Mitch McConnell, the Impeachment, and the Republican Fissure

Mitch McConnell, the Minority Whip in the current session of Congress, given as Donald Trump's ongoing refusal to acknowledge his defeat and the following January 6 insurrection brought the Democrats into power through the Georgia runoffs, issued, this extraordinary statement following the impeachment vote on January 13.  

You must keep in mind here that McConnell voted "not guilty" on the charges against Donald Trump.

January 6th was a disgrace.

American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.                           

Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President.

They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.

Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.

The House accused the former President of, quote, ‘incitement.’ That is a specific term from the criminal law.

Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.

And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

The issue is not only the President’s intemperate language on January 6th.

It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged ‘trial by combat.’

It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.

I defended the President’s right to bring any complaints to our legal system. The legal system spoke. The Electoral College spoke. As I stood up and said clearly at the time, the election was settled.

But that reality just opened a new chapter of even wilder and more unfounded claims.

The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.

Sadly, many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors that unhinged listeners might take literally.

This was different.

This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

The unconscionable behavior did not end when the violence began.

Whatever our ex-President claims he thought might happen that day… whatever reaction he says he meant to produce… by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world.

A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.

It was obvious that only President Trump could end this.

Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the Administration.

But the President did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored.

Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election!

Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger… even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters… the President sent a further tweet attacking his Vice President.

Predictably and foreseeably under the circumstances, members of the mob seemed to interpret this as further inspiration to lawlessness and violence.

Later, even when the President did halfheartedly begin calling for peace, he did not call right away for the riot to end. He did not tell the mob to depart until even later.

And even then, with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors, he kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals.

In recent weeks, our ex-President’s associates have tried to use the 74 million Americans who voted to re-elect him as a kind of human shield against criticism.

Anyone who decries his awful behavior is accused of insulting millions of voters.

That is an absurd deflection.

74 million Americans did not invade the Capitol. Several hundred rioters did.

And 74 million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it.

One person did.

I have made my view of this episode very plain.

But our system of government gave the Senate a specific task. The Constitution gives us a particular role.

This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal.

We are not free to work backward from whether the accused party might personally deserve some kind of punishment.

Justice Joseph Story was our nation’s first great constitutional scholar. As he explained nearly 200 years ago, the process of impeachment and conviction is a narrow tool for a narrow purpose.

Story explained this limited tool exists to “secure the state against gross official misdemeanors.” That is, to protect the country from government officers.

If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge.

By the strict criminal standard, the President’s speech probably was not incitement.

However, in the context of impeachment, the Senate might have decided this was acceptable shorthand for the reckless actions that preceded the riot.

But in this case, that question is moot. Because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.

There is no doubt this is a very close question. Donald Trump was the President when the House voted, though not when the House chose to deliver the papers.

Brilliant scholars argue both sides of the jurisdictional question. The text is legitimately ambiguous. I respect my colleagues who have reached either conclusion.

But after intense reflection, I believe the best constitutional reading shows that Article II, Section 4 exhausts the set of persons who can legitimately be impeached, tried, or convicted. The President, Vice President, and civil officers.

We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.

Here is Article II, Section 4:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Now, everyone basically agrees that the second half of that sentence exhausts the legitimate grounds for conviction.

The debates around the Constitution’s framing make that clear. Congress cannot convict for reasons besides those.

It therefore follows that the list of persons in that same sentence is also exhaustive. There is no reason why one list would be exhaustive but the other would not.

Article II, Section 4 must limit both why impeachment and conviction can occur… and to whom.

If this provision does not limit the impeachment and conviction powers, then it has no limits at all.

The House’s ‘sole power of Impeachment’ and the Senate’s ‘sole Power to try all Impeachments’ would create an unlimited circular logic, empowering Congress to ban any private citizen from federal office.

This is an incredible claim. But it is the argument the House Managers seemed to make. One Manager said the House and Senate have ‘absolute, unqualified… jurisdictional power.’

That was very honest. Because there is no limiting principle in the constitutional text that would empower the Senate to convict former officers that would not also let them convict and disqualify any private citizen.

An absurd end result to which no one subscribes.

Article II, Section 4 must have force. It tells us the President, Vice President, and civil officers may be impeached and convicted. Donald Trump is no longer the president.

Likewise, the provision states that officers subject to impeachment and conviction ‘shall be removed from Office’ if convicted.

Shall.

As Justice Story explained, ‘the Senate, [upon] conviction, [is] bound, in all cases, to enter a judgment of removal from office.’ Removal is mandatory upon conviction.

Clearly, he explained, that mandatory sentence cannot be applied to somebody who has left office.

The entire process revolves around removal. If removal becomes impossible, conviction becomes insensible.

In one light, it certainly does seem counterintuitive that an officeholder can elude Senate conviction by resignation or expiration of term.

But this just underscores that impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice.

Impeachment, conviction, and removal are a specific intra-governmental safety valve. It is not the criminal justice system, where individual accountability is the paramount goal.

Indeed, Justice Story specifically reminded that while former officials were not eligible for impeachment or conviction, they were “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.”

We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

I believe the Senate was right not to grab power the Constitution does not give us

And the Senate was right not to entertain some light-speed sham process to try to outrun the loss of jurisdiction.

It took both sides more than a week just to produce their pre-trial briefs. Speaker Pelosi’s own scheduling decisions conceded what President Biden publicly confirmed: A Senate verdict before Inauguration Day was never possible.

This has been a dispiriting time. But the Senate has done our duty. The framers’ firewall held up again.

On January 6th, we returned to our posts and certified the election, uncowed.

And since then, we resisted the clamor to defy our own constitutional guardrails in hot pursuit of a particular outcome.

We refused to continue a cycle of recklessness by straining our own constitutional boundaries in response.

The Senate’s decision does not condone anything that happened on or before that terrible day.

It simply shows that Senators did what the former President failed to do:

We put our constitutional duty first.

Most, but not all, Democrats have reacted with disdain for McConnell's remarks, and not without some justification.  Trump's impeachment trial could have occurred when he was still in office, contrary to what McConnell has asserted, but it would have required McConnell to bring the Senate back into session.  It would have also required the Senate to put together rules for impeachment, and the like, which would have been difficult, to say the least, for  a body that doesn't move quickly and which is mostly made up of older people. The late, if you will, delivery of the Articles of Impeachment has been regarded as a  pure political move by McConnell in some quarters, and there's merit to that view.  In effect, McConnell may have orchestrated events so that Trump would be impeached after he left office, saving Republicans from really having to throw in in for, or against, the President.

It's clear that McConnell detests Trump, and apparently he has all along.  He's used Trump, as the GOP did, and now that's a problem he's trying desperately to deal with.

McConnell has now declared is that Donald Trump's actions were in fact impeachable offenses, but you can't impeach somebody who isn't in office.  That's the sole reason that he was voting against conviction, he claims.  Having orchestrated a late impeachment trial, perhaps, relying on it being late may be hypocritical, or not.  It's certainly problematic, however.

