“God said, take what you want, and pay for it.” -A Spanish proverb, supposedly
What is remarkable about the obsessive media coverage of Howard Schultz (president emeritus of Starbucks Corporation) announcing his desire to run for president is not the fact that he made the announcement (since everyone in the Democratic Party is running for president) but that the pro-gay, pro-choice billionaire is NOT running as a Democrat. Here’s just three (out of maybe thousands) of media reactions: “Howard Schultz May Be Even More Disingenuous Than Donald Trump” “Howard Schultz Doesn’t Understand American History” and – horror of horrors – when pressed, he can’t say how much a box of Cheerios costs.
If half the reason for Donald Trump’s support is the sentiment, “he may have problems, but he’s got the right enemies” then this apparent media mass phobia toward Howard Schultz would seem to indicate that rather than support Trump or divide the vote against him, all the redcaps ought to go out in 2020 and elect Schultz president, since he offends at least as many liberals as Trump and unlike Trump hasn’t proven to be a complete fuckup.
Obviously my problem with Schultz isn’t that he’s too liberal for the Republicans but not leftist enough for the Democrats. (Indeed, that seems to be his main selling point, if anyone’s buying.) It’s not that he’s an independent, or even that he allegedly would allow an otherwise vulnerable Trump to win re-election. My problem is that I look at this guy and go… why him?
I have an old-school liberal friend who’s such a partisan Democrat that he told me, “I’d rather vote for an empty pizza box than any Republican.” And I told him, “I agree. Unfortunately, Democrats didn’t nominate an empty pizza box in 2016, they nominated Hillary Clinton.” I later said that this is why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, because he was the closest thing we had to an empty pizza box.
I look at Howard Schultz and I don’t even see an empty pizza box.
I didn’t even know that Howard Schultz was the name of the guy who turned the old Starbucks Seattle coffee shop into a megacorporation, because he, like Starbucks, has no bearing on my life.
Whatever you think of Gary Johnson now, he did have a resume as an elected official and was generally considered to be a good governor of New Mexico, back when Republicans actually cared about good government. And on that score, how am I supposed to believe that Schultz is a “fiscal conservative” when his company charges more for coffee than Ben & Jerry’s does for ice cream?
That’s the real problem with the anti-Schultz hysteria. If somebody like me who seems to be his target audience looks at Howard Schultz and goes, “neh,” then how is he supposed to get enough votes to “spoil” things for the “right” (Democratic) candidate?
This fear and loathing on the part of the commercial intelligentsia has little to do with whether Howard Schultz has any merit as a presidential candidate and everything to do with liberal fear that they’ll lose a sure thing yet again. “Besides, he’d never win.” So why then is a candidate who can’t get enough votes to win guaranteed to pull enough votes to make sure the “right” person doesn’t win? It’s like saying, “Nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”
Believe it or not, libs, there is
nothing in the Constitution that says, “Thou shalt only vote for
Democrats or Republicans” nor even a subclause saying “and
if you do vote Republican, you’re just a racist meanie who wants to
force women to give birth so that the Koch Brothers can eat their
babies.” Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein ran for president
before 2016. Your candidate lost in 2016 for the same reason that
Gore lost in 2000 and Kerry lost in 2004: Because they sucked. You
want to know how you can win presidential elections,
Democrats?
NOMINATE A CANDIDATE WHO DOESN’T SUCK.
It’s not that hard. I mean, you did it only ten years ago.
One point of the criticism that does make sense is that there really isn’t that much constituency for people who care much about deficits (in either major party), nor is there a pivotal constituency for people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” It used to be that such people – like myself – could at least pretend that they had representation in the Republican Party, but the party in practice never honored that classical liberalism. And since Trump it’s become very clear that the Republicans are animated by the opposite spirit: socially conservative and fiscally statist. Which is why another Slate article suggesting that Schultz, the anti-tax liberal, ought to run as a Republican is either clueless or straight-up disingenuous. Ben Mathis-Lilley, referring to Nate Silver’s tweets for FiveThirtyEight, says that Schultz ought to appeal to the fiscally conservative voter who won’t vote for Trump but thinks Democrats have gone too far left. I think this was written before Schultz went on The View and immediately alienated Meghan McCain by saying he was pro-abortion rights. That right there is why Howard Schultz can’t run as a Republican even if he wanted to, because there are two things Republicans will never forgive: being pro-choice and not willing to lie your ass off about how anti-choice you are even if everyone knows you spent half your time banging New York models for at least 30 years and may have had to pay for abortions as a result. Not that this description applies to any Republican, I’m just speaking hypothetically.
But even that just gets to the real point, which is the erroneous idea that the Republican Party gives a rat’s tail more for fiscal conservatism than it does for social libertarianism. Mathis concludes: “By running as a Republican, Schultz would almost certainly not defeat Trump. But by giving GOP voters a chance to vote for a fiscal conservative who isn’t a raving conspiracy idiot, Schultz would be selflessly providing a model for a sane Republican Party that is more like the conservative parties elsewhere in the developed world, and he’d be directly challenging the guy who is most personally responsible for the “toxicity” he says he deplores in national politics. ” But the reason the formerly grand old party is what it is now is that they were raving conspiracy idiots before Trump showed up. They LIKE being raving conspiracy idiots. Being pro-market and socially tolerant would be more like the conservative parties in the rest of the world, but that only demonstrates that that is not what Republicans want, any more than Democrats want a billionaire who is socially tolerant but anti-tax and pro-business. But yet to Mathis-Lilley, it’s okay if Schultz tilts at the other team’s windmill, just not at his. He doesn’t consider that after years of dealing with windsock Republicans In Name Only, most Republican voters have gotten smart enough to see through this presentation. (They’re just not smart enough to look for a better alternative than Trump.)
