The revolutionaries will eventually come for the likes of James Carville, too. They always do.
Old men, particularly those who made their names in industries that are tossed about by the fickle winds of fashion, are sometimes tempted to humiliate themselves in the attempt to hold onto their declining relevance. James Carville is only the latest.
Opening his New York Times op-ed as he does, with an apology for being an octogenarian with a record of getting centrist Democrats elected to high office, Carville knows he has a lot to atone for. But the aging political consultant still has wisdom to offer, he insists. Not that any of that is wisdom is apparent in the text. Instead, Carville proves his worth by telling progressive activists what they want to hear, ratifying what they already believe, and insisting that their only problems are their critics.
The art department at the Times did Carville no favors by gracing his effort to flatter progressive pretensions with a portrait of a feral donkey, spittle erupting from its clamorous muzzle. The image did, however, capture the spirit of the piece.
“It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage,” Carville wrote. The Democratic Party’s only path “out of the abyss” is to embrace wholly New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s policies and campaign messaging. For Democrats, “raging against the rigged, screwed-up, morally bankrupt system that gave us the cost-of-living crisis must be the centerpiece” of their appeal to voters. If Democrats are not “adamantly, even angrily, opposing the system,” they cannot harness and channel the public’s anxiety.
While utterly reckless, urging Democrats to gnash their teeth over “the system” would help the party’s candidates paper over their contributions to the very crisis against which they’re supposed to be raging. Carville lists the younger generation’s grievances: the high cost of housing (a function of limited housing stock exacerbated by municipal zoning regulations, environmental studies, and legal compliance costs), rising utility rates (due to insufficient capacity resulting, in substantial part, from environmentalist activism and policy prescriptions), and the cost of food (which was too high even before Donald Trump’s tariffs, owing to the Democratic Party’s heedless 2021-22 spending spree and its inflationary effects). If Democrats do not rage constantly and monomaniacally against these conditions, “we will continue to be viewed as part of it.”
In other words, the idiot masses can be bamboozled into forgetting the Democratic Party’s role in their malaise if the party’s messengers are sufficiently irrational about it. Coincidentally enough, Carville’s advice just happens to align with the political project in which the progressive movement’s youngish revolutionaries are already engaged. He’s got his finger on the pulse.
The tell that exposes this old political hand’s knowing duplicity is in his willingness to abandon all he understands about politics merely to court the passions of the moment.
“Just as we did in 2018 and even in 2022, it’s all but certain that Democrats will turn out urban and suburban voters in the midterms, specifically the kind of people who vote regularly,” Carville wrote. “At this point, it’s a damn near guarantee for our party, and we must continue to surge these voters.”
If anyone knows that there is nothing that is a “damn near guarantee” in politics, it should be someone like Carville. As he concedes, the shift among suburban voters to the Democratic Party — a condition that buoyed its candidates in special, off-year, and midterm elections — is a relatively new phenomenon. Its perpetuation is hardly guaranteed.
There is precious little evidence that those voters will put aside their qualms with revolutionary socialism and its many sordid prejudices in the suburbs. Hell, Mamdani just barely managed to eke out a majority of the vote in New York City. Banking on the suburban voters who are only recent and perhaps tentative converts to the Democratic cause to ingratiate the party among the radicals is precisely what Carville has spent his career advising against.
He does, however, try to square this contradiction. Carville passingly indicts “woke” politics, not because it was savage in its own way but because it carried with it a “whiff of moral absolutism.” Where we’re going, there are no morals. “If you’re a student of history, the French Revolution is in the American wind,” he closes ominously. “Le peuple se lève” — the people rise up — he writes in his audition to serve as the progressive movement’s Marat. But the revolution took Marat with it. Carville has lived long enough to recognize the threat he is inviting into the Democratic tent.
But what can he do about it? The revolutionary fervor on the left is moving on its own inertia now. Carville has no more lessons to impart. He will surf this cresting wave, avoiding the fate the revolutionaries will reserve for the old guard for as long as he can. Indeed, in one revealing passage, Carville contends that his formula for Democratic success represents “the greatest gift you can have in American politics: a second chance.” Perhaps he seeks one of those for himself. But the revolutionaries will eventually come for the likes of James Carville, too. They always do.