In the course of Bernie Sanders’ pretty decisive win in the Nevada caucuses, I’d decided to stay home and watch MSNBC, since I had already done early voting the week before. What I saw was pretty revelatory, given that MSNBC is perceived to be the Democrat channel in the same way that Fox News is the Republican channel. (Which is why I and others often call it ‘MSDNC.’)
First, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville told Nicole Wallace, “If you’re voting for (Sanders) because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool … And if people are appraised of this, and they know that, and they want to do it as Democrats, that’s their own business. But I don’t think they have all the facts that they need before they make this judgment going forward.”
Harsh as that was, that wasn’t the network’s biggest own-goal news story. A little bit later, national anchor Brian Williams interviewed MSNBC’s elder statesman Chris Matthews to get his take, and he said, “I’m reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over,’” Matthews said. “And Churchill says, ‘How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’”
Such was the reaction to this comparison – in which Matthews indirectly compared Sanders’ campaign to the Nazi regime that ended up killing so many of Sanders’ European Jewish relatives – that Matthews (or a network superior) was obliged to open Hardball Monday the 24th by saying, “I was wrong to refer to an event from the last days, or actually the first days, of World War II.” And then he brought on New York City’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio, to explain his staunch support for Bernie’s left-wing policies.
Now if you’ve been paying attention, Chris Matthews, an old-school, anti-communist, Kennedy liberal, is no big fan of Sanders. Not too long before this, Matthews was part of post-debate commentary in New Hampshire, and told other panelists, “I remember the Cold War … I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?” Also if you’ve been paying attention for years longer, Matthews’ foot-in-mouth speaking style is not limited to calling the 1940 campaign the “last days” of World War II. I mean, given how much he trips over facts and gets people’s names wrong, the fact that he can score points on people like Gary Johnson and Donald Trump is that much more remarkable. He’s like the Columbo of political TV. Either that or his success says a lot more about the qualities of the political elite that he interviews.
And as super-liberal as MSNBC is perceived to be, Matthews is simply the standard. On one side you’ve got Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace and Never Trump Republican pundits like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin who only have common cause with the liberals because they still believe in a definition of conservatism prior to “whatever Trump says, goes.” Then you’ve got Matthews, the middle-brow elder. Then you’ve got Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow and a few other “progressives” who are certainly more leftist than Matthews but no socialist’s idea of a socialist. Most of the real political extremists, like Melissa Harris-Perry, Cenk Uygur and the famous Keith Olbermann, are long gone due to backstage squabbles. So while Matthews is not entirely representative of MSNBC opinion, his senior status makes him a leading indicator of where the network is on Bernie.
Here’s the thing, Matthews’ blockhead insensitivity drew attention by invoking the Holocaust (however accidentally) but I sort of see his point. It just wasn’t the one he was intending to make. Mind you, what I’m about to say is NOT intended as a defense of Matthews. It’s just my take on the comparison.
If you’re a World War II buff, like I am, you can acknowledge the skill and success of the German military without being a fan of the Nazis. When Matthews made his remark about 1940, and Churchill’s surprise that France lost so completely when they had “the greatest army in Europe,” there was a right to be surprised. While France had about half Germany’s population, they still had 5 million men under arms, with about 2,240,000, or 104 divisions, in the north. They were backed up by the Dutch and Belgian armies (over a million men) and the British Expeditionary Force with over 1.5 million men. Germany had about 3 million men available for the Western Front. It actually had less vehicles and heavy tanks than the French army. What they had, and the Allies did not, was a willingness to try a new strategy rather than assuming they would win the same way they did last time – because for one thing, Germany didn’t win the last war, but the Allies eventually did with trench warfare and attrition. And being fundamentally lacking in imagination, the Allies neither adapted to current conditions nor anticipated that an enemy which had every incentive NOT to repeat a losing strategy would in fact refuse to do so.
“In March 1940, less than two months before the German surprise invasion, Parliamentary Army Committee member Pierre-Charles Taittinger led a parliamentary delegation to inspect the defenses in Sedan, a city for whose defense General Huntziger was responsible. Taittinger prophetically reported, “In this region, we are entirely too much taken with the idea that the Ardennes woods and the Meuse River will shield Sedan and we assign entirely too much significance e to these natural obstacles. The defenses in this sector are rudimentary.” He wrote that he “trembled” at the thought the Germans might attack there. General Huntziger dismissed Taittinger’s warning entirely.
