Chapo Trap House - Episode 276 - Under the Hood at the Beltway Garage (12/30/18)

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

Chapo News Network senior political analysts Franklin Darrow and Taft Hartley run down the winners and losers of DC in 2018. Then, Matt and Virgil engage in a freewheeling discussion of predictions for 2019. New Years, baby, gimme dat new ass year.

Hey residents of DC Land and Parts Unknown, welcome to Under the Hood at the Beltway Garage. Last takes for 2000 miles, as always, I'm your host, Franklin Darrow, aka the Phelonious Wonk. And I'm Taft Hartley, and we're here to break down the winners and losers of DC in the year 2018. I feel like 2018 was longer than most years. Honestly, by March, I just kept thinking, we still have eight more months of this. I mean, hello.

I was saying around March, hey, 2019, can you come over now? And I was posting things to that effect. Yeah, I remember posting a fake screenshot, or I pretended to text 2019 with the words you up, indicating that I was interested in a liaison with 2019, because 2018, I mean, as the women say, I would swipe left on 2018. Well, before baby New Year gets born, hopefully not in Ohio, old man 2018 needs his due with the winners and losers of the whole ding-dang year. Yes, we need to find out after all of this, Misha gosh, after all of these fights, after

all of this battling between Republicans and Democrats, donkeys and elephants, midterms, the cabinet reshuffles men and women, men and women wars, Supreme Court justices, beer likers and beer scorners. The question is, who is emerged from this? These battles on the top of the heap. You have winners and you have losers, and that's really all there is to it. Yeah, I mean, that's what we're here to do. That's what we exist to do, to let you people know who are too busy to keep track of the

day-to-day ins and outs of Washington. Let you find people know who's coming out on top, because that's all you really need to know as you go about your day, as you talk to your co-workers around the water fountain or your family members at dinner, is to know who is on top, and that's what we're here to tell you. You want to be able to go to your family and say, hey, did you see who won the week? Yes. John Delaney once again.

And who better than us to let you know the more important question of all, the question that you can answer to everyone at your New Year's Eve party who won the year. Now you want to lead off from your list? Sure. I've got a list here of a few people I think can look back at 2018 with a smile of satisfaction knowing that their gladiatorial battles and the coliseum of politics were successful. And first, I've got to go with an old warhorse, a tried-and-true DC creature who didn't really have a lot to do in 2018, but one by holding back, by surveying the field around him and

by making smart moves when he had to, and I'm, of course, talking about Diamond Joe Biden. Mm-hmm. Now, as we all know, 2018, it was a rocky year for Republicans, I mean, between the midterm drubbing and the continued rush to get investigation, the GOP elephant has been on the run. So who in the Democratic Party is best positioned to make 2019 their breakout year? And it's got to be, in my opinion, Joe Biden, he's got the combination of experience and charisma to rebuild the Obama coalition and make the Democrats cool again.

I mean, sure, he seems to be actively trying to antagonize millennials with his quote, enjoy paying your student loans until you die, bitch, is messaging, but young people love that kind of straight shooting contempt. I predict 2019 will be another year of epic Joe Biden memes. If I know young people, they love being lectured by an 80-year-old man. They do. It satisfies their deep desire for parental discipline that they didn't get from their indulgent Gen X and Boomer parents.

Interesting. Let me lead off with a member of the opposite party here. One of my winners of 2018, Florida Governor and Senator-elect, Rick Scott. Rick, you might look like an anti-circumcision infographic, but no one can deny that you've got a head for politics. You were originally a healthcare executive whose company was so corrupt it was subject to the largest fraud settlement in American history, $2 billion for defrauding Medicare. In a good country like China or Japan, you would have committed ritual suicide, but instead

you received over $350 million in compensation, which you used to buy the governorship of Florida, the old people state, despite having ripped off Medicare. What else did you do to win that race? Dig up Paul Harvey's skull and piss in the eye socket on Tampa Bay TV? Well, you won re-election in 2014, and 2018, despite shutting down beaches, you won a Senate seat against incumbent Bill Nelson, who it should not be understated as senile. I thought you would lose, Rick, but I guess we can't all be Jesse's girl. I grew up in the 80s.

Ah, yeah, of course, as we all did. That was a song, then. As all good people did. Well, staying on the right side of the aisle, I'd say that another big winner of 2018 was Mike Pence. Now, Shakespeare once said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and Donald Trump's troubles have redundant the benefit of his quiet but determined vice president. As the Mueller probe and his erratic irresponsible tweets make Trump more isolated, they make

solid, reliable Mike Pence look good by comparison. If Trump is forced to resign or is impeached, Pence is positioned to offer the GOP a bridge of stability to 2020 and beyond. I think after two years of the madness of Donald Trump, which don't get me wrong, has been a gift from God to our late night hosts and the writers of Saturday Night Live. I envy those guys. A lot of people just kind of want to return to normalcy, and who's more normal than Mike Pence?

Exactly. Who's more normal than a glowering alabaster religious fanatic staring at you through charcoal dead eyes and wishing that he was electrocuting a Gapers? As governor of Indiana, he created a lot of camps to turn children normal. He has a lot of experience with public health issues, considering that he oversaw one of the largest outbreaks of HIV and AIDS in the United States. Let me go to my next winner of the year. This is a big one, and I know that you probably count yourself among their ranks.

Winner 2018, Senate Confirmation Hearing Heads For the longest time, you guys were the soccer fans of U.S. politics, up at 5 a.m. demanding the TV at the sports bar be tuned to some obscure contests like the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals cloture playoffs. But 2018 was the year everyone turned to you and asked, hey, why is that alcoholic prep school rape monster about to be on the Supreme Court? Suddenly, everyone in the office is talking about whip counts and boofing like we're in her most venerable majesty's rivers of blood league. So shine on, judicial nomination fans.

We'll see you in three months when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced with the older brother from the Twisted Sister videos. I'm looking forward to those confirmations. They're going to be off the chain in the... That's good. That's good. Yeah. I thought so.

That's... That's what they say, right? Yeah. I've seen that on the... People yelling at me on Twitter say that sometimes. Yes, yeah, with the pictures they send us. Yeah. Awful.

