Summary: the events of the last week have read like something out of a very bad political potboiler/spy novel. An out-of-control President of the United States, a presidential contender suffering from a heart attack, and attacks on a presidential front runner have all combined to induce in much of the American public a curious mixture of Schadenfreude and low-level dread. What the hell will happen during the next 24 hours?
What will happen as Bernard Sanders recovers from his coronary "episode?" It's not unfair to speculate that his followers will seek to deflect and redirect discussion of Sanders' fitness for office by ramping up their attacks on Joe Biden with help from Donald Trump campaign.
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Donald Trump is unraveling before the eyes of a shocked American people as a cynical world takes a certain joy in The Donald’s self-induced impeachment drama. Never have we seen, not even with Richard Nixon and the Watergate coverup, not even with Bill Clinton and his Oval Office blow job, not even with the semiliterate Andrew Johnson and the donnybrook over the Tenure of Office Act, a president so obviously desiring to be impeached, and so obviously shooting himself in the foot at every opportunity.
Today’s “spit up your coffee” headline news leader was that The Donald was, or thinking about, entreating the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Given that The Donald has been busy whipping up an economic war against the People’s Republic of China, his apparent effort to enlist Beijing in some sort of outré effort to salvage his presidency strikes most Americans as risible.
Similarly, his insistence that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is somehow guilty of treason for opposing The Donald also has Americans spitting up their coffee. Add to that the efforts of the once respectable Rudy Giuliani to gin up a false narrative of the alleged corruption of the Bidens, conduct which should by Rudy significant discipline of his professional law licensure (up to and possibly including disbarment), leads many Americans to and ineluctable conclusion that we are dealing with an American equivalent of the Madness of King George III.
But as much as many Americans find the Madness of King Donald vaguely amusing, and as much as many Americans are experiencing a certain degree of Schadenfreude over it, our Schadenfreude is not unmixed with a certain low-level dread. Now, most Americans probably have no idea who Alberto Fujimori was. Fujimori, an otherwise colorless politician in Peru was elected that country’s president in 1990, and who, two years later, with the support of the Peruvian military, carried out a so-called self-coup in which he shut down the Peruvian Congress, suspended the Peruvian Constitution, and purged the Peruvian judiciary.
The precedent of Fujimori’s self-coup cannot fail to appeal to Gospodin Trump and his inner circle advisors, corrupt men like William Barr, Stephen Mnuchin, Stephen Miller, and Gorka Sebastyén. Indeed, as an increasingly cornered and desperate Donald Trump lashes out, referring to his congressional antagonists as traitors, declaring that “[he wants] Adam Schiff questioned at the highest levels for fraud and treason,” and hurling all manner of false and unsupported charges against his potential Democratic rival for the presidency, Trump begins to sound like a Latin American dictator of the old “blood and thunder” school. The Donald apparently has never familiarized himself with Charles De Gaulle’s rhetorical question “[p]ourquoi voulez-vous qu'à 67 ans je commence une carrière de dictateur?” Why do you think that at 67 I would start a career as a dictator?
Trump, of course, has neither the wisdom, nor the courage, nor the sense of occasion the Charles De Gaulle had. For Trump, riding down the gilded escalator of Trump Tower represents his “greatest achievement.” Nothing The Donald can ever do could possibly match the sheer physical courage of De Gaulle walking unhesitatingly up the center aisle of the nave of Notre Dame in the face of German sniper fire before taking his place in the choir to join the Cathedral chapter in chanting the Magnificat on that glorious day when Paris was liberated from four years of Nazi occupation. Nothing Donald Trump can ever do could ever match the way in which de Gaulle saved the French Republic in 1958. But then, de Gaulle was a man raised with concepts of duty, honor, and country that entirely evade the mental wreck of a man that is Donald Trump.
Of course, if Donald Trump is a mental wreck, recent events have certainly suggested that wannabe president Bernard Sanders is a physical wreck. Sanders’ recent hospitalization to have two stents implanted after a coronary “episode” in Las Vegas has brought to the fore the issue of his health and fitness for office.
Of course, based on Gospodin Sanders prior performance, both in this campaign and against Hillary Clinton in 2016, we may assume that his supporters will attempt to deflect and redirect the conversation about Sanders’ overall health away from that topic by any means available. Their efforts will no doubt take the form of intensified and redoubled efforts to spread disinformation and defamation against Joe Biden. In doing so, Sanders and his feckless, redeless, followers will happily, eagerly, and uncritically borrow whatever talking points are available against Biden from the Trump campaign. They did this against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they will do it against Joe Biden in 2019/2020.
The Sandernistas’ eager attacks on Joe Biden demonstrate two unanswerable facts. First, it demonstrates that Gospodin Sanders and his followers will avail themselves of any means of attack available to them to do harm to Joe Biden, and to Elizabeth Warren as well. Second, it also demonstrates the willingness of the Sanders effort to make common cause with Donald Trump and with his Russian puppet masters. And the Sanders people will do this without any shame whatsoever, because, in the Sanders cult of personality, any dirty trick is acceptable as long as it advances the Sanders campaign.
