Alex Explains the News: Marianne vs. Littlefinger
In which Alex Howe opines on headlines.
Before Trump, the consensus narrative — outside the Fox News ecosystem — was that the Republican platform has lurched right in recent decades, while Democrats have largely remained in place. If anything, liberals were observed to be getting less liberal.
Things have changed. Between Bernie, AOC, and now Tiffany Cabán, concepts considered radioactive outside Tumblr even five years ago — the word “socialism” is a prime example — are being discussed with enthusiasm by the stars of the Democratic party. Heady times for progressives, indeed.
It’s impossible to say how much of this is a response to Trump, and how much was already in the air before he ran for President. Certainly the Great Recession was destined to shake up the political landscape regardless of who populated it; and the ongoing calamity of global warming is galvanizing crisis and violence — and therefore heavy-handed political and governmental response — worldwide. (Recall that the extreme politics of the 1930s — totalitarianism on both left and right — didn’t arrive out of nowhere: the Great Depression helped catalyze drastic ideology.)
Where are we headed? According to Marianne Williamson, a global revolution in consciousness. Honestly, maybe she’s right.
But what of the earthbound Democrats? Much of the party and the mainstream media is embroiled in a debate over healthcare: How popular, exactly, is the progressive proposal to implement Medicare for All? Evidently it depends on how pollsters frame the question. Fine.
Sure, prominent Democrats are moving left in this arena — but it’s a leftward move that more or less reflects voter sentiment, at least in their party. These ideas also jibe with — as Bernie no doubt reminded you before breakfast — the healthcare reality of other rich democracies. (How has socialized medicine turned out for them? Harder to pay for than they once thought, but they wouldn’t trade it for our system in a million years.)
But what of immigration? This is trickier. Just ask Obama, who managed to pass healthcare reform despite a hyper-obstructionist opposition; no such luck with immigration reform.
It is easy to lose track of just how far left the party has moved on this issue. As recently as the mid-aughts, it would’ve been unremarkable to read a dyed-in-the-wool liberal’s liberal warning of the economic consequences of “illegal immigration” in the New York Times. Yet as of this week, it is the minority position among Democratic presidential candidates that crossing the border illegally should be illegal. Howard Dean counters: “We’re going to get tarred with open borders no matter what we say.” True, but don’t you think the charge will have more sticking power if you do, in fact, open the border? No one talks about “death panels” anymore — because they weren’t real. (Caveat: Opening the border wholesale could be the most humane choice! AETN can’t say for sure — and in any event, even Castro’s proposal wouldn’t prevent the government from deporting people crossing the border. Suffice it to say: this post seeks to describe the political landscape rather than prescribe an ideal end state.)
As with healthcare, it is useful to take a glance at our friends in Europe: the Other Rich Democracies. Spoiler alert: Not even Angela Merkel was able to withstand the backlash to maintaining open-ish borders on humanitarian grounds.
This is where things gets even stickier. Democrats are proposing to decriminalize border crossings for an extremely compelling reason: Trump is separating parents from children using the criminal statue Julián Castro has popularized eliminating.* Therefore, it would seem natural for anyone who opposes family separation to support any measure seeking to block it.
But take a step back: What percentage of the electorate believes our border with Mexico ought to be porous?** Outside Tumblr, their numbers are small. (As dilapidated as Biden seemed during the debate, give the old man credit for an old-fashioned, nakedly tactical equivocation on this issue.) Who knows: Maybe we’re simply witnessing the birth pangs of a new center-left consensus on immigration—don’t market to the consumer, create the consumer, etc. And maybe not.
On one hand, candidates have scrambled to outdo each other in pleasing their base during primary season — only to scramble back to the center for the general election — since time immemorial. On the other: far from being confined to the primary, this rift is already threatening serious damage to Democratic Congressional consensus.
The Trump administration’s immigrant detention centers are a moral crisis of the highest order. How does one conduct politics when the stakes are life and death? How does a party choose a platform when the principled option could threaten their chance to govern — potentially destroying their ability to help?
The truth is that the stakes of politics are always life and death. In moments like these, AETN wonders: What would Tommy Carcetti do? Hell — what would Littlefinger do? And why does Aidan Gillen always play hypereffective schemers? Maybe we just need to get him and Marianne in a room together. The solution lies somewhere between her galactic conscience and his Machiavellian craftiness. Does anyone know their agents?
Edit 7/3: If the right next step isn’t in electoral politics, it may lie outside them.
Footnotes:
*Child separations did occur under previous administrations, but rarely; that said, the current wave of Central American migration began under Obama, and his administration failed to furnish humane treatment for many of the new asylum-seekers. (For even more context: The criminal statue in question has been on the books for nearly a century—but went largely unenforced until recent years.) While Trump is on track to deport slightly fewer people than Obama did, his administration has drastically expanded the policy of separating migrant families. Trump marries these policies with explicit nativism, further fueling cultural anti-immigrant hostility that was — hypocritically or not — absent from Obama’s rhetoric, and therefore less acceptable in the mainstream at the time.
**Indeed, there is even a case to oppose illegal immigration from the left. While an influx of migrant labor can boost the economy overall, new arrivals willing to work for lower wages create unwelcome competition for existing low-wage workers — a population whose prospects are dim to begin with. It goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s appeal — but Bernie himself has made the same argument. Even among Latinx Democrats, border-policy sentiment is not as unanimously progressive as Julián Castro might hope. (This poll isn’t the world’s most reputable, but it’s the rare one I could find that asked explicitly about this issue: 21% of all respondents supported “basically open borders,” versus 19% of Hispanics.)
