James Carville Gives a Terrifying Glimpse of Democrats’ Future Governing
James Carville Gives a Terrifying Glimpse of Democrats’ Future Governing Agenda
Perhaps determined to confirm once and for all that there is no longer such a thing as a moderate Democrat, the famed political strategist James Carville recently advised his party that if they obtain a trifecta in Washington, D.C., in 2028, they should try to abolish American politics. “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress,” Carville proposed, “I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico and D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust.”
These ideas did not occur to Carville ex nihilo. Still, it is rather jarring to hear them from someone who once insisted that “to be a contrarian, you’ve got to be a contrarian against your own people.” At best, Carville is engaging in cheap fan service for his own people. At worst, he has become as unhinged as they are. If indulged, the course of action that he endorses would break our politics and cause dysfunction that would take decades to fix. Does the man have nobody at home who can dig him gently in the ribs?
That Carville has gone down this road is ominous — not least because it suggests that, if the Democrats give in to their worst instincts the next time they enjoy uniform power, all manner of supposedly respectable figures are likely to go along. Undoubtedly, the press will be among them. In theory, our journalists exist to push back against this sort of Jacobinism. In practice, they are sympathetic to the ends and therefore indulgent of the means. If it comes to it, they will mislead, euphemize, downplay, and create false equivalences, such that contextualized debate becomes impossible. The Democrats’ press releases will be echoed in the newspapers verbatim. The party’s activists will be presented as analysts. And, at all junctures, we will hear the infants’ retort: They started it!
That will all be nonsense. There is a reason that James Carville followed up his proposition with the counsel “don’t run on it, don’t talk about it, just do it,” and it is not that the “it” in question represents quotidian American politics. On the contrary: “F*** it” is the motto of the man who has abandoned discipline, while “Eat our dust” is an adage for the presbyopic. Only oncein American history has a president attempted to do what Carville is recommending, and the result was a rebuke from his own supermajority party that has echoed throughout the ages. Court-packing, wrote the chairman of the House Rules Committee, represented “the most terrible threat to constitutional government that has arisen in the entire history of the country.” His equivalent on the Senate Judiciary Committee went one further, submitting that the idea “violates every sacred tradition of American democracy,” corrupts “all precedents in the history of our government,” and “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”
Quite so. To achieve their ends, the Democrats would be required to dispense with a trio of fundamental norms. They would have to abolish the filibuster, which has obtained in its true form since 1837. They would have to add seats to the United States Supreme Court, which has had nine members since 1869. And they would have to add states without bipartisan buy-in, which has not been done since 1890. This would change all three branches in one fell swoop. It would change the Court by turning it into an explicitly political body. It would change the Senate by adding four new members and reducing the threshold to a simple majority. And it would change the presidency by remaking the Electoral College.
To justify those moves, the Democrats would presumably insist that the Republicans have committed crimes of an equal nature. But that is absurd. Twice in recent memory, Republicans in the Senate have been pressured to abolish the filibuster by a president of their own party, and twice they have refused to do so. Neither, despite winning a trifecta, have they added states or packed the Supreme Court. Certainly, Republican senators have filled the Court — first by refusing to acquiesce to a nominee whom the majority disliked, and then by approving three nominees whom the majority favored. But they have not packed it, tried to pack it, or approximated packing it in any way. To pretend that the Senate picking judges during a vacancy is the same as Congress adding judges so that its majority party can achieve its preferred political outcomes is to stretch the English language to its breaking point. “F*** it,” indeed.
The lesson of the past two decades ought to have been that cynical, outlandish, and arrogant political gestures have a tendency to repel the public and push it back toward the party that it just rejected. President Biden became extremely unpopular after he allowed himself to be persuaded that he was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Trump’s second-term “vibe shift” was peremptorily curtailed by his preposterous experiment with tariffs. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger has become the most unpopular recently inaugurated governor in the state’s history, after she traded her “security mom” campaign mien for an electoral power grab that would have made Huey Long blush. In 2028, the Democrats have a chance to break the cycle — but to take it, they’ll need a leader who is willing to be a contrarian against his own people.
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