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!
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