Insider Status

Nick Gillespie must have forgotten to vote

I don't always agree with everything a candidate says or does after Blue America helps get them elected. I've had disagreements and even arguments with Donna Edwards, Alan Grayson, Matt Cartwright, Ted Lieu, Beto O'Rourke... to name a few. But so what? These are people I like and respect and no one agrees with anyone on everything all the time. These are still people I like to speak with and to exchange ideas with. Other relationships have been with candidates who are... less resilient. Some are downright brittle-- so much so that a polite criticism leads to a "fuck you, asshole; lose my number." Gee, I'm glad I helped you raise thousands of dollars when no one else would even take your call. Some don't even wait for an argument. There have been two or three candidates we've helped, who, after election day, never even called to say thanks and then never returned a call or an e-mail, even people I had spoken with regularly during their campaign. What an odd thing! Maybe they just feel guilty for having lied about how progressive they would be as they quickly pivoted to being a conservative... or started looking for lobbyists to line their pockets. That's rare but not that rare. Or maybe it was something else.

In a short interesting piece in In These Times last week by Barbara Ransby, comparing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib with Shirley Chisholm and Ella Baker, Ransby wrote that "[w]hen outsiders are allowed into the inner sanctums of power, the first condition is that they assimilate. Shirley Chisholm, a tough-talking former school teacher from Brooklyn with Caribbean roots who became the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968, recalled how her colleagues, believing she didn’t 'understand politics,' tried to 'educate' her about Washington’s horse-trading ways... Insider status is a privilege. New members of the club are expected to play by the rules. As James Baldwin observed, that is 'the price of the ticket.' The second condition for outsiders is that, once admitted, they distance themselves from the movements that got them elected. 'When I first came to Washington, I would sometimes confide to other members how I wanted to help the people of my community,' Chisholm writes in her memoir, Unbought and Unbossed. 'It became embarrassing. I was talking a foreign language to some of my colleagues when I said community and people.'"

What scares the establishment is not that a single Black or Latinx or Arab-American or indigenous woman is allowed “inside” the corridors of power, but that she gives voice to the communities that elected her. During Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, critics were outraged by a 2001 speech in which she suggested an experienced Latina elder might in some cases possess better judgment than a privileged white male “who hasn’t lived that life.” That is what the establishment fears: not that newcomers look different, but that they bring with them a set of values, ideas and sensibilities validated in oppressed communities. The “price of the ticket” for inclusion often means conformity.

“I did not come to Congress to behave myself and stay away from explosive issues so I can keep coming back,” Chisholm wrote. She served in Congress on her own terms and in 1972 made a bid for the presidency, an audacious move by a black woman at the time. She did so against the advice of supposedly admiring insiders. And when the radical Black Panther Party endorsed her, she accepted their support, refusing to conform to liberal expectations that she distance herself from the more militant wing of the Black Power movement.

...Like Chisholm and Baker before them, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are not dazzled simply to be in the club nor intimidated by the threats of marginalization lobbed at them. When Tlaib called for Trump’s impeachment, she used gritty language from the street, not the parlance of the elite. In response, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted to Tlaib that “I got your back” and the “GOP lost entitlement to policing women’s behavior a long time ago. Next.”

Ocasio-Cortez insists on advancing a Green New Deal, and Tlaib is pushing for a delegation to Palestine. When Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) admonished Tlaib to instead “listen and learn,” Tlaib evoked her Palestinian family in a tweet: “I hope you’ll come with me on the trip to listen and learn. My sity (grandmother) will welcome you with an embrace & love.”

Reason magazine is a small libertarian publication over which Nick Gillespie ruled until 2017. He still writes from the publication as an editor-at-large. Yesterday, after he watched Trump's deranged rant at CPAC, he wrote a silly piece for the magazine, Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today. You can see why the magazine must have been relieved to have gotten rid of him from their top slot. "If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C.," he wrote, "his reelection is a foregone conclusion. There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn't be absolutely blown off the stage by him."

At the same time Trump was giving a juvenile speech only a moron could like and that indicated he was high on Adderall and should be carted off to an insane asylum, Bernie was speaking to thousands of people in Brooklyn, addressing the problems and solutions Americans would like to discuss. Trump was name-calling and acting like a clown. Bernie was speaking like a president. Yet Gillespie saw something very different in Trump's idiotic address than what I saw claiming "he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce"-- don't speak Latin? that always means he's about to unleash a series of absurd lies-- "serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations."

