Cotton was short and the weeds were tall / but Mr. Roosevelt's a-gonna save us all —Alabama, “Song of the South”
When I was young, the Democrats seemed like a party of relatively normal people. They were for free speech, free trade, against pointless wars, against unchecked immigration, and relatively cognizant of debt and the dangers of inflation. They had very recently learned the lessons of inflation (Carter), finger-wagging morality (Carter) and electing a candidate mostly supported by long-haired students and radicals (McGovern). They were very against terrorism and generally supportive of Israel. They wanted to run a budget surplus. This was important to them. They could use it as ammunition in their war against Republicans.
They saw crime getting bad? They did things they thought would lower crime—as was natural.
When there were anti-globalization riots, Clinton quickly called in the national guard.
Why would a president ever, ever be supportive of rioting?
I recently re-watched the documentary of the 92 Clinton campaign, The War Room, and that time—those clothes, dads in purple jackets and white mesh hats—them all jogging together—it fills me with all the past bygone feelings.
The economy was good enough that people could focus on culture and art and being wild and free in their lives.
My family was and is Republican, and by comparison, all of the people they listened to seemed dour and frumpy—Newt Gingrich, Rush, Hannity and Colmes, Imus.
These people never stopped talking about Clinton’s crimes and all the people Bill Clinton had sex with.
This was all they had to go on.
The Republicans also supported free trade and open borders and NAFTA.
The Clinton campaign, these southern neoliberal upstarts, they really seemed so fun-loving and light and the future seemed promising.
Saxophones. The Macarena. A happy carefree smile even in the midst of cascading scandals.
And they were good at politics. Clinton was a generational political talent. James Carville, the moderate, no-bullshit, LSU graduate who got Clinton elected—who out of everybody should be jaded having seen sausage get made—still speaks highly of him and seems in awe of him to this day (who knows, maybe this lovefest is fake, maybe he signed some terrifying lifetime NDA.)
“I still believe in a place called Hope.” Hope, Arkansas. Bill Clinton said that.
Such good American messaging. Great artists steal. Obama stole it and won on that message.
To be on the left at that time was to be against the moderate Democrats and the globalist free trade policies.
To be left was also to be against surveillance and the FBI and the CIA and the courts and the evil corporate future and cameras and government and technology intruding into every aspect of your life.
Parts of the left romanticized the Unabomber for living without technology and fighting against modern society.
*
I got into a phone argument with an old friend of mine recently. An old political organizer from old Anarchyland times—who has in the course of the last three years has been—in meme-terms—Dark-Brandon-pilled.
“Best president and best economy of our lifetimes.” He ran off the numbers and reasons. The rising wages and worker-power. Great. But the wage-price spiral, do the wages actually offset the prices?
You hear this kind of thing a lot nowadays, not from the people you’d expect to hear it from—the eternal mouthpieces of American liberalism—but more from former Bernie-types who have gone over and made peace with the Biden camp.
These individuals are not reformed or working within the system per-say, but it’s a temporary alliance of convenience.
The problem is that the Biden administration feels to me like such a complete farce, a farce that is trying to emulate genuine elements from the past, but without any of the passion or without the American Bullshit-detectors all going off.
It’s not just that they ate Bernie’s soul and absorbed all of his policy positions at a time when they no longer made reasonable political or economic sense, during the worst inflation in 40 years—it’s not just that.
It’s also that Biden brought along some of the worst detritus and hangers-ons of the Clinton years, flaks from the Lies and the Lying Liars Who Are Telling Them-era—when I hear the Biden economic and foreign policy and labor team go on Bloomberg Surveillance pod to talk shop, I want to throw my phone across the room.
These are the leftovers, the second-rate apparatchiks.
Clinton, a true talent. Obama, a once-in-a-lifetime talent. Trump, a political animal, hated, despised, but with the foresight to kill Iran’s foreign-militias leader years ago—years before they started really killing Americans in earnest, last week. But now our lives are in the hands of people like Jake Sullivan, Hillary’s magical boy-wonder, who has a pretty bad track record in Libya, who is good at fucking things up, and is whispering things in the old demented king’s ear. And Tom Sullivan. And Blinken, with his wide-open dead-boy-eyes as he comes face to face with this big, dark world.