Right now, Joe Biden remains the consensus front runner in the Democratic primary campaign. Both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders would like to change that. Both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders have demonstrated in the past their willingness to make common cause against a common adversary. Only time will disclose whether the cynical joint Trump-Sanders effort will be successful. Those of us who are loyal Democrats must work to ensure that it is not.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no secret of his profound, patriotic, disdain for Donald J. Trump and for Bernard Sanders. The views expressed herein do not reflect the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, another organization for which Mr. Marchand feels a distinct measure of disdain. Call Mr. Marchand a "neoliberal," a "corporate Democrat," a "shill," or a "Hillbot" and Mr. Marchand reserves the right to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is available and ready to hand. Mr. Marchand also reserves the right to have yellow dogs bite you in a sensitive location.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
THE PERILS OF PERSONALISMO
Summary: Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been victims of hostile takeover bids from two men with deep sympathies for the Russian State and a distinct affinity for forming cults of personality about themselves. Bernard Sanders’ hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party in 2016 failed, as it will ineluctably fail between now and the Iowa caucuses. By contrast, Donald Trump’s Russophile takeover bid against the Republican Party has been a success.
Now, as we gear up for the hypertrophic, hyperactive, hyperventilating 2020 presidential campaign season, Bernard Sanders is attempting another hostile takeover bid against the Democratic Party. During the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers conducted a slash-and-burn campaign against Hillary Clinton. The acrimonious tone of the 2016 Democratic primary has very much carried over to this year’s Democratic pre-primary. Sadly, many Democratic hopefuls have adopted the Sanders slash-and-burn methodology to savage their opponents. This may very well give the election to a man who will almost certainly go down in history as the worst President of the United States to date.
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Cathedral City, October 2, 2019 -- Since the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, observers, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, have come to expect that the Democratic primary campaign of 2020 will be nasty, acrimonious, protracted, and unpleasant. And much of the blame for the unfortunate state of the Democratic primary can be assigned squarely to the Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, and his supporters.
Sanders has always been a contentious, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous loudmouth with a no-compromise “my way or the highway” attitude toward politics. Worse, Gospodin Sanders has always attracted to his campaigns similarly loudmouthed, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous, contentious, misogynistic, borderline racist, redeless, followers, the American equivalent to the interwar European street toughs who made the continent safe for fascism between 1922 and 1939.
What a contrast to the Democratic primary campaign in 2008!
In 2008, the last campaign before 2016 in which the presidency was open, i.e., in which the incumbent was constitutionally inhibited from running for a third term, the Democratic primary campaign, for all of the sometimes unfortunate jabs exchanged between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was fought in a civil fashion between two adversaries who recognized that when the sound and the fury were over, both rivals were still Democrats, both rivals still had policy positions that merited serious discussion, and both rivals still held each other in a certain level of regard. And when the primary campaign was over, Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful candidate, made speed to throw her support and that of her loyalists followers behind Barack Obama, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President.
Not so, not so at all in 2016. Again, the presidency was open and the incumbent constitutionally inhibited from seeking election to a further term. Bernard Sanders, who was and is not a member of the Democratic Party, mounted a hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party, which foolishly allowed him to run in their primary. The jabs and the agitprop from the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton, the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, began almost immediately.
It became very clear that Gospodin Sanders despised Sec. Clinton at a visceral, personal, deeply misogynistic level. Moreover, his foot soldiers, never inclined to think things through or to tolerate any criticism of their Dear Leader, made haste to accuse Sec. Clinton of the same enormities that Donald Trump and his supporters were eager to belabor her with. Worse, some of Sanders’s followers eagerly reached into their worn-out grab-bag and pulled out the thought-terminating cliché of anti-Semitism, by which they proposed to shut down any criticism of Gospodin Sanders.
Anyone with any memory of the 2016 campaign will recall the demonstrations orchestrated by the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton almost everywhere she appeared. Add to that the crude sexist manner in which the secretary, and her daughter were routinely travestied, usually in the coarsest of terms, on social media, together with the ill concealed preferential option of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for Sanders and Trump.
Moreover, Sec. Clinton was routinely abused by both Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers for the 1994 crime bill in which she had no vote, as well as for somehow being responsible for her husband’s extramarital affair. Additionally, one should recall the riot at the Nevada caucuses orchestrated by Sanders and his campaign, together with the Sanders-organized demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, even after it had become clear that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of the Democratic Party for president in 2016.
Throughout the entire primary campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers waged war against Hillary Rodham Clinton as if they were the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy waging a desperate rearguard action against the advancing Americans. And when Hillary’s nomination had become inevitable, Bernard Sanders and his followers insisted on behaving like angry Japanese holdouts, marooned on Pacific islands such as Saipan. Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, taking pot shots at the Americans.
One need not burden the record with a recapitulation of the behavior of the Bernie-or-bust bitter-enders, who, the evidence has now begun to show, were eager to share talking points – many of them generated by Julian Assange and the Russian State-- and opposition research against Sec. Clinton with the Donald Trump campaign. Put bluntly, Gospodin Sanders and his feckless, redeless followers behaved like sore losers determined to throw the election to a Republican out of sheer spite. Between 12 percent and 26 percent of Sanders primary voters cast their general election ballots for Donald Trump. The “Bernie-or-bust” vote gave Donald Trump his narrow margin of victory in the electoral college. In doing so, the Bernie-or-bust voters managed to cast the word “progressive” in distinct malodor among loyal Democrats.
