“I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” – Will Rogers
“Moral victories don’t count.” – GURPS Illuminati
Democrats: We need to talk.
This week, Joe Walsh – not the cool ex-drunk who plays with Eagles and Ringo Starr, but the Republican ex-Congressman – announced that he was ending his campaign for the Republican nomination, referring to the Republican Party as a “cult.” As at least one journalist put it, this raised the question of why Walsh needed to run an expensive political campaign just to find that out. Now, I like Walsh’s moxie – like when he came on Chris Matthews’ Hardball this week and pronounced the Republican Senate to be “chicken shit” – and I admire the fact that he is capable of holding conservative views while still disagreeing with Trump, but by the same token, being batshit crazy on almost every other subject, Walsh is a great example of the anti-intellectual Tea Party philosophy that turned the Republican Party into the cult that it is.
And then there’s Bill Weld, who I supported as Gary Johnson’s running mate, but who is still running in those Republican primaries that allow him to do so. This makes even less sense than Walsh’s run, because again, Walsh is a Tea Partier. Turning back to the Republican Party is blanking out the point that Weld left them in the first place because he wasn’t xtreeem and edgee enough for them. He’s not a good fit for the Libertarian Party, but with his positions he’s still a better fit with the LP than with a party that has rejected his moderate, common-sense attitude. In retrospect, the Republicans never were a party of free minds and free markets, but they’ve been more clear than ever in displaying that they don’t believe in them now.
So if I’m a right-winger and I go along with the establishment’s binary logic, and the designated “right-wing” party is actually against my values, well, until the Libertarian Party steps up to the plate – assuming they want to – there’s no point in being a NTR (Never Trump Republican). Might as well be a DJTFT.
Democrat Just To Fuck Trump.
But if I’m supposed to agree that we HAVE to vote for the lesser of two incompetents because the stakes are so dire, then if I and other people who don’t normally vote Democrat are on board with that, it behooves the Democratic Party to do it’s part and QUIT FUCKING IT UP.
They should have already figured out that it’s possible to have the most evil and unworthy opponent in American history and still lose.
I mean, Christ on a cracker, if you look at Chuck Schumer give an interview on MSDNC, it makes you want to put on a uniform and drag Hispanic kids to the border camps, that’s how anti-inspirational he is to the Resistance. If Schumer was half the hardass in the Senate that Pelosi has been in the House, we might not be in this kind of mess. (I know, because Harry Reid WAS that kind of hardass, even when Democrats were the Senate minority.)
I’d like to give some advice – I can’t say it’s good advice, but it can’t be any worse than the advice that the Democratic leadership has been following, on the premise that they take any advice at all.
For one thing, there’s one word you need to burn out of your vocabulary: “bully.” Quit saying that Trump is bullying you. Quit saying it’s unfair. If you actually remember what it was like to be bullied as a kid, you remember what happened when you whined and cried and told the bully to stop picking on you? That’s right! He picked on you even more! Because you’re dealing with a sadist and a culture of sadists, and telling the sadist that you’re in pain because you can’t fight back is like a shark smelling blood in the water. It’s what they live for. It doesn’t help that so many people on the liberal side come off as just that type. I mean, I get the impression that Chris Hayes got stuffed in his high school locker on a regular basis.
Quit being losers. Quit being wimps. There’s a very wise thing that was once said by General Patton – well, actually it was George C. Scott. It was: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” That sort of can-do, optimistic spirit really is what makes America great. But it’s also a problem in one respect. “Winning” in itself is not a moral value. As a decidedly more liberal character said, “it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” Now, in one respect it’s a good thing that Democrats have some scruples over winning at any cost, but if they think the stakes really are the future of America, they may want to find a way to win with morals. The alternative is not to just keep losing. The alternative is to get so desperate and power-hungry watching the other side remake the country that you will do literally ANYthing to win. Cause that’s what happened to the Republicans. As far as they’re concerned, America’s Apocalypse already happened, because of That Man Obama. (In their defense, they did have the minor issue of out-of-touch presidential candidates who pushed counterproductive policies that nobody liked.) They think that THEY’RE being bullied, they’re being picked on, and anything that they do to fight back is justified. This is of course, the attitude of racists and conspiracy theorists, but even the Trumpniks who aren’t at least one of those have been labeled such by association, so they don’t care anymore.
