Fear of a socialist nation

Apparently there was some big “Third Way” shindig in Ohio this past weekend, at which various centrist Democrats looked longingly for some alternative to Bernie Sanders in the 2020 battle against Donald Trump:

“Right now in the Democratic Party, there is only one option on the table: Sanders-style socialism. That’s the main option on the table. We’re doing this now because the party’s got to have a choice,” Jon Cowan, president of the think tank co-hosting the proceedings, with New York City real-estate executive Winston Fisher, told me. . .

Addressing the audience that morning, Cowan introduced a new branding and policy direction that he hoped would drive the middle back to power. He called for the rise of the “Opportunity Democrats,” a line of messaging built out of extensive research that was then presented by Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, a Third Way vice-president whose online bio begins with her proud vote for Ross Perot in a fifth-grade mock election.

The new economic platform leans heavily on words like “earn” and “opportunity,” and away from demonizing tycoons — “For most Americans, billionaires and millionaires are not next door, or part of their lived experience,” Cowan said in his opening speech. . .

Pulling up data from a large nationwide poll the group commissioned, combined with focus groups, Erickson Hatalsky explained that Americans, including Democrats and independents, were anxious about the future. But, she said, they were worried about the inequality of opportunity rather than the inequality of income by a healthy margin, and it was, in fact, upper-income citizens who reported worrying more about income than opportunity.

Over and over, she revealed how the group had tested its new, future-focused “Opportunity Democrat” line against what she called the “Sanders-style” version and the “Trump approach” alike, and how their approach repeatedly came out on top. The conference, it was by now clear, was not only a declaration of war against Sanders, but an implicit acknowledgement that Bill Clinton–era triangulation and its attendant nostalgia were politically stale, too. “The time has come to mend, but not end, capitalism for a new era,” Cowan told the audience, in a speech where he also declared, “Big isn’t enough. If it’s bold and old, it’s simply old.”

“Let’s be clear. Eighties-style supply-side, ’90s centrism, and ’60s socialism will not cut it for the era we live in,” he conceded. . . .

At the core of their pitch is a fundamental belief that one of the party’s central debates is whether to tack toward swing voters, or to run a base-first national election. There was little room for doubt here that Clinton did too much of the latter, and that Sanders’s approach represents a full embrace of that side. (And it was always Sanders who came up when the centrists spoke of the left, never Elizabeth Warren or any other potential lefty standard-bearer.)

Thoughts:

Anybody who talks about the Great Society as “60s-style socialism” needs to be ignored.

“Equality of opportunity” is another country club Republican phrase that really means “maintaining the economic status quo.”  I’ve been meaning to do a separate post about this, but the whole idea that there’s some sort of significant difference between inequality of opportunity and inequality of income is at the core of the nonsense that Ronald Reagan et. al. pitched with such great success when fighting back against the “socialism” of Medicare and food stamps.  Progressives should be in favor of greatly reducing social and economic inequality, period, rather than engaging in the typical NYT OP ED page handwringing about isn’t it a shame that more poor kids don’t go to Princeton and Swarthmore.

Is Bernie Sanders really the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination? Is this actually happening, or is the angst from reactionary centrists about this supposed fact based on something real? (This isn’t a rhetorical question.  I haven’t been paying attention to whether Sanders is actually gearing up for another run).

FWIW, I think there should be an extremely strong presumption against nominating somebody who would turn 80 during the first year of his presidency, as in it should almost be disqualifying by itself.  But that too is a subject for another post.