LITTLE SNAPPERS: The Predicted Trash Talking of Bernie Sanders by His “Supporters,” and Why the Democrats Need to Open the Gift the Coronavirus Represents

"Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.”

-William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (Act III Scene 2), 1697.

Screw Maximilian!
I do!
So do I!
You bastard!

- Exchange between Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) and Brian Roberts (Michael York) in Cabaret (1972), screenplay by Jay Allen, adapted from a I Am a Camera by Christopher Isherwood.

Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.

-Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried) to Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), Casablanca (1942), screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison.

They pull a knife, you pull a gun, they send one of yours the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue!

-Jim Malone (Sean Connery) to Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), The Untouchables (1987), screenplay by David Mamet, based on The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley.
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Summary:  As the heavyweight endorsements of Joe Biden roll in, and as the Democratic Party coalesces around his presumptive nominee for President of the United States, there will be those, particularly on the Sanders left, who will try to condition their redirected allegiance to Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., on Biden’s proffer of a variety of policy concessions of a strongly leftist character. Biden needs to resist these demands and to keep faith with the moderate, Gladstonian liberal Democrats who have brought him to where he is today. For once you have yielded to the Berners’ demands, you can never get rid of the Bern.
    Moreover, as the campaign pivots toward the general election, Democrats at every level should weaponize against the Republicans and against their fascist Dear Leader Donald Trump their and his treasonable incompetence in mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is no time for Democrats to worry about being thought overly political, or to fear “descending to [the Republicans’] level.” They go low, screw going high; let’s meet ‘em in the basement with a switchblade. Let’s freaking wave the bloody shirt.

Cathedral City, April 16, 2020 -- The high-powered endorsements of Joe Biden’s candidacy for President of the United States continue to roll in. The other day with Bernie Sanders, yesterday it was Elizabeth Warren.

By now, Uncle Joe is more than the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination of the Democratic Party; he is the presumptive nominee, and the process of pivoting toward the general election, when our patriotism will demand of us that we unhesitatingly vote to send Uncle Joe to the White House. 

Of course, as I warned in my immediately previous post, there will be those who will be unwilling or unable to reconcile themselves to the advent of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. as either the nominee of the Democratic Party or as President of the United States.

As I suggested, some of these will be Trump agents provocateurs, infiltrated by the Trump campaign to try to cause as much damage as possible to the quondam vice president. Ultimately, these people will be fairly easily detected and fairly easily rooted out, though disturbers of the peace such as Twitter and Facebook will still eagerly traffic in anti-Biden memes and commentary for clickbait and to boost their market share. No one should ever be prepared to give Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg the benefit of any doubt whatsoever.

But, there are those fellow travelers, those perennially angry far leftists who “[have] no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd,” and who apparently believe that Trump represents the perfect catalyst, and that Sanders represented the perfect vehicle for the accomplishment of repetition, here in the United States, of the October Revolution of 1917. They have already begun the process of turning their vials of wrath upon both Uncle Joe and upon Bernie. Put simply, the far left is as angry as Cabaret's Sally Bowles was when she found that her boyfriend, on whom she was cheating with a Bavarian nobleman, was sleeping with the same Bavarian nobleman.  “Screw Maximilian! I do! So do I! You bastard!” Cue the drama and cue the far left freakout in 3... 2... 1....

But while Bernard Sanders may be taking heat from the #demexit dimwits, the Green Party gadflies, the Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-islands intransigents, and the Jill Stein/Vladimir Putin groupies, and while he may be making the appropriate professions that not supporting Joe Biden is “irresponsible,” there are still indications that he is making demands on Vice President Biden and the Biden campaign that it tack further to the left than may be sensible.

Thus, while it is certainly permissible to say to the Sanders people what Victor Laszlo said to Rick Blaine in Casablanca: “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win,” and while it should not be denied, and cannot be gainsaid, that drawing as many Sanders supporters as possible into the fold of Team Biden is both advantageous and prudent, there has to be a practical limit to the concessions that any political majority makes to a strident and outspoken minority. The situation is best summed up in the pithy words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written a thousand years ago when England was being repeatedly blackmailed by Danish invaders and the English governments of the time, under King Æthelred II “The Unready,” kept trying to buy them off with progressively larger payments of money called Danegeld. “But once you have paid the Danegeld,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle warned, in one of the earliest recorded diagnoses of the pitfalls of appeasement, “you can never get rid of the Dane.” In more modern English, we might express this sad truth in the formulation “give 'em an inch, and they’ll take a mile.”

At some point, therefore, Team Biden will have to strap on its metaphorical balls and set some boundaries. If the Biden campaign allows the Sanders people to push the Democratic Party platform too far to the left, it will open up the Party to facile, if spurious, charges that the oldest still-functioning political party in the world has gone off some sort of Marxist deep end. 

