The Tyranny of Decorum: A Look Back on the 2020 Primary

By David Sirota, TMI

17 April 20

Note: I’ve known Bernie Sanders for 21 years. He’s been a hero for me. I deeply respect his life’s work and he remains an inspiration to me — and no amount of post-election gossip, punditry or backbiting will change that. Working on his campaign was a great honor, and I’ve thanked him and so many others for that experience. What follows are some frank takeaways from the campaign. We did not run a perfect race — and having worked on both winning and losing campaigns, I accept my share of responsibility for that. Lord knows I was hardly perfect — and from the very beginning until the very end, I’ve taken my share of criticism. But I believe that we have an obligation to look back on the painful past because we must always try to learn lessons for the future. - D

f you’ve read the autopsies of the Bernie 2020 campaign in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, Buzzfeed or CNN, you’ve probably read a version of a story that goes something like this: pollster Ben Tulchin, co-chair Nina Turner and I were fire-breathing monsters aggressively pushing Bernie to “attack” Joe Biden, Bernie refused to do it, and that’s why Bernie lost. 

There are some nuggets of truth in here, but there’s also some fiction — and so it is worth separating the facts from the fantasy, in order to understand a huge-but-little-discussed problem plaguing the Democratic Party that I call the tyranny of decorum. 

A Thing That Is True: We Pushed, With Some But Not Enough Success

Yes, it is true — a small group of us with many years of campaign experience pushed Bernie to sharply contrast his own progressive record with Biden’s record of working with Republicans against the Democratic agenda. I’ve been on seven underdog challenger campaigns in my life, and won a few of them -- this is campaigning 101: you contrast, or you lose. And with Biden, the contrast was particularly stark.

While Bernie was fighting to stop the Iraq War, Biden helped the GOP pass the Iraq War resolution and vote down Democratic amendments to that resolution. While Bernie was fighting to stop the bankruptcy bill, Biden helped the GOP pass the legislation that could now crush hundreds of thousands of Americans during the coronavirus recession. While Bernie and Paul Wellstone were pushing a bill to lower the price of prescription drugs and prevent profiteering off vaccines developed at taxpayer expense, Biden was helping Republicans kill the initiative. And as I told MSNBC, while Bernie was fighting to protect and expand Social Security, Biden was helping echo the Republican argument for cutting Social Security. 

Even though Biden at times pathologically lied about some of these facts (at one point he actually insisted he didn’t help write his own bankruptcy bill!), this record is verifiable, it is not in dispute. A group of us believed it was important for this record to be spotlighted — because it was good strategy and good for democracy. 

We didn't push Bernie to “attack” Biden in some sort of vicious way. We pushed him to instead simply and very explicitly cast the primary as a choice between a vision of progressive change, and Biden’s promise to his donors that “nothing will fundamentally change.”

To his credit, Bernie at times worked with us and embraced the strategy -- and when he did, it was successful (see his Social Security contrast with Biden in Iowa, and see his contrast with Wine Cave Pete in New Hampshire). 

At other times, though, the campaign backed off and did not seize opportunities to explicitly and continually spell out big differences between the candidates. 

Ultimately, Biden was able to avoid having to constantly try to explain his offensive record. Instead, he was allowed to depict himself as a safe, electable “unity” candidate. 

Was it fun to always be one of the people pushing the campaign to be more aggressive, and also eating shit on Twitter for supposedly being “toxic” for simply tweeting a few videos of Biden pushing some grotesquely retrograde policy? No, it was not fun. I have more gray hair and less stomach lining because I pushed. I’m no hero or a martyr, but I can tell you it was awful, excruciating and heartbreaking.

But it was necessary.

A Thing That May Or May Not Be True: Winning

Would we have won had we consistently contrasted with Biden? If we’re gonna play shoulda-coulda-woulda, I’d love to say yes. However, I can’t say that with total confidence, because there are so many variables and because Biden was an extremely powerful primary candidate, even if he may not have seemed like it to the average onlooker.