This does raise the question of whether there even is a political constituency for people like us, where it’s going to go, or even what it is. Libertarianism? The New Whigs? What? Because if the last few years have proven that we have no place in the Republican Party, we are if anything more hated by the “tolerant liberal” Democrats.
In Reason, Nick Gillespie addressed the question of why Howard Schultz couldn’t just run as a Democrat: “(In) other interviews, Schultz is perfectly clear on why, if he runs, he will do so as a “centrist independent.” He openly disagrees with a lot of ideas that dominate Democratic Party discourse and he doesn’t want to be forced into accepting those policies… In his various interviews over the past week or two, he never misses an opportunity to talk about how a $21 trillion debt is the single biggest problem we need to reckon with. He’s right to say it not only ties the hands of government (and the ligatures get tighter as interest rates rise) but also that it inhibits broad-based economic growth, the best way to increase living standards. He also refused to be penitent about being rich last night, at one point saying he helped to create a great company and wasn’t going to apologize for his or anyone else’s success. He called the class-warfare rhetoric used by so many Democrats “so un-American”! In other words, he doesn’t fit very well in today’s Democratic Party.” “There’s almost no way he can actually win, especially if he runs as an independent, but since when should getting elected be the main goal of politics?”
This is actually close to the sentiment from the other side of the argument. Referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ recent proposal to bring back the 70% marginal tax rate,
Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Atlantic: “Most Americans—myself included—probably don’t have a well-thought-out position on whether a 70 percent marginal tax rate is a good idea. But it probably doesn’t matter whether it is, or whether it would “work.” To argue that “workability” is secondary might sound odd to many Democrats, particularly party leaders and experts who have long prided themselves on being a party of pragmatic problem-solvers. This, though, could be the most important contribution so far of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new crop of progressive politicians—the realization that the technical merits of a particular policy aren’t the most relevant consideration. For these new Democrats, the purpose of politics (and elections) is quite different.”
He continues: “Few people actually vote based on policy. As I recently argued in American Affairs, even the better educated don’t primarily vote based on policy. In fact, higher levels of education can increase polarization. (In other contexts, such as the Middle East, the advent of universal education and higher college attendance fueled ideological divides.) … Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives appear to understand instinctually what (a) growing body of research on voter preferences suggests. And its implications are potentially far-reaching. Once you accept that voters are rationally irrational, you can’t help but change how you understand political competition. Incidentally, this is one reason that right-wing populists across Europe (and India and the Philippines and many other places) have been surprisingly—or unsurprisingly—successful: They seem to have relatively little interest in what works.”
I am not quite so sure that disregard for what works is acceptable. More times than I can count, I have gone over how Republicans made repealing the Affordable Care Act the center of their domestic policy, and then once they actually had a Republican president to do so, they didn’t have anything to replace it with. And that lack of a plan wasn’t just not constructive, it was actually destructive – whether you’re a liberal who wants healthcare as part of public policy or a right-winger who thinks we could have done better than the ACA. Where I will agree with Hamid is where he says that setting the terms of debate – or shifting the Overton Window, as he later discusses – is ultimately just as important as hammering out the policy itself.
However libertarian I am, I’m not fanatically opposed to some level of public support, especially (as with healthcare) the alternative would be even more costly in the long run. But if we actually want a valid democracy, decisions have to be made by an informed electorate. My opinion is that if you want all kinds of stuff to be covered by the government, you had better be prepared to pay for it. And by “you”, I mean YOU. If you’ve read history (or at least Wikipedia) you’ll know that the whole premise of the 16th Amendment (legalizing a progressive income tax) was to move away from tariffs as a means of financing the government, since they disproportionately affect the poor. A gross income tax was presented as applying only to the upper percentile of income. When first enacted in 1913, the base rate for most people was 1 percent and the top rate was 7 percent. That didn’t last long. Currently, Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax that would only affect the “tippy top 0.1 percent”. Odds are, that wouldn’t last long, either. And that’s why right-wingers are always asking how much government we’re supposed to have, because desire is infinite and funding is limited. Even if we do soak the rich and reverse the Trump-Ryan tax cuts (which we probably need to do anyway), it won’t cover all the new stuff “progressives” want to do. And while Republicans have successfully played this game of telling Americans that they can have all the Big Government they want without paying for it, the reason they can get away with their anti-tax stance is that it’s just a variant of the Democrats’ stance: “Someone else will pay for it, not you.”
In this regard, Howard Schultz is just like the rest of us in that he doesn’t want to pay more in taxes than he absolutely has to. But unlike the rest of us, he has the money and influence to affect public policy. And I’m sure that counts for a lot of leftist resentment. But if the unpopularity of redistributionist policy is grossly overstated, that does not make it universally popular, if the need for such policy needs to be seriously debated, that debate will not necessarily make the policy more popular, and if it is implemented, it won’t necessarily work, or be a political payoff for Democrats.
Because even the moderate liberal Affordable Care Act was compromised and badly implemented, such that it became a political liability to Democrats who lost record numbers of Congressional seats under Obama, also losing the Senate in 2010, with results that are still being felt now. The only reason the ACA survived is because it was clear that Republicans had no clue, or desire, to come up with anything better.
The problem is that Democrats can’t just win every policy argument by default, or by going “But Republicans are worse.” After all, they tried that in 2016, and that’s how we got Trump.
And that, I suspect, is the real reason that the Left is panicking.