THE ONGOING DEMOCRAT CRACKUP.

The failure to get a proper tally from the Iowa caucuses might be simple incompetence, although Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi isn't prepared to rule out malice.  "After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a 'botched' vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced." Mr Taibbi once lived in the Soviet Union, and his generalization from his own experience might be accurate. Pig looked from man, and man to pig, and all that.  By all means read the article, particularly if you believe the national Democrats learned the wrong lesson from George McGovern being wiped out, followed by Walter Mondale.

The possibility that the caucus is a symptom of an underlying power struggle doesn't go away.  Here's an anonymous meme-composer was thinking along the same lines.  The picture made the cut at a special Power Line Mid-Week in Pictures post.

Unattributed image retrieved from Power Line.

Symptoms of the fissure proliferate.  The Nation's Jeet Heer (no, at the breakfast bar) didn't like the narrow focus of the recently concluded partisan impeachment.  "[House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's] main goal has been to frame an impeachment acceptable to the most conservative members of her caucus—one that is so carefully confined to issues of national security that it might even win over some moderate Republicans." By that standard, it's a moral victory, in that Utah's Senator Romney voted to convict on "abuse of power." (And a Wisconsin team that was wiped out by Michigan State, 51-3, got that field goal on their opening possession.)

Put another way, it's an attempt by the traditional Establishment to continue the Washington Consensus.

Yale history professor Samuel Moyn is skeptical that Pelosi’s version of impeachment offers any basis for energizing mass politics. “Why the narrow charge, and why the parade of figures who basically represent Cold War foreign policy business as usual?” he asks. “The pageant in Washington lately has been playing on expected outrage that the president didn’t follow hostility to Russia as the rational course. It doesn’t seem like it’s been organized in Washington as a larger grassroots strategy. Just the reverse.” Impeachment, he worries, will be a way for moderate Democrats to join forces with never-Trump Republicans for a “centrist restoration.”

Centrists are using impeachment to cast the Trump years as a regrettable detour in American history, one that is soundly rebuked by Washington professionals who uphold a Cold War consensus that will again become the norm after he is out of office.

By "mass politics," both the author and his interlocutor are hoping (the article being in The Nation) for the Vanguard to Take to the Streets.  "Is it really possible to transform this centrist impeachment into something more ambitious and far-reaching—a people’s impeachment? And can such an impeachment hope to achieve the success of the mass actions seen in Puerto Rico and elsewhere?"

Lovely.  A third-world demographic shift, third-world levels of corruption, third-world levels of competence.  I can't slag them for the guillotines being carried, as that came later.

As an aside, Mr Heer notes another phenomenon that's relatively new.  "Progressives favoring impeachment have to fight a war on two fronts: against moderates in their own party and against Republicans."  I recall an observation by a conservative, don't remember who, responding to a question from a Democrat about what would happen to conservatism now that the Soviet Union is gone.  His response was something like "we had to fight the Soviet Union with one hand and the San Francisco Democrats with the other.  Now we have both hands free.  What we did to the Soviet Union was business.  With you, it's personal."  For the first time in contemporary politics, it is the self-styled progressives fighting both the Establishment and the conservative populists.

How nasty could the fight between the left and the Democrat establishment?  Let's start with a bartender who is not sharing her tips with the bus-boy.  "Congresswoman from New York withholds dues from the party machine and launches a new PAC to help insurgent left-wing candidates."  This could be interesting, she gets primaried by an establishment Democrat while she's fundraising to contest primaries against establishment Democrats elsewhere. "I don't see the sense in giving a quarter-million dollars to an organization that has clearly told people like me that we're not welcome."  National Review's Mairead McArdle characterizes the representative's move as "frustrating House Democrats."

Perhaps that couldn't happen to a better bunch of people.  Here's Hamilton Nolan for The Guardian.

Fortunately, the Democratic party is no longer going to be defined by its establishment powers. It is going to be defined by the people who are inspired to come out to vote. For the past four years, it has been clear that Sanders and Trump each represent a direct response to the severe (and warranted) disillusionment of average Americans, who have seen the American dream of economic mobility die during their lifetimes.

We'll see. This morning, Meet the Press featured Mr Buttigieig and Mr Sanders: once the transcript becomes available I will argue that moderator Chuck Todd was generally gentle toward the mayor, and in truculent chipmunk mode, apostate Democrat setting, toward the senator.  Neither Mr Biden nor Mrs Warren agreed to appear, they, along with the mayor, did appear on This Week, where former Democrat operative George Stephanopoulos could be depended on not to bite any ankles, including social democrat ankles.

Speaking of the socialist alternative, well, they see the fix being in where the fix is in.

The leadership of the Democratic Party can only be described as pathetic. As their incompetence in Iowa is front page news, Trump struts in his State of the Union address. Meanwhile all Nancy Pelosi can offer to millions of enraged Americans is transparent theatrics, ripping up his speech.

The truth is that while the Democrats say their priority is getting rid of Trump, their real number one priority is to stop the growing movement behind Sanders, the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump! They scream about “unity” and “vote Blue no matter who” all while they sabotage Sanders and prepare to engage in every manner of dirty tricks on behalf of their ruling class masters against the emergence of a working class political force.

I'm not sure what's unfolding here, but, years ago, when I taught a survey of public policy class, one of my organizing themes was Intelligent Design confronting Emergence.  I didn't use those words: one never stops learning.  I used a supplementary reader (Gott im Himmel: $60 new???) that attempted to offer Conservative, Liberal, and Radical perspectives on selected policy issues.  It's useful, as former students will attest, to not map those classifications onto Republican (because of the business class rent-seekers) Democrat (because inter alia deregulation began in the Carter administration) or Socialist (because the presentation of Radical ideas was crummy).  And here we are: Trumpian populism has been surprisingly libertarian, did anybody ever expect a sitting president to say "failing government schools" in the State of the Union?  The Wise Experts of the old Establishment are deciding that their agreement on their Suitability to Tinker transcends party labels.  Then the people who would rather allocate resources by political processes rather than rely on markets might be capturing the machinery of the Democratic Party.