After all the bilious racist, misogynist, xenophobic, birther horseshit that’s come out of this man’s mouth all these months and years, this has finally blown my mind:

I’m promoting this topic from a comment thread that will get too deep otherwise. Laska and I were going back and forth on what we think “left” and “liberal” mean. Defining terms is always impossible, but it may be actually interesting that in this election year, those two are up for definition after so many years of being run away from. We also have an opportunity this year to ponder what “populist” and “fascist” mean. Even “democracy” and “republic.”

Regarding “left,” I like to stick with old, hardassed definitions  like “struggle against capitalism,” partly because that rules out seeing liberalism as a philosophy of incremental progress toward left goals. Like Naomi Klein is a leftist, not a liberal: the climate crisis is to her the crisis that will bring about the revolutionary change she’s always wanted to bring about anyway. But I’d call any movement left that wants to use the power of the state to advance labor over capital.

So maybe Orwell would be left? And maybe all democratic socialists?  And maybe Laska too?

In that context, the 19th Century Populists were left, though by no mean Marxist. And yet when I see today’s new-new left, with its revived Marx-Leninism, claiming Lincoln and free-labor free-soilers for its own, I cry foul, though unfortunately, in space nobody can hear you scream.

Hilarious to me that Marx himself started that tradition by trying  to rope Lincoln into the communist international (scroll down for the natural brushoff).

As much as, in this election year, I know something’s happening but I don’t know what it is, I’m kind of glad these questions are being raised. I think we’ve never had any idea what we mean when we say “American democracy” or “democratic republic” or “of the people, by the people, for the people.” A more optimistic person than Mister Jones would see this election year as the beginning of a painful national quest to find out.

I’ve been thinking about “incrementalism” too. It’s another big word out there this year, and those who use it don’t mean it in a nice way — does anyone actually call themselves incrementalist any more? (I actually don’t know.) Isn’t it basically a slam? But I think I’m on a track somewhat parallel to Laska’s post on the idea, so this isn’t really a response to that.

I’m wondering about this: liberal incrementalism toward — slow, steady, art-of-the-possible steps toward — what? The end of capitalism?

Because I think I’ve been seeing on the left (by which I mean on my Twitter TL), and especially on the crunchy-liberaloid wannabe left (I wish Nate Silver should poll on that filter), a muddling of the goals of what I think of as two totally distinct, actually historically opposed categories: leftism and modern social-contract liberalism.

The incrementalism of a Bill Clinton, for example, as addressed in Laska’s post, seems to me to to have represented, philosophically anyway, a backing off, in the particular historical and partisan context of the day, of modern “big-government,” Great Society liberalism, widely at the time deemed to have failed — and to have threatened, hardly coincidentally to certain pols’ urgency around solving the problem, the entire Democratic Party — in favor of a more cautious approach, mingling elements of conservatism, with an intention to incrementally regain, and pragmatically defend and maintain, more modest versions of the original goals of modern social-contract liberalism, as founded in the New Deal. That process was intended to revive — again, far from coincidentally — the party, re-attracting white working-class voters who had grown skeptical, putting it mildly, of both liberalism and the party, and appealing to the young and upscale, and yet the process was also intended to refrain from abandoning — supposedly — original liberal goals.

The ways in which that approach succeeded and failed, and was ill- or well-conceived to begin with, are important for the issues raging in this election, and Laska has started that conversation for this blog here.  But when it comes to defining terms, I want to hold up a minute and begin sorting something out. And now it’s occurring to me that this does have something to do with both of Laska’s most recent posts.

It’s true that Clinton Democrats / DLC / neoliberals took an approach that they justified, anyway, as a more incremental way of achieving, in a new political and economic context, the social goals of modern liberalism. And they may have been more or less or 100% full of shit. But I sniff a feeling out there, among both some leftists and some liberals, that liberalism itself, even at its most FDR-LBJ aggressive, may be defined as an inherently incrementalist philosophy, one intended to move slowly — i.e., weakly and phonily, to leftists in this mood, and pragmatically and sincerely, to liberals in this mood — toward goals that are ultimately those of the left. I.e., evolving the country to a condition of economic equality, with public ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialism.

I think that reading of modern social liberalism is way off in so many obvious ways, but to make it crazy plain: the origins of the program put forth by FDR, and carried through (by no means always in concert) by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nelson Rockefeller, and maintained, if in a less vigorously progressive manner, by the likes of Eisenhower, JFK, and Nixon, had origins in an effort to defeat and destroy the socialist American left that, in the 1930’s, had made such strong inroads  with American workers, for many cogent reasons.

