Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump--And Democrats From Themselves

by Rick Wilson

  The fact that the Democrats running for president are all aflutter about socialism in 2020 is a sign they’ve bought into the myth that America is finally ready to tear down the edifice of market capitalism and create a country where the workers control the means of production and the beet harvest always exceeds the goals of the Five-Year Plan. I know, I’m a smartass, but the conceit that democratic socialism will be front and center in the 2020 campaign is delightful if you’re Donald Trump’s campaign team. They’re thrilled.

  Watch how the word “socialism” will rise from Trump’s blubbery lips again and again over the coming year. It will be for one reason: Socialism per se has a horrible branding problem.

  The socialist brand comes with a lot of political overhead that isn’t going away, given that history presents us with far too many cases where socialism went hand in hand with bodies stacked like cordwood. No, not always, but often enough to blot its copybook permanently. “But Sweden” doesn’t make up for “But Stalin.” Democrats (and I’m looking right at you, Comrade Sanders) who just ignore Stalin, Mao, Castro, Maduro, and others ought to know better.

  Even the Holy Grail of American socialism—universal, single-payer government healthcare—has slipped badly in public polling. In 2003, 62 percent of Americans favored a single-payer system with no private insurance. That number was down to 41 percent in a July 2019 Washington Post poll, so of course the majority of the 2020 Democratic field stick their hands up when asked if they’d trash the private health-insurance market that covers 180 million Americans. Because of course they do.12

  No matter how many times you try to change it, the cultural and economic operating system of America is market capitalism with some socialist accessories. Yet the lonely voices in the Democratic primary field who understand that market capitalism—as flawed, inequitable, manipulated, cronied-up, and corporate as it’s become—is still much closer to the aspirational vision Americans embrace were greeted with derision and were mostly marginalized in the 2020 field.

  For being a clunky and terrible candidate in a number of areas, Elizabeth Warren has gotten closer to a winning message, broaching the idea that a government doing socialist-adjacent things doesn’t have to be socialist itself. It’s smart politics. My conservative eyebrows are raised. As an ad guy and message strategist, I think she’s closing in on something that resonated with the Trump base the first time around—that the little guy without an army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., gets fucked and everyone else gets rich. I hate to admit it, but she’s not even wrong.

  This is a message window for Democrats if they can just skip playing “The Internationale” at the convention.

  Trump can and will try to box Democrats in on support for communists like Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. It would help—and I know this is difficult with red-diaper Bernie in the party—for the Democratic nominee to end the reflexive defense of socialism when it’s in the authoritarian frame of a Cuba, Venezuela, or China.

  If you think 2020 is the time and place to litigate socialism, democratic or otherwise, just resign yourself to a generation of Trumps in the White House. It may be popular with voters born after the end of the Cold War, but may I remind you who votes? Old people vote. Old people who remember we fought a twilight struggle against fucking communism and who still view socialism as communism’s slightly cleaned-up cousin.

  A major poll from Public Opinion Strategies—some of the very best in the business, on either side of the partisan divide—in February 2019 started probing the socialism question ahead of the 2020 election, testing the following proposition with likely 2020 voters: “The country would be better off if our political and economic systems were more socialist, including taxing the wealthy to pay for social programs, nationalizing health care so that it’s government-run and redistributing wealth.”13 Democrats love them some socialism. By a margin of 77 to 19 percent, they agreed—they are ready to embrace the glories of our postcapitalist future despite it all! All hail the record tractor production at People’s Heavy Industrial Plant 16!

  Republicans? Well, duh—83 percent disagreed with the proposition, compared to 14 percent who were OK with it. Independents are also opposed to socialism in America, 37-to-56 percent. You know who else missed sending in their dues to the People’s Revolutionary Collective Fan Club? Suburban women, 57 percent of whom are opposed, and voters in eleven of the swing Electoral College states for 2020 report opposition at 54 percent.

  There’s more cold water in this bucket. While younger voters are dreamy-eyed about socialism by a 53-to-40 percent margin, older voters—again, you know, the voters who vote—oppose it, 60-to-38 percent.

  Luckily for the Democrats, a glorious revolution is upon us and they won’t need independent voters, suburban women, or old folks! And who needs those swing states, anyway? You can just run up the numbers in California…

  Oh. Wait.

  Scenes from a Trump Focus Group

  MODERATOR: Now, I want to talk a little bit about the president and truthfulness.

  BUD (50ish, CPA): Well, we like a little sales talk. It’s good. He’s a salesman.

  MODERATOR: Can you say he’s always trustworthy, mostly trustworthy, or something else?

  KATHERINE (40ish, suburban): Well, I voted for him because Hillary was the real liar. After she murdered all those children, I could never trust her again.

  BUD: After he went over and fought those ISIS boys hand to hand and then bought Greenland, I was sold.

  MODERATOR (voice tightens): I don’t believe he bought Greenland.

  KATHERINE (interrupts): Greenland is a state now. I’m just worried they’re going to have sharia law there. And Mexicans. Are Greenlandians whites?

  MODERATOR: But the market is down—down by a lot.

