James Carville Has Never Stopped Being Wrong

Instead of reinventing themselves, the hacks of neoliberal yesteryear are still playing all the old hits

Source: YouTube via The Nation

James Carville, if you can believe this, is less than ecstatic about the recent swathe of DSA victories in New York state. Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer has written a wonderful dissection of Carville’s complaints — complaints that, among other things, ironically channel all of the bad impulses neoliberal centrists like him typically invoke to indict the left (purity testing, a rejection of pluralism, the dogmatic refusal to operate in the context of a big tent party).

I’ve always found Carville incredibly annoying, in part because so much of his mythos comes from a single election in 1992 whose outcome was to elect Bill Clinton with 43 percent of the popular vote (and a popular documentary that came out of it, which I wrote about here). He’s now been saying the exact same things about politics and electoral strategy for more than 30 years and it’s both incredibly unoriginal and utterly lacking in insight. If one hears that Carville has weighed in on some recent political development, it’s immediately obvious what he’s going to have said, and it’s inevitably just some orthodoxy from the heyday of the Democratic Leadership Council stuck in the microwave.

Anyway, a few years back I wrote a goofy little article for Jacobin about the Carville mythology and why a guy like this can spend 30 years saying the exact same thing and never see a drop in his Beltway share value despite constantly being wrong.

As a final publisher’s note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

Anyways, enjoy.

-Luke

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A version of this article was first published in Jacobin in July, 2021

J. R. R. Tolkien famously christened “cellar door” as the most aesthetically-pleasing phrase available in the English language. By way of contrast, I submit that it’s nearly impossible to conjure a less euphonious sequence of words than “James Carville interviewed by Chris Cuomo.” It’s similarly difficult, even by the lowly standards of cable news, to imagine a program description that sounds less appetizing. Whatever your politics, I think we can all agree that the prospect of hearing Andrew Cuomo’s brother pick the brains of a Clinton-era apparatchik mainly known for yapping received centrist wisdom in a Louisiana accent doesn’t exactly scream “good vibes.”

Not counting myself among the dozen or so millennials who regularly watch network primetime shows, I hasten to add that I discovered the interview in question while scrolling through Twitter — that is, without the intercession of paid agitprop from personal injury lawyers, insurance companies, or miracle weight loss scams. And so it was that I happened to stumble upon the iconically cadaverous face of a man who has not had the flicker of an original political insight or purchased a single skincare product since 1992.

At a glance, very little about the segment was actually notable. With a few assists from a sympathetic Cuomo, Carville essentially regurgitated a version of the same narrative centrist Democrats have been peddling since they barely won last November: the crux of it being that a “noisy” and pronoun-obsessed “identity left,” representing about 15 percent of the party, has become an albatross round the necks of those in the sensible middle — imperilling their prospects with voters who are turned off by rhetoric about defunding the police.

Nuance and careful analysis, for what it’s worth, have never exactly been Carville’s strong suits. As the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu pointed out, 15 percent is actually a less than negligible chunk of the Democratic base — barely smaller than the African-American share of the electorate and in fact more sizeable than Hispanics (which seems somewhat beside the point that Carville was, with characteristic hyperbole and imprecision, attempting to make).

What struck me, though, was how tiresomely familiar it all sounded. Interminable debates about November’s election notwithstanding, Third Way liberals like Carville really have been performing the same basic schtick for decades — its thrust being that Democrats win by scolding and/or disciplining a portion of their own base and lose whenever said portion is allowed to become too vocal.

Whatever the era, whatever the actual debates at hand, and however many cultural and political realignments occur, there is somehow always said to be a segment of liberal voters and activists whose crank enthusiasms are alienating the good people of the hardworking, reasonable middle.

The exact contours of this caricature, of course, can be amended as needed. Thus, in one fell swoop, the same cadre of Dem hacks who so cynically wielded identity politics as a cudgel against Bernie Sanders can now just as easily blame a phantom version of them for their own lacklustre election results. South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn, among the originators of the spin presently being wielded by the likes of Carville (and one of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma money in Congress), can casually collapse Medicare For All supporters and slogans about defunding the police into the same, hazily defined scapegoat constituency. Thus, in one fell swoop, last year’s feral pinko “cult” can become this year’s cop-hating pronoun brigade.

Triangulation may come in many forms, but the basic political cosmology embraced by centrist liberals really hasn’t changed since the early 1990s when Bill Clinton consolidated the shunning of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and made antagonizing the left a formal part of the Democrats’ political repertoire.

For Carville and plenty of others involved, Clinton’s 43 percent victory in 1992 was less a conventional electoral event than it was an act of providence. As far as electoral tactics were concerned, it was seen to represent a formula that could be repeated more or less indefinitely. Since this was so obviously not the case (two years after Carville’s would-be Machiavellian genius helped build the indomitable Clinton coalition, the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years) it ensued that the same logic could also be applied in instances of failure — even, and especially, when centrists themselves had defined, planned, and executed a campaign.

Talking to Chris Cuomo, Carville’s warmed-over bash-the-fringe routine thus felt a bit like a flash-in-the-pan pop star performing a one-hit wonder decades after its disappearance from the charts. In the nearly thirty intervening years spanning today and 1992 — years which have seen dynasties rise and fall, the global economy collapse, orthodoxies dissolve, and American culture undergo countless seismic shifts — his political outlook does not seem to have evolved one iota. To give the Ragin’ Cajun due credit, consistency is hard to come by in the political mainstream and, for what it’s worth, the man has never wavered from his steadfast determination to be wrong as often as humanly possible.

The Carville mythos, such as it is, owes heavily to 1993’s The War Room, co-directed by living legend of documentary cinema D. A. Pennebaker. Its stylistic flair notwithstanding, the film has aged about as poorly as the Third Way consensus itself: it now being a monument to the final conquest of American politics by a class of backroom hacks whose air of impenetrable wizardry has at least as much to do with playing savvy operatives on TV as it does with actually being them.

‘He’s become a commodity of himself by design . . . a walking conglomerate,” a Washington insider once said of Carville in an apparent attempt at a compliment. The remark wasn’t exactly wrong. In fact, Carville’s rather dubious billing as a kind of ur-political impresario has earned him astonishing sums in the form of book deals, media appearances, and corporate ad campaigns (the beneficiaries ranging from Heineken and American Express to Nike).

For a guy whose original billing was as a “strategist,” however, it must be said that he is hardly a modern-day Sun Tzu. Animated by his hall monitor–like desire to defeat Bernie Sanders in 2020, Carville’s finely tuned political instincts led him to go all in with Colorado senator Michael Bennet, who fetched a whopping 952 votes, or roughly 0.3 percent of the total, in the New Hampshire primary and ultimately finished behind several write-ins (one of whom was quite literally Donald Trump).

Last year, he brazenly boasted that November’s contest would swing so decisively in Joe Biden’s favour that its it outcome would be known by 10 PM on election night, a crystal ball divination so eerily prophetic it would later be included by Politico on a list of “the most audacious, confident and spectacularly incorrect prognostications about the year.” No matter. In the sclerotic culture of the Beltway, the reheated bilge of triangulations past can be forever packaged as hardheaded political wisdom; the hacks of neoliberal yesteryear as electoral grandmasters of Clausewitzian insight.

James Carville will never stop being wrong. But, God help us all, he’ll also never stop being on TV.