For 30 minutes prior to last night's self-destructive GOP debate, I watched Chris Matthews destroy Bernie Sanders in a "Hardball" college-tour interview.
I felt nothing but pity for Sanders. This was the first interview I have seen in which Bernie's interlocutor applied a withering reality-check to the candidate's "political revolution" of so much proffered appeal. He will do this and he will do that, said Bernie; he will clean out Washington's filthy stable of corrupt money, he will guarantee every American healthcare, he'll provide free college education, he'll tax the plutocrats as plutocrats should be taxed, he will, in brief, usher in a progressive Elysium.
And so it went, for half of a half-hour. The other half consisted of the MSNBC host's returns to Earth. Yes, yes, that's all very nice, countered Matthews repeatedly. But how do you actually accomplish it? — any of it? — he persisted. And against all of Matthews's countering came Sanders's whimsical universe of a magical, starlit political revolution.
Through People Power, said Sanders; by amassing We the People against the forces of Washington wickedness. One mustn't negotiate with Mitch McConnell, said Sanders; no, no, one must gather the forces of virtue outside of Sen. McConnell's marbled institution, whereupon said virtuous forces demand that he do the virtuous thing. One relentlessly directs populist-progressive pressure against the wicked, the corrupt, the, uh, popularly elected of differing sentiments, said Sanders — though he omitted that last part.
The half-hour look on Matthews's face was to be cherished, capturing, as it did, the stunned bewilderment of all still residing on the planet. Mitch McConnell as well as House Freedom Caucusers are rather unlikely to bow to populist-progressive hordes, observed Matthews, especially seeing how McConnell & Co. will be reelected to ignore them. What else in heaven's name is a red-state senator or some U.S. representative from the ill-educated swamps of Mississippi to do? In their elected chambers, each represents admittedly aggravating but nonetheless democratically valid positions. And there's not a damn thing that a President Sanders could do to move them from those positions. Nothing.
That is quite literally the other side of Sanders's political revolution: The other side gets a vote. Yet Sanders's "We the People" routine was blindly dismissive of Matthews's "We Those Other People" argument. Time and again Sanders simply came back to the intoxicated whimsy of an all-powerful progressive movement — one shattering every dim bulb in its determined path.
In the face of Matthews's remorseless prosecution and grilling realities, there were moments — visible moments — when Sanders seemed to realize that his jig was up, and he was momentarily left wordless. In the secular hell of temporal congressional politics, legitimately elected counterrevolutionary populists wouldn't give a flying fuck what Sanders's political revolutionaries were demanding; what's more, the latter herd would soon thin and scatter in profound disappointment. It was, they would realize, all a mirage, a false promise of revolutionary change in a nonrevolutionary nation. But Sanders would gather himself in each moment of self-gotcha and robotically relaunch Rubiolike into yet another fanciful seminar on People Power.
I genuinely pitied the man. There's a prodigious difference between dreaming and working for change — a difference that our greatest presidents, from Lincoln to FDR to Obama, learned early and learned well. Bernie Sanders? At the age of 74, he's still seated at the head of a bootless graduate seminar on utopian politics — misleading the pitifully naive.