I’m baffled by the amount of energy going into whitewashing the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Donna Brazile said something-something-something, and we’ve got both the professional and amateur partisan Democratic punditry parsing it six ways to Sunday to attempt to discredit it and anyone who believes her, apparently including Elizabeth Warren, one of our very few national politicians who is broadly popular among Democratic voters. Whatever.
In professional wrestling, which everyone knows is scripted, there’s something called kayfabe, which — and I’ll spare you the carny etymology — amounts to strictly pretending that it’s real, even during one’s off hours. It’s part of the schtick, and the audience knows it, and everyone has a good time with their soap opera of toxic masculinity. There are any number of surprisingly large Wikipedia-like fan websites cataloging every aspect of the business, just like there are for Trekkies and Star Wars fans, and no one mistakes it for reality. Everyone’s in on the joke. The wrestlers know it, their incredibly wealthy management companies know it, and the fans know it. But everyone from the executives to the fans plays their assigned roles during the matches.
Politics has a lot in common with professional wrestling. The difference between them is that politics has real world consequences, and failing to recognize that distinction is deadly dangerous. It doesn’t matter who “wins” the annual world wrestling championship. Who we elect, on the other hand, is a matter of life and death for an awful lot of people. So let’s cut the kayfabe.
Are Donna Brazile’s charges accurate? Depends on who you ask. The DNC cheerleading squad will assure you that they have been “debunked”. The Sanders faction seems to be taking them as unvarnished truth. More objective observers will (correctly) point out that there’s a lot that’s open to interpretation. But it doesn’t matter.
It was obvious at the time that the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. This was acknowledged by Kos himself and any number of front-pagers who, while stalwart Clinton supporters, were quite happy to launch frequent rants about what a shitty human being DWS was. Even after Kos’ 180-degree about-face on Clinton herself, who went from being a race-baiting career apparatchik in 2008 to the second coming of the American left in 2016. Even the gate-crasher turned gate-keeper couldn’t swallow the DNC’s ham-handed manipulation of the primaries. Hippies got a break from the usual punching for daily Two Minutes’ Hate piling on of DWS.
It was obvious at the time that DailyKos was crowding the DNC for space in the same Clinton tank. There was an unprecedented official end to debate on the primaries well before they were over. Front-pagers spouted the same weird “preparedness” party line that the campaign was hammering. Opposition to Clinton’s candidacy was met with coordinated ad hominem attacks that ranged from (mostly) unjustified charges of misogyny to really bizarre claims that anyone who supported Sanders was a racist because Clinton was supported by a majority of African-American women. And it went downhill from there.
I don’t know if any money changed hands to arrange this degree of conformity with the party line and unexplained total changes of opinion, and we’ll probably never know — DailyKos is a private, for-profit business and Citizens United benefits Democratic politicians just as much as it benefits Republican politicians — but considering the possibility doesn’t make you paranoid. American presidential campaigns involve billions-with-a-b of dollars, and each new one breaks all the records of the previous ones. Everyone has a price, and as much as we’d like to think we’re the exception, seven or eight digits turns more heads than not.
The DNC and the Clinton presidential campaign don’t even have the fig leaf of political “journalism” to hide behind. Campaigns run on money, and parties operate on networks of favors and loyalty and still more money. If the famously well-connected Clinton faction could call in favors to satisfy Hillary Clinton’s lifelong ambition to be president, they would, and did. Democratic politicians with a whole lot more daylight between them and HRC than between her and Barack Obama dutifully trotted out endorsements while still spending their days in Congress pushing policies Clinton publicly disavowed.
This isn’t news, it’s not shocking, and it’s not open to serious dispute. It’s politics in a country where a handful of billionaires and corporations wield more power than its entire citizenry. Everyone knows it, and no one is surprised. Whether or not Brazile’s claims are overstated, we all spent most of 2016 watching the DNC. Why the insistence on kayfabe? Hillary Clinton won’t run again, nor will the six-digit sums she gets for giving pep talks to banking executives diminish, and it’s frankly kind of amusing watching the competition between her and Barack Obama for the largest paycheck on the financial industry lecture circuit. They’ll be making bank on book deals for the rest of their lives, no matter what is said about them on fundraising sites disguised as independent political blogs.
There are good, honest, dedicated Democratic politicians, and virtually no good, honest, dedicated Republican politicians. And we’ll keep showing up at the polls, holding our noses if necessary, to vote for the lesser evil. But if we expect anything to actually get better, pretending that there isn’t widespread corruption in the national party (and a great many state parties) isn’t going to help. Pretending that our side’s national politicians aren’t almost entirely multi-millionaires whose business is pleasing even richer donors isn’t going to help. Pretending that our party is good because it’s the lesser evil isn’t going to help.
And if you want things to actually get worse, then insulting the intelligence of millions of Democratic voters by telling us that we didn’t see what we all saw quite clearly — that the national party wanted Hillary Clinton to win and worked to that end — is a great way to get people to stay home. Being reality-based precludes splitting hairs over how rigged something has to be to warrant that particular word. It precludes pretending that all Democratic politicians are virtuous beyond question.
And telling people that they are undermining the party by honestly discussing the real world? That’s asinine. Randy “Macho Man” Savage won the WWF championship in 1988 because that’s what the WWF decided to make happen. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 because that’s what the DNC decided to make happen. Breaking kayfabe on camera is bad form. Not acknowledging it off camera is just silly.