Still Bernie Sleeps Beneath The Mountain

I do not often find myself impressed by Matt Yglesias; few pundits float so freely on the wind. He was for our brief Iraqi detour because the “credible people” wanted war; he was against “the fundamental folly of occupation” when the bodies piled high enough to cause the credible concern. He was a China dove when “why do you hate the global poor?” was enough to own the hawks; now velvet gloves are out of style, and he wonders if the war on global poverty was really worth the cost. His register of facts expands; his worldview does not. Still, I appreciate that he has noticed the distinction:

this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.

He has caught a glimpse of other systems of the world; he knows not all credibility is his. But for all that he has grown beyond his old routine as a cheerleader for the regime, he remains its loyal opposition. He no longer trusts the self-styled stewards of our empire to serve its real interest, but he still thinks that interest ours. He still thinks of it as us.

Now his sense of who is “serious” has shifted once again. Now he turns his face from Vox, and puts his own self at the center; he still maintains the fiction that his old “progressive” allies are the only alternative that’s left. “Most bad trends on the left”, he says, “are recognizable versions of perfectly reasonable ideas”; they are defective prototypes of his. In oracle bones carved from the carcass of “Yes We Can”, he divines “a revolution of rising expectations”; the entrails whisper warnings not to hope for better worlds than this. In the “early enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders”, he sees “a tremendous hunger for new ideas” - before nameless “things” “turned nasty”.

I was there for that early enthusiasm; I may have briefly been a nasty thing that Tuesday, right there at the end. I know it’s empty liberal moralism, to fume and hunt for fault. I know that man is fallen, and cannot choose to rise; I know that apes who rise too far have nothing left to lever off, and nowhere left to stand. But Warren does not have my forgiveness, and she would not have my vote. She was meant to stand with us. I know history has no great men, that it will turn when it will turn. I know the Amerikadeutscher-Never-Bernie-Bund would have backed a darker horse; I know he’d take that trip to Dallas from which no traveler returns. But despite it all I still believe: Bernie Would Have Won.

I have seen, in short, what Yglesias has only sniffed at in disgust. I have known political economy; I have tasted of its fruit as “is” matured to “must?”. I have hungered for new ideas; Bernie offered an old future, charged with new belief. We had lived by bread alone too long; Sanders offered roses. He did not propose to lead us from the desert; he reminded us we did not cry out in that wilderness alone. His words resounded with the voices of prophet-Presidents of old. You could almost hear that old call to arms again, when the coinflips came down in Iowa. You could almost hear a voice declare: “They are unanimous in their hate for me —and I welcome their hatred”. He fed our appetite for “us”.

He did not promise prizes; he promised us a fight. Enough Is Enough. This, I suspect, is what keeps my parents’ generation stuck fast beneath the flag; this is the lamplight they still see. This is what it is like to feel that history is with you; to have no fear but fear and trust that where the fear has gone, only we remain. We were going to euthanize the rentier class and make gentle the life of this world; we were going to study politics and war, as our parents’ parents had, that our heirs might learn philosophy, as our parents did. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected”. Little was expected of us, at history’s end; we had no say in how it ended. Bernie was a hot mic, carelessly left on: now we could say our piece; now they had to listen. Bernie was a mirror: now we could expect something of ourselves; of us much could be expected.

Yglesias is his own mic; his audience is his. He has picked his “us” already, and he has fixed his aim. He is America; America is him; he is we are us are it is I, America must win. We will all win, once all are we are I, and dulce et decorum est, to trade countrymen for country. We had to occupy Iraq; Enduring Freedom would ensure that ours endured. We should never have invaded; it was the work of madmen from the start. We had to integrate with China; we were on our way to a free and peaceful world. Now we need to shove the commies back in their commie box, lest our empire slip away. And of course, it is very important that there be One Billion Americans - because despite it all he still believes: America must win.

This is not a place to linger long. there’s no future to believe in there, no “us” still conscious of that past. No “us” conscious of anything: just a spate of princely states pretending to enlightened rule where the res publica had been. Even Sanders was a sort of rearguard action out of Elba, a final hundred days campaign to vindicate the past. “If any of you wishes to kill your Great Society, you may shoot it now”. We did; it passed. But still Yglesias has set his watch upon the Rhine. Still he walks the left bank, lest its princely atavisms fall once more to forces futher left and future. Still he holds up whitepapers for princes; still he will to his lord be true and faithful, and love all which he loves, and shun all which he shuns. Still his America is winning, and still he thinks its conquests his. Still Bernie Would Have Won, and still his hopes are ours.

Yglesias has made himself America, and he has not ceased to win. Bernie would have made America an us, and though Bernie Would Have Won - Bernie Sanders lost. Not everyone took it well; not everyone could take it. To hear Pravda tell it, disaffected Bernie Bros flocked to Donald Trump; Pravda is not what it was. The samizdat consensus is that the berned-over district signed up for the culture war, as it’s wont to do; dissidence in these latter days is also diminished into less. They are mistaken. The cargo-culted “left” lacked compassion for that hurt; Trump lacked for concepts and for words. When the optimism of the will gives in, it’s the center that stakes its claim.

Not the well-heeled sort of center with the suit and slicked-back hair; not the horned-rim Hamilton fans who just can’t reach these kids; not the “progress studies” orbiters who have never worked in real labs; not the literary “radicals” who mangle language like Parisian Markov chains - these things are fictions, ways to say you’ve got more taste than money and that means that you’re ok. Barbarians above you, noble savages beneath - and the future at your fingertips, all the world your stage. Those shows go on undaunted; those players still preen and strut and wreck the DSA.

At the real center of American politics there are no such illusions, and no hope of escape. At the fringes those still reeling say: we should have known better. How stupid we were, to trust a politician; how pathetic was our faith. They are still grieving; let them grieve. They will resign themselves; time will drape scars across their berns. They will almost seem to heal. They will almost seem to make themselves America again. But they have eaten of the fruit; they cannot forget that America is not. They have gorged themselves on ferment; they have forgotten they were we. Still they will not forge new links again; still they flinch back from the flame.

They have only popped another pill, and in their dreams they whimper only: “I just wanna grill”. Want, not will. Not we - I. A house in the suburbs with a white picket fence; Monday night football on a color TV. Old comforts shorn of causes; old symbols lifted from old dreams. Freedom from politics - freedom from failure, freedom from sin. A sort of faith in the system restored, as we have faith in our senses; as we are resigned to them. Tearing at the temple veil, tearing at the flesh, tearing out the weeping ducts that gave this vale its name. There there is just Bernie; there there is no we. At the bottom of the bitter draught, America dreams itself awake. Matt Yglesias dreams himself America; he does not dream of thee.