While watching Trump’s second impeachment trial, I heard his lawyers use a strategically clever term that I dissected and denounced at New York:

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial lawyers, amid their effort to recast Trump as a victim of Congress — rather than the president who sent his militant followers to storm the U.S. Capitol and stop the routine confirmation of an election he himself had tried to steal — deployed an evocative new term: “constitutional cancel culture.” Attorney Michael van der Veen introduced it as part of his angry diatribe against the alleged Democrat witch hunt targeting Trump. Then Bruce Castor used it again to dramatize his claim that Trump’s wild remarks on January 6 were protected by the First Amendment and squarely within existing political traditions.

This semantic development was probably inevitable. “Cancel culture,” a term originally associated with a sort of loosely organized boycott of offensive people in power, gradually gained use as an invidious description of any incident where people are pressured to conform their opinions. But then “cancel culture” was adopted by conservatives, for whom it has the same sort of function the equally abused term “politically correct” used to serve: a way for those wrong-footed by habits of prejudice and privilege to regain high ground by posing as victims. And it has caught on with Republican politicians in a very big way, as Vox’s Aja Romano pointed out during the 2020 GOP National Convention:

“[D]uring Monday night’s lineup, several speakers mentioned cancel culture. Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle portrayed it as a culture of ‘elites … who blame America,’ and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) stressed that Republicans ‘don’t give into cancel culture or the radical and factly baseless beliefs that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s.’ Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley described cancel culture as ‘an important issue. [Trump] knows that political correctness and cancel culture are dangerous and just plain wrong,’ she told viewers. ‘You cannot cancel a culture that love its heroes,’ Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl) said, referring obliquely to the nationwide trend of toppling Confederate statues in protests against racism.”

More recently, the term “cancel culture” has been used to convert some of the more egregiously aggressive and violence-prone conservatives into brave and persecuted dissenters, most notably freshman congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Last week, House Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan wept crocodile tears for Greene, asking: “Who will the cancel culture attack next?”

On the principle that the most authoritarian of political figures are most likely to need the kind of moral switcheroo that attacks on “cancel culture” are designed to produce, it’s not surprising to find Donald Trump’s lawyers try to confer him its benefits. But it was devilishly clever to elevate it to a constitutional matter. Regardless of what you think of the arguments over the Senate’s power to sanction an ex-president, or the question of whether he met the definition of “incitement,” or whether mob he spoke to on January 6 constituted an “insurrection,” it is indisputable that Trump was the aggressor against Congress in trying to disrupt an entirely routine electoral vote count. Earlier he was the aggressor against the states, both Republican and Democratic controlled, who sought to count and certify votes. And above all, for months and months, he maligned and assaulted the rights of voters who wanted the opportunity to vote by mail in order to reduce their odds of dying. He left office as he spent every day of his presidency: a bully who deeply and cynically believed in winning by intimidation and incessant lying.

Wrapping this man in the crimson robes of martyrdom is one of the most outrageous stunts of Trumpism, worthy of its object in shamelessness. Yes, Trump will be acquitted, and there are defensible grounds for that verdict. But he did not come to the events under debate in the impeachment trial with clean hands. The idea he deserves pity for the treatment he has been given, and the dignity of a constitutional doctrine to protect behavior like his, is simply unconscionable.

MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, has taken to calling the G.O.P. “the cop-killers caucus.” Harsh, yes, but it’s fair insofar as the likely acquittal of Trump will give a free pass to the primary instigator of the vicious riot that took the lives of a capitol policeman, Brian Sicknick. Two others, Howard Liebengood and Jeffery Smith dies by suicide in the wake of the riot.

So much for the “Blue Lives mattter” mantra of Republicans who profess to be champions of the police who risk their lives to protect the public — and members of congress.

Every Republican Senator knows Trump instigated the treasonous riot at the capitol. Every Repubican knows that the riot would not have happened and the seven lives would not have been lost without Trump’s agitation. Yet, if more than 10 of 50 Republican Senators vote to hold Trump accountable, it will be a surprise.

The impeachment managers did an outstanding job of presenting the case against Trump. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes, summing up their work:

Nothing in recent days has exasperated me more than the desire of Washington reporters to imagine some anti-Trump coup led by Mitch McConnell. I tried to pour cold water on it at New York this week:

A day into the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and more than two weeks after a test vote that showed how many Senate Republicans wanted to stop the trial before it started, there remains a peculiar, glittering fantasy among Beltway media types that somehow Mitch McConnell will yet find a way to lead his flock onto the path of righteousness in time to save his party and prevent a Trump comeback. Here’s a report from Bloomberg:

“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is signaling to fellow Republicans that the final vote on Donald Trump’s impeachment is matter of conscience and that senators who disputed the constitutionality of the trial could still vote to convict the former president, according to three people familiar with his thinking.