But I feel like... Roses and what have you. Disgusting. But I feel like I'm kind of speaking their language now. And finally, my last winner of the year, journalists. Now, some might say that journalists had a tough year in 2018 from Adnan Khashoggi's brutal dismemberment in the Saudi consulate to Jim Acosta's, in some ways, even more brutal expulsion from the White House briefing room.

But these guardians of truth, as Time Magazine has dubbed them, have responded to these horrors by reminding the world through tweets and columns and TV appearances and podcasts and more tweets, just how crucial they are to exposing hard truths, such as the vital need for bipartisan cooperation to tackle entitlement spending. These are the clarion voices and the real heroes. I think you'd agree with that. Oh, absolutely. Journalists are, by far, the bravest and probably most Christ-like individual in the type of

individual in the country. If it weren't for journalists, how would we know the news? Yeah. Nobody's given me a straight answer for that. Exactly. And how would we know, more importantly, how to feel about the news, which is really all anyone needs when they're going around through their day-to-day basis. It's not like they can change anything.

My last winner of 2018, here's a big one, ethno-nationalism. As the world careens towards ecological collapse, a mostly white yet quite powerful minority of upper-class Americans continues to call the shots. This group of folks, major backers of the Trump administration, as well as every administration since the New Deal, fired the first salvos this year in the brewing resource war against the exploited global south. In late November, they shot tear gas into a crowd of refugees that included children. After this month, two refugee children, on the age of nine, died in U.S. custody, one

of dehydration. Well, American whites won't be thirsty for political influence in the upcoming year. Both major parties have pledged billions more dollars to our draconian violent border security regime to ensure pre-check lanes are open across the country. Yeah. I say, you know what? To all the people horrified at the advance of ethno-national violence and what seems to be a creeping authoritarian fascism or at the very least militarism, I just have to say,

hey, they wanted it more. They put it out there every day and they've gotten all the benefits to show for it. And you know, that's just life in the big city. Ethno-national really is a lunch pail nine to five ideology, you know. It's out there. It doesn't complain. You know, it doesn't take a selfie in the bathroom, doesn't, you know, of themselves crying.

It certainly does not kneel for the anthem. I'll tell you that right now. So those are the winners of the year. Congratulations. Congratulations to all you guys. You can take a bow because you've really done it. You have, you've had yourself a hell of a year and you can only look forward to an even brighter 2019.

So now we're not going to look at some of the losers of the year. First, Yemen. Oh, yeah. Now, the nation of Yemen, it took it out of the chin in 2018 with thousands of people starving to death or dying of preventable diseases and millions more at risk. I'm putting an L on my forehead. Yeah. No, they took the big L there.

Now there was some hope earlier this month that Congress would invoke the war powers act and force an end to U.S. logistical aid to the Saudi military effort there that's responsible with a vast majority of the casualties, but you can never underestimate the house of sound when it comes to being a crucial link in America's geostrategic force projection in the Middle East. I almost put them on my winter list. Absolutely. Now it's not too many foreigners.

I mean that there was, they had a few rough moments, but at the end of the day they pulled it out. And also it's tough to swing, it's very tough for swing district Congress people to go back to their constituents and justify allowing Shia influence in the Gulf of Aden to undermine regional Saudi Saudi agemony. That's not playing in the Rust Belt. Oh, absolutely. So better luck in 2019, Yemen.

Oh, big loser of this year. And he's actually, you know, he was in on my loser list the past nine years. Bernie Sanders, the Democrats win 40 house seats in the midterm elections. Bernie Sanders doesn't call himself a Democrat. Republicans increase their majority in the Senate. Bernie Sanders calls himself a senator. Interesting. Frankly, I'm starting to think Bernie shouldn't have taunted Christ on his way to the crucifixion.

Bernie ended his 2018 with characteristic depravity, dispatching his most vicious and toxically masculine bro thugs like David Sarota and Nathan Robinson to mess up toothsome Irish rival Beto O'Rourke's pretty face. Being a young POC is a questionable move for Bernie, considering how poorly his race-baiting 2016 campaign went. If Bernie chooses to spend all next year promising the flannel-clad bumpkins of the Rust Belt that he'll bring back the racist figurine factories they were laid off from or pay for their college so they can attend blackface Toga frat parties, we'll be in for a long

primary. Oh, man, I am not looking forward to it. The Bernie bros are already in my mentions. Am I the only one who's sick of white male presidential candidates? Absolutely. I mean, we have had enough of those for our entire lives. I think from now on, we should only be listening to the voices of the marginalized, like Beto O'Rourke.

We already have a senile president who's a white man. Isn't it time we had a senile female president too? We don't need another senile man as president. No, no. We need a woman who has a lifetime of experience and deep dementia. Broke Dick Bernie ought to step aside and make room for a member of the Grey Gardens Caucus, like Betty White, or the woman at my father's nursing home who throws rocks at geese.

Where's the beef lady still alive? I feel like she could have a real draw with people remembering her from those TV commercials. Clara Pell. Yes. I remember, I interviewed her at the backstage at a presidential debate in 1984. Yes, because famously Mondale used where's the beef as an attack on Ronald Reagan, and we all know how well that turned out. It was an attack on Gary Hart, actually.

Must correct my esteemed colleague. Really? I thought that was a... Yes, indeed. Gary Hart, you know, has a lot in common with Bernie Sanders. He was also, he represented a new transformative type of politics. And he also had a legion of young white male supporters who were harassing women, people of color, journalists on telex devices.

Finally, my last loser of the year, human civilization. Yeah, the United Nations released a report this year showing that the world's economies have about a decade to drastically reduce CO2 emissions before it leads to irreversible climate catastrophe. Coincidentally, 2018 also posted the highest carbon emissions in human history. Now, the Trump administration has shown themselves unwilling to confront this reality and the slathering law of capitalism ever hungers for cheap fossil fuel, choking human civilization in the natural world in an ever thickening carbon blanket that will likely end all life

on earth, but within the next century. But before that, we're likely looking forward to decades of violent authoritarianism, genocidal enforcement of borders, and eventually total social collapse, all of it overseen by a tiny segment of the ultra wealthy guarded by armed robots and hardened techno bunkers, while the rest of us tear ourselves to pieces. It'll be an age of blood that will drown humanity and all the other poor dumb species held hostage with us on this smoldering dying planet. So look out for that to be a trend in the coming years unless Congress gets cracking.

Huh? I mean, I'm looking forward to see what Miss Pelosi has with this new green, new deep and the new deal, new green deal new committee deal, which I don't really understand. I don't know what's going on with that color because I understand blue and red and that's of course yes. Those are the two big ones. Those are the primary colors. I mean, is she talking about green party?

I mean, I don't think we want you to find this crystal for every American unless you could speak Russian. I don't know how you can communicate with those people. Here's a votive candle that you can light and pray to, to keep the sea levels down. Good luck with that, folks. All right. My last big loser of 2018, fans of houtkouture. Newsflash to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It's the House of Representatives, not the House of Irreput. Thanks to the Washington examiners, Chief Creepshot correspondent, we've learned that the freshman from Queens has been strutting down the halls of the Nathan Bedford Forest Memorial Office building in designer TJ Max Pantsuits. What's more, the citizen journalists at WikiFeed have leaked ample evidence of bunions and calluses that this pundit has vowed to get to the bottom of. If she hopes to compromise on this green new deal business, AOC, as she's known to admirers, needs to lick these controversies in the bud.

Absolutely. I mean, how are we supposed to take her seriously if she doesn't take her appearance seriously? I mean, I remember the days when Margaret Chase Smith roamed the halls of Congress in a full taffeta evening gown. Now, that was when politics worked. But I'll say this, and I left this off my list because I didn't know whether to put it in the winners or the losers category because it's a little of both this year. But it's the concept of friendship, which is honestly so important.

It's important to reach across the aisle and make friends and sit down and have a meal or a drink or a line of cocaine, some... Some Adreta comb. There's a ketamine, something like that. Some cheese pizza. With someone you might not always see eye to eye with. I thought things were going to turn around this year after Vice News reporter Kate Gusher did CrossFit with Stephen Miller.

But the anger that that article was met with made me think that quite a lot of people on the far right and on the far left just aren't interested in a prosperous and functional civil society. I mean, that seems to be the case. People just want to yell at each other. They don't really want to get things done. They forget that things get done at dinner, at the bar, in the cloakroom, not out yelling at each other in Congress or certainly not yelling at each other on the Internet.

So here's what I'm hoping for in 2019 that Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Ben Norton, Ben Shapiro can all sit down at a big table and say, hey, pass me the ideas. Yes, with a side helping of solutions. Hi folks, Virgil and Matt here for the end of year wrap up and more importantly, looking forward to 2019. What's going to happen? What's 2019 going to look like?

We all know what happened in 2018 and let's let's face it, folks. It was a dumpster fire. I'll give you I'll give you one prediction right now. I'm going to I'm going to fuck up writing all my checks for at least a few months and my emails too. I write the date on my emails. It's very formal. I'm considering all of the shenanigans going on right now that have no signs of stopping.

I'm going to be writing myself prescriptions for wine every day to deal with it due to my massive alcoholism. So we talked a bit about the winners and losers of 2019 or else 2018 rather our compatriots did a good job on them. But you know, no, no use looking back too much. We documented it very extensively on this show. If you've listened to the show, you should know what happened in 2018 unless you're the memento guy.

So I think we're going to spend the rest of this episode looking forward. What is 2019 going to bring? Now one of the things that you foreign policy heads have been obsessed with lately is Donald Trump has announced he's going to do something or other. He has decided that he is going to remove the U.S. military presence, which is in the mountains, which a lot of people didn't know until the day he said that I didn't know there was a military. Yeah.

From northern Syria, where they have been operating in conjunction with the local Kurdish militias there in the face of Turkey's desire to basically wipe them off the map in their ever never ending quest to end Kurds as a thing. And he had and President Erdogan apparently had a very nice conversation with Trump where he probably told him for the first time how many American troops were actually in Turkey or in Syria, which because Trump is in the degree to which he could have an ideology is an isolationist, you know, in whatever dim recesses of his head have actual ideas in them.

And I think what happened to us, I mean, it's a combination of things. One, the Turks sort of had Saudi Arabia by the balls because of all their knowledge about the Khashoggi killing. And also Trump didn't really know what was happening in Syria. He's allowed the military to sort of do their own thing. And being reminded, oh, yeah, there's thousands of troops in Syria. He thought, oh, no, well, I don't like that. And so he decided to remove the troops from Syria, which most people said, oh, he's not

going to stick to that. It's another brain fart. But then shortly after he announced that, Jim's madness, the defense secretary resigned. And it was supposed to be effective at the end of February and then Trump just unilaterally after he read his letter, his resignation letter that was critical of him decided, no, you'll leave in January 1st. So the boys are coming back home. The boys are coming back home.

Now it still might not happen. But what's interesting about this is how it really does show how Trump is a uniquely free actor as president. He doesn't have any kind of constituency among the bureaucracy government. Those are all regular GOP people and members of the blob foreign policy establishment. But he has one thing that pretty much every president before him doesn't have, which is one, he does no personal commitment to maintaining America's military posture because he doesn't think that way.

And two, he doesn't have to worry about the politics of it. Barack Obama was paralyzed for eight years by appearing by appearing weak. He was terrified of appearing weak to the Republicans by, by giving into the radicals office or whatever. Trump can do anything. Trump could remove every troop from every country tomorrow and his hog fans would love it. Sure.

