Obama’s Sexism and the Democrats’ Dead Dogma

Strictly as a matter of political theater, it’s difficult to root for either party. Warren, the great progressive hope, is scuttling an imperfect but potentially beneficial trade deal largely on the basis of protectionism and opportunism. Her status as a paladin of progressive principle on this issue certainly hasn’t been earned. Just to cite one notable example, it’s hard to square her opposition to the TPP with her strong support for the Export-Import Bank — which is, as an informed friend notes, “trade-related, opaque, AND actually corrupt corpratism.” But unions and other progressive constituencies oppose the TPP, so Warren worked to kill it. On the other hand, the story of Obama’s presidency is that, despite being sold as a man with unparalled rhetorical gifts and charisma to burn, the man couldn’t build consensus around free candy in a kindergarten class. Everytime he wades into a legislative debate, it’s like tossing a Baby Ruth in the pool. 

Anyway, as the tension over the TPP mounted, Obama couldn’t hide his frustration with Warren and so he called her out by name. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” Obama told Yahoo News reporter Matt Bai. As insults go, this is a subtle but classic Obama formulation; it’s undoubtedly true that Warren is a politician and motivated by political concerns. But by drawing this contrast between the two of them, the implication is that Obama is motivated by something more pure than the mere political concerns of Warren and “everybody else.”

Did this result in a substantive intraparty debate on the issues? Of course not. It ended with the president of NOW and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown both calling Obama sexist for referring to Warren by her first name. Or something. Writing at The New York Observer, Brent Budowsky further characterizes Obama’s defense of TPP as a matter of invective:

In response to Budowsky’s pique, blogger Ace of Spades’s sarcasm speaks loudly for everyone on the right: “Gee I’ve never heard any of those insults before.” Obama supporters have spent his entire presidency asserting meaningless signifiers — e.g. the word “golf” — were some some kind of slanderous reference to his melanin levels. Baseless attacks rooted in identity politics were fine so long as they were targeted at Republicans, but there seems to be genuine consternation over the president now being crtiqued in a such a manner. I don’t know whether the preferred animal metaphor is “what’s good for the goose…” or “the snake eating its own tail,” but if you’re a Democrat you have to be alarmed by this development. That’s because it appears that identity politics have become such an ingrained nearest-weapon-to-the-hand tool of the Democratic party, they don’t even know how to talk to each other anymore. For so long, the Democratic rhetorical strategy has been focused on morally discrediting the opposition as people, not just their ideas. As our first black president, we were told no dissent could be allowed from attempts to portray Obama as an historic symbol of national healing. But one day he runs afoul of a female, Native American Senator who currently enjoys more popularity with some key constituencies, and just like that, we come to find out he’s just another half-white tool of the patriarchy.

Now maybe insults are acceptable to Democrats, and even effective, when directed at Republicans, but the problem is that you can only refuse to debate on substance for so long before losing sight of what you yourself believe. And so in 2015, Democrats can’t find a coherrent trade policy with both hands and attempts to come to any sort of politically beneficial compromise within the party now automatically result in personal insults directed at each other. As John Stuart Mill put it, the Democrats have become the party of Dead Dogma:

The Democratic party’s complete ideological breakdown in favor of party leaders fragging each other would be an amusing spectacle if so many of America’s imminent problems didn’t depend on working together. But I suspect things are going to get worse—and more insulting—before they get better.

UPDATE—Fredrik De Boer has also published an excellent essay today that’s well worth reading, and not just because his argument puts us both on very much the same page: