Republican pollster Ed Goeas (The Hill, 12/3/18) says he has “warned many of my Democratic friends that they are facing something in the Democratic Party much like what we faced with the Tea Party,” which resulted in the biggest midterm gains for any party since 1948.
It’s a trope that dates back more than a decade, but the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has seen a recent surge in the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend (IRPF), a specific genre of concern-trolling where a long-time Republican operative, politician or pundit offers “advice” to Democrats about how they should avoid going “too far left.”
These takes—frequently featured as earnest appeals in liberal and centrist outlets—are ostensibly framed as straight-talk advice that should be accepted as objectively in the Democrats’ best interest, and never presented as an ideological argument that would otherwise make sense coming from a right-winger. “Republican hates socialism” isn’t that newsworthy, whereas “GOP operative identifies Democrats’ best interests” somehow is.
In just the last few weeks, we’ve received this sage-like advice from professional Republicans:
- “Michael Bennet Could Be the Answer to the Question Every Democrat Is Asking,” declared former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough (Washington Post, 2/11/19), referring to the centrist Democratic senator from Colorado.
- “GOP Pollster Warns Progressives Could Inflict Long-Term Damage to Dems” was a report in The Hill (12/3/18), highlighting Republican operative Ed Goeas’ contention that “moving left” “ends up hurting the [Democratic] party.”
- “As centrists, Democrats would clean up in 2020, but instead, it’s leftward ho!” was National Review‘s promotion (Twitter (2/15/19) of an article by Michael Brendan Dougherty that counseled Dems, “Avoid talking about impeachment and stick to simple bread-and-butter issues.”
- “Joe Biden is a gaffe-prone 75-year-old Washington veteran—who is exactly what Democrats need,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry (11/20/18). “The play for Democrats should be obvious…. Go with Joe Biden or someone like him with a Midwestern or working-class sensibility.”
- In “Democrats Need to Beware Their Loony Left” (Washington Post, 2/13/19), conservative columnist Max Boot warned Dems not to “turn themselves into the far-left caricatures that Trump and Fox News would like them to become.”
Unsolicited advice from Republicans to the Democratic Party frequently appears on Twitter. Republican “political strategist and blogger” Patrick Ruffini (8/6/18) offered:
A good 2020 Dem would: 1) Support charter schools 2) Oppose repealing Obamacare (President Obama’s signature domestic achievement) with single-payer 3) Repeal tariffs but not tax cuts.
While Lee Atwater protege Rick Wilson (2/19/19) declared:
Bernie Sanders is Trump reelection insurance. “The solution to Trumpism is a crusty 80-year-old professor of socialist poetry from Bennington Community College,” said no one, ever. Why not just declare the Sanders/Gabbard ticket now and bring the doom early?
USA Today (12/31/18) warns against “progressive payback,” by which it means the enactment of progressive policies.
Republican lawyer Chris Truax, writing in USA Today (12/31/18), at least had the self-awareness to recognize that “progressives often get annoyed when well-meaning conservatives offer them political advice.” So instead, he told Democrats, “I am speaking to you as one American to another about what our country needs.” And what the United States needs, it turns out, is to not have a progressive political agenda succeed, because that would only create a “permanent political canker sore.”
Why, one is compelled to ask, do longtime, diehard conservatives care so much about what’s in the Democratic Party’s best interests? Put differently: Which is a more likely scenario: that these Republican pundits, politicians and highly paid talking heads actually care about the future of the Democratic Party, or that their “concerns” about insurgent leftism in the party are just an ideological objection to leftist ideas themselves? Not to mention that in the event of a Sanders presidency, or a party shift where the tone and content of policy are set by the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, these pundits would be rendered superfluous.
Yet centrist and liberal media give a platform to conservatives who are presented as Just Giving Friendly Advice. On MSNBC (2/22/19), host Stephanie Ruhle entertained conservative columnist A.B. Stoddard’s contention that Trump secretly wants to elevate Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that centrist habitual staff-abuser Amy Klobuchar is more likely to win in 2020. Ruhle and Stoddard would have us believe that right-wing media obsess over Ocasio-Cortez and ignore Klobuchar because they’d prefer to take on the former and secretly fear the latter.
But this makes no sense. You don’t attack politicians because you prefer them; you attack them because you’re scared of them. Why would Trump and the Republicans fear Klobuchar, whose “moderate” policy approach and managerial affect are 2020’s closest analogue to the candidate they defeated in 2016?
Max Boot (Washington Post, 2/13/19) cautioned Democrats they would squander “a heaven-sent opportunity to win back the White House and Senate in 2020” if they don’t distance themselves from progressives.
The right criticizes left-wing politicians on both ideological and pragmatic grounds. They criticize them because the right, by definition, loathes the left’s worldview, and because the left shakes up the neoliberal status quo that’s given the right the edge for 30 years. The emerging progressive wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t buy into discredited austerity logic, or the “race to the center to pick up Republicans in Fairfax, Virginia,” consensus. At least on domestic issues, they offer a bold alternative vision that rejects the capitalist premises Republicans have always used to control the terms of debate. Why wouldn’t the Navarros and Frums and McMullins want to discredit them?
