Shut Up, James Carville
Congratulations on the election you won 32 years ago, but things have changed a little.
Once upon a time, 32 years ago or so, a man named James Carville achieved the impossible. He helped a nice-looking, sorta-hip-for-that-time, saxophone-playing guy widely known to be one of the most charming motherfuckers on earth win an election against a deeply unpopular and uncharismatic Frank Perdue-looking president presiding over a failing economy alongside a vice president who could not spell the word “potato.”
The levels of full-on fairy godmother magic required to pull that one off are still a mystery unto us all. All we do know is that he encouraged this man to focus on the economy and to engage in a now-legendary attack against a Black female hip-hop artist that likely did not have any actual effect on the outcome of the election, in order to let the whole world know that he rejected Black left-wing activists and, more specifically, that he rejected Jesse Jackson.
Since then, Carville has styled himself as an election whisperer, working on such fabulously successful campaigns as John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination — and otherwise sticking to elections in foreign countries because, as he explained, “if you go to Peru and you run a presidential race and you lose, no one knows or cares.” He’s also spent no small amount of time telling Democrats what they are doing wrong.
In a New York Times op-ed published this week, Carville suggested that Democrats in office should completely ignore the demands of their constituents to speak out, and instead be vewy, vewy quiet and wait for Republicans to screw up, and then reap their just rewards at the ballot box.
Here’s how he imagines it happening:
For Round 2 in office, instead of prioritizing the problems he campaigned on — public safety, immigration and the border and, most of all, the economy — President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government. To accomplish this, he has put his faith in the most incompetent cabinet in modern history: a health and human services secretary who is already targeting federal vaccination efforts and dumped a bear carcass in Central Park as a fun prank at age 60, a director of national intelligence who was devoted to an allegedly abusive yoga-centered cult, a WWE tycoon turned head of Department of Education and a former cable news talking head as defense secretary. Which will result in one clear thing: disorder. There will probably be more enormous tax cuts for the wealthy and Medicaid cuts hitting a lot of other people, but there is nothing the American public despises more than disorder and a broken economy.
If the American public gave a flying fuck about “disorder,” would they have elected Donald Trump to be president? I don’t think so. Clearly it’s not nearly as high on anyone’s list as Carville imagines it is. “Disorder,” actually, is the thing that is making them feel like something is getting done.
He’s also vastly overestimating the average American’s powers of observation and ability to connect cause and effect. Trump and the GOP have also given themselves a buffer by telling people that they are going to have to “tighten their belts” so that we can “live within our means,” and that if they just go through this, there is a big pot of gold waiting for them on the other side — and an army of trolls out there putting that message out on repeat, suggesting that anyone who isn’t willing to go along with it is selfish and lazy. It’s going to be harder for people to connect their own hardship with a bad economy rather than some temporary austerity in exchange for something better.
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.
Yeah, that’s not actually going to happen, either. Because all that’s going to do is give Republicans the opportunity to set the narrative themselves, and the story they’re going to tell is going to show themselves and Trump in a fabulous light.
The Army has a term for this: tactical pause. It’s a vision move — get out of the hour-to-hour, day-to-day combat where one side (ours) is largely playing defense and struggling to defend politically charged positions (like explaining D.E.I. or persuading voters to care about foreign aid) and take time to regroup, look forward and make decisions about where we want to get to over the next two years. I don’t think a lot of Americans are waiting around for us to use the same old arguments and same old language to pile on Donald Trump. They’re tired of it, and our Democratic voters are tired of watching us moan and groan to cover up our impotency out of power. They want us to be smarter than that.
Yes, we should explain DEI. We should explain why people should care about foreign aid. We need to be clear about how little we spend on it and what a difference it makes around the world. We need to be able to tell America a story it wants to hear about itself. Every single time we cede a narrative to the Right, we lose and we encourage them to do it again. There’s not a bottom. Democrats need a clear and coherent ideology and they need to be able to explain to voters why their way is better, rather than being scared that doing so will put them off.
The long-time Democratic habit of retreating and conceding loss whenever the Right targets something or someone has never resulted in a single thank you card, at the ballot box or anywhere else.
Also, Democratic voters have actually made it very, very clear that they want Democrats to be an actual opposition party this time around. And if they refuse, we are going to replace them.
Our first major test in the art of strategic retreat comes in a few weeks, as the Trump administration must get a budget passed that raises the debt ceiling. There are deep internal Republican divides over the budget: Republicans don’t know what they want to include, they don’t agree on an agenda, and they do not have a clear path forward. Mr. Trump has asked for an abolishment of the debt ceiling. The speaker of the House, his close ally, has yet to definitively support him on it.
Yeah, so: The main reason people are going along with the DOGE shit is because they believe that the country is going to use the “savings” (the so-far practically non-existent savings) to pay down our debt, which they consider probably the second-most important issue after deporting undocumented immigrants. Republicans have been pretty smart about doubling down on issues that are never actually going to impact anyone’s lives, so that all they need to “succeed” is to loudly proclaim victory.
It would be beyond stupid to let this one fly — especially since he is raising it not to improve the lives of everyday Americans, but to give very, very rich people a tax break. It gives us an opportunity to show people that “fiscal conservatism” is not just cruel, it’s obscenely irresponsible.
Already, many Democrats across the party are itching at their seams for a showdown. Instead of gearing up to fight them — as we love to do — the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse. Do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ’em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink and it appears they could collapse the global economy, come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party.
There are people out there who love the idea of “making politics boring again.” All of those people are already reliable, economically well-off Democratic voters who are generally only affected by government when politicians personally annoy them. There are also people out there who are put off by arguments and “infighting.” These are those same voters. No one else cares. They either ignore everything or they’re not as averse to chaos as Carville believes they are.
It won’t take long. Public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening. Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls. The people did not vote for the Department of Education to be obliterated; they voted for lower prices for eggs and milk. Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away.
No one actually voted for “lower prices for eggs and milk” — that was always a troll. It was always a fake-out. It was always something they went after to make themselves sound reasonable. And yes, a very large number of them absolutely did vote for the Department of Education to be abolished, because they have no idea what the Department of Education actually even does and they have been told for years that it is the source of all of their school-related pain.
This is not to say that the #resistance strategy of responding to everything Trump and friends do or tweet, including eating steak incorrectly and making spelling errors, is the way to go. Rather, we need to stick to the things that actually matter. Democrats need to be out there putting forth a coherent ideology, explaining to people why the Department of Education is necessary, pointing out when things that piss people off are the result of what Trump and the other Republicans are doing.
Why? Because otherwise people don’t know. We have a lot of bread and circuses in this country and it takes a lot of noise to break through that. We no longer have a media that reaches everyone in the nation — the Right has its own media and legacy media is doing everything it can to disassociate itself from the Left. We no longer, for the most part, even really share a social media.
If Democrats shut their mouths, they have no chance of controlling the narrative, and the narrative is all a whole lot of people will ever get. These people have no idea what any of these departments do, what the federal workers who are being fired do, and they don’t know why they are necessary. Therefore, even when they come up on ways in which they are inconvenienced, they are not going to make that connection unless it is pointed out to them.
We need elected Democrats, who still have platforms, to use them in order to show people what they would do differently, to tell the story they want to tell (and stick to it) and to connect the dots for them. There is only one person here who needs to shut up and go into a tactical retreat, and that person is James Carville.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
>> the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead <<
I'm sorry, is this or is this not exactly what elected Dems have been doing repeatedly since the passage of the ACA?
I am guessing he is not going to be negatively affected by anything trump and the Republicans do. Easy for him to say play dead Democrats, because no matter what happens, he will be just fine.