Carville and Carny-Barking

You want to like James Carville—whether he’s onscreen in the documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! or in the 80-year-old flesh answering questions about it at the Crosby Street Hotel in downtown Manhattan this week. I mean, “He’s a character,” as we often said with real joy in the days before it became more common to say glumly of people in politics, “He’s a carefully focus-grouped, non-threatening media construct.”

In a way, Carville and Trump are both populist reactions to the past few decades of making everything appear rational and squeaky-clean on the surface even when it’s all corrupt and insane below. They both seem to be letting it all hang out, which is reassuring to the average citizen, who always remains rightfully suspicious that there’s a lot being hidden by smoother talkers. The downside is that both men are a bit nuts.

From the surprisingly cute documentary, you also get the impression Carville’s probably drunk much of the time. Among other things, he travels with tiny bottles of alcohol in his luggage and talks about them as if they’re necessities. Forgive me if that topic has been hashed out in detail or debunked already, but one can’t help suspecting that Carville’s marriage to comparably ornery Republican Mary Matalin is partly the story of one or more combative alcoholics, not just a tale of a politically-mixed couple, but congrats to them for sticking together regardless.

Carville’s luggage also creates the impression that he wears LSU paraphernalia whenever possible, so his misleading press nickname “Ragin’ Cajun” is something of an unfair promo for LSU rival University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Trump’s occasional authoritarian utterances get a lot of press, but for the past three decades, even in the ostensibly sedate and wonky Bill Clinton era, we probably should’ve been alarmed by the prominence, in the form of Carville, of a man who openly thinks the most important thing in the world is “political power,” as he affirmed with gusto on and off-screen Monday night.

His life story, growing up surrounded by rural southern Louisiana poverty and passionately desiring to do something about it, is enough to persuade a viewer of the documentary that Carville’s motivations for wanting to wield power are more good than evil, but it’s easy to see how that can lead to ruthlessness nonetheless, with little time left for carefully constructing economic-analysis charts and rereading fine points of constitutional law.

He complains—and tried to warn in advance—that Harris lost the 2024 presidential election in part because, whether you agree with her or not, she was spouting ideas more pleasing to the faculty at Swarthmore than to the males in particular (of all ethnic groups) who, during the Trump era, have been shedding their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Just as Trump talks enough like a “tough businessman” to keep people listening even when he isn’t articulating clear principles, Carville tries to echo his encyclopedia-selling mother and had dubious early political heroes such as Louisiana State Sen. Dudley LeBlanc, now best remembered for promoting the snake oil remedy Hadacol, popular in dry counties more for its one-twelfth alcohol content than for any power to cure disease, leading to its jingle “Hadacol Boogie” becoming popular as a radio single but also to multiple songs and comedy routines mocking the scam for years afterwards.

Winning isn’t really everything, of course, though it’s almost scandalous to say that in front of Americans of any political stripe. Sometimes products sell for stupid reasons, much as I respect the right of the individual consumer to choose. Sometimes, more obviously, bad candidates win elections (technically, by my anarchist-libertarian standards, elections are always won by bad candidates). Even in science, fashionable ideas may override hard experimental evidence for decades. And in the natural world, whether it’s “predatory young males” getting their way in primate societies or snakes devouring small mammals out in the woods, dominance often matters more than justice.

Carville, as he’s likely well aware, is as much a product of the marketplace as of government. You can’t get good things done in politics unless you win the election first, as he puts it in the film. As in so many other realms of life, though, that easily leads to the attitude, conscious or subconscious, that victory is sufficient justification not only for whatever was done to achieve it but for whatever actions the victor subsequently pursues, even brutal actions.

Tweak that amoral attitude in slightly different ways and you get Trump railing against “losers,” Nietzsche praising masterful men, Rome celebrating its right to conquer, social democrats rationalizing the will of the voting populace no matter how ignorant, and anarchist mobs making their violent displeasures known. Winning isn’t everything, and indeed it’s often horrible.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey