Electable Democrats

As Bernie Sanders continues to build what looks like an avalanche of support among unanticipated legions of naive dreamers, the analysts fret and the experts foment that defeat is thereby assured in the general election. We don't need someone who is dominating primary elections. We need someone who can win The Big One. We need someone electable.

With recent history as our guide, we can safely say that electable Democrats only slow the rate at which our country and the world decline. Electable means that they don't threaten corporate domination of our economy. Electable means that they don't do anything substantial to overturn endemic racism. Electable means that they water down or completely abandon measures to protect the environment. It means that they don't persist when seeking full freedom and respect for women at all levels of leadership.

You can't do anything if you don't get elected at all. But you really won't do anything anyway if you're an electable Democrat.

After Lyndon Johnson decided not to push his luck, Republicans put a lock on the Oval Office that held until Richard Nixon stepped in it so badly that his successor, Gerald Ford, couldn't hold off a plucky peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. But the peanut farmer only made it once. He wasn't re-electable.

For one thing, Jimmy Carter was too idealistic. They were good ideals, too. Solar panels on the White House. A suggestion that our consumer society might want to take a look at itself and reassess its priorities. A nudge toward citizen responsibility for society's well-being. So of course he got hammered, and the Democratic Party was shut out for another dozen years. We got trickle-down economics, union-busting, and legitimization of reactionary sentiments in an increasingly hard-line backlash against "liberalism."

Along came Bill Clinton, a Baby Boomer with a rock 'n' roll soundtrack and a sly southern drawl. You knew he was a bit of a rogue, but he was smart and charming and brought youthful energy to an office that had been dominated by old fuds for too long. He managed to hang on for two terms, but his embarrassing behavior in the second one poisoned the well again for the next eight years. But what got him into office in the first place was that he did not threaten the status quo in corporate capitalism. There was that early push for universal health care, but they dropped that like a hot rock and never looked back when they saw that big money was going to stone them with it in the next election. The Clintons were not shy about admitting that they wanted to be rich and saw nothing wrong with being rich to the limit of one's ability to suck in and retain assets.

Given what happened in 2016, I have absolutely no explanation for the election of Barack Obama in 2008. He was undeniably moderate, intelligent and eloquent, but his race was problematic. I have even less explanation for his re-election, although I am glad that he won both of his elections. Throughout his presidency, though, I knew that it was only delaying the inevitable. Nothing was really getting fixed. His presidency solidified the dark energy that propelled the current occupant of the Oval Office to victory in 2016. We are now set back considerably, and going further in the wrong direction every day.

Congressional elections are even more crucial than presidential elections to ensure that the country moves forward on anyone's agenda. If everyone could vote from neutrally-composed districts, elected officials would have to address issues knowing that their solutions really do have to satisfy the needs of ordinary voters regardless of party. The way that the two major parties have divided the problems of our nation, our world, and our species into binary, yes-or-no questions assures that we will fail to improve the situation for all but a handful of wealthy potentates and the uppermost of their loyal retainers. The GOP in particular has made governing nearly impossible by making the government itself look more evil than the real evils that threaten the liberty and happiness of ordinary people.

Conservatives talk about liberty, but only envision what they call "normal" people getting to use it. The right vilifies the left for promoting intrusive government. The "intrusion" consists of insisting that people and corporations pay their taxes, and enacting regulations to protect the environment. The intrusion curtails the right wing's ability to limit the freedom and prosperity of minorities of all kinds. The big government of the left is no bigger than it needs to be, to keep greedheads and bigots from inflicting their cruelty on people who make them uncomfortable.

You know who makes me uncomfortable? People who throw their shoulders around and threaten violence. People who have to walk around with guns hanging off of them. They can be ISIS or NRA, makes no nevermind. If you have to make a big time about how armed and dangerous you are, you're part of the problem. Your kind may well prevail, to the detriment of the happiness of our entire species, but you're still the problem. A world ruled on those principles is dark, dirty, and doomed.

The dominant opinion on the Democratic side is that Bernie Sanders is going to lose the 2020 election. His massive support among progressive factions will fail to provide enough votes to overcome all the advantages held by the incumbent, regardless of whether those advantages are ethical and legal.

If Bernie is toxic, the Democratic Party must take steps to put someone else up there. No one else in the primary field seems to inspire huge waves of enthusiasm. So we're screwed either way, unless enough people are repulsed by the GOP to vote against them no matter who gets the nod from the Democrats.

If the Democrats spend the next four months beating it into people's heads that Bernie can't win the general election, and then they let him become the nominee because they'll face an insurrection within their own party, they'll either have to bend over and back up to Trump or start working overtime to try to undo the damage they've done to Bernie's campaign. I hear a lot of blame hurled at progressives for being uncompromising and naive, but they keep winning these early primaries. Elections are decided by the people who show up.

The clouds of analysis grow thicker and thicker. That helps nothing.  It only creates more fog, more optical illusions and mirages over a real landscape that was already difficult to discern even without all the vapor and tricky lighting.

If anything emerges from this, it's that the policies presented by the progressives are way more popular than hedged bets offered by the candidates identifying themselves as moderate, if they identify themselves at all. A politician identifies according to the audience addressed. I do understand that elections require a certain flexibility, as does parliamentary government. But that gets back to the basis for our voting districts being prejudicial to the outcome. You never know for sure until someone gets into office. Even then, the thing that derails something you were looking forward to can take place in a meeting you never hear about, for reasons that legitimately and regrettably force a change in priorities. If you really want to know what's going on, get elected yourself and hear it on the inside. That's not an option for most of us, so we make do with what we can glean.