That’s part of the secret to fighting back. No, not giving in to evil and associating with the worst thugs on your side of the aisle. The trick is not caring any more. “Conservatives” know that you’re going to call them Nazis anyway, so they don’t even bother countering the argument any more. I’ll get to that shortly. But in general, what you do is you take their whining and you turn it against them. When a Trumpnik says, “Well, you’re just mad that Hillary lost!” say, “Whitey, please. Half of Team Trump is still mad that Lee lost Gettysburg.” When they say, “Well, you just hate Trump, and you’re just haters, and you’ve wanted to get rid of him before he was even inaugurated” you respond, “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing. That’s like saying ‘You just hate colon cancer.’ There’s something WRONG with that? Trump is the colon cancer of the republic. It’s like a Yakov Smirnoff routine gone blue: ‘In Soviet Russia, asshole eats YOU!’ Speaking of Russia, why doesn’t Trump show his tax returns?”
The other point I want to make is that the Democrats need to quit playing circular firing squad. (It used to be Italian Firing Squad, but not only is that politically incorrect, the Democrats make Mussolini’s army look competent.)
Specifically, there is a perception, fair or not, that the results in the Iowa Democratic caucus were deliberately slow-walked in order to create a better impression for Pete Buttigieg over Bernie Sanders, who can claim victory by actual votes under the arcane system they’re using. The debate rules have changed so that Mike Bloomberg will be allowed to appear, when he fell under the previous standard that had excluded Julian Castro, and there are rumors that the DNC is going to reverse the rule on first-round superdelegate votes at the national convention. With Biden and even “progressive” Elizabeth Warren getting bad returns in Iowa, and New Hampshire just around the corner, the liberal political-media complex seems to be scrambling for somebody, ANYbody, other than Bernie Sanders.
Just this week, covering the Friday New Hampshire debate for MSDNC, Chris Matthews said, ““I have my own views of the word ‘socialist’ and I’d be glad to share them with you in private. They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” he said. Matthews continued, “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?” Then Matthews made the connection to Sanders, claiming ignorance about whether or not the candidate did, in fact, support violence and public executions. “So, I have a problem with people who take the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years,” Matthews said. “I don’t know what he means by socialist.” The Rolling Stone article with this quote concluded, “Matthews nearly losing his mind on national television in addition to some of the debate questions about Sanders — including whether his opponents were afraid of having a democratic socialist on the ticket — shows just how terrified corporate media is of a Sanders win.”
But if my moderate first choice, Pete Buttigieg, gets appointed with the same sort of shenanigans that the Party institution pulled for Clinton, you will see the same schisms as 2016, and that will defeat the purpose of electing a moderate, which is to have a candidate who can unite the mainstream and the Left against the reactionary Republican plurality.
Bernie Sanders is not necessarily my first choice for president; I’ve already gone over that. The idea of Bernie is probably more attractive than a Sanders Administration would be in practice, and there are problems that it would create going in. (For one, Larry David doesn’t want to appear on Saturday Night Live every month for the next four years.) But while I’m chewing out the Democrats on their wimpiness towards every other subject, I need to address the mainstream party’s phobia towards socialism. And I don’t even LIKE socialism.
There’s a whole spiel I could go into about the definitions of socialism, and I think I will in another post, but for now let me focus on the point that for this year’s State of the Union speech, Trump invited Juan Guaido, the opposition leader against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela’s government, which really is an example of socialism gone wrong. The main reason I don’t support active measures to depose the Chavista government is because we already tried that, and it didn’t work. But in any case, it’s a little odd to declare yourself an opponent of the Venezuelan approach when you want to close the border to your own citizens (as Maduro does), want to control the economy for political purposes (as Maduro does) and game the system to make sure that both the legislature and judiciary are dominated by your yes-men (as both Chavez and Maduro did).