This doesn't mean that the argument that you can't impeach somebody who has left office is wrong.  I frankly think he's correct on that.  This impeachment trial came down to an argument on that point, and it seems most scholars disagree, but as a textualist, I can't see how this provision of the constitution can be stretched to mean anything else.  Indeed, at least some of those seeking to stretch it are doing so by noting that as impeachment is political, it's solely the Senate that decides what it means.

That argument, I feel, is completely erroneous.  Armchair legal scholars may believe that because there's no "appeal" to the United States Supreme Court from impeachments, that there's no way to take the question to court. There is.  That would have required a petition for a special writ to the court, which the court may have declined, but it might not have. And had that gone to the United States Supreme Court, which is where such a petition would go, my guess is that the court, probably on a five to four basis, would have held that the text doesn't allow for impeachment of private citizens.

None of which gets McConnell off the hook here, or even close to being off the hook.

I've already noted here that there's something really, really desperate going on inside the GOP, and all this plays out in that background.  And here's where McConnell, routinely argued to be a master political strategist, and indeed, somebody who really seems to be one, has made a critical error.

I think he knows that too.  Indeed, I'm certain that he does.

Which is in part why his speech is frankly brilliant, but also why it will have very little impact.

The insurrection on January 6 was a Trump loyalist deal.  Not every Trump loyalist, obviously, but McConnell is 100% correct on what occurred and how it came about.  The election was not stolen.  Starting well before the election Donald Trump plotted to take the Oval Office by judicial storm if he lost.  Faced with states going over to mail in balloting and guessing correctly, maybe, what that meant for his chances, he started a campaign against it, and indeed he may have used his office to directly attempt to impede it.  The Atlantic, pretty much the last great remaining opinion journal in the United States, completely predicted what Trump would attempt to the last letter, and before the election had occurred.

As McConnell notes, not only did Trump attempt this, but he lied to his base and the country at large about having won, and he gave tacit and even overt support, through his statements to radicals who were willing to use force to keep him in office, believing as he did that his loss of power was either impossible and therefore due to some nepharious conspiracy, or that any vote for Biden was philosophically invalid.  It all seemed so unlikely that it just wasn't possible, but it was.

And we now know that even after the insurrection had started Trump didn't seek to intervene at first, and even gave tacit support to the insurrectionist.

So why did McConnell delay and what now, and does it matter?

Answering the last question first, it really does. This is now a full scale Republican disaster.

McConnell may have delayed, ever the tactician, as he is fully aware that over the past four years the Republican Party brought in large numbers of disaffected blue collar and disaffected middle American voters who idealize Trump and hugely credit them. These people were not in the party before. Their presence changed the party massively, however, which was never the intent.  A good example of this is the  Wyoming GOP.  Four years ago, it was a uniquely Wyoming conservative party that often took unique stands.  There were hard right members in office from it, but few.  Now the party itself has gone completely over to the Trump wing of the GOP and has moved from center right libertarian to the hard alt right.  When it censured Elizabeth Cheney for voting to impeach, it asserted that Antifa and BLM had been involved in bringing about the insurrection, which is simply untrue. But now this wing of the party, which didn't even exist four years ago, is running the local party.  And not just here, but in many places.

But the old established party, which ironically Lummis, Barrasso and Cheney are all from, still exists.  Cheney had the courage of her convictions and has been receiving criticism.  Lummis, likely angling for a position in a hoped for Ted Cruz Administration, is tacking to the Trump wing of the party.  Barrasso is too.  Cruz, of course, is fishing for the Trumpites in what is likely a highly cynical attempt to get their support for 2024 when he'll run again for President.  He has no choice as he'll lose that year if he runs again against O'Rourke.

In the meantime, it's now the case that traditional Republicans are abandoning the GOP in droves.  Some would say "where will they go" cynically, feeling that as the GOP is the conservative party they have no other home.  But a lot of them are going into the Democratic Party.  

That may seem counterintuitive, but it should be remembered that regionally there were highly conservative Democrats up into the 1990s . The Democratic Party in the American South was more conservative than any other political party in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s.  The Democratic Party in the West, including Wyoming, was full of conservatives. Today there are at least two major Republican figures in Wyoming who are regarded as extremely conservative who were Democrats all the way into the late 1990s, if not the 2000s.

The Democratic Party itself started to lose this feature when Reagan intentionally angled for the conservatives in the Democratic Party who were disaffected with it.  It was a singularly effective strategy that held all the way up until January 6, 2021. It then started to crack apart, and the first crack became a fissure in Georgia.

It's perfectly possible that many leaving the GOP now will register, tentatively, as Democrats.at first.  They won't like everything in the party, but they'll start to influence it quickly.  

Moreover, the assault on January 6 likely had the impact of permanently impacting the views of some of those voters.  Urban Republicans who are fiscal conservatives but who went along with the party on matters like gun control because they were fiscal conservatives have likely reassessed their view following January 6. I'd be surprised if on the national scale feelings on that issue haven't moved enormously over the past month.

Indeed, it's really the social issues, such as matters regarding abortion, general issues, and "wokeness" that have kept a lot of conservatives in the GOP.  And they still might.  But for lots of traditional Republicans a new issue has been added, and that's support for democracy.   And that, for many of them, will be the defining issue.  They'll feel that they can take their values into the Democratic Party and dissent there, in a party that right now stands for the rule of law, or as independents, rather than remain in a party which seems welded to, in the words of Ben Sasse, "one dude".

Indeed, it's likely that McConnell, by delaying, missed his chance.  Had he taken up the impeachment immediately and whipped his party, as Majority Leader, towards impeachment, there'd be howls of Trumpite protest, but the Trumpites would likely have been broken as a force.  It seems, rather, that delay has cemented them in place.  Trump is now angling for a 2024 run.  Lots of local parties are in full denial that anything blameworthy occurred on January 6.

So now what?

On the cover of the Sunday Trib, the paper noted that Wyoming's delegation had "diminished" influence.  Both Senators criticized the impeachment process, Lummis most strongly.  Lummis complained that the Senate was engaged in the impeachment trial as a sideshow, and not focusing on issues that matter to Wyoming.

Diminished influence?  How about no influence whatsoever?

The Democrats are the majority party and control both houses.  Republicans are leaving the GOP in floods.  By 2022 chances are this disarray will not have been repaired and the party will go into the election highly divided, and maybe divided in fact.  Its the Democrats who will benefit from that.  With a party that's splitting apart as their opposition, why would the Democrats care at all what the Republicans wish for, let alone what Republicans in Wyoming think?