Gillespie seems to think a majority of voters are eager for more of Trump's bullshit and more of his greatest hits-- "Crooked Hillary," "build the wall," "America is winning again"... They don't. "At times," he wrote, "it was like listening to Robin Williams' genie in the Disney movie Aladdin, Howard Stern in his peak years as a radio shock jock, or Don Rickles as an insult comic. When he started making asides, Trump observed, 'This is how I got elected, by going off script.' Two years into his presidency and he's just getting warmed up." Not this time. The CPAC crowd will be with him and plenty of 2-digit IQ dullards on drugs-- and Gillespie-- but normal Americans are sick of this shtik and can't wait to see Trump and his family marched off to prison. This isn't going to elect anyone:

First and foremost, Trump was frequently funny and outre in the casually mean way that New Yorkers exude like nobody else in America. "You put the wrong people in a couple of positions," he said, lamenting the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, "and all of a sudden they're trying to take you out with bullshit." He voiced Jeff Sessions in a mock-Southern accent, recusing "muhself" and asked the adoring crowd why the former attorney generally hadn't told him he was going to do that before he was appointed.

Democrats backing the Green New Deal (GND) "are talking about trains to Hawaii," he said. "They haven't figured out how to get to Europe yet." He begged the Democrats not to abandon the GND because he recognizes that the more its details and costs are discussed, the more absurd it will become. "When the wind stops blowing, that's the end of your energy," he said at one point. "Did the wind stop blowing, I'd like to watch television today, guys?" "We'll go back to boats," he said, drawing huge laughs when he added, "I don't want to talk [the Democrats] out of [the GND], I just want to be the Republican who runs against it."

He railed against Never-Trump Republicans: "They're on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," he said, adding "they're basically dishonest people" that no one cares about. He joked about being in the White House all alone on New Year's because of the government shutdown. "I was in the White House and I was lonely, so I went to Iraq," he said, recounting that when his plane was approaching the U.S. airstrip in Iraq, all lights had to be extinguished for landing. "We spend trillions of dollars in the Middle East and we can't land planes [in Iraq] with the lights on," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "We gotta get out." He then riffed on the generals he met there who, contrary to the Pentagon brass he dealt with, said they could vanquish ISIS in a week. He claimed to have talked with a general named "Raising Cane," which might be Brigadier Gen. J. Daniel Caine, but Trump is the farthest thing from a details guy, right? "Sometimes I learn more from soldiers than I do generals," he said, deftly moving from jokes to more-substantive discussions of policies or issues.

...All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, "one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time." It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today's speech, Trump has mostly ditched the "American Carnage" rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. "We have people in Congress right now who hate our country," he said. "We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad."

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. "We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare," he averred at one point. "Now you have a president who finally standing up for America." The future, he said "does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I've said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country." That's a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

None of this is to suggest that this speech wasn't as fact-challenged as almost every utterance Trump has given since announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination (go to Daniel Dale's Twitter thread for a running count of misstatements of fact). He hammered trade deficits in a way that will remind anyone with an undergrad economics course under their belt that he fundamentally doesn't know what he's talking about. He misrepresented both NAFTA and the new trade bill he crafted with Mexico and Canada, and at the exact moment that hundreds of wearied listeners started leaving the ballroom at The Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, he claimed that not a single person had left their seat.

But the 2020 presidential race is not going to be decided based on which candidate is more tightly moored to reality. It's going to be decided, like these things always are, by the relative health of the economy and the large vision of the future the different candidates put forward. As the economy continues to expand (however anemically compared to historical averages) and he continues to avoid credible charges of impeachable offenses, Trump is becoming sunnier and sunnier while the Democrats are painting contemporary America as a late-capitalist hellhole riven by growing racial, ethnic, and other tensions.

Trump isn't the creator of post-factual politics in America, he is merely currently its most-gifted practitioner (oddly, his ideological and demographic counterpart and fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may become a challenger to him on precisely this score). Trump may have next to no credibility in profoundly disturbing ways, but American politics has been drifting away from reality for the entire 21st century, when the 2000 election was essentially decided by a coin flip, the United States entered the Iraq War under false premises, and Barack Obama took home Politifact's 2013 "Lie of the Year" award and dissembled unconvincingly in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.

That Trump didn't invent the current situation doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about it, but if he can continue to perform the way he did today at CPAC, it remains to be seen what Democratic rival can rise to that challenge.

He referred to Mazie Hirono, who is being treated for cancer, as a "crazy female senator." No doubt he'll say something like that in every speech he gives between now and November 2020. And no doubt Nick Gillespie got a genuine kick out of it. But Trump is loathed by women, by people of color, by educated people, by the LGBTQ community, by political independents, and, increasingly, by folks at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, who finally realize he lied to them. Let Gillespie take another hit of that libertarian bong he's clutching and imagine Trump's going to win all he wants. But maybe he'll be saved by his brilliant and attractive legion of supporters, like the lovely economist and social historian Roseanne Barr: