Fuck Off, James Carville
Democrats don't have a "woke problem," they have an economic one, stupid.
(MSNBC/Tim Burke via Twitter)
James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist who gained mythological status among the pundit class as the Ragin’ Cajun who orchestrated Bill Clinton’s rise to power, wants you to know that the Democrats have a “wokeness” problem. At least, that’s the conceit of his recent media tour, starting with a Vox article published Tuesday and an MSNBC appearance Wednesday, which gave me the picture for this article.
James Carville is, as you might expect from a 75-year-old white man who lives in a multi-million dollar mansion in New Orleans and is married to one of the co-founders of “Catholics for Trump,” is not quite in touch with the wants of your average Democrat. This is a man who endorsed Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) in last year’s Democratic primary, calling him “John Kennedy recloned.” (Bennet dropped out after finishing 11th in New Hampshire, below Tulsi Gabbard, Deval Patrick, and write-in candidates.)
So why should we still listen to him? As the Vox interview shows, when it comes to individual ideas, Carville doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about either:
Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan? Where’s the flag? Where’s the logo?
We don’t have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You don’t need the sloganeering and sound bites. That’s for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts, and from that, everyone will just get it.
Hm, where indeed are the bumper stickers? The world may never know. To Carville’s credit, when he acknowledges Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he elides a full equivocation of her with Marjorie Taylor Greene. The typical play for a pundit would be to paint two sides as equally extreme, despite AOC (to my knowledge) never calling for the execution of a sitting member of Congress. What Carville tells Vox, however, is a more insidious insult:
Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.
Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.
This is an incredible sleight of hand. In this interview, Carville—himself a longtime cable talking head—ignores Ocasio-Cortez’s signature policy, actively rejecting substance to make a stylistic comparison. Marjorie Taylor Greene has no signature policy. She is a Newsmax segment given sentience.
Newsmax, by the way, has a millionaire owner, much like OANN and Fox News beforehand, willing to shovel cash and airtime out to Greene and her ilk, so long as she keeps cutting their taxes. No financier is lining up to do the same for Ocasio-Cortez or her policies; she’d hurt their bottom line. This media economy, in which the millionaire James Carville is an active participant, is a fairly compelling reason as to why right-wing narratives tend to supersede left-wing policy in the public consciousness.
Speaking of the economy: that’s something Carville really likes to do. He earned his reputation as a political svengali with his de facto slogan for Clinton’s upstart 1992 presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As told to Vox, he remained steadfastly on message:
Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there’s nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we’re running?
If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.
Once a spin doctor, always a spin doctor; Carville never tells us who “they” are. The only concrete thing he can point to in the article a single tweet from Rep. Rashida Tliab (D-MI) calling to abolish the police. But Tlaib is very clearly outside of the mainstream of her party, with everyone from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders rejecting calls to even defund the police. No Democrat in Miami-Dade campaign telling people that Democrats will defund the police; the only people saying that are Tucker Carlson and the weirdos on WhatsApp.
So why don’t Democrats listen to Carville and run on popular policies like felon enfranchisement? Well, maybe they happened to be listening at the wrong time, like February 2020:
We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.
[Bold is mine, not Vox’s.]
Carville only got half of what he wanted, unfortunately: while Bernie Sanders did not win the nomination, Joe Biden did, “block[ing] out good candidates like Cory Booker or Michael Bennet or Steve Bullock.” And yet, those “fringe” positions, despite the right-wing media feedback loop (and their centrist accomplices) working overtime to paint them as mainstream, didn’t stop Democrats from flipping the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. Hell, some of them became mainstream enough to be accepted by guys like James Carville!
Of course, the Democrats underperformed expectations in 2020, losing ground in the House and only narrowly reclaiming the Senate. Carville is eager to blame that on “wokeness.” Yet if we travel back in time and listen to another nugget of Carville’s wisdom, and assume — just for a second — that it is indeed the economy, stupid, you’ll find perhaps a more compelling explanation, as Jamelle Bouie wrote shortly after the election in the New York Times:
At the end of March, President Trump signed the Cares Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks ($1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold) to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits. These programs were not perfect — the supplement unemployment insurance, in particular, depended on ramshackle state systems, forcing many applicants to wait weeks or even months before they received assistance — but they made an impact regardless. Personal income went up and poverty went down, even as the United States reported its steepest ever quarterly drop in economic output...
Voters, and especially the low-propensity voters who flooded the electorate in support of Trump, aren’t attuned to the ins and outs of congressional debate. They did not know — and Democrats didn’t do a good enough job of telling them — that the president and his party opposed more generous benefits. All they knew is that Trump signed the bill (and the checks), giving them the kind of government assistance usually reserved for the nation’s ownership class.
Indeed, for all of his horrific austerity and bluster, Trump did go against decades’ worth of conventional Washington wisdom to directly give money to people — far more tangible in a voter’s life than a random member of Congress across the country calling for a policy with no shot of passing.
The CARES Act, and Biden’s subsequent willingness to dish out more cash, marks a paradigm shift. While Carville and Clinton campaigned, and delivered, on “ending welfare as we know it” in 1992, the amorphous fear of running up the national debt doesn’t seem quite as existential during a pandemic where people are losing their jobs, homes, and lives. As Bouie suggests, it's not just good policy, but good politics.
As Upton Sinclair wrote, “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In Carville’s case, his salary isn’t contigent on his understanding anything; he told what the ruling class what they wanted to hear. Of course, that didn’t stop when he became a member of the ruling class itself.
If Clinton hadn’t bought into the right-wing deficit canard in the first place, then Trump wouldn't be there to reap the benefits of bringing back its scraps later, with the added benefit of not immiserating hundreds of thousands of people in poverty as collateral. If James Carville was interested in winning—or, say, not a man who had made millions as a political operative—maybe he would’ve realized that before 2021. Instead, his best advice for Obama was to smoke crack. Fuck off, James Carville.
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