The back story, moreover, is that the Democratic Party in 2022, and 2024, is likely to be more conservative than it is now.  That may be the start of a subtle change. The Democratic Party has shown in the past the ability to modify its stance on issues when it feels there's an advantage to doing so, which the Republicans right now aren't showing at all.  A good example of that is gun control, which the Democrats have intentionally not pushed for decades.  As this is about to come up soon, we'll soon see where the part is on this now.  More than one Democratic figure this past election suggested that the party's position on abortion really ought to be abandoned.  Will there be room to contest abortion within the Democratic Party?  Right now there isn't, but we'll see if it wakes up to opportunity and goes back to a "freedom of conscience" position it had at one time.

And truth be known, while social conservatives have lots of issues with the Democrats, now that they've taken a beating from their own party through its fanatic allegiance to a single person, they're likely to simply shelve some of them in order to retain the remainder.  A good example of this, once again, are the Southern Democrats. They never liked desegregation but they got over it pretty quickly when it became an unsustainable position in order to retain their other values, like them or not.  For that matter, the Republican Party got over isolationism pretty quickly following the fall of China in 1947.  Deeply held convictions are hard to but on back burners, and for good reasons, but then social conservatives who are moderate on other matters are undoubtedly highly uncomfortable with their fellow travelers right now.

And indeed, this problem has existed, and in both parties, for a long time.  There's no real reason to believe that dedicated opponents of abortion aren't also environmentalists, or diehard opponents of the death penalty.  Indeed, quite a few abortion opponents are indeed opposed to the death penalty. And its a safe bet that a lot of urban women who march in opposition to abortion are sympathetic to gun control.  Wyoming Republicans who have sided with the "Stop the Steal" assertions of the Trump wing of the party may be staunchly on the right wing side of every issue, but frankly average Wyomingites are not, and if this is true in the most "pro Trump" state in the union (a claim which I have my doubts about), it's true everywhere.  The GOP's Trump wing right now feels its vindicated and "right", but my suspicion its moment in the sun is over.

All of which is to say this.  Mitch McConnell is the real head of the Republican Party.  Donald Trump  remains the leader of the Trumpite wing and an internal wrecker.  Figures like Ted Cruz are so focused on their ambitions they're willing to allow the wrecking to continue as they don't realize that it will wreck the party itself.  Lots of Senators, like Lummis and Barrasso, are sitting on the fence as they know that if they go with reality they'll also face a big backlash at home.  Back at home the Trump wing of the party is listening only to itself and convinced what its telling itself is correct, and that everyone who is right thinking agrees with them.

But nationwide, they don't.  If this keeps up, by 2022, there will be hundreds of thousands fewer Republicans, assuming the party survives, and it's position will be cemented in the extreme right, which will be distasteful not only to Democrats, but also to Independents.  2022 will see Democratic gains.  The 2024 election will be the one that Republicans really feared, the one in which a real liberal gains the White House.

McConnell has on his plate trying to prevent that.  If he does, he'll be regarded as one of the greatest political tacticians of all time.

Cliff notes of the Zeitgeist Part I. Some Observations on current events, political, economic, religious, and otherwise.

1.  Populism and racism aren't the same thing, even if some populist are racist.

Theodore Roosevelt.  He was a populist, and a progressive.  Just being a populist doesn't make a person a racist, or even a conservative.

What happened on January 6 with an attempted coup in Washington D. C. will go down as one of the back marks in American history.  Truly, an infamous day.

Post insurrection analysis has frequently strayed into suggesting that part and parcel of the insurrectionist goal is a deep seated racism.  To hear commentators speak of it, you'd get the idea that the storming was by the Dixiecrats of the last century.  This does a disservice to the facts and ignores the real divide in the country.

Some of the populist are racists, there's no doubt about it. And Donald Trump did nothing to distance himself from racists while he was President.  Having said that, however, the GOP started quietly down this path in the 1970s with Ronald Reagan's "Southern Strategy".  Before that, the Democrats were the party with a regional race problem and the Republicans were not.  The GOP couldn't win in the South for that reason.  So, much like in the compromise that resulted in setting the 1876 election, the GOP decided to abandon its strong civil rights position in order to court the otherwise highly conservative, and mostly white, Southern electorate.  

That's a legacy of what we're seeing now, and its a feature of some of the populist movements from around the country, but it doesn't really define what's going on. What defines it is the abandonment of the Rust Belt working class by both political parties.

The American blue collar working class was hailed since the early 20th Century as the real definers of what it was to be an American.  There's an endless amount of propaganda about it and everyone has seen it.  Rosie the Riveter wasn't a college educated career woman who was living with a Soy Boy café worker.  No, there was about a 50/50 chance that she hadn't finished high school and was going to stop working the second her boyfriend returned from defeating the Axis and took back his welding job, after which point they'd get married and have stout little kids who played baseball and football and who would look forward to the same careers their parents had had.

Now that seems to be all gone, but the implications have not been worked out at all.  You can't tell a group of people that they define what it is to be an American and then one day that they're the enemy of progress.  Men and women who simply want jobs to live rather than to live their jobs and who are Christians with traditional Christian values have, over the past decade or so, been told that they need to move on to the metro and reeducate, and that the values they held which defined society are now not only obsolete, but they need to keep them to themselves.

When people speak of a "culture war", that's what they're talking about, and that's what's brought about what we're seeing right now.  At least half the country, and probably more, is sick of being told that their deepest values need to be put on the shelf forever.  

That doesn't excuse what occurred on January 6, but it gave rise to it.  Trump gave voice to it.  And at some point a group of people who were told over 90 years that they were the real Americans, and defined Americanism, are going to react with huge suspicion if they're suddenly told they aren't.

The culture war rift in the country is now a grand canyon.  And its runs right through Western society into other countries.  It's not close to being over and there's no good reason to believe that Joe Biden can heal it.

But claiming that everyone who is on the right is basically Nathan Bedford Forest, as some on the left, and the constant press commentary, has, isn't going to make things better.  It may actually make it much, much worse.

2.  The "choice" isn't between "Democracy and Socialism".

Socialist leader of France, and anti Communist, Francois Mitterrand and his ally, Ronald Reagan.

I'm noting this here as I hear things like this all the time, and I read an op ed article in the Trib by somebody who is a clear supporter of Anthony Bouchard's run against Liz Cheney which referenced that phrase, although not in connection with Bouchard's primary effort to displace Cheney, which I'll predict will end up just being an expensive waste of time on his part.  The author of the op ed apparently wrote a book in which he claims that will be the choice for 2024.

No it won't, and it doesn't make sense.

I'm really sick of people getting these confused.  It's perfectly possible to be an ardent (small d) democrat and a Socialist.

Indeed, the Social Democratic Party is the largest party in Germany and, sorry US, its' considerably more democratic than the United States.  The current German constitution and body of electoral laws makes us look rather backward in that regard, restrictions on the freedom speech where it pertains to fascism and restrictions on strange movements like Scientology notwithstanding.

And the SDP isn't the only full democratic, and Socialist, party that's governed in Europe. France had a massively anti communist, heavily allied to the United States, elected premier during the Reagan administration, Francois Mitterrand, who was the First Secretary of the Socialist Party in France.