And so that gives him a unique freedom. But the problem is it's in the face of a bureaucracy and a deep state that is totally opposed to that. And the question really comes down to, can his instinctive isolationism win out against his also instinctive laziness and stupidity that prevent him from actually following through on any meaningful pushback on the consensus positions. Well, what does it mean to have internal pushback? Well, it means that when he says something like, I want to leave Syria or I want to draw

down troops in Afghanistan, 15 guys with egg salad on their shirts sit down in front of him and explain to him for 20 hours, why that's a bad idea and use every trick they have to remind him of it. Low roll his suggestions. We already know from insider observations that when he makes, he made suggestions to matter sometimes, he would just literally say, we're not doing it and then wait for him to forget about it, which you would. So that's the main thing they have is that they can do a Fabian strategy of just sort

of absorbing his, his rants and his instinctive shot calling and then wait for him to forget about it while they continue doing what they were going to do anyway. So in your mind, this is, this is kind of a Ron Contra writ large here. There's an entire military that is not being overseen by anyone but a cabal of generals. Yeah. I mean, there's no actual civilian oversight at the mill, oversight of the military at this point. Well, see, this is where that's why 2019 talking about looking into the future is going to

be an interesting test case because Trump seems to have gotten in his head that he wants to push back against this consensus. And we're going to see in the coming months, whether he can actually do it where I currently it does look like there has been a drawdown in northern Syria where the position that the U.S. has left has been filled by, by the Assad regime, the Kurds having been once again for I think the 500th time built up and then betrayed by the United States have looked to the Syrian military to be a buffer between them and Turkey, which they're only bet and a smart move.

And I hope it works out because it would be awful to see the shithead Turkish regime destroy northern Syria that way. But yeah, their best bet is with was certainly with Assad. It's not with us. We will never, we're never, we were never there for the long haul, obviously, and we were never going to seriously on a long term basis be that antagonistic towards our NATO ally Turkey. So they've done the smart move, but it has appeared that at least in the initial stages,

there is a significant drawdown that has changed the strategic map there in northern Syria. And the question is whether he can keep doing it. He's also talked about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. We'll see if he follows through on that. So that's going to be something and it's one of those questions where my instinct says he probably can't do it for a number of reasons, but I don't know. He does have a, I mean, the president is incredibly powerful, theoretically, but in foreign policy, but there's all these constraints that are kind of invisible to us.

Well, I mean, are these okay, but what's really more interesting to me than the actual action itself is the response to the react to the action and the strange bedfellows it created. Trump was defended by Ted Liu, the Tweet and Congressman, the one who's always posting epic clapbacks against the president, replying to his tweet, quote, tweeting him and saying, you know, that's your three Pinocchios, Dothard. He said, you know, hey, wait, by the way, guys, we, you know, we, this is a good thing. We should be drawing, drawing down our engagements overseas, even while quite a lot of, of Democrats and even the sense of liberals were appalled by this.

Yeah. That's going to be another interesting thing to see is, is the degree to which the Democrats react to this, if it's real, by doubling down on being the power of competent, the party of competent imperial management, the party of endless war, but, but with a heart, I guess, with, with a techno drone warfare that is, that is a world expanding, but also in its own way, benevolent and mostly hands off, but troops where they need to be and no real questioning of the necessity for having hot oars flaring on three continents. Well that's really it and I, I have a suspicion, a general suspicion, I've never really thought

about it that deeply or, or, or tried to falsify this idea, but I believe that the anti-war liberal or progressive fantasy that we can draw down our military engagements overseas, we can, we can become something like a military isolationist country, but maintain free trade and maintain what remains of our empire and maintain the prosperity at home is, is a fantasy. I think that's not possible. I think you can't get the prosperous Hegemon America, the economic Hegemon without the military Hegemon. I think that's largely true.

I mean, the, the weather that needs to be is another question, whether we could reorient the world economy on a different basis is another question. I mean, internationalism is going to be key to any sort of serve any, any, any, any hope to survive. That's a question that isn't really, you know, being grappled with right now here, but I, in the UK, I consider Corbinism to be a left response to that. Absolutely. He, this is, this is something critical to his ideology and to his message.

And I think it's critical to any emergent left in the United States that wants to seriously take that name of Syria, like be, be seriously considered to be a new socialism is one that is, that is not only morally opposed to the, the status quo of endless war, but also it's good politics. People are fucking sick of it. But here's what was interesting to me. You know, we don't know what the president's decision-making process is. We can guess at it because there, there are hints and this one man's madness is something

that all of us are now consumed by. We all live in his dying brain. Yes. And he was ostensibly really upset with the reaction from the right, from left, you know, from the neocon establishment, from the interventionist to his Syria withdrawal. And he's, and he complained that if any other president had announced that, you know, we're bringing him home, they, they would get a parade. They would be, they would, people would celebrate that.

And of course, there can't be an imperial parade for this war that was going on that nobody really knew about. Right. Exactly. And, and it occurs to me that those days are over of having this, this grand national, you know, celebration, a triumph for the emperor here in the United States in this era of asymmetrical post-modern ambient warfare. And that, I think, is the real root of his hostility to the war on terror and the military

posture. It's not fun. Exactly. He doesn't care about the deaths. He doesn't care how many civilians are killed. He has no moral compunction about any number of deaths, including American troops. What he cares about is that it's not in the context of a heroic struggle that can redound to him being, uh, being praised as a war winner because he sees with his P brain that there's

no end to any of this. Yeah. I mean, when he said any other president bringing him home would get, uh, you know, uh, a parade, one, no, two, no president would do it because these are open ended commitments. They can't end, uh, given the current, uh, situation. So in a way, you know, and I'm sorry for the cliche here, both sides do are both sides are right about certain aspects of this, particularly that the interventionists are, uh, correct when they observe that this is the, you know, these, this ambient warfare, this postmodern

warfare is the cornerstone of our imperial control. This is necessary to it. And Trump childlike doesn't realize that. But Trump also into it's that, uh, there's, you know, there's no glory in this that this is. He's not somebody who will really, you know, comprehends how the global economy works, except in a very, very broad scale, uh, he, uh, but he does understand that, uh, the what, what, what, what is the popular distaste for open-ended warfare.

Right. Uh, he just doesn't really appreciate that nobody gives a shit. I mean, his fans might pretend to care like, oh, oh, thank God, I can take the ribbon off my fucking tree now that these fucking 4,000, uh, uh, officially classified military agents in Syria are coming home. Right. I mean, the last time we had a triumph was, uh, manufactured by the White House of Bush in 2003, mission accomplished, which, you know, that became a punch line just a few

months afterwards. So we're past that. We can't have that anymore. There's no, no more VJ days. No, that's not, there's, yeah, there's no more triumph. There's no more glory to be had, which for a guy like Obama is fine because he's accepted his position as a technocratic administer of empire for a guy like Trump who's just there for the kudos for the adulation for feeding his, his endless thirst to be considered a

world historical figure. It's just the percentages are no good. It's a bad deal. Folks, it's a bad deal. What are we getting out of this? I'm not, no one's, we're not doing a parade. I mean, where's the parade? I'm not going to, they're not forget about it.

