Insane Clown President & Bernie’s Path to the Nomination
Insane Clown President & Bernie’s Path to the Nomination
Today’s quotation comes from Matt Taibbi’s 2016 US Presidential election campaign book, “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus” – a volume that mostly consists of essays Taibbi released over the course of the entire campaign (Primaries and General Election) with some glue in the introduction and concluding portions of the book, to tie the whole thing together.
As those of you who regularly read my work here on Can’t You Read are no doubt already aware, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi’s writing – both in terms of style and the value of the content he provides. While nobody who can effectively work in mainstream media for over a decade should be trusted completely, I think it’s fair to say that Taibbi is, by the comparatively poor standards of his industry, an honest, rational observer of an institution (U.S. politics) that is anything but honest and rational. He is also, despite the numerous attempts to smear him, a fundamentally decent human being and that still matters a little bit in the world of American politics – although, maybe not as much as it should.
As for the book itself – Insane Clown President is ultimately a frustrating collection of writing; while two thirds of the book represents Taibbi at the absolutely height of his powers and easily ranks among his best work, the remaining third feels like a bunch of social media posts and fan mail cobbled into something resembling a narrative, then inserted into the book to fill out the page count. For example, while hashing out the rules of the GOP debate drinking game and conducting unofficial primary polls was probably a lot of fun for Taibbi’s followers on Twitter, it simply doesn’t translate into an enjoyable experience when transported onto the written page – the effect is actually quite jarring and somehow manages to detract from the rest of the extremely high-quality analysis Matt brings to the table.
The upshot here, are of course passages like the one quoted above, from a chapter appropriately and presciently titled – “June 9th, 2016: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with Bernie.” It is in moments like these that Taibbi seems to have his finger directly on the pulse of the class conflict between the voting public and the political elite (of which the mainstream media is effectively a public relations arm) in the United States. Unfortunately, despite Matt’s incisive analysis of the problems that would eventually define the entire 2016 election, the author’s (somewhat myopic) attachment to a liberalized ideal of previous editions of the Democratic Party, ultimately prevents him from drawing the obvious conclusion his own writing exposes throughout the book – that Trump is going to win, because American politics and its political media, are both fundamentally broken.
Despite these issues however, Insane Clown President’s most important contribution to understanding the current US political environment is Taibbi’s ability to recognize both swine emperor Trump and Bernie Sanders as symptoms of a populist insurgency waged not against internal factions within the normal framework of U.S. politics, but in opposition to the entire elite American ruling class and its institutions – our “establishment” if you will.
Before I go any further into what this means for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race however, I’d like to talk a little bit about the false media narrative that the left wing populist movement behind Bernie Sanders is somehow “the same” as the revanchist, reactionary right wing movement that propelled Herr Donald to the White House in 2016 – a narrative which is, in a word, bullsh*t. While both political phenomenon are motivated to some degree by a mistrust of, alienation from and even outright loathing of the U.S. establishment and its institutions, the reasons for that mistrust, the overall end goals and the origin point of these respective insurgencies are totally different.
The far right “populist” movement that Trump was able to usurp during the 2016 Republican primaries, has its roots in Paleoconservatism and the largely AstroTurf, billionaire-funded conservative “Tea Party movement.” It is a fundamentally reactionary movement, created by the rich to blame America’s ills not on deregulated capitalism and an absurdly greedy ruling class, but instead on the proverbial “other” – brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims, the gay and transgender community, women, African Americans, the Jewish left, political correctness, big government and most of all, the dreaded “socialists, communists and liberals.” At its core, what we now call “Trumpism” is a revanchist Frankenstein’s Monster; the result of decades of weaponized and fetishistic worship of American exceptionalism, white supremacy and the absolute rule of capital – the only problem for the architects of this movement is that Trump managed to hack the code and establish his own mini-cult of personality by being more explicitly fascist and hateful than they were.
The movement propelling Sanders to the forefront of American politics by contrast is a genuine, grass roots endeavor. Although it’s easy enough to make the argument that the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, anti-fracking activists, and the Black Lives Matter protests have all provided inspiration and ideological underpinnings for this democratic socialist wave, the fact is that there is no unseen hand at work here; no billionaire backers, no guerrilla marketing wunderkinds, and no AstroTurf corporate media campaigns can claim responsibility for the phenomenon Sanders has helped embody in American politics. I say helped, because this too represents a key difference between the DemSoc wave and Trumpism; as a policy-focused movement, this new American left isn’t just about Bernie Sanders and already we’ve seen inspiring young leaders like Lee Carter, Rashida Tlaib, and especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez step to the front with their own democratic socialist message.