Is it just an illusion of time, of getting older, or is there actually a decline in the quality of individuals in our politics? I’m sure grandpa and great-grandpa felt that the Clinton administration were toddlers and inexperienced morons, and felt Eisenhower was much sturdier hand at the wheel.
So many of your parents—you with the liberal parents from the ’68 generation— oh how they HATED and loathed and wanted to destroy LBJ.
Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!
In spite of the mistakes he made around Vietnam, in spite of his shortcomings, LBJ seen from today is looking pretty great, pretty transformative.
He was triangulating, compromising, cajoling, clever, operating, trying to push things forward with one hand and hold them back with the other—as is completely natural for an American politician, or any successful politician.
And now the Clinton era, and Obama eras—yes, they were also triangulating liberals, and they also seem so sane now in comparison.
And then Franklin. FDR the trickster. Elected by near-dictatorial margins in the Southern states. He toed the line. He hewed to public opinion, but would also push people via persuading in his way.
Eleanor was his deniable advance guard pushing things forward ahead of him, and would often go further than he was able to go given his electoral coalition and the mood of the country after the Depression.
How can you look at Biden or any of the recent Democratic presidents and even compare them to the Master?
They are all so far from the Master.
There is no light now in this big, dark world, dead souls and second-raters everywhere you turn. We have strayed so far from God’s soft-green light.
Biden doesn’t care about public opinion or the ox and the yoke of pushing forward and pulling back when he authorizes and re-authorizes and re-re-authorizes billions in aid for Ukraine, he doesn’t come to us and ask us and persuade us and sell us on it, explain to us his thinking in a clear way.
I did not like Bill Clinton as a young person, I was against Bill Clinton, but I appreciated the stability of that time, because that would have been the first thing Bill Clinton did. He loved The People, in a needy way that any therapist would have wanted to “interrogate” sure, but he would have gone out there and explained and debated it, with a smile, because that was the kind of sociopath he was.
Biden just does it as he and his administration have been doing things, in the backroom, arrogantly.
They said that FDR was a tyrant, an usurper—but unlike the covid pandemic, the Depression and the war and the labor strife of the 1930s were actual real American emergencies.
Covid was a kind-of-sort-of national emergency, used to provide an FDR-like pretext to pass FDR-like policies while pretending like this was the past, but without the inventiveness and oversight of the past.
Eleanor Roosevelt on her husband, in This I Remember:
Franklin was a practical politician. He could always be told why certain actions or appointments were politically advisable. Sometimes he acted on this advice; on the other hand, he did many things and made many appointments against the advice of the party politicians, simply because he believed they would have a good effect on the nation as a whole. And he was almost always right. However, as a practical politician, he knew and accepted the fact that he had to work with the people who were a part of the Democratic party organization. I often heard him discuss the necessity and role of local political organizations, but he recognized that certain of them were a detriment to the party as a whole. He never got over his feeling against Tammany Hall or any boss-ridden organization, though he acknowledged that some were well administered and valuable.
At this point, it just feels like they’re shitting in our faces. Inflation is “over” and “going down” even though everyone can still see it every day, Ukraine is more important than America (why?), and half of the country are treasonous and should be subject to reprogramming.
Obama and Clinton—maybe they didn’t do the right thing, but they reached out, they had tact, they tried to convince and sell and persuade. They did not fall back on the Party.
Now it is all just laid bare, with no talent or Glow, and it is ugly, and it is offensive.
Caring about the national debt, that’s just a Republican talking point, isn’t it?
Fuck it, we can do this Ukraine adventure, who cares, it’s the moral thing to do, there won’t be consequences, we’re secure, we’re fine.
One dollar as reserve currency to rule them all, one dollar to bind them.
The petrodollar is still secure, right? The Saudis won’t backstab us, right, our special relationship?
The New New Deal. Slipped through under cover of covid.
We Americans, we still think we’re so special.
We were special, for a while, but we’ve been coasting on granddaddy’s economy and granddaddy’s accomplishments and granddaddy’s post offices and infrastructure for a very, very long time now.
What is the plan?