Sixty Percent Want a Third Party in the United States

FiveThirtyEight, a bastion of faux-hipster centrism led by Nate Silver, this morning publishes a round-table chat on third parties, "Does America Want A Third Party? (Or Is It Just David Brooks?)"

It is superficial and not worth the time. The writers and editors mostly take aim at New York Times columnist David Brooks, and they are largely on the mark:

micah: The column: “The End of the Two-Party System.” Can someone give us a fair summary of Brooks’ argument?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The summary is that we need the Reasonable Center Party, which happens to have exactly the same policy positions that Brooks has and would be enormously successful if only anyone bothered to create it.

The FiveThirtyEight crew has a hard time grappling with this -- "About six in 10 Americans think third major U.S. party is needed." They spend the most of their time talking in circles. They do briefly mention the structural barriers to third parties in the United States; they mention electoral reforms liked ranked choice voting before dismissing the possibilities for such change; they mention the flexible nature of the two-party system and its ability to accommodate populist surges; and they briefly mention the success of Emmanuel Macron in France.

Overall I think they dismiss Brooks' third party too lazily. I think a billionaire like Bloomberg fronting someone telegenic like Macron could run a successful third-party presidential campaign in the United States.

It won't happen as long as the Democratic National Committee stays in neoliberal hands, and, according to Kim Moody's On New Terrain, there is zero chance of it not remaining in neoliberal hands (which means no Bernie in 2020).

My guess is that it will be Cuomo in 2020, someone whom I think Bloomberg and Brooks are fine with. The question is, What about Indivisible?

We'll find out this year if  #resistance can stay together after repeated betrayals by congressional Democrats. My guess is probably, but only as another well-funded, top-down hollow organization.

Give Trump credit, his white supremacist GOP has the most active support of any mass political organization in the U.S.

"No" is Enough for the Democratic Party

Tory doyen Theresa May has been pronounced dead. Jeremy Corbyn's rejuvenated Labour Party will likely lead the United Kingdom in the not too distant future. Whether a real social democrat can turn the battleship around, at least when it comes to its militaristic foreign policy, is subject to debate.

At least the UK has arrived at a point where the neoliberals have been routed from a mainstream stronghold, the Labour Party. That's not the case in the United States. The neoliberals remain deeply entrenched and in control of the Democratic Party.

Yesterday prominently featured throughout the day in NYT's online edition was Kenneth Vogel's story, "The ‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics." Vogel describes less a sea change and more an exercise in hedging by wealthy Democratic donors as they distribute money to big post-Trumpocalypse groups like Indivisible:

Perhaps no group epitomizes the differences between the legacy left and the grass-roots resistance like Indivisible. Started as a Google document detailing techniques for opposing the Republican agenda under Mr. Trump, the group now has a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country. The national Indivisible hub, which consists of a pair of nonprofit groups, has raised nearly $6 million since its start, primarily through small-dollar donations made through its website.

Yet Indivisible has also received funding from the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, as well as foundations or coalitions tied to Democracy Alliance donors, including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.

And an advocacy group funded by the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros, a founding member of the Democracy Alliance and one of the most influential donors on the left, is considering a donation in the low six figures to Indivisible. Mr. Soros has already donated to a host of nonprofit groups playing key roles in the anti-Trump movement, including the Center for Community Change, Color of Change and Local Progress.

Indivisible would “gladly” accept a check from Mr. Soros or his foundation, said an official with the group, Sarah Dohl. But, she added, the group is committed to ensuring that money from major donors does not become a majority of the group’s revenue “because we want to maintain our independence both from the funders and from the party.”

I'm sure Soros et al. want to fund Indivisible to get at its list of activists. There was a political awakening after the Trumpocalypse that didn't always reach establishment groups like the Clintonista Center for American Progress (CAP). Also, it is not clear how committed to "No Is Not Enough" that Indivisible is. At the end of the day -- the end of Tuesday, November 3, 2020 -- "No Trump" might be enough.

At the moment it is this calculation -- that a neoliberal Democratic establishment can harness enough of the disenchantment with Trump without having to yield to social democratic demands (Medicare for all, free college tuition) to win in 2020 -- which is preventing the kind of overhaul of the party which Corbyn and Momentum have achieved in the UK.