Now, to a certain extent, it pains me, as a person of the historic, Gladstonian Left to acknowledge that there should be limits to our leftism. Historically, this country has always made greater advances under center-left government than under the moral bankruptcy of conservatism, which has rather lost touch with its roots in the careful, balanced, well considered thought of Edmund Burke (perhaps the greatest political thinker ever to come out of Ireland). Instead, American conservatism has tended to identify itself with William Buckley’s dictum of a conservative as “a fellow standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”

By contrast, a measured, Gladstonian/Jeffersonian approach to politics stakes out a position somewhat to the left of center, in the territory we should now call classical liberalism. Unfortunately, most of the crypto-Marxist attitudes of the Sanders left are such as to give as much agita to the Gladstonian left as they are to the center and the right.

What we cannot afford--- in the 200-odd days that separate today from the November election ---  is to allow ourselves, as Democrats, to give away the unquestioned political advantage which has come our way as a result of Donald Trump’s treasonably incompetent mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite Trump’s narcissistic and pathological lies, barely one percent of the American public has been tested for coronavirus. Backlogs of tests have produced lines and inequities reminiscent of the Soviet Union and the third world. Thus, the white, the well-off, and the well-connected can get tested. The rest of us are left to surmise as to whether we have the coronavirus or whether that scratching in our throats and sniffles in our nostrils are simply artifacts of springtime pollen production. In short, on Donald Trump’s treasonably incompetent watch, the One Percent, as usual, are taken care of, while the 99%, at least in Donald Trump’s fetid mind, can go screw themselves.

The Democratic Party should understand that Trump’s gross, treasonably incompetent (and the phrase “treasonably incompetent” cannot be repeated too often) mishandling of the pandemic represents an absolutely priceless gift. Thanks to Trump’s... treasonably incompetent mishandling of the epidemic, the American economy is tanking. By this time next week, we can expect 25 million Americans to be out of work. That’s worse performance than that which drove Herbert Clark Hoover out of the White House in the elections of 1932.

But the Democratic Party needs to do a hell of a lot more than merely understand that Trump’s treasonable incompetence with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic is a gift. Gifts are no use at all unless the recipient of the gift has the good common sense to open the damn thing. And that is what fills me with fretful worry as we pivot to a general election campaign that is as fraught and full of danger as the campaign of 2020 shaping up to be.

The Democratic Party has a tendency to be caught up in a self sabotaging cult of niceness. We've always remonstrated with one another that “we mustn’t descend to their level,” and “when they go low, we go high,” noble sentiments from Michelle Obama, but in the context of the 2016 election, and in the expected context of this election, a tragically misguided formula for unconditional surrender.

Instead, we must be prepared unhesitatingly, unflinchingly, unapologetically, and un-self-critically to weaponize against the Republicans the situation in which this country finds itself. Every time a Democrat running for office at any level has an opportunity, he or she needs to excoriate his or her Republican opponent for the treasonable incompetence of the Republican Party and their gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We should be prepared, as the Republicans were in the years following the Civil War, to “waive the bloody shirt,” holding the Republicans responsible for every single COVID-19 death in this country. 

We need to be prepared, when they go low, to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. To use Sean Connery’s line from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables, “[t]hey pull a knife, you pull a gun, they send one of yours the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue!”

Too many Americans have already gone to the morgue as a result of the Republican mishandling of the pandemic. Let’s make sure we send a whole raft of Republicans to the political morgue.

Wave it! Wave the fucking bloody shirt; the survival of the country depends upon it!

-XXX-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq., lives in Cathedral City, where he served as a city councilmember for two terms, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Like many sole practitioners, his office revenues have taken a shit as a result of the tanking of the economy in consequence of Donald Trump's treasonably incompetent mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many partisan Democrats, Mr. Marchand believes that the Republican Party at every level, and the Sanders left at every level, ought to be given the bum's rush. This is not a time for niceness or a time for Democrats to fret about "descending to the Republicans' level. The views contained herein are Mr. Marchand's own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.

BERNIE SANDERS’S JOURNEY TO THE MISSOURI

Summary: It has finally happened. Bernard Sanders endorsed Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States yesterday. It did not take Bernie as long as many had expected it to take to get with the program, so to speak. Metaphorically speaking this was like the journey Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru and chief of the Imperial General Staff Umezu Yoshijiro had to make to the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, the day the Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allied powers. The task will now be to integrate as many supporters of Bernard Sanders as possible into a unified campaign to defeat Donald Trump in November. Equally important, however, will be deterring the intransigent holdouts whose animus toward Joe Biden will lead them to do everything possible to sabotage his campaign.
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Cathedral City, April 13, 2020 –- Bernard Sanders made it official yesterday. That morning, the Independent Vermont Senator endorsed Joe Biden’s candidacy for President of the United States. Sanders’s endorsement comes far earlier in the campaign than did his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. In that year, Sanders continued the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where a large number of his diehard, intransigent supporters staged a theatrical walkout and demonstration outside the convention center.