Every European nation except for the United Kingdom and Ireland has a viable and large Socialist Party that participates in their parliaments.  And, taking us back to history again, it was the SDP that was the last bulwark against the Nazi Party and the Communist Party in 1932 in trying to keep democracy running in post World War One Europe.  Yes the CDU was in there too, but the SDP was the big, anti Communist, anti Fascist, party.

Why do people believe this myth?

Bad historical education.

People seem to think that Socialism=Communism, and way, way back when, before there were any Communist countries, this was in fact true.  It hasn't been true since 1917/18 however, and in that time frame the Communist and the Socialist separated with the Socialists uniformly supporting democratic governments.  They went down in defeat on that point against the Communists in the Russian Revolution and in Nazi Germany.

What Socialism really is, is an economic system that argues for "social" control of the economy.

Get it straight.

Indeed, while not a Socialist whatsoever, I'd note that Socialist will claim that Socialism is more democratic than Capitalism, as there's social vestment of the economy in society at large.  I think that's mostly hooey, and in reality the economy always ends up being vested in the government, but the end game for Socialism and unrestrained Capitalism is the same. . a monopoly.  That's why nearly all Capitalist economies have Distributist laws, even if they don't call them that, such as the Sherman Anti Trust Act.

FWIW, the percentage of the GDP that's attributed to the government hovers between 35% and 40% in the United States irrespective of whether the GOP or the Democrats are in control.  There's never been a country, ever, whose government didn't dominate some aspects of its economy.  It's just that people tend not to be able to recognize it, except in the case of outright Socialism, including in Wyoming. For example, the state could completely contract out highway snow removal if it wished to, which would be a lot more free market.  But it's not going to. Or the state could close the remaining 100% of the highway rest stops and let people travel to gas stations, etc. in times of need, but that sure wouldn't be very popular.  You get the picture.

3.  While we're at it, "free market economics" doesn't equal Capitalism either.

Capitalism is a system under which business organizations which are actually partnership in the natural sense obtain state protection for their de fact partners by making them de jure shareholders and granting the corporation legal personhood.  It can't exist without the state.

There are a lot of reasons this system has proven to be such a huge success, but its a mistake to assume that the system is natural or that its a pure free market one.  In a pure free market natural economy (which would be a type of distributist economy), corporations wouldn't exist but partnerships would.

Every member of a partnership, of the traditional type, is legally liable for the acts of the company.  In a corporation, generally, only the company itself is. That's why corporations are so successful at raising "capital".  Only the shareholder's investment money is at risk.

Anyhow, if you point out that Capitalism is always a state sponsored and created economic system, as Socialism is when actually applied, you'll draw a blank look.  People are so use to thinking the opposite that they don't grasp that Capitalism is not a natural system, and that it requires state support to exist.

4.  The GOP adrift. Real Wyoming isn't as alt right as the alt right thinks.  It isn't even as conservative as people think.

There's conservative and then there's Wyoming conservative and then there's the conservatism of Wyomingites. 

They're not the same.

Time may prove me incorrect on this, but what has been going on in the state's GOP in the last few years really doesn't reflect the way most Wyomingite's actually think.  In reality, most Wyomingites just don't follow politics all that closely.

To grasp this you have to first realize that there's basically two, or maybe three, Wyoming populations. There's the temporary one made of transient workers who are here during booms, and then depart during busts.  When they're here, they make a big difference in politics and they bring their politics with them.  They aren't all oilfield workers by any means, as some of them have come in as professionals due to the boom, or occupy other boom time economic positions.  Then there's the Jackson Hole crowed, which is now more diffused than in just Teton County, who are also from somewhere else, but upon arriving here they buy a puffy coat or a Stetson and imagine themselves to be Wyomingites.  They also bring their politics with them.

And then there's the people who were born here, brought here while very young, or who were from a neighboring rural state that was much like Wyoming in some ways.  These are the people who are staying and whom make up most of the electorate.

They're political views are really unique to themselves. They aren't actually all that conservative, but can be mistaken for conservatives. They're more in the nature of rural libertarians combined with something that might be most comparable to the Russian Civil War era Ukrainian Greens.

This group isn't going to rail against Liz Cheney for voting her conscience and, like it or not, they aren't all that worked up on social issues either.  They're just as likely to support a "right to roam" as they are property rights, and no matter what your views are on one thing or another in social trends, they're going to espouse the traditional views while ignoring whatever it is that other people are doing.

I note all of this as the current drift of the GOP towards a really, really hard right is already beginning to further split an already split party and the GOP doesn't seem to get it.  At the same time that county GOP organizations are voting to censure Liz Cheney, the written comments to the Trib are overwhelmingly in her favor, including those written by her avowedly former opponents.  The GOP seems to be on the verge of splitting in two nationally and if it does, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the state party will go wherever the Trump wing of the party does, which in state politics is likely to pretty quickly end up in their becoming a minority party.

5.  Apparently "innocent until proven guilty" is something that nobody really believes. . . or at least it doesn't apply to Catholic clerics.

I haven't commented on this before and perhaps I shouldn't here, but I'm going to anyhow.

The Tribune has been following, understandably, the legal woes of retired Wyoming Bishop Joseph Hart now for years.  Bishop Hart was accused of sexual ickyness with male minors.

During the same period of time during which Hart has been dealing with this, three local Protestant ministers have faced the same accusations, and they all proved true. Mention of it in the Press was very brief.  No following story occurred.  Hart's story has, however, proven different.

The initial investigation lead the Laramie County authorities to pass on doing anything. They didn't see enough evidence.  The current Bishop, however, Bishop Biegler, chose to revive the matter within the church itself and that lead to it being looked at by the authorities a second time.  On that second occasion, the prosecutor in Natrona County again determined not to charge Bishop Hart with anything.  That lead to criticism, he reopened the file and, after some time had passed, he once again determined not to file charges.

The internal church matter, however, went on to some sort of tribunal at the Vatican. And now it also has determined that there's not enough there to do anything.  

With this being the case, Bishop Hart, over a period of decades, has endured and prevailed over four separate prosecutorial episodes, three at the state level, and one at hte Vatican level.

The American myth is that you are innocent until proven guilty.  Hart hasn't been proven guilty of anything. The Tribune, however, continues to treat his as if he is guilty and getting away with it.  Indeed, Bishop Biegler isn't helping much either as, having gotten this rolling, he's still basically sending out signals that he believes that Hart is guilty and will be crediting his accusers in spite of years and years of such efforts having failed.  This gets to something regarding Bishop Biegler we'll deal with in a moment, but we'll note this here.

Bishop Hart gets this sort of attention as he's Catholic.  The Catholic Church has gone through a horrific episode recently, now mostly addressed, with clerics who are now all older having committed terrible sexual transgressions.  Most of these, however, seem to have arisen due to a vareity of factors that let in priests who were not there for the right reasons, although their views are ones that the press also genuinely celebrates.  Indeed, this takes us back to the culture wars item above, as Catholic clerics that are loyal to the Church's traditional beliefs and dogma are ones that the press really doesn't like.