“The Kentucky Republican has also suggested that he hasn’t made up his mind how he’ll vote, two of the people said, even though he voted Tuesday to declare it unconstitutional for the Senate to hear the case against a former president.

“That position is starkly different than McConnell’s declaration at the start of Trump’s first impeachment trial last year that he did not consider himself an impartial juror.”

This intel was gobbled up and posted at the top of Wednesday’s edition of Politico Playbook, the daily bread of the Capitol set. Both the Bloomberg and Playbook accounts have “to be sure” acknowledgements that Trump’s conviction remains unlikely. But there’s something dreamy and almost mystical about the abiding belief that the wily McConnell is operating behind the scenes to save his party from a MAGA future. It was, indeed, a raging counter-narrative in Washington until January 26, when McConnell joined 44 other Senate Republicans in supporting Rand Paul’s effort to preempt the swearing in of senators on grounds that trying an ex-president is unconstitutional.

Technically, it’s true that the January 26 vote was on a motion to table Paul’s resolution stopping the trial. So, in theory, Republicans could say they just wanted to hear more about Paul’s deep constitutional thinking, and did not necessarily share it. But that’s certainly not what anyone understood the vote to be about at the time. Paul designed his gambit to show that conviction was impossible, and accomplished his purpose.

Those who detect the moving of tectonic plates far beneath the surface of Senate Republican sentiment may point to Senator Bill Cassidy’s epiphany on Tuesday. He was the one Republican who apparently changed his mind since January 26 about the constitutionality of the trial. But what was his reasoning? He was pretty clear about it in interviews:

“The House managers were focused, they were organized … they made a compelling argument. President Trump’s team, they were disorganized. … One side is doing a great job and the other side is doing a terrible job. … As an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job.”

Voting for the team of lawyers who put on a better show on a matter of constitutional law is not a very good look, though in Cassidy’s defense, he is a gastroenterologist by training, not an attorney. He’s already been rebuked by his own state Republican Party, and isn’t exactly showing his colleagues the benefits of changing sides.

As for McConnell, it’s easy enough for him to call the ultimate guilty or not guilty verdict a “vote of conscience.” In Senate-speak, all that means is that he won’t whip the vote and make it a matter of party conference discipline. But here’s the thing: Unless there’s some previously undetected movement in his conference, he doesn’t have to.

So why do sources “familiar with his thinking” keep whispering in the ear of reporters that McConnell is still on the fence? That’s unclear, though they could be trying to force the Kentuckian’s hand via the media, tapping into the intense desire of the permanent Washington Establishment for a return to the pre-Trump days when politicians didn’t incite mobs to attack the Capitol.

Most likely, a misunderstanding of the current fault lines dividing Republican elected officials is the problem. Since January 6, only a handful (like the ten House Republicans who voted for impeachment) have been willing to fully turn their backs on Trump. The vast majority have been divided between those who argued Trump did nothing wrong (and that his allies who tried to overturn the election results in Congress were brave patriots trying to “stop the steal”), and those who conceded bad presidential behavior but wanted to forget about it and move on to the crucial task of opposing Joe Biden’s agenda. McConnell has been in the latter camp all along. There’s a vast gap between that position and the fateful step of telling Republican voters they have no right to vote for Donald Trump in the future, which is what a conviction would mean. If some force exists that will ultimately save the GOP from the views of its own base, it’s not going to be Mitch McConnell or the Senate Republican conference, no matter how poorly Trump’s attorneys perform.

Here’s why so many young people say they support “socialism” despite the fact that it is politically toxic to many American voters and the actual policy agenda that they support isn’t really socialist.

For a wide variety of progressive political strategists it is understandably frustrating that Bernie Sanders and his followers insist on describing their objective as “socialism” when their actual policy agenda more closely approximates that followed in the Scandinavian countries – which are market economies with substantial social regulation and welfare systems and not socialist economies – and the term socialism is wildly unpopular with many of the working class people that they sincerely want to win to their side.

As Ruy Teixeira notes in a recent post:

…for many who use the term, their idea of socialism seems closer to a traditional social-democratic mixed economy than a radically different system that would somehow do away with profits and markets. So why call it socialism, a term that has all kinds of unpleasant associations and does imply a replacement of capitalism? Why not call it “people’s capitalism” or “democratic capitalism” or “the advanced mixed economy” or whatever?

By grasping nostalgically at revolutionary rhetoric, the Left sets the bar high for public embrace of what might otherwise be quite popular policy ideas, from single-payer health insurance to free college to a job guarantee.

Teixeira, along with others he mentions including John Judis, E.J. Dionne, William Galston, Fred Block and Andrew Koppleman, all carefully distinguish between the classical definition of socialism and the range of political platforms, economic policies and government institutions that the modern left actually supports. Their common hope is that that these clarifications might wean the left away from its unnecessary infatuation with “socialism” as their label of choice.

