Bernie Sanders has been spending some time lately arguing that he is the rare Democrat who can appeal to Donald Trump’s white working class following. It’s a fine idea. But his approach to them brings back some bad memories of past campaigns, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

Remember “Bittergate,” one of the big but ultimately not decisive moments of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process? It’s pretty clear Bernie Sanders doesn’t, because he’s repeating Barack Obama’s much-repented mistake of condescendingly speaking of white working-class voters’ concerns on noneconomic issues as representing displaced anxiety about lost jobs and low wages.
On Face the Nation yesterday, Sanders had this to say about Donald Trump’s appeal to downscale white voters:

“Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity,” Sanders said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears which are legitimate and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims, and in my view that is not the way we’re going to address the major problems facing our country,” he said.

Compare that to Obama’s famous remark about the same kind of voters in 2008:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Other than the fact that Obama’s comments were made in a private Bay Area fund-raiser and subsequently leaked, while Sanders made his on national television, they differ mainly in that the former slighted the hot-button subjects of religion and guns while the latter limited his condescension to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim appeals. But in both cases you get a strong whiff of the ancient lefty habit of claiming the noneconomic concerns of economically stressed people represent a “false consciousness” actively promoted by the economic ruling class.
What should Sanders (and other progressives) be saying to less offensively make their case for working-class economic populism? For one thing, it would be helpful not to conflate quasi-economic issues with totally noneconomic issues, as Sanders does with immigration and terrorism. You can tell people that corporate power rather than “illegal immigration” is the reason wages have been stagnating without insulting them. Telling them they should be worried more about money than (in their view) their families’ and their country’s security against terrorism is another matter altogether, especially when in both cases you are more than slightly hinting they are bigots for listening to Donald Trump. Having a progressive answer to fears about terrorism — even if it’s to say such fears are exaggerated — is invariably better than changing the subject or implying that if you care about terrorism you are a conservative.
Barack Obama apologized immediately and often for “Bittergate,” and did not again make the mistake of appearing to tell downscale voters their professed concerns and beliefs show what dopes they are. But Democrats seem to need a reminder now and then, just as Republicans seem to need a reminder that their contempt for the poor and minorities is as easy to spot as Mitt Romney at a civil-rights rally.

Political analyses of the future prospects of the two major parties vary according to a lot of variables. But to over-simplify, some observers stress long-range trends while others focus on short-term events that could significantly bend future trends. A good example of the former has just been published by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, and I discussed my misgivings about it at New York today:

Excessive faith in the inevitability of progress is one of the hazards of being a “progressive”…. Peter Beinart has written an election-year table-setter that political people left of center will be forwarding to one another to ward off fears of a Ted Cruz presidency or worse. Its title is “Why America Is Moving Left.” I wish I were sure he is right.
Beinart’s jumping-0ff point is his belief that though conditions might seem right for an old-fashioned law-and-order backlash to phenomena like #blacklivesmatter, liberalizing forces in both parties will prevent that from happening. Again, I’d feel better about that prediction if it rang true a few years from now.
One big factor preventing a shift to the right, says Beinart, is that the “centrist” forces in the Democratic Party, which in the ’80s and ’90s pushed for accommodation of conservative ideology, are largely gone. He speaks as the former editor of one such institution, The New Republic. I feel qualified to respond not only as a fairly substantial contributor to TNR for a while, but also as a former staffer at two other “centrist” institutions he mentions, the Democratic Leadership Council and the Washington Monthly. In Beinart’s view, the center-left discredited itself by enabling George W. Bush’s domestic and international agenda. While his account is oversimplified — the DLC, for example, attacked the Bush tax cuts pretty aggressively, though some of its congressional allies voted for them anyway — I’d say there’s some truth to it. But it’s also true that Democrats absorbed enough “centrist” common sense in the 1990s to make it possible to exploit the implosion of conservatism under Bush. And some of the ideas Beinart writes about as “centrist,” such as the neoliberal advocacy of means-testing big social programs (associated with WaMo), were not accommodations of conservatism but rather efforts to make more funds and political energy available for the truly needy. Unlike the kind of split-the-differences “centrism” that really has expired, there could be a future for means-testing, as suggested by Hillary Clinton’s habit of looking in that direction for new social initiatives like pre-K and paid family leave….
All quibbling aside, Beinart is obviously right that the Democratic Party is more consistently liberal than it has ever been. But the idea that it’s all part of a leftward trend that is invincible even within the Republican Party is much more problematic.
Yes, ultimately, the more progressive views of millennials mean that a GOP that has been trending pretty steadily rightward for four decades will have to adjust to reality, at least on cultural issues. And yes, the fact that many of the conservative movement’s most fervent causes — such as fighting universal health coverage or same-sex marriage or any sort of gun regulation — are not exactly sweeping the country means they will not have a cakewalk in presidential contests where the electorate is not skewed in their favor.
But that’s an influence, not a trend. Beinart believes any GOP general election candidate this next year will smell the coffee and appeal to millennials and minority voters by repudiating the hard-core conservatism that’s characterized the nominating process for so long. You sure would not guess that from the electability theories of candidates and analysts alike, who believe a supercharged turnout by the same old conservative coalition could prevail if reinforced by natural fatigue with a two-term president, a sluggish economy, and terrorist fears. Beinart also believes a Republican president would turn the page to the left. Yet the most profound reality the country faces is that a GOP president with a GOP Congress could, via the budget reconciliation process, repeal almost all of Obama’s accomplishments. The nascent and in many respects faint progressive impulses of the Reformicons are to a considerable extent just too little and too early.
Yes, in the long run there are forces that will build a wind to the back of progressives. But today’s conservative-movement-dominated GOP is too radical and too close to total power for anyone to take that to the bank. Some very reactionary days could be just ahead.

