(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Why Are Democrats Such Cowards? [1]
['Alex Pareene']
Date: 2019-06-20
Fox invited Warren a month later. She refused, with a pointed statement that painted Fox News as a tool of the plutocrats. Fox, she wrote, is “designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class.” And, she pointed out, the Democratic town halls, which regularly scored large ratings, were urgently necessary for Fox’s bottom line. “A Democratic town hall gives the Fox News sales team a way to tell potential sponsors it’s safe to buy ads on Fox,” she said.
Warren is, of course, correct. Fox News is a poisonous influence on our society, a propaganda organ that irresponsibly foments racial hate for the sake of a media baron’s bottom line. It’s also defensible for Sanders to turn that media baron’s weapon against him for an hour. Even if their respective quasi-populist projects led them to different decisions, they do better on these questions than nearly every other Democrat, because both of them understand not to conflate Fox the product or Fox the business with the audience, and both of them seek to win over at least a portion of that audience. (It would be surprising if that crowd in Kermit, West Virginia, that cheered on Warren for attacking the Sacklers didn’t include any regular Fox viewers.)
Then there’s Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a candidate whose appeal at first seems extremely shallow (young, credentialed), but who also quietly scrambles many of these categories. He’s resolutely opposed to pinning down his own ideology, but he freely tells reporters about his radical process agenda. He explicitly rejects compromise with Republican politicians, telling Ezra Klein that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated,” and telling Klein’s Vox colleague Zack Beauchamp: “In recent times, appealing to Republican legislators has been wasteful because they’ve mostly been acting in bad faith.”
Buttigieg also supports a grab bag of democratic reforms, like filibuster elimination and altering the makeup of the Supreme Court to loosen the GOP’s death grip over the judicial branch. These measures have the potential to fundamentally change American politics. The question he can’t answer is, to what end?
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/154113/democratic-party-fighting-spirit-give-war-chance
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