An Anxious Yankee Bonapartism
A wizard’s strangled cry on NH Primary Day
1:27 PM on Primary Day, sitting in Flight Coffee’s new cafe hidden deep within a Bedford industrial park, and a small three-person platoon of weathered Michael Bennet supporters strolls in as though there’s nothing weird about that. 1:27 PM on Primary Day and there’s still Michael Bennet people walking around. Can you imagine?
I just had to Google the guy. I’m not ashamed. He’s a real senator, apparently. I used to know who all the senators were, back when I thought a lot of them were good. I admired and envied them, too, believing even as a wee teen that US Senator had to be the best gig in all of politics (because it is).
As recently as 2008, I might have killed for a primary as interesting as this one, with as many dynamic candidates, with the outcome so incredibly uncertain. To be sure, we’ve had to do without more colorful personalities like Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton. Mike Gravel did make a brief cameo in this story, but his (sincerely) heroic and impressive teenage supporters failed to persuade the DNC that they should follow their own rules and allow him to participate in even one single debate.
I’ll give the DNC credit for this one thing: they’re sure not fucking around this time. Gravel was only the harbinger and I suspect last week in Iowa was only the very beginning of the trickery we’re about to see between now and the end of this summer’s convention in Milwaukee.
It was somewhere around 2004 — when the convention was in Boston and we spent our nights hanging out with Chris Matthews and Russell Simmons and Joe Scarborough and Ron Reagan until 2 AM each night — that I first became aware of Bernie Sanders, this delightful old social democrat congressman from Vermont. Since then, I’ve rejected the Democratic Party, political liberalism, and even social democracy. For every kind word I’ve said about Sanders, I’ve denounced him in an angry diatribe. He doesn’t know me, but we have a very complicated relationship.
Despite all that, it’s impossible not to admit the dramatic change in Democratic Primary political discourse in the intervening sixteen years. Universal health care is not a far-off European amenity but something all of the candidates are forced to grapple with right out in the open, even if they oppose it. We talk about things like new New Deals, criminal justice reforms (the good kind), universal basic incomes, ranked choice voting, job guarantees, and everybody but Mike Bloomberg is cool with the weed. Even reparations for slavery has been discussed in earnest, if not for very long.
In 2004, we were still arguing about gay marriage. The fact that anybody mainstream is actually talking about these things is, from that perspective, astounding. That said, few — if any — of these policy proposals are likely to become a reality any time soon regardless of who wins this primary or the general in November. Rhetorical progress, though certainly worth mentioning, quite probably does not mean all that much.
Everyone seems to sense this. I believe it’s why, despite the progress, despite the ostensible vibrancy of these candidates and their contest, despite the hypothetical enthusiasm surrounding the quest to defeat an oft-loathed sitting president, the mood here in New Hampshire on Primary Day mirrors the rest of the country: anxiety abounds. It’s the kind of profound unease crafted through the suppression of certain forms of dread.
Once proud Biden has ignominiously fled the state already, and Bernie appears poised to win clean and early. I won’t be surprised if NBC calls it right at 7, or stalls us for an hour with “too early to call” before announcing it around 8. That seems good. But there’s little about this primary, ultimately, to give much in the way of substantive hope.
It’s encouraging that Sanders is able to command this level of support, but it should concern earnest progressives that the “other progressive candidate”, Elizabeth Warren, instead of maintaining their early unspoken nonaggression pact, chose to make a vicious and cynical attack against her fellow New England senator on the basis of lies and some kind of curdled-milk “feminism”. Her attack failed and she deserves to lose — and will — but anyone with an actual horse in this thing ought to be looking at why it went down like that.
The DNC or “the establishment” or whatever we want to call them has actually been less shy in 2020 about the whole thumb on the scale thing than they were in 2016. Their problem, however, is they don’t have a singular favorite or viable candidate this time. Biden is senile. Warren is a liar — and probably too progressive for them anyway. Buttigieg was good enough for that whole Iowa Caper, whatever happened there, but is a lightweight mayor who can’t cast much of a shadow outside the midwest. Klobuchar will throw things at you. Now, after none of these others have managed to stick to the wall, we have to deal with the Urban Assbag, Mike Bloomberg, as though a November Street Fighter 2 battle between two NYC billionaires is good for…anyone.
Hell, I don’t even think it’s good for the other billionaires. Bonapartism or bust, friends!
Embracing my bonapartism after retiring from communist activism means I don’t have to abstain from Democratic Primaries — nor have I ever been able to anyway, if I’m to be honest. I’ve had fun with three candidates this year. None of them would actually make good bonapartist executives given that they lack the base of support to properly keep either warring economic class in line, but they’ve all given me fond memories.
Marianne came first. You never should have dismissed her like you did. Yes, I’m talking to you. She sounds like a crackpot and has an imperfect past (especially with regard to AIDS in Los Angeles), but when she talked about the dark spiritual forces that led to the election of Trump, she describes the state of affairs in the US better than any of the others. The truth is, I no longer believe you can fully understand our political moment without examining the spiritual climate and weather out there. She gets it. She also — sorry to say it, but it’s true — understands Marxism and the United States in its historical context better than most Marxists I know, and can explain it all better, too.
She had her moment, but faded and dropped out. I was next seduced by Tulsi Gabbard, particularly after she cast the only correct impeachment vote in the entire US Congress. She didn’t want to call Trump innocent, she explained, but she wasn’t willing to get on board with the Democrats’ pig circus charade. The only. Correct. Vote. She’s also done a great job with her retail campaigning in New Hampshire. She stood in awe watching Peterborough’s sacred Lantern Parade back in December and spent the Superbowl randomly at my coworker’s house party. And from the beginning, she’s had a better grasp (and condemnation) of US foreign policy than even Sanders does.
Plus, I figured if I voted for her I could piss off all my socialist friends and all my liberal friends in one fell swoop!
In the end, I had to go with Sanders. He’s the one they’re all scared of, and he keeps surging no matter what gets tossed at him. They will find a way to destroy him in the end; even if he were to accidentally make it to the general election, they’ll get him like they got George McGovern — the last time a progressive accidentally won a primary despite the best efforts of the Party. Were he to somehow accidentally win the election, his biggest opponents in Congress will be in his own party. As I’ve said, that’s no way to exercise proper bonapartist control.
But they’re scared of him and I like that. In an age of such profound anxiety, that might be as good as it gets.
When the results come in, we’re going to find out that, despite all the urgency and attention and pummeling of coverage over the last year, turnout was not particularly high. The anxiety of the day is not breeding participation so much as stress and paralysis. Even when it comes to Sanders, there is no “movement” outside of the slight radicalization of a segment of those who are already politically aware and active. Could that change over the next nine months? Possibly, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Come tomorrow, we’ll be forgotten again. Joe Biden, they say, already can’t remember what a “Nashua” is. The ugliness and fitful concern will only continue. It remains unclear and perhaps unlikely as to whether ANY level of participation in this system can take us all to the next level, can bring us that leap of advancement we know is possible, know is waiting for us, just sitting there. We must be practical, the moderates say — and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps real progress, here in the Granite State as elsewhere, needs to come from another direction.
Until then, my services as benevolent despot are always available.