The, where's, yeah, no, no yellow ribbons. It's going to be. I hope, I hope that if this persists, it creates a crisis because you can't have the Republicans and the Democrats both saying war is actually good, sir, because that is going to be a situation where you have what a president holding out in this weird isolationist position and then both parties united around imperial war forever. I mean that can't, hopefully that can't persist and ideally it could if the costs are low enough is the thing.

I mean, remember a lot of the opposition to the rock war, which is this big spectacular thing was based on the fact that it's expensive and we're not paying for it. We're losing not just blood, but treasure. We love that treasure. We need the treasure. They're taking the treasure. We love the treasure. Take my blood, but leave my treasure.

I'm just hoping, I guess that people talk about a resurgent left that this kind of crisis, this kind of inflection point on the issue of our endless war is an opportunity to articulate a alternative point way forward. Right, but it's not just an alternative foreign policy. You can't silo foreign policy off from a grander alternative conception of what the global economy would look like, what America's place in the world would be, which is a cliche itself that's already kind of meaningless. Right.

Well, we just haven't, we have not even considered it as a thing. And now it's falling apart in front of us and no one has thought about it for a minute. All of the institutions that might have been doing work to create alternatives have rotted on the vine in the last 30 years. So we're starting from scratch. And so that's another reason the 2019 is going to be a terrifying year. Terrameter has just gone up three ticks. Condition orange.

Condition tiny hands. We're entering now week two of the shutdown that nobody really cares about because it's Christmas. Yeah. Except unless you are one of those poor bastards who works for the federal government and had to return your Christmas presents because you couldn't afford them. It is as I've told by a random guy that the first paid furloughed paychecks won't go out for another week.

So there's still time to resolve this before no harm, no foul. Yeah. Well, we'll see. But it appears that Trump in his peak in his he's having a tantrum. You can kind of tell. I mean, there's no way you can disentangle him deciding to fire his secretary of defense and withdraw from Syria from his decision to make a red line on wall funding. He's just in a general end.

I hate to bring this up, but he clearly cares about the Russian investigation and Michael Flynn's and Michael Cohen's pleas. You've got to be annoying him. Well, yeah, if you're a personal lawyer who knows literally all the crimes has turned state's evidence. That's bad. So he's clearly having a fit. He's having a tantrum.

And one of the big expressions of it is he decided after after initially appearing to back down on wall funding, being called a chicken by Fox News and deciding, no, I'm going to I'm going to go to the mat for wall funding. And so now he's shutting down the government over, I guess, five billion dollars. It was he wants five billion dollars earmarked for border wall and the original compromise that was ironed out with the Senate, ironed out with Schumer was, I believe, something on a level of one and a half billion dollars for a border fence. And famously Schumer's starting point for the negotiations was $1.8 billion.

He said, you know, that's how much you're getting for any sort of symbol of white supremacy at the border, sir, and you're going to take it. That was the compromise position at the start. Actually, no, fuck that. That was the democratic position from the start. And of course, the Senate was all too happy to take it because even Republican senators don't actually give a shit about the wall. They have no fucking clue why we're fighting.

The wall is entirely symbolic because it's been pointed out. There is a ton of fencing on the Mexican American border. There is a ton of fences. The idea and even if you were to blank at the entire border and fencing, it would not by natural because of the nature, just mountains and you would never, it could never cover the whole thing. It's not going to be a seal that goes from sea to sea. It's going to have gaps.

It's going to have openings. And there's already tons of fencing there. Well, it's it's it's dumb guy shit. We've known this for a while. It's just dumb shit. He's dumb for proposing it. Voters are dumb for liking it, but it is it has become the sine qua non of his policy. And so he has to back it.

And but that means that it's also the sine qua non for opposition to him, which means Democrats have to oppose it. So as of right now, the Republicans of Congress have just said, you know, fuck it, we'll just wait for the Democrats to take the gavel in the house and let them figure it out. And Democrats in the house I read are contemplating just sending them another one point five billion dollars for border fencing. And I was trying to figure this point out and until you brusically said, I don't want to I don't want to hear your explanation right now.

Why is if if if Trump and I presume this will happen, the government will just get funded and he won't get the five billion for the wall. I'm fairly confident of that because it's stupid and he doesn't have any allies in Congress at all, except for the Freedom Caucus will be in the minority. Yeah, I think if we have to figure this out, I'd say sometime in the next week, they make a deal for some number less than five billion. And it might be earmarked like other money has for one and a half to two and instead of building more fence, it'll be it'll be reinforcing existing fence.

Maybe it'll build a little extra, but it's not going to be the wall, no matter what, but it is going to be money for some sort of barrier. But that's so so Trump has already, you know, drawn a lot in the sand and says five billion dollars. That's that's, you know, five billion dollars, five billion dollars wall or bus. So ostensibly, anything less than that is a loss for him. Yeah, I know he's staked out a position where if he doesn't get every cent, he has back down.

But I fail to see how the Democrats agreeing to two billion dollars more for border security for a border that is secure, that has been militarized for decades now that routinely murders migrants and that is not enforcing our treaty obligations in terms of refugees, how that is anything for a victory, anything of a victory for anyone posted the president's policies of post his white nationalist policies. Well, the question is the difference between perception. I mean, is it a who will be perceived by the audience, by the general public as having won the shutdown?

That's a separate question from how closer are we to there being a fully functional border wall there that that, you know, that is the dream of people like Trump and Stephen Miller. Well, the walls are relevant. We've already said that the wall is a symbolic thing and that's that's pretty much the same as as the talking about in the kind of winners and losers of the shutdown mode. I'm talking about the Democrats coming to, you know, who just got off winning 40 seats in the last midterm election, taking the gavel in the house and figuring out what kind of Congress that's going to be, because that Congress actually does have to fund the government.

It does actually have control. I mean, that it is it's it's it's constitutional prerogative. It's sole constitutional prerogative control over the federal budget. And the fact that right out of the gate, they want to give $2 billion and a seed to this racist border panic is very troubling to me. I thought that these, you know, these liberals were weren't they radicalized by the images of the past year, weren't they also retweeting, sharing and sad about tear gassing refugees at the border about baby cages and shit?

