And there’s always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks
But his honor is pure and his courage as well
And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man
-Billy Joel, “Prelude/Angry Young Man”
So: February is over. And so is this year’s CPAC. The keynote speaker, of course, was Russia’s Viceroy in exile, Donald Trump, who actually told his crowd that he was looking forward to beating the Democrats a third time, so fat chance that any of these people will see reason. It’s pretty obvious that unless homeboy dies from swallowing a chicken bone whole, the Banana Republican Party is gonna hold the nomination open for him, and if he dies, they’re probably going to pave the way for Junior or Ivanka or one of his other sperm products. I guess it’s easier than coming up with new candidates or new ideas.
The former Party of Lincoln isn’t a political party anymore: It’s a pity party. In 2016, Trump achieved white-trash apotheosis by telling his audience what they wanted to hear (like ‘we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it’) even though they, contrary to image, were educated enough to know this could never be true. Now, these same people, most of whom are old enough to remember when the Republican Party had a reputation for competence, are agreeing with Donald Trump and telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear, knowing now that it’s only lost them the White House and the Senate, not because they believe it, not because he really believes it, but just because it makes him feel better.
What is the alternative to the “alt-right”? The NeverTrump organization, The Lincoln Project, which was already in bad odor with a lot of “progressives” because it was run by exactly the kind of people who were mean to them before Trump took over the Republicans (and therefore, unlike the Left, knew how to fight him with his own weapons) practically disintegrated in the first two weeks of February when New York Magazine and other sources revealed that Project co-founder John Weaver was using his position to pressure young men into sex. I mean, this isn’t the first time that somebody I rooted for turned out to be a creepy sex predator, so let’s just say that February wasn’t a good month for me.
What’s the alternative to the Right? The Democrats, whom the Party of Trump will say are more lefty than Leon Trotsky at a Frida Kahlo party. Try telling that to the Left. Right now “progressives” are mad about at least two events in the Biden Administration, their bombing of Iranian allies in Syria, and their lack of support for Office of Management and Budget Director nominee Neera Tanden, who had to withdraw her nomination this Tuesday. This second issue is that much more rich because Tanden is one of those disingenuous, arrogant establishment liberals who has pulled off the diplomatic feat of pissing off both the woke Left and the Trumpnik Right. Not that it’s in any way hard to piss off either one, but it’s usually for radically different reasons.
It has been pointed out for instance, that Tanden is a Beltway insider and former head of the Center for American Progress, an ostensibly centrist think tank with strong Democratic Party roots, and while managing it catered to wealthy donors, including foreigners. She has also been slagged (mainly by Bernie Sanders fans) for “late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting”, which is now the stated rationale for cloth-coat Republicans like Mitt Romney to oppose her nomination in the Senate, even though for most Republicans other than Romney that was hardly a disqualification for Trump being president. David Sirota:
“On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican party’s hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual record.
“Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting, journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden’s tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and distracting attention from Tanden’s alleged attack on a union of journalists.
“As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace, which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. …
“Moreover, the Tanden brigade – and their online army now bullying reporters with racist vitriol – are cynically relying on a political and media environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any social cause.
“Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise. They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are supposed to inform democratic decision-making. The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the Washington media wants to center Tanden’s nomination on her actual record, because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.”
As for the Syria bombing, I have to agree with a summary in New York Magazine’s website: “Biden has much more regard for constitutional checks and balances than Trump ever did, but the legal basis for Thursday’s action remains thin. To his credit, at least he attempted to make an argument on the basis of self-defense, and perhaps the threat the target posed was more imminent than we know. But most likely, the administration proceeded with the strike without asking Congress’s permission simply because the defense and national security brass knew they almost certainly wouldn’t get it and wouldn’t face any real consequences for acting without it. Dropping bombs in the Middle East without congressional approval has become a humdrum exercise by now.”
