Yakkin’ About The Election

by Jonathan M. Katz and Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos:  Okay, so… I wanted to talk about the Washington Post debacle, and the matter of endorsement. As you know we decided not to endorse, at Flaming Hydra, and in our conversations I got the sense that there are a lot of people who are voting for Harris who want to do so quietly, because they’re so ashamed of and so furious about her foreign policy. And there is also some amount of just hoping against hope for a chance to finally push the Democrats to the left.

JK:  Right.

MB:  I gotta say, I’ve been fighting for that my whole entire life, for Democrats who would govern from the left. And we were talking earlier about how I'm so anciently old I paid 35 cents for lunch in elementary school (“chopped steak on mashed potatoes,” I remember like it was yesterday, it came with a carton of milk—chocolate milk, if you wanted.)

JK:  No, I’m the same. I think the only Democratic president I’ve voted for that I was like, “I actually feel really good about this,” was—and you know what I’m going to say—Obama in ’08. Right?

MB:  And look what happened.

JK:  Yeah. And then in ’12, I was like, “Okay, I’m back to voting for him in the same way that I voted for the others.”

MB:  Yes, yes. Purely to prevent worse things.

JK:  Again.

MB:  In ’08… it’s so sad to remember. I’d volunteered in Nevada for the last six weeks of the campaign and then, we’re all at the Rio Hotel to watch the returns and when they called it for Nevada—I’ve never in my life been among people so happy. In this intoxication of hope, of a chance for things to finally get better. People weeping, people on each other’s shoulders, running around screaming, strangers embracing.

And four months later it became limpidly clear that nothing was going to change, there was going to be no accountability and he was not going to put a single one of these criminals, these bankers, the butchers of Abu Ghraib, nobody was going to jail for anything. And it was like, What is happening in this world? All that, and for what?

JK:  Exactly.

MB:  I was so—ugh, I’m still—as you can see, I haven’t gotten over it one teeny tiny bit.

JK:  On election night in 2008—I was living in Haiti at the time, and I went to this spot in Pétion-Ville called La Reserve. It was mostly like, kind of upper-ish class Haitians, people from the neighborhood and a number of foreigners. And everyone was so excited. I was there with a friend from France, and another friend from Germany; the German friend sadly ended up dying in the earthquake, just over a year after that.

MB:  Oh, no.

JK:  And the French friend, going in, said, “Jamais, your country will never vote for a Black man.” And I said, “I don’t think you’re right. I think he’s actually going to win this election.”

Then they began to call each state, like right in the beginning, when they’re saying, “We can now project that the state of Massachusetts will go to Barack Obama.” And, I mean, the whole crowd’s going crazy. And I was like, well… wait a second, now. But then… oh, it was great. You know, we thought, this is amazing. We’re gonna turn the page from the Bush years. The War on Terror will be over. We’re gonna close Guantánamo. And yeah, you know, the bankers are going to go to jail.

MB:  Oh, god.

JK:  We’re not gonna be invading countries anymore.

But like other than that, you know. I didn’t want to vote for Hillary fucking Clinton in 2016. Are you fucking kidding me?

MB:  It was horrible, horrible.

JK:  When she would come to Haiti, even before the earthquake, I would often be following her around, and—she was a piece of shit to Haiti. I mean, not in the way that people have ginned up, I don’t think she personally robbed Haiti, or like enslaved Haitian children, no—none of that’s true, but like—just bog-standard, shitty U.S. foreign policy.

Then in 2016 when it became very clear that she was gonna be the candidiate I was like, goddamit, I don’t wanna fucking have to vote for her, but I do, I have to, because otherwise—the fucking fascist! Who I was like clocking as a fascist in like, late 2015.

MB:  Long before that. What year was it that it came out that he keeps like, a Hitler book on his nightstand?

JK:  Yeah, Hitler’s speeches, yeah.

[I looked this up after: it was in a 1990 Vanity Fair interview with Ivana Trump.]

JK:  It’s hard for the youths to understand. I was at this writing retreat recently in Greece, and a very young person, like early 20s, was one of the people in my cohort. I don’t think that they’re gonna necessarily go vote for Trump, but they certainly didn’t understand how abnormal he is in American politics—or rather, what a signal change in American politics his time is. Also, I’ve seen people say, online, things like, “Well, but all politicians talk that way.” But they didn’t use to.

From that initial speech where he was saying “Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, and some of them are good people, and we’re gonna build the wall.” It was crazy. It was absolutely batshit, fucking insane.

MB:  Unhinged shit. Idiocracy levels of senselessness. And people were falling all over themselves trying to dignify this.

JK:  I know it’s so banal to even talk about that anymore.