Why would they want to go along with this to and why should they trust it? They'll go along with it because they want to reopen the government because they they freak out and we know this from the last shut down last year, which was a similar thing. It was over immigration that time. It was over the dream. And the same thing, even though it was initiated by Trump and he was perceived as the guy doing it, even though it was at that point a entirely Republican Congress, which is almost unprecedented having a government shutdown when your party controls all of the branches.

But they still conceded because they freak out at this stuff as every minute that the government is shut down, they spend screaming and like rain man. So I don't think I just think that that internal political consideration, the way they view things, the way that they view shutdowns as these category five emergencies that have to be stopped at any cost almost will mean that if they can make themselves, if they can convince themselves that they won because he didn't get everything he asked for, then they will take it as a win. But I think they're also invested in the militarization of the border at a minimum.

At minimum, they have pandered to racist attitudes over it. And that does, you know, absolutely led to misery, suffering, brutality and murders at the border. Well, once again, we're talking the same thing with foreign policy. We have a bipartisan I mean, what these really having this wild having this demented old man with no real policy commitments and no, no buy in to any of the structural elements of government has revealed is the degree to which we have bipartisan commitments to endless war and to a militarized border.

I mean, that's what we're finding out. And we're realizing, oh, we don't really, I mean, people said this, but most people have taken it as as hysterical exaggeration. We really have two part, we have one party of capital with two wings. And the Trump presidency has thrown this into a sharper relief probably than it has in generations. And the question is, what do we do about it? And I don't think that's going to be answered by any of the people in power right now because they're part of these decrepit and totally compromised and sclerotic institutions.

Your prediction for the way the shutdown ends? I mean, I don't want to say anything. I don't want to get too specific, but it's not going to last too much longer. They never do, and they'll probably end up giving him some symbolic amount of money for the border. How much? How much? Two billion.

I'd say maybe they split the difference because zero between zero and five, 2.5. I'm going to bet $1. Damn it. Price is right rules. He's going to get the washer dryer. No, I say it ends after Pelosi figures out how to fund the government and the Senate just rubberstabs it because they don't want this fight and they have no fucking clue why this fight is happening.

No, this is entirely the spiteful fit of a dying old man, which is amazing. We really are held hostage by the specific dimensions. And that doesn't change the, that's what's so fascinating about it because none of this changes the structural material conditions that are generating the territory that we're all dealing with. But his erratic and impulsive choices are creating crises that throw that into relief in specific ways that they wouldn't have under any other president. Last thing I want to talk to you about here.

And I tried to avoid this. I really tried to avoid it. I know you did too. But everyone was just posting so fucking much about it. And on Christmas Eve, on Christmas day, just posting livid about this fucking shit that it was unavoidable. I, it's, it's, it's the Beto and Bernie, the little cat fight there. You know what it was like?

It was like Bart trying to read the newspaper. Hey, Jughead, did you hear Beto O'Rourke's position on Medicare for all is burky at bed? Oh, God damn it. People, people tweeting while carving into their fucking Christmas hams, just ignoring their entire families and their stocking stuffers and cherished memories in order to get off a hot take about Beto and Bernie. Yeah. No.

And then of course the response for many is this is, this is the next year speaking about looking forward. This is the next year. Yep. Oh yeah. Big time. But the whole thing is relevant. This is, this is from top to bottom in utterly manufactured controversy.

Neither man has launched a presidential campaign. We don't even know what Bernie thinks about Beto. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's stupid. It's maddening. It's genuinely maddening. We don't know what these candidates are, are going to be. We, I, I, it is stupid in the sense that nothing anyone says on these forums, this far out is going to mean anything and people need to get kind of internalize that there's, there's

this real, real urge to impart meaning on your posts because we have nothing else to do because we feel so totally help us and we grab anything that even feels like, like agency and we, we invest it with, with import and I understand that I've certainly felt that way too. But I think that the instinct, like the, the, the, the Bernie Krat sort of antibodies going in the overdrive when the Beto push came, when you got those few art, those first few articles about Beto, I think that was, that came from a totally understandable place. Right.

Right. That's the baffle man at the, the liberal infatuation with them. Well, it's, it's, well, it's baffle meant, but it's also you're recognizing what they're trying to do. Like there is one candidate, one potential candidate for 2020 who is unacceptable to the democratic establishment. They've said so. Like third way has said, we're for anybody but Bernie.

Yep. And so that means for anybody who is genuinely horrified by the current democratic party and sees electoral politics as a way of, of uprooting them and creating a new, new opposition force, then that means he's the only candidate for you. And that's obviously true. He's, people can say he's old. He has problems with articulating himself on race or gender or whatever, whatever, all true.

None of them mean anything in the face of his singular status as the only candidate who is perceived by the establishment as a real threat. And so he is to be supported. And that means that when you see these people, especially people who, who spent 2016 saying how much they were done with white men, rallying around this guy, Beto O'Rourke. You can see them trying to look for that, that life preserver that'll save them from another Bernie tide that's going to be a headache, especially since this time there's going to be this huge, probably like 10 plus candidates running.

There's going to be money and support is going to be spread out over a lot of places. And the worry is it's going to take too long to coalesce around an anti Bernie that he might end up getting the nomination. And so they want somebody who can not just be another one, another face in the establishment crowd, a guy they can trust who could potentially steal Bernie's thunder, steal his supporters and torpedo him before the first primary has been run. But keep in mind that's not just the establishment. There are and, and this, this cannot and ought not to be ignored.

Quite a lot of people who are regular democratic voters who don't like him for a number of maddening and stupid reasons. Right. But it's not. I mean, who knows what polling means at this point in time, but it's doesn't seem to be a significantly large percentage of voters. And well, so keep in mind, like not every primary is a closed primary. So to a point like that, polling is a relevant exactly.

But there is just this establishment desire to find somebody who can, who can neutralize the Bernie threat and they see Beto as the most plausible guy. I mean, they talk about him as the white Obama and white and Obama was the guy who got the young people and the young people who were also who are the ones who powered Bernie. And their big hope is that those young people went for Bernie because of his sexy old man charisma. Yeah. And now he's a thought.

