America the Failure, unless we act now

 You know how it sucks when a product you really like is still in production, but the great company that made it was bought out by some greedy corporation, so the product is a cheap copy of what once made it so desirable?

That conveys the feeling, but hardly the true threat we face since gullible voters reinstalled the worst president in our country's history at the controls of what had the makings of eventually becoming a great country.

The "sphere of influence" concept championed by greedhead Putin works by threatening neighboring countries and absorbing them into a totalitarian framework. You might decide to run your sphere differently, being generous and kind, but eventually you will have to face a militarized foe when the cruel empire decides to push its boundaries. 

Republican Saint Ronald called the USSR the evil empire. Now Republicans embrace Russia under the leadership of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Vain, greedy, and stupid, yet exalted by American media culture as a beacon for idiots, Trump was the most useful idiot the Russians had ever had. He's paying off big time now.

Proponents of the unitary executive -- an all-powerful presidency served by a subordinate Congress -- really pushed us off a cliff here. Several Supreme Court justices should be dragged off the bench and put to work cleaning latrines for that one. Dictatorship is tempting when you feel confident that your ideological position will always be on top. SCOTUS and the Heritage Foundation laid a lot of groundwork to build a system that will assure their control. Their opposition may be tempted to leave the machinery in place and use it to force a different set of reforms. That will fail because the natural human inclination is conservative: fear based and self protective.

Various fables use the device of shabby travelers seeking shelter, turned away by most, but taken in by a generous host at last. After the host provides food, shelter, and comfort, the shabby travelers reveal that they are gods and reward the hospitable mortals handsomely. This may be supposed to teach hospitality and generosity, because you never know who might be a god, but it starts from the basic human fear of strangers. Vampires can only come in if you invite them. Drifters and hobos might be serial killers. That hitchhiker might murder you. Or you might murder them.

On a very basic level, we don't trust each other. Of course we do trust each other constantly, but paranoia is never far away. It's easy to excite. It drives conservative thought. So if a self-styled progressive administration tried to strong-arm benevolence on people, it would set off the kind of quiet resistance that leads to stunning election losses and a return to institutionalized distrust. You want some assistance when you're down and out? How down and out are you really?

Trump rallies were not the norm, although the Tea Party rallies did foretell them. The norm was Republican victories just quietly grinding forward with their bold assurance that the party of killjoy fuddy-duddies knew better than those dippy kids thinking that we could have luxuries like universal health care, excellent public schools, and well-maintained infrastructure. Next they'll be saying that we should go back to taxing the wealthy! Ha ha ha, how cute. Now run along and bury yourselves in popular culture while the grownups run things.

Conservatives have been constantly pulling toward authoritarianism in the name of freedom while the other side was trying to find something for each side. The net result is that we kept getting dragged toward the situation we're in today. Freedom was always code for a very specific, vocal, violence-prone subset of the entire population. The rhetoric of the conservatives was as elastic as the founding documents themselves. It's as vague, contradictory, and modularly applicable as the Bible.

The changes in tax laws and election financing since 1980 have almost turned our elections into shareholder meetings where the wealthy actually get to outvote us. The upcoming midterms may be our last chance to assert the true power of the people by voting against the party most thoroughly responsible for empowering rich punks and gangsters.

Should the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress, don't expect an instant miraculous recovery and get all snitty in 2028 when it hasn't happened. A depressing percentage of potential voters are persnickety and apathetic. They don't vote or vote third party, thus perpetuating the conditions that make them persnickety and apathetic.

Social media showcases cynicism and sinister conspiracy theories designed to convince you that you shouldn't waste your time trying to make anything better. These posts can appear right next to one about environmental protection, social justice, universal health care, or political action, posted by the exact same person who just told you that the medical establishment is just a money machine designed to keep you sick and paying, and that "both parties are the same." You can't exhort people to vote and then tell them that anyone who runs for office is guaranteed to be a con artist or worse. And don't get me started on the childish belief that term limits for elected officials will solve anything. Term limits is not the same thing as limited terms, as would be a good idea for supreme court justices. But in that instance, the length of a fixed term would give parties a set target to anticipate exactly when they get to appoint a successor. It would become another precise political calculation. Not a magic bullet.

What is a magic bullet is your vote. You get one shot per candidate or ballot measure. You will be part of a massed volley in one exchange of fire. At the end, we will have a winner. The bullets, fortunately, are metaphorical, but the result will affect lives for years to come. We're choosing once again what our brand and quality will be. What do we offer to each other and  the world? We failed in 2016. We barely came back in 2020. Lost our chance in 2022 and set up the epic faceplant of 2024. One more time: are we stupid and violent or are we thoughtful, brave, and faithful to the ideals of human rights?

Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

A note to my Democratic senators...

 Just  caught some social media chatter to the effect that Senate Democrats are considering offering increased funding to ICE in exchange for body cameras and de-escalation training.

Respectfully, ARE YOU FCKING KIDDING ME?!  That's some top quality appeasement. "Give him the Sudetenland, maybe he'll be satisfied." No. Just no. And furthermore, hell no.

ICE funding should be cut. Any pending funding should be held back while all of their crimes, including the murder of Renee Good are fully investigated and evidence logged for future prosecution after we no longer have a corrupt POTUS. And the utterly improper investigation of Good's wife on trumped-up domestic terrorism allegations should be halted immediately.

ICE needs a firm yank on the leash, not more biscuits and pats on the head.

Thank you.

Norms vs Effectiveness

In a recent piece on Democracy Docket, Marc Elias wrote about how the Biden administration failed to secure free and fair elections because officials below the president and vice president were fixated on preserving norms. Attorney General Merrick Garland was particularly strict about not wanting to appear partisan. In Elias's words, he "brought norms to a Trump fight."

