Normalcy isn't a real word and it definitely won't work

This morning I came across a very interesting conversation within the Democratic family. As Driftglass and Bluegal always like to say, the debates occurring now in Primary season are a family discussion. This is how it always goes during Primary season, there are a thousand or more points of view within the big tent of the Democratic Party and it takes a while to settle things down to just a few. The problem is when these conversations become arguments and the partisans within each group get entrenched and bitter. While the Republicans are almost entirely authoritarian at this point, RWAFs in the base and social dominators in leadership and wannabe leadership, the Democrats are not without authoritarians of the left-wing variety. Whereas right wing authoritarian followers prize conformity and obedience to power along with aggression against any out-groups, left wing authoritarians prize perpetual rebellion and individualism. Bernie bros and Naderites are the classic cases and they did plenty of damage with their purity tests and privilege of saying "let the Republican win, that will show 'em." Obviously it is a scale, there aren't hard and fast delinations marking each group. But each family fight has the potential of setting off LWAs and forming schisms within the party that can ruin elections.

So I have to try and temper any remarks because I don't want to fan a spark into a schism or empower LWAs at all. First and foremost, as I have mentioned before, I don't take positions in Primaries because the worst Democrat is always better than the best Republican. We have a pretty good group of competent, experienced candidates with good ideas that will all represent the Party and the non-insane majority of this country well. Joe Biden is the candidate at the heart of this conversation. It starts with Brother Charlie Pierce's column from August 26, arguing that Biden is the "return to normalcy" candidate with great similarity to Warren G. Harding. Rick Perlstein upped the ante by stating:

Ah, our very own James Buchanan: the rocky-steady candidate of experience, promising to bring back all that yummy, yummy normalcy. I'm sure it will all work out swell, just like 1856-60.

Now, both Harding and Buchanan are consistently ranked among the worst presidents this country has had in our history by professional historians. Personally I rank James K. Polk higher in the awfulness chart for waging an aggressive war of conquest against Mexico based on lies that empowered southern slave owners into forcing their demands for more slavery and more oppression onto the rest of the country. Maybe because the parallels with Dubya and Cheney's contempt for the rule of law and empowering the worst people in the country to shit all over democracy are just too strong. In my reading of history, Polk doused the country in gasoline with his splendid little war and gave boxes of matches to authoritarian slave owners. Sure, there was a short interregnum with Whig presidents (Zachary Taylor, hero of the war with Mexico then Fillmore) where the country could have gone in another direction but the same kind of normalcy set in once Franklin Pierce (no relation to Charlie, that I know of) took office. Pierce was a doughface, actually the poster child for doughfaces, who wasn't going to do anything about slavery because he saw the abolitionists as the problem.

There is no going back. WWI changed the country in many, many ways. Though Harding and his successors tried to go back to the federal government doing nothing and retreat from internationalism, the world and much of America did not really cooperate. Similarly, Buchanan just tried to ignore the simmering divisions and violent trends with a lighter touch on the doughface identity. But even an experienced, long-serving politician like Buchanan could not sweep things away by inaction, simply hoping that not making waves could patch things up so we could go back to arguing over tariffs and internal improvements instead of slavery and expansion.

So, no amount of hoping a Joe Biden could patch things up after doughfacedonny goes away will suffice. There is simply no going back. And according to FiveThirtyEight Biden's lead is shrinking, so it's possible that the issue of having to hash out who is right in their comparison won't persist into Primary season. I like and respect both Charlie and Rick, and I'm on board with their basic premise that trying to campaign on the return to normalcy will probably be a disaster. No schism here, if Biden gets the nomination I will obviously vote for him but then immediately go back to organizing and working to defeat authoritarianism. Even if that means watching Diamond Joe lead with his face into republican baseball bats.

Permanent Rebels

One of the purposes of political parties is to consolidate the almost infinite variations of the people's wants and needs for and from self-government. Another is to educate the electorate about competing visions for our collective future and decide on a program that has the broadest possible appeal to their side. Then to persuade as many voters to support that platform. It never works perfectly, certain things can help in the process such as including as many different people in building the party as possible and maintaining trust between leaders and members. We are as far from those as we can possibly be and therefore we have a barely coherent party system. The republicans are busy ripping their party apart with the members supporting Donald Trump while their leaders fret about not being able to control the hideous beast they created. But that is a subject for another time, today it is the disconnect between Hillary Clinton and an unknown percentage of leftist voters.

The percentage may be small, but they are stubborn and they are loud. These #NeverHillary people or whatever they are calling themselves now are so angry now that the Secretary has been cleared by the FBI. They are also angry that their hero has "sold out" and endorsed her. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the vicious smears coming from republicans and the cries from these silly dead enders. There may be a lot of overlap there too, a lot of the people hooked on Ron Paul last time have mysteriously become democratic socialists this time. And there's no shortage of right wing trolls playing at attacking Hillary Clinton from what they believe the left looks like. But the true believers that I know are definitely of the ideologically schizophrenic variety.

Who are these people who are so selfish and insulated from the hurt that He, Trump can and will put on America? In my unit in the Army being an individual was a grave offense and being a selfish one was worse. Yet these #neverhillary people have convinced themselves that echoing right wing talking points loudly is somehow noble and pat each other on the back for their imagined integrity. 