Let’s remember: in the last 65+ years, no current or immediate past vice president has ever mounted a serious run for president and not successfully secured his party’s nomination at least once. That obscure stat evinces a core truth: if given the choice, voters of both parties almost always opt to nominate people who were a heartbeat away from the presidency (and incredibly, with all the talk about “electability,” they have done this even though vice presidents don’t have a great record in general elections).

As a former vice president who once bragged about being one of the most conservative lawmakers in the Senate, Biden had the support of much of the corporate-aligned party establishment, as well as the billionaire class that correctly saw Bernie as an unprecedented existential threat to their economic interests. 

That establishment may be weaker than ever — but it is still enormously powerful, especially because so much of the media often echoes its objectives. Some examples: CNN likened Bernie to coronavirus. MSNBC ran an all-out campaign against us. Self-described “fact-checkers” insidiously obscured the facts and deflect criticism of Biden’s very clear record. And as Politico reported, “Biden enjoyed nearly $72 million in almost completely positive earned media” in the pivotal days leading up to Super Tuesday.

Maybe a sharper contrast coulda overcome this, maybe not. I’m not sure. 

I am confident, however, that a stronger contrast would have at least put us in a better position to survive when Beto, Klobuchar, and Wine Cave Pete all fell in behind Biden to help him seal Super Tuesday. 

In absence of a tough critique early on and with no day-to-day focus on his record, Biden was able to solidify an “electability” argument he didn’t deserve or earn. 

According to exit polls, Biden was able to win the largest share of Democratic voters in 15 states who said health care was their top priority, even though a majority of Democratic voters in those states said they support replacing private insurance with a government run plan — a position Biden opposes. 

Biden won Midwest states that have been ravaged by the trade deals that he himself supported. 

Biden even won the most Democratic voters in 11 states who said climate was their top issue, despite his far weaker climate plan.

By the time our campaign was finally comfortable consistently making a strong case against him, it was after Super Tuesday and it was too late.

A Thing That Is Dangerously Untrue: Contrasts Are Bad

If you’ve read this far, I know what you are wondering: what explains Bernie’s resistance to more sharply contrasting with Biden? 

IMO, three things, with the third being the most problematic for the future: 

1) Bernie is a deeply principled lawmaker, but he is not a scorched earth politician, and never has been. Since he was first elected to a public office, his approach is one that seems defined by a belief that to make real change from the outside, you must push hard, but always maintain one foot inside the power structure and not try to burn it all the way down. The calculation is that if you are too adversarial against the establishment, you will be instantly marginalized, depicted as irrelevant and disempowered (Side note: as the primary results show, the problem with this theory is that even if you are nice and don’t go scorched earth, the power structure has other ways to defeat progressives).

2) As he himself said, Bernie likes and respects Biden. I personally don’t believe that affinity is justified, considering Biden’s legislative record, but I’m not going to litigate that point. It is what it is.

3) The Democratic Party has manufactured a culture that creates the conventional wisdom and perception that any efforts to contrast opponents’ records from the left in a primary is “negative,” and therefore destructive. 

That culture, of course, is the structural factor that lasts beyond the Bernie campaign, and it is a huge problem. It is a new tyranny of decorum that aims to convince voters to value etiquette, pleasantries and party unity over everything else -- even their own economic interests.

Let’s remember: we have just experienced modern history’s first contested Democratic presidential primary in which the candidates declined to seriously criticize each other in any kind of sustained way. 

There were certainly momentary flashpoint, but compared to past primaries, this was a muted affair — and if you somehow think this primary was uniquely “negative” because Bernie once in a while gently mentioned Joe Biden’s vote for the Iraq War, you are apparently Rip Van Winkle waking up from a 50-year slumber. You somehow never saw Democratic ads against Howard Dean in 2004, you never saw Hillary Clinton ads depicting Barack Obama as corrupt, and you never heard Obama’s ads and speech portraying Hillary Clinton as a puppet of corporate lobbyists.