The problem comes down, as always, to the conflict between electoral politics and operational politics. You might even say between electoral politics and actual government.

I read the complaints of Democratic supporters who say that they want their party to fight with the fervor and effectiveness of Republicans. But the Republicans win by trampling the rules and trashing the systems that made the country functional. They win by creating instability, promoting suffering, and profiting from the stress that they create. Maybe the price of gasoline drops a little bit for a while. This allows Republican propagandists to crow about the great economy while they continue to undermine the future prospects of entire generations.

If Democrats use Republican-style tactics to force policy changes, the right wing message machine will scream about it nonstop. Yes, the Republican Party is hell bent on destroying the country as we knew and loved it, but gosh darn it you don't want to look partisan by pushing the efforts of the other party, that wants to halt and reverse the destruction.

The elements who managed to seize control of the government in 2024 are tightly focused on a divergent array of entirely bad policies for the average citizen. That divergence is all that saves us from the imposition of more complete totalitarianism, whether it's a technocracy craving some sci-fi dystopia with their billionaires on top, or a Christian nationalist theocracy. Christianity has been notoriously divided for centuries, so the theocrats can't even agree amongst themselves about the details of that dictatorship. Praise the Lord(s). The mess we have now is a result of letting all of the allied autocrats operate during the first weeks and months of the current regime, wrecking things in ways that make sense to each mastermind, but add up to a disorganized mess.

The statistical average citizen is politically apathetic and not extremely religious. Zealot factions gain power when a party figures out how to rope them in and uses them as a reliable percentage of support. They seem like the majority, because they get pushier and pushier as they feel validated by political rhetoric. The Democrats haven't really enjoyed a reliable bloc like that in years, as the "left" is actually more divided by splintering purity tests. This reflects a basic naivete among Democrats and left-leaning independents, that they feel they have the luxury of insisting on perfection.

Independent voters are the key to winning elections. It's a diverse population under one misleading heading. Political campaigns have to find the right balance between terror and Utopia to spook each element among them in the desired direction and convince them where safety and prosperity await them.

As the deteriorating situation makes it obvious that this specific regime needs to be replaced as soon as possible, the party that seeks to replace them needs to represent the rules-based order that used to protect everyone. Its imperfections annoyed many and stoked paranoia in some. Our country definitely got up to some reprehensible hijinks in the post-World War II world, and for all of the decades since, but we also provided a great deal of humanitarian support. That's been chiseled away steadily by selfishness in the general population and in the leaders they elected. Since the 1980s, dedicated selfishness in business has led to a massive shift in wealth toward a small percentage that now controls every major institution.

The party in power now is clearly dangerous both domestically and globally. They're prone to violence on a local and international level. Their hard-core supporters respect and admire violence. They will make the country much less safe for nearly everyone. The threat is obvious to groups targeted now, lulling the remainder into believing that the winners in power will always consider them teammates. Good luck cracking that loyalty. You may peel off a few. The remainder will keep pushing talking points that undermine confidence in the progress of any administration that displaces them.

Most people would rather be alive than dead, most of the time. None of us ask to be born, but life becomes a habit. We don't know whether heaven, hell, or oblivion wait for us when we die. We put off the discovery as long as possible. If tyranny becomes the norm, most people will try to go along, get along as best they can. That was the secret to the Big Brother regime in 1984. The proles were never going to rise up. Their drab existence was better than the high likelihood of not existing at all. Find what happiness you can.

We are approaching the last exit for a long time at which we can exert what's left of citizen power to make citizen interests a top priority again. Most people today don't know what "the liberal consensus" is or was. Conservatives were taught to loathe it, even though many rely on its programs, like Medicare and Social Security. The bustling, improving United States of the second half of the 20th Century depended on the idea that government exists to improve the lives of everyone, not to enhance the power of the already privileged and rely on them to distribute benefits to the general population as they see fit. Government, not private enterprise, sent us to the Moon. Government funds most basic research, which leads to new and better drugs, medical devices, environmental safeguards, and much more.

It's not all good. But the good parts are all that the Republicans are destroying right now. They're beefing up surveillance, unleashing a poorly trained and unaccountable police force that appears focused only on "undocumented immigrant criminals" but which has no restraining rules to keep it from turning the same tactics of kidnapping and imprisonment on anyone the regime considers a threat, or just an annoyance. The Navy operates like pirates (in the Caribbean, no less!). The current occupant of the Oval Office operates like a mob boss whose territory is at least the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.

Only the citizens themselves keep any nation from operating like a criminal syndicate. Authoritarian leaders have varying success repressing their populations, based on the traditions of a region and its people. The United States as a country was formed by people who moved here, creating it from intellectual principles. By the time of the American Revolution, there were multiple generations of the native-born, but still plenty of young adults from away who believed in the philosophical basis of the new nation and its charter. And immigrants have played a major role ever since. It is based not on thousands of years of ancestral possession but on an idea, handed from generation to generation, evolving steadily as our species learns more and more. Some should not be more equal than others once a very basic threshold is met.

The Democratic Party's accidental 4-D chess

 The Democratic Party has been a consistent disappointment at least since Lyndon Johnson buried us balls-deep in the Vietnam War. I mean, they've had their moments, but even after Watergate the party couldn't get the White House back for more than one term between 1972 and 1992. The Democrats did control Congress until the mid 1990s, but that power crumbled as well.

The Vietnam War was very much a bipartisan endeavor, from all the way back when it was our French allies getting forced out of their colony in Indochina. But it became the Republican Party's problem when the Nixon administration viewed it as not a burden but a joy when they took over from the departing Johnson administration. They became the party of war, of the military-industrial complex, of heavy handed reactions to protest under leaders like California governor Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Party pivoted to an anti-war stance, or at least a portion of it did. It had already stressed itself by passing civil rights legislation. Now it dallied with being "soft on Communism." This was the era when you could buy bumper stickers that had a picture of a peace sign with the caption "footprint of the American chicken." Yep, even then, masculine virtue was linked to fighting in any war assigned to you, to prove that your physical courage -- or the insecure need to project its image -- far outweighed your moral courage.

Regardless of the party in power, our country made social progress on multiple fronts, as well as enacting environmental protections that addressed some of the more obvious pollution and degradation effectively enough to make industry organize politically and economically against government. As elections became more and more just sales campaigns, and society grew more noisy and complicated, voters were easier and easier to distract and divert while powerful financial interests focused on taking control.

A philosophical basis isn't really a detailed plan, but generation after generation of Republican politicians advanced the idea that the rich should be allowed to become richer. Because every American liked the idea of being rich, having seen the freedom, luxury, and leisure that the top tier enjoyed, even on the hippie side of the aisle no one seemed averse to making a pile if they could. During the dark age when a Democrat couldn't get within sniffing distance of the presidency, this embrace of a prosperity gospel seeped in to saturate them. The neoliberal was born.

Mind you, I witnessed most of this as a dipshit kid, and later as a dipshit adult. I always had this vision of a country and a world where everyone had enough, no one had too much, and we were all fine with it. I mean, how stupid is that? It seemed to me then, and still does, that it requires the least wasted effort on cruelty and the artificial suffering of war, for the most return on the true simple pleasures of life. As far as I could tell, I was nearly alone in this belief. There was absolutely no political machinery devoted to something so benign. But if anyone was going to pay it lip service it was probably Democrats. It was a thread in the successful campaign of Bill Clinton to finally unseat the Republican fuddy-duddies who acted like grandparents and made our government smell like mothballs and cordite.

Of course the Democrats couldn't break the Republican hold on the Oval Office without the leverage of corporate money. Someone has to pay for the media saturation. So lip service was all we got, along with incremental tidbits.

The partisan divide is the reason so many voters identify as unaffiliated. Shallow observers identify this as "the middle," where the wishy washy majority loll in contemptible political apathy, but it's more than that. It's a diverse ecosystem of assorted malcontents. We are all afflicted by the same foul forces from above. And here's where the accidental 4-D chess comes in.

There's some chess involved in governing, but what is chess anyway? It's a game with known pieces on a finite board. Seriously, after all these years with so many documented games, why doesn't every game between Grand Masters end in a draw? Any top level player knows where the pieces go and has gamed out every possibility. But in real life, a player blinks, forgets, or is successfully distracted for just long enough. Politics and government take place on an almost infinite board with many more pieces, none of them reliably under direct control. Philosophies that stress obedience to authority have an advantage keeping their pieces moving where the plan requires, so authoritarianism has come to dominate. But the combination of Republican centralized authority and Democratic structural instability may finally have pissed off enough of that reachable rabble of independent minds to get them to mutiny and take control of the one party still up for grabs and publicly devoted to the general welfare. The brilliant, accidental move by establishment Democrats has been finally to demolish themselves and let the next wave climb the rubble to plant a flag and build something better.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a politically viable number of people to catch up. Maybe they finally have. The party label only matters because branding still matters. The Democrats were the party of slavery in the 1850s and the party of civil rights in the 1960s. The Republicans were the party of abolition in the 1860s and the party of cronyism and corruption in the Gilded Age. But we're comfortable with the names. I don't care what you call it. Just get busy proving that life really will be better when the lowest are lifted and the highest are hauled down a few notches.

It's never going to happen like the flip of a switch. Progressive activists today hiss angrily that the Democrats never really intended to fix anything, because they so seldom succeed. This narrow-minded perpetuation of the blame game betrays a youthful naivete about human nature and the political headwinds that nominal members of the same party face in their highly varied home regions. Democrats have been the less popular party for so long that they are always more worried that a backlash will whisk them out of office or that a "blue wave" will roll back leaving them flopping helplessly on parched sand before they can spawn a new generation. 

Ignorance and malice always move with great confidence. We are by far a country of bystanders when it comes to elected office. Snappy put-downs resonate with us as an audience, because most of us have never had to try to bring together disparate factions to enact large-scale policies against well-funded resistance. The oversimplification gives these darts a sharp point and a sticking barb. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

Cynics are disappointed optimists. Don't let the bitterness fool you.

As always, success comes down to gathering the votes. Candidates and their organizations have thousands and millions of cats to herd to get everyone to go to the polls at all and then to make the desired choice. Then the actual legislating starts, with more votes to wrangle from officials gathered together from all across the sprawling country. Each one comes with their own set of leashes and tripwires installed by everyone who had a hand in getting them there. Some of the strings are clearly visible, some are not. Even the ones not obviously owned by some power bloc are answerable to the voters back home, some of them placid, others highly volatile.

Winning and losing and fighting dirty

 I've caught some chatter about Democrats pushing their elected representatives to fight more like Republicans. You know: dirty.

While Republicans are great at obstructionist politics, it's mostly because conservatism has really degenerated into nothing but obstructionism, combined with outright reversion to much uglier, less free, more violent past forms of our national and state governments. This is painted as some idealized, moral society of small town virtue and agricultural wholesomeness. It never existed, and its architects know that. They're just selling the fantasy of manly men and appreciative women to an audience hungry for a simpler moral landscape than reality ever provides. Conflict resolution goes from strong words to bare knuckles to six-guns. Might makes right.

Politicians lie. You have to filter for the percentage of lies, the persistence of the lies, and rhetorical goals of the lies. You have to vet the truth, too. It's hard, because a candidate for office, even if they're the incumbent, is asking you to believe that they will bring you what you want, when they haven't yet. And these better things have to be the result of a widespread cooperative effort among a majority of the elected officials. No single savior can do it, not even an imperial President.