Finally, unlike Trumpism, this Sanders-inspired DemSoc insurgency is a movement whose policy proposals match their rhetoric; striving for economic equality, environmental protections, universal health coverage, increased educational opportunities for all, a restoration of democratic rights, better jobs with improved working conditions, the right to collectively bargain, affordable housing, ending mass incarceration, women’s rights, civil rights, and yes, despite what you’ve heard in corporate media owned by rich white people – ending racism and injustice against all marginalized people. Indeed, particularly on the issues of supporting Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid and ending American imperialism abroad, the movement Sanders helped to inspire appears to be driving him further to the left on the political spectrum; although not as much as some, myself included, would like.
In short, if Trumpism is about dragging the country back to a more explicitly white supremacist era, the movement Sanders helps represent is about establishing a fairer, more compassionate and more democratic America than the world has ever known – even under FDR.
There is however, one potential analogue between these two insurgencies and this is where I think the above quote from Taibbi’s book comes in; while there are no real similarities between Trumpism and the Sanders movement, there are a great deal of similarities between the ways both established U.S. political factions and their media minions have responded to an insurgent voter’s revolt.
In 2012, and fresh off the heels of a traumatizing insurgent Tea Party revolt within the party, the Republican establishment put all its chips down on making Barrack Obama a one term president. Expending what would turn out to be the last of their political capital, the GOP establishment managed to force through the Butcher of Bain Capital, “center-right” candidate Mitt Romney during the GOP primary process – a choice distinctly divorced from the anti-elite sentiment (if not reality) of a Tea-Party base now openly indulging in Birtherism and starting to warm up to, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It was the type of calculated bet the party elite would only have been prepared to make if they were sure Romney would win the 2012 presidential election, because they were essentially gambling that deposing the hated Obama would quell the rage their reactionary base felt at being betrayed by the GOP elite, embodied in the form of Romney.
In retrospect, it seems obvious now that when (despite all of Karl Rove’s rosy projections) Romney went down in flames, the GOP establishment was fatally fractured; having demonized Obama as literally an enemy of the American people, when the Republican brain trust failed to deliver his head on a platter that morning in 2012, they effectively lost the revanchist right who’d powered their surge back to political relevance only two years before.
From the outside however, this was not immediately apparent; the Republican leadership quickly announced an election autopsy and soon enough the same people who’d failed Republican voters in 2012 were offering their prescriptions for how to win the next one in 2016. Putting their mighty heads together, these elite GOP power brokers came back with arguably the only candidate more Republican establishment than Romney, Jeb Bush.
It was as we now know, a drastic miscalculation but one that should have been recognized long before Trump won the GOP nomination. When Party leaders lacked the ability to preemptively weed a wild and opportunistic seventeen candidate Republican nomination field, including, incredibly, a credible “center-right” candidate from anointed establishment GOP champion Jeb Bush’s *own* state – the writing was already on the wall for a party leadership group that was only keeping up appearances after exiting 2012 essentially politically bankrupt and broken.
Moving the timeline forward four years, it’s extremely difficult not to see strong parallels on the Democratic side of the ledger. Here too we see a party that barely staved off a radical insurgency by expending an enormous amount of political capital to ram through a highly-unpopular candidate, all the while dismissing the growing outrage from the left wing portion of their base as irrelevant because Hillary Clinton would definitely be the next President of the United States. After losing the 2016 election, the Democratic establishment quickly conducted an autopsy, made some vague platitudes about listening to the angry left-wingers that backed Bernie Sanders and ultimately decided to keep doing the same things they’ve always done before; just like the Republican Party in 2012. Yet, as the 2020 Democratic Party race opens, it is clear that the liberal establishment no longer has enough control over the party to weed the field, and prevent more than a dozen nearly-identical centrist candidates from splitting a vote that would otherwise be united under one candidate, preordained to fight off Bernie Sanders once again.
Can a broken, politically bankrupt Democratic Party hold off Sanders a second time doing essentially the exact same things that failed to hold off Trumpism on the GOP side of aisle?
I wouldn’t bet on it – as beloved American author Samuel Clemens is often (and perhaps falsely) reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
– nina illingworth
