The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [63]
“People say, ‘Let’s end the war right now,’” he said. “Okay, fine. How?”
“Well,” said Sirota, “the Washington Post this morning is reporting that the new supplemental is going to have the timeline taken out, or reduced to a nonbinding, advisory timeline.” He paused. “They’re apparently doing this because conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson are threatening to not vote for any bill that has a timeline in it. Let me ask you this—can your side play a similar role in these proceedings? Or does the leadership only listen to the Ben Nelsons of the world?”
Sanders sighed. “That’s a difficult question,” he said. “I suppose you have to take it on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, you don’t want the president to get a great victory, but on the other hand you don’t always want to be on the losing end—”
“Let me put it to you another way,” interrupted Sirota. “In general, does the leadership listen to the conservatives like Nelson much more than people like you? Is there a way to play it like he plays it?”
Sanders looked grimly over at Sirota.
“Look, I’ve been here three and a half months,” he sighed. “I like Harry Reid. I think sometimes you have to put yourself in his shoes. Sure, you can say to the Ben Nelsons, ‘Ben, we don’t want you to be in the coalition anymore.’ And then what? You walk over to Mitch McConnell and say, Congratulations, you’re the new majority leader. That’s the reality of the situation. You want to do that? We can do that tomorrow.”
“But—”
“So given that reality, what do you do? What do you do?”
The room fell silent. I looked down at my notebook. The word “reality” had been written about fifty times in the past hour. Every time he used the word “reality,” it seemed, a little life went out of the room. Suddenly I was confused about something.
“Senator,” I said, “isn’t there a chance this whole thing could blow up in the faces of the Democrats? I mean, if they were planning on compromising all along, if they were always going to cave after the veto, then won’t it look like they were just playing politics with funding for the troops this whole time? If you were always going to compromise in the end, isn’t it fair to ask—what was this?”
Sanders sighed again.
“That’s a good question,” he said.
In the end the whole drama of the Democrat-controlled Congress publicly musing over whether or not to fund the war turned out to be a classic Washington mutual masturbation session, a prolonged exercise in favor trading and power maintenance that had as little to do with actually serving the desires of the electing public as a Martian zoning hearing would have. The “reality” narrative that even an honest guy like Bernie Sanders has to play along with to survive turns out to be no more rational or grounded in fact than the conspiracy narrative sustaining the 9/11 Truth Movement—in both cases you have a group of people whose community is defined by its members’ common deference to a vast range of plainly bogus assumptions. Put five people who believe the Twin Towers were mined together in a room, and you have a 9/11 Truther meeting; put together five people who think they won’t be able to golf in Scotland anymore if they vote “against the troops,” and you have a caucus of Democratic senators. The fact that the internal logic—the “reality”—of congressional procedure has drifted so far from the needs and expectations of voters is highly convenient, of course, for the entrenched bureaucratic class in Washington; once you’ve created a situation where elected officials feel like