The critical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans only want their team to win, whereas Democrats want the whole country to win. The Republicans view their team as the only true Americans, while the Democrats have taken the position that the United States is a work in progress, evolving by absorbing a diverse population enjoying individual liberty responsibly in a cooperative endeavor to create a more perfect union.  

Each political party's vision of the future is quite different. Individual humans regardless of party affiliation are susceptible to human failings of greed, lust, and denial, but that doesn't mean that "both parties are the same." Horny Bill Clinton was not the same as horny Newt Gingrich when it came to governing philosophy.

Elections are sales campaigns. Politicians are service providers who carry out their jobs more or less constantly in the public eye. The House of Representatives is full of people you may never have heard of unless they do something stupendous or outrageous, but the voters of their districts mostly know who they are and what they do. Senators have higher profiles, because there are fewer of them. Thus we are all affected by the decisions of people we have no chance to vote for. We have no leverage except to appeal to their morality or intellect. And legislators among themselves have to negotiate constantly to make laws and otherwise fulfill their duties while remaining electable at home. When voters periodically heave a bunch of them out, the deal process has to start all over again.

Universal access to the same information, through broadcast media and the internet gives people in vastly different circumstances a deceptively uniform portrayal of the world outside their immediate surroundings. People collect in their echo chambers, but the chambers channel each other's messaging to stitch into the fabric of the tailored message to their followers. We argue in general about the same broad topics regardless of where we live. The issues might be real, but the life experience of the audience is not the same. Come election time, only the voters in each Congressional district get to vote for the politician who will carry their standard to DC to help make things better or worse for people who live in the myriad of other districts all over the country.

Democrats have an image problem that won't be solved by becoming more like Republicans. They tried that in the 1990s and ended up with more corporate influence as we got dragged further to the right. On the other hand, political power ultimately does originate in the voters. One could infer that the shift to the right reflected the overall character of the majority of voters. The key phrase there is "majority of voters." Especially in midterm elections, voter turnout represents less than half of registered voters in most states, sometimes much less than half. And that's only registered voters. Adults who are eligible to vote but don't register don't show up in statistics. But they do show up in the bitching and moaning.

Voting is a process of elimination. In an election where the winner has 52 percent and the loser has 48, 48 percent of the winning total just went to cancel out the loser's votes. The more people who actually show up and cast a ballot, the more accurately the results represent the beliefs of the adults in the district in question, whether it's local, state, congressional, senatorial, or presidential. The electoral college sucks, but it would matter a lot less if voters turned out en masse every time, and voted on more than a single issue or two. Voting can be discouraging when you don't see the improvements you were hoping for, or keep losing over and over because sports fan mentality has replaced critical thinking.

Meanwhile, elections have consequences. In Missouri, voters passed a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage and require sick leave. One and done, right? Wrong. The Republican legislature and governor decided that they rule over the mere voters, so they passed legislation reversing the decision. This is a pitfall of our representative democracy, when the elected officials decide that the disadvantaged minority they really answer to is rich donors. Voters install the officials, but the officials then have the power to implement the policies and laws under which ordinary citizens live. I would have said under which everyone lives, but we all see how the system goes lightly on prominent people. And legislators all too often exempt themselves as well.

Some Democrats are operating more aggressively, but it's a fine line between beating the other team at their own game and becoming as bad as they are. As Texas prepares to gerrymander their state even more aggressively to counter the losses Republicans expect in Congress as a result of their unpopular and destructive Big Steaming Pile of a Bill, California has floated the notion of redistricting to dilute republican power there, to counteract the expected shift in election results in the Lone Star State. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's only a battle tactic. The real winning strategy for the country as a whole would be a law requiring nonpartisan redistricting nationwide at all levels. Make politicians run on the issues, not on their party affiliation. Good luck getting that passed when so many members of Congress got there from gerrymandered districts, but we can dream.

In New York, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has run a thoughtful and energetic campaign to promote the ideas as well as the candidate, to put a human face on the bogeyman of a progressive Muslim vying to head the government of the most populous city in the United States. It's not fighting dirty at all. It's communicating intelligently. If the Democratic Party is going to turn the tide of authoritarianism being driven by the current degenerated state of the Republican Party, thoughtful communication will be at least as important as clever and hostile political maneuvers. Successful hostilities gratify party faithful, but they make genuine mutual understanding less and less possible. "They kill one of ours, we kill one of theirs..." This only creates two committed minorities, each incapable of winning a free and fair election on their own, fighting for the uncommitted voters increasingly turned off by both of them.

The Republicans were the good guys in the Civil War, but by the end of the 19th Century they had become the tools of plutocracy. Democrats notoriously presided over rigged towns like Chicago, and were the power behind Southern racist politics throughout most of the 19th Century, and well into the 2oth. General party characteristics of either side blend with local variations, so you have to pay attention to the details where you happen to be. Listen to what the candidates say. Pay attention to what they actually do when they get into office. Communicate often, in clear and constructive terms.

I hate talking to people, especially about politics and government. I would much rather take some time over a piece of writing than have to think fast on my feet, summoning up the examples I know someone will ask for. I greatly admire people who can do that and bring receipts. It's especially gratifying when those receipts will stand up to fact checking. Communicate in your preferred way.