But in order to understand the preference many young people have for the word “socialism” these days, it is important to understand that for many, their advocacy of the term is not based on support for any specific set of policies or specific form of government so much as it is on a profound rejection of the basic moral and ethical value system that is inextricably bound to capitalism.

It was the great intellectual contribution of the otherwise appallingly un-intellectual Ayn Rand that she was willing to proudly express and glorify the underlying value system of pure capitalism – the social Darwinist view of the world popular at the beginning of the 20th century. It held that:

Greed is good, altruism is bad

Competition is good, cooperation is bad,

Contempt is good, compassion is bad.

The poor are not the “blessed” of Jesus and the bible. They are lazy, despicable losers who deserve their fate and the scorn of the successful.

There are inherently superior individuals and inherently inferior individuals and an ideal society would give absolute freedom to the former and absolutely nothing to the latter.

And so on. Anyone wanting to wade through 90 interminable pages of this essentially sociopathic philosophy can find it in her book, Atlas Shrugged.

Back at the end of the 19th century there were many social Darwinists who had the courage to express this moral and ethical philosophy proudly and openly but after World War Two the rhetoric of naturally superior people and utterly worthless inferior people carried with it a little too much of the lingering odor of the gas chambers to be argued in polite company. Rand was the only major figure willing to champion Social Darwinism without apology.

Instead, the post-war defenders of capitalism argued two things:

First, that Capitalism was the only alternative to state totalitarianism and prison camps. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was the Ur-text of this view for intellectuals; Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom was the Cliff Notes version for college freshmen. Buying and selling things in markets was a magnificent exercise in freedom; paying taxes and supporting social programs was tantamount to suffering the whips and chains of slavery (one leading conservative taught his toddler son economics by buying him an ice cream cone and then taking a series of big bites out of it while saying “You see, this is the federal tax, this is the state tax.”)

Liberals argued that some minor reforms of the capitalist system could be made in the name of compassion but that such reforms had to be made very timidly because there was, as the Kennedy Administration economist Arthur Okun, titled his 1963 book, a “Great Tradeoff – Equality versus Efficiency.” Any interference with the perfectly balanced, automatic operation of a completely unregulated free market inevitably reduced economic efficiency and made all of society poorer as a result.

Stripped of its fancy math, the logical argument behind this “perfect efficiency” notion was the following:

If one accepts the necessary sassumptions that all businessmen and all workers have “perfect foresight” about the future and all men and machines are perfectly mobile and adaptable, then, in principle, an ideal free market economy would automatically be optimally efficient.

Why?

Because with his perfect knowledge of the future each businessman would only hire the most productive workers he could possibly find and each worker would only choose the job that paid the best wages for his particular skills. As a result, each worker would get exactly what he was “worth” and each businessman would always get the most productive possible workers for the job.

This same perfect knowledge of the future would also allow the businessman to produce exactly what consumers desired and consumers to know exactly what bundle of goods and services would give them the maximum satisfaction. The logical deduction from these assumptions was therefore that an ideal free market would necessarily produce the maximum possible economic efficiency and consumer satisfaction.

Stripped of the elegant mathematical equations that the theory basically plagiarized from classical physics and electrodynamics, as a purely logical argument this conclusion really sounds very silly – and, in fact, it really is. Using exactly the same assumptions it can be shown that Santa Claus could also create

a “perfect” economic result. With his perfect knowledge of how good or bad every little boy or girl had been (perfect foresight) and with infinite elves to produce exactly the right toys (perfect mobility of labor and capital) Santa could produce maximum economic efficiency and consumer satisfaction as he flew around the world instantly delivering all the toys on Christmas eve.

No-one in the real world (other than economists and small children) took this argument seriously but as long as unemployment stayed reasonably low and the standard of living gradually increased during the 80’s and 90’s the idea that the “free market” was basically efficient was able to escape close scrutiny. In fact, as the 2000’s progressed, the business establishment and the wealthy became increasingly convinced of their own spectacular genius and innate natural superiority and increasingly demanded not only lower and lower taxes but also the most abject and humble awe, respect and admiration from the “little people” below them.

The 2008 crisis blew up this fantasy, revealing a vision of the wealthy and powerful as venal money grubbers who cynically extracted vast bonuses from their corporations while the economy collapsed and millions of ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. The generation of college students coming of age in this era, as a result, looked behind the economic textbooks and began to perceive capitalism as a conspiracy of vastly overpaid men hiding in luxurious mega-mansions and gleefully reciting the interminable harangues of the hero in Atlas Shrugged to themselves like magic incantations.

Quite naturally, then, many young people were attracted to Occupy Wall Street and then the campaigns of Bernie Sanders. It was an emotional reaction – a moral and ethical outrage at the twisted morality of “Capitalism” that generated their advocacy of socialism and not the details of economic policies platforms and institutions. They simply felt that unfettered capitalism was an inherently immoral system and “socialism” a convenient word to suggest a more humane alternative.

