You probably remember Ben Rhodes as the deputy national security advisor who helped President Obama create a media echo chamber to sell the Iran deal.
As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Given his connection to high-level Democrats, some of what he has to say in this NY Times opinion piece is a bit surprising. To be clear, the point of this piece is not to spill tea on his own party. His purpose is to argue that America is slipping into autocracy and that only a populist movement on the left can save it. But in the process of saying all that, he does make a few admissions against interest, i.e. statements of fact about where the party went wrong that many Democrats haven’t been willing to make. Let’s start with the big one:
The hard truth is that the Democratic Party, in its current form, cannot lead the opposition that is required. Faced with a relentless onslaught from Mr. Trump, the party has lost touch with an electorate that sees it as emblematic of what they hate about politics, a polarized culture, overseas commitments and an economy where being middle class doesn’t feel like enough to get by.
The party has a credibility gap rooted in its initial willingness to support Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election while warning that the stakes were existential. If that was the case, then why ignore the overwhelming majorities of Americans who believed that he was too old to run, and choose loyalty to a Washington stalwart over the country’s appetite for drastic change?
We are living through the reckoning of defending the status quo.
I think you could fairly summarize that first paragraph as too many people see Dems as the party of wokeness, war and inflation. But it’s the next paragraph that really hit me. The party has a credibility gap because it spent a full year lying about Joe Biden’s fitness for office. That’s something I’ve been saying since the day after the election, but I haven’t heard a lot of Dems say it out loud.
Unfortunately, he pulls back at the last moment and says the party is being punished for defending the status quo. That may be true but I think it’s also fair to say the party is being punished for defending a blatant lie, i.e. he’s sharp as a tack behind the scenes.
This next part is more of a mixed bag. Here’s Rhodes arguing that autocrats thrive on crisis.
The history of other countries captured by autocratic populist nationalism suggests that often it is a financial crisis, a war or some other major event that leads to the quashing of dissent. That may be when America joins the ranks of countries, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that turned to imperial conquest. If that sounds alarmist, consider that the relatively normal first Trump administration ended with a deadly riot amid a pandemic.
He may be right about autocrats and crisis but suggesting Trump used the pandemic the way Putin used the invasion of Ukraine is pretty much the opposite of reality. Trump didn’t use the pandemic, he was taken down by it. Not only were people unhappy with him over his response, the media and the left really ganged up on him to suggest that some other (Democratic) president would have done everything much better.
This was always a lie. The governor of New York, considered the hero of the pandemic by many on the left, did a largely terrible job. The governor of Florida who was made a laughingstock by the media did a much better job, opening schools sooner and reopening the economy.
It wasn’t Trump and the right that used the pandemic crisis to control the US it was the left which sold everyone on “two weeks to flatten the curve” and then spent the next year demanding schools remain closed, masks remain on, businesses remain shuttered and threatening violators with arrest. What Rhodes misses is that the autocratic moment happened and it was largely his party pushing for the most extreme measures.
When it comes to solutions, Rhodes endorses an endless series of protest targeting Republicans in general and Elon Musk in particular.
Protest at shuttered facilities in communities, not agencies in the capital. Make noise however you can. Amplify the voices of people out in the country. Hold town halls where Republicans are afraid to. Boycott the businesses of specific billionaires, like Elon Musk. File lawsuits. Sign petitions. Organize communities, including deep red ones. Support people who get arrested. Create a culture around the movement.
And here comes another admission against interest. In order to do any of this, the party needs to stop issuing purity tests on every fringe issue:
This approach sidesteps purity tests and the pursuit of an agreed-upon national message that has shrunk the Democratic Party. “There’s a lot of folks who are nervous about getting into our tent,” Mr. Murphy said, “because they think they’ll use the wrong words, or they’ll get canceled, or if they’re with us on 11 out of 12 issues we don’t want them.” It is easier to invite someone into a movement if all you both must agree on is one issue, not a dozen.
He’s not using the word woke here, but that’s what he’s talking about. Left-wing cancel culture hobbles every institution it is part of and that’s a problem for Democrats. Wokeness and a big tent don’t go together.
One more admission before the end. Rhodes notes that the Democratic Party has a problem with corruption. Geriatric party bosses pick candidates and limit outcomes to ones they can control using money from big donors to do it.
While Democrats are right to cast themselves as a party that opposes corruption and concentrated wealth, they are often deferential to a donor class that includes the same oligarchy they rail against, special interests with powerful lobbyists and aging politicians standing in the way of generational change.
How are you going to reform how politics works in this country if you won’t reform how it works inside your own party?
In short, Democrats talk a good game but in reality are hypocrites. For every Elon Musk they target there is a George Soros they happily ignore. He’s right about that.
And one final disappointment. Rhodes wraps up with a stemwinder paragraph about what most Americans believe, including this:
I believe that most Americans are sick of culture wars that force us to care about the political views of athletes, the restroom policies of some school on the other side of the country or the programming decisions at the Kennedy Center.
Is he talking about Riley Gaines? If so, he’s got this backwards (again). Gaines didn’t choose to become a political spokesman because that’s what she wanted. She did it because she was confronted with left-wing extremism that put leftist orthodoxy over fairness. The problem isn’t Riley Gaines. She would, I suspect, be happy to go away if the underlying unfairness went away. The problem is the far-left purity tests on these issues that Rhodes was mentioning earlier. In other words, woke progressives are the problem and good luck solving that one.
Before the Democratic party can take down the right, they need to take down the extremists who are preventing them from connecting with normal people. Rhodes seems to get that, at least partly, but despite all his admissions against interest he’s still underestimating how extreme and intransigent they are.