And then uncompromising commitment to policies that are oppositional to the democratic orthodoxy. And that's, and that's why they love Beto because they're hoping that he can just, he can, he can get by on the charisma and his toothy smile. And all of that concern about white male candidates goes out the window. Interestingly, Jonathan Chait of all people seems no more as colleagues about what's really happening here, what really animated the Beto versus Bernie online contra-tum. And he correctly ascertained that, and I'm quoting from him here, the primary struggle in American politics as they see it, they being the Bernie crats, the nascent intellectual

left is not between liberalism and conservatism, but between socialism and capitalism. And yeah, obviously that's true. And if I would have the opportunity to talk about this, which, you know, you guys were drawn into this, you're quoted in news articles trying to stoke the fires with whatever you little monsters said. And if I would come to this, I would say, I agree, I'm not interested in progressivism, which is a euphemism that's the easiest fucking thing to call yourself. Like most of the candidates will just call themselves progressives in 2020, and I don't

really care to be reassured that, no, no, no, no, this candidate is a progressive. This candidate is a great progressive. They signed on to a bunch of bills that have absolutely no chance of ever passing. I'm interested in candidates who are at minimum, and I think what we need are candidates who are at minimum, critical of capitalism at its core. And ideally pose a real threat to it. And Beto Rourke is obviously neither. And I went out last night, I looked into this.

On his campaign website, Beto's position on the economy starts with, all workers should benefit from the economic growth they help create. That's good, right? I agree with that, sure. Now, workers are entitled to the product of their labor. Now, classic Marx. Then it goes into the bullet points of how to do that. You ready for this?

Workers of the world unite, baby. You ready for this? Promote policies that encourage companies to focus on returning investments back to their consumer, their employees, into the community. Oh, hell yeah. Give me some of that. Lower the barrier of entry for small businesses so that every entrepreneur or emerging growth company can have an opportunity to be successful.

Go off. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I am skateboarding into that. Yeah, I agree. I waited for it. This is Beto O'Rourke. Are you sure this isn't the Communist Manifesto?

Because this is the exact same boilerplate that every Democrat has. Every Democrat talks this way. A lot of Republicans do too. Exactly. It's devoid of any means. That's why I want to say, there's one term that seeing people talk about drives me insane. And it's, and it really is, it gets to the heart of why electoral politics, if they have purpose, have one.

And that is, I see a lot of these Democrats saying, why are you being such purists? You purists, you demand the most pure candidate. And the mindset behind that is the idea that we're all on the same team and that there's some, that there's like 100% progressive, whatever. And then you're, and they're angry at you for demanding 100% purity instead of 95% purity.

And that is, that's a slight of hand that obscures the hand of capital. Because like take healthcare is obviously the easiest one and it's the biggest one. And it's going to be because it's the thing that directly affects the most people. Polling shows it as people's number one concern. And it is a crisis thing.

And it is a situation where there is a left, the socialist position of Medicare for all, whatever that ends up meaning, is one that abolishes a profit center, abolishes a capitalist market. It abolishes the insurance. That is the only left position here. Exactly.

And these people try to act like, they use the word purity because that says, well, if you get universal coverage and we still have employee-based healthcare, and we still have this patchwork system, but it covers everyone that that is in its particulars, that's identical to something like Medicare for all or single payer or the NHS or whatever.

And it's not because it still has insurance companies, which means it still has all of the inefficiencies and grotesque injustices of a profit-based healthcare system. Like most people, they're happy with their healthcare in that they have it, but if they need to use it, it can still be disastrous. The number of people who are rendered bankrupt by medical bills while having insurance is huge.

The number of people who don't seek healthcare because they can't afford it even though they need it, and our insurance is still significant. These problems persist even if you're covered, and they still allow this parasitic industry that controls, that gives tons of money to the Democrats to persist. And so any effort that tries to fix healthcare

while leaving insurance is not a break with capitalism in the context of healthcare. Medicare for all, whatever that ends up being, if it ends insurance companies, it is a direct assault upon that pillar of the market. And that is a different thing. It's not a question of percentages of purity. It is a different creature

than whatever patchwork bullshit Democrats talk about when they talk about expanding access to affordable healthcare. But broadly speaking, even if Bernie were to be elected president, and I know you talk about this a lot, there has to be a transformational change in the Democratic Party. There has to be a massive upheaval,

and quite a lot of people need to leave the party. That's it. You can't have a party that's both bosses and workers. That doesn't function, that doesn't do anything. You can't have a situation where, for example, say there is, it falls into, luckily the Democrats win the Senate. If they keep the filibuster,

there's no hope for any kind of meaningful movement on anything from healthcare to climate change to anything. But again, even if they had a two-vote majority of the Senate and they abolished the filibuster, they don't have 50 votes to pursue a radical agenda. Right, well, they wouldn't have 50 votes to get rid of the filibuster in the first place. Oh, right, I mean, I'm just saying,

like you would need 50, oh gosh, I don't know, ideologically pure or devoted legislators to accomplish anything, anything whatsoever. No, I mean, that is the real danger of the, if Bernie were to win, the good coin basically, and I don't even know how it would turn out, is Bernie's, because he's not gonna get anything done. People need to get that around, get that through their head.

The way the Democratic Party is arrayed. If he were to get into power, even if they held both houses, he's not going to get this stuff through. Well, he would have to go to war with the party. Exactly. And that's kind of something that I've been thinking about a bit, trying to game out what Bernie's campaign

in the next year is gonna look like. And the conclusion that I keep coming to, and especially after reviewing the evidence of this, all of the people who have shown their hands here in 2018 about what they really think about him, and thanks for doing that on this early day, that he has to run as an insurgent again, and he has to run as a cleansing force

to take over the party. And the Democratic Party apparatchiks, or just loyalists who say, oh, he's not even a Democrat, and his supporters aren't even Democrats, and they just want to take over the party are correct. That absolutely utterly needs to happen. And I take solace in the fact that it should Bernie win.