It really is going to depend on what happens next year.

After months of watching Donald Trump seize and maintain almost constant media coverage via out-there rhetoric and policy proposals, we have to wonder what’s next. I thought about that and reached a startling conclusion at New York yesterday:

Trump’s first big leap into the badlands of previously unmentionable policies was to embrace a “deport ’em all” posture on undocumented immigrants that others had hinted at and argued toward but never quite came out and articulated. More recently, he’s placed himself beyond the outer bounds of acceptable discourse on national security by suggesting the families of terrorists should be targeted and killed, and then by calling for a temporary ban on entry into the United States by Muslims (other than those employed, of course, by the Trump organization). With every such step, Trump seems to have found hitherto unplumbed depths of extremism among Republican primary voters, even as he shocked progressives, Establishment Republicans, and the mainstream media into giving him attention, often in the increasingly irrational hope that he has finally gone too far.
But where can he go next? I have an idea of where that might be, and it’s frighteningly consistent with what he (and his doppelgänger Ted Cruz) has said about national-security challenges generally, and the fight against ISIS specifically. It’s “Kaboom! Nuke ’em ’til they glow!”
Trump has shrewdly occupied that niche in conservative foreign-policy thinking populated by people who simultaneously oppose what George Washington called “entangling alliances” and the “no-win wars” America has engaged in since World War II — but who favor retaliatory military action against the country’s enemies so long as it is swift, certain, and as lethal as possible. Often called “isolationists” by their enemies because they mistrust diplomacy and drawn-out military engagements, they are naturally drawn to air power as the way to project force with a minimal risk of U.S. casualties or of the kind of quagmires that Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq turned out to be. And when pressed, these nationalists with an intense antipathy for “limited war” are prone to flirt with the idea of waging nuclear war. It’s the tradition that led many “isolationist” Republicans who backed Robert Taft’s opposition to NATO to support Douglas MacArthur’s proposal to use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean War. (In turn, MacArthur endorsed Taft’s 1952 presidential campaign against the conventional anti-Communist Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
It’s also the tradition that motivated Barry Goldwater’s criticism of LBJ’s “no-win war” in Vietnam in 1964, even as he supported letting field commanders launch tactical nuclear weapons. Nukes are the best and ultimate friend of American exceptionalists who hold the lives of foreigners in low regard and cherish the idea of the United States as a peace-loving country that will tolerate no restraints on its righteous use of arms once it is provoked into action. And even more obviously, the threat to go nuclear is the toughest posture a potential strongman president could possibly take.
Does that sound like Trump and his supporters? It sure does to me. The willingness to use nukes to make it clear messing with America is suicidal is entirely consistent with what some have called the “Jacksonian” tradition in American foreign policy, which has long exerted an emotional pull among the conservative white working-class Americans who arguably form Trump’s base. When he talks about destroying ISIS without getting into the kind of “mess” he says we created in past Middle Eastern interventions, and without respect for civilian lives, it’s a short if audacious jump to the tip of a warhead as the tip of the American spear.

Ted Cruz, who’s already talked about finding out “if sand can glow in the dark,” would probably follow Trump in this direction if he takes it. And if either does, another healthy inhibition in American politics would have fallen by the wayside.

