As we prepare to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday, it’s time for progressives to prepare ourselves for a fresh effort by conservatives to purloin his legacy and rewrite the history of the civil rights movement. Just yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul, a serial offender, tried to compare defenders of the filibuster–the filibuster!–and other restraints on popular democracy to advocates for the civil rights of racial minorities. I addressed this effort at WaMo today:

Last April [Paul] gave a speech at Howard University that pursued the ridiculous theory that the New Deal was essentially a complement to Jim Crow in its “enslavement” of African-Americans to the terrible indignity of material living assistance. And now we have this, via WaPo’s Aaron Blake:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview Thursday, likened President Obama’s governing philosophy to the kind of “majority rule” that led to Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.
Speaking on Fox News, Paul reacted to Obama’s repeated assertions that Republicans should win elections if they want to control the agenda in Washington. Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” Paul said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”
Paul added: “There’s a real danger to that viewpoint, but it’s consistent with the progressive viewpoint. … Progressives believe in majority rule, not constitutional rule.”

Don’t be confused with the conflation of the Japanese interment outrage–a temporary product of wartime hysteria which no one at the time regarded as “progressive”–with Jim Crow. The original Constitution which Paul and his followers worship certainly didn’t concern itself with the rights of racial minorities. It took the most egregious exercise of “majority rule” in U.S. history–the Civil War–to abolish slavery. Only a majority given extraordinary power by the self-exclusion of southerners was in a position to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the most important efforts taken until 1964 to vindicate the rights of racial minorities. It was a failure of will by the majority that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow regime. And it was the power of the minority in the Senate (and by the 1930s or so, the minority in the Democratic Party) to thwart majority rule via the filibuster that kept Jim Crow in place for so very long.
And BTW, it’s conservatives, far more than progressives, who perpetually chafe at judicial enforcement of individual rights, unless it happens to coincide with their own policy goals. But in any event, Paul and others like him really need to stop trying to invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to attack “majority rule” on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism” aimed at creating a oligarchical or even theocratic dictatorship of absolute private property rights and puny government. The “minorities” they want to protect are snowy white and very privileged.

It’s very important, morally and politically, to fight back against the kind of egregious revisionism and phony parallels offered by those who are the ideological (and in some cases, literal) descendants of the people who fought against King and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the least we can do to honor the sacrifices made by so many to create the kind of society the “constitutional conservatives” are determined to bury.

With the MSM (and for that matter, political junkies everywhere) loving electoral horse races as they do, there’s enormous artificial pressure for creating a competitive 2016 Democratic presidential contest. That possibility is largely up to Hillary Clinton, who could create one instantly by deciding not to run. Otherwise, there will be talk about Elizabeth Warren and Martin O’Malley and maybe a few others taking the plunge, until each takes his or her name out of contention.
But for now, what we’ve got is former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a one-time netroots darling who is making all the noises you’d associate with a serious potential candidate, including trips to Iowa. And he doesn’t seem intimidated by HRC.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin, though, Schweitzer has unveiled a peculiar strategy: strong opposition to Barack Obama, almost across the board. Here’s part of what I had to say about that major mistake at WaMo today:

Unless this was some sort of screwed-up revival of Teddy Kennedy’s famously disastrous Roger Mudd interview in 1980, Schweitzer’s sure taking an unorthodox route to a Democratic presidential candidacy. Yes, his complaints about Obama’s record are shared by quite a few progressive folk. But generally trashing Obama–or for that matter, trashing HRC–is not the way to build a base for a presidential campaign. According to the latest Gallup numbers, Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified liberal Democrats stands at 84%. That is rather high. Among African-Americans, who play a huge role in many Democratic presidential primaries, it’s at 86% (it’s only 58% among Hispanics, but that includes a decent number of Republicans).
As I’ve observed on more than one occasion, left-bent Democratic presidential nominating candidacies have failed again and again because of poor support from minority voters. There’s virtually nothing about Brian Schweitzer that gives him a natural connection to these voters (unless you count his reported proficiency in Arabic as appealing to Muslims). Making common cause with Republicans in Obama-bashing isn’t going to help.

