The grass-roots revolution continues apace

Second day with only partial results from the Iowa caucuses. An interesting piece, The Center Cannot Hold, subtitled "Bernie Sanders’s strong showing in Iowa is a turning point in the battle between the party’s establishment and left wing" by Elizabeth Bruenig. Supports my interpretation that in contrast to the dominant narrative of political polarization, what we are experiencing in the US and across the OECD is the rejection by the electorate of the incompetence and corruption of the establishment parties, whether nominally of the right or nominally of the left.

The Republicans are only advantaged to the extent that their rebellion of the grass roots against the establishment began much earlier. They are on the third wave of grass roots take-over. Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America was an opening shot but the Republican establishment eventually coopted and neutered him and his movement. The Tea Party had their brief shining moment beginning in 2009 and surging for a couple of years before being shunned and hobbled by the establishment parties and the mainstream media who did their sleazy best to represent classical liberal, libertarian, responsible government, fiscal conservatives as Nazis, xenophobes, and racists.

The third wave of the grass roots classical liberals (i.e. conservatives) finally found their unexpected and improbable champion in a New York former Democrat, media celebrity and property developer. A man who reminded technocratic establishment politicians what real retail politics looks like, getting out and about with all voters, making promises that he then kept, promises that were rooted in the interests of the plurality of all Americans, not the interests of insiders and fringe groups.

The Republicans have had 25 years of gradual reverse takeover of the establishment party by the grass roots citizens. It has been bumpy, messy, is still incomplete, but is pretty far along.

Establishment Democrats? The Establishment Democrats thought they could control the identity crowd and they thought they could control the hot-headed socialist wing. Bruenig questions whether that assumption was correct.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in mid-January, Hillary Clinton said she considered Bernie Sanders unaccomplished and unlikable, with few friends on Capitol Hill. Then, last Friday, as though sensing the controversy generated by her remarks had faded all too quickly, Mrs. Clinton appeared on the liberal-minded podcast “Your Primary Playlist” to accuse Senator Sanders of failing to do enough to unite the party behind her candidacy after her primary win in 2016.

Mrs. Clinton was not alone in her apparently rising anxiety. Near the end of last month, the centrist think tank Third Way released a memo all but begging Iowans not to vote for Mr. Sanders. The former Democratic nominee John Kerry was reportedly overheard on Sunday contemplating several strategies to stop Mr. Sanders from taking the nomination. Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee members are considering shifts in convention rules tailored to hobble Mr. Sanders’s chances.

It is fair to conclude that the Democratic Party’s center is panicking, and it is now fair to conclude that it has good cause: With 62 percent of Iowa caucus results in, Mr. Sanders leads the popular vote, with 26.3 percent. He trails former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., in state delegates by a slim margin. But with Mr. Buttigieg struggling in primary polls in New Hampshire and Nevada, it seems unlikely his campaign has the kind of momentum that could lead to the nomination. Thus, the greater Iowa upset is that heir apparent Vice President Joe Biden is a distant fourth. With Mr. Biden’s front-runner status compromised, Mr. Sanders emerges from Iowa as a formidable candidate — without establishment imprimatur.

She hones in on the Establishment Democrat fear which is more fundamental than politics and ideology. It is the fear that the gravy train will dry up.

Mr. Sanders’s radicalism, Professor Kazin speculated, is troubling to establishment Democrats for a variety of reasons, from worries about his strength against President Trump in the general election to a desire to find a candidate who can unite the party. Both of those concerns seem surmountable to me. But the one unsurmountable establishment fear surrounding a Sanders win is something more like naked self-interest, and its attachment to power.

[snip]

But the threat Mr. Sanders poses to centrist control over the party apparatus seems to be the most serious risk of all, at least as far as party insiders are concerned.

“If he won the nomination, I think obviously he would take over the party,” Professor Kazin said. “When you get the nomination, you usually get to name a new chair of the D.N.C., for example. And every congressional candidate would either have to get on board with his politics, more or less, or at least make peace with him.” A Sanders White House would likely also produce much less demand for the center-left policymaking institutions that dominate Washington.

“That’s the change, I think, that would be quite radical and amazing,” Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told me over a recent lunch. “You’d have to compel and force institutional structures to start to bend to an agenda that they have long forgotten or discarded.”

Bruenig discusses the various issues and concludes:

It is difficult to see a robust centrist victory in the months ahead. Supposing Mr. Sanders follows Iowa with a win in New Hampshire on Feb. 11 — as polling forecasts — then his campaign will have achieved heady momentum. Mr. Biden may hope to eke out a lead through success in Southern primaries and tweaks to convention rules, but Mr. Sanders is picking up steam in South Carolina, and these 11th-hour D.N.C. machinations reek of desperation. A narrow win under dubious conditions is no victory for the center, and augurs doom even as it delays it.

Who knows? It is politics.

While the Establishment Republicans have had twenty-five years of encroachment by their grass-roots, the Establishment Democrats have an internal civil war going on which is in some ways the more important contest than their effort to unseat Trump.

The Republicans had a binary evolution, from establishment interests to grass-roots centrist convictions. The Democrats have a three way contest. Are they going to be a grass-roots centrist party, a hard left postmodernist party or a party of the establishment interests? The Establishment Party has evolved itself to a dependency on identity groups and the hard left which constrains them in ways not experienced by the Republicans.

These aren't quite the arguments Bruenig is making but her assessment lends itself to that view.

Hers is among the most frank analyses I have seen and one which I think comes much closer to the truth. Voters are taking back the big parties from the corrupt, incompetent, self-dealing insiders and trying to get back to the fundamentals that government should reflect and serve the interests of the whole nation, not self-anointed insiders.

We have a ways to go. The grass-roots displacement of the Establishment Republican party could back-slide. The Establishment Democrats could lose their party to the hard postmodernist left. Anything could happen.