The Americans who want to get us back on track to save the small-d democratic portion of our great republican government have no immediate choice but to back capital D Democrats in large numbers. We can sort the rest out later, but right now we're fighting the battle with the troops we have, and the weapons they bring. The system needs a reset to make Congress take its job seriously, make the courts independent again, and the President less of a quasi-monarch. We won't get there in one or two elections, but we won't ever get there if we don't take the first step. Vote for Democrats and then don't just release them into the wild. Stay on them and hold them accountable, as you would with anyone you hired to represent you. It's a nuisance and a pain in the ass, but it's the basis of the Constitution from which comes your beloved right to yap off and carry a gun. If they let you down, don't flip to the other party without checking out their plans thoroughly. Instead, vote in primaries, to refine the trajectory, not turn the gun on ourselves.

Bitching about the age of Democrats

 The age of Democratic elected officials is a symptom, not the disease itself. It's a troublesome symptom, a side effect of inconvenient truths about the party itself and the psychology of American voters.

Jeet Heer in the New Republic wrote: "The party is a heterogeneous coalition of centrists and progressives that has failed to define a core goal." This is and has been a simple truth since the party shifted to the left in the 1960s, as the Republican Party became the party of business over individuals, property rights over civil rights, and truculent conservatism in general. Those are some great core goals. Their evolution has led to the current authoritarian regime.

Heer pointed out that three House Democrats have died this year, all from states that Trump won or that have a Republican governor. This implied that more youthful presence of Democrats in those states might have improved the party's standing overall, but I think it says more about the states themselves, and voter psychology. 

Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona died at age 77, from cancer. He had represented his seat to the satisfaction of the majority of voters in his district for more than 20 years. Seventy-seven seems old when you're 35 or younger, but wait until you're in your upper 60s, still working and feeling pretty energetic, and have some respect for the value of experience. If someone has been doing an acceptable job, gets the votes, and contributes to the party's national presence, why not keep sending them? Arizona is full of old people. It takes a particularly persuasive whippersnapper to get old farts to switch their allegiance. Grijalva was a reliable Democratic seat in the House. Maybe the district is drawn to keep it that way. But if a fresh-faced newbie hops in there and makes a mess, all of those calculations fall apart.

Gerry Connolly drew ire earlier this year when the party chose him as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then he up and died of esophageal cancer, which he knew he had. He was 75. He had been an effective legislator for more than 16 years. 

The current occupant of the Oval Office will turn 79 on June 14, and is a babbling wreck. His backers will keep pushing him along as long as they can, because he is a reliable brand for them.

Most voters hate to think. I'm with you. My life is a testimony to my lack of mental discipline. Also, when you're busy busy busy, either scraping out a living or trying to have enough fun in your time off to feel ready to go back to scraping, you don't want to dig through the dense language of policy analysis. You want someone to tell you that everything will be okay if you put them in office. Public prominence brings with it an automatic assumption of some level of competence. Look at how Joe Biden was alternately a drooling bumbler and the evil mastermind of a vast criminal conspiracy. Anyone who makes it to the top has to have done something right. Right?

Hardworking, solid, prosperous citizens who put aside the artistic dreams of youth and became corporate lawyers are just as pressed for time as dishwashers, shop clerks, and bicycle mechanics.

An analysis of Kamala Harris's loss in 2024 stated that her voters were mostly "super voters" -- people who are more attentive and engaged in politics than average voters. We spent more time reading and absorbing analysis of the threat presented by another go-round with MAGA at the helm, and did what we could to prevent it. Added to that would be habitual party voters. But her race and gender were too much even for some of the regular partisans. Those regulars who sat it out did not believe that the current regime would be bad enough to warrant setting aside their core prejudices to elect a woman, especially a non-white woman whose voice they might not like.

Democrats re-elect old farts because they keep being electable. I've dunked on electable Democrats before, but even a dead weight like Joe Manchin at least held a seat that added to the technical majority. Yes, it's a coalition party. It always will be, because it collects all of the people and sub-groups that don't move in lockstep: the true exemplars of individual freedom of thought. We are the reason that the Constitution was written and amended as it is. The lesser of two evils is still less fucking evil.

The elements gathered into the Democratic Party have been fighting to defend their lives since the 1970s. Even as the work to expand civil rights and full citizenship to women and minorities has gone on, public perception has morphed and modified under the influence of changing media and economic pressures. And public perception is the foundation of electoral politics. Facts matter, but opinions get you into office.

The young have vision. The old have experience. The old also have the memory of their younger visions, many of which might match surprisingly well to those of the young today. 

If I'm still alive at 75 or 77, I fully expect still to be working, because I was too much of a dumbass to secure a lucrative retirement package. Or maybe AI will have set up a robot army to cull out the slower members of the herd. We can be processed into any number of useful things. A lot of us out there expect still to be working if we haven't been forcibly removed by some ageist purge.

People only vote against

The Republican Party figured out decades ago that people don't vote for things, they vote against them. What is conservatism but the commitment to hold back change? What is bigotry but the insistence that a particular group should be prevented from taking a full and equal place?

The opponents of this exclusionary point of view vote against it at every opportunity.

Voting for civil rights was voting against firehoses, and police dogs, and police with teargas, and lynch mobs. Look at how progress on civil rights slowed and has reversed when the tools of oppression became almost invisible except to the people on whom they were used.

Voting for environmental protection was voting against brown air, and rivers that catch fire, and polluted groundwater, and pesticides sickening and killing humans and wildlife alike. And so much more. The idea of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been a harder sell, because they are less obvious. Are we against an earlier spring when winter is so damn dreary? How bad is it really? Maybe we won't get devastating super storms this summer. And aren't the early crocuses a welcome sight?

The Democratic Party has been rightly inspired and energized by Cory Booker's historic marathon speech in the Senate on Monday and Tuesday, and with the resounding defeat of billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election. I have received a blizzard of fundraising emails and seen a barrage of social media exhortations to rally the faithful with the idea that "we can win elections!"