Voting your conscience

I would like to stake a position about this issue that the Bernie or bust crowd is not going to like. Voting in the general election, while an individual right, is a public responsibility and not just a personal choice. The time to build a movement, plan a revolution, organize like-minds into a coherent vision for the future; that time is between elections. We are stuck with the hodge podge mashup of precedent, tradition, and the push-pull of various interest groups in the present. Voting your conscience sounds good, but like so many sound byte, bumper sticker slogans used by the Right, it means less than nothing. In fact, treating your vote like your virginity, only to be surrendered to the perfect candidate, is actually surrendering the nation and yourself to the forces of darkness. Anyone throwing a purity tantrum now, when the country actually has a chance at a Democratic successor to the presidency, is acting like a child.

I don't care how many fussy dilettantes unlike my page or send nasty emails, you have had eight years to build an alternative to the Democratic establishment, and you didn't. It is time to grow up and realize that the establishment was here before you and I were and there's no silver bullet to destroy it. Do you think progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, anti-trust laws, the National Labor Relations Board, workman's compensation, and all the rest happened overnight or easily? No, liberal reform has always been a work in progress. Vote for Bernie in the primary, work for his campaign, protest real injustice, and work to persuade people to take an interest in issues that matter. But have a little dignity, show some humility, and for crying out loud listen to yourselves. Have the Democrats been so awful for the past eight years that you are willing to surrender the presidency to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz because you believe the three decade smear campaign against Hillary Clinton?

I was on the fence about this Bernie or bust business until I got a chance to hear some of them call in to the Brad cast recently. Up to that time I had only seen a few dingbats write about how they will never vote for Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee. They never come across as being particularly knowledgeable or wise, but in print the anger and screaming doesn't come through. So now I know that the idiot tea party paranoid style is not just on the extreme right. When I heard these people yelling and ranting about Hillary, it became clear that tea baggers are not the only gullible authoritarian followers out there.

Before you turn up your nose and dismiss me as part of the establishment or a sell out or whatever, I did vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I respect his integrity, his positions on issues that matter to me, and I respect him as a man of the people. However, you people out there, who were all in for the ReLOVEution or whatever that was for Ron Paul. You who stood with Rand Paul because President Obama is worse that Bush; and you who are now claiming that the only thing you can do in good conscience if Bernie doesn't win the nomination of a party he still does not belong to is to stay home and pout or vote third party, are not worthy of any respect. I dealt with a lot of you in the Army, we called them blue falcons, the ones who refused to ever admit a mistake or something they did wrong, and were willing to let the whole unit be punished because they couldn't own up and take responsibility. Yes, if you could put aside your juvenile idealistic standards for the moment it would take to pull the lever for the socially responsible act of keeping a fascist like Trump or a theocrat like Cruz out of the White House there would be no problem. But you have to keep going on about this as though it is somehow noble to throw away a perfectly good chance at keeping momentum going for a progressive future. 

No, of course Hillary Clinton is not perfect and neither is the Democratic Party. Why? Because she is human, and the party is made up of humans. People who have flaws, people who have different views, different experience, and yes, different levels of involvement in the special interests and corrupting influences of money. No one in politics has exactly the same perspective, that is why we have parties. The objective is to get as many people's ideas as possible aggregated into as coherent a platform as possible. It is unfortunate that basic political science is not dropped into our political discourse very often. So rarely in fact, that when I tried Google searching for some of the ideas I studied many moons ago in poli sci 101 I could not find them so I'll have to paraphrase. Our electoral system is called single district plurality or first past the post, meaning that only the candidate with the greatest vote total wins. Therefore, rational office seekers coalesce into a mere two choices as close to the center as possible with one party going one way from that center and the other going the other way. The two party system, while sounding like the least number of choices outside of a one party dictatorship, actually presents the greatest choice in a winner take all election. The problem is that republican so-called conservatives have pulled that center further and further to the right, and then run candidates who start on the far right and only grudgingly move to moderate their stances and thereby increase their constituency. Democrats like Hillary Clinton start at the center and generally get pulled to the right. This is not a good situation I grant you, but threatening to pout and stay home is not going to help anyone but the Republican candidate. 

Right now, Bernie or bust people are nothing but lonely, alienated voices in the wilderness. You have no money, no organization, and no leverage; nothing really to offer. Screaming on social media or call in shows does nothing but alienate you further from people who actually have something to lose if a republican takes the White House. And that is why I'm saying that voting your conscience is a self-defeating fallacy. Make your voice heard constructively, build something, move the center in a more progressive direction. But simply screaming about how you will refuse to vote if your demands are not met will alienate you not only from the people you claim to be making your noble claim about defending but the Democratic Party as well.

Again, a personal campaign to make the political system more just, to fight for equality, and society more fair is best conducted between elections. The stakes are too high to pull this crap right now. The last eight years would have been a golden opportunity to organize all the people hurt by bush's wars and financial collapse, to educate people on why big changes were needed. That didn't happen, but there is no reason why you can't try again.

After the election, no matter who the Democratic nominee is. Patience, we can do this right. And it won't mean selling out, it just means being a team player. Aim lower, if the tea bag authoritarians can take over their local parties and put bible-thumping weirdos or monsters like this guy into office, imagine what we could do with good ideas.