The opposite dynamic defined the 2020 primary. As the health care industry ran ads vilifying Bernie’s signature Medicare for All plan, and as a super PAC aired ads suggesting Bernie couldn’t win a general election, the tyranny of decorum dominated the candidate discourse. 

Anytime Bernie so much as made a passing mention of one of Biden’s bad votes, there were overwrought accusations that Bernie was “going negative,” hand-wringing warnings about the “perils of going negative,” with Team Biden shedding crocodile tears about “negative attacks.” This transparent bullshit soon became attacks on staffers who dared to point out flaws in Biden’s record — Turner and press secretary Briahna Gray were routinely demonized on social media, and I myself was labeled a toxic “attack dog” for the high crime of periodically tweeting links to Biden speeches in the Congressional Record.

This attempt to scandalize policy criticism supposedly reflected heightened concerns about “electability” — the idea promoted by Democratic politicians and pundits being that sharp contrasts might weaken the eventual Democratic nominee against the existential threat of Trump. 

And yet, history argues exactly the opposite — tough, brutal primaries often end up battle-testing nominees and making them stronger (see President Barack Obama). In the same way the minor leagues can prepare players for the major leagues, brutal intraparty contests subject the eventual standard-bearers to training, and they also suss out potential weaknesses at an early point when a party can still make a different nomination choice. 

By contrast, primaries dominated by demands for “good decorum,” “unity” and “decency” create coronations -- and coronations run the risk of creating nominees who are not adequately road-tested, and who are only publicly vetted in the high-stakes general election, well after the party could have made a different choice. 

That is where we are now — a tyranny of decorum has given us a presumptive nominee whose record hasn’t been well scrutinized or challenged. 

One Last Thing That’s True: Contested Primaries Are Good

Now it’s true: Democrats’ cries of “you’re being too negative!” -- and all the overdramatic fainting spells about tweets to C-Span videos -- did work in the primary. The tactics successfully scandalized any legitimate scrutiny of Biden’s record to the point where mild criticism of specific votes was instantly depicted as a substance-free “controversy” about tone. 

But those same cheap tactics -- the screaming about negativity, the whining, the fainting spells -- are not going to work when Donald Trump spends a billion dollars on negative ads hammering Biden’s votes for NAFTA and the bankruptcy bill, votes that Biden could have been better prepared to deal with had they been litigated in the primary. He may still be able to defeat Trump (and I’ve said I hope he does), but the comparatively soft primary did not strengthen him for the general election.

Looking ahead beyond 2020, we can’t allow this stifling worship of decorum to define Democrats’ political culture. We must remember that intraparty contrast is good in primaries. 

Hillary bashing Obama was good.

Obama bashing Hillary was good. 

The same goes for down ballot races: Ned Lamont running a tough primary against Joe Lieberman was good. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ending Joe Crowley’s political career was good. 

The 2020 primary was pleasant, civil and polite — and that’s bad.

We’re in the midst of unpleasant, uncivil and impolite emergencies that threaten our country and our planet. A global pandemic won’t be stopped by niceties. The corporations profiting off the health care crisis won’t be thwarted with good manners. The fossil fuel giants intensifying the climate cataclysm won’t be deterred by gentility. And elections will not be won by prioritizing good decorum over everything else.

In short: preventing a real contrast and a real conflict over ideas only serves the establishment and its politicians who know that scrutiny will weaken their power to decide nomination contests and control the future. 

But winning nomination contests without real vetting not only serves corporate power, it also jeopardizes that much-vaunted quality that parties claim to care so much about: general election “electability.” 

Sirota

P.S. If you are interested in more insights about the campaign, click here to watch this interview I did this week with Cenk Uygur of the The Young Turks.