Here's the thing: Neither party can win an election with its base alone. The margin of victory always lies with the unfaithful. I can't speak for elections before I was born, or old enough to understand, but you could say that Franklin Roosevelt came to power because the voters were rejecting the Republican mismanagement that had wrecked the national economy. They continued to support him because they liked what he was doing -- so they voted for it, but by extension voted against letting the screwups who had wrecked things in the first place get control again. Then, through World War II, FDR remained at the helm because voters didn't want to disrupt leadership.

Truman won his election in 1948 basically on voter complacency. All the experts had stated pretty strongly that he was sure to lose. Come 1952, the voters voted against letting the Democrats continue their hold on the White House after 20 years in power.

Policies are important. Our economy has been mutilated and our elections sold out by the policies championed by Republicans. They have been largely unopposed by corporate Democrats, but corporate Democrats are a product of the corrupting influence of big money on elections. I apologize for my generation, but I think that a great many of the Baby Boomers believed that they (we) were not only going to enjoy the most protected childhoods any generation had received that far in history, but that we were also somehow miraculously going to become rich. It should have been obvious by the late 1980s at least that we were wrong, but faith is persistent. That's what makes it faith.

The bigotry just came along for the ride.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because voters voted against Nixonian shenanigans, which slopped over onto Gerald Ford by association. Reagan won in 1980 because voters voted against what was seen as Carter's weakness in the face of global threats, and the faltering economy as the country as a whole was deciding what to do with itself after partying for most of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 because the Reagan recession had eroded faith in the Republican brand. You could say that we voted for youthful enthusiasm, but that also means that we voted against stodgy old men. But then in 2000, voters voted against Clinton's sexual escapades, which stuck to Al Gore like a suspicious, waist-high crust on the Oval Office drapery.

It seems like the thing that the uncommitted voters (and the Republican base) seem to like to vote against the most is their own interests. That's a tough one, because they're also voting against "socialism," "terrorism," "lawlessness" (particularly hilarious), "tyranny," "government overreach," "globalization," all of which need to be addressed with counteracting negatives. Because they're never going to vote for you.

Voters in Wisconsin voted against Elon Musk. They might have voted against what the MAGA candidate for the supreme court seat represented, but Elon really crystalized it for them. That jackass is so despised, people are setting fire to his cars even in other countries. He's living proof that you really can be too rich. It's encouraging that enough voters wanted to prove that democracy was not for sale on that day in that state in that race. Now let's see them bring that same energy to every other election in every other place.

As much as we all want to be positive and live in a supportive environment, we can never escape the essential negativity that goes into choosing our elected champions. As a representative -- rather than a direct -- democracy, we have to pick people who will defend our position up where the decisions finally get their legal weight. We the people do have the power, but that requires us to exert it every day, not just on election day or -- worse yet -- only on occasional election days. This ain't your church. You can't just show up on Christmas and Easter, have a slug of wine and a piece of bread and call yourself right with the Lord. The politicians need to hear and see what we are against, every day.

Negatives can be positive. I'm against bigotry, persecution, environmental destruction, sprawl, overpopulation, anthropogenic climate change, moto-centric transportation planning, and so on. That means I am for the policies that act against these things.

In the film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey's character suddenly gets to receive the prayers of everyone in the world. It's an overwhelming flood of messages asking for benedictions or divine wrath. This is basically what an elected official faces. We owe deep gratitude to them and their long-suffering staff members who get buried in this avalanche. However, every contact shapes political decision making. They have to hear it everywhere they go. It doesn't have to be obnoxious direct confrontation, although sometimes that is warranted and makes highly entertaining video. It just has to surround them. While you live as you believe people should live, narrate it to no one and everyone. Make no secret of it. Drop them a note from time to time. Keep it short and courteous. Just try to remember to be there, in their inbox or voicemail or even an old fashioned paper letter.

Citizen government is hard. Benjamin Franklin didn't know the half of it when he said, "A republic...if you can keep it." We have way more to keep track of than he ever imagined. But it is more important than ever to pay attention. I know it's hard. We can't know everything. We have to trust office holders and civil servants to take care of the sensitive stuff in a way that will promote the general welfare and not reflect badly on our national image. We're certainly not getting that now.

The big challenge for a party interested in ultimately positive goals is to find the right negative approach to gather in the fearful and pissed off to support them for more than one lousy election cycle at a time.

The Constitution fails when one side bails

 Democrats should definitely continue their token resistance through the traditional methods of debate and deal-making. Republicans will honor it about the way that Russia honors arms limitation treaties, but it's important to maintain the structure of the system that should be in effect, in case we get back to it at some point.

We could be very close to the point at which the current regime could just start having rivals poisoned, pushed out of windows, or killed in bathtub and stairwell falls, and there would be no meaningful penalty. This is not because law enforcement is completely owned by the dictator and his organized crime syndicate, but because enough police and judges are compromised to slow things down by sheer internal friction and purposeful inefficiency.

Some alarmists warn that the regime is just looking for an excuse to impose martial law. I say that they don't need to, nor do they want to. Trump might be so vain and stupid, but the right underling or puppeteer might be able to explain to him how that makes his life more complicated and could interfere with golf. As it stands now, the regime could open fire on protesters anyway, on some trumped-up excuse. The faithful would back him. The opposition would explode into arguments among themselves about exactly why what he did was wrong, while coordinating exactly zero effective response. Suits would be filed. Charges would be suggested, but probably never brought.

The "armed patriots" who have insisted for decades that they were gathering their forces and arsenals to fight just this sort of tyranny will do nothing, because the tyranny will be acting out their own wishes. They've only ever wanted the freedom to be dicks to whoever they dislike. The regime represents the pinnacle of that. Those assholes stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to keep that bigotry firmly in power. They rejoice at its return.

