JHUS Staging

Tag: democratic party

  • Why There Will Never Be A Successful “Third Party” In The US

    To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”

    The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.

    The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)

    The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.

    The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.

    That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.

    (NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)

    It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.

    There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.

    The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.

    Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.

    (In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)

    This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.

    Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.

    In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.

    I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.

    People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.

    The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.

    The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.

    The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.

    No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally

    It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.

    * In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”

    The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.

    If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.

    By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.

    (NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)

    In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.

    Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.

    No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).

    We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.

    That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.

    If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.

    And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.

    When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

  • 2022 State of the Union

    Some rolling observations I made while watching the Big Speech.

    “Freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” We start off with a few bold statements praising Ukraine and sharply criticizing Russia. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause chaos.” Biden makes a good solid speech and case here, discussing work on alliances, sharing and analysis of intelligence data, and the deliberate choices to speak clearly about these things as they were happening.

    It’s a good case made, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a time there’s been this clear, sharp, and immediate response from the international community to provocative events.

    Talking about going after the oligarchs. Wish our leaders in the Democratic Party were as enthusiastic about mitigating the power of oligarchs here in the US.

    Biden reinforces that they’re not moving US forces “to fight Russia in Ukraine,” right before listing off all the countries where US forces are being moved and readied for conflict the minute one of those borders is crossed by Russians fighting in Ukraine.

    Announcement of release of some oil reserves, 60Mbbl total.

    “Iranian” instead of “Ukrainian,” and someone shouted something. We’ll see how the right-wing punditry handles that in this new era of anti-Russian sentiment.

    LOL boos from the right as Biden mentions “unlike the two trillion from the previous administration that went to the top one percent.”

    Economics. Lots of slogans and so forth, will there be any kind of solid announcements for any kind of relief? Applause line for infrastructure plan. Hearing more details on how that money’s being spent specifically, all of which is cool or cool-ish at least.

    Passing econ bill with sales pitch including promise from Intel to drop $100Bn on manufacturing growth. Lots of revitalizing manufacturing talk and so forth. I think it’s short-sighted to continue focusing on “creating jobs,” but most of the world isn’t on that page yet.

    Inflation and price conversation, lots of nativism in this conversation, but it is what it is. “USA” chant like we’re at a wrestling match. Validating the economic plan. Reducing prescription drugs, arguments in favor of reducing prices, political rhetoric but not ineffective, shout out to the kid in the audience, lots of well-used crowd-pleasing techniques here. Proposes capping cost of insulin at $35 a month. Let medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. Next up cutting energy cost & climate change. Tax credit for weatherization. Hints of subsidies for EVs and similar tech, but no specifics. Cutting child care costs, which is very popular and not a bad thing, but it’s not an issue super close to me as a single adult.

    Not hearing anything to strongly disagree with here or be terribly cynical about so far, other than continued bleating about “back to work” and “continued economic growth.”

    Discussions of fixing tax code and so forth, as well as a shot about confirming his fed nominations.

    Watchdogs are back, the Justice Department “will soon be naming a chief investigator for pandemic fraud.”

    “I’m a capitalist.” I’m not impressed, but that’s the frame we’re in. He’s not wrong about anything so far, staying within that framework.

    Lots of pitching for some leftist favorite ideas, and some discussion of Covid impact.

    Eh. Fund the police. Blugh. They’ve got funding; we need funding for everything else that feeds in to criminality.

    Right to vote. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the DISCLOSE act, etc. All good things, nothing particularly new here though.

    Shoutout to Justice Stephen Breyer, which naturally goes to a pitch for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    Border security and immigration reform, some idiot – probably Boebert or Greene – trying to get a “built that wall” chant going that died quickly. More generally well-known talking points on that issue.

    “Preserve a woman’s right to choose,” Equality Act and addressing the LGBTQ+ population with supportive statements that appear to be aimed not so subtly at some state-level oppression that’s been happening there.

    “Unity agenda”

    • beat opioid epidemic, including the usual details
    • mental health, particular for kids
      • “hold social media companies accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
    • support veterans
    • end cancer as we know it

    This section of the whole thing seemed pretty cookie-cutter and not holding any gigantic announcements or headlines, but also nothing terribly objectionable or obnoxious.

    Ah, here we go, ARPA-H, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. I like this.

    “The state of the union is strong because you the American people are strong. This is our moment to overcome the challenges of our time, and we will.”

    Overall a solid performance, nothing to give progressives any huge enthusiasm, but some support for those priorities with a much heavier dose of status-quo dogwhistling…which isn’t unexpected. As a speech I’ll give it a B+. As a matter of hearing what I wanted to from a standpoint of advancing progressive priorities, C+.

  • Post Hoc, Ergo Cluster Hoc

    Everybody wants the rewards of hard work and due diligence, but most people only want the rewards, without doing the hard work and due diligence.

