I finally saw an opportunity to address a pet peeve of mine at New York this week, and took it:

Progressives should keep in mind that sometimes ideological or strategic differences of opinion among Democrats are just that, and do not betray an overweening desire to sell out “the base” for a mess of bipartisan pottage or pundit admiration. And being “tough” or a “fighter” or “unafraid” does not necessarily dictate the most successful course of action. Even though progressives have earned the right to lead the Democratic Party, an aggressive attitude simply won’t be enough.

It’s an important distinction to remember in the Trump era, when it’s a rare left-of-center political person who does not openly and loudly disparage the president and his party. Trump is the American Beauty rose of will-to-power politics, who has satisfied those in the GOP who cared most about “owning the libs” and defying “political correctness.” But the habit of identifying the leftmost course as defining Democratic courage lives on in the attacks on Nancy Pelosi for resisting demands for an immediate lurch down the path to impeachment. Does anyone who has paid attention to Pelosi’s career really believe she’s afraid of anybody or anything? Quite possibly she is wrong that impeachment might materially improve the odds that Donald Trump will serve a second term in which he can further stack the judiciary with stone ideologues and shred every constitutional and democratic norm. If she’s wrong, she’s wrong, but it’s not a matter of inadequate spine.

You can hear the same sort of mistake being made in the criticism of Joe Biden’s irrepressible faith in an honorable GOP that will spring back to life once the Evil One in the White House is gone. He’s absolutely wrong about that, of course. But it’s not because he’s soft or too nice or lacks spine. No one Biden’s age is likely to be afraid of anything other than the Grim Reaper.

More to the point, though, toughness is not going to beat Trump or the GOP, either. It’s going to require brains and and a workable strategy, both in the 2020 election and beyond. And it’s the apparent lack of brains exhibited by Biden’s persistent bipartisanship that’s troubling.

Nobody’s going to call progressive writer Brian Beutler a milquetoast centrist. He is practically the Cato the Censor of pro-impeachment agitprop. But he understands why Biden’s misapprehension about Republicans is a problem, and what needs to be done about it:

“[It] … foreshadows how things will go for any winning Democratic candidate who clings, sincerely or otherwise, to the view that a golden era of compromise will dawn once Trump is gone. These candidates will lock themselves into a mode of governing that can not work anymore. Their supporters and intra-party critics will be demoralized, their presidencies will stagnate, and they will waste precious time grasping for a better approach. (That’s if they don’t react to predictable GOP resistance by passing new, ill-conceived pseudo-compromises like the Hyde amendment.)

“It’s obviously just as naive to assume that hard-nosed realism about the nature of the modern GOP will unlock a progressive revolution all on its own. But candidates who understand what they’re signing up for can take steps to prepare for governing around Republicans now, knowing it’s delusional to imagine they’ll govern in coalition with them. If Democrats win the White House but not the Senate, Democrats should be prepared to implement creative foreign and administrative policies; if they consolidate power, they should be prepared to legislate in an aggressive and likely partisan way. The next time a Democrat is president, Republicans will again want to filibuster his or her presidency into failure, so the filibuster must be on the chopping block, and the party should be prepared to legislate around its own internal center, rather than let its most conservative members set the agenda in the vain hope of securing bipartisanship.”

This is a challenge to intelligence and imagination and political skill, not just to courage and strength and “spine.” Out-thugging Donald Trump may well be impossible in any event. So instead of simply demanding that Democrats “stop bringing a knife to a gunfight,” progressives should ask them to bring all their assets to the table. They’ll need them.

This week, I returned at New York to an old obsession of mine: the long-long Democratic tradition of advocating significant government reform:

One of the problems progressive Democrats have had for a long while is the inveterate American suspicion of and sometimes hostility toward government, and particularly the federal government. It’s not a phenomenon isolated in any one demographic group, region, or cultural persuasion. As the party of activist government, Democrats have often vacillated between opportunistic appropriation of selected conservative anti-government themes, emphasis on government functions that happen to be popular, and, well, changing the subject to go after institutions (e.g., Big Pharma or banks) that are at least as unpopular as Washington.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore made “reinventing government” a major theme of their administration in the 1990s, it was a point of departure for Democrats that soon more or less evaporated, in part because they oversold the initiative and in part because it focused too narrowly on cost saving rather than improvement of public services. When the more virulent forms of anti-government activism like the tea party movement arose in the 21st century, progressives tended to defend government rather than trying to fix it. As social scientist Paul Light noted in 2015, the constituency for reinventing government faded thanks to this pincer movement, and along with it, any immediate incentive for progressives to embrace public-sector innovation. And as Yoni Appelbaum observed a few years earlier, Democrats were losing ground in the eternal fight over the shape and size of government:

“The current progressive movement has … tended to promise better policies and improved implementation, while rallying to the defense of government from its critics. It insists that government should do better, but not that we need a better government. Whatever its intellectual merits, this approach has a fatal political flaw: most Americans number themselves among government’s critics. They don’t think government works terribly well, and they are disinclined to support politicians who do.”