Now, with the 2020 primary cycle starting to shake out, with the second and third tier candidates dropping out of the race or giving indications of an intent to drop out of the race, Sanders’s Birkenstock Bolsheviks are at it again. They began the campaign season by attacking former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. When O’Rourke’s poll numbers began slipping, and it was obvious that he no longer was a first-tier candidate, Sanders and his followers began lobbing their bombs at Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and at the front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. As was the case in 2016, the nastiness on social media, particularly the nastiness directed against Joe Biden, has become a subject of conversation throughout the political world.
Now, indications are that Sanders, always one to burn an asset that may be standing in his way, is about to launch an all-out war against Elizabeth Warren. We know that Sanders himself will question the Massachusetts Senator’s “purity,” to say nothing of casting a blind eye upon the inevitable efforts by his supporters to question Sen. Warren’s Native American heritage. And inevitably, Sanders’s followers will avail themselves of Trump’s talking points to attack a woman with far more education and qualifications than Bernard Sanders, with his undergraduate political science degree, will ever have. And when they savage a woman who is by far Bernard Sanders’ better and superior, it is almost ineluctable that David Sirota or some other Sandernista operative somewhere will avail him- or herself of the Trumpian racial slur “Pocahontas.”
Now bluntly, there is absolutely no reason that the Democratic primaries should become so ugly. But Bernard Sanders is a profoundly ugly man, just as is Donald J. Trump. Of course, both Sanders and Trump are interlopers in their respective parties. Sanders, the unsuccessful interloper in the Democratic Party, is still doing a burn over the fact that he got pwned by ... a girl! No doubt, if we were unlucky enough to see a Sanders presidency come 2021, he would practice the same kind of politics of grievance and resentment that we have seen during these last two and a half years from Donald Trump himself.
Indeed, as much a Sanders was an interloper — albeit unsuccessful — in the Democratic Party, Trump’s efforts to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, with the help of the Russian state and American domestic Russian assets, was entirely successful.
Now Donald Trump himself and the Republican Party which he has taken over, have no guiding set of principles, no defined Weltanchauung or ideology beyond the crude evangelical Protestant Nonconformist mass line which Trump and the Republican Party peddle eagerly to an uninformed, racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, base which eagerly laps up whatever sewage of Sodom Trump and his acolytes see fit to spew before them.
The crude mass line Trump and his acolytes have foisted on the American public resembles nothing quite so much as that seen in the United Kingdom and on the continent of Europe during the years between the Great War and World War II. Indeed, the similarity between the Trump and Sanders efforts is that both of them bear an altogether unfortunate resemblance to a whole clutch of “personalist” right wing authoritarian political movements and their “leaders,” among others, Charles Maurras’s Action Française, Jákfai Gömbös Gyula’s Hungarian Unity Party, Szálasi Ferenc’s Hungarian Arrow Cross, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde’s Spanish Falangists, Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, Ante Pavelić’s Croatian Ustaše, and the risible British Union of Fascists under their popinjay leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Every one of these politicians represented, in a European context, what has been referred to in Latin America as personalismo, defined by Britannica.com as “the practice of glorifying a single leader, with the resulting subordination of the interests of political parties and ideologies and of constitutional government.” In the United States, both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders reflect a kind of emergent personalismo.
Specifically, we have seen how both Trump and Sanders have called frequent (and fraudulent) attention to the alleged size of their rallies. Indeed, more than one commentator has called attention to the use by the Sanders campaign of an image of a May Day March in Havana that the Sanders campaign falsely captioned as depicting a Bernard Sanders rally in California. Similarly, the Trump campaign consistently overestimated the size of its own rallies; how can one forget the epic Trumpertantrum that ensued when the White House was caught grossly overestimating the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural address crowd? And as much as both Dear Leader Bernard Sanders and Maximum Leader Donald Trump were accustomed to overstating their crowd sizes, both men were equally wont to attack the news media for reporting accurately on their usually much smaller than advertised crowd sizes.
Of course, if crowd sizes, and Trunp's and Sanders's insecurity about them, are a reflection of personalismo, the almost cultish devotion of their redeless followers is another indication of the dangerous cancer of personalismo in American politics. Trump’s votaries tend to be older, whiter, and less educated. Sanders’s cultists, by contrast, tend to be in the 18-35 cohort. Many of them possess undergraduate degrees, often in traditional liberal arts fields. And whereas Trump voters tend to be nostalgic for the dispensations obtaining in, say, the 1950s or early 1960s, Sanders voters tend to pine for some kind of notional radical, transformatiional “revolution.” Neither contingent has much tolerance for, or interest in, the views of the other side. Both contingents claim that they are being victimized and misunderstood by some sort of nebulous “establishment.” Finally, both share in common an altogether dismissive Weltanchauung that finds expression in a condescending, combative, confrontational tone.