This suggests that the common ground progressive “social democrats” and “socialists” can find with each other is in the realm of morals and ethics, in their shared rejection of the cynicism, greed and selfishness of “ideal” capitalism’s social Darwinist philosophy.

In closing his post, Teixeira suggests that “just for old time’s sake” Social Democrats should recall the song “The Red Flag” the traditional, idealistic anthem of the British Labor Party that had been sung at every annual conference since the 19th century.

It well recalls the triumphs past
It gives the hope of peace at last
The banner bright, the symbol plain
Of human right and human gain

To find common ground with the modern socialist supporters of Bernie Sanders and AOC, traditional progressives and social democrats can also recall a more recent anthem of social protest that was also shared by millions:

imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world,
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

It is on this shared belief in the hope and possibility of a more moral and ethical social system than venal social Darwinistic capitalism, and not in debating the details of programs and policies or labels like “social democrat” and “socialist,” that the basis for political collaboration and alliance can be found.

Will voters in the 2022 midterm elections remember and penalize Trump’s enablers in the Senate? Put another way, will Trump’s Senate trial have an effect on the midterms, whether he is convicted or not? If Trump is convicted, a long shot, the answer could be yes to some extent. Unfortunately, several of Trump’s most shameless Senate enablers, including Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell are are not running in 2022. Marco Rubio has announced that he is running for re-election in 2022. He will likely face a high-profile Democratic opponent, since popular Reps. Val Demmings and Gwen Graham and former Rep. David Jolly are reportedly interested in running against him. Rand Paul, another Trump apologist, could run for re-election in 2022. He has supported legislation limiting senators to two terms, which he will have completed by 2022, so he may retire, although nobody ever went broke underestimating the integrity of Republican senators. If there is a wild card, it’s Mitch McConnell who could influence other senators with a strong stand for conviction. But it has to happen very soon. More likely, Democratic Senate prospects in 2022 depend less on Trump’s fate than the course of the pandemic and the economy.

There is not much chance that Trump will be convicted, according to Manu Raju and Alex Rodgers at CNN Politics, who report: “But even after witnessing the deadly violence firsthand, and being reminded of it again at the scene of the crime, many Republican senators appeared no closer on Wednesday to convicting former President Donald Trump on the charge of “incitement of insurrection.”….While they were struck by the impeachment managers’ presentation, these Republicans said that the House Democrats did not prove Trump’s words led to the violent actions. They compared the January 6 riot to last summer’s racial justice protests and criticized how the trial is being handled….Sen. Lindsey Graham said he couldn’t believe “we could lose the Capitol like that” but added that it didn’t change his mind on whether to acquit Trump during the trial. “I think there’s more votes for acquittal after today than there was yesterday,” the South Carolina Republican said….”I think you get at best six Republicans — probably five and maybe six,” GOP Sen. Tim Scott told CNN when asked if the video and footage changed his mind on convicting Trump. Asked if he considers himself an impartial juror, the South Carolina Republican said: “I think I’m as impartial as the other 99….The six Republicans could be Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — the six Republicans who broke with their party Tuesday to vote that the impeachment trial was constitutional.”

With many rank and file Republicans walking away from their party in disgust, it should be a good time for Libertarians and other third parties to crank up their recruitment efforts. As regards a “Trump-Led third partty,” Geoffrey Skelley calls it “unlikely” at FiveThirtyEight. As Skelley writes, “On the one hand, this political calculation does make some sense. Many Americans (57 percent in 2020, per Gallup) think a third major party is needed. And there is some evidence that if there were more than two parties — for instance, if the Democratic Party and Republican Party each split in two — many Americans would identify with a new party.” However, Skelley notes that “many states have onerous ballot access lawsthat require large numbers of signatures or stringent filing fees. This makes things extra challenging for third parties as they have a harder time raising money, finding volunteers, paying workers and getting enough signatures to qualify to appear on a ballot than their Democratic and Republican counterparts….Voters’ strong attachment to the major parties has also limited the ability of third parties to grow. Although a huge share of voters claim they’re independent, the reality is that roughly nine in 10 Americans identify with one of the two major parties, and, by and large, that’s been the case for decades. Add in the deep divides in our current political environment, and the status quo doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon, especially as the risk of “wasting a vote” on a candidate with little chance of winning could actually help the party a voter dislikes win.”

