A personality cult in search of a personality
You know what No Labels is. Digby’s been shouting it. But they are stuck with no serious candidate yet still hope to keep the spoiler train roling. Without the spoiling.
Roll tape leaked to The New Republic:
The contents of the call offered nothing to dispel this fear. The call consisted of No Labels party members from numerous states, each reporting on what members in their states and regions were thinking and feeling. While many of these local leaders said there’s a lot of enthusiasm for a No Labels run, some of them reported that members are wary of functioning as a spoiler.
For instance, a No Labels leader in Idaho said that while members are all for run, they believe the ticket should “only” be offered to a candidate who has a “reasonable path to succeed and not be a spoiler.” A leader in Iowa said the candidate must be “strong” and have “the ability to win.”
They don’t know what they want but they want it now. Somehow.
What was striking about this call was how deeply a lot of these party members have bought into No Labels’ hype. One leader after another repeated, almost robotically, the idea that a No Labels candidacy would be a true act of heroism that could only rescue the country from the alleged horrors of having to choose between Biden and Trump.
I don’t know what they’re smoking, but it’s not your grandfather’s weed.
Biden, of course, has at times governed in a bipartisan way—which No Labels says it prizes. And there’s a vast asymmetry at play here, in which Trump poses a severe threat to our democracy and our country, and one major party is his willing accomplice in this regard, even as Biden and Democrats pose no such threat.
But No Labels simply refuses to accept this basic state of affairs. And there was no sense on the call that party members have seriously grappled with what it means that one side poses that dire threat while the other does not, or whether that creates an obligation for No Labels to be particularly cautious in proceeding. Instead, there was a lot of self-congratulatory talk about the group’s own bravery.
And you thought MAGA was the only political cult loose in the land. What do you call a personality cult in search of a personality?
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