And for that reason, it doesn't like the church itself, which is why this gets so much press but real proven accusations by protestant minister is the same readership field, do not.

6.  Bishop Biegler and the rearward gaze.

We're now a full year into a present massive crisis that has caused a crisis in the Church but to look at the Diocese of Cheyenne, you'd not know it.

The Bishop has suspended the obligation to attend Mass on what is now running up on a year.  I had real doubts about this early on, but as the pandemic deepened, I have to admit that at some point, that's valid.  As soon as the churches were opened back up, I started going back to Mass, but in the recent deepened episode, I suspended going, taking advantage of the dispensation as I had a childhood asthma condition and I really don't want to get virus, particularly with vaccinations come on so soon.

Anyhow, if you check in on the Diocese website the first thing you are going to find is a statement by Bishop Biegler about retried Bishop Hart.

Bishop Hart was the bishop here from 1978 until 2001.  I.e., he hasn't been the bishop for 20 years.  He's been retired for 20 years.  We're on our third bishop since that time.

Wyoming, as we've noted above, is a highly transient state.  There's a core of us diehards who were born here, and who will die here, and who are watching people come and go in the meantime.  And quite a few of us, although its a minority in the state's population, are Catholic.  Quite a few of the transients are too. 

Most of the people in the pews have very low interest, in this point, in the Joseph Hart saga.  It doesn't impact our daily lives whatsoever.  When Hart was last Bishop, I was 37 years old and my youngest child was a baby.  

The pandemic does impact my daily life.

During the entire pandemic, I haven't had a representative of the parish reach out even once.  I've reached in several times, but at the time the pandemic struck I'd only recently gone off of a parish council.

Indeed, the pandemic struck at a particularly bad time, in this context, for me, as I'd gone off of the council and I stepped down as a lector as the Mass time didn't work well for my spouse and both kids were headed off to Laramie.  I'd been a lector at that point for years and years, and I do miss it. But as that occurred it was also the case that the downtown parish was clearly being changed into the Hispanic parish. That's fine, but Mass times were also altered for reasons that aren't clear to me, and therefore I went across town to another parish. The entire process left me feeling a bit unmoored as the parish that I'd served at quickly became pretty unrecognizable, the new Priest had no idea who I was, the focus was on a demographic that needs to be focused on but which I'm not part of, and then the pandemic hit.

The parish I was going to did a good job at first at dealing with the crisis but then the Bishop ordered the doors closed.  I'm sure I'm just lost to where I was at, and now I'm barely known where I am.  I get that.

What I don't get, quite frankly, is why there wasn't a full scale effort to require the parishes to reach out to parishioners.  There wasn't.  Or at least there wasn't one that I could see.  And to check in on the Diocese website to learn the latest in regard to the church and the pandemic is a disappointment, as the information is hard to find.  News on Bishop Biegler and Bishop Hart is easy to find, however.

And here's the point.  In a pandemic in which our connections with our parish is now strained and souls stand to be lost, dealing with a problem that's now 20 years in our review mirror should not be front and center.

7.  "I have a right to an opinion" doesn't mean your opinion is worth listening too.

Given that so much discourse happens on social media anymore, you've seen this argument. Some issue is out there, somebody argues the facts, and the reply is "I have a right to an opinion".

First of all, it's debatable if you have a "right" to an erroneous opinion.  It may be your opinion that you are a polar bear, but you don't really have a right to that, as that would be delusional.  That's an extreme example, but it demonstrates a point. At some point opinions can so depart from reality that they can lead to institutionalization.  So, in fact, you don't have a right to an opinion without question.

You may have a right to an opinion, however, on matters which are fairly debatable.  And that's the kicker.  A lot of people raise the "I have a right to an opinion" defense at the point at which their opinion is, in fact, no longer fairly debatable.  

Now, assuming that the opinion doesn't constitute a danger to yourself or others, you may have a legal right to hold it, but that doesn't amount to an existential right.  You have no right, really, to be wrong.  So taking refuge in that argument actually isn't a defense at all.

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VI. The wobbly Democratic Party.

In part III of this series, I address the sad situation in the Republican party, a scene so bad that some people believe the party is on the verge of death and, in spite of an effort to unify the party behind the "presumptive  nominee", we are actually still seeing an effort to find an acceptable third party candidate by some Republicans who are big names.

First the tell of the tape:

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,293 (525 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,533 (40 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,161 (of which 58 are unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  567   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 18 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  168.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  159.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

Well, if the GOP is in ICU, laying right there in the bed next to it is the Democratic Party, something that's become increasingly obvious as the Sanders campaign and its supporters have finally managed to get some press, late in the election, and as they start to become increasingly vocal about their discontent about the coronation of Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic nominee, a move that reflects just how ossified the Democrats are.  Indeed, the insurgent Sanders wing of the party is now actually in full revolt.

A notable feature of this election is that, even though the country has more Democrats than Republicans, the Democrats would have been blown out of the saddle this year but for the fact that the GOP apparent nominee is even more unpopular than Hillary Clinton.  It's an amazing feat that the Republicans have pulled off, managing to find a candidate that actually is throwing voters to a candidate who is really unpopular, maybe.

I say maybe, as its still possible, although extremely unlikely, for Sanders to win. With a campaign that the press has treated as dead right from the onset, he has continued to win state after state and would be within striking distance of Clinton but for the Superdelegates, those delegates that the Democratic establishment have established to prevent the nomination of anyone who isn't solidly Democratic mainstream.  If the Republicans are facing an internal revolt, they at least have a democratic method of letting the steam off and the party adjust.  The Democrats, however, have built in a structural roadblock that's actually designed to prevent that, and for that reason, the fact that the party is nearly as ill as the GOP hasn't been apparent.  But the Democrats are a house of cards, held up right now only by the lack of a strong wind from the Republican Party.

How did the second American political party enter the same state of advance decay that the GOP did, and how can it address it?

Well, its where it is largely for the same reason that the GOP is where it is.

And to do that, we need to take a look at its history, to see how it got to where it is.  More particularly, how did the Democratic Party become a working class liberal party in the 20th Century, only to devolve to an effete, East Coast, upper class white WASP lite party?

As with the GOP, we find that story starting once again with the election of 1912.  It's amazing how pivotal that election really was, and the extent to which its defined the evolution of the parties for over a century.

 More Trump than Clinton, Andrew Jackson was the first Democrat to be elected President.  Even up until fairly recently Jackson was celebrated by Democrats in an annual "Jefferson Jackson Day" in most places, including in Wyoming. Recently, they've started omitting Jackson's name, cognizant that he wasn't exactly a modern liberal.