In terms of formulating long-range strategy, Democrats would do well to heed the warning of Ronald Brownstein,  who writes at The Atlantic: “The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week started running ads tying potentially vulnerable GOP House members to both QAnon’s rising presence and Trump’s role in provoking the riot….Yet most Republicans appear more comfortable weathering those attacks than confronting what McConnell has called the “cancer” of growing extremist influence in the party. Opening the door to radicals like Greene is part of a much larger shift: As I’ve written before, the GOP is morphing into a quasi-authoritarian party—one that’s becoming more willing to undermine democratic norms to maintain power. Its long-term evolution toward any-means-necessary militance is likely to only intensify as the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity, which triggers so many in the party’s base, unspools through the 2020s. This tug toward conspiracy-theory-laden, often-racist extremism “is in the Republican Party DNA,” [author of Rule and Ruin Geoffrey] Kabaservice told me. “If the party isn’t going to forcefully turn against QAnon and the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazis who invaded the Capitol … then that DNA is going to be passed along in an even more virulent form to the next generation of Republicans.”

Nathaniel Rakich and Jasmin Mithani explain “What Absentee Voting Looked Like In All 50 States: It was historically popular — and historically Democratic” at FiveThirtyEight. As Rakich and Mithani write,

According to preliminary findings from the 2020 Survey on the Performance of American Elections, a poll of 18,200 registered voters run by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III, 46 percent of 2020 voters voted by mail or absentee — up from 21 percent in 2016, which at the time was considered high. Only 28 percent of people reported voting on Election Day — less than half of the 60 percent who did so in 2016. In-person early voting also reached a modern high (26 percent), although the change from 2016 (when it was 19 percent) was less dramatic.

Of course, the primary reason for the surge in absentee voting was the Covid-19 pandemic. The turnout was likely boosted by Trump’s alarming denial and incompetence in addressing the pandemic as it spiked upward across the nation.

And it was a broad increase, with few exceptions, across the 50 states. As Rakich and Mithani note,

….According to the SPAE, 47 states and the District of Columbia saw their rates of mail voting rise from 2016 to 2020. The only exceptions were the three states that have held predominantly mail elections for years: Colorado, Oregon and Washington. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest spikes in mail voting occurred in places that went the furthest to encourage mail voting (i.e., those that automatically sent every registered voter a ballot), especially those with little history of mail voting prior to 2020. These include New Jersey (where only 7 percent of voters voted by mail in 2016, but 86 percent did so in 2020), the District of Columbia (12 percent in 2016 versus 70 percent in 2020) and Vermont (17 percent in 2016 versus 72 percent in 2020).

By contrast, the five states that clung to the requirement that voters provide a non-pandemic-related excuse in order to vote by mail (Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas) saw some of the smallest increases. For example, Texas’s rate of mail voting in 2020 was only 11 percent (barely changed from 7 percent in 2016), while Mississippi’s was only 10 percent (just a tad higher than the 4 percent in 2016).

Here is FiveThirtyEight’s graphic display of the absentee voting increase in the states:

Rakich and Mithani add that “If we had data for all 50 states, we would likely see Trump winning the Election Day vote in almost all of them and Biden winning the absentee vote in almost all of them….the fact that these votes were so Democratic is very likely due to Trump himself. By casting doubt on the security of mail ballots, he all but ensured that most of his voters would cast their votes using traditional methods, leaving the pool of absentee ballots strikingly — but not surprisingly — blue.”

They note further that ” Some states are thinking about making their expansions of vote-by-mail permanent, while other states have shown little interest” and they warn, “still others are even considering bills to restrict absentee voting.” Voter asuppression is what Republicans do. Yet absentee voting is far easier on state budgets and remains highly popular with voters. Democrats should be prepared in all the battleground states for an extended fight over absentee voting — if they want to keep it.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I thought this was a fine essay by Andrew Koppelman on the Niskanen Center site. His basic point is that many, if not most, socialists are really social democrats who believe in a better capitalism and therefore are undermining their cause by insisting on the socialist label. Readers of my (now classic!) essay, “The Five Deadly Sins of the Left” will notice a family resemblance between Koppelman’s argument and sin #2 in that essay.

Here is perhaps the nub of his case:

“In a socialists-for-capitalism program, one of the first things that needs to go is the word “socialism” itself. George Orwell wrote in 1946 about the degradation of political discourse: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.” Every use of such empty terms, he thought, “anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.”

The sensible response by scholars who have studied the left is to distinguish (as Sheri Berman does in her wonderfully clarifying history, The Primacy of Politics) between socialism, which aims to abolish capitalism, and social democracy, which accepts a capitalist economy but demands a state strong enough to moderate its failures and excesses. Judis responds that social democracy is “a label that has no currency in American politics.” True, but there is value in a term that’s not already contaminated with misleading associations. It also helps to be able to articulate distinctions that matter….

Today’s American left has a suicidal tendency to rally around phrases with extreme, politically disastrous significations: defund the police, prison abolition, police abolition. Proponents of reform find themselves constantly explaining that those terms are not to be understood literally (giving new significance to the old slogan, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”). But the use of this toxic language is not accidental, because in each case the most committed members of the movement aren’t fooling; they are using the phrases literally. The police abolition movement includes genuine anarchists. As [John] Judis reports, many of the most committed American socialists are old-fashioned Marxists. Orwell thought that vague political terms like socialism “are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows the hearer to think he means something quite different.”