Hopefully, Sanders’s endorsement, coming just after Easter, will enable the Democrats to field a far more unified, far more disciplined campaign against Donald Trump then was the case four years ago.

It is probably safe to say that for a great many supporters of Bernard Sanders, the last few days have recapitulated the five Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Polling data suggest that fully eighty percent of Sanders supporters have seen, or will be able to see, their way clear to supporting Joe Biden as the campaign now pivots to the general election.

In so doing, these former Sanders supporters will have recapitulated the experience of many activists involved in an unsuccessful primary campaign. Former Texas agriculture Commissioner and Sanders supporter Jim Hightower described the experience as being something like taking the "Midnight Train."

Late on election night, as the returns come in, and becomes mathematically impossible for your candidate to win the primary, you take that metaphorical "Midnight Train" over to the headquarters of the victor. Once there, you grit your teeth, mend fences, have a couple of helpings of humble pie, and then put your name on the volunteer list for the victorious candidate's general election campaign.

Jim Hightower’s Midnight Train metaphor resonates with most of us because most of us have supported at least one unsuccessful candidate’s primary campaign. However, I expect that the metaphor that hits most powerfully home for a lot of disappointed Sanders supporters right now will be the “journey to the Missouri” metaphor that finds its source in the surrender of Japan to the Allied powers, which took place aboard the battleship Missouri (BB-63) on September 2, 1945.

The surrender proceedings, carried out under the auspices and at the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, went off with a kind of grace and dignity by which the irresistible power of the United States and her allies was showcased while at the same time saving the face (Ch. bao mianzi) of the Japanese participants in them.

As I suggested in this blog a couple weeks ago, the critical issue for the Biden campaign would be enlarging the traditional big Democratic tent and inserting leaves into the table to accommodate those Sanders supporters who were willing to take the Midnight Train and enter the Biden fold.

Unfortunately, not every Sanders supporter will be willing to make that midnight journey. There will be those self identified followers of Bernard Sanders who will eagerly live down to the stereotype of the intransigent, bitter-ender, Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island, and defiant resisters for whom the mantra “#never Biden” is one by which they will live and die.

These intransigents fall into three broad categories.

The first of these are the Trump/Kremlin trolls and moles. These are the people who infiltrate the Democratic Party in order to cause enmity and division within it. Their motivations are not motivations of support for Bernard Sanders as much as they are expressions of hatred toward Joe Biden, injected into the Democratic primary structure for the ultimate and ulterior purpose of aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s reelection effort.

The second group of self-identified Sanders intransigents have no real dog in the political hunt; they are simply anarchists and bomb throwers who delight in raising little hell and making people crazy.

The third, and most dangerous, category of bitter-end intransigents are those who do in fact have an ideological dog in the hunt. These, frequently identifiable by a large number of social media “likes” of Marxist or socialist memes, themes, and groups, tend to see the presidency of Donald Trump as a catalyst for a repetition, in the United States, of the October Revolution of 1917. In their Weltanschauung, Bernard Sanders is nothing but the instrumentality by which this October Revolution is to be accomplished.
 
This third group of intransigents seeks, in Leninist fashion, to “heighten the contradictions” in American society with a view toward fomenting that October Revolution. Sanders, whom they had relied upon to be their vehicle for the accomplishment of their sought-after October Revolution will be derided as a “sellout” before this day is over. 

We may expect, within the next twelve to twenty-four hours, to hear all, or at least a substantial number of, the cargo shorts communists who had loudly professed their fealty to Bernard Sanders to trot out every thought-terminating cliché available to them to express their anger at his endorsement of Joe Biden. “Centrist,” “sellout,” “corporatist,” “corporate whore,” and probably a few anti-Semitic broadsides will form the underpinning of the intransigent polemic against Bernie Sanders.

Feeling betrayed by Senator Sanders, the intransigents will include both him and Joe Biden in their polemic. Many of them will probably gravitate toward a third-party candidate, such as Putin’s pal Jill Stein, the perennial presidential hopeful of the Green Party. In the end, however, many of them will pledge their "fealty" to Donald Trump in the hopes that a second Trump term will sufficiently heighten the contradictions to the point where an "October Revolution" becomes inevitable.