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world.  It hasn't always been anything like the party it is today, however.  Prior to 1912 it was basically a conservative party with a strong secondary base in ethnic immigrants.  It was steeped in racism (which it didn't overcome in 1912) and it was the party that basically had come down on the wrong side of the Civil War.  Prior to the war the Democrats were strong supporters of Manifest Destiny, while the GOP opposed it, two positions that have oddly sort of lived on in the parties in spite of themselves, as the Democrats have always been more strongly associated with the violent maintenance of American ideals overseas, while the Republicans have not.

That the party survived the Civil War at all is stunning, in that the Democrats opposed the war for the most part and the Democrats had a strong Southern base, which the war did not disrupt.  Following the Civil War it retained its basic conservative base and it remained the party of Southern whites, which meant that after Reconstruction was defeated that it was the party of the South.  Only blacks provided a base for the GOP in the South at the time.  Still the war meant that the Democrats were out of the Oval Office for a 20 year period.

Running up to the 20th Century an aspect of the Democratic Party in the North that was already there became cemented as the Democrats also strongly came to be associated with ethnic minorities, and often Catholic ethnic minorities, such as the Irish.  The machine system in politics was extremely strongly expressed at the time and that strongly favored Democratic recruitment of disfavored minority voters in a region where the Democrats were otherwise not very strong.  With patronage being the basis of the effort, and successfully, in the North the party came in some ways to be partially defined by this, while ironically in the South its membership was much different.

 William Jennings Bryan, populist, and Presidential candidate at age 36.

The evolution of the modern party oddly began with an odd issue, coinage.  The Depression of 1893 threw monetary policy into focus and populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan ran on the platform of free coinage of silver, as ridiculous idea that would in no way have served to end the depression.  This makes Bryan recognizable, in some ways, to our modern era in that he was campaigning on an easy fix to a complicated problem that really had no hope of offering a solution to it.  The party nearly split in half as the conservatives in the North and the South united in a breakaway party, the National Democratic Party, which was started by Grover Cleveland and saw the recruitment of Woodrow Wilson.  Bryan took the nomination, in a manner that's somewhat reminiscent of Donald Trump today, and he saw huge crowed in the rural Midwest and South before he went down in epic defeat in 1896.  The result was a disaster, but it did start to bring into focus a populist movement that was brewing in both parties at the time, much as the same is occurring in both parties now.

What started in 1896 developed in 1912, and the upper class elements that had been the National Democrats united with populists and progressives to basically swipe the progressive movement from the GOP. The GOP was clearly split on progressivism at hte time, and the Democrats had their chance, which they took with Woodrow Wilson.  From that moment on the Democrats have been the liberal, or as it is sometimes said, the progressive, American political party, solidly to the left of the Republicans.

 Woodrow Wilson, of whom we've been seeing a lot here recently.

That 1912 liberal party wasn't what we see today, however, and its not really quite how the Democrats define themselves today. For one thing, Wilson was highly racist, but this didn't really matter to a party that didn't count on black or minority votes anywhere, and which could and did count on Southern whites, who really remained more reflective of the old conservative Democratic Party.  But the roots of the current party were there. They really came forth into bloom into what Democrats imagine themselves to be, however, with the 1932 election.

 Considered by some to be a "traitor to his class", Franklin Roosevelt as President.

In 1932 the Democrats elected the most liberal, by default, President the nation has ever seen, Franklin Roosevelt.  Coming up when he did, he came up in a party that had developed since 1912 in an era of increasing radical politics in the United States. The GOP remained solidly conservative during this time period, and the Democrats solidly liberal, except in the South, but the Socialist Party and even the Communist Party were serious parties from about that point until World War Two.  Angling for the votes of blue collar laborers, the Democrats found themselves contesting with really radical parties which saw some success.  The Great Depression brought that battle into sharp focus and the Democrats, seeking to address he nation's ills, went sharply to the left, basically taking the wind out of the hard left's sails, but also becoming a much more liberal party itself.  This continued to develop throughout the Great Depression and World War Two, during which the Democrats became solidly party nearly defined by support for working class laborers.  It became the part of the "working man".  Consistent with the general policy of progressives, it also became the party that favored expansion and protection of American ideals beyond our shores.

Coming out of World War Two, the Democrats were a solidly working class party that also had a strong base of ethnic Catholics and nearly the entire white Southern population.  It was very pro labor, and by that we mean pro organized labor.  It was in favor of big government and it also was in favor of a very active foreign policy designed to counter threats to American interest and in favor of American values.  Having been in favor of entering World War Two long before the Republicans, who only came to that opinion on December 7, 1941, the party tended to see, and often correctly, analogies with Hitler in Communist movements all over the globe.  The party was also strongly anti-colonial in terms of its foreign policy.  A recognition on its part that its support of the working class everywhere meant that its hostility to blacks in the South started to force the reform of the party on civil rights as well and blacks in the South started to join the party for the first time, following blacks in the North that had started to do so while FDR was President.

Following World War Two that Democratic Party remained the party up until the late 1960s.  It was the party's interventionist foreign policy that undid it.  The Democrats lead the nation into two wars following World War Two, neither of which was wildly popular.  Intervention in the Korean War in 1950 came first, obviously, and had the impact of finally ending GOP isolationism as the majority platform of the GOP.  The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 saw the party take a "go anywhere" view towards intervention which shortly lead the country into a conflict in Vietnam.  It's interesting to note that during Eisenhower's Republican administration, the first GOP administration in over 20 years, the country eschewed intervention in foreign campaigns, leading in part to the Communist takeover in Cuba, while this changed rapidly with Kennedy coming into office.

 

 U.S. soldier in the Korean War and . . . 

Vietnam.  Two post World War Two wars which started for the US with intervention under Democratic Presidents, and not featuring Declarations of War, and which ended during the administration of Republican Presidents.

Vietnam would turn out to be a hugely unpopular war and that saw its reflection strongly in the Democratic Party. At the same time, the old hard hat blue collar base of the party really began to age out of politics.  Economic changes brought about by World War Two put the sons and daughters of blue collar workers into university where they remained in their parents party but lost their connection to the strong, often ethnic, working class societies their parents had been in.  As this occurred the union between theory (the Democrats had incorporated a lot of hard left economic theorist during the Great Depression) and practicality began to break down in the party.  The Democrats had been, because of their strong blue collar and ethnic base, surprisingly conservative on many domestic issues while practical liberal on economic ones, with the hard hat element of the base tempering strong leftist instincts that were otherwise there.  Staring in the late 1960s, however, with the economy doing well and younger members of the party divorced from industrial labor, while becoming increasingly radicalized in universities, the party began to transform into what it currently is.

The battle lines became sharply drawn in 1968s when Democrats literally fought each other at the Democratic Convention.  Hard Hat Democrats and the police, in a solidly Democratic city, rioted against war protestors, who were also Democrats, assuming that they were not in a party further to the left, over the war. The war, of course, had been brought about and maintained under two Democratic Presidents.  The result was the loss of the 1968 Presidential campaign and enduring memory on the part of the party insiders that its hard left elements had to be controlled or they'd bring the party down.