How We Can Build a Hardier World After the Coronavirus

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

17 April 20

he coronavirus pandemic has revealed one particularly shocking thing about our societies and economies: they have been operating on a very thin margin. The edifice seems so shiny and substantial, a world of silver jets stitching together cities of towering skyscrapers, a globe of soaring markets and smartphone connectivity. But a couple of months into this disease and it’s all tottering, the jets grounded and the cities silent and the markets reeling. One industry after another is heading for bankruptcy, and no one knows if they will come back. In other words, however shiny it may have seemed, it wasn’t very sturdy. Some people—the President, for instance—think that we can just put it all back like it was before, with a “big bang,” once the “invisible enemy” is gone. But any prosperity built on what was evidently a shaky foundation is going to seem Potemkinish going forward; we don’t want always to feel as if we’re just weeks away from some kind of chaos.

So if we’re thinking about building civilization back in a hardier and more resilient form, we’ll have to learn what a more stable footing might look like. I think that we can take an important lesson from the doctors dealing with the coronavirus, and that’s related to comorbidity, or underlying conditions. It turns out, not surprisingly, that if you’ve got diabetes or hypertension, or have a suppressed immune system, you’re far more likely to be felled by COVID-19.

Societies, too, come with underlying conditions, and the two that haunt our planet right now are inequality and ecological turmoil. They’ve both spiked in the past few decades, with baleful results that normally stay just below the surface, felt but not fully recognized. But as soon as something else goes wrong—a new microbe launches a pandemic, say—they become starkly evident. Inequality, in this instance, means that people have to keep working, even if they’re not well, because they lack health insurance and live day to day, paycheck to paycheck, and hence they can spread disease. Ecological instability, especially the ever-climbing mercury, means that even as governors try to cope with the pandemic they must worry, too, about the prospect of another spring with massive flooding across the Midwest, or how they’ll cope if wildfire season gets out of control. Last month, the U.S. Forest Service announced that, owing to the pandemic, it is suspending controlled burns, for instance, “one of the most effective tools for increasing California’s resiliency to fire.” God forbid that we get another big crisis or two while this one is still preoccupying us—but simple math means that it’s almost inevitable.

And, of course, all these things interact with one another: inequality means that some people must live near sources of air pollution that most of us wouldn’t tolerate, which in turn means that their lungs are weakened, which in turn means they can’t fight off the coronavirus. (It also means that some of the same people can lack access to good food, and are more likely to be diabetic.) And, if there’s a massive wildfire, smoke fills the air for weeks, weakening everybody’s lungs, but especially those at the bottom of the ladder. When there’s a hurricane and people need to flee, the stress and the trauma can compromise immune systems. Simply living at the sharp end of an unequal and racist society can do the same thing. And so on, in an unyielding spiral of increasing danger.

Since we must rebuild our economies, we need to try to engineer out as much ecological havoc and inequality as we can—as much danger as we can. That won’t be easy, but there are clear and obvious steps that would help—there are ways to structure the increased use of renewable energy that will confront inequality at the same time. Much will be written about such plans in the months to come, but at the level of deepest principle here’s what’s key, I think: from a society that has prized growth above all and been willing to play fast and loose with justice and ecology, we need to start emphasizing sturdiness, hardiness, resiliency. (And a big part of that is fairness.) The resulting world won’t be quite as shiny, but, somehow, shininess seems less important now.

Passing the Mic

Mary Annaïse Heglar is one of the freshest and most important voices in the climate movement. She’s the writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her personal essays—most of which revolve around themes of climate justice—are some of the most engaging writing I know on a subject that often inspires earnestness; a recent favorite was in Wired magazine. This interview has been condensed for clarity.

You say, “The facts have been on our side for a very long time, but we’re still losing.” Why?