One of the side benefits of Democrats losing control of the federal government in 2016 was that it liberated them from the reflexive habit of defending Washington. Indeed, one of the hottest topics in progressive political discourse these days is the once-radical belief that our current institutional arrangements all but guarantee a conservative oligarchical control of the country for decades to come. Add in a huge Democratic presidential field and voters hungry for new ideas, and you have a prescription for a revival of interest in government reform.

“It has not always been thus. During the Progressive period of the early 20th century, liberals rallied around a series of major systemic reforms. They pushed to break up trusts. They expanded the vote, and demanded recall elections and popular referenda. They passed the Seventeenth Amendment, mandating the direct election of senators by voters, rather than by state legislatures.

“Democrats took up this mantle, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Republicans could still win presidential elections, but as with Dwight Eisenhower, they were often offering just a scaled-back version of Democratic big-government ideas. The GOP was supine.”

Part of the new interest in government reform on the left comes from the very old fear that the public sector has been “captured” by wealthy interests, and needs refocusing as much as it needs expansion. That’s at the heart of the wonkiest of Elizabeth Warren’s wonky policy ideas, a proposal to reorganize federal trade policy functions. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in this area since at least the Carter administration:

“[A] new Department  —  the Department of Economic Development  —  will replace the Commerce Department, subsume other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, and include research and development programs, worker training programs, and export and trade authorities like the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The new Department will have a single goal: creating and defending good American jobs.”

In this case, reform serves as the handmaiden of the populist goal of ridding the federal government of a pro-corporate structural bias that has been built right into our fragmented system. But it reflects a more general resurgence of interest in government reform among presidential aspirants, as Graham notes:

“Many of them are proposing things that would require constitutional amendments, all the more notable since there hasn’t been a substantive amendment since 1971. To name just a few: O’Rourke wants term limits. As I wrote earlier this week, radical reforms to the Supreme Court, including court packing, have become central to party thinking, even for cautious candidates such as O’Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Obama achieved universal insurance coverage through the private-insurance system; several Democrats want to bulldoze it entirely with Medicare for All schemes. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been perhaps the most aggressive of the bunch, pushing everything from abolishing the filibuster to busting trusts to enshrining a right to vote.”

Medicare for All is not only the largest and most revolutionary government reform idea kicking around left-of-center circles this year; it’s also one that cleanly illustrates the conflicting impulses progressives continue to have between reforming and simply expanding government. On the one hand, single-payer health care is a classic reform aimed at sweeping away the hodgepodge of public and private health-insurance services that has so ill-served Americans over the years, and creating a much simpler and fairer model that has been tested in many other countries. On the other hand, its proponents have chosen to brand it (somewhat misleadingly) as simply an expansion of an existing government program, albeit one that is relatively quite popular. Unsurprisingly, public support for this reform tends to shrink when conservatives and their health-industry allies pound it as a government takeover of health care that will reduce consumer choice and carry an enormous price tag: the standard anti-big-government theme that always strikes a chord with so many Americans.

In this as in so many other areas, Democrats would be wise to remember that a majority of voters don’t inherently trust government any more than they do big corporations. The political power of “populism” — in both its left- and right-wing expressions — derives from a perpetual national craving for leaders who will bend government to the popular will and force it to address genuine needs. This by no means requires hostility to public employees or any reluctance to expand government where it’s needed. But it does mean boldly taking issue with government as it exists.

Being from Georgia myself, I don’t generally throw too many stones at Deep South states for being Deep South states. But a realization about Alabama made me pick up the nearest rock at hurl it towards Montgomery via New York.

Alabama’s recent (and overwhelming) enactment of the nation’s most reactionary abortion law — a law that embarrassed many Republicansnationally and even occasioned a dissent from its terms by Donald Trump — probably made some Americans who don’t regard the state as their sweet home wonder if the self-described Heart of Dixie might profess some values a bit out of the mainstream.