It didn't happen immediately at first, of course, but the impact was real and last to the current day.  Starting in 1968 the more conservative working class elements of the party became marginalized and began to leave it.  In the north the party increasingly became an upper class liberal party with little connection to working men or even to the ethnicities that had been strongly part of the part, although that process can be dated back to 1960 when John F. Kennedy started that process by suppressing any suggestion that his religious roots, strongly associated with an Irish base in the party in many cities, would not mean much.  The party really remained a separate party in the South, a legacy of the Civil War, but that would soon change too, but not before two Southern Democrats would in fact be elected President.

 Jimmy Carter, sometimes considered the first post Civil War Democrat to be elected to the Presidency since the Civil War, he was actually the second as Woodrow Wilson was as well, although his academic career had placed him in New Jersey at the time he ran for office.  Carter was an unsuccessful President, but reflected the best of the Southern Democrats.

The first of those was Jimmy Carter, a Georgian with strong rural roots, who reflected in many ways the Southern aspect of the party in the best way.  His Presidency failed however and he was replaced by Ronald Reagan, the first Republican President to separate southern Democrats from their party.  In fairness, while that strategy (often denied to exist by Republicans) was effective, the Democrats themselves started it in 1968.  The Southern party was largely conservative and the Northern party was increasingly liberal and highly urban.  By the 1980s the Southern Democrats were dying off, with that base defecting to the GOP in droves.

These factors, however, weakened the Democratic Party and it realized it.  In spite of being a liberal urban party in terms of its "establishment", it realized that the country was not as liberal, nor as urban, as it was, and starting with the election of its last Southern President, Bill Clinton, it worked to appeal to a broader base, hoping to retain Democrats who were not as left wing in the areas that it could.  The strategy has been very effective and the Democrats remain the largest American political party.  They've even gained since 2012 in some demographics, such as Catholics for example, where their social policies had been causing them to loose members.

And then came this election, the 2016 election.

But we need to look first at the election of 2008.

The election of 2008 and the election of 2012, for the Democrats, repeats what the Republicans  experienced, but have forgotten,in 1980 and 1988.  In 1980, the Republicans elected a new type of conservative with Ronald Reagan. In 1988 the old party mainstream seized the Presidency, and the party, back with the election of George Bush I.  The party is paying for hat now.

But that's what the Democrats have sort of experienced as well, and might, or might not, depending upon the rebellion going on in the Democratic Party.

President Barack Obama.  Like him or hate him, he's a point of departure for American politics, but perhaps the Democrats haven't realized that as of yet, a this year's choices show.  The first President to have come into his adult years without the Vietnam War and the 1960s as a point of reference, he's also the first President who is ethnically ambiguous, thereby reflecting the younger base of the party, rather than the older, whiter, and 1960s dominated nature of the party's elite.

Like him or hate him, Barack Obama was a different type of Democrat from those that came up in the party post 1968.  He is a true liberal, but a post 1968 liberal.  Not truly grounded in the hard core upper class effete branch of the Democratic Party, he has been a clever politician, and even if truly liberal on many things, he's held off in many areas and even declared what amounts to a truce in others.  He's been pretty ineffective in many areas, due to a professorial confusion of speech with action, but he's not a 1968 Democrat.  He's the first American President who has no 1960s frame of reference and the first who is really ethnically ambiguous.  He's not a 1960s, member of NOW, ERA, type of Democrat.

Hillary Clinton, however, is.

Clinton has a long history in the Democratic Party and came up in the party very much during its hyper liberal stage.  She represents the Boomer Party, which Obama does not.  If elected, she'll be the triumph of that wing of the party.  While Barack Obama has been regarded as highly liberal, and in his last year of office is indeed proving to be highly liberal and is actually remaking, to the distress of much of the country, the nation in a more liberal mold, perhaps temporarily, there's no doubt that Clinton retains a view of the world that can be found in the annals of the history of 1970s liberals, like most of the leadership of her party's elite, whether they've effected those views or not.

Which is the wing of the past.

And which is why there's a full scale revolt going on in the party.

The old fights that so concern the 1968-1978 liberals are largely ones that are either past concern, or are ones that society actually has caused to highly evolve and which are much different than those in the past.  The 1968 party still believes in "firsts", which the rest of American society put to bed with the election of Barack Obama.  Old causes, such as "women's issues", are largely unrecognizable to younger voters who have moved past those long ago, which explains why younger Democratic women are almost insulted by the suggestion that they are somehow required to vote for Clinton just because they are women.  Democratic base voters, moreover, who saw it as a matter of human justice to struggle for the rights of minorities and women do not necessarily equate those fights with ones that are based on social theory, such as re-identification of a person's gender or attacks on traditional marriage.  People who would have gone to jail to allow a black and white couple to marry are baffled in some instances by the suggestion that allowing people of the same gender to marry is the same fight, or that people are okay not to marry at all and are defined as "partners".  Indeed, to some there seems to be some retreat involved.  Rural voters who stayed in the party since the 1930s for support to rural populations are now baffled by why the Democratic Party seems so eager to disarm them.  Union members are baffled why the Democrats stood by and seemingly did nothing as the rich of both parties exported factories overseas.  To some extent, the natural base of the Democratic party has moved to the center or into lethargy on social issues that the party leadership, now that the gloves are off and they feel that they can surely win in the fall, has gone far to the left on.

The old Hard Hat Democrats in the Midwest and East, where they still exist, have produced a younger generation that is, moreover, nearly completely divorced from the upper class liberal wing of the party.  Their focus is economic, and on social issues they are may be or are far to the right of the leadership of the party.  The party's ethnic base is likely paper thin as those voters who still identify themselves as Democrats due to ethnicity are increasingly forced into a position in which their values are starkly in opposition to those espoused by the party.  A group such as Hispanics, for example, who are constantly presumed to be natural Democrats, are only Democrats on labor  and immigration issues.  On social issues their views are much more closely aligned to the Republicans.  In some areas of the country, such as the Rocky Mountain West, the Democrats became so disaffected with their own party that the majority of them left it and joined the Republicans or became independents, with t his move not being closely analogous to what occurred in the South.

But for the extremely strange GOP fight, caused by its ignoring its base, the Democrats would be dead in the water this year.  The Democrats seem set to chose Clinton against an insurgent Sanders in part because Sanders was ignored by the Press and because Democratic control over the party membership has proven to be more effective, although frankly only barely so, than Republican control over its base.  If Sanders, who has campaigned almost exclusively on populist economics issues, had been receiving the same level of attention that Trump did, he likely would be the front runner in actual "pledged" delegates.  Clinton's large margin is attributable only to the Superdelegates.