The science on climate change has been crystal clear for literally decades. As Amy Westervelt has illustrated beautifully, on her podcast “Drilled,” the fossil-fuel companies knew that before anyone else. James Hansen testified before Congress thirty-two years ago. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the precursor to the Paris Agreement) dates back to 1992. We didn’t wind up in a climate crisis for lack of information, or even for lack of clearly communicated information. What was done was not done out of ignorance—it was done out of malice and greed. If all we had to do was have the right facts, we’d have been done a long time ago.

People feel as if they can’t take part in the fight because they’re not scientifically inclined. What do you tell them?

What I tell them is, “Girl, me, neither!” But you don’t need a scientific background or inclination to be part of the climate movement or conversation. This is not about science; it’s about justice. The science proves the severity of the injustice, sure, but it’s not the entire story. There’s a place for everyone in the climate movement because everyone, even the smallest toddler, understands the concept of “no fair.”

Everyone always asks me, “What should I be doing as an individual?” But is that even the right way to frame the question?

I get that question all the time, too, and it’s really frustrating. As I argue in my article, if you’re ready to graduate beyond the things that everyone should be doing—like cutting your carbon footprint, and voting for the climate, and showing up to demonstrations—then you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to become a bona-fide climate person. That means you’re past the one-size-fits-all activism. It’s time for your activism to mold to you, and only you can do that. No one told Greta [Thunberg] to strike, no one told Jamie and Nadia [the teen-age climate activists Jamie Margolin and Nadia Nazar] to help start Zero Hour. They just did it. No one told me to write—in fact, plenty of people told me not to! There’s so much to be done on climate, and so much that the people already involved with it haven’t thought of. There’s so much room for new ideas and new voices, so if you’re a new or aspiring climate person, you’re right on time. The better question would be “What can I do next?” An even better question would be “How did you find your niche in climate?” And then take those answers and carve out your own niche.

Climate School

As Earth Day approaches, Denis Hayes, who spearheaded the original observance, in 1970, writes in the Seattle Times about what had been the plans for a mass fiftieth-anniversary day of action next week. The activities will be going online, instead, at EarthDayLive, but Hayes points out that we’ll get a real chance to show our commitment on November 3rd. His essay is worth looking at for the vintage photographs alone, but he adds an aside that I didn’t know: just days after the original protest, in which some twenty million Americans participated, the escalation of the war in Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State drove it out of the news.

Cutting down rain forests is a bad idea because it helps wreck the climate. It also increases the chances that diseases will jump from animals to humans, according to a new Stanford study. The veteran writer David Quammen distills some of those lessons in a new interview, based on his book “Spillover,” from 2012. I confess that I had no idea that one in four mammal species on our planet was a bat.

The Times has a doleful piece on Nepali climate migrants leaving their home villages because of the Himalayan drought. According to one official, ongoing bouts of extreme weather across the region threaten to “reverse and undermine decades of development gains and potentially undermine all our efforts to eradicate poverty.”

Scoreboard

President Trump keeps rolling back environmental regulations, but one of the few silver linings to the incompetence of this Administration is that it frequently manages the rollbacks with the same flat-footedness that it brings to, say, epidemiology. This means that the courts often overturn them; last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit restored a regulation that prohibited businesses from using chemicals in refrigeration systems that contribute to climate change.

In Kansas (of all places), a judge appointed by the former far-right governor Sam Brownback (of all people) ruled that the utilities could not charge people a monthly fee more for putting solar panels on their roofs. The surcharge—similar to plans put in place across the nation by utilities who fear that the quick penetration of solar power will undercut their revenues—would have in some cases extended the time it takes for residents to pay off their systems from thirteen years to thirty-nine. That the judge was the appointee of an anti-environmental governor makes the ruling “almost a cherry on top of an ice-cream sundae,” as one advocate put it.

Warming Up

Judy Twedt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, managed to put the Keeling Curve of rising carbon dioxide to music—“it gets screechy at the end,” she admits, as the numbers keep rising. Here’s a short interview with her, and her TEDx talk, and her home page, where you can check out the score she made from the data record of melting sea ice.