Tough Times Ahead for Democrats

Yesterday's Water Cooler, by Lambert Strether, was particularly good on the DNC election:

“During the 2016 DNC primary, Perez encouraged the Clinton campaign to paint Sanders as a ‘candidate of whites’ in a pathetic attempt to turn off minority voters. That should give people an idea of where the Democratic Party is headed” [American Greatness]. “As I used to tell my fellow Republicans who opposed the Tea Party movement, “you’ve gotta dance with the one who brung ya!” And if you don’t, you won’t go anywhere electorally. After the 2012 presidential election, with the exception of a handful of party elites, the GOP grasped this concept. … A similar battle has been raged between the grassroots segment of the Democratic base and the party’s elite. Except in this case, the elites have bested the base yet again. By denying the groundswell from the 13 million disaffected Leftists who both voted for Bernie Sanders and wanted Keith Ellison to lead the party, the Democrats have solidified their place as a permanent minority party. In all likelihood, the real threat to President Trump’s agenda over the next four years will come from congressional Republicans, not the Democratic Party ‘resistance.'”

"Resistance Recess" did its job to the extent that it generated media. But it is unclear to me if this outpouring of activism isn't what Republicans tag it as, "AstroTurf." Republicans should know because the Democrats are merely copying what they did after the 2008 Obama landslide.

There is this interesting conclusion to Matt Flegenheimer and Thomas Kaplan article, "With Voters Riled Up, Both Parties Aim to Channel the Fury," in yesterday's national edition of The New York Times:

Many attendees at meetings during the recess seemed to be taking their cues from a group called Indivisible, which was created by former congressional staff members after the election to “resist the Trump agenda.” With thousands of local offshoots reported, the effort has emerged as perhaps the most potent cog in the organized activist resistance to Mr. Trump.

“This level of participation was just not built into our lives,” Janene Smith, 35, of Charleston, S.C., said before an event in her home state featuring Representative Mark Sanford and Senator Tim Scott. “Now it is.”

Across the room, a peer, Martha Beck, recalled the last time she had sought such an active political role. “I haven’t done anything since the Nixon era,” said Ms. Beck, 65, a retired teacher.

And often, constituents seemed eager to dispel the suggestion from some Republican lawmakers that people were being paid to protest at their events.

At a forum held by Representative Tom Reed in western New York, Susan Meara, 63, and her husband, Tom, 65, brought a sign to erase any doubts. “I am not being paid to be here,” it read, “but you are, Mr. Reed.”

Maybe there will be a great bourgeois liberal political awakening, but I doubt it. "Resistance Recess" will be hard to repeat. Chuck Schumer thinks otherwise. The senate minority leader thinks people will stay focused and involved throughout the Trump presidency; but that will be hard to do when the party is split.

Look at the Standing Rock Sioux. Their tribal board was split, and they ended up losing their fight to stop DAPL with barely a whimper, 

Will Trump Last the Year?

I run into people -- in the laundry room of my apartment building, at the side entrance to the building where I work -- and the sense I get is that there is an impression forming among Democrats that Trump will not last the year.

Flynn is out and deep state favorite H.R. McMaster is in. Bannon is now in the cross hairs. And Dems are reprising the Tea Party performance of yesteryear.

But how broad and intense is the movement if a Waterloo comes and goes with barely a whimper? The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline capitulated without a fight.

This was a fight that had to be waged. The enemy was well defined -- oilmen, big money, a culture that perceives Native Americans as not wholly human, climate change. As early as the end of last year there was an enormous outpouring of support for the Standing Rock Sioux, support so robust it prompted the Obama administration to call for a halt to construction.

But in the end, as with Occupy Wall Street, it is hard to maintain a spontaneous, organic mobilization, particularly when you're dealing with the reality of camping out in a North Dakota winter. Also, and no doubt critically, tribal leadership was opposed to a pitched battle. Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has been telling protesters for months to go home.

So the radical progressive left is flaky, scattered and unprepared to fight a long, disciplined fight. It doesn't bode well for 350.org's fight to halt the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Maybe MoveOn, Organizing for Action and Indivisible will have better luck with their various Tea Party simulacra, like Resistance Recess. It is hard to lodge much hope here though. These efforts have the feel of a color revolution. Even if they are successful, all we will end up with is more neoliberal centrists. A lot of energy in the prestige press is being put into making sure Emmanuel Macron makes it to the second round of the French presidential election, and knives are forever being sharpened for Labour's Jeremy Corbyn. It's the old saying, "Money doesn't sleep."

Trump has a fail safe. He tacks to the deep state center, which he is doing now, and he buys himself time. This might create problems with the vanguard of his base, but those are problems Trump can likely manage.