The whole rhetorical gambit is bad-faith claptrap. And, as with most ideological scams, it only travels in one direction: leftward. One seldom hears liberals or leftists in the press give “advice” to Republicans about what they ought to do to win. This isn’t a posture they mimic, because they’d be laughed out of the room. Why would partisan Democrats care about what’s best for the conservative agenda? Somehow the inverse isn’t true. In corporate media, anti-choice, racist, warmongering, overpaid mercenary GOP “strategists” are treated like objective, neutral voices simply looking out for the best interests of the people and institutions they’ve spent their lives trying to destroy.
Excellent piece! This should be re-printed and posted every week until the election. Maybe someone will actually begin to learn to discern truth again.
If only “progressives” and “democratic socialists” gave the duopolistic status quo something to truly be scared shitless about.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
The nightmare will come soon enough.
And if any Pollyanna needs reminding, the Republicans are the party that — at least since the days of Richard Nixon —- has been the party of dirty-tricks, dog-whistle racism, insane military spending, deregulated banks and businesses, regulatory agency-heads who try to sabotage the agency, the instigators of the Iraq War Crime, just to list a few, and we’re supposed to take ‘friendly’ advice from them, as-if it’s being offered sincerely? All these ‘recommendations’ signify to me is how far to the political right the MEDIA has shifted that they can print these columns in mock-seriousness…
PS – maybe the LA Rams should take advice from the New England Patriots about who should be the Rams’ head-coach/manager, or who their coaches & players should be IF they want to win the Super Bowl against the Pats next year — that would make as much sense…
Bennington isn’t a community college, in Vermont.
Nor has Sanders ever lived in Bennington Vermont, which is in the south west corner of the state.
The closest equivalent to Bennington College (not the town) would be Sarah Lawrence which is a very liberal private college in Bronxville/Yonkers just to the north of New York City.
Not really a surprise that this Rick Wilson is that astoundingly ignorant of private colleges in the north east.
As far as I know, Sanders has only ever taught at the Kennedy School at Harvard.
If any of that were true, they would actually be keeping their mouths shut in order to let the Democrats tank themselves in 2020. That’s what they want. The fact that we see so much concern trolling about a populist candidate like Sanders is that they are actually afraid that his candidacy could transcend labels like “socialist” or “communist” and he could be swept into office on a wave of sensibility.
The Progressives are coming, the Progressive’s are coming! Yes, and in fact, they are already here. I am so impressed with many Progressives as it appears that THEY have actually read the Preamble—-and they are working on making it into a FUNCTIONING document and a REALITY in America!
It’s about time.
The Republicans need the duopoly, and thus any threat to the nature of an enabling Democratic Party is to be feared and loathed, no matter how far it may fall from a truly radical transformation.
A lot of people keep wondering why the Republicans keep supporting Trump. Their logic is that as Trump’s actions are increasingly seen as lies, and his tax cuts are for the rich, his employment policies are not producing gains in salaries even though the numbers are good. Trump is seen as an immoral liar.
They wonder, why the Republicans do not moderate their party, and their leader based on the fact that voters will get tired of Trump who is the most unpopular of Presidents, ever. They just keep acting like an invading army, doing what they want unilaterally, and not taking any note of what the Democrats are doing or how popular they are.
They answer to that seems to me to be that they know the elections in this country are rigged, along with the media – the radio, TV and the major sites on the Internet, and that these broadcast brainwashing sources work very well in the core of he US, the red states where no information to the contrary comes out.
The only answer to why the Republicans refuse to represent the people of America is that they know their election is in the bag. Elections are thrown all over the red states. Finally the Democrats are doing something about it, but there is not a good record of setting them right. If need be Republican dirty tricks can rig the election.
– They can print the ballots on heavier paper do they jam the counting machines for selective precincts.
– They can turn off the WIFI firewalls on the voting machines so they can be hacked.
– They hand out #1 pencils when the counting machines can only register #2 pencils.
– The change the voting standards so that only two counts are allowed … meaning when there is a mistake they do the same fail over and get the same result … and then that’s it.
The Republicans are standing with what are the virtual American Nazi party.
No rest for the wicked; another prime example of this phenomenon in today’s NY Times:
“‘Ultimately, this is going to be a choice between Donald Trump and somebody who sounds like they think the U.S. should be a socialist country,’ [Republican National Committee member Henry] Barbour said.
“But party strategists like Mr. Barbour acknowledge the president’s misconduct has made him vulnerable to defeat, at least if Democrats put forward a broadly appealing candidate.
“‘If Democrats nominated a moderate from the heartland of the country, then it would be a much tougher race,’ Mr. Barbour said.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/politics/michael-cohen-trump-reelection.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
From Trump on down, such trolling is evidence that the GOP is scared of a populist backlash in 2020. Their playbook seems predicated on that the disillusioned may revolt if not carefully managed. Will it work for them? Only if MSM continue to parrot their talking points. Continue to call out the neos and trolls!