I wish I could say that there is a concrete course of action, a road map to reclaim democracy. Maybe we get there through the 2026 midterms, if the regime hasn't assassinated all viable Democratic candidates.

Will mass protests turn the trick? They suggest that the country could rise in even greater unrest, but what happens to most of those crowds when a hail of lead tears through one or more of those gatherings? We may find out. On the other hand, the Democrats suck so badly at coordinated public messaging that Gavin Newsom is now laughing it up with Charlie Kirk while Chuck Schumer embarrasses the party almost daily with attempts to be cool. And that's hardly the full scope of silly antics and betrayals. The Democrats all seem to agree on the single fact that the current regime is a threat to ordinary citizens, particularly the ones who don't fit into the narrow columns in which the right wing puts their "free people." The prospect is so legitimately monstrous that the diverse segments of the Democratic coalition are panicking a little bit. Someone needs to do something, and do it fast... okay, let's hear it.

The sad fact is, a better country has always depended on lots and lots of people making the same choice without coercion, to accept each other's benign weirdness and focus on the real problems brought about by the lust for power and wealth that has defined success for far too many generations.

We must resist all of the efforts underway now to homogenize the country and turn it toward global authoritarianism. The same "armed patriots" who grumble about government overreach only care about what impacts them directly. They cheer for Hungary's Orban and Russia's Putin. They're even warming up to Kim Jong-Un. They like what's happening here too much to do anything substantial to stop it now or undo the damage and beef up firewalls against it if democracy comes back to win this round.

Among the majority of voters less inclined to revel in violence, too many still succumb to distractions like transphobia, fetuses, or specific favorite aspects of law and order and playing by the rules. Examples include immigrants who want to get tough on immigrants, and people with student loans who don't want to see anyone else's financial prospects improve because theirs never did. For many generations, each generation did see average gains, even if every individual didn't experience those gains. Since the 1980s, we've increasingly emphasized resentment, jealousy of the advantages that younger generations enjoy, rather than a sense of accomplishment at having contributed to them.

I understand: the little shits don't seem to appreciate how good they've got it. They waste their advantages in ways that we never would. Little bastards...grumble grumble. Also, a lot of the gains in the industrialized, consumerist world came at the expense of future generations who are here now to rebuke us. Dammit! That future was supposed to be comfortably far away, along with the worst consequences of our environmental devastation. We weren't supposed to experience those directly! We were just supposed to cash in on our Exxon Mobil stocks to finance our luxurious retirements.

The  Republicans gain and consolidate power by narrowing options and making life seem simple. They rate success on the basis of whom they make unhappy. The Democrats fail because the disparate groups they gather from the many who reject the right wing focus on favorite parts of the tangle of interconnected problems. They add or withhold their support based on those specifics to the detriment of overall progress on a broad, though irregular, front. The Democrats need to make more people happy for more of the time, just to tread water, let alone to gain. Figure out how to do that. When you do, let us all know.

Staying elected

 I'm getting emails telling me to press my Democratic senators and congressional representative to hold the line against the Trump administration and demand guardrails against the blatantly unconstitutional devastation and pillage of DOGE and cabinet members purposely selected to destroy their agencies or use them as tools of Trump's personal vengeance. These are worthy and necessary goals, but they're running up against the endlessly grinding wheel of the election cycle.

New Hampshire identifies as Republican even though the entire Congressional delegation is Democratic. Those Democrats manage to piece together enough factors to appeal to a majority of voters. But it could flip at any time. The majority in the state legislature are Republicans, and mostly hard right. The countryside is studded with Trump flags and signs even now.

Without a Congressional majority, Democrats can't do anything that will stop Trump completely. Even if they could, Democrats in swing states would have to impress enough right-leaning independents to retain their seats so that they could continue the fight. If they lose, a senate seat goes out of reach for six years. A Representative goes out for two. If that provides or perpetuates a Republican majority, their program continues, perhaps with new energy.

It's not just about staying in power. It's about continuing work in progress. The Republicans have the power now because they have no work in progress in the government. They can sub in any yokel who can get elected to swing a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. The painstaking work on their side has been done in places like the Heritage Foundation and right wing media. All of that has just been a setup to get their wrecking crew in place. They could literally just jump up and down and throw feces at this point.

You might think that Democrats would then be free to field a variety of candidates, but for some perverse reason the Republican shit show still draws significant support. It manages to attract a small percentage of self-identified "thoughtful" voters who believe that they are supporting some kind of coherent policy. Once they realize that they've wasted their vote it's too late. Maybe they reject the candidate they picked the first time, but their conservative leaning means that they're ripe to believe the marketing they hear and see about the replacement goon put up next by the Republicans.

The Democrats aren't a pure force for good by any means. In states where they are the entrenched power, human nature dictates that they succumb to corruption at the same rates as their right-wing counterparts. Maybe the goals of it are different in some cases, but the methods are still questionable or illegal. It's significant that the Trump administration has reached across the aisle to pardon corrupt Democrats like Eric Adams and Rod Blagojevich. It proves that criminality is the unifying principle, not any of the political, economic, and social philosophies they claimed as talking points in the campaign. Rod Blagojevich?! Who even remembered who that was? His name was fun to say, though.

I can tell an elected official what I wish would happen. I can advise. But I know that they know things that I don't. They're dealing with the situation in person, and coordinating information from their state and districts. They have to run the calculation constantly to find the balance between what a portion of their constituency says it wants and what will actually fly. I'm as disgusted and disappointed by John Fetterman as anyone, but I also know that he's balancing the input from his diverse state, attempting to represent them fairly and stay in place to advance better values when the opportunity arises. He seems like a duplicitous asshole to some of us right now, but maybe he's not a complete Manchin or Sinema.

At least he's no Tulsi.

