Meanwhile, in this country, the Democratic primary campaign for president is shaping up to be another gift to Donald Trump. The Sanders-induced climate of rancor, which manifested itself so strongly in the primary campaign of 2016, has returned as strong and as cancerous as ever. When will Democrats learn not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The Militant Tendencies on the far left of the Democratic Party need to hear this message: straighten the fuck up and fly right; America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
Anyone watching Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons the other day might have been forgiven for thinking that the Commons of the United Kingdom had lost their collective minds. From Boris Johnson violating decorum by using a barnyard epithet (hell, let’s shame the devil, tell the truth, and admit that what BoJo uttered was the word “shit,”) to Dr. Philip Lee, MP’s dramatic defection across the aisle to the Lib Dems in the midst of BoJo’s speech, the virtual mayhem in question time itself may well have been a low point in the institutional history of the Mother of Parliaments.
Indeed, the whole Brexit situation is curiously topsy-turvy. The most vocal pro-Brexit “change agents,” the “leavers,” are the base of the Conservative & Unionist Party, those Tories of Middle England who tend to share in common they are of great age and the fact that most of them are drawing pensions from HM government.
On the other side of this curiously topsy-turvy Brexit brouhaha are those “remainers” who prefer to continue Britain’s membership in the EU. They tend, as a rule, to break younger then the angry Tory “little Englanders” who make up the Tory base. They also tend to break more Welsh, more Northern Irish, and decidedly more Scots than the “leavers,” who in overwhelming numbers are Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen.
In short, the more Burkean conservative (small “c”) demographic, the demographic that prefers not to upset existing dispensations, is actually the younger demographic that should be expected to be willing to embrace change and to take the risk of burning down existing systems.
Nevertheless, in the topsy-turvy world of British Brexit, it is the older, “leave” voters who are more willing to burn down the system. To a certain extent, the hard-line Brexiteer Tory voters who are prepared to burn down Britain’s time-honored political system, and plunge the country into uncertainty where the pound is dickie, the royal house is on thin ground, and the rest of the world looks at England as little more than a laughingstock, the home of unruly, Sassenach soccer hooligans. In short, the "leavers" are the same people who have been mourning the loss of the British Empire since 1947.
Many of the sour, stolid, solid, superannuated “leavers,” when pressed hard enough, will evince a surprising degree of nostalgia for the palmy days of the Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set. They will tell you all the Great Days of the Empire, reciting for you a doleful litany of how Great Britain taught a watching world the art of gracious Imperial leavetaking. “When we were in... India, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, The Sudan, The Gold Coast, Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, Nigeria and the British Cameroons, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika, Malta, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Swaziland, Trucial Oman, Aden, British Honduras, Hong Kong, and so many other shreds and patches once colored British red on a map of the world.
Now, in 2019, having seen the once mighty British Empire reduced to a few island outposts in the West Indies and in the far South Atlantic between Argentina and Antarctica, the Tory nostalgists of Empire, trooping off to hear “Rule, Britannia” at the annual Proms, have become embittered and disinclined to engage with the larger world of which the British Isles are necessarily still a part.
Nostalgic as much for the era of “Splendid Isolation” from Europe as they are for the era of Empire, it is easy for Brexiteers to conflate the two trends. They see the period of “Splendid Isolation” as being concurrent with that of the British Empire at its apogee, when the rest of the world trembled lest the British lion roar in their general direction. Much of the Tory base, the superannuated, Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen who voted “Leave,” have a fanciful view of Brexit as representing the accomplishment in some way of some sort of redemption of Britain’s conceit of itself as an imperial power.
Younger Britons, on the other hand, having no memory of Britain before September 1, 1939, when the balloon went up and everything turned to shit, tend to accept the idea of a “United States of Europe” such as that visualized by Giuseppe Mazzini, Napoléon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and Robert Schumann. For younger Britons, who have known only the reality of the EU, the EU, for all its bureaucratic aggravations, for all its imperfections, and for all of the demographic changes that have occurred under the EU, is still a hell of a lot better than the alternative, a cloistered Britain clutching at a collection of nostalgic remnants of its imperial past.
Better the EU devil younger Britons know than the Russian devil they also know. Better to have peace in Ireland and no hard border there, than to usher in a recrudescence of The Troubles. Better not to retreat into the castle as the “leavers” prefer, slam the front gate, raise the metaphorical drawbridge, and retreat to the parapets to hurl contumely at the wogs who, as any Sassenach Englishmen can tell you, begin at Calais.
What is happening in the U.K. right now is a confrontation between two fundamentally irreconcilable views of what Britain is, what it should be, where it’s been, and where it’s going. Ironically enough, the “leavers” seek new dispensations they believe will take England (but not necessarily the Celtic nations) back to a time of splendid isolation and imperial greatness. The “remainers,” on the other hand, the more Burkean “conservative” section of British society, want to keep Britain as it has become since joining the European Economic Community and acceding to the European Union; they want to see a Britain that is engaged in its neighborhood and a Britain which rejects the atavistic isolationism which the Conservative & Unionist Party has so insistently embraced in the years since Prime Minister David Cameron cynically threw a bone to the far right of his party by agreeing to a Brexit referendum he privately thought should never have happened and would never carry.
The battle for Britain is well and truly underway.
* * * * *
While the Tories are savaging themselves over Brexit, laying infrastructure for a general election in which Labour may well cruise to a commanding majority in the House of Commons, notwithstanding their own internal nets and quarrels, American Democrats may be preparing to gift wrap the next election and present it on bended knee to Donald Trump.
Simply put, the Democratic Party is living down to the traditional stereotype of the Party as a gang that can’t seem to shoot anything except its own foot. Barack Obama’s warning about a circular firing squad is certainly coming true.
