-----------------------------
While I loathe the Russian/Republican Party, I can’t help but feel a certain measure of disdain and unease for my own Democratic Party. Activists on the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Democratic Party, not satisfied with relentlessly attacking current front runner Joe Biden have begun to fear the possible advent of a newer, younger, queerer possible front runner in the form of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on whom the vials of wrath and vitriol appear to have been well and truly opened.
This outpouring of what the Los Angeles Times today referred to as a “sneering tone,” of barely concealed anger at Mayor Buttigieg certainly puts one in mind of the sneering, misogynistic tone that Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers adopted toward former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 primary. The tone of the Sanders faction’s critique of Secretary Clinton was, to put it mildly, hateful, misogynistic, and steeped in male, Trumpian, privilege. Worse, the insistent Sanders "we wuz robbed" Dolchstoßlegende in which Sanders and his foolish followers claimed that they were deprived of the 2016 nomination through sharp practice at the DNC, benefited, and benefits, no one but Donald Trump.
To put it bluntly, Bernard Sanders and his followers managed to inject a poison into the Democratic body politic in the 2016 primary cycle that has come back to haunt us in the 2020 cycle. That it is indeed a poisonous tone can be illustrated by the fact that the redelessly doctrinaire Sanders followers seemed to care not one whit that their confrontational, condescending, pugnacious, partisanship cost them friends within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.
Indeed, we saw, throughout the 2016 election cycle, how not only did at least 15% of Sanders primary voters cast general election ballots for the unspeakable, soon-to-be impeached, Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, but how even more of them eagerly and uncritically adopted the Trump-WikiLeaks-Kremlin narrative and talking points to attack Hillary, even after Secretary Clinton had clinched the nomination of her Party to be it standardbearer for the presidency of the United States. What we saw, in short, was a nasty case of sore-loserism, misogyny, and spite emanating from the Independent Vermont Senator and his hyperventilating followers.
Now, with Pete Buttigieg rising in the polls and presumably siphoning off support from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, it is perhaps ineluctable that the vials of wrath and vitriol would again be opened. As much as the Sanders campaign in 2016 could justly be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, misogynistic tone, in 2020 it can with equal justice be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, Sanders- against-the-world tone that traffics in left bourgeois homophobia, left bourgeois misogyny, and (snortgiggle!) charges of ageism against Joe Biden, who is two years Bernard Sanders’s junior.
And certainly, the Sanders campaign has managed to enlist the support of the default group of publications of the radical left. The Nation, once mordantly — and accurately — characterized by a Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke as “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left,” very publicly announced an “anti-endorsement” of the quondam Vice President.
Further into the realms of Marxist dialectic, the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s house organ for the traitor Edward Snowden, and the Marxist periodical Jacobin have both been banging the drums for Bernard Sanders quite loudly and insistently. Moreover, as Buttigieg has improved his standing in the polls, the Marxist magazines and “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left” have fallen into lockstep to excoriate Mayor Pete for being, among others, insufficiently queer, too queer, too white, too privileged, too corporate, and just too much of everything that the doctrinaire left in this country despises. Even his relative poverty compared to the other Democratic candidates has been held against him. In all this, it’s not hard for a queer person to sense a kind of dog whistle homophobia.
Of course, queerfolk are despised by both the hard right and the hard left. The hard right, waving their copies of the King James Bible, excoriates queerfolk on the strength of certain verses in Leviticus, on whose authority they seek to compass our vanishing. The hard left, for their part, tend to adopt the Marxist-Soviet critique of queerfolk as not having the strength of will necessary to help accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat. (This, notwithstanding the fact that the first foreign affairs, commissar of the Soviet Union, Gyorgy Chicherin, was an openly queer man who accomplished a great deal in advancing the dictatorship of the proletariat.)
Either way, the right-bourgeois will treat queer folk as unspeakable and not to be received in a social setting. But at least with the right bourgeois, queerfolk know where they stand. It is with the left bourgeois that queer folk are perpetually uncertain; from the left bourgeois, such as Bernard Sanders or even Mark Zuckerberg, one can expect lip service to the idea of tolerance for queerfolk, but privately, when they think no one is listening, left bourgeois personages such as Gospodin Sanders or Gospodin Zuckerberg will privately assure their intimates that we are really not their kind, dear.
What this means, in short, is the Democratic Party has allowed itself to imbibe, in full measure, the same poison that has so badly damaged its counterpart, the Republican Party. Bernard Sanders, for example, has much to account for with respect to the poisoning with Vermont’s nuclear waste of poor, politically powerless communities of color in Barnwell, South Carolina and Sierra Blanca, Texas. In neither case did Gospodin Sanders apparently bother to acquaint himself with the fact that the communities to be poisoned with Vermont’s toxic atomic detritus were in fact communities of color. When Gospodin Sanders took a shellacking in the 2016 primary elections in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, largely because he had not connected with African-American voters in those states, he pooh-poohed the poll results in primitive, racially insensitive terms. Of course, we all know how Sanders and his redeless followers, together with WikiLeaks, that asset of the Russian state, travestied both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the most offensive, misogynistic terms imaginable.
And it is happening all over again.
An Internet meme of some vintage suggests:
“Dear Liberals and Independents,
In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President.
It is very likely this candidate:
-Isn’t your first choice
-Isn’t 100% ideologically pure
-Has made mistakes in their life
-Might not really excite you that much
-Has ideas you may be uncomfortable with
Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting till 2020.”
Democrats need, indeed, to start getting over that shit now, rather than getting into an endless conniption over who is their first choice, who is 100% ideologically pure, who has a totally clean record, who excites one, and who is free from any discomforting ideas.
Our candidate will not be a Messiah. Our candidate may well be prone to gaffes, or have some blots on his or her legislative escutcheon. Shit, some of them may even have said "no" to a Girl Scout cookies salesgirl in 1983. As Democrats, we need to remember that even our heroes have feet of clay. We can’t afford the vain and frivolous luxury of purity tests or looking into a candidate’s distant past to find that one indiscretion which the Marxist left defines as disqualifying.
We are in the fight of our political lives against an incipient dictator. We can’t afford to fight from a crouch or allow ourselves to be washed away on waves of fear pee every time the Republicans and the Kremlin say “boo.”
Instead, we must be guided by the advice that Sean Connery’s character tendered to Kevin Costner’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
“They pull a knife, you pull a gun;
they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs the morgue!”
The vanity and frivolous luxury of ideological purity testing, heresy hunting, or being terrified of making a gaffe cannot be allowed to metastasize. We can’t afford the equally vain and frivolous luxury of Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but unacceptable counsel of going high when they go low.
Instead, we must be prepared to meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
The future of the Republic demands from us a kind of steely, Bolshevik resolve, a willingness to be Stakhanovite, and the readiness (hopefully in a merely metaphorical sense) to kill or die in the service of vision of America that must not be allowed to waste away or be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican Party’s insensate desire for power.
Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!
No comments:
Post a Comment