Actually Yes, Let’s Keep Litigating The Democratic Primary

Have you noticed that the people who are most insistent that it’s foolhardy to “keep fighting” the Democratic Primary tend to be people whose assumptions about it proved disastrously, horrendously wrong? And who contributed directly to the nomination of a historically poor candidate, the most stalwart defenders of whom maintain to this day that she didn’t actually “lose” — rather, she was unjustly deprived of victory by sinister exogenous forces such as Russia and the FBI?

Enter: Joan Walsh.

Instead of taking full stock of what exactly brought about their epic failure, characters like Joan Walsh would rather run around condemning others for declining to “look forward, not backward” — that ubiquitous mantra always intended to absolve those who intone it of culpability for whatever offense they might have committed.

Even those of us who had some select qualms with Bernie Sanders (as I did, on foreign policy especially) recognized that he was far and away the candidate who could most effectively marshall the popular anti-establishment sentiment of the time, and was therefore worth supporting notwithstanding any minor, ancillary objections. Put another way, it was well worth backing Sanders’ candidacy and subordinating any qualms to further the broader effort of 1) Bolstering his bid to upend the Democratic Party establishment 2) Widening the spectrum of political possibility in the country writ large and 3) Challenging concentrated corporate/economic power via populist upsurge.

But Joan didn’t see it that way. She was #WithHer. Not only was she #WithHer, she went out of her way to incessantly denigrate, mock, and slime Sanders supporters as a bunch of naive miscreants who are possibly both racist and sexist. When things really got wild, she even referred to Sanders as the leader of an “angry white male cult.” She helped to popularize and propagate the discredited, debunked “Bernie Bro” meme, which has to be one of the most ridiculously bogus smears ever puked up in the history of modern politics.

Walsh employed the most pernicious, smear-job, blackmail tactics to tarnish not just Sanders but his run-of-the-mill supporters, all in service of securing the nomination of one of the most unpopular candidates of all time, Hillary Clinton. It’s not just that Walsh took a position that one might disagree with: that happens on occasion. Rather, she slandered her adversaries, all from atop the perch of one of the country’s most prestigious left-wing media outfits, The Nation magazine, which gave her nasty crusade the appearance of credibility. When all was said and done, Walsh earned the distinction of being among the absolute worst, most damaging pundits ever. Question: will she pay any professional price for this incredibly bad behavior? No, of course not.

Only someone who wanted to preserve their unwarranted power and/or platform — such as Walsh — would discount ongoing, unresolved post-election debates as “infighting,” which as a term connotes pettiness or fixation with trivialities. There is nothing petty or trivial about examining how the Democratic Party comports itself, who wields power within its broader policy/staffing/media apparatus (such as Walsh), and related issues pertinent to its viability or non-viability as a political force. You’d want to ward off or discourage such discussions only if you are implicated in them, as Walsh most certainly is.

I’d love to live in a world where people like Walsh command no power whatsoever, but unfortunately they do, because our corrupt media/consultant class assigns lots of prestige and influence in accordance with who appears regularly on cable news and has lots of Twitter followers. Sadly for the Democratic Party and the nation (and The Nation) — Walsh fits the bill.

If I were Walsh, and my failures were so obvious and pronounced over such an extended period of time, I’d probably want to reevaluate and maybe even seek a new line of work. But sinecured pundits never face any tangible repercussions, so Walsh doesn’t face job insecurity as a result of her disgrace. If anything, she’s bound to lap up even more prestige and acclamation. That’s how the incentives of the Media Punditry Industrial Complex are structured; Walsh gets rewarded despite repeated failure, while others are penalized for being correct.

Walsh is an especially insidious example of the Perpetually Failing But Prominent Pundit, because she constantly over-personalizes political disputes, turning everything into a grand, self-involved narrative about the “journey” she is on and how this informs her views. Her big “endorsement” in The Nation of Hillary was an overwrought load of BS, laden with excessively personal anecdotes that had no relevance at all to the “Sanders or Clinton?” question, but which Walsh apparently thought needed airing in a political affairs magazine rather than in her own private journal.

Here’s another example from 2008 — she’s arguing for how great an idea it is for Hillary to be nominated Secretary of State under Obama (ultimately one of his worst decisions, it proved). When pressed on the merits of her argument by the late Christopher Hitchens, Walsh retorts, “That’s your opinion, Christopher.” She then causes the exchange to devolve into the realm of the weirdly personal, bizarrely declaring: “I’ve had dinner at your house… we’ve had drinks together.” Why should the viewer care in the slightest whether or not Walsh had drinks with Hitchens? Who knows: it’s just her instinct to frame every political dispute as of a piece with her melodramatic personal “story.”

Walsh’s tendency carried forward to 2016, when her decision to vigorously back Hillary was once again woven into some kind of personal redemption narrative. Upon announcing that she’d support Hillary over Sanders “with joy and without apology,” Walsh revealed that a big reason for her Hillary endorsement was so she could really stick it to some unnamed mean people on Twitter. How small-minded and petulant do you have to be to allow Twitter trolls to dictate your endorsement decision? It just shows how myopic so many of these people are: for them politics is this vapid, never-ending soap opera, of which they’re the leading star.

Count how many times Walsh uses the word “I” in the endorsement essay linked above. I have no inherent problem with writing in the first person (this sentence begins with the word “I,” after all) but her over-reliance on it as a rhetorical style shows how profoundly self-obsessed she is, which is obviously a corrosive influence when applied to political analysis.

It’s going to take an intensive, long-term, multifaceted effort to excavate the Democratic Party from the massive rut it presently finds itself in; necessary but not sufficient in that effort is forging a new kind of Journalism Pundit Media Whatever landscape. With people like Walsh at the forefront, the Party is destined for more failure. How do you think Trump feels when he sees Walsh out there leading “The Resistance”? He’s very happy about that, because it makes “The Resistance” look like a joke.

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