Two endorsements
Also: the real MLK
Yeah, one, two endorsements sit before you / That's what I said, now.
Endorsements from The Paper / Just go ahead, now
One says she'll cancel your school debts / That's some bread, now
One throws binders at her staffers / Ain't that real jacked, now.
OK, I’ll stop now.
On Sunday, The New York Times decided to split the difference, and instead of issuing a single endorsement, they endorsed two people: Elizabeth Warren and record scratch Amy Klobuchar. Wait, what?
It’s Monday afternoon, which means you’re reading this Tuesday morning (instead of the regular schedule of Monday morning); that’s because Monday was a holiday. That also gave me a bit more time to think about this particular twist in the Democratic race, as opposed to giving it a knee-jerk reaction on Sunday night, right after it came out.
So: what gives?
First, this is pretty much in line with the choice that Democrats have before them. If you look at the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, progressive Dems are backed by 37.6% of the party; the moderates edge them by a single percentage point, at 38.6%. That’s essentially an even split.
Whomever wins the nomination has to bridge that gulf. When I wrote last week about Paris being worth a mass, this is what I was getting at. Supporters of Bernie Sanders like talking about how Democrats can’t win without us, and that’s true; we’re going to need every ounce of enthusiasm we can wring out, because the other side’s certainly going to fight like hell to hold on to power.
But the converse is also true: if Bernie (or Warren) wins the nomination, they’ll have to quickly get a ton of disappointed folks onside — folks who are convinced, to a certain degree, that neither can defeat Trump and the Republicans. The easiest way to do that is with rhetoric and with the choice of a running mate.
This is why Bernie vociferously says he’ll back whomever wins the Democratic nomination, for instance: he’s trying to reassure skeptical folks who feel (wrongly, in my opinion) that he helped submarine the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. This is also why I suspect Bernie’s running mate, if he wins the nomination, won’t be a firebrand who disdains the Democratic “establishment”, but someone who reassures that establishment to a certain degree, and more importantly, can serve as President if Bernie can’t finish his term.
The Times clearly erred on the side of pragmatism here, as well. And I do mean erred, as in making a mistake.
In considering someone from the progressive side of the party, they opted for Warren over Sanders because they thought she’d be the more pragmatic choice. That’s despite Bernie’s real history of pragmatism and compromise (seriously, you don’t spend 30 years in Congress unless you learn to play well with others), the fact that any Democrat elected President will have to wield extraordinary amounts of unilateral executive power in the face of Republican intransigence, and the reality that between the two of them, Bernie is much more deferential to Congressional traditions.
It’s in considering someone from the moderate side that the Times really fumbled here. Start with the fact that a lot of circumstantial evidence points to the editorial board leaning towards endorsing Cory Booker, before he dropped out:
This calculus makes sense! Biden’s interview with the board wasn’t great, and at times bordered on ridiculous-to-sad:
Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s interview was mediocre, at best, and you just can’t escape the reality that his sole electoral experiences comes from governing the 300th-largest city in America. To think that Pete Buttigieg is “ready” to be President is to make a mockery of what it takes to be President. I’m serious. Listening to people explain why they back Buttigieg for the Presidency is like listening to a mockumentary of a fictional Presidential candidate:
So, then, Booker. And then — Booker drops out. Which leaves you with Amy Klobuchar.
Look, I get it. Klobuchar talks a good game about “getting things done”, and “bringing people along”; she’s extraordinarily popular in Minnesota, which she represents in the Senate. That’s probably why she’s outlasted so many other people in the race, and why folks in Iowa, particularly, seem to take to her.
But she’s almost certainly done after the Iowa caucuses, unless she shocks everyone and finishes in the top three (which could happen! you never know!); the Times endorsement explicitly gets at this, citing John Kerry’s “comeback” in 2004.
More fundamentally, she’s a bad choice for two reasons, one unique to her, the other inherent in all the moderate contenders. Let’s start with the latter one.
We are in a radical moment. The Times acknowledges this!
There has been a wildfire burning in Australia larger than Switzerland. The Middle East is more unstable at this moment than at any other time in the past decade, with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if. Basket-case governments in several nations south of the Rio Grande have sent a historic flood of migrants to our southern border. Global technology companies exert more political influence than some national governments. White nationalists from Norway to New Zealand to El Paso use the internet to share ideas about racial superiority and which caliber of rifle works best for the next mass killing.
(also: “basket-case governments”? Give me a damn break; the reason those countries are unstable is specifically because of American involvement over the last 150 years or so. Pretending otherwise is borderline racist, and extremely offensive.)
In a moment such as this, what’s the likelihood that moderate solutions will work to actually fix these problems, not just assuage them, or worse, inflame them? We are in a divisive moment precisely because those divisions are fundamental. This isn’t just rhetoric on my end; we can look back at American history for proof of this. How many compromises have we hailed — the Missouri Compromise; the Compromise of 1850; the end of Reconstruction; and so on — that have merely forestalled the inevitable reckoning with our moral compass? And isn’t this just another of those times?
So that’s the burden every moderate must contend with. The other is Klobuchar’s: specifically, her history of abusing staffers. I personally know three people whom she’s abused in her capacity as an elected official, and I’m sure there’s others. To me, that’s disqualifying. We’re not talking about verbal abuse, or as the Times puts it, “berating” people. Klobuchar physically threw things at these people.
To me, that’s disqualifying, and people who argue that we should look past it are really telling on themselves.
20 years ago, in the run-up to all the end-of-century retrospectives, the polling agency Gallup decided to find out whom Americans admired the most. Mother Theresa scored 49%; the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose holiday we celebrated yesterday, earned 34%, finishing second.
Today, we celebrate MLK as a kind of secular American saint, focusing on a singular moment - the March on Washington - and on a singular passage of a singular speech. You know the one:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
We’ve removed the sting and power from what the Reverend King said and did in his lifetime, enough so that people who’d intractably oppose King if he were alive today, and who advance views diametrically opposed to King’s vision, feel secure celebrating him:
I’ll let this speak for myself:
In our process of political beatification, we’ve effectively turned Martin Luther King, Jr. into a kind of mascot, inoffensive and toothless. We’ve drained him of power and potency, because the reality is that this is the only way we can reckon with his indictments of society.
Where do I begin? How about here, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail?
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. (emphasis added)
Gee, doesn’t that remind you of a great many people today?
Or here, in his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War?
“This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love,” he warned. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
By this standard, after nearly 20 years of non-stop war in Afghanistan and Iraq, America is long past spiritual death and fast approaching literal death, as people ration insulin and other life-giving drugs to stay alive, while we spend countless sums on wars that have long been lost.
Rev. King’s convictions came from a deep well of morality. “Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them,” he said in this same speech. “This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties, which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls ‘enemy,’ for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
Even his devotion to non-violent direct action - which some people can misunderstand as soft and unrealistic - comes from a position of clarity and purpose. “Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”
So, 25 years after we established a holiday in his honor, 51 years after he was slain, let’s remember him with clarity and purpose. The Reverend would have it no other way.
Listen: the world’s rough out there, OK? So this is me telling you that you’re OK, and we’re going to get through this together, not alone. I love you for you, in all your messiness and complexity and fuckedupness. As ever: if you think this newsletter is worth sharing, jam that button below. If you need anything - a job lead, a shoulder to lean on, someone to talk with - just hit reply.
I’ll be there, waiting.