David Parsons and Matt Christman Talk about Hell World

This is an edited segment of episode 50 of The Nostalgia Trap, a podcast which was created and is hosted by David Parsons. Episode 50 features an informal interview/conversation with Matt Christman, one of the 3 original hosts of Chapo Trap House, released on October 16, 2016, just a few weeks before the Trump upset in the 2016 presidential election. This segment is roughly the last 15 minutes of the episode. I think it shows the dual mindset of many on the Left at that moment in time —at times prescient about the larger implications of the Donald Trump phenomenon, while at other times being circumspect or in denial about the possibility of his presidential victory.

https://youtu.be/59hcTK1GwGs

Edited and condensed for clarity.

DP Don’t you ever feel like, when you’re on Twitter, that we’re living in an odd apocalyptic moment?

MC Yes, incredibly so. To trace it back a bit, after 9/11, it was as if 9/11 the event punched a hole in reality and all of these dystopian modernist literary concepts just broke through and they took over the reality we thought we were living in. It’s like Pynchon and Don DeLillo just punched through and now we’re just living in them.

DP Yeah. Shows like Black Mirror that are focused on technology look at that aspect of it, but I feel technology is just expressing something even deeper of what’s coming out of human beings in this moment.

To me the fact that we’re lamenting Trump and Hillary right now, it feels like it’s happening too slowly. Sometime in 2013, I called it on Facebook that I think the next election will probably have candidates that are an MMA fighter and a hologram of Tupac. In other words I think the devolution is happening slower than I thought.

MC Yeah, well, we’re certainly there with the Republicans. We’re totally in the hyper-real state, the whole thing’s collapsed and that’s why it’s so surreal to watch them debate because you have someone who is still representing this absolutely doomed political establishment that has lost all credibility from everyone, right? No one believes in it, none of its tropes work, none of them have any effect, yet she’s still there, like this lone sentinel standing for this thing, you know? She’s the Japanese soldier in the cave 20 years after the war ended.

So she’s out there, she’s the face of it, she’s half of it, and it’s so asymmetrical, it’s so vertiginous, because he’s out there stomping around and it’s like, ok, this is where we are. He makes more sense, really, than she does.

DP Totally. We’re in the Robocop world and he’s the Robocop president.

MC Right. When he’s talking it makes sense. I understand the world — he represents the world I’m living in. And then they go to her and she says *Hillary voice* “Well I just wanna say that Donald does not represent all of the goodhearted Republicans who I’ve met.” And it’s like, you’re a dinosaur. Why aren’t you in black and white?

DP Yeah. Everyone made fun of the “Trumped up trickle-down economics” thing.

MC Oh God.

DP But what was crazy about that to me is what is it, like, 1989? It’s so fucking weird.

MC Exactly! And you know they had a goddamn whiteboard with 50 ideas on it at her headquarters, and they ended up circling it like, “Yes! Trumped-up trickle-down!”

DP That got vetted. That went through lots of writers.

MC And of course they were all ready for that to be a hashtag, and a T-shirt. Then everyone just laughed and moved on because we’re not living in that world anymore.

DP It’s beyond that the Democrats are out of touch. To me they’re so far gone they’re in reptile world. To say things like…A couple days ago they said they were going to reach out to millennials with Al Gore!

MC Because Al Gore cares about the environment.

DP I thought that was the funniest — I laughed and laughed. When I saw that, I really thought that, you know, obviously that has to be a clever parody account of some kind.

MC No, no. They are beyond parody at this point. When she said *Hillary voice* “I don’t know who invented Pokemon Go but I want them to invent Pokemon Go to the polls,” I thought to myself that this can’t be real.

DP Wow! I forgot that one.

MC And then just last week Tim Kaine was in Charlotte at a hip-hop station, at a radio station doing an interview, they were talking about rappers and he said “They call me Lil Kaine, not Lil Wayne.”

DP Whoa, easy Tim Kaine, easy. Jesus Christ. Well, it’s weird because I feel like the people that are listening to your show are people that are finally done with The Daily Show and all that shit. It’s fucking awful, it’s been awful for a long fucking time.

