Trouble brewing

The president is on a roll lately.

The recent ugliness surrounding The Squad is a case in point.  Frustrated by the continued string of off-the-script attention garnered by freshman Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rasheda Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley (known collectively as "The Squad"), Nancy Pelosi groused publicly about them a while back, mustering as much condescension as she could.  A back-and-forth continued for days as the Squad was not prepared to take the digs lying down. Seizing on the moment, the president jumped on Pelosi's bandwagon, commandeering it until it went careening down a hill of flaming bigotry and racism to the delight of Trump's base and forcing Pelosi to attempt a backpedal in defense of the women she had been trying to tarnish.

But you have to wonder who Pelosi is defending them to?  She has no influence over Trump's base, and her recalcitrant refusal to hold Trump accountable for his abuse of office -- her preference to run out the clock on his first term, thereby in effect doing her part to keep Trump's agenda in motion -- is destroying any credibility she may have once had with the vast and nebulous multitude of potential democratic voters who needed no help in supporting the Squad to begin with.  That leaves her true constituency, the Democratic establishment and their corporate donors, a well-heeled group who will have no guarantee of success in defeating the Know-Nothing Trump in 2020 on their own, and whose tenuous grip on what motivates voters in these times shows no sign of tightening, a predicament that spells continued, and by now all-too-familiar trouble for the coming election.  In this case, it was clearly trouble of Pelosi's own making.  And it's no trouble for Trump.

The answer for Pelosi and these types always seems to be to tone it down, stay the course, hold the middle.  It's really no mystery why the sexless, featureless, flavorless center that voters understandably reject-- and after all, why not reject it since what has it done for them lately?-- is so seductive to the Dem establishment: it's the Benjamins, baby!  Come on!  This is exactly what their donors are paying for.  That glazed look in Nancy Pelosi's eyes that you observe whenever she is explaining herself for the cameras is the 100 yard stare at her true audience, the donors watching the show from their skyboxes.

That show is going to continue for as long as it has sponsors.  Sponsorship seems to have little to do with popularity as measured by the count of heartbeats, nor with effectiveness-- although we can almost certainly rest assured that it is having whatever effect the sponsors are after.  What really concerns me is the sway that it seems to continue to have on a certain segment of the electorate that votes Democratic.  These are the voters who if you polled them would state as their first priority for 2020, defeating Donald Trump.  According to a Harris Poll taken in May, 65% of voters who identify as Democrats say the top characteristic they are looking for in a candidate is his or her ability to defeat Trump, above any policies that they may agree with.  This singular focus no doubt accounts for Biden's enduring support in the face of public airings of his superhero origins in States Rights, advocacy of amped-up privatized incarceration, credit card company favoritism and the propounding of anti-busing legislation, which support we can expect to endure as long as the mysterious perception that Biden stands a good chance against Trump survives.  It's hardly worth constructing an argument against, given Biden's pattern of imploding on his own.

I am the first to say that Trump has got to go.  That's obvious.  But obviousness is exactly the problem with investing all of one's hopes and dreams on that one anti-goal at this stage of the game.  Defeating Republicans is what Democrats exist for -- obviously!-- but it cannot be everything that they exist for, or they will lose again.

Until there is only one Democrat left in the race, it should be the mission of democratic voters to define the alternative future that their candidate is going to represent.  Trump has clearly laid out the future we do not want to have. If Democrats don't sell us a better future, Trump's may continue to be the dystopian one we live in.