MB:  Your 20-something-year-old was like, what? 16 years old then, 14 or whatever, they don’t know anything. They’re only thinking about like, I don’t know, NSYNC, or something, One Direction…few kids that age understand that this is gonna have an impact on your life.

JK:  In 2016, I was in all these online fights with mainstream political journalists, former colleagues of mine from Congressional Quarterly, AP, things like that. And I was like, “This guy’s a fucking fascist.” Like definitionally, he’s a fascist. He is an ultranationalist. Blood and Soil.

MB:  It’s pure Theweleit, tapping into this aggrieved male energy. You’ve created a society predicated on notions of success that are Darwinian, you prevail and you get your pick of the women and a lot of fast cars, like Tony Stark notions of power and success. It’s all connected, a whole dramatic narrative constructed on the basis of authoritarian power, that is what they are participating in.

And the women are no better, they are deliberately giving up their autonomy so they can feel like pampered pets, and protected by the big strong man, and everybody else can get fucked.

JK:  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Robert Paxton talks about the politics of resentment, that’s been his entire thing. He writes in The Anatomy of Fascism that fascism is,

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

JK:  Basically we’ve got all but the external expansion part, at the moment.

MB:  I think you could make the case that his affiliation with Putin, who is an expansionist, totally nods in that direction.

JK:  Anybody working on a theory of fascism in Europe, like, obviously, has to take as their starting point, Italy and Germany, both of whom embarked on expansionist campaigns. But you know, you read somebody like Federico Finchelstein, talking about fascism in Latin America, fascism in the Middle East—Saddam Hussein does try to expand into Kuwait, but for Pinochet, there’s nowhere to expand to.

MB:  Nowhere to go that you would want. Nothing to grab.

JK:  So I don’t think that’s a key piece of it. But in the case of the United States, we already have so much territory. And so… what Trump does talk about is internal expansion. Taking public lands, drill baby drill, you know, and then also part of the ethnic cleansing—he wants Lebensraum. He and JD Vance, that’s literally their solution to the housing crisis, is to take the homes of people who we don’t like, who “shouldn’t be here,” disfavored ethnic groups, to take the homes of “the illegals” and give them to “Americans.” Take their jobs, and give them to Americans.

It’s spazio vitale. It’s Lebensraum.

MB:  And to say all this and then to be treated in the newspaper as if they were ordinary politicians, when they are bragging that they intend to commit literal crimes against people who were born in the United States? I would’ve told you even ten years ago that it would be in twenty-foot-tall type on the front of every newspaper: THIS IS FASCISM. STOP THESE PEOPLE. And it’s not there.

JK:  The main advantage of identifying it as such is that it’s useful in a predictive capacity. It tells you that this is what they are going to do. It tells you that they’re going to use violence in order to stay in power.

And what happened? After January 6, how could you have any doubt in your mind?

For all of the fucking bullshit that Americans have done around the world, and in America, right? Go back to the Redeemer period at the end of Reconstruction: there was a coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. There was Wade Hampton, there were a bunch of autogolpe-style elections, keeping power through violence.

That tradition hasn’t existed in the States for a long time and it’s never happened in federal politics.

MB:  Well. That’s what happened in 2000, man, the Brooks Brothers Riot was exactly that.

JK:  Right… the Brooks Brothers riot, if I had to guess, would be the model for the mini-January-Sixes that I think we’re gonna see this year.

MB:  Those Republicans were never called out for sabotaging democracy. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace was the comms director for Bush II, and she was never once called to account for this, to my knowledge. The Cheneys emerged from it scot-free.

(To say nothing of the three members of the Bush 2000 legal team now on the Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice.)

At one time the U.S. was leading pro-democracy institutions and initiatives all over the world. The U.S. government, imperfect as it was, was supposed to be improving on a model for things to get better, here and elsewhere, and then Obama absolutely ruined that chance by not ensuring accountability for the crimes committed in the administration of Bush II.

Now he’s out there with his folksy charm, and pretending that everything—I don’t even know, how did we even get to this point?

JK:  The Democrats see a clear throughline to Kamala Harris here, campaigning with Liz Cheney and celebrating the-the Dick Cheney endorsement. He very much was a co-conspirator in [the selection of Bush II].

MB:  He’s a fucking war criminal!

JK:  Oh. Besides that, yes. Though I don’t agree with people who think that this indicates that she’s going to follow Dick Cheney’s foreign policy.

MB:  No, no.

JK:  Maybe I’m being pedantic, but it is fully understandable to ask, now that the U.S. is in a supporting financing role for wars in both Ukraine and Gaza, and now Lebanon, and now also Iran. But there’s a key distinction. Maybe I’m just telling myself fairytales—

MB:  No, you’re not. You’re 100 percent right. And here’s why: There has to be a way back for these people, terrible as they are—and they are, and they’ve been terrible all the time—they’re like cornered rats, at this point.