Wonder no more. AL.com confirms:

“Jefferson Davis — the president of the Confederate states from 1861-1865 — was born on June 3, 1808. Alabama marks that occasion every year with an official state holiday …

“The Davis holiday is one of three in Alabama that honors Confederate leaders: Robert E. Lee’s birthday, which is marked in January on the same day as Martin Luther King Day; Confederate Memorial Day in April; and Davis’ birthday in June …

“Alabama is the last state to have a legal holiday set aside solely to commemorate the birth of Davis. Mississippi marks Davis’ birthday but includes it in the Memorial Day celebration. In Texas, Davis’ birthday is part of “Confederate Heroes Day” while other Southern states, including Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee, have a holiday for Davis on the books but do not give employees a day off.”

That’s right: Even Davis’s home state of Mississippi, which he represented in Congress and where he died in 1889, no longer shuts down state government to honor the arch-traitor. But Alabama does….

Unlike his traitor-in-arms Robert E. Lee, Davis can’t be defended with the sort of weak rationalizations available to protect the legacy of the Lost Cause. Davis was by no means a military genius or a symbol of postwar reconciliation or some sort of icon of southern chivalry. He was a bigot who was convinced that civilization itself depended on the enslavement of African-Americans, as illustrated by this very typical quote unearthed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Confederate president Davis made white supremacy the unmistakeable cornerstone of his criminal enterprise, as James W. Loewen observes:

“White supremacy was Confederate national policy from the top down. In November, 1862, for example, Confederates seized four African Americans in U.S. uniforms on a South Carolina island and asked Richmond what to do with them. President Davis and his secretary of war approved their “summary execution,” which was and is a war crime. When President Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Jefferson Davis called it ‘the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.’ He proposed to his Congress that white officers of black troops be delivered to state authorities to be ‘dealt with in accordance with the laws … providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection’ — again, execution. The Confederate Congress responded that the C.S.A. should use its own military courts to have such persons ‘put to death or be otherwise punished.’

“The Confederacy put these policies into practice. Time after time, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee; Poison Spring, Arkansas; Brice’s Cross Roads, Mississippi; Olustee, Florida, etc., Confederate troops killed black POWs and their officers. On the home front, in February, 1863, Davis decreed the enslavement of ‘all free Negroes in the Southern Confederacy.’”

After the war, Davis was imprisoned but escaped trial for treason thanks to a tragicomedy of errors committed by Andrew Johnson’s administration. Unsurprisingly, he was a bitter opponent of the Reconstruction of his region, and defended the Confederacy even when mild repentance might have won his clemency:

“An amnesty bill that restored citizenship to Confederate leaders in 1876 specifically excluded Davis, and the former Confederate president did not fight the decision. ‘It has been said that I should apply to the United States for a pardon. But repentance must precede the right of pardon, and I have not repented,’ Davis told the Mississippi Legislature in 1884, before adding, ‘If it were all to do over again, I would again do just as I did in 1861.’”

Jimmy Carter, the first post–Civil War president from the Deep South, signed a pardon in 1978 posthumously restoring citizenship rights to Davis in what was likely an effort to secure political cover for his controversial amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders. Even if his desire for letting bygones be bygones was understandable, honoring Davis as a hero, as Alabama still does, is just wrong.

But the idea that celebrating racism is an innocent recognition of “heritage” lives on, as reflected by the attitude of Alabama’s governor, who also recently signed that abortion bill:

“In 2017 … Alabama enacted the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which prohibits local governments from removing, altering or renaming monuments more than 40 years old.

“The state’s attorney general in August 2017 used that law to sue the majority-black city of Birmingham for covering a Confederate monument with plywood and a tarp. Gov. Kay Ivey has called efforts to remove Confederate symbols ‘politically correct nonsense.'”

So, too, presumably, is respect for the African-American citizens Jefferson Davis considered suitable only for slavery.

There are obviously many things Donald Trump does every day that bug me. But there’s one in particular that is simply enraging, and I wrote about it this week at New York:

On the 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump famously predicted that if elected he’d do such wonderful things for African-Americans that he’d win 95 percent of their votes in 2020. Since he won a booming 8 percent of the black vote against Hillary Clinton, there was nowhere to go but up, and indeed, Republicans won 9 percent of the African-American vote in 2018, according to exit polls. But the signs for Trump were really bad:

“An election-eve poll of African-American voters, moreover, showed that 83 percent said Trump made them feel ‘disrespected,’ and 79 percent ‘angry.’ In the same poll, 48 percent of African-Americans labeled Trump a racist who is deliberately trying to hurt minorities.”

