Does Thomas Friedman Live Under a Rock?
Friedman’s critique of progressives reaches a new level of bad faith.
Thomas Friedman had lunch with President Biden. If that seems to you like a flimsy basis for a column in a prestigious national newspaper like the New York Times, you’re probably not alone. Alas, that is the springboard for the latest installation of tired arm-chair political musing from a member of the liberal establishment, and the results are, predictably, not pretty.
Friedman begins by stating that his conversation with Biden was off the record, “so I can’t tell you anything he said.” He then describes what he ate, a tuna sandwich with fruit and a chocolate milkshake, which is a good foreshadow of the column that follows: entirely predictable and thoroughly boring. When an op-ed begins by admitting that it has nothing new to say and then skips to a description of the writer’s lunch, you have a sense of where things are going. And for a writer like Friedman in a paper like the Times, that place is almost certainly going to be one that involves blaming progressives for everything.
After a few unobjectionable, albeit obvious, statements about the danger of the GOP, whose “top priority is installing candidates whose primary allegiance is to Trump and his Big Lie,” Friedman gets to the crux of his argument: that Biden has failed to permanently stem the tide of the right because the far-left has prevented him from doing so. He states:
To defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10 percent of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a center-left Biden, which is what he was elected to be and still is at heart. But we may not be able to get even 1 percent of Republicans to shift if far-left Democrats are seen as defining the party’s future.
I will not bother adding to the chorus of analysts who have rightfully pointed out the absurdity of this argument, which again, is hardly anything new. What it’s worth pointing out, however, is how stale and brazenly bad-faith these arguments have become. Friedman doesn’t bother to engage with critics or even substantiate his analysis to any degree, and by doing so, he reveals something about himself and others similarly situated.
For one thing, it would be great to sit down with Friedman and ask him what he proposes the Democratic Party do to achieve his goal of preventing the “far left” from “defining the party’s future.” If I could render a guess, I’d bet he would propose some combination of embracing a message of unity over partisanship, disavowing unpopular progressive proposals such as defunding the police and sidelining progressive politicians in favor of a staunchly center-left party leadership.
At this juncture, you may wonder whether Friedman lives under a rock (a scenario one should not dispense with lightly). Of course, as any casual observer of American politics can tell you, the above proposals represent not only the precise strategy offered by Biden and leading Democrats in the 2020 election, but also the dominant political blueprint for the Democratic Party for the past several decades. The idea that progressives have had their moment and failed is a bewildering argument to make when the standard bearers of the Democratic Party are Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. If Friedman is so sure that unifying the center-left with moderate Republicans is the way forward, he has the burden of explaining why this strategy has failed again and again.
It’s not surprising that Friedman fails to give any forward-looking examples of how the Democratic Party should change course, because any examination of actual actions taken by the party would indicate it is already doing exactly what Friedman wants it to. The example he does provide, however, illustrates just how incoherent his world-view is. Friedman states that Biden erred in allowing the far left to make his infrastructure bill “hostage to other excessive spending demands.” By that, he must mean Biden’s Build Back Better plan, a piece of legislation supported by a huge majority of voters and blocked single-handedly by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. If Friedman wishes to see a Democratic Party more broadly appealing to American voters, it’s curious that he calls out a piece of legislation that is uniquely suited to do just that.
At a certain point, it becomes difficult to engage with critics like Friedman, who don’t even bother to make a coherent argument. We’ve reached the point where establishment Democrats have managed to force the idea that progressives are the problem into the public consciousness merely by repeating it over and over and over again. No matter how many times the theory is proven wrong, it continues to be repeated by the most prominent observers in the most prestigious forums. This is not an outcome one would expect from a group of people truly interested in finding answers. Instead, it’s a situation one can only describe as desperation: the Friedmans of the world can sense that their brand of politics is quickly approaching irrelevance, and the only way to save it is through a war of attrition with their critics.