Time was that Democratic presidential nominees were made in a metaphorical smoke-filled room, as the party elders argued and finally came to consensus with one another about who was the best candidate.
When that gave way, under the impetus of the civil rights movement and its impetus towards “extensive democracy,” to the primary system to which we are all now accustomed, that primary system itself seemed to work satisfactorily well; primary elections and state delegate selection caucuses seemed to produce, in fairly orderly fashion, a nominee for the presidency with sufficient delegates to be nominated on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention.
Until 2016.
In 2016 that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating bourgeois Brooklyn/Burlington Bolshevik, Bernard Sanders heeded the siren song of his ego and tossed his Mao headgear into the ring, determined to lead a “political revolution,” that would radically transform America and remake it in his own Leninist image.
And so the Sanders agitprop began.
In sharp contrast to proceeding primary campaigns, Sanders and his supporters went after front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton in the nastiest way imaginable. Aside from uncritically and enthusiastically repeating Trump’s talking points, they also gleefully encouraged WikiLeaks and the notorious traitor Julian Assange to act as an unlawful foreign surrogate for the Trump and Sanders campaigns.
The Sanders campaign also enlisted social media, particularly Facebook, making inroads to Mark Zuckerberg and the left-bourgeois Berniebros in Menlo Park.
Zuckerberg and his bros did not disappoint. Facebook soon gained a malodorous reputation for hosting grossly one-sided content on its platform, while overpolicing and aggressively censoring (a practice they refer to as “moderating”) any attempts by Hillary Clinton loyalists to state her side of the case. Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders, and by extension, Donald Trump, was instrumental in poisoning the tone of the Democratic primary and dividing the Party against itself. If Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had sought to run an active measures information warfare campaign, he could not have found a better operative than Gospodin Zuckerberg and Facebook.
The divide in the party, with the Sanders "Bernie or bust" intransigents either protest voting for a third party candidate such as Gary “Aleppo” Johnson or Jill “I sit with Putin” Stein, or spite voting for Trump, proved to be fatal to Hillary in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where though Hillary outpolled Trump by nearly 4 million votes nationally, she lost by 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which because of our insane electoral college system was enough to give the election to Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders and his redeless followers are personally, jointly, and severally responsible for having inflicted Donald Trump and his racketeer influenced and corrupt organization crime family on the United States. A famous Internet meme, depicting a number of people sitting around a campfire against the backdrop of a ruined city, captioned
“yes, a homophobic, Latino-hating, Muslim-hating racist, sexist pig won the US presidency, but for a beautiful moment in time I got to stamp my feet and refuse to vote for Hillary. You’d understand if you saw how many people on Facebook were impressed with me at the time[.]”depicted with mordant accuracy what Sanders, Stein, and Gary Johnson, with the help of Vladimir Putin, had inflicted upon this country.
Now, in 2019, we see the same kind of nasty, bitter, offensive tone manifesting itself again against front-runner Joe Biden. The Sanders people, with predictable help from Donald Trump and from the Kremlin, have tried to start a “but his gaffes” narrative, accusing the quondam Vice President of everything from racism to senility. And as in 2016, the Sanders/Trump/Russia axis is making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to spread this active measures information warfare through the Democratic electorate.
And again, Twitter and Facebook are knowingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, uncritically, complicit in the Trump/Sanders/Putin campaign of information warfare. Facebook is once again busily taking sides against Joe Biden. Facebook’s moderators have once again been policing and suppressing commentary favorable to Vice President Biden, while giving an indulgent pass to Sanders/Trump/Putin trolls and troublemakers.
What we’ve seen, every time Bernard Sanders’s ego gets the better of him, is a schism in a Democratic Party between those who understand how politics works, and the far left which doesn’t give a shit about the practicalities of politics, but was just wants what it wants, right now, and be damned to the rest of us. We see in Sanders and in his redeless followers a kind of neo-Bolshevism that is almost as irresponsible as the cynicism of the Tory Brexiteers in the United Kingdom.
The revolution came to this country in 1776 and is still ongoing. Hell, we Americans invented the idea of revolution. What we do not need is Gospodin Sanders and his bullshit so-called political revolution in 2019. We don’t need redeless Sanders followers such as Susan Sarandon telling us that there is no difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as she did when she told us that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Ms. Sarandon, after all, has the wealth and the wherewithal to ride out the shitstorm she’s responsible for creating in the relative safety and comfort of a flat on the Île-St.-Louis, or in one of the trendier arrondisements of Paris, or in Auteuil or some such other upscale Banlieue, where she may hobnob with snarky, anti-American, French intellectuals who will privately moan about their North African help and talk about the evils of immigration into the French Hexagon.
The left-bourgeois, like Susan Sarandon and Mark Zuckerberg, will do a great deal of damage to this country. Ron Wyden may be right to suggest that the federal government should criminally prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and as for Ms. Sarandon, she is welcome to hang out in her trendy arrondissement of Paris until either Joe Biden is president or the 2nd Tamanskaya Guards Motor-Rifle Division of the Russian army rolls down the Champs Elysées.
The Democratic Party needs to discipline its discourse, purge its Sandernista dissidents, boot Bernard Sanders the hell out of the Democratic Party, drop the caucuses, require every state to have closed primaries, and send a clear message to the Militant Tendency on the far left of the Democratic Party: straighten up and fly right.
America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is a former two-term member of the Cathedral City city council. He is a pugnacious Democrat who, when he hears the word “progressive,” “corporatist,” or “neoliberal,” wants to reach for his revolver. He has no room for Militant Tendencies.