If you tell them explicitly that they will be cast out forever, if you tell them y’all are fascists and you are going to stand in the corner in a dunce cap for the duration, you are just going to frighten and embolden them. Instead you could say: Follow laws, support this administration, and we’ll see.

The inclusion of the Cheneys I think was intended to do two things. One, make it impossible for anybody to accuse Harris of being a commie libtard. Two, assure those Republicans who are like pretty crazy, but not entirely, irredeemably crazy, that there might be a way back for them, in government.

JK:  Part of it is that there’s this sort of intra-Republican beef between the Trump Republicans and the Bush Republicans. This is part of the reason that I’m so into pedantry, is that the details matter… It’s not that Bush Republicans are good, or even really better than the Trump Republicans, but they’re different, and they hate each other.

MB:  There’s a Kremlinology to it, for sure.

JK:  Exactly. For whatever reason, because of her father, or because of whatever, she found herself in the out-group. And there had been talk... she was once thought to be considering a run for president.

MB:  There might have been some exploratory something or other. In 2021 Maureen Dowd called her “a chip off the old block who was once talked about… as someone who could be the first woman president.” Before the J6 Committee I bet they thought they’d be able to peel off enough halfway sane Republicans—

JK:  That’s exactly what it was. Yeah. I wrote in my newsletter: “In internet fandom terms, she’s doing fanfiction or, if you prefer, a retcon. Broadcasting to the nation a version of the Republican Party in which good, brave, attractive members of the in-group all stood up to the craven, awkward, cranky loser Donald Trump on January 6 and protected the Constitution.”

That didn’t really happen, but she was trying to pretend like it had.

MB:  I mean, it’s a good narrative. And she did actually participate in the J6 Committee, which... whatever else, that really was a good thing.

JK:  Yeah. We would be better off if there was a Cheney/Kinzinger ticket going up against Biden or whatever right now.

I’ve been on like two tracks my whole life: an increasing and constant re-radicalization against American empire, against the crimes of American foreign policy especially. And then also seeing the rising wave of authoritarianism within the Republican party, which has been going since I could vote. The first election I voted in was 2000, the first election that I was eligible.

I was 20. I wrote an endorsement of Al Gore, and I’m pretty sure Tommy Craggs was part of that.

MB:  Where were you at school?

JK:  At Northwestern.

It was basically about how Al Gore—he’s better on the environment. Better on not trying to cut Social Security and Medicare—but other than that, not a whole lot. 

MB:  I don’t know about that. Very different results, maybe.

JK:  Do you remember the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush? But you could see what was coming. We wrote at the time—I looked this back up recently: “The only flaw more terrifying than Bush's utter lack of experience, ignorance of domestic and foreign issues and phenomenal lack of qualifications is the callous disregard for human life he has displayed through his affection for the death penalty and through his tragic records on poverty and pollution as governor of Texas.”

And then he stole the election.

And then Trump shows up in 2016 and you know, again, the structures of the two-party system are what they are. They’ve been that way since the first election in which George Washington wasn’t participating. It’s very hard to get around, and this has been true my entire life.

My 2013 book on the Haiti earthquake is unsparing of Hillary Clinton, so during the campaign her opponents were all coming to me and clamoring, “Give us this ammunition against her.” Republicans, Leftists, everyone. I had done a big profile about Bill and Hillary called “The King & Queen of Haiti” in Politico in 2015. I ran down all the rumors, the conspiracy theories, all of this bullshit.

That election [a year later] was the first time I indicated in public who I’d be voting for, because wrong conclusions were drawn from my intense criticism of Hillary Clinton. A lot of people were like “You know, Katz is a fucking neoliberal shill and he loves the Clintons and he loves the Democrats.” And I was like, none of that. None of that.

I saw what Trump was like four, five years before January 6. I saw what he was and I’m telling you what he is now, and it’s worse.

People can do what they want, but Trump will attempt to steal the election. And just to put it out there, like every piece of evidence that could be marshaled to show that he didn’t win, should be. Because things will get much worse under him.

MB:  I agree with that. We live in really ugly times. It’s not good. It’s hard to make these calculations, but for sure with the tiny crumb of power that you have, fucking throw your body upon the wheel, man.

JK:  In May I saw pro-Palestinian protestors slammed to the ground and beaten with nightsticks and maced, and with weapons pointed at them. That happened under a Democratic president, Republican governor and a very liberal university president. How are you going to make the case to people who have literally been body-slammed by heavily armed police for peacefully expressing their views on U.S. foreign policy. How are you gonna make the case to them that they have to vote against fascism?

The answer is that fascism still has to be fought and it has to be redressed, and people have to be held accountable. Because otherwise, it can get worse and it will get worse.

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