The DSA declares: “Until we face, and beat, the stigma attached to the ‘S word,’ politics in America will continue to be stifled and our options limited.” That’s true only if the option one hopes to keep open is the Marxist one, which even most Sanders voters reject. If the word frightens away voters, then it is the word itself that stifles politics and limits options. [EJ] Dionne and [William] Galston acknowledge that “Medicare and Social Security are, in a sense, socialist, and so are our public schools and universities, our community colleges, our water supplies and sewers, and our mass transit systems.” If those can happen without the S word – and they did – then they are not what the S word is necessary for. There are, indeed, enemies on the left.”

His argument is well worth reckoning with I think especially for those who have some attachment, sentimental or otherwise, to the socialist label but also wish to be politically effective.

For what it’s worth, here is how I made a similar case in my Five Deadly Sins essay.

“The second deadly sin of the Left is retro-socialism, which demands a complete remaking of the market system to heal the problems of contemporary capitalism. In this view, the ills of the current era are traceable to neoliberalism—faith in the market as the organizing mechanism for society—which compounds underlying problems with the capitalist system itself. The retro-socialists contend that the public is so sick of stagnating living standards, inequality, and periodic crises that it will (eventually) embrace their complete socialist overhaul of the system. This mistakes the public’s genuine discontent with current outcomes for a desire to abandon capitalism entirely. Voters are indeed dissatisfied with the current model of capitalism, but what they want is a different, better capitalism, not “socialism.”

The American Left is mostly careful to put the qualifier “democratic” in front of “socialism” to distinguish it from the authoritarian, command-economy socialists of yesteryear. And for many who use the term, their idea of socialism seems closer to a traditional social-democratic mixed economy than a radically different system that would somehow do away with profits and markets. So why call it socialism, a term that has all kinds of unpleasant associations and does imply a replacement of capitalism? Why not call it “people’s capitalism” or “democratic capitalism” or “the advanced mixed economy” or whatever?
By grasping nostalgically at revolutionary rhetoric, the Left sets the bar high for public embrace of what might otherwise be quite popular policy ideas, from single-payer health insurance to free college to a job guarantee. Generally, it is not a selling point for voters that your policies are a step along the road to socialism. Moreover, belief in the viability of replacing capitalism and the market encourages unrealistic thinking about policies that might work within a market system and misestimation of how quickly they might be adopted. This tendency has not gone unnoticed by voters, who are pragmatically interested in what is feasible and workable and have no ideological commitment to a different system. The socialist label and terminology undercut efforts to persuade voters that the Left’s agenda can work.”

A lot to chew on here. For further edification I recommend reading the two fine books Koppelman discusses in his essay, John Judis’ The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left (2020) and Fred Block’s Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion (2018). And then you can all join me in a rousing chorus of “The Red Flag” for old-times sake.

In “The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon: Their belief that this surreal conspiracy has arisen because of the poor education of its adherents is based in classism, not reality,” Osita Nwanevu writes at The New Republic: “There were plenty of graduates and good students in the mob that day. Plenty of dropouts and poor students looked on in horror. And as much as the right’s critics might prefer an understanding of what’s happened to our politics that flatters their intelligence, the challenge we’re facing isn’t that millions of hapless and benighted yokels have been bamboozled by disinformation. It’s that millions of otherwise ordinary people from many walks of life—including many who went to and even excelled in college—have a material or ideological interest in keeping the Democratic Party and its voters from power by any means possible. And those means include the utilization of narratives, including conspiracy theories, that delegitimize Democrats and offer hope of their eventual comeuppance….Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.”

Skylar Baker-Jordan’s article, “I come from white Appalachia. Here’s the hard truth about Marjorie Taylor Greene and why you can’t stop her: Nobody in DC can realistically rid us of Greene. If you want to strategize, take a look at what people think on the ground” at The Independent provides sensible guidance about how to get rid of the latest looney Repubican. As Baker-Jordan writes, “You will never find enough Congressional Republicans to reach the two-thirds threshold needed to send her packing. The only way to get rid of Marjorie Taylor Greene is the same way she got into the Capitol in the first place: via the ballot box. To do that, we need to be fighting Taylor Greene not in DC, but in Dalton….Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which Taylor Greene represents, borders my own district here in Tennessee and isn’t much different….Trump’s anointed candidate, Taylor Greene faced a comparatively poorly funded primary challenge which state GOP operatives blame McCarthy for stymying. Her Democratic opponent in the general was forced to drop out following a divorce which necessitated his move out of state, meaning she ran unopposed in the general election. Her victory is as much an accident of circumstance as it is a five-alarm fire of insanity….Democrats have long ignored the region and Republicans have long taken it for granted. So, the people of the Georgia 14th — faced with no real alternative — elected the South’s answer to the Mad Queen Cersei Lannister….Finding a local candidate with roots in the region to challenge her, either in the primary or in the general, could lead to her downfall. The Georgia Republican Party is in full-on civil war following its historic losses in the presidential and Senate races, but the Democratic Party — backed by an excellent ground game built and orchestrated by Stacey Abrams — is in a better position than it has been in decades….Focusing our efforts on expelling Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t only going to backfire. She raised $1.6 million off the efforts just last week, and the people of her district aren’t taking kindly to being told their choice isn’t good enough. If we want to extinguish this fire before it consumes us, we need to turn on the hose right now. But we need to fight this fire at its source, which means dousing the flames down in Georgia — not in DC.”