MC Yeah

DP I mean back into the Jon Stewart period, I include all of that. I hate all of it. But at the same time the Democrats don’t even do that shit. Like the joke that you just quoted that Tim Kaine told, that wouldn’t even make it on The Daily Show. You know what I mean? I hate their politics and I hate them, but I’m willing to admit that their joke crafting is a little better than “Trumped-up trickle down economics.”

MC Yeah. They think about it for a minute.

DP So why can’t they get some of The Daily Show writers in there? It’s insane.

MC They can’t because they are still committed to an idea that politics and entertainment are separate.

DP And there’s that self-righteous moral tone, like they’re all Atticus Finch.

MC Right. Exactly! It’s like “We’re going to speak to the American people.” And of course it’s very disingenuous because the Hollywood connection to the Democratic Party is incredibly intimate. They all go to Harvey Weinstein’s house and he says “I’ll tell you what you need to do.”

DP *Hillary voice* “I enjoyed the wonderful Steven Spielberg film ‘Lincoln’. I rented it on DVD.”

MC Right. Exactly. She had to say Spielberg. Couldn’t just say it was the movie Lincoln. She had to name check Spielberg, because she’s probably been at his house 50 times. But they have to maintain, as I’ve said on the show, kayfabe, that wrestling term. They have to maintain the false reality that says “we are serious politicians, we are not entertainers.”

DP They won’t play the game then.

MC Yeah, so to a degree, the jokes have to be terrible, and the zingers have to be kind of awful and cringe-inducing, because to do otherwise would be to let in the implication that this is entertainment, which they can’t do because they’re still committed to this extinct idea of politics.

DP Well that’s why I said MMA fighter and Tupac hologram because I think there is an in —do you think there is an entryway for someone that’s mastered the language of viral culture to take over in that way? Trump is kind of signaling that but he can’t do it because he’s so retrograde.

MC Well, Ross Douthat basically posited that in an article recently. He said, okay, yeah, you’re making fun of the Republicans but this can happen to the Democrats. But I don’t think that it will happen to the Democrats anytime soon because, as absolutely anachronistic as Hillary’s campaign feels, the Democratic Party is a more stable unit. It is a more stable coalition than the Republicans and so they were doomed, they were bound to crack up first.

DP Yeah.

MC Now that might change. We’ll see if the Bernie thing really coalesces into a genuine Left opposition within the Democratic Party, a genuine challenge to leadership. We’ll see — maybe, maybe not, I can’t tell you. But if that happens and you see real fractures, then maybe that’s when entertainment comes in. But for now the Democratic Party is stable enough that they can still breeze through, even though to watch them campaign is so hallucinatory and weird.

DP Yeah. And disturbing. Really truly disturbing. I teach, and my students, the ones who watch the debates, it’s truly sad to see the look on their faces. But it’s not like I remember a time when any of this shit was pure. My first presidential election was 1996, Clinton vs Dole, and even that was ugly. When I look back on it, it’s not Trump vs Hillary, but it’s as dark and fucked up, and if you know what’s going on during that era, it’s been corporate and shitty for a very long time.

MC Oh man, the ‘96 election was genuinely never close, it was always a laugh where Clinton led wire to wire. Dole was having to do these absurd stunts just to get people to pay attention. During the end of the campaign he did some insane 40-hour, week-long thing where he never stopped campaigning.

DP Right, Yeah.

MC Because everyone thought he was old and he wanted to show everyone he was still vital.

DP I thought you were going to say he put on a Velcro suit and they catapulted him up against a wall, like Letterman or something.

MC They might as well have. And then at the end of it, though, he fell off a dais.

DP Yeah. Oh yeah.

MC But the reason Dole was behind the whole time, and the reason he was resorting to stunts like that, and saying he was gonna give a 15% across the board tax cut, is that the Clintons had just stolen the Republican platform. That’s why.

DP Right. That makes a lot more sense now.

MC That’s one of the big reasons the Republicans hated Bill Clinton so much is that he was a goddamn plagiarist. He took away their issues.