If that surprises you in any way, be aware that a Google search for “racist Trump” pulls up 163 million hits. Aside from his exalted status among white nationalists and his deeply reactionary domestic agenda that would devastate poor and minority communities, the man’s reflexive defense of neo-Confederate symbolism and his solidarity with racist politicians make the troubles Republicans have had with African-Americans for decades look benign.

Nonetheless, Trump’s reelection effort will include an effort, well, not so much to win over African-Americans as to encourage them to stay home on November 3. A notable falloff in black turnout in 2016 was one of several key factors leading to Clinton’s fatal underperformance in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, in the end, were the ball game.

This was not entirely an accident or just a product of Barack Obama’s not being on the ballot, as Philip Bump explains:

“’They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary,’ Trump said. ‘They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.'”

According to reporting from Bloomberg shortly before the 2016 election, the campaign was working hard to ensure that they didn’t. A senior campaign official told reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg that they had “three major voter-suppression operations underway,” including one aimed at dampening turnout among black voters. In part, the Bloomberg report suggested, that included running under-the-radar ads on Facebook tying Clinton to the 1994 crime bill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump is already pulling the same stunt with possible 2020 opponent Joe Biden, calling the 1994 crime bill “a dark period in American History” that the former vice president should apologize for, and contrasting that with Trump’s involvement in criminal justice reforms that “helped fix the bad 1994 Bill.”

The mendacity of this line of argument is stunning. Aside from Trump’s personal history of backing the nastiest kind of law-and-order politics, he’s acting as though the sentencing provisions of the 1994 crime bill, which many observers now blame for contributing to mass incarceration, was some sort of “Democrat” scheme. Yes, a majority of House Republicans opposed the final version, but that was due to its assault-weapons ban and its crime-prevention programs; the GOP wanted purely punitive legislation, as the New York Times reported:

“The bill that passed trimmed the original package from $33.5 billion, with nearly two-thirds of the cuts from prevention programs that Republicans had branded as useless welfare spending …

“A measure proposed by Representatives Bill Brewster, Democrat of Oklahoma, and Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, to scrap the bipartisan compromise and approve a plan with no money for so-called prevention programs — and no ban on assault weapons — failed, 232 to 197. ”

All but 30 House Republicans voted for that lock-’em-up-and-let-us-keep-our-guns version of the bill. No, Trump wasn’t in Congress then, but, if anything, he has represented a return to the brutal anti-crime and war-on-drugs policies and messaging that helped make Republicans toxic to minority voters before he came on the scene.

But Trump’s slurs about (and/or ignorance of ) the 1994 crime bill are nothing compared with his chutzpah in bragging about the criminal-justice-reform legislation that “helped fix the bad 1994 bill.” His 2016 law-and-order campaign derailed a bipartisan drive for a more comprehensive reform bill after Mitch McConnell decided to yank it out of fear of contradicting Trump (and his chief Senate agent, Jeff Sessions, a bitter opponent of reform). With Sessions installed as attorney general, it looked as if criminal-justice reform might be dead, but then presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner got behind a modest prison-reform bill in the House, eventually merging it with a few sentencing-reform provisions in the Senate, and spent months trying to convince Trump to get onboard the bipartisan train. Finally, and reluctantly, the president agreed to a watered-down mini-version of the bill he indirectly killed in 2016. And now he’s acting as though it was all his idea.

So Trump’s insulting audacity in addressing African-American voters isn’t abating at all. And he’s hoping he’ll demoralize them into failing the exercise the franchise. What a scandal for a president from the Party of Lincoln.

The Washington Post‘s outstanding political commentator Paul Waldman wrote something over the Memorial Day weekend that struck a chord with me, and I expanded on it for New York.

It’s become a standard feature of big national holidays: pious chest-thumping and finger-pointing about how Americans used to truly represent a United States but have now let politicians with their petty partisan squabbles drive us apart, when a little old-fashioned good will and elbow grease would fix everything. I heard a species of this meme over the Memorial Day weekend from CBS correspondent Scott Pelley:

“Today, liberals and conservatives barricade themselves in digital citadels where some media, with calculated bias, assure their viewers that what they already believe is correct. If we wall ourselves in castles of confirming information, I fear a new Cold War. This time, a cold civil war.