Is it ideal? Of course not. But the strength of democracy is also its weakness. At every election, the candidates have to persuade a majority of eligible voters to pick them. The process never ends. Every action is scrutinized and analyzed, packaged and presented by all interested parties to guide the choice for or against.

Everything You Always Wanted from Your Government, but were Afraid to Ask

Joe Biden's victory in South Carolina shows that the forces of reason are reasserting themselves in the topsy-turvy Democratic Party. The moonbats of progressivism are being brought to heel by the adults in the room.

Realpolitik rules. It's what makes government work, and what makes it a constant disappointment. As I observed in the previous post, what makes a politician on the nominal left electable is the assurance that he or she will continue the inexorable pull to the right.

In the quest for electability, candidates like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigeig all in varying degrees make sure that the broader electorate knows that they will not support things like an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income. They don't use the word "free" to refer to education. Nothing is socialistic.

Socialism is a scare word with good reason. It has much less power now than it did when our global nemesis was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the USSR did plenty to tarnish the brand, which -- in its purest form -- is a recipe for just another kind of heavy-handed government. The negative stereotype has wide, deep roots and a dense, hard grain that you won't cut just by insisting that this socialism is democratic, and doesn't really mean what one definition of the word has always meant: government ownership of the means of production. It's been politically risky from the outset to try to turn socialism into a proud badge of American identity. It was one of those things that you would try to ignore, while focusing on the actual good things offered by the movement. But too many people can't overcome their ingrained visceral repulsion at the term. And then there are the wealthy, who stand to lose, bigly, with the institution of any form of widespread democratization in the workplace and the economy at large.

Small business owners may be even more afraid of humanitarian movements, because small businesses are much more vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces. Technological developments or social trends may kill demand for your product or service with no quick route to regain your revenue stream. Rising wages not coupled with other social improvements like universal health care and affordable access to education and retraining may make employees too expensive, even though your business volume calls for more personnel. But because universal health care has been widely reviled for decades, you know as a business person that it's too risky even to try. Because everything in this country since 1980 has been based on the pursuit of profit and the glorification of wealth, it's un-American to suggest that education should be subsidized and expanded.

Tax policy could be designed to extract much more from the big earners, especially the corporate behemoths that profit inversely to their social responsibility, but that would require an overhaul of investment culture at its most basic level. Good luck with that.

This is why we can't have nice things: because the people with lots of nice things don't want to give any of them up, and the people who have managed to scrape together a few nice things know from sad experience that they are the ones who will get squeezed if any pie-in-the-sky programs get adopted. The wealthy who control the government will make sure that they get their preferential tax policy no matter what crazy bills manage to crawl all the way through an accidentally and temporarily progressive majority in Congress and get signed into law by the odd and occasional Democratic chief executive.

Even Democratic and unaffiliated voters who might want those nice social policies are afraid to ask for them because they know they will get hammered by the opposition from the GOP, corporate Democrats, and right-leaning unaffiliated voters.

The unifying factor among the majority of voters is that they want to make plenty of money, pay as  little as possible in taxes, and take no real risks. Even the lefties who say they don't mind if their taxes are high only accept the taxation as long as the money goes to the kinds of social programs they believe are ultimately good.

Policy fails because its proponents can't convince enough people that it is ultimately good. Because any policy usually takes a long time to show results, the waiting period often spans an election cycle, giving disappointed voters a chance to flip the party dominance in retribution. This generally derails beneficial social policies more than destructive ones, because nurturing and growth are slow processes that require patience. Destruction often shows quick profits, even if they're only a benefit to the rich getting richer. Economic pundits can still point to positive numbers as evidence that this is the way we should have been headed all along. That goes back to the fundamental toxicity underlying investment for profit. And the conservatives gravitate more readily to a warlike model of political interaction, which bolsters gerrymandering and dark money contributions to advance the glorious cause of unlimited wealth on a finite Earth.

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 representative democratic 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.

"Affordable Care"

After hearing some hopeful things about the Affordable Care Act in New Hampshire from friends who have been using it, I finally had to sign up myself after the insurance from my wife's former employer ran out.

To start with, it's not affordable. Even with my "subsidy" in the form of a tax credit I would be paying more than $300 a month to have a deductible of $5,750. The $40 co-pay for doctor visits isn't bad, but at my income level, $300 a month is a chunk, especially when you consider that I have to pay out of pocket for everything up to $5,750 and, if I did get seriously ill, would still have to go to work to earn the money to keep my premiums up. And of course the deductible resets every year.

I'm not a political pea-brain, so I don't blame Obama. Indeed, the people who make Obama a bad president are the same people who made George Bush a bad president. In the case of Bush they reinforced everything he did. In the case of Obama they throw roadblocks in front of everything. So one president drove us down a rocky slope and when the next one tries to steer us back onto the road the yahoos keep grabbing the steering wheel and stomping on the brakes.

I did not vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 primary in part because his health coverage proposal was basically like Mitt Romney's system in Massachusetts, based on private insurance that everyone has to buy. After he won the general election, Obama began adding better features to his proposal, like the publicly funded option which would, in fact, blessedly have killed the private insurance industry and set us on a path toward a true universal coverage system. But the insurance lobby and the largely Republican political operatives who serve them made sure that went away.

I know that plenty of Democrats have financial obligations to corporate interests. But most issues tend to divide pretty neatly between the D's and the R's.

If someone said they were going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a universal, single-payer system and some strong, rational controls on medical service and drug pricing I would support it instantly. And that's simply never going to come from the Republican side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, that leaves me unable to afford Affordable Care. I will return to the ranks of the uninsured, get my self-pay discount from medical service providers, pay the much more affordable tax penalty in lieu of the fat honkin' premium and hold on for Medicare.