Marianne Levine reports on the “Democrats’ big shift in Trump’s second impeachment” at Politico: “Democrats made a push for witnesses central to President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. But not this time….Senate Democrats are making it clear they’re taking a different approach than they did for Trump’s infamous Ukraine call. Now, they say their experience as witnesses to the Jan. 6 insurrection is enough….“This is based on a public crime,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “His intent was unhidden and so I think there’s a danger as there always is for a trial lawyer and prosecutor to over-try, to add more witnesses that prove the obvious.”….Some Senate Democrats have called for a prompt trial, citing other priorities like coronavirus relief and the extreme unlikelihood that 17 Republicans will join them in convicting Trump. Meanwhile, most Republicans are coalescing around the argument that impeaching a former president is unconstitutional.” While Democrats feel an obligation to do their duty and try to convict Trump, they don’t want to waste too much time on it — especially when all indications are that the GOP is not going to do theirs. The evidence and the case for conviction are overwhelming to honest people who have a conscience and care about democracy. Unfortunately, few of today’s Republican senators meet that standard.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the case for conviction of Trump in his current Washington Post column, and his summation explains why Democrats had to do their duty: “He lied about the election — consistently, resolutely, systematically. He kept race in the forefront, regularly leveling his fraud charges against big Democratic cities in swing states where Black voters were a decisive force….And then he moved to replace democracy with mobocracy, gathering a throng in Washington and inciting it to march to the Capitol and sack it. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer, and the crowd threatened other elected officials, including Trump’s own vice president. This is the outrage that the House impeachment managers will describe in detail this week. The nation, and especially the Republican Party, cannot just walk away….The managers are expected to show video interviews of members of the rampaging horde making clear that they were doing what they were doing because Trump asked them to. And they will demonstrate that Trump himself welcomed the violence….We cannot have the national “unity” everyone claims to yearn for unless the president’s own party acknowledges that these were high crimes and misdemeanors of a fundamental sort. We’re talking about an attack on democracy itself through force and violence at the beckoning of a leader who sought to corrupt not only our political process but also our self-understanding as a nation of equals….The impeachment managers will be insisting that this can never be our “new normal.” Here’s wishing them Godspeed in their work.”

As someone who was in Des Moines during the 2020 Iowa Caucus debacle, I’ve been watching what may happen next with the presidential nominating system, and wrote it up at New York:

One year ago today, Iowa’s Democrats caucused in the first step of their party’s 2020 presidential-nomination process. As is now clear, state’s party officials were nervous heading into the night of the caucuses because of new reporting demands imposed on them by the national party, a new (the first ever) remote-caucuses process, and because they had doubts about the technologies being deployed to tabulate the results. And during the event, the overburdened, volunteer-run caucuses results reporting system broke down, leaving furious campaigns and pundits with nothing to talk about.

As I reported at the time from Des Moines, there was a palpable sense of mourning the following day amid widespread predictions that the meltdown would cost Iowa its privileged — but much-criticized — position in the nominating process.

Little did any of us political junkies know that the country was about to experience traumas that made the Iowa-caucuses reporting debacle the smallest of small potatoes. Even in terms of the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Iowa (along with its co-privileged first primary in New Hampshire) wound up being largely irrelevant, as the nomination was won by a candidate who finished fourth in Iowa (once the votes finally were tabulated) and fifth in New Hampshire.

In any event, the fateful presidential cycle of 2020 has now given way to its successor, and the parties are beginning to look ahead to 2024. Given everything that happened in the past year, everything’s on the table, including a return to the status quo that looked kaput after the last caucuses, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Democrats and Republicans are united in Iowa behind defending the state’s political golden goose: the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses …

“Members of both national parties are already strategizing about how to structure the 2024 nominating contests, a formal Democratic National Committee review is under way, and potential Republican presidential candidates are likely to spend time in Iowa and other early states this year.

“Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party of Iowa chairman, said he plans to meet soon with his newly elected Democratic counterpart, Ross Wilburn, and pledged bipartisanship in trying to keep both party caucuses first. ‘We will stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight,’ he said.”