The similarities between Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have been described and discussed too often to require further repetition here. The similarities between the followers of Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have likewise been discussed and described too often to require further recapitulation here. Rather, the issue for loyal Democrats, those of us who would vote for a Yellow Dog before voting for a Republican, is to understand that we may well be confronted with a Hobson’s choice: Bernard Sanders is not enough of a yellow dog to deserve our vote. Bernard Sanders, who, like Ralph Nader before him in 2000, helped deliver the 2016 election to Donald Trump, is no Democrat.
Instead, Bernard Sanders is still carrying a torch for the Soviet Union, which landed on the ash heap of history a generation ago. Unfortunately, that renders Mr. Sanders susceptible of use by a Russian state in the throes of an identity crisis. Does Russia want to be a constitutional democracy? Does Russia want to retreat to its Soviet past? Or does Russia want to clamp rose-colored glasses to its head and become a simulacrum of what it was when St. Nicholas II the Passion-Bearer was Emperor? Until Russia makes a decision to commit to liberal democratic values, Russia will be our enemy. Right now, we have two men who are either ideologically connected to the Russian State (Bernard Sanders) or beholden to it in a way that compromises them and opens them up to manipulation and treason (Donald Trump).
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger!
Now, as we gear up for the hypertrophic, hyperactive, hyperventilating 2020 presidential campaign season, Bernard Sanders is attempting another hostile takeover bid against the Democratic Party. During the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers conducted a slash-and-burn campaign against Hillary Clinton. The acrimonious tone of the 2016 Democratic primary has very much carried over to this year’s Democratic pre-primary. Sadly, many Democratic hopefuls have adopted the Sanders slash-and-burn methodology to savage their opponents. This may very well give the election to a man who will almost certainly go down in history as the worst President of the United States to date.
------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, October 2, 2019 -- Since the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, observers, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, have come to expect that the Democratic primary campaign of 2020 will be nasty, acrimonious, protracted, and unpleasant. And much of the blame for the unfortunate state of the Democratic primary can be assigned squarely to the Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, and his supporters.
Sanders has always been a contentious, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous loudmouth with a no-compromise “my way or the highway” attitude toward politics. Worse, Gospodin Sanders has always attracted to his campaigns similarly loudmouthed, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous, contentious, misogynistic, borderline racist, redeless, followers, the American equivalent to the interwar European street toughs who made the continent safe for fascism between 1922 and 1939.
What a contrast to the Democratic primary campaign in 2008!
In 2008, the last campaign before 2016 in which the presidency was open, i.e., in which the incumbent was constitutionally inhibited from running for a third term, the Democratic primary campaign, for all of the sometimes unfortunate jabs exchanged between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was fought in a civil fashion between two adversaries who recognized that when the sound and the fury were over, both rivals were still Democrats, both rivals still had policy positions that merited serious discussion, and both rivals still held each other in a certain level of regard. And when the primary campaign was over, Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful candidate, made speed to throw her support and that of her loyalists followers behind Barack Obama, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President.
Not so, not so at all in 2016. Again, the presidency was open and the incumbent constitutionally inhibited from seeking election to a further term. Bernard Sanders, who was and is not a member of the Democratic Party, mounted a hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party, which foolishly allowed him to run in their primary. The jabs and the agitprop from the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton, the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, began almost immediately.
It became very clear that Gospodin Sanders despised Sec. Clinton at a visceral, personal, deeply misogynistic level. Moreover, his foot soldiers, never inclined to think things through or to tolerate any criticism of their Dear Leader, made haste to accuse Sec. Clinton of the same enormities that Donald Trump and his supporters were eager to belabor her with. Worse, some of Sanders’s followers eagerly reached into their worn-out grab-bag and pulled out the thought-terminating cliché of anti-Semitism, by which they proposed to shut down any criticism of Gospodin Sanders.
Anyone with any memory of the 2016 campaign will recall the demonstrations orchestrated by the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton almost everywhere she appeared. Add to that the crude sexist manner in which the secretary, and her daughter were routinely travestied, usually in the coarsest of terms, on social media, together with the ill concealed preferential option of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for Sanders and Trump.
Moreover, Sec. Clinton was routinely abused by both Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers for the 1994 crime bill in which she had no vote, as well as for somehow being responsible for her husband’s extramarital affair. Additionally, one should recall the riot at the Nevada caucuses orchestrated by Sanders and his campaign, together with the Sanders-organized demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, even after it had become clear that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of the Democratic Party for president in 2016.
Throughout the entire primary campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers waged war against Hillary Rodham Clinton as if they were the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy waging a desperate rearguard action against the advancing Americans. And when Hillary’s nomination had become inevitable, Bernard Sanders and his followers insisted on behaving like angry Japanese holdouts, marooned on Pacific islands such as Saipan. Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, taking pot shots at the Americans.
