NEGOTIATING DÉTENTE

A beginning is a very delicate time.

                -Frank Herbert, Dune

"There is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant and I would rather die a thousand deaths."
   
                -Gen. Robert E. Lee, CSA, before surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, April, 1865

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds....

                -Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

We have fought this fight as long, and as well as we know how. We have been defeated. For us as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation.

                -Gen. Lee

We wuz robbed!

                -Boxing manager Joe Jacobs, after his fighter, Max Schmeling had lost a controversial split decision to boxer Jack Sharkey, 1932.

Summary: Word has surfaced that within the last 24 to 48 hours talks have been underway between staffers for the campaigns of former Vice President Joe Biden and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, ostensibly to coordinate messaging concerning the coronavirus pandemic that has the country scared shitless and in economic freefall. Rumor has it that in addition to talking about the Outbreak, the staffers are negotiating what amounts to the surrender of the Sanders campaign. If so, the negotiations need to be carried out with an appreciation for the delicacy of the enterprise upon which the negotiators are embarked.

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Cathedral City, March 19, 2020 – Yesterday afternoon, stories surfaced in various media outlets to the effect that pourparlers have been occurring between the campaign staffs of former Vice President Joe Biden and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders.

The ostensible purpose of the talks has been the coordination of the campaigns of the two Democratic presidential contenders on messaging concerning the coronavirus outbreak that has not only scared the nation shitless, but which has also plunged the nation and the world into what may well be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Rumor has it that in addition to discussing the Outbreak, the staffers are negotiating what amounts to an armistice, a surrender of the Sanders campaign. If so, such an armistice must be negotiated with the greatest of care. It will be important to preserve Sen. Sanders’s “face,” that subtle Chinese cultural construct expressed as miànzi or lianshàng, implying reputation, self-respect, honor, prestige, or social standing.

From a Chinese cultural perspective, it is always important in negotiation, particularly if there is a power dynamic differential, to ensure that the party holding the preponderance of power does not “take away” the face of the less powerful party. In English, the concept of saving face has been devised as an opposite of losing face, and has been retconned into Mandarin Chinese as bao miànzi, meaning to guard/save face.

It will be necessary to bao miànzi with respect to Sen. Sanders to ensure that he and Vice President Biden can establish a workable détente to carry forward the critical enterprise of ensuring the defeat of the Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing Shitgibbon that is Donald Trump.  In beginning this new détente, it will be critical for both sides to realize, as Frank Herbert put it in his magisterial 1965 novel Dune, that a beginning is a very delicate time. It will be a time when both sides will need to be exquisitely discreet, exquisitely careful, and exquisitely sensitive. It will be a very delicate time in which the slightest miscalculation or actual or perceived slight may be enough to derail the whole enterprise.

If, in fact, Sen. Sanders is preparing an exit strategy, or if his staff is indeed in armistice/surrender negotiations with Vice President Biden’s staff, staffers for the quondam vice president will need to understand that both Sen. Sanders and his followers, redeless though many of them may be, will be going through the ineluctable Elisabeth Kübler-Ross five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.

No doubt, if Sen. Sanders is preparing to and his campaign, he may well be feeling the anguish that Marse Robert Lee felt during that penultimate week of Lent in April, 1865, when he acknowledged to his aide de camp, the Baltimore lawyer Lt. Col. Charles Marshall, in phraseology that could have come straight from William Shakespeare himself, that "[t]here is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant and I would rather die a thousand deaths." 

Under such circumstances, it will be absolutely incumbent upon Vice President Biden and his staff to have before them the sentiments and the soaring words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

[W]ith malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the [Democratic Party’s] wounds...,

And to be guided by them.

As far as Sen. Sanders is concerned, he and his campaign staff would be well advised, mutatis mutandis, to take counsel of Gen. Lee’s admonition to his staff:

    We have fought this fight as long, and as well as we know how. We have been defeated. For us as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation.

In short, it is now time for cooler heads on both sides of the intra-Democratic divide to have space to prevail. The Sanders campaign has fought as long as it knew how, as well as it knew how. And though Sen. Sanders does not share Gen. Lee’s Conformist Episcopal religion, the statesmanlike response to the fact of his ineluctable defeat must be to accept the situation.  

By the same token, the Biden campaign, which came back from nothing, which had its El Alamein moment in South Carolina, and subsequently went from victory to victory and strength to strength, also needs to accept that the path to victory in the November election necessarily has to include a working détente with Sen. Sanders and his more pragmatic supporters.

Of course, there will be that fraction of irreconcilables and intransigents in the Sanders campaign who, like Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands continuing the Pacific War long after the Shōwa Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, will want to carry on the fight, insisting, like boxing manager Joe Jacobs after his fighter, Max Schmeling, was bested in the ring by Jack Sharkey in 1932, “we wuz robbed!”

Now, many of these irreconcilables and intransigents are either antisocial, pugilistic, confrontational, chip-always-on-the-shoulder types for whom the Sanders campaign offered them an officially sanctioned vehicle to misbehave, an opportunity to rumble, or they were trolls, agents provocateurs from the other, Republican, side.

Along the way, these irreconcilables and intransigents, these Berniebros who became such a phenomenon during the campaigns of both 2016 and this year, did incalculable, irreparable harm to the Sanders campaign. If they were agents provocateurs owing their true allegiance to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and/or the Kremlin, the venality and dishonesty of their motives can be easily understood.

On the other hand, if they were truly the kind of street brawlers they appear to have been, then the fault must be apportioned between them and the candidate himself. If in fact the Berniebros were truly loyal to their candidate, they can be justifiably taxed with an appalling lack of self-awareness. That lack of self-awareness, in its turn, led them to generate a tsunami of disdain and ill will, not only for them, before the Vermont senator himself. Indeed, Sen. Sanders himself can be faulted in his turn for his own lack of self-awareness in not perceiving early enough the enormous harm the Bros were doing to his campaigns, both this hear and in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, whom Joe Beden is emphatically not.

In short, Bernie was at least partially done in by his Bros, and it will now be incumbent upon him to cut them loose forthwith in the bluntest possible fashion if a working détente with the Biden campaign is to be established, and if, on the basis of that détente, victory can be organized against Donald Trump.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own, unless readers find them congenial, in which case, they can be theirs, too.