What the DNC is really signalling with the Iowa hijack: a threat to push the self-destruct button
It was a staple of old Star Trek episodes (and maybe new, which I never much watched) that when some alien force or other villain gained control of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk, with steely, eyeball-to-eyeball resolve, would start the ship’s self-destruct sequence, then glare at the intruder while the computer tonelessly counted down. The intruder naturally backed down at the last second.
This came to mind when considering Iowa. For the sake of thoroughness, let’s run through the possible explanations of what’s happening. First, it might have been a genuine and accidental technical glitch, combined with inadequate training and rehearsal. (The accidental nature of such a glitch seems unlikely in view of the connections between the app developer Shadow Inc. and the Buttigieg campaign plus holdovers from Clinton 2016.) Second, there might have been widespread though not necessarily purposive rules violations, such as voters deserting in the second round (“alignment”) a candidate who was viable in the first round. Such retrograde movements were actually seen in several of the precinct tallies revealed so far. The state party might be trying to untangle those as discreetly as possible, because if they let such rules violations stand, the whole results becomes illegitimate by its own rules. Third, the anti-Sanders fix is in: they are trying to hack his victory by misrecording or altering the numbers reported by the precincts, or at least, deny his victory its due visibility by delaying and confusing the results. And fourth, the fix might have tried to be in, but some honest people detected it, and are now trying to extricate the real, fair results.
The rest of this article presumes option three, which is looking truer with each passing hour.
What is the DNC trying to do here? (We can presume that it has the Iowa state Democratic Party under its thumb.) Does it really think that by fudging Sanders’ victory in Iowa, it can stop what the polls show to be a mounting Sanders wave across the states? I don’t think that’s their plan. I think they are making a veiled but unmistakable threat to Sanders and his supporters — that if the latter have the gumption to actually try to win the nomination on the basis of majority vote, to the extent that DNC fixing cannot stymie him, the DNC will resort to the final option: the self-destruction of the party. Like the Enterprise, the Democratic Party with all its machinery is too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
Why should we understand this as a threat to self-destruct, instead of just an exercise in jimmying the vote count, as they did repeatedly in 2016? Firstly, because it’s blatant. If they merely wanted to monkey around with the vote tally, they could have done so smoothly and almost invisibly, as in 2016 (and who knows how many times previously). But this one wasn’t meant to fool anybody: like many such set-ups, it’s deliberately unconvincing. At most it suffices to construct a cover narrative that the establishment can repeat with almost a straight face, like the faked suicide of Dorothy Kilgallen on the eve of her revelations about what Jack Ruby had to say from prison. No cops were fooled by that one. But it gave them enough to point to so that they could go with the flow. Same in Iowa — no one would argue that an app glitch is impossible.
Secondly, the DNC knows as well as everyone else by this point that if it cheats to deny Sanders again, the progressive wing of the party would desert it for real this time. (In 2016, many Sanders voters sat out the general election, especially the independents; a few voted for Trump or Stein. But the majority of Democratic Sanders supporters apparently voted dutifully for Hillary.) Another abduction of the primary process would show Sanders supporters that their engagement with the party is futile, and they would not turn out even in fleeting numbers for a Democratic candidate crowned against popular will. Some third party is likely to attract many of them, but not enough. With the loss of such a major and energetic part of their base plus independents, the Dems would never again be competitive at national level, nor in most states. And the progressives wouldn’t get what they want either, because they can’t (yet) muster a majority, or even a plurality, of the general voting public. (This is not to disregard the fact that the general public clearly favors progressive positions like Medicare-for-All and curtailing corporate power. In fact this makes these centrist positions — the center turns out to be progressive. But the fact is, unless and until the voting public recognizes who is offering this and who is refusing it, or who is offering some false equivalent, progressives need the backing of major-party voters including the reluctant ones, and the party machinery that turns them out, to get over the top.). With the blatant Iowa hijack, the DNC is saying to progressives “yes, we will really do this.” Eyeball to eyeball.
But with typical recklessness, what the DNC would be destroying is far more than the party that hosts it: Trump would triumph again, and the undoing of our republic would be unstoppable. In fact it may even beat climate change to the punch.
We’ve known for some time that the DNC would rather lose to the Republicans, even Trump, than win with the wrong nominee. (This is now echoed in the UK, where for example a corporate Labour Party member opposed to progressive Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was caught on election-night camera chortling at her own party’s massive defeat — because now Corbyn and his progressive platform were certainly finished.) We’ve also known that part of the purpose of the Democratic Party, to its wealthier supporters, is to co-opt and defuse progressivism. But now, when it’s becoming evident that progressivism’s day is here, the DNC is preparing to go all the way: like Captain Kirk launching the self-destruct countdown, it’s sending a signal that it will destroy its own party before it lets progressives take it over. The DNC is preparing to fulfill its duty with the ultimate sacrifice.
How then do progressives respond to this? I’ll let you know when I think of something.