One need not burden the record with a recapitulation of the behavior of the Bernie-or-bust bitter-enders, who, the evidence has now begun to show, were eager to share talking points – many of them generated by Julian Assange and the Russian State-- and opposition research against Sec. Clinton with the Donald Trump campaign. Put bluntly, Gospodin Sanders and his feckless, redeless followers behaved like sore losers determined to throw the election to a Republican out of sheer spite. Between 12 percent and 26 percent of Sanders primary voters cast their general election ballots for Donald Trump. The “Bernie-or-bust” vote gave Donald Trump his narrow margin of victory in the electoral college. In doing so, the Bernie-or-bust voters managed to cast the word “progressive” in distinct malodor among loyal Democrats.
Now, with the 2020 primary cycle starting to shake out, with the second and third tier candidates dropping out of the race or giving indications of an intent to drop out of the race, Sanders’s Birkenstock Bolsheviks are at it again. They began the campaign season by attacking former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. When O’Rourke’s poll numbers began slipping, and it was obvious that he no longer was a first-tier candidate, Sanders and his followers began lobbing their bombs at Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and at the front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. As was the case in 2016, the nastiness on social media, particularly the nastiness directed against Joe Biden, has become a subject of conversation throughout the political world.
Now, indications are that Sanders, always one to burn an asset that may be standing in his way, is about to launch an all-out war against Elizabeth Warren. We know that Sanders himself will question the Massachusetts Senator’s “purity,” to say nothing of casting a blind eye upon the inevitable efforts by his supporters to question Sen. Warren’s Native American heritage. And inevitably, Sanders’s followers will avail themselves of Trump’s talking points to attack a woman with far more education and qualifications than Bernard Sanders, with his undergraduate political science degree, will ever have. And when they savage a woman who is by far Bernard Sanders’ better and superior, it is almost ineluctable that David Sirota or some other Sandernista operative somewhere will avail him- or herself of the Trumpian racial slur “Pocahontas.”
Now bluntly, there is absolutely no reason that the Democratic primaries should become so ugly. But Bernard Sanders is a profoundly ugly man, just as is Donald J. Trump. Of course, both Sanders and Trump are interlopers in their respective parties. Sanders, the unsuccessful interloper in the Democratic Party, is still doing a burn over the fact that he got pwned by ... a girl! No doubt, if we were unlucky enough to see a Sanders presidency come 2021, he would practice the same kind of politics of grievance and resentment that we have seen during these last two and a half years from Donald Trump himself.
Indeed, as much a Sanders was an interloper — albeit unsuccessful — in the Democratic Party, Trump’s efforts to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, with the help of the Russian state and American domestic Russian assets, was entirely successful.
Now Donald Trump himself and the Republican Party which he has taken over, have no guiding set of principles, no defined Weltanchauung or ideology beyond the crude evangelical Protestant Nonconformist mass line which Trump and the Republican Party peddle eagerly to an uninformed, racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, base which eagerly laps up whatever sewage of Sodom Trump and his acolytes see fit to spew before them.
The crude mass line Trump and his acolytes have foisted on the American public resembles nothing quite so much as that seen in the United Kingdom and on the continent of Europe during the years between the Great War and World War II. Indeed, the similarity between the Trump and Sanders efforts is that both of them bear an altogether unfortunate resemblance to a whole clutch of “personalist” right wing authoritarian political movements and their “leaders,” among others, Charles Maurras’s Action Française, Jákfai Gömbös Gyula’s Hungarian Unity Party, Szálasi Ferenc’s Hungarian Arrow Cross, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde’s Spanish Falangists, Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, Ante Pavelić’s Croatian Ustaše, and the risible British Union of Fascists under their popinjay leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Every one of these politicians represented, in a European context, what has been referred to in Latin America as personalismo, defined by Britannica.com as “the practice of glorifying a single leader, with the resulting subordination of the interests of political parties and ideologies and of constitutional government.” In the United States, both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders reflect a kind of emergent personalismo.
Specifically, we have seen how both Trump and Sanders have called frequent (and fraudulent) attention to the alleged size of their rallies. Indeed, more than one commentator has called attention to the use by the Sanders campaign of an image of a May Day March in Havana that the Sanders campaign falsely captioned as depicting a Bernard Sanders rally in California. Similarly, the Trump campaign consistently overestimated the size of its own rallies; how can one forget the epic Trumpertantrum that ensued when the White House was caught grossly overestimating the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural address crowd? And as much as both Dear Leader Bernard Sanders and Maximum Leader Donald Trump were accustomed to overstating their crowd sizes, both men were equally wont to attack the news media for reporting accurately on their usually much smaller than advertised crowd sizes.
Of course, if crowd sizes, and Trunp's and Sanders's insecurity about them, are a reflection of personalismo, the almost cultish devotion of their redeless followers is another indication of the dangerous cancer of personalismo in American politics. Trump’s votaries tend to be older, whiter, and less educated. Sanders’s cultists, by contrast, tend to be in the 18-35 cohort. Many of them possess undergraduate degrees, often in traditional liberal arts fields. And whereas Trump voters tend to be nostalgic for the dispensations obtaining in, say, the 1950s or early 1960s, Sanders voters tend to pine for some kind of notional radical, transformatiional “revolution.” Neither contingent has much tolerance for, or interest in, the views of the other side. Both contingents claim that they are being victimized and misunderstood by some sort of nebulous “establishment.” Finally, both share in common an altogether dismissive Weltanchauung that finds expression in a condescending, combative, confrontational tone.