“The chief comptroller of the Army asked General Huntziger if he put any stock in Taittinger’s report and the general replied, “Certainly not, the Germans are dead afraid of attacking.” On May 9, less than twenty-four hours before the invasion, Huntziger told his troops that “the German preparations which you have observed are only an exercise. The Germans are not crazy enough to take the additional risk of facing twenty-seven Belgian divisions”—though, to be fair, the confidence of the French High Command was not entirely without justification.” https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/the-super-simple-reason-nazi-germany-crushed-france-during-19484
If you are a student of history, which I guess Matthews takes himself to be, you know what happened next. Using a repeatedly-modified plan from rising general Erich von Manstein, Germany first attacked Holland and Belgium, leading the British and French to believe this territory was the main thrust of the attack, as it was in 1914. They advanced and Germany, taking a risk, forced motorized units through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes, bypassing both the French fortifications on Germany’s border and the main Allied armies to the north. While those armies engaged the Germans in Belgium, German armor units blitzed out from the breakthrough point and cut the coalition off from Paris, eventually isolating them from their supply lines, taking Brussels and devouring Allied units piecemeal, which led to the Dunkirk evacuation of remaining Allied forces and shortly thereafter, the fall of Paris. History also records the lack of leadership and initiative on the other side, one French staff officer describing a general at headquarters, “in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision which he was incapable of taking.”
Not unlike Hillary Clinton’s people in fall 2016, actually.
What did Sanders do that he didn’t do last time? Well, for one thing, he didn’t have one opponent with the entire Democratic establishment behind him, which is one reason Matthews’ reference is not the best. But Sanders did know he needed organization and leadership, based on the hard fight he had in Nevada last time. And he had that. I can tell you from my own experience at the 2016 caucus, the 2016 Clark County Democratic convention, and my volunteer work for Sanders leading up to the caucus this year, that Sanders’ people had numbers, they had a schedule, they had their own apps to keep track of who they recruited. They followed up on the people they contacted (including me). I volunteered largely because I knew they had that level of organization in 2016, and I didn’t see anybody else in Nevada who had that kind of commitment. In many ways, it’s as simple as that. The main thing I’ve heard from various news sources in regard to the caucus is all the Hispanic voters telling reporters that they voted Bernie because he was the only candidate doing ads in Spanish and raising his profile. I don’t really follow Hispanic media in Las Vegas, but I know it exists, and I know it’s huge. This is one thing that the Sanders people tried to do in 2016 but didn’t really succeed at until now. Meanwhile the same experts who assumed that non-white people were not sympathetic to Sanders took it for granted that those votes would go to Joe Biden. Just as they took a lot of stuff for granted in 2016.
Insofar as the comparison to World War II applies, it’s that the “good guys” used tactics that were already flawed at the time without examining how things had changed, whereas the “bad guys” were adaptive and worked in directions that their opponent didn’t anticipate. It was assumed for instance that it would be a strike against Sanders when the Culinary Union refused to endorse him on the grounds that Medicare for All would take away their healthcare plans. However, exit interviews with union workers indicated that many members were thinking of friends and relatives who don’t have their coverage or would lose it if they lost their jobs. And again: it is that much more obvious in retrospect what a colossal strategic error it was for Mike Bloomberg to enter the debates before actually contesting a state race, because not only were his own negatives used against him in the Las Vegas debate, in the process everyone concentrated on Bloomberg and not Sanders, making it that much less likely that there will be a strong alternative to him in the contests to come. And in the contests where Bloomberg is competing, he is coming off a public humiliation without actually getting any votes.
If we continue the Nazi comparison, Western civilization was eventually saved when Nazi Germany ran up against Soviet Russia and was defeated. So for mainstream liberals like Matthews to save their party from socialism, they have to hope that Sanders is eventually defeated by Donald Trump. Which, given that Trump is Vladimir Putin’s bitch, fits the analogy.
I mean, at another point on Saturday, Matthews had a panel where he posed the question, “I’m wondering if the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President? I mean, he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party,” Matthews continued. “Maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in the Democrat that they like.” SURE. After all, Trump has outright said, “I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Maybe he’d let the Democrats survive as a party. Maybe not. Who knows? He might keep up appearances just to keep the liberals from being more scared of him than they are of Sanders. The Democrats might be allowed to survive, if only as the House Negroes of the Trump Plantation.
(Does that analogy offend you? GOOD! Now try not to justify it.)
But really, the problem with Matthews’ analogy isn’t that it doesn’t apply on some level, but that it isn’t the most immediate or relevant analogy to apply. The obvious similarity to Bernie Sanders’ current romp is not with Nazis in Europe, but with Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign. You know, where the incumbent party had an unpopular candidate that no one would run against because they had institutional backing, while the party out of power had everybody and his Mom running for president, and it was all they could do to get everyone on the same debate stage, and after a few months of that circus, people decided they liked the blunt-talking outsider who wasn’t in the party machine, and he ended up getting victory after victory, albeit by plurality, and where all the non-Trump candidates knew that they had to bow out and unite behind a designated NotTrump, and for various self-centered reasons, all of them refused to do so. And eventually, after talking a big game about populism and “the real America”, all the technocrats and policy wonks and shills of billionaires in the Republican Party had to walk in line behind the radical who actually took all that stuff seriously, and from then on they had to go along with it even if they didn’t agree. And if liberals want the White House back as desperately as conservatives did, they might have to do the same thing.
Maybe that’s why they’re so scared.