DP He’s like “I’m into ending welfare and being tough on crime and building the power of big businesses.”

MC Yeah, and so when you look back at that, people joke about elections that don’t give you a real choice, but that is a really dark election in terms of seeing just an absolute bipartisan hegemonic mindset and policy positions that hurt the hell out of millions of people.

DP That was Clinton’s plan from the get go. We’re gonna win elections by stealing the Republican platform. It’s something that’s happened in American politics over and over again, you see that stuff getting absorbed.

MC Yeah, but traditionally it’s an insurgency, like when the populists melded with the Democrats.

DP I was thinking about McKinley and the 1896 election.

MC Yeah, but this is some horrible nightmare inversion of that where they say, okay, we’ll just take the reactionaries point of view. And that’s why the Clintons hate the Left so much. It’s because they have total contempt for them, because they have nowhere else to go. So they have them, they are a captive voting bloc. And so they can go as right as they want. Because their vision of the Democratic Party, and the reason that they’ve been doing so much to kiss Republican asses and try to disconnect Trump from Republicans, and say, you know, *Hillary voice* “Trump does not represent the Republicans I know,” and crowing for these (Republican defector) endorsements, is because it’s in line with their long-term strategy.

If the United States were a parliamentary system, as you would have in Europe, there would be four main parties. There would be a left…a social-democrat or left party, there would be a center-left, there would be a center-right, and then there would be a National Front. And the Clinton position, the Clinton long-term project since ‘92 is basically to take the leftmost three blocs, the three chunks other than the hard right, and making that one party, i.e., making the Democratic Party the party of the center-right, center-left, and the captive — nay, hostage — Left. The Left at the end that has no power, but can’t vote for anyone else because the only other alternative are literal Nazis. And this election has been a real chance for them to consolidate that, because the hope is that all of these embarrassed, suburban, well-to-do Republicans will eventually go to the Democrats, leaving just this rump of angry white men.

DP “Well I thought about my daughter and I voted for Hillary Clinton.” Yeah.

MC And then part of the reason they would be willing to do that is because she, and her wing of the party, will be happy to show them that they will have a hell of a lot more influence and control over the policy and over the direction than the Left will. And so if the Left is a completely neutered component of this broad coalition, that’s going to be attractive to people who are sick of having to defend Neanderthals. Because I think that the genie out of the bottle with the Republicans here is, we know for a fact that there are enough voters that will show up at the Republican primaries to elect somebody who will basically say the things they are thinking, who will unleash their id and just give them the spectacle of cathartic hatred. And that’s not going away. They’re not going to accept some milquetoast guy who wants to bring it back to tax rates. That’s not going to work. Because now that people know that that’s an option, that’s always going to be the spot, that’s always going to be where the energy and the heat is.

DP Yeah. So what you’re saying is they are isolating and strengthening politically the National Front edge by consolidating all the other parts into a mono-party.

MC Yeah. And so the pressure on the respectable Republicans is going to be, do I basically surrender to these guys the way the Rockefeller Republicans surrendered to the Goldwater guys a generation earlier and to the Reagan guys a generation earlier, or do I go to the Democrats? And either way, some of them will just say fuck it and end up being the way that I said the moderate republicans made peace with Reaganism, or they’re going to split, and either way you’re going to end up with this broad Democratic Party that’s realistically run by the center-right, and then just a howlingly racist chunk of aggrieved white people.

DP Which is, you know, a nice little political set up to have when we’re heading towards world war.

MC Yeah. It’s great. It’s awesome. And climate collapse. These are really good dynamics to have when you have no left alternative.

DP Yeah, none of which is being discussed at all. We’re literally talking about Trump grabbing women’s pussies for the last few weeks now.

MC Yeah. That’s it.

DP So it’s all come down to personality. We’re at a really repulsive and dangerous political moment in America, and you and your compatriots on Chapo Trap House do such a wonderful job of describing it. I wanted to thank you on behalf of the people who listen to the show and thank you for joining.

MC Thank you very much this was a lot of fun.