In other words, Democrats don’t seem to have learned anything either. And half of the reason we had the last four years is that America was sick and tired of Beltway business as usual no matter how obviously unqualified the alleged alternative to the swamp was. Biden won because Trump made the swamp that much more murky and vicious, but the reason bad politicians continue to win elections is because Americans have a notoriously short memory for what happened two to four years ago, and it’s that much easier to fleece an audience like the current Republican Party, which doesn’t want to remember what happened even yesterday.
On MSDNC in December, (before he was called to account over John Weaver) Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told one of the talking heads that he’d officially switched to the Democratic Party. He said, “At the end of the day, there’s now one pro-democracy political party in the United States of America and that’s the Democratic Party. And I am a member of that party because of that. I’m a single issue voter. I believe in democracy.” Problem is, it’s a bit hard to present yourself as a defender of democracy if you’re actively working to reduce, not expand, the number of choices in the system. (It’s also possible that Schmidt’s claim of being a Democrat wasn’t on the up-and-up.) It may in fact be the case that there is only one practical choice, but again, America as a political consensus has a terrible memory, and when it is fueled primarily by negative partisanship, that means that there is always a chance that people will vote for the not-incumbent member of the duopoly no matter how objectively terrible it is. People apparently need to be reminded that that is how Trump won last time.
I keep seeing all these liberals and centrists tell me that a serious political system needs two parties to work, but I don’t know how serious they are when they say that. Basically they want the illusion of debate with a “Democrat Lite” party that is more generically conservative than they are. That’s half of why the Party of Trump is such a radicalized personality cult, because they really don’t like the Republican Party establishment either. And why should they? They’re just as much swamp creatures as Neera Tanden.
The problem with that zombie party is not that they disagree with Democrats, but that they disagree with reality. They are a malignant organ in the body politic. And frankly, I don’t see why the entire country (many of whom would still be Republican, except that they believe in heresies like that Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun thing) has to get swallowed up into the Democratic Party just to oppose the anti-reality insurgency, when that party isn’t even a good fit for the Left.
One of the better burns I’ve seen recently was somebody on social media pointing out that all the stuff they told us would happen under socialism is in fact what’s happening now under capitalism. “There will be lines for food! They won’t be able to keep power on! Medical care will be rationed! You won’t have real choices in elections!” Yes indeed. And I’m still not socialist, because all that stuff that socialists tell us is happening in this country IS in fact still happening in Venezuela, and if anything pissed me off about the Party of Trump winning Florida last election it was all the people who fled Cuba and Venezuela who were willing to vote for a corrupt thug to create a one-party regime. I guess it’s okay if you pay lip service to religion or something.
The problem in both cases is not whether the country is socialist or capitalist. The problem is whether public affairs are accountable to the whole community or merely to an elite (whether that be a political party or a business elite). And that is never going to change as long as the only alternative to the Republican Party is the Democratic swamp, and the only alternative to the Democratic Party is… what we saw at CPAC last weekend.
And I am not bringing up Democratic malfeasance to engage in whataboutism, because the premise of whataboutism is somewhere between “X is morally superior to Y because no matter how bad X is, Y is always worse” and “X doesn’t need to be better than Y because the two are morally equivalent.” The Right can’t play that game any more because after years of history it is too obvious that Republicans go out of their way to be more immoral and corrupt than Democrats when they get real power, escalating all the traits that they rightfully attacked when Bill Clinton was president, and combining them with incompetence to boot.
What I am saying is that if Y is going to be better than X, that has to be proven by action. You can’t just give one side a pass because you have good reason to not want the Republicans back in charge. The only way to break the cycle is to have something that is better than X or Y, and right now, the Libertarian Party ain’t it. However it has more potential to be “it” than anything else in America.
It’s pretty Goddamn obvious now that the Republicans not only will not learn anything, at this point they may not be able to. If Democrats expect me to vote for them again, they need to demonstrate that they’ve learned something after all this.
To Be Continued…