I can't really imagine a circumstance where it doesn't fracture the party, where it doesn't go to the convention, and there's a gigantic fucking floor fight over him. I don't think he could really win by convincing marching. I don't think he would run away with it like Kerry did. It would be a slog where he would probably

win a lot of contests with 40% of the vote or something like that. He has, I think, the highest floor of any candidate right now. I think that's proven. It's something on the level of 20%. That's a hell of a lot. And if he is capable of running

in extremely disciplined campaign, which I don't know if he is, I don't know if his team is even up to this task, but if he can run an efficient delegate operation, if he can bring, crucially, bring people who aren't regular Democratic voters into these caucuses of primaries, I certainly think that his ceiling could be anywhere

from 40 to 60%, which would be enough if, consistently across the board, to take the nomination. But it would be a gigantic find. A lot of people would leave the party over it. There would potentially be a third-party challenge. The American Lib Dems, basically. Yes. Well, the question-

But it is a thing. I think that would be good. No, it would be extremely good. It's necessary because Senors Presidency, like I said, there's a good case. There's a best case scenario, worst case scenario. The best case scenario is that his presidency is this bolt of lightning that illuminates

all of the hidden compromises and corruptions of the Democratic Party, and that enough voters who consider themselves Democrats, and also maybe have not until now, but are drawn to Sanders, specifically, come together to insist upon a people being in accord with his policies, and that even if these guys,

the specific politicians don't have some change of heart, they are forced, they are coerced by their own constituents into supporting his point of view. And that's best case. Worst case scenario is that he's Carter, and like a reverse Carter, because Carter tried to bring his,

because Carter was the first neoliberal president who came into office with a New Deal Congress and tried to push them to the right. He tried to beat them to the right, and they fought him the whole time, and he got nothing done, and he ended up losing. He deregulated a few industries. Right, and then he became the harbinger

for the greater neoliberalism. So I don't know, maybe that would be good too, because yeah, Carter brought Reagan, maybe Sanders would bring ultra Sanders. Or ultra Reagan. Or ultra Reagan. Or dead Reagan. That's the thing, is that we do have,

because the Republican base is so durable that these kind of fractures can sometimes allow them to, even though they will never again be a majority position in this country, they've got things wired still to this point that they can take any kind of break among the Democrats

as an opportunity to see them. What's interesting you talk about that, the Republican base and its durability, some, I don't know, I don't know how you wanna cut this, but maybe 35, 40% of the country or so. And certainly a shrinking share, but an increasingly radical share of the country. That's really enthralled Trump.

And what really needs to be created here in this country is a comparable left base. A comparable, I don't call it a Bernie Sanders base of the country that is equally uncompromising, that is equally radical, that is equally demanding of its politicians. And that base, I think the people are there, but they have not been organized or radicalized

in any fashion. And the Democratic Party obviously is not doing that, has no structural interest in doing that, correct? You know, I mean, and this is what makes, this is what Bernie really has to grapple with going into 2020 is there are quite a lot of Democratic voters who are woke, but whose class interests are opposed

to redistributive policies and who will fight him tooth or nail. And just as well, there are quite a lot of Democrats who were fine with swallowing bullshit. There's quite a lot of them who have, like as we wrote in our book, The Chapel Guide to Revolution, A Manifesto Against Logic Facts and Reason,

checked into the asylum, who believe that Bernie is a Russian agent. And people whose brains are massaged when they hear something like incentivizing opportunity, you know. One poll of Iowa Democrats I saw has Joe Biden with an 80% favorability rating among Democratic voters.

Yeah, well, Biden is the wild card. I think you and I are sort of in agreement that he's likely to just get me tooed out of the gate. And it's just gonna be a very, very, very disaster. I'm happy to say that now, is that Biden, I believe, will implode spectacularly. There's absolutely no way that he, you know, stays in the poll position.

It's another Jeb, it's another Lieberman, it's another Rudy Giuliani. Yeah, I think that's likely. Well, no matter what happens with the Democratic primary and all the other shit happens, we can guarantee that it will be incredibly stupid and innervating and people will make you wanna die on a daily basis, but we will be here a whole way

to make you wanna kill yourself slightly less. It will be and, you know, we wanted to talk about this more in this episode, we're running out of time here, but I just wanna close on this note that it's a lesson to the hogs, the treasured hogs, the precious pigs. Precious pigs. That when, if you are gonna be following politics

and being online in the next two years, you're gonna have to face a lot of people, people who are idiots, who are mendacious, who are safeguarding their class interests, or they're straight up paid to say things, who will tell you that Bernie's a racist, misogynist, whatever, and you can't talk to those people. You can't win them over with your logic or links.

You can't send them pictures of corn cobs or guillotines that think you've accomplished anything and you can't get angry at them because of course that means you lose. And engagement is a profound waste of time. And that's lesson, not just for online, but for this campaign overall. And however, one should choose to engage with it

because the energy spent on the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign would be utterly wasted if we're not focused on constructing building a mass movement that will outlive him. Otherwise, it's just posting and getting mad at shitheads, which are fine indulgences while we wait for the notions to consume us. Mm-hmm, yeah, keep that in mind.

Because the siren call of the online own is incredibly powerful as we all know, but it is a beckoning to the rocks. Till next time? Indeed. See you in 2019. Won't go on, brothers. Here's to another goddamn new year.

And outside two million drunk Bostonians are getting ready to sing all blank, sign out of tune. I sit there in my easy chair, looking in the clouds, orange with celebration. I wonder if you're out there. Hey, the ice of Boston is muddy. Never flex no white vintage for a night. And I slip on it every time.

Pop open the third bottle of bubbly. Yeah, and I take that bottle of champagne, go into the kitchen, stand in front of the kitchen window, and I take all my clothes off, take that bottle of champagne, and I pour it on my head, fill a cascade through my hair and across my chest and the phone rings. And it's my mother.

And she says, hi, honey, how's Boston? And I stand there all alone on New Year's Eve, buck naked drenched in champagne, looking at a bunch of strangers, looking at them, looking at me, looking at them, and I say, I'll find mom. How's Washington? Hey, the ice of Boston is muddy.

Never flex no white vintage for a night. And I slip on it every time. Hey, the ice of Boston is muddy. Never flex no white vintage for a night. And I slip on it every time. Time, time, time again.