The idea was to defeat socialism, save capitalism. Not endorsing that, or saying that it can ever work — but put that way, socialism and social liberalism are in direct conflict with one another. No real leftist would ever see the New Deal as a revolution.

It’s true that there’s a parody left pov, in which the inherent opposition of liberalism and socialism is all just part of some dialectic process leading inevitably toward the end of capitalism anyway. (With great lawyers Mister Jones has discussed lepers and crooks.) I don’t know: maybe in his rabid anticommunism the hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey just didn’t know he was part of a process unfolding toward democratic socialism.

And I take some of this muddling as deliberate. The Jacobin left seems to be in a kind of Popular Front mood regarding the Sanders campaign; I suspect it wants to maneuver fellow-traveling common-cause libs into seeing their own liberalism as naturally tending toward leftism, but just in a lame and crappy way, as Clintonian liberal incrementalism will demonstrate. That mood might pull right-thinking young converts away from liberalism as a whole — once the failure of the Sanders campaign demonstrates the failures of liberal democracy as a whole — and toward the revived Marx-Leninism that the young, optimistic new-new left braintrust is into. (I like everything about them — except the optimism.)

So if it’s tactical, I get it. Attack liberal incrementalism, you also undermine liberalism as a whole, even at its least incremental. And I can’t disagree with the critique, even if it is often made too covertly and manipulatively for my taste: maybe New Deal liberalism was always just the old bourgeois political economy with a human face. But if some leftists and liberals actually think the New Deal liberalism we all claim we want to revive came along to provide a form of slow change leading, if at times too slowly for the left, toward the end of capitalism — what I see as the ultimate goal of anything I’d call left — as a kind of American Fabian socialism — then I think they (we) have had our political heads up our asses for decades, and being in that position might help explain why the country is having such a hard time talking about anything.

A question  — less for lefties like Laska than for liberals (like me?) — might be: whether incrementalist or anti-incrementalist, why are you a damn liberal at all, anyway? The kind of question a self-satisfied liberal like Jonathan Chait (a longer-winded Hodgman with no sense of humor) never genuinely asks. Maybe because, if we really look back at the New Deal, and who got left out, and how fragile that doomed coalition really was anyway, largely because of American racism, the answers are bound to be pretty bleak. It’s hard to get excited about any brand of liberalism right now, and that’s why I prefer the grim “hold the total lunatics at bay one more time” approach to anything pretending aspiring to inspiration.

“…like any political system, it can be gamed,” rightly notes Laska in a comment on “Getting Nominated in America,” listing that fact as among sources of growing public frustrations with the current system. The system is designed to create a winning outcome, he notes there too, and again I think rightly points out that “designed to win” isn’t the same as “designed to achieve certain goals.”

I’ve found the issue a big point of interest this election year, and my superficial studies of older primaries and conventions suggest that public frustration may arise less from the fact that the system  can be gamed than from unhappy situations that arise when it’s not gamed to go our way. Like: do we want a clean, fair fight and will accept loss with a good will under those circumstances? Or do we just want our candidate to win (leaving aside the question of what goals may thereby be achieved) and can more or less handle the gaming that goes on to make that happen?

Short of rank criminality, I mean. I’m not talking about outright election fraud, lawbreaking (although Dems probably tolerate some of that, too, when remembering JFK’s victory in 1960); this is more about the trickiness that seems like a lot of what politics fundamentally is, in situations where competition for public support is the mode, as in a democratic republic. The hardass pols of the past were just great at the game, loved it as such, didn’t think of it any other way. I find that creepily fascinating and weird,  and only sometimes related to achieving goals, but I also think none of those who ever did achieve good goals ever looked at the process any other way. I’m glad Lincoln won the 1860 election, for example, and I find it really doesn’t bother me–within the available contexts–to have read somewhere (I’m too lazy to look it up right now) how Lincoln’s people used a favorite-son tactic at the convention to deny Seward a first-ballot victory, getting Seward’s people seated far from their allies, printing fake tickets to pack the floor with hundreds of loud people to yell for Lincoln, offering positions to bosses in order to swing delegations, etc.