One option for maintaining Iowa’s position as a protected “early state” (there are four whose status have been recently protected by both parties: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) would be to switch from a caucus to a primary (as Nevada is already planning to do in a bid to enhance its own status). But that would require action by the Republican-controlled legislature and an expenditure of taxpayer dollars in a state where the parties have controlled and financed the presidential nominating contest dating back to 1972. Worse yet, New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of State to take every necessary measure to ensure that its primary remains first is a problem for Iowa and for Nevada – it’s largely why Iowa has stuck with having a “first-in-the-nation caucus” for so many years.

A wild card is new DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison, who, as nominations-process expert Josh Putnam explains, may not approach the primary calendar unprejudiced:

“[N]ewly elected DNC chair, Jaime Harrison does hail from South Carolina. That could mean an effort to strip out contests that were not representative to the broader party (like the three states that preceded South Carolina on the 2020 Democratic calendar). But it could also translate to a maintenance of the status quo if the delegations from each carve-out state’s party to the DNC sees benefit in coalescing.”

Presidents have a huge influence over their own party’s rules for the nominating process. In Joe Biden’s case, it’s hard to overestimate how much he owes to South Carolina Democrats, who saved his bacon after poor performances in the three earlier contests and put him on the road to the White House. And any national deal to subordinate the “early states” could depend on the kind of bipartisan agreement that won’t be easy, particularly given the many uncertainties impacting the field for the presidential race in both parties. Yes, Iowa haters may use the experience of 2020 and the state’s (and equally white New Hampshire’s) unrepresentative nature to push for a new calendar. But so long as the four early states hang together, it’s a lot more plausible now than it was a year ago that the political class will again be spending many wintry days and nights in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2023 and 2024.

It’s now clear that killing the filibuster altogether is a non-starter, since several Democratic senators have already expressed opposition to the idea or are skeptical about it. The other non-starter is doing nothing, which would limit the potential accomplishments of the Biden Administration.  Michael Ettlinger, founding director of the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire discusses five alternative measures for filibuster reform at Vox. The first two proposals include,

1) The “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” rule

The current filibuster rules don’t require senators to hold the floor with uninterrupted oratory — the popular idea of a filibuster — to block action. If senators had to keep speaking to forestall a vote, gridlocking the Senate, it would make filibusters more painful and hence, presumably, less frequent. The bills that centrist Democratic senators most fear are those that Republicans most strongly oppose and would probably be blocked. Other needed legislation would, however, have a better chance.

2) 41 to block, instead of 60 to pass

Flip the way the Senate does business: Instead of requiring 60 votes to proceed on a bill, require 41 (or more) votes to block it. A bill could advance with a simple majority unless 41 senators were at hand to vote “no.” This would require 41 opponents to stay close to the Senate floor lest the bill slip through when their numbers are below the blocking threshold.

Both of these approaches are based on making the filibuster more of a hassle for senators and take time away from other work. Also, they may not work anyway, since the filibustering party should be able to find enough senators to hang around and obstruct the legislation. But the next three reform proposals Ettlinger discusses should have more appeal. They incude:

3) More exceptions to the filibuster rule

There are currently exceptions to the 60-vote requirement for budget reconciliation and, as of recently, presidential nominations. More exceptions could be added. The benefits of this approach, and the level of support for it, would depend on the breadth of the exceptions. Exceptions that have been suggested include votes to raise the debt limit, expand voting rights (HR1, for example) or fund the federal government.

This approach could also be tailored to deal with very specific concerns of senators; there could be an exception, for example, for “legislation that expands access to health care.” Another possibility would be to allow majority votes on statehood to make it possible for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to gain representation. Ad-hoc exceptions are an inelegant approach, but might be necessary.

4) Overcome the filibuster with a vote in two Congresses

Allow passage of bills that can currently be filibustered when a simple majority supports the legislation in two successive Congresses, with an intervening election. A number of states similarly require votes in successive legislative sessions for advancing state constitutional amendments. This approach would allow the will of the Senate majority to be expressed, ending the ability of a minority to perpetually block legislation, but with an opportunity for opponents to make their case, and voters to intervene.

This approach would also create an incentive to pass compromise legislation without waiting for the second vote: Each side has something to gain by coming to an agreement that provides the 60 votes needed for one-session passage in exchange for changes in the legislation. It would still be very hard to pass legislation, but a persistent, election-tested, majority could accomplish its goals, even in the face of a committed opposition.

5) Lower the filibuster threshold

The number of votes needed to break a filibuster was previously reduced from 66 votes to 60. It could be further reduced. If one thinks that there are Republican senators who might break from their party to support some Democratic priorities, reducing the threshold to 52 or 53 votes would address the concern of passing legislation with no Republican support, while not requiring more than the couple of centrist Republicans to join.

Yes, yes and yes — these are all good ideas. It should be possible to get Democratic senators who oppose killing the filibuster to support some combination of these three alternatives, with a little arm-twisting and positive inducements, if needed.