  BUD: Fake news, my friend. Fake news. The market is doing great, it’s just the media lying about it to hurt Mr. Trump.

  KATHERINE: I don’t know if Greenlandishmen are socialist. Lordy, I hope not.

  (At this point, the camera behind the mirrored glass of the focus-group facility picks up a noticeable tremor in the moderator’s hands.)

  KUMBAYA

  All this Democratic intramural spritzing and primary scrapping is just good clean fun, isn’t it? It’s just the feisty process of electing a unifying candidate who will bring even the most disparate elements of this most disparate party together as one, all hands on deck, all backs to the capstan, right? They’ll all come together in the end, right?

  Sadly, history doesn’t suggest this will be the case. If Democrats don’t enforce some hard, punitive party discipline on anyone who wants to play games with the nominee or the fall campaign, they’re going to give Trump a wonderful opportunity to churn their divisions into a full-scale meltdown.

  Ambition is a heady drug. As of this writing, the Democratic field has somewhere around ten candidates of varying degrees of seriousness, and a few persistent hangers-on without the political wherewithal to win a race for middle-school class president. As of October 2019, you still have a goddamn New Age fortune-teller in the race, for fuck’s sake. Those in the serious tier are followed by a group of could-be candidates and a horde of people there because the barriers to entry are lower now than at any time in the past.

  Some are running on the notion that if a no-account prank candidate like Donald Trump ran for and won the GOP nomination for president, why not spin the wheel? “It could happen to me,” they whisper to themselves. “I could catch fire,” they tell donors, “I only need to have my moment on the debate stage and for Trump to tweet about me.” A field this large—as this book goes to press, there are enough Democrats in the race to fill a platoon—the elbows are flying, the purity shit-checking is rampant, and the hostility is getting pretty marked.

  It’s a bitter, tough race. These folks obviously aren’t going to walk out of this polit
ical Thunderdome without some bruises and scrapes, but for the love of God, Democrats, keep your eyes on the prize. You need to herd all the cats of your normally unmanageable party behind the nominee, and focus on making 2020 a referendum on Donald Trump, not a scrap inside your own team.

  Granted, calls for Democratic unity from an apostate Republican are a bit unusual. But I want to talk about what became a famous analogy from the 2016 election. In an essay published under the nom de douche Publius Decius Mus, later revealed to be Michael Anton, the writer compared the 2016 election to the doomed Flight 93 of September 11, 2001. He argued that unless Hillary was defeated, death was certain for all that Republicans held dear. Storm the cockpit and die? Possibly. Sit quietly and let the terrorists fly the plane into the White House or the Capitol? You’re dead either way.

  Anton’s argument to his fellow conservatives concerning the highly unorthodox, and to many distasteful, candidate Trump was this: We need to put aside our long-held conservative ideas and ideals to get to the goalposts. Storming the cockpit with Trump is better than sitting quietly while the Democrats steer America toward a progressive apocalypse from which it would never recover. It was a painfully facile argument on one level, since Hillary was hardly going to seize the means of production for the workers or impose sharia, but it persuaded many on the right. And Hillary wasn’t—what’s the word?—insane. Can serious people argue that Donald Trump, who is in control of our nuclear arsenal, isn’t at least potentially batshit crazy?

  For Democrats, this really is a Flight 93 election—except the emergency isn’t to elect Trump, but to beat him. Unless Democrats put aside their internal grievances, beefs, ideological wish lists, and purity-posse threats to stay home in November, they might as well expect Trump for another four years, and his spawn in the White House for decades after.

  In 2008, once Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, and then the White House—and against the advice of some of his most passionate supporters—he drew Bill and Hillary Clinton closer to him. First, he had Bill and Hillary as part of his campaign surrogate operation, and later named Hillary as his Secretary of State. This was good, unifying politics. He didn’t want a flank exposed, and understood the Lyndon Johnson truism about having people inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. Obama was smart and lucky. The Clintons accepted the embrace, cautiously at first, but both sides benefited from the alliance.

  In 2012, perhaps Hillary Clinton believed that in setting aside her anger and hurt over losing to Obama in 2008 she had set a precedent for putting party first. After all, when the insurgent Obama had taken down the Democratic Establishment Death Star that was her campaign, she was graceful to a fault:

  The way to continue our fight now—to accomplish the goals for which we stand—is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him, and throw my full support behind him. And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.14

  She went to work, first on the campaign, and later as one of Obama’s most loyal and effective cabinet members. It was a win for her, and for Obama.

  Perhaps when she won the nomination in 2016, Hillary expected Bernie Sanders, her most persistent rival for the nomination, to do the same. Yeah, not so much. Sanders, that bitter old fart, may have capitulated, but he never truly stepped up with the support she needed from his faction of the progressive base. Many Bernie bros in 2016 sat on their hands, stayed home, and in some cases voted for Trump. When will Democrats learn that Bernie is in a party of one: the Bernie Party? The nominee in this cycle will need to watch for Angry Old Commie Throws Hissy Fit, 2020 edition.

