More Political Irony than Jacobin intended

I started off feeling pretty good about the situation. Bernie won in New Hampshire, the cast of centrist misfits were scattered and disorganized. It was sad to see Elizabeth Warren not get the support I think she deserves but I kind of got on the Bernie train. "Alright, let's go" a little voice in my ear said, the New Dealer is finally going to get center stage and reorient the party from outside to return to its roots as a party of the people. But you cannot ignore the sniping from the left that is going to make the unity, energy, and motivation needed to remove the cancer of republicans unnecessarily difficult.

My friend, a history professor I have great respect for, posted this story from Jacobin magazine recently. It contains many ideas worthy of consideration, but also glosses over a big problem--it doesn't address the massive conspiracy theory at its root. Nor does it even pretend to isolate and reveal who exactly is in the conspiracy and barely addresses what they want. Now Jacobin is definitely the "it" destination for left-wing authoritarian followers, the permanent rebels that will turn on Bernie the minute he has to negotiate the varying priorities of the coalition and not deliver exactly what they want at that moment. Yes, that is kind of a challenge. Prove me wrong you in the "holier than thou" crowd that you can compromise with your fellow liberals. I am always skeptical of unnamed conspirators within some shadowy group out there, somewhere, that controls everything. Which is what this article does. Do not give me a mealy-mouthed response about having to know the meta-narrative perpetrated by Jacobin, I want names named before I take it seriously.

What makes Bernie Sanders so threatening to the Democratic establishment is that he stands for what millions of Democrats thought their party stood for all along.

"The Democratic establishment" is the kind of weaselly generalization that raises alarm bells. He offers one example: President Obama. Later, Joe Biden gets added but dang, two people control the "Democratic establishment"? Yes, there are things I wish Obama had done differently, I wish he could have pushed harder for Progressive change but his hold over the government was always tenuous at best as the Congressional caucuses of the party were never fully in agreement. I have written about Wailers before on this blog (here and here for starters), in short is it a term coined by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to describe the kind of left-wing intellectual who is content to write columns for various weeklies decrying the state of the world but do nothing beyond that to actually pitch in and fix things. I'll be the first to admit that the Democratic Party has problems but it really chafes to hear Wailers assert that this "establishment" would rather let doughfacedonny win again than let Bernie or another actual Progressive get the nomination. Obama was just as subject to the Driftglassian "Four Front War" as any other Democrat, he also was handed an economy in collapse, failing wars, and a prevailing perception of being too young and inexperienced to fix the mess republicans had left for him. So considering all of that pressure, it sounds more like Obama was a victim of this establishment than its leader.

The author of this article, Seth Ackerman, then wags his finger at all of those precious, naive Democrats voting in the primaries.

But that’s not the same as a fundamental ideological difference. My hypothesis is that when Sanders condemns the depredations of the “billionaire class,” or calls for a major power shift from corporations to workers, a majority of the party faithful assume he’s saying out loud what popular Democrats like Barack Obama truly believe in their hearts but are, perhaps, a little too politically prudent to state so baldly. 

Why would loyal Democrats labor under such illusions about their party leaders? Because those leaders go to great lengths to cultivate those illusions — and for the most part they succeed. Many of us on the Left tend to tune out the stump-speech platitudes of mainstream Democrats, which makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that, to the ideologically unarmored, those platitudes can make a  speaker sound a lot like someone who shares the values of, say, a Bernie Sanders.

The irony he talks about in the title is that the mythical establishment's platitudes about addressing inequality collapse when the real deal shows up. But you cute little Democratic sheep don't know the difference do you? Isn't that quaint? As though the people who can be bothered to show up and vote in primaries are stupid and beneath an intellectual heavyweight like Ackerman and the mighty Jacobins. There is real irony as well that he refuses to write one word about the similarity to doughfacedonny's supposed takeover of the death cult of human suffering. Bernie cuts through the crap to sincerely stand for the forgotten ideals of the Democratic Party and throws the fakes in disarray. Trump took the platitudes of the really-existing fascist propaganda machine built by the asshole he gave the (now meaningless) Presidential Medal of Freedom to recently among others and regurgitated them apparently more sincerely to the ravenous mob of right-wing authoritarian followers. I say apparently because, being a know-nothing loser, doughfacedonny was among the prime targets of brain-washing by the propaganda and therefore sincerely repeats the ideas shit into his skull the same way the average republican voter internalizes the interests of billionaires as his own. Trump just said the quiet parts out loud, republican voters understood that they had to settle for dog whistles and the implicit understanding that corporate insider establishment republicans they elected would do what those voters wanted, namely to punish their enemies and the brown-skinned others.

My point is that assuming a powerful insider conspiracy without actually naming names is rather lazy thinking. Especially when we just went through a blue wave election where lots of progressive outsiders were elected and genuine progressive organizations were built. Does that mean in the Jacobin mind that those things happened with the establishment's blessing? Or could it be better explained, the mainstream elite rejection of Bernie Sanders' campaign, as the toothless whining of a small number of public leaders who actually do not exercise that much power? I wish I could remember who taught me that you should never assume a powerful conspiracy pulls strings behind the scenes when simple explanations like timidity, greed, incompetence, and coincidences can also explain out of the ordinary behavior. Especially when the meta-narrative of Democratic conspiracy allows you to wave away very real patterns of abuse and bullying the last time around.

The obvious solution, of course, is to resort to electability arguments. Indeed, if Sanders once seemed to have a ceiling of support, it wasn’t because Democratic voters were alienated by his “extremism” or turned off by his “rabid fanbase” (a hilariously solipsistic explanation that doubles as a diagnostic test for Terminal Onlineness). They worried about whether he could beat Trump. 

Sanders is old, he’s strident, he’s Jewish. He calls himself a socialist and speaks with what is easily the least presidential accent of any nominee since Al Smith. He isn’t anyone’s textbook image of electability. That gave Democratic elites an opening: “We would love to see a President Sanders,” they implied, “but nominating Bernie will just give us another four years of Trump.” [emphasis mine]

Maybe it was "Terminal Onlineness" last time that turned me off. I decided to give Sanders another chance this time because all of the people I know IRL and most of the ones I follow online supporting him were genuinely good people. After all, I did vote for Sanders in the primary and I did write a pretty long blog about his sincerity as a New Dealer and Progressive. I guess I cut myself off too much and forgot that BernieBro culture is alive and well. Why take a perfectly good premise, that voters are voting for their first choice who represents what they believe is good and can be what the Democratic Party stands for again, and turn it into a conspiracy theory? I'm sticking with my friends who haven't lost their innocence and given into lazy cynicism like Ackerman.

For decades, those leaders propagated the conceit that intra-party disagreements are never about ends, only means; that they’re merely differences over how best to realize the ideals that everyone in the party supposedly shares: ideals of justice, compassion, defense of the little guy. Now, to their horror, they realize that this conceit has left their flock wholly susceptible to the charms of any politician who can speak with evident sincerity of justice, compassion, and defense of the little guy — and they are powerless to stop it without destroying the conceit. 

Again, the real irony is this is exactly what happened to the republicans last time, a genuine fascist (charlatan) won the allegiance of the party faithful who were tired of the conceit that their leaders wanted the same things they did. Enough of the cutting taxes for the rich, when are we going to see some concentration camps? It's a genuinely opposite position for the Democrats, perhaps the one that will really get through the fascism and snap the demographic jaws shut on the right wing.