The similarities between Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have been described and discussed too often to require further repetition here. The similarities between the followers of Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have likewise been discussed and described too often to require further recapitulation here. Rather, the issue for loyal Democrats, those of us who would vote for a Yellow Dog before voting for a Republican, is to understand that we may well be confronted with a Hobson’s choice: Bernard Sanders is not enough of a yellow dog to deserve our vote. Bernard Sanders, who, like Ralph Nader before him in 2000, helped deliver the 2016 election to Donald Trump, is no Democrat.
Instead, Bernard Sanders is still carrying a torch for the Soviet Union, which landed on the ash heap of history a generation ago. Unfortunately, that renders Mr. Sanders susceptible of use by a Russian state in the throes of an identity crisis. Does Russia want to be a constitutional democracy? Does Russia want to retreat to its Soviet past? Or does Russia want to clamp rose-colored glasses to its head and become a simulacrum of what it was when St. Nicholas II the Passion-Bearer was Emperor? Until Russia makes a decision to commit to liberal democratic values, Russia will be our enemy. Right now, we have two men who are either ideologically connected to the Russian State (Bernard Sanders) or beholden to it in a way that compromises them and opens them up to manipulation and treason (Donald Trump).
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger!
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
STRAIGHTEN UP AND FLY RIGHT, DAMMIT!
Democrats need to get their shit together. Democrats need to straighten up, fly right, and stop sniping at one another. Democrats need to get over purity tests, virtue signaling, and holier than thou posturing. And they need to do it damn fast. Because, if we don’t straighten up and fly right, if we don’t embrace transactional pragmatism, and stop looking for utopia in a day, we will hand the 2020 election to Donald Trump, and we will ourselves responsible for the destruction of the American democratic project.
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Cathedral City, October 1, 2019 – as the hypertrophied 2020 Democratic campaign continues its endless, agonizing march to the election, we are starting to see the Democrats live down to the traditional stereotype of the Democratic Party as being a group of people with an amazing propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Notwithstanding the unexpectedly strong performance of the Party in the midterm elections of 2018, observers have already begun to note signs of fission within the Democratic body politic. We seem to be setting ourselves up for electoral defeat; we seem to be living down to the stereotype of Democrats as being weak kneed ideologues who would prefer to accept defeat with our “principles” intact, rather than achieve victory with dirt on our faces, having arrived first at the finish line hot, stinking, and bathed in sweat. In other words, Democrats aren’t willing to get dirty to win, and that is a serious problem for this Party.
Pragmatic Democrats (and there are more of us then is generally realized,) understand that this nation stands at the brink of an irrepressible conflict. Will this nation redeem once again the solemn promise made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?” If we are to preserve the American project in democracy, this great experiment in representative self-government, this living political proof of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s observation that “Nothing great or living can be done except where [people] are self-governed and independent,” quoted in W. Ward, Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman 367, (London, 1912) we must be prepared to do more than clutch our beads at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization that the Republican Party has become.
What, then, must we of The Democracy do to save our darkened and desecrated country? We cannot content ourselves with polite discussions or debates with the party opposite. We must be prepared to wage all out political war to ensure that our view, our correct view, of what America is, can be, and should be, prevails. Yet, by the same token, we must also understand the importance of maintaining what Kaiser Wilhelm II described as eine Burgfrieden, a “truce within [our own] fortress.” Unfortunately, Democrats are piss poor at maintaining anything resembling Burgfrieden.
Instead of embracing Burgfrieden, Democrats turn and embrace the Chinese concept of luan, or chaos, indulging in all manner of internecine battles, including purity testing, virtue signaling, and vicious heresy hunting within the Party. Not only do Democrats want to fall in love, placing their candidates on pedestals and reacting like jilted lovers when their candidates prove to be human beings with feet of clay, (as opposed to Republicans, who are content to fall in line), but Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to take a pugnacious, censorious, condescending, and confrontational tone toward allies deemed guilty of demonstrating insufficient fealty.
During the 2016 campaign, I fell out with a substantial number of erstwhile friends who had declared their undying fealty and allegiance to Bernard Sanders. I, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As the 2016 Democratic primary moved toward its ineluctable conclusion, i.e., as Hillary racked up a prohibitive advantage in delegates, the followers of Bernie Sanders reacted with the same kind of desperate, Saipan/Iwo Jima/Okinawa anger that had animated the desperate, doomed, Japanese defenders of those island outposts.
For example, I participated in an unbelievably acrimonious exchange of emails with someone who had been a friend of mine for 25 years. His emails became so misogynistic, so conspiracy-theory-driven, and so borderline racist that I finally stopped responding to them.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this phenomenon was limited to the 2016 campaign. It is not. Fellow activists tell me that they have fallen out with old, much cherished friends, not merely over differences of opinion about whom to support among the Democratic candidates in 2020, but also over how Democrats ought to wage and prosecute a successful campaign against That Fascist Donald Trump.