All of this reflects a party breakdown and the party is in fact breaking down. Sanders' supporters are now crying "foul" on a lot of the process and Democrats are starting to call for the head of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a spokesmen that only the upper class East Coast Democrats could love.  The Democrats, however, are in danger of massively misinterpreting what is going on at the establishment level, however, as the insurgency is being lead by a candidate that is economically on the extreme left of the party.  They better think twice about what they are seeing.

Looked at carefully, the successful Trump insurrection and the struggling Sanders insurrection share certain common traits, which is not to say that they are identical by any means, and which is not to say that the two personalities are the same.  Rather, what's seems to be motivating core elements on both sides is similar or identical, and that's disaffection with American Corporate Capitalism. Beyond that, the  Trump voters are reacting to forced social change and being repeatedly ignored by their own party.  The Democrats are mostly reacting to the same economic factors the GOP insurgents are, but they are also reacting to the ossified leadership of their party as well, but not really over the same set of issues, if any issue in particular.

At the voting both level both Democratic and Republican insurgents have a significant number of what I've referred to as "Hard Hat" voters.  Voters who live in regions that were once industrially strong but now are shadows of their former selves.  Ironically, when the boomers moved on and left their parents in the rust belt, they left a lot of their fellows there as well. Not everyone went on to university.  The "60s" that formed the backdrop for the boomers controlling the Democratic Party was not one single experience, but several. For many in the rust belt the 1960s saw the last era in which American industry was really strong in the steel, coke and automobile sense.  Those Democrats and their children were left behind and they know it.  Now forced into college academics by the dissolution of t he meaning of university and with no solid place to go, and even facing a  future in which the traditional blue collar escape careers, such as the law, no longer mean anything near what they once did, they feel themselves to be in a box.  Hence the demands for the concern for the working men and for "free" university for their children.  They have to do something, they know, and feel betrayed by a party that claims to have the rights of the working class at heart, but hasn't shown it, because it no longer really does in the same way it once did.  Sanders voters suspect that the Democratic Party is comfortable with the new economy that shipped their jobs overseas.  They want those jobs back or, if they can't get them back, they want to be allowed to be trained for the new world they didn't want.

That makes those voters much more conservative than Democrats like Clinton or Wasserman-Schultz, and even where they are liberal, they aren't the same kind of liberal.  Clinton looks and sounds like she's staring in a guest episode of Maud!, which doesn't mean much to a group of people who think The Big Bang Theory is funny.  She sounds like an artifact of the 1970s, because she is.  Sanders, who is older, doesn't.  Because he's an artifact of the 1930s, which now seems oddly fresh again.  When Clinton up talks the end of her sentences in her harsh voice about what is going to be achieved, it sounds oddly like a cry from 1974 more than 2016.  Sanders rhetoric may read like Huey Long, but it sounds fresh in 2016.

Looked at that way, the Democrats would be wise to reconsider the hard slide to the general left they are taking right now, although that frankly means accommodating themselves to flexibility which they do not seem inclined now to do.  Democrats don't seem to trust any state to make its own laws, and they tend to come across, on the national level, as a party headquartered in Greenwich Village that thinks everyone, everywhere else, is stupid.  No matter what they declare their policies to be, deep down they give the strong impression that they thought their platform up in a Vegan Deli where only graduates of East Coast universities with trust funds were admitted. That is, they sound like snots and they don't seem to realize what matters to a lot of voters, including their own party members.  They need to get over that.

For one thing Democrats need to realize that in a lot of areas, for example the knee jerk side of an argument, and lurching to the left, isn't how people think on things.  In the rural ares of the country, for example, tacking to the left on gun control is not appealing to Democrats, not actually relevant to that region, and it wipes out any chance that local Democrats have on anything.  That's partially the reason that Democrats are nearly dead in Wyoming. Democrats would be wise to leave that as a state issue, which basically has been the approach of Sanders who is to the right of Clinton on this issue.  On social issues involving life, death, and marriage, the Democrats should realize that they're driving away ethnic groups and religious groups that have traditionally supported them and they don't need to for any reason.  They've been driving them away since the 1970s, and have lost a lot of ground in some areas here, and they really cannot afford to continue on this path long term.  This points to the Democratic support of statism, that is control from the top, which is anti-democratic and something the Democrats should learn to reverse themselves on.  Democrats nearly everywhere tend to be lock step in line with the Greenwich Village Vegan Party while most of the country isn't.

The Party, however, as a party that doesn't dislike government and which is in favor of an active role for government shouldn't be afraid of actually addressing modern problems on a state or local level, but it has to have some flexibility to do that.  Taking my state as an example again, the field should be wide open for Democrats this year as the GOP has become hostile to much of what the state stands for in terms of open spaces. And some Democrats have taken advantage of that this year. But with a party that can't resist campaigning in opposition to the views of the majority of residents on social views, it's not going to do well.

And they shouldn't ignore economics which is their actual natural defining point.  Economics, more than anything else, is what put them in power in 1932 and which has defined them since.  Democratic insurgents who accuse the Democrats of selling out to Wall Street put their argument well.  There's really no difference between the Democratic Party and the GOP on economic matters.  The Democrats need to rediscover that its the voter in urban Detroit that maters to them, not the voter in Manhattan.

In other words, the Democrats shouldn't lurch to the left on everything, and they shouldn't use 1973 as their defining moment in the world.  And they ought to pick up their copies of Keynes and maybe even find Belloc and Chesterton.

More than anything, the Democrats have got to let the party leadership that's stuck in the 1970s go.  Claiming to be the party of diversity, the Democrats this year ran two elderly candidates who were both white.  Sanders is Jewish, of course, but post Obama that hardly matters.  He seems to be an elderly white man, which is odd for a candidate who is the hippest and coolest of the year.  Hillary Clinton seems to have been transported, Star Trek style, right out of 1974.

A good example of what I mean here might be given, again, by Wyoming.  This year there is a Congressional race going on in Wyoming. The GOP field has quite a few candidates, but because of the nature of the last couple of legislative sessions, right now the field is being dragged to the far right.  The field is open for the Democrats to try to challenge, and they are.  One of their announced candidates is a young man from the coal industry.  He's clearly a liberal, but he's also a liberal in a fashion that addresses some issues that are deeply appealing to Wyoming voters, such as access to public lands.  Well, of course, just yesterday Charles Hardy announced. Hardy symbolizes what's wrong with the Democratic Party.  He's 75 years old, a 1970s type liberal, announced right away that he was concerned with equality issues based on gender identification, and he's notable for having been a Catholic Priest that left his vocation to get married.  He may be, and probably is, a very admirable, deeply Christian man, but he calls to mind, in this sort of thing, the Berrigans of the 1960s and 1970s, and that ship sailed and sank long ago, for the US and for the Catholic Church for that matter.  That Hardy would feel he'd need to run, with a young more vigorous working class man actually running, says volumes about what the Democratic Party is, and what it needs to become.

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Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part II

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part III Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Tracking the Presidential Election Part IV

Tracking the Presidential Election Part V