Or maybe it does bother me. But the way it bothers me opens up questions about society and human nature that run deeper than anything elections, democracy, parties, or reforming them can ever address. If we survive, there will be better ways to do things. Or at least it’s the right thing to believe that’s possible. For now, though, maybe gaming the system is the system we’ve believed in, and actually kind of liked, for a long time.

In Parade’s End, the young suffragist Valentine Wannop and the thirtyish “last Tory in England” Christopher Tietjens are arguing about allowing women to vote (it’s just before WWI).

She says:  “But just get it out, will you? […] — you know the proper, pompous manner: You are not without sympathy with our aims, but you disapprove […] of our methods.”

He says (after some internal monologue): “I don’t.  I approve entirely of your methods [riot, protest, civil disobedience, etc.] , but your aims are idiotic.”

And later he asks her: “What good did a vote ever do anyone?”

With which Trotsky, writing maybe five years after the fictional conversation, might have heartily agreed.

As disenfranchised people have fought, bled, and literally died for their right to vote, Tietjens’s dismissal of democracy, and his tolerance of riot, say, can sound glib from our vantage point–and Valentine comes right back at him (and later they fall insanely in love)–but he has a point nonetheless, and it’s not “it’s rigged, they’re all crooks, don’t bother to vote” but something far more profound, regarding the origins of elections in the Anglo world from which our own systems came, what purposes elections were originally meant to serve, and how we may have failed to understand that extending the franchise may never be a way of revolutionizing systems in a genuinely democratic way. Might be like extending a blade of grass in hopes of one day using it to hit a baseball over the fence.

Not that anyone’s ever come up with a better idea.  Anyway–it’s a good book.

The following is a re-post of something posted earlier that temporarily fell victim to the heated behind-the-scenes corporate politics prevailing here at In at the End of the World. I repost it now, with a few updates:

This relates to issues raised in What’s a Primary For, Really, and Coronations, below. I hope somebody will jump on here and give us a real history of how the party nominating processes developed. My generalized impression is of a series of ongoing reforms over many decades, intended to bring elements of democracy to a process for nominating presidential candidates that is not inherently democratic at all, given the nature of how the parties themselves developed. Like at first some guys in a room pretty much decided it, with little public input and little press coverage of all the scuzzy dealmaking involved. But if you’re a party, you want to avoid nominating a candidate who can’t win. So some public input is a benefit, and that impulse dovetailed somehow with 19thC. reform movements for making the political process more democratic. So: primary elections in some states, for one thing.

But I can well remember at thirteen, in the hot summer of 1968, asking my parents, with outrage, how my guy Eugene McCarthy could have won primaries and yet Hubert Humphrey, who didn’t compete in primaries, could get the nomination. I’m sure I answered myself: It’s rigged!

Well, yes, rigged indeed, but the rules of the rigging weren’t secret; I just didn’t know them. In those days, conventions were still a matter of peeling off the other guys’ delegates–they were far more loosely “pledged”–with promises and threats and highballs while trying to protect your own. A lot can happen between the NH primary and August; anyway, whole delegations were under direct control of governors and other bosses, and the trick seems to have been to deny a frontrunner outright victory on the first ballot, then try to widen the cracks and find a space for your candidate to rise in succeeding rounds. In the 1940 GOP convention, for example, Wendell Wilkie, after coming in second and third, was nominated on the sixth ballot.

Reforms have ensued. [UPDATE: In a comment now lost, CVFD reminded me that the most modern reforms came from McGovern, after 1968; he was the most knowledgeable about the rules. Made me reflect on how McGovern’s disastrous campaign has been invoked this year, in just this context: do you want things so democratic that a nominee is selected (cough, Sanders, cough) who might only carry one state? The counter to that would be that this year maybe *only* the more democratically supported candidate has a shot in November.] Have we come a long way since the days of brokered conventions? Should we go farther? Trump seems to want a general election–of him–in the primary process. Some Sanders supporters object strenuously to certain party voting rules in certain states as not only insufficiently democratic but outright suppression; then again, many of the same supporters celebrated Sanders’s victories in highly undemocratic caucuses; and others are pretending, at least, that their strategy is to sway the superdelegates at the convention to overcome a popular majority. So what the hell is this process, anyway, and what are the principles involved, if any, and what if anything does the process have to do with our cockamamie ideas about American democracy?  And are we going to see something old-school this summer, at least at the GOP convention?

In the meantime, I found this funny and possibly informative of realpolitik: https://www.yahoo.com/news/party-primaries-are-not-public-decisions-rules-154558765.html