Of course, let me throw my own bomb in this discussion. I believe that the 2020 presidential campaign is an existential test and turning point for the American experiment in representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his Message to Congress of December 1, 1862,
Lincoln wrote those words against the background of the greatest existential struggle in our history. The unwillingness of the American South to accept the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election had led to the worst act of organized treason ever perpetrated in American history. And not satisfied with throwing down the gauntlet, the South had decided to appeal to violence to make its case, and the nation was riven in twain by the Civil War the “Confederacy” had inflicted upon it.
Now, nearly 160 years later, we find ourselves trembling on the brink of an irrepressible conflict, in which it is reasonable to believe that the incumbent president of the United States and his followers, who have seen fit to break every rule of civilized political behavior, are meditating the use of violence to ensure their continued political power.
In short, America is sliding toward fascism. It is not necessary to believe that Donald Trump will, himself, be the Fascist dictator who emerges at the end of the process. Some disciple of Donald Trump, some younger man, may very well be preparing himself in the wings against the day when Donald Trump suffers a stroke or coronary episode.
Democrats need to stop chiding one another for being willing to say such things. We must stop pooh-poohing one another for believing that fascism is a real possibility in this country and being determined to resist it by Any. Means. Necessary.
Therefore, when I suggest that Democrats need to start fighting dirty, like street fighters, I’m not suggesting such a thing simply to be provocative or to cause some of my timorous Democrats to clutch their pearls and emit manifest signs of the vapors.
We Democrats need to stop accepting uncritically the well-intentioned, but dangerous counsel of Michelle Obama, a woman whom I otherwise admire tremendously.
When Michelle said “when they go low, we go high,” I don’t think she intended her statement as anything more than an aspirational call to Democrats to seek to make America a better place. Unfortunately, it has become a formula for abject and unconditional surrender. We can go as high as we would like once we have achieved a victory that can only be won through fighting dirty.
We did not secure victory in the Second World War by negotiating politely with the Axis Powers. We defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy the old-fashioned way; we kicked their ass, nuked the Japanese, and kept on kicking their asses until they begged us to stop. We met them in the gutter, we fought them there, and then, in an act of magnanimity without parallel in the history of the world, we raised them up, we gave them the gift of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and yes, we went low to make it possible for the entire world to go high.
But before we can go high, we have to win the political war we are prosecuting. Nothing makes me madder then to be remonstrated by Democrats for being “tiresome” when I repeat a mantra for victory riffed from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: they pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
The Republicans fight this way. And when they do, and we insist on some kind of schoolmarmish purity, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as ineluctably as Judas opening the gates of the garden of Gethsemane to the Temple guards, before Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss. We must adopt the Republican style of combat, the way Patton and Montgomery adopted the fighting style of Erwin Rommel, the way Chester Nimitz adopted the wolf pack submarine tactics of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz to break the Japanese Navy and merchant marine throughout the Pacific.
For Democrats to fall into squabbling with one another, reproving one another, remonstrating with one another, or attacking each other in vicious heresy hunts over who is more pure, who is more progressive, who is a better Democrat, is an assured recipe not only for the destruction of our own party, but for the destruction of the American democratic project as well. We are in fact the oldest still-extant political party in the world. We have survived across 200 years because what we stand for is nothing less than democracy itself. And that is something worth fighting for.
So, straighten up and fly right, Democrats!
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a pugnacious, combative, "Yellow Dog" Democrat who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He misses the days when the Party could discipline its officeholders and activists. The views set forth herein are his own, not the views of any timorous, self-sabotaging, Stockholm syndrome "Democrat."
--------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, October 1, 2019 – as the hypertrophied 2020 Democratic campaign continues its endless, agonizing march to the election, we are starting to see the Democrats live down to the traditional stereotype of the Democratic Party as being a group of people with an amazing propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Notwithstanding the unexpectedly strong performance of the Party in the midterm elections of 2018, observers have already begun to note signs of fission within the Democratic body politic. We seem to be setting ourselves up for electoral defeat; we seem to be living down to the stereotype of Democrats as being weak kneed ideologues who would prefer to accept defeat with our “principles” intact, rather than achieve victory with dirt on our faces, having arrived first at the finish line hot, stinking, and bathed in sweat. In other words, Democrats aren’t willing to get dirty to win, and that is a serious problem for this Party.
Pragmatic Democrats (and there are more of us then is generally realized,) understand that this nation stands at the brink of an irrepressible conflict. Will this nation redeem once again the solemn promise made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?” If we are to preserve the American project in democracy, this great experiment in representative self-government, this living political proof of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s observation that “Nothing great or living can be done except where [people] are self-governed and independent,” quoted in W. Ward, Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman 367, (London, 1912) we must be prepared to do more than clutch our beads at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization that the Republican Party has become.
What, then, must we of The Democracy do to save our darkened and desecrated country? We cannot content ourselves with polite discussions or debates with the party opposite. We must be prepared to wage all out political war to ensure that our view, our correct view, of what America is, can be, and should be, prevails. Yet, by the same token, we must also understand the importance of maintaining what Kaiser Wilhelm II described as eine Burgfrieden, a “truce within [our own] fortress.” Unfortunately, Democrats are piss poor at maintaining anything resembling Burgfrieden.
