The Centrists Love To Lose
James Carville finally admitted it.
Sometimes, when I’m unfortunate enough to see James Carville on my TV or on my various cursed social media timelines, I wonder if this guy – the guy who guided Democrats out of the deep Reagan-era wilderness – actually wants elected Democrats to run Washington today.
Carville is the guy who watched the country’s first tyrant rise to power and told his fellow Democrats to do absolutely nothing about it. Unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis? Don’t even worry about it, James said from his inexplicable cable news soapbox. The president raising his own paramilitary force, invading and occupying opposition strongholds, and weaponizing every part of the federal government against his enemies, both real and perceived? Forget about it, Carville said.
This is nothing. Just wait it out, he advised.
Support the reader-backed Bad Faith Times with $3 or $5 a month and join the Bad Faith Times discord channel. You can also subscribe for free.
Focus on the price of milk and eggs and everything will take care of itself. Certainly there is some validity to that – a nation of consumers cares only about the Price of Shit – Carville’s handwaving at the country’s accelerating small-d democratic backsliding told me two things: He’s really rich in a time of never-before-seen plutocratic excess, and maybe he doesn’t mind it so much if Republicans run the joint from here on out.
Carville over the weekend did the work for me. He answered very clearly my questions about his political prefernces, telling weirdly-woke former George W. Bush adviser Bill Kristol that he would like to see Republicans hold a narrow House margin in the upcoming midterms.
“I would like to see the Republicans win by five than the Democrats win by five,” he said as Kristol nodded along after two years of warning his fellow two dozen anti-Trump Republicans that totalitarianism had come to our shores.
The rambling Carville seemed to suggest he’d be OK with a big Democratic House majority in 2027. That’s good, I guess. A narrow Democratic majority, he said, would make the Real Adults in the chamber – including the woefully unprepared Hakeem Jeffries – a hostage to the handful of democratic socialists who will win their congressional elections in November.
So that settled it. James Carville, a king of enlightened centrist kings, would prefer a radicalized, explicitly anti-democracy Republican Party remain in charge if that other option is Democrats who think people should not go bankrupt as a punishment for getting sick and women should have bodily autonomy, things of that nature. I would like to thank James for his honesty.
Denny Carter
Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise considering centrists have flailed without any real direction for two years, trying and mostly failing to find a balance between Orange Man Bad and a New American Reconstruction. The secret – the thing that is never said aloud – is that centrism isn’t real. Polls conducted with the express purpose of promoting centrist policies around the economy and immigration and healthcare and basic rights and everything else that has no center asks voters to go left or to go right. The closer to the center these voters can get, the more reasonable and high minded they seem. That there is no center seems not to matter.
There is every incentive to say good and bad things are exactly the same. This is the most respectable stance in politics – at least it was back when Carville was not only relevant, but dictating the direction of the far right's only opposition party. Centrism was the only respectable politics in an era with much lower political stakes than we have today. In Carville's day, a Republican win did not mean the end of constitutional self governance in the US (though the Newt Gingrich-led GOP, with quickly shifting demographics shaping up as an existential threat, certainly toyed with anti-democracy policies and concepts). In Carville's day, a Republican victory did not mean armed federal agents would storm cities and states that had not voted Republican; it meant tax cuts for rich guys and meaningless, kayfabe congressional hearings for Hillary Clinton.
Denny Carter
Guys like Carville and former Obama adviser David Axelrod – who for some reason thinks Abdul El-Sayed's self confidence will be a turnoff for Michigan voters – are threatened by a left-wing backlash to the authoritarian excess of the past couple years because it would all but ensure their game is over – their game being an American political environment that is played between the 20 yard lines, that never goes too far one way or another. Meanwhile, the second Trump regime, with aid and comfort from John Roberts and the anti-constitutionalists on the U.S. Supreme Court, has been dancing in the end zone for eighteen months. They long ago breached the unspoken between-the-20s agreement and Carville and Axelrod either choose not to notice it, or want Democrats' only function to be pushing the country's politics back inside the 20s.
A new generation of Democrats who came of age during the radicalization of the Republican Party have politely suggested that hey, maybe we can barrel past the 20 yard line once in a while and score a touchdown ourselves. Maybe we can take drastic measures to save the imperiled republic, punish those who have ransacked the country, and make people's lives a little less bleak, a little less desperate. Perhaps we can defend democracy against the right's bad-faith politics. Maybe we can have nice things.
Carville sees this up-and-coming generation of Democrats and says no thanks. Give me the Republicans, now and always. Because like all centrists, Carville loves to lose.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
