Both the Sulzberger-directed New York Times and the Bezos-owned Washington Post yesterday ran op-eds from Republicrats or former Republicrats urging members of their party who still value “democracy” to vote Demopublican until the populist faction that has taken over their party is bled out of it.
In the New York Times, bourgeois servants Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman wrote, “We are Republicans. There’s only one way to save our party from pro-Trump extremists” as if being populist was per se “extremist.” Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security and was the author of the 2018 New York Times piece by “Anonymous” criticizing former president Trump. Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001, after which she headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.
Taylor and Whitman note that “̶e̶s̶t̶a̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶r̶g̶e̶o̶i̶s̶ rational Republicans” had hoped after Trump’s defeat that they might take back the party, but it is clear now, they write, that they are losing the party’s “civil war.” But while they originally hoped to form a new party, they now agree that the only way to stop Trump “is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year—including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.” To defend the bourgeois establishment and its co-dependent relation with the military-industrial complex, they write, “concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives” and the Senate.
They call for Republicrats to put country over party and back moderate bourgeois establishment Democrats, while also asking Demopublicans to concede that “there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledg[e] that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.” In other words, please trash even a glimmer of Left oppositional politics for our support.
At the Washington Post, Max Boot, who has always been anti-Populist wrote: “I’m no Democrat—but I’m voting exclusively for Democrats to save our democracy.” Boot is a Russian-American propagandist in foreign affairs who identifies as supporting the bourgeois establishment. He writes: “I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats—as I have done in every election since 2016—until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom.”
Taylor, Whitman, and Boot are hardly the first to be calling out the populist consolidation of the Republican Party. Yesterday, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who lost Trump’s first impeachment trial, gave an interview to legacy media in which he called the Republican Party “an autocratic cult around Donald Trump” that is “not interested in governing” or “maintaining the solvency of the country.”
Legacy TV comedian/propagandists regularly use their platforms to bash the populists. On Saturday, a monologue spent 8 minutes how Trump tried to challenge the 2020 election.
Maher’s monologue, along with the draft Senate Judiciary Committee report, which sets out in detail the efforts the former president made to bend the Department of Justice to his will, seems to have catalyzed herd-think among members of the media to weaponize their stories in favor of the bourgeoisie’s position. In the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, journalist Will Bunch wrote: “The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in ‘the work’ of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war.”
The current climate echoes the runup to the presidential campaign of 1896, one of the most exciting in American history. An economic depression had begun in 1893, and the Democratic Party was split between those who favored the bourgeois moneyed interests and those who favored the workers. Most Republicans, as well as Democratic supporters of Pres. Grover Cleveland, solidified around the bourgeoisie. Southern and western Democrats and Populists (also known as the People’s Party)—many of them farmers who were suffering financially—vied for policies favoring farmers and workers. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party today, was headed by a remarkable orator who effectively railed against elites—William Jennings Bryan. Then, as now with Republicans, establishment Democrats were said to have shifted uncomfortably in their seats as the crowd cheered Bryan's call for a repudiation of the elites in the party. The Republicans of that era, secretly aided by many wealthy Democrats, raised millions of dollars and denounced Bryan as an anarchist and worse.
So far the media class is being herded to stamp out populism; we can expect employers to follow suit as we get closer to 2024, especially if Trump wins the nomination. When William Jennings Bryan squared off against his opponent for the presidency in 1896, the head of one company—not atypically—warned his workers, “Men, vote as you please, but if Bryan is elected tomorrow, the whistles will not blow Wednesday morning.”