Why aren’t we talking about that? Why is the Democrat expected to recoil like Dracula from the cross at the word “socialism”, but no one in the Democratic Party (as opposed to Facebook liberals) will compare the Republican agenda to fascism? And why is it that when you do make the association, “conservatives” on social media will either avoid the association or turn the corners of their lips, and say “So?….” Why is it not possible to acknowledge that one can reach the same destination on a different road, and that all the things that Republicans claim to hate about socialism are the result of the road we’re on now?
As the guys at Jacobin Magazine would tell you, most “democratic socialists” aren’t even socialist in the sense of seizing the means of production, they are mainly trying to create the same social supports that conservatives in Canada and elsewhere take for granted. It is still a legitimate question as to who pays for all that shit, and what the broader costs of redistribution would be, but it is not a literally unthinkable policy. I have seen people on the Internet make serious arguments – namely, the point that America spends more money on healthcare, including government money, than “socialist” countries in the European Union, and gets worse results – but hardly anybody in the Democratic Party institution will make these arguments. But that’s why Sanders and kids like “the Squad” will look at your demon-word “socialism,” smile, and say, “So?…”
There’s a pretty good reason why Senator Bernie Sanders never ran for Senate in Vermont as a Democrat and why he only registers as a Democrat for the limited period that he runs for the Democratic Party nomination. And it’s much the same reason that he’s got a serious chance to win that nomination. Because Bernie Sanders is NOT a Democrat, and I can’t imagine why anybody would be.
But yet, Sanders knows that in this binary country, if he’s going to run for a national office, he needs as broad a base as possible, and if an independent run is a “spoiler” but taking over a national party means that you get that huge group of people, a majority of whom don’t agree with you on every thing or even most things, but they’re gonna go with you anyway cause you’re their nominee, then the expedient thing to do is run in that party in hopes of accomplishing your goal.
Bernie is a DJTFT.
And even though I’m not a socialist, and I don’t think that healthcare or any good thing you want government to pay for is a “right”, I do think there’s some stuff that we are better off having government do even if it isn’t a right. We don’t think that the interstate highway system is a human right, but we were willing to pay for it (if not to maintain it). Bernie and I are opposite on many things, but we have something in common: We both avoid the Democratic Party as counterproductive to our goals and yet have to work with it to deal with Republicans who are the real problem. There are a surprising number of people – both leftists and former conservatives – who fit that description. Hell, Joe Walsh, y’know, the guy who said “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care” also said after dropping out of the race, “I would rather have a socialist in the White House than a dictator.” So, if THIS guy gets the distinction between socialism and dictatorship, and understands that someone on the anti-socialist side CAN be a dictator, then why can’t the Democratic National Committee??
This goes along with a certain theme I’ve been seeing on the Internet. It’s “democrats would rather lose” or more precisely, “Democrats would rather lose to Trump than win with a progressive.” The main Party still sees the Republican Party as a factor in the political institution rather than a cancer on it. Biden is the obvious example of that. They are actually less threatened by Trump than by the idea of losing their own institutional power. After all, even if Trump wins, this may not become a one-party state. Maybe. We may still have the illusion of a multiparty system, as with Hungary or even Venezuela. The professional Democrats will still have jobs, to the extent that they can get anyone elected. And at the same time, some “progressives” would rather lose to Trump to teach the mainstream Democrats a lesson.
The “lesser of two evils” argument was no less – probably no more – relevant in 2016. And the reason Democrats couldn’t get enough people to vote for Hillary is because institutional Democrats couldn’t convince people that their future was at stake. As Thomas Frank put it just after the election: “To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.”
In other words, Democrats expected voters to treat the election as though the world was at stake while taking the voters themselves for granted.
And some of them want to do it again. And if it isn’t the old Cold Warriors trying to head off “socialism” it’s the woke “progressives” blowing off the moderates.
So in conclusion, Democrats: Grow up and get your shit together. You can’t expect me to believe that any Democrat is better than Trump if YOU don’t believe it. And there isn’t much point in NOT being a Libertarian if the Democrats are only slightly more effective in politics despite having a vastly larger budget than the Libertarian Party and the singular advantage of actually having people in office.