I also noted that some of Schweitzer’s former fans in the netroots–most notably Markos Moulitsas–are annoyed that he took a pass on running for a critical Senate seat in Montana before seeing the next president of the United States in the mirror. All in all, if he does want to occupy the Oval Office, he’s not off to a great start.
BTW: lest you think this is all just premature crazy-talk given the calendar, keep in mind that we’re just two years away from the likely date of the 2016 Iowa Caucuses. Past candidates have in some cases taken up virtual residence there by this juncture.

With all the vast literature on partisan polarization out there, it’s important to draw attention to those who understand the phenomenon in depth (not a large group), and recognize that something more powerful and ominous is going on. I wrote about one example at WaMo today:

At WaPo’s Monkey Cage subsite today, there’s an important piece by University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault that gets to a distinction in political attitudes that some of us have been trying to articulate ever since the radicalization of one of our two major parties occurred:

I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….
Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.

That’s probably why Cornyn has attracted a right-wing primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman.
The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo in 2012. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

That clearly has not changed since 2012.

As we soberly look ahead at 2014, it’s important to remember state elections in addition to competitive congressional races. Alas, the landscape for Democrats is not as good as one might imagine given the radicalism and misgovernment exhibited by the state-level Republicans who benefited from the landslide of 2010. I summed up the lay of the land in a column for TPMCafe today, from which I’ve drawn this excerpt:

In theory, Republicans should be exposed to some serious losses thanks to their 2010 landslide. They will defend 22 of the 36 governorships up this November. Nine are in states carried twice by Barack Obama. Republicans also control 27 legislatures (91 percent of state lower-chamber seats are up this year, along with 55 percent of state senate seats) and partially control five more; five states carried twice by Obama have Republican-controlled legislatures, and three more have split legislatures.
Aside from possible “over-exposure” in places that lean blue, Republican state-level success in 2010 means they could suffer from identification with a wildly unpopular status quo. While approval rating polling of governors has been erratic of late, several notable Republicans (e.g. LePage of Maine, Scott of Florida, Kasich of Ohio, Corbett of PA) have been struggling for many months.
But when you consult the professionals on how gubernatorial races look, there doesn’t appear to be any Democratic counter-landslide in the offing for 2014. The Cook Political Report does not presently show Democrats leading in any race involving a Republican-controlled governorship. Cook does have four Republican incumbents in toss-up races (LePage, Scott, Corbett and Snyder of MI), but that’s balanced in part by two Democratic governorships (Pat Quinn’s Illinois, and Arkansas, where Mike Beebe is retiring) in toss-up status. Overall, Cook shows nine gubernatorial races as competitive (toss-ups plus leaners), and five are Republican, four Democratic. Another rating site, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, presently shows Pennsylvania and Maine favored to flip from Republican to Democratic, but also shows three current Democratic states (Connecticut as well as Arkansas and Illinois) as toss-ups.

Why the lack of opportunities? There are three basic reasons:

The first is the recent alignment of the two parties with elements of the electorate that do (older, whiter voters) and don’t (young people and minorities) tend to vote disproportionately in midterm elections. The “fall-off” in voting for midterms and its variable level in different parts of the electorate is an ancient phenomenon; what’s new is how it affects the major parties, particularly given Democratic dependence on young and minority voters. While a lot of political observers have noted this new situation (and a few, like yours truly, have suggested it will make the elimination of partisan gridlock very difficult), few if any have concluded the “two electorates” with their different leanings are likely to provide Republicans with a significant advantage in gubernatorial elections since four-fifths of them occur in non-presidential years. This advantage may really come in handy for GOPers in 2014.
A parallel factor of equal importance is the sharp decline in ticket-splitting that has occurred since the late 1980s (roughly the time when the ideological sorting-out of the two parties reached its culmination, greatly reducing the number of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who were natural ticket-splitters). In a period of strong national partisan polarization, the likelihood of one trend in congressional elections and a contrary trend in state elections is significantly lower. And that’s why for all the persistent talk of “anti-incumbency elections” or “waves,” it’s actually rare to see elections “turn out the bums” in both parties at different levels of government.
Finally, at the state legislative level, it’s important to remember that the same gerrymandering efforts that solidified Republican control of the U.S. House benefitted the GOP Class of 2010 among state legislators as well.