It’s become a cliche that this election cycle is breaking all sorts of precedents. But it’s true, and one could become a biggie if it persists: the disastrous failure of Team Jeb Bush’s lavish paid media strategy. I wrote about it at New York earlier this week:

Unless his campaign really starts to cook, Team Bush is on a trajectory to become one of those historic profiles in futility that influence future behavior. And it could push the already crusty and embattled theory that you win elections by dominating TV airwaves with paid advertising right off the cliff.
The latest report from NBC’s Mark Murray (based on data from the network’s ad-monitoring partner SMG Delta) on ad spending by presidential candidates not only reinforces the general story of a disconnect between money out the door and invisible-primary poll standings; it specifically draws attention to the ongoing disaster of Bush super-pac Right to Rise’s massive pro-Jeb advertising campaign in the early states. Up until now, Bush’s allies have outspent the entire remainder of the field in paid media, with $35 million already gone. Nearly half of that is in New Hampshire, where Bush is currently in sixth place according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with about one-fourth the level of support of front-runner Donald Trump, who has spent almost nothing on ads. But the worst could be yet to come: According to Murray, Right to Rise also has another $28 million in ads in the pipeline. Unless Team Bush has already executed some big strategic pivot without anyone knowing about it, you have to figure they are for the moment almost literally doubling down on positive ads touting Bush’s fine conservative record in Florida, at a time when GOP voters have decided they really don’t like governors.
Right to Rise’s Mike Murphy, whose reputation is on track to become one of campaign ’16’s most lurid casualties, has publicly floated the idea of using the rest of his war chest to “carpet-bomb” everyone in the field other than Donald Trump, creating a Bush-Trump battle to the finish in the smoking crater of the contest. It’s not clear whether that was a dark omen of things to come, or a head-fake, or an indication that it’s time for donors to pry Murphy’s fingers off the keys to the vault lest Jeb Bush go down in history as the man who selfishly wrecked his party’s prospects in a critical presidential year. He’s already in danger of joining Phil Gramm and Lloyd Bentsen and John Connally in the pantheon of big-spending presidential candidates voters just didn’t like.

Bush really needed the modest praise he got after Tuesday night’s debate. With that and a few million dollars, you can buy an early state ad campaign.

Looking back at the last year, it really hit me that the fabled Republican Establishment has taken a very good hand and played itself into a big hole. I summed it all up at New York:

The Republican Party emerged from the 2014 midterm elections in fine fettle. Analysts competed to describe exactly how long it had been since the GOP had the kind of power it would exert in Congress and in the several states — pretty much everywhere other than the White House. And the White House itself, with Barack Obama about to leave office with poor job-approval ratings, a meh economy, and overseas crises growing like Topsy, seemed an overripe fruit ready to fall.
Best of all, the party elders appeared to have finally gained the upper hand in their battle with angry tea-party conservatives.They largely avoided the rash of primary defeats to unelectable wingnuts that cost them the Senate in 2010 and 2012, and even got candidates to attend special training sessions where they learned not to stumble into stupid comments about things like “legitimate rape.” The RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential loss that stressed the demographic importance of not offending Latinos, women, and young people had become the conventional wisdom. And in sharp contrast to 2012, it appeared the party would have a large and deep 2016 presidential field, led by candidates with impressive federal and state experience like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and John Kasich.
Fast-forward to the waning days of 2015 and of the invisible primary before the presidential nominating process gets very real and very fast. Far from debating the best vehicle for minority outreach, the GOP presidential field is being driven into a nativist, Islamophobic frenzy by a candidate nobody thought would even run. Establishment favorite Jeb Bush appears to be trying to decide whether to crawl off to (politically) die or instead use his super-pac to damage every other candidate not named Donald Trump in order to lift himself above a desolate landscape. The most viable alternative to Trump at present may be a harshly right-wing freshman senator despised by his colleagues who is stopping just short of embracing the entire Trump agenda.
It’s all gotten so bad that Republican pooh-bahs (including RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) convened a “secret” dinner to plot a strategy to block Trump at the convention if his success continues into the voting phase of the nomination contest. This development was instantly leaked to the Washington Post, presumably by someone believing it would send a “help’s on the way!” message to Republicans worried about a party veering out of control. Instead, it produced this reaction (as reported by Talking Points Memo):

If Republican party bosses continue meeting to discuss how to derail Donald Trump at the convention, Trump won’t be the only one to turn his back on the GOP. Now, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson says he’ll leave too.
“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning.
“If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replaces it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party.
“I pray that the report in the Post this morning was incorrect. If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it.
“This process is the one played out by our party. If the powerful try to manipulate it, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next summer may be the last convention.”

So what was intended as a quiet session to explore ways to block Trump without giving him an excuse to run as an independent is already spurring anti-Establishment revolt that will feed the paranoia of “angry outsiders” while generating an open invitation to an indie Trump run from another candidate.

Can it get worse for these people? I cannot wait to find out.