    This is reflected in non-solutions to political problems like term limits (it’s called VOTING; term limits only serve to ensure that if you do get a decent person in office they can’t stay there long enough to get much done), and specious “solutions” to avoidable problems, like expanding the Supreme Court to counter-act the impact of a bad appointment. The proper way to have dealt with that was years ago, by not electing someone who’s going to make bad appointments. The proper way to have dealt with THAT was to not put up with the so-called Democratic party shoving a status quo token candidate down our throats in the face of overwhelming support for a progressive reformist platform. That means you stop jumping on the bandwagon you’re told and worrying about whose “turn” it is, and start taking issue with your “democracy” being dictated from the top down.

    America has a bad habit of not bothering to try to do things right and then complaining and trying to find shortcut solutions when things go wrong, and that never has worked and never will. We have proven once that “just do what you’re told or else the eviler will win” ends up with the eviler winning anyway, and I have a bad feeling we’re about to do it again. I hope not, but I suspect this race is going to be close enough for Trump to try to throw it to the Supremes, counting on the result being in his favor because he’s effectively turned the Supreme Court into a partisan weapon. And still, you hear “but Hillary won by three million votes.” Horse hockey. She lost. She and her team know how the electoral college works just like Trump and his team did, and she got cocky and arrogant and so did a whole lot of her voters, who were expecting a coronation and got a coup. Ralph Malph could have beat Trump by three million votes; the spread should have been five times that at least, and you should have had an energized, progressive ticket all the way down to your county commissioners and mayoralities.

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    I’m sorry that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but this nonsense of waiting to get angry and do something until the damage has already happened is just that, nonsense. Hillary Clinton was a lazy, arrogant candidate who assumed right up until the returns started coming in on election night that she had everything in the bag, and that’s what cost her the election. Many of us KNEW that’s how it would play out, but the majority just did what they were told, didn’t ask questions when the primary was obviously rigged and public opinion manipulated to gain post-hoc validation for the DNC-sponsored pillory of Sanders, the more popular candidate *by far*. They deliberately disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people, telegraphed far ahead of time that they were going to do what they wanted so there was no point in voting anyway, and then blamed the very people whose voices they silenced for their own incompetence, ineptitude, and hubris.

    We let them do the same in 2020, and it’ll be nothing but a miracle if things don’t play out more or less the same way, handing the country over to Trump for another four years, and thereby effectively ending American Democracy.

    We have got to learn to stand up when it matters. Why do black people have to die before the masses listen to what many of us have been saying for decades about the militarization and authoritarian over-reach of local police? Why do we have to wait until millions are facing eviction before we start railing against the whole stupid system that’s created six times as many empty houses as homeless people but we still find a way to convince ourselves the homeless deserve it? Why do we have to wait until millions are infected with a deadly and crippling virus before we get serious about reforming our broken, cruel, and ineffective for-profit health care system?

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    We humans love our comfort, and our addiction to it – to the point that we’ve damn near sacrificed our very existence just for the illusion of comfort – is killing us.  That is how we got to the point that a single 87 year old woman is nearly all that stands between us and totalitarianism.

    That is why I’m not always polite and smooth-talking about these things. My readers are unquestionably of a higher intellectual and ethical caliber than the majority, but it’s still up to you guys to keep the word spreading, to take the chance on hurting your nazi grandma’s feelings or telling your drunk Uncle Bob who thinks OAN is a news source to shut the hell up, and to make the realities unavoidably clear to those who continue trying to avoid them.

  • Why Is Sanders Running As A Democrat?

    (Somewhat ironically, a technical error prevented me from getting an archive of the first night with the “new set.”  I’ve embedded the livestream from Facebook here, but I’ve only got the last ten minutes locally and right now FB is not letting me download the video directly.  If/when I can get this archived on YouTube, I will.  For now, you can find it here:  https://www.facebook.com/144898762238389/videos/496311224370776).  Yes I know the audio’s out of sync.)

    Why is Bernie running as a Democrat?

    U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

    One of the most-often asked questions I see – or depending on who’s talking and what their purpose is, accusations – about Bernie Sanders is why he’s running on the Democratic ticket.  There are a number of reasons, some easier to see and obvious, some not so much.

    First and foremost, he’s running on the Democratic ticket because the two major parties have the process locked down and an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance in hell at winning.

    Now maybe – MAYBE – if he finds a way to get on the national ticket without the democratic party at this point, if they decide to keep playing to power, depending on how things go over the next couple of months – after all this work and in this time of great crisis that screams out with the voice of millions that the things Sanders has worked for must be done now, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could win the electoral college as a write-in. He needs 270 votes.  9 states, for a total of 53 electors, don’t allow write-ins. 

    The rest – 483 – do, with various requirements.  In Michigan, for instance, you have to file a letter of intent by the beginning of September and have a list of electors.  Each of them must have been a resident of the congressional district for which they’re voting for one year, and a US citizen for ten. But right now I think the inclination of the campaign is to do everything possible to save the one remaining party structure that *could* be saved to energize a united President and Congress to get some things done.  Certainly that’s not the Republicans, so the Dems are what’s left.

