To McFly or not to McFly?
by Tom Sullivan
Robert Mueller finally appears on Capitol Hill this morning to answer questions about is report on Russia and Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice. No one should expect a Democratic impeachment inquiry out of it. Brian Beutler writes at Crooked Media, “Naturally, conflict-averse moderates want no part of such a confrontation, and so Democratic leaders have done everything in their power to stave it off.”
Pundits regularly chalk up the divide in the Democratic Party to an ideological split between progressives and moderates. Alternatively, between an activist wing and a “corporate” one institutionalized to Washington and lobbyist money. Referencing some tweets by Matt Stoller, I described it as a cultural difference between those with enough tenure to have become conflict averse after years of abuse by more aggressive Republicans (and conservative media) and those new enough not to have absorbed the lesson of going along to get along. But that makes it also a generational divide, as Ryan Grim described, between Democrats with a kind of Vietnam syndrome left over from the 1980s and those born later who never contracted it.
Beutler adds to the anthropological study his observation that progressives itch for a fight while more “don’t make Daddy angry” Democrats see ruffling as few feathers as possible as the more reliable path to retaining power:
But because Democratic candidates in battleground districts campaigned almost exclusively on inoffensive kitchen-table issues like protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions, the lesson the party took from the midterms is that correlation equals causation—that the only way to beat Trump in Republican precincts is to be as milquetoast as possible, and to take no position on any of Trump’s outrages apart from his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Perilous times demand taking risks. Timorous Democrats invite disaster. From December 2016 post:
After confiding my concerns about Democrats playing it safe in the age of Trump, my friend summed up the situation in a single, powerful metaphor: “The Ring has to go to Mordor. It won’t help to carry it back to The Shire.”
Jamelle Bouie responds to Beutler via Twitter:
it is incredible, and very on-brand, that the democratic lesson from 2018 was not that the public was energized against the president and wanted to cast a vote against him, but that if you hide in your shell and say health care every other sentence, you won’t get hurt too badly.— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 23, 2019
Beutler asks, “Should Democrats be afraid or proud of fighting as hard as they can to help as many people as possible? They have spent their first six months in power testing the theory that they can do the most good from a defensive crouch, and it’s gotten them nowhere”
Jeepers, I don’t know. Which George McFly do you pump your fist for?