“Given this danger, why do both parties promote almost nothing but divisive scandals? Because it is so much easier than health insurance or immigration reform. Taking on actual challenges would require work, and listening, and thought, and union.”

Aside from the implication that, say, the crimes and misdemeanors revealed in the Mueller report are simply “divisive scandals,” what is most objectionable about Pelley’s complaint and so many others like it is the suggestion that partisan differences are superficial, or even artificial. Yes, of course, there’s an element of self-interested gamesmanship in partisan competition, particularly in a period when neither party can secure a reliable grip on the White House, Congress, or public opinion. But you can make a strong case that today’s partisan disagreements are rooted in basic differences involving not just facts or policy positions but very basic principles and values.

Look at the key issue in the 2018 midterms, health-care policy. Even if they disagree on how to achieve universal health coverage, most Democrats agree it’s essential and a basic human right. Republicans almost never call health care a “right,” and instead tend to regard it as a scarce resource whose price should be regulated by markets and quantity should be limited by clean and responsible living. This is not a matter of “I say tomato and you say to-mah-to,” by any means.

Consider another ineluctable partisan fight concerning firearms regulation. To most Democrats, the “right to bear arms” has little or nothing to do with fanatics and other fury-driven testosterone addicts stockpiling automatic weapons and evading minimal background checks by frequenting gun shows. To nearly all Republicans now, the Second Amendment is the single most essential element of the Bill of Rights, the guarantor not only against violation of hearth and home but against tyrannical government. Maybe all partisans don’t share the views of those on the left who would ban all private gun ownership or those on the right who threaten to use their shooting irons to kill cops or soldiers who try to enforce laws they don’t like. But there’s really not much middle ground, and that’s not because partisans are inventing phony conflicts.

Look at how the two parties think about voting rights, which was once, in living memory, a truly bipartisan cause. Democrats almost invariably think of the right to vote as fundamental to democracy and resist any measures that tend to suppress the most abundant levels of participation in elections. To an ever-increasing extent, Republicans think of making voting easy as an invitation to fraud and the plundering of the public treasury by ignorant plebes who will “vote themselves benefits” in league with corrupt elites. That’s a gulf in perception that no compromise can bridge.

Check out one more issue on which the parties have become polarized: campaign-finance reform. For most Democrats, this is a common-sense matter of minimizing the strength of wealthy special interests and reducing official corruption; the whole chain of Supreme Court decisions leading up to Citizens United is considered an abomination. Most Republicans agree with the SCOTUS premise that “money is speech,” and fear campaign-finance regulation as a big step down the road to publicly financed and eventually government-controlled elections. In this case the two parties’ points of view are very nearly inverted, with the donkey’s freedom from special interests equaling the elephant’s enslavement. Can a room full of wheeling and dealing overcome that rift? I don’t think so.

Recognizing that partisanship is based on legitimate differences of opinion has huge implications for how one understands government dysfunction and the way to “fix” it, as Paul Waldman observed over the weekend:

“The reality is that we’re in an era when, unless there’s unified government, not much is going to get done, at least in terms of legislation. That’s not because there’s something wrong with Washington; it’s because the two parties have fundamentally different ideas about what we ought to do.

“Which means that, as they try to win back the White House and plan what to do with it if they succeed, Democrats don’t need to devise a strategy to persuade Republicans to join with them in a new era of bipartisan governing. They need a strategy to win full control of Congress, then a strategy to keep their members together to pass their agenda. If they manage that, nobody will complain that Washington can’t get anything done.”

This ought to be fairly obvious, but unfortunately, the idea that partisanship is somehow a free-floating demonic force rather than a reflection of deeply held values has infected political discourse even more than partisanship itself, as Waldman also notes:

“Unfortunately, politicians do a great deal to mislead voters about how politics works. Every election, candidates for the House and Senate tell voters that the problem is this thing called Washington, whose dysfunctions can be cured with the proper kick in the keister. And I, the candidate says, am just the person to do it, to change Washington into what it ought to be. Why? Not because I have policy expertise or relevant experience; those things don’t matter. No, it’s because I have common sense, and I know how to get things done.”

And so when nothing changes or partisan “dysfunction” gets even worse, voters become even more disillusioned with “Washington,” and listen to the pied pipers of rhetorical enchantment who pretend getting things done is easy for the stout-hearted and the open-minded. It’s not.