    But in the end, Bernie’s allegiance is to this country, not a party.  How that will lead him to decide the best way to pursue this situation, I don’t know.  I think if he made sure to dot his I’s and cross his T’s he could be an eligible write-in candidate. Depending on how many districts in which he can win the popular vote at that point, he’s got a margin of 213 electoral votes to work with.

    But in the end his allegiance is to doing the right thing for the people of this nation.  He’s entirely uncorrupted by special interests.

    That’s. Why. The. Party. Doesn’t. Want. Him. To. Win.

    That’s why the power that props the party up, including all the media companies who make all the big campaign donations, do not want him to win.

    That is why it does not require a conspiracy. The big money interests, including those who control most of the information you see, do not want a healthy, educated population. Having a healthy, educated population creates opportunity for you which means it creates competition for them in an “open market.”

    This is not an open market.  If this market was open, we’d all be making plenty.  We’re not.

    This is not a free country.

    You are not free when you don’t have your health.

    You are not free when you aren’t taught quality critical thinking skills. You can not be free if you can’t think clearly. You can’t think clearly if you’re surrounded by carefully crafted messaging with the direct purpose of keeping you stuck where you are and falling like you have been for decades.

    It would be easy and poetic to say that we’ve become so advertising-besotted that we can’t tell a real message from an ad anymore, but sometimes poetry doesn’t tell the story.  The reality is not that you are stupid.

    The reality is that you have been kept ignorant.  What you hear and see shapes what you believe, and no matter what your race, class, culture, identity, background, current status, that is the truth.

    There is a very small group of people who control what you hear and see for their own interests.  That is also the truth.  In much the same way it does not require a formal conspiracy for like interests to pursue like ends, it does not require traditional authoritarianism to keep at least enough people at heel to discourage the rest who aren’t from rising up in protest.

    One of the ways that works is through recursive authoritarianism.  So and so has this going on at worked that could be improved or has ethical considerations that concern you, but it’s clear that your best interest, and the company’s, is to simply not acknowledge that out loud. So you agree to say nothing and now whatever your position, you have to use it to ensure nobody else does either.  Authoritarianism.

    You are constantly at risk of losing your livelihood if you do the right thing ethically when you’re doing business.  I have been constantly paraphrasing a line from Robert Heinlein lately: the survival of the species is the only universal morality.

    Willful ignorance – the selfish pretense to stupidity

    A whole BUNCH of people are about to hit what a lot of people, including people like me, have lived with most or all of our lives. It is not going to be pretty.

    And where we are mostly not prepared is in our own minds and hearts to just admit that we have been wrong, and do something about it.

    You are watching everything change, right now. It is changing precisely because IT HAS TO.

    It’ll happen the easy way with good leadership – leadership that has consistently stood *against* all these abuses of power and resources, who has consistently worked in the best interests of *the people* and *the nation* and long-term sustainability and health and education and all the other things that go along with REAL freedom.

    This is not an acute problem. This is the predictable result of a systemic problem. We can face that, or we can KEEP trying to pretend “it can’t happen here, not to us, we’re good people, my deity wouldn’t do that to me, we’re just trying to [insert euphemism to rationalize all the ego-driven bullshit of this planet], we’re doing the right thing, all these people who want all these changes are just self-interested, I just want what’s best for me.”

    What’s best for all of us is to start working together instead of against each other. Abundance is everywhere. We have everything we need. We just refuse to let go of the things we don’t, because they’re comfortable.  Because of that, we’ve all become far LESS comfortable than if a few of us weren’t so obstinate about their comfort.

    The future is scary.  The unknown is scary.  The future is unknown.  What is known is that we are at a key point in human history when we can no longer continue to pretend and act at the game of political leadership.  We must lead, individually starting with ourselves, and in the world starting with a capable, competent, non-nonsense president who walks into the office with zero allegiance to anyone but the people who elected him.

    The global coronavirus pandemic absolutely must be dealt with in an immediate fashion, and it is – as much as the ham-handed boobs currently running the country can manage it.  But we absolutely must not ignore the lessons it brings, because frankly there will be more if we don’t re-prioritize IMMEDIATELY.  To simply deal with the immediate problem is to remain unprepared for the next one.

    Bernie Sanders understands that and is doing his best with a system that has been corrupted almost beyond repair.  Personally, I hope if he loses the Democratic nomination he chooses to move forward as a write-in candidate in any state where he can’t get on the ballot as an independent, immediately if he loses the Democratic primary, which *right now* it appears he may, but we’ll have to see what happens.  The concept of faithless electors exists, too.  We have no idea how the national conventions, which are traditionally where the nominations take place, will turn out yet.  A lot can change between now and then.  I think it would be a mistake to start running independently *before* the official things are officially official, unless they try to drag ass past the deadlines for indys or write-ins to get on ballots.

    But if they officially reject Sanders as a nominee…boy.  I just can’t see him as head of the Senate.  That’s not his job.  And the offer would have to be made – which would immediately break Biden’s campaign promise – and he’d have to accept, neither of which we know anything of right now.