The good news for Democrats is that Republicans seem to be overconfident about 2014, and just as importantly, determined to continue pushing their luck with radical policies that could help Democrats make major steps in overcoming the midterm turnout “fall-off” problem. I vividly recall one midterm (in 1998) when offensive Republican behavior towards minorities and national revulsion against the effort to impeach Bill Clinton produced a major turnout surge among African-Americans that lifted Democrats to upset gubernatorial victories in three Deep South states (Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina). That sort of scenario is by no means impossible this year in the wide swath of Republican-governed states, but it will take a supreme Democratic effort to make it happen.

Earlier today TDS cross-posted a provocative op-ed by E.J. Dionne making the case that Democratic “moderates” have a stake in the revival of the “Democratic Left” as represented by Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren. I’m a big fan of E.J.’s, and appreciate his effort. But at WaMo, I took issue with some of the implications of his argument:

Anyone who knows WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne can tell you he’s an enormously decent man who dislikes unnecessary conflict. So it’s entirely unsurprising that E.J. took it upon himself to assure “moderates” that the resurgence of the “Democratic left” is a good thing for them and for the country. He does so via a simplified version of the Hacker-Pierson “Off Center” hypothesis:

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.

And thus, the prescription:

When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right’s concerns about “big government” and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.

That’s true, in terms of the rather mindless echoing of whoever makes the most noise that is so annoyingly common in the MSM. But while positioning language like “left,” “right” and “center” is an indispensable short-hand in sorting out political tendencies, it can be taken to the point that it distorts what people who answer to (or are forced to associate with) such labels actually care about.
My colleague Martin Longman’s reaction to E.J.’s piece over at Booman Tribune illustrates part of the problem:

The problem is that, on any subject you might choose to consider, the right wing in this country is wrong, and they have enough power to keep us paddling in place at best, and, more often, moving in the wrong direction.
That a portion of the left is waking up to the problem is a good thing. But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.

I suspect Martin’s objection would be widely shared by many progressives who don’t see themselves as simply a counter-weight to the Right for purposes of making “centrism” viable again.
But the positioning analysis also sells many “moderates” short as well. A lot of those folk (say, my colleagues at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocated what ultimately became Obama proposals on health care and climate change many years before Obama did) support “centrist” policies because they believe in them, not just because more liberal policies are politically difficult or because they favor bipartisanship as an end in itself. Moreover, many “moderates” or “centrists” don’t agree with each other all the time. Some (and I would put most though hardly all self-identified Democratic “moderates” in this category) share the left’s–which is to say the historic progressives’–values and policy goals, but disagree over program design or political strategy and tactics. Others hew to the kind of “centrism” that represents elites as against popular movements of the left or the right, or really do make a fetish of bipartisanship in a way that plays right into the conservative movement’s efforts to keep political debate on its own ground as defined by its own terms.
The bottom line is that all the positioning language should not obscure the sharp divisions between the Left (including the fairly large Center-Left) and the Right (including the small and shrinking Center-Right) over values and goals. Everyone legitimately on the Left favors, for example, universal health coverage; those on the Right just don’t, much as they pretend to favor “reforms” that would allegedly improve coverage.
What this means for the Left and Center-Left is that its advocates should respect each other’s point of view as something other than an instrument for their own success. They can and should argue and fight with each other over the specifics of policy and politics without for a moment forgetting the gulf that still separates them from those who champion unfettered capitalism or “state’s rights” or inequality as a positive thing or the perpetual disabling of the public sector or an “American exceptionalism” that becomes an excuse for militarism and unilateralism in foreign policy or a government-mandated return to the cultural values of the 1950s.
Much as I honor E.J. Dionne and his irenic motives, “moderates” shouldn’t think of the “revived left” as a cat’s paw any more than “true liberals”should think of moderates as sell-outs who don’t have the guts to advocate the correct policies. For all the silly “civil war” talk, a big portion of the success of the Right in skewing the political conversation is its essential unity. Karl Rove’s view of the ideal America isn’t that different from Ted Cruz’s, and should be equally horrifying to those on the Left and Center-Left. We should keep that in mind even as different factions on the progressive side of the spectrum maneuver with and sometimes against each other. A “revived Left” is good for “moderates” because it represents a new and enthusiastic set of allies, not a device for triangulation.

This is an important topic, and we’ll certainly return to it again, particularly if the specter of Democratic factionalism materializes more visibly.