Elizabeth Warren Knows It's Not Just About Trumpism. It's About Completely Rebuilding Our Politics.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and a sharp critic of big banks and unregulated capitalism, entered the 2020 race for president on Monday, becoming the first major candidate in what is likely to be a long and crowded primary marked by ideological and generational divisions in a Democratic Party desperate to beat President Trump.
In an 8:30 a.m. email to supporters on New Year’s Eve - 13 months before the first votes will be cast in the Iowa caucuses - Ms. Warren said she was forming a exploratory committee, which allows her to raise money and fill key staff positions before a formal kickoff of her presidential bid. Ms. Warren also released a video that leaned on the populist, anti-Wall Street themes that are sure to be central to her campaign message.
Here's the announcement video, courtesy of her own website.
(And, to be fair, in the above passage from The New York Times, the phrase "major candidate" is doing too much work winnowing the field far too early in the process. Former Obama cabinet official Julian Castro beat Warren to the exploratory committee line by a couple of weeks. And nobody should be determining who "major candidates" are this early in what is still an embryonic Democratic field.)
There are going to a whole passel of these coming out between now and the beginning of March. Each of them will stake out a particular issue profile for each candidate. These profiles then will be fed into a two-year sausage grinder in which their essence will get mingled with all sorts of off-brand stuff and nonsense. Unless the candidates are very careful, what comes out will have as much to do with the original announcement video as Duck Soup does with Paths of Glory. The elite political media, which ought to be the equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration in this extended metaphor, has shown no indication that it's learned many damn things since 2016, so it is fair to assume that the candidates likely will be on their own again. These are the kind of politics for which the country has shown a distressing tendency to gorge itself, so there we are.
At the very least, Senator Professor Warren has staked out a clear global theme for her campaign: the tight connections between political corruption, in both its legal and illegal forms, and the relentless, crushing momentum of income inequality that touches almost every aspect of our political and cultural life. SPW's greatest natural political gift is to explain how all these moving parts work together to crush families and small businesses, and to do so in a manner clear enough for slow journalists to understand.
(My first encounter with her was when she still was at Harvard and I was at the Boston Globe, and she explained the dynamics that nearly shattered the economy in less than half-an-hour.)
This was first put into play for 2020 when she introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, a sweeping good-government initiative that hearkens back to the legislation produced by the Progressives fighting the excesses of our previous Gilded Age. If nothing else, this bill puts her beyond any serious argument that she would be running merely an anti-Trump campaign. Her measure treats the election of this president*-correctly, to my mind-as the product of systemic corruption that had been allowed to run wild for too long. Note that her video includes a piece of film in which President Ronald Reagan talks at the New York Stock Exchange about "turning the bull loose."
A great deal of the current problems brought into our politics by modern movement conservatism-and by the Republican party, which has been its primary vehicle for longer than many people can remember-began in that glorious year of 1981, when government was the problem, and not the solution. People were told, from the top, that self-government was for suckers. This made a Trump, or someone like him, inevitable. Whoever is the Democratic nominee is going to have to cope with that history because, if that nominee gets elected, the job is going to be about more than repairing the damage done by the current incumbent. It's going to be something close to a second Reconstruction. At the very least, Warren's anti-corruption bill seems to acknowledge that historical reality.
Of course, the sausage-grinder being what it is, two months after she announced this bill, there was the DNA test and at least two weeks of obliterative process-story trash-talk about whether or not that was a good or a bad idea, which led into some preliminary thumb-sucking and pre-emptive chin-stroking, which culminated in a sap-headed editorial in The Boston Globe in which SPW was encouraged not to run because it was determined that she somehow had missed her window (When exactly was that?), and, hilariously, that she was too "divisive" and that what the country needed was "a unifying voice after the polarizing politics of Donald Trump."
The chasm in that logic, of course, is that "the polarizing politics of Donald Trump" are still running the government. To produce a unifying voice that can get anything done, let alone begin the work of the second Reconstruction, is going to require a strong political message that is going to alienate the forces that have produced the destruction. This will certainly be polarizing. And it should be. This election ought to be about reasserting self-government against the forces of organized predatory capitalism, and against three decades of propaganda against the notion that the fight against those forces is even necessary.
This is a first shot. And it's a good one.
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