict the political heading. I am referring to very small changes occurring in those extremist parties. Sometimes, it can be difficult to find the data needed for this analysis.

A possibility that I see happening would be that the Right wing momentum continue leading us fully into Fascism. The Constitutional checks and balances have not, thus far, kept this regime in check. However, The House needs a chance to do it's work. The Founding Fathers could not have anticipated a regime like Trump's getting into office. So far, the Checks and Balances have not held him back. He removed transgender persons from serving by Tweet. The environment is at risk by Executive Orders. Now they have Roe v Wade in the crosshairs. Not to mention all else he's done.

If we are to escape the path we are following, we need a strong no-nonsense, statesman/stateswoman; however, thus far there's no one who fits my definition of a candidate for President who can reverse our course abruptly. I believe this individual needs to have a great deal of experience in terms of government (or executive) leadership, and be someone other countries can relate to.

[nhplowboi]

I feel like such a hypocrite because I was all for Beto in the Senate but I have to say ….um no as my president.