Ed Burmila - Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center

I f you picked up this book, theres an excellent chance you feel like something about the Democratic Party is, well, off. Not quite right. Your relationship to the party is defined by either total exasperation or a veneer of enthusiasm covering a roiling cauldron of doubts you cant quite calm. You get your hopes up and are inevitably disappointed. You say things like Well, it could have been worse or I guess that wasnt so bada lot.

Democrats give up when they should fight. They say they know how to get things done and then spend their time in power explaining what they cant do. The victories they declare are strangely unsatisfying and require more asterisks, caveats, and qualifiers than a prescription drug ad. They use phrases like better than nothing and half a loaf like they have an endorsement deal with the concept of mediocrity. They seem to want the same things as the opposing party with disturbing frequency. They react to every failureand these arent rarewith vote blue, harder! and a barrage of fundraising emails so overwhelming that no filter yet devised is powerful enough to redirect them all to the spam folder. Sorry we massively blew that whole protect abortion rights thing; smash that donate button though! Even when Democrats are in power, the Republicans seem to be the ones in control.

You cant put your finger on it, but something is wrong.

Every voter who has been in the orbit of the Democratic Party experiences two important moments. The first is the moment of realization that what passes for liberal in the United States is closer to the political center by any meaningful definition of the term. For me, that moment was spread out across 2009 when Barack Obamabacked by a near supermajority in Congresslet Wall Streets masters of the universe off with a slap on the wrist as punishment for shit-canning the global economy, then insisted they get bonuses he previously described as shameful, When he walked out of his long-awaited sit-down with the CEOs of Americas banking giants in March 2009 with assurances that everyone was on the same page and Wall Street was sincerely ready to help, I saw all too clearly that change was not going to be quite as radical as we were led (or had led ourselves) to believe. Even the greatest economic crisis in decades wasnt sufficient to obviate hand-wringing over the deficit, not only from Republicans, from whom it is expected, but from the Democrats, the party that is, in some abstract sense, the working-class party.

The second moment is the brutal one, and the one not every would-be Democratic voter is willing to face. Its the moment you realize that there is something deeply wrong with these people. They are not merely a little too eager to compromise, too moderate, or too trusting of Republicans who radiate maliciousness. Those things may be true, but the problems run far deeper. The way they see politics and the political world are, in a word, broken. For me, this moment can be dated precisely: February 28, 2017. Around 10:00 p.m.

President Trump had just delivered his first speech to a joint session of Congress, one of many occasions early in his presidency on which desperate pundits tried to convince themselves that Trump had become president and was about to start acting like an adult with object permanence (oops!). The Democratic responsealways a thankless task for the minority partywas delivered by former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear.

It looked terrible. Somehow, the words were even worse:

Im here in Lexington, Kentucky, some 400 miles from Washington at a diner with some neighborsDemocrats and Republicanswhere we just watched the presidents address. I am a proud Democrat, but first and foremost, I am a proud Republican, and Democrat, and mostly, American.

Lets think about this for a second.

Donald Trump has just been elected president over Hillary Clinton, whom Democrats broadly believed to be both a shoo-in and the most qualified candidate ever, the obvious heir to the legacy of moderate liberalism embodied in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She lost to a sentient Twitter account, a complete imbecile, a shamelessly self-promoting C-list celebrity, the avatar of every American yearning for someone to tell them its OK to be a narcissistic prick because there are no consequences (or shouldnt be), a man who quite possibly has never read a book to conclusion in his life. Trumps election was an existential threat to the country and to the Democratic Party. It wasnt a wake-up call; it was WAKE UP! engraved on a giant cartoon mallet that walloped Democrats in the face.

And this was what the Democratic powers that be (and still are) concocted. This was what they chose to do with their first big symbolic chance to show America that they werent the sad-sack team in Air Bud that just lost a basketball game to a fucking dog. This was the way they thought they would inspire their emotionally shattered base and win over a country full of people grappling with the prospect of four years of President Father Coughlin.didnt even try to sound a note of energy and enthusiasm. They went with David Lynch Presents: Bipartisanship at the Cracker Barrel.

Clearly, in the grand scheme of things, the response is epiphenomenalit gets attention for the moment and then everybody forgets about it immediately. I wasnt troubled because Steve Beshears response had meaningful consequences. I was troubled because everything about it was bad. Everything. It was bad in a surreal way, a DVD bonus material