  The Democratic Party isn’t without its own “Fuck it, burn it all down” elements, and in the 2016 election, and the opening acts of the 2020 election, many of those people seem to flock to the banner of Bernie Sanders.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t it time for a president who can praise Soviet Communism in Russian and mean it?”

  Democrats cannot afford to let Bernie drag the race into the late summer of 2020. They can’t afford a messy floor fight or months of the media narrative of “Can X unify the party with Bernie still sniping?” It’s going to take some time to convince his “my way or the highway” supporters that knocking Trump out of office is more important than ushering in the Workers’ Paradise with Comrade Bernie at the helm. It sucks for the eventual nominee, but Bernie’s pattern of behavior, if repeated, is a significant problem.

  Anyone who has spent even a moment on social media knows who the Bernie elements are: the blue-state version of Trump’s online army, with some live humans, some bots, some foreign-propaganda agents. They respond with livid, spittle-flecked outrage at any word about Bernie that doesn’t declare him the ideological second coming of Lenin, the vanguard warrior for whom the American proletariat has been waiting, and the man who will burn Wall Street to the ground and build a socialist paradise from its ashes.

  The reality isn’t as lofty. He’s a grumpy, mean old bastard who stomped off in 2016 after doing the absolute minimum for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He’s become a marketing and branding candidate, milking his email lists with Make America Collectivist rhetoric and policies just a notch short of the Bernie Sanders Eat the Rich Cookbook. (Though I’m told his recipe for Oligarch à l’Orange is magnificent.) Bernie’s retirement fund—pardon me, ongoing political advocacy—depends on maintaining that edge-case rhetoric. He’s the Commie Ron Paul.

  In a year when Democrats had a stark, bright-line ideological contrast before them—sane, stable-to-a-fault HRC versus Donald Fucking Trump—one group stood out in switching their party preferences radically: the Bernie bros. Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of Sanders voters switched their preference on Election Day to Trump. These aren’t principled progs; they’re arsonists.

  Bernie is Trump reelection insurance.

  If he’s the nominee, I say to my Democrat friends, get ready to lose forty-five states. If he’s not, prepare for Bernie to mutter a few words of mealy-mouthed support for the Democratic nominee and then keep on being Bernie. I don’t think Bernie will do anything for the 2020 Democratic nominee, and I’m not sure the Democrats have the capacity to alter his behavior in the slightest. The dream of progressive perfection dies hard. The Democrats need to get the Bernie progs in line, and fast. They can’t afford 15 percent of Bernie’s voters to either vote for Trump or stay home; this would mean having to overshoot even more in the purple and red swing states on the Electoral College map.

  Democrats should also keep an eye on Putin shill Tulsi Gabbard, because I’d put money down she’ll be announcing a third-party run once she gets trounced in the Democratic primary. As Jill Stein demonstrated, even a small bleed of voters on the left side of the Democratic equation can be catastrophic in the general.

  Every serious candidate, and the eventual nominee most particularly, needs to keep the house in order, and that starts with reminding every Democratic also-ran that defeating Trump isn’t just the top job, it’s the only job. The Democratic donor class is split at the moment among the top-tier candidates, but they have a vital role to play in patching the party together after a winner emerges. These moneyed powerhouses need to tell the wannabe candidates that they’re going to have another chance to run someday, but unless they get out of the race quietly, play nice, and work hard for the ticket, all hell will befall them.

  Scenes from a Trump Focus Group

  MODERATOR: Finally, I’d like to ask the group why it is you stick with Donald Trump. We’ve talked about the damage he’s done to the economy here in ■■■■■■■■ with the trade war. We’ve talked about how he isn’t truthful. We’ve talked about the broken promise
s. We’ve talked about his…

  CARL (white, 60): He’s just like us.

  MODERATOR (a note of sarcasm): You mean you’re a lunatic with four bankruptcies, three wives, and an itchy Twitter finger?

  (Silence.)

  MODERATOR: I apologize. I wasn’t referring to you, sir. I was speaking of—

  CARL (angry): You blasphemed the God-Emperor.

  MARCY (whispers): Heretic.

  KAREN: Heretic.

  ALL: Heretic! MAGA!

  MODERATOR: If we could just…

  (At this point, the lights flicker briefly and one of the focus-group participants locks the door.)

  YOU’LL GET OBAMA’S MINORITY TURNOUT

  In the 2016 presidential election, there was a 1.1 percent decrease in the total number of votes cast by African Americans and a 4.5 percent decrease in black turnout as compared to 2012. Seems trivial, doesn’t it? Just 1.1? 4.5? Hardly.

  Those numbers were a cataclysmic drop-off in African American voters and cost Hillary Clinton the election. Hillary won 88 percent of the African American vote compared to Barack Obama’s 93 percent. In a counterfactual alternate history of our times, if major African American population centers in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia had turned out for Hillary even at 90 percent, she may well have offset Trump’s Electoral College edge.

  It didn’t help that Hillary Clinton is the whitest, most schoolmarmish person in America, and that African Americans were never going to peg the needle for her as they did for two terms of Obama. Her campaign still, fatally, assumed both in their top-level political calculus and their voter models that Clinton would enjoy the same support.