Instead of embracing Burgfrieden, Democrats turn and embrace the Chinese concept of luan, or chaos, indulging in all manner of internecine battles, including purity testing, virtue signaling, and vicious heresy hunting within the Party. Not only do Democrats want to fall in love, placing their candidates on pedestals and reacting like jilted lovers when their candidates prove to be human beings with feet of clay, (as opposed to Republicans, who are content to fall in line), but Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to take a pugnacious, censorious, condescending, and confrontational tone toward allies deemed guilty of demonstrating insufficient fealty.
During the 2016 campaign, I fell out with a substantial number of erstwhile friends who had declared their undying fealty and allegiance to Bernard Sanders. I, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As the 2016 Democratic primary moved toward its ineluctable conclusion, i.e., as Hillary racked up a prohibitive advantage in delegates, the followers of Bernie Sanders reacted with the same kind of desperate, Saipan/Iwo Jima/Okinawa anger that had animated the desperate, doomed, Japanese defenders of those island outposts.
For example, I participated in an unbelievably acrimonious exchange of emails with someone who had been a friend of mine for 25 years. His emails became so misogynistic, so conspiracy-theory-driven, and so borderline racist that I finally stopped responding to them.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this phenomenon was limited to the 2016 campaign. It is not. Fellow activists tell me that they have fallen out with old, much cherished friends, not merely over differences of opinion about whom to support among the Democratic candidates in 2020, but also over how Democrats ought to wage and prosecute a successful campaign against That Fascist Donald Trump.
Of course, let me throw my own bomb in this discussion. I believe that the 2020 presidential campaign is an existential test and turning point for the American experiment in representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his Message to Congress of December 1, 1862,
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Lincoln wrote those words against the background of the greatest existential struggle in our history. The unwillingness of the American South to accept the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election had led to the worst act of organized treason ever perpetrated in American history. And not satisfied with throwing down the gauntlet, the South had decided to appeal to violence to make its case, and the nation was riven in twain by the Civil War the “Confederacy” had inflicted upon it.
Now, nearly 160 years later, we find ourselves trembling on the brink of an irrepressible conflict, in which it is reasonable to believe that the incumbent president of the United States and his followers, who have seen fit to break every rule of civilized political behavior, are meditating the use of violence to ensure their continued political power.
In short, America is sliding toward fascism. It is not necessary to believe that Donald Trump will, himself, be the Fascist dictator who emerges at the end of the process. Some disciple of Donald Trump, some younger man, may very well be preparing himself in the wings against the day when Donald Trump suffers a stroke or coronary episode.
Democrats need to stop chiding one another for being willing to say such things. We must stop pooh-poohing one another for believing that fascism is a real possibility in this country and being determined to resist it by Any. Means. Necessary.
Therefore, when I suggest that Democrats need to start fighting dirty, like street fighters, I’m not suggesting such a thing simply to be provocative or to cause some of my timorous Democrats to clutch their pearls and emit manifest signs of the vapors.
We Democrats need to stop accepting uncritically the well-intentioned, but dangerous counsel of Michelle Obama, a woman whom I otherwise admire tremendously.
When Michelle said “when they go low, we go high,” I don’t think she intended her statement as anything more than an aspirational call to Democrats to seek to make America a better place. Unfortunately, it has become a formula for abject and unconditional surrender. We can go as high as we would like once we have achieved a victory that can only be won through fighting dirty.
We did not secure victory in the Second World War by negotiating politely with the Axis Powers. We defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy the old-fashioned way; we kicked their ass, nuked the Japanese, and kept on kicking their asses until they begged us to stop. We met them in the gutter, we fought them there, and then, in an act of magnanimity without parallel in the history of the world, we raised them up, we gave them the gift of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and yes, we went low to make it possible for the entire world to go high.
But before we can go high, we have to win the political war we are prosecuting. Nothing makes me madder then to be remonstrated by Democrats for being “tiresome” when I repeat a mantra for victory riffed from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: they pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
The Republicans fight this way. And when they do, and we insist on some kind of schoolmarmish purity, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as ineluctably as Judas opening the gates of the garden of Gethsemane to the Temple guards, before Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss. We must adopt the Republican style of combat, the way Patton and Montgomery adopted the fighting style of Erwin Rommel, the way Chester Nimitz adopted the wolf pack submarine tactics of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz to break the Japanese Navy and merchant marine throughout the Pacific.
For Democrats to fall into squabbling with one another, reproving one another, remonstrating with one another, or attacking each other in vicious heresy hunts over who is more pure, who is more progressive, who is a better Democrat, is an assured recipe not only for the destruction of our own party, but for the destruction of the American democratic project as well. We are in fact the oldest still-extant political party in the world. We have survived across 200 years because what we stand for is nothing less than democracy itself. And that is something worth fighting for.
So, straighten up and fly right, Democrats!
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a pugnacious, combative, "Yellow Dog" Democrat who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He misses the days when the Party could discipline its officeholders and activists. The views set forth herein are his own, not the views of any timorous, self-sabotaging, Stockholm syndrome "Democrat."
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