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.

The revolution will not be comfortable

 Listening to an analysis of right wing media coverage of the Super Bowl halftime show, I could hear the anxiety masked as dismissiveness in the voice of the mostly white commentators.

Racism is only one aspect of the authoritarian power play, but it's fundamental. From the 17th Century onward, slave owners and their neighbors feared slave uprisings. Later, in the 19th Century, the first super-wealthy industrial capitalists feared labor uprisings. In both cases, the power class used deadly force to attempt to break the will of the oppressed.

Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying that "power never concedes anything without a demand." Power is never willingly surrendered. Sometimes this calls for armed conflict. Much of the time, however, social and political change succeed because the holders of power succumb to some other kind of pressure, whether it's conscience, or economics, or they simply extend themselves too far and fall flat.

In the case of women's suffrage, holders of power became allies and willingly elevated the political status of women. The people who could vote had to be convinced to surrender their undiluted power. In the case of Black civil rights, holders of power in the white supremacist system had to become allies and vote for the change. Sure, there was violence associated with both movements, but it was only one factor in convincing the holders of power to give up some of it. The whole organism of resistance and change combined many elements. The same goes for the progress that labor made, before the ownership class started exploiting philosophical wedges to pit workers against each other over cultural issues. Power was conceded.

This time around, the conflict is not between a single oppressed category and a relatively homogeneous majority. The argument started back around 1980: are we a country that takes care of everyone, or one that lavishly rewards ruthless scrambling for personal wealth? Are we a united nation that recognizes the value of all contributors, all the way down the economic continuum, or one that values humans purely monetarily? Right now, a lot of people who could quiet down and make the best of it are still talking a good game about resistance and change. How long will they last when they figure out what change really means?

Make no mistake, the regime in power now is very very bad for the country and the world. But the antidote to them is for people who might be rather comfortable right now to be permanently, willingly less comfortable as part of the rebalancing of social opportunity and respect. These people are mostly white or think of themselves as white. They're well off under the current economic system, when the current economic system is largely responsible for the rise of the movement that is destroying the country. They were winners because they pleased their masters or entrepreneurially exploited the inequalities to enrich themselves, even if they faithfully voted Democratic.

Change is coming no matter what. It could be the widespread death and misery that will follow full implementation of right wing social engineering, or it could be the reordering of the economy to improve circumstances at the bottom very much to the detriment of the top and a chunk of the middle. There is no third option. The status quo is dead. We can't get back to it and we shouldn't want to. This can be done without rewriting our Constitution, although we will need an amendment or two. The fundamentals are sound as long as the full scope of We the People isn't limited to the originalist concept of We the White, Male Property Owners.

The good news is that the system that improves life at the bottom also frees up everyone along the entire spectrum to have more of their own time to spend as they wish. A well-ordered economy using the lavish talent pool available if we quit being obsessively competitive could easily have shorter work days and weeks and still get everything done that needs to be done. It will require examining our goals and the costs associated with them. It will mean the death of go-go, unrestrained consumerist capitalism. And good riddance.

Stimulus checks are an abomination!

 My little daily news blurb from the New York Times this morning featured a pro-con analysis of the direct $2,000 stimulus checks proposed as part of the Biden administration's coronavirus relief package. The checks would actually be $1,400, building on the $600 already sent out by the previous administration, but the total we're kicking around for purposes of argument is $2,000.

The arguments in favor of the direct payment all made sense, as did one of the arguments against it. But, as usual, the other arguments from the conservative side were completely insensitive to the realities of daily financial life for working class Americans.

First the argument against the $2,000, that is even remotely arguable: The money could be used to increase unemployment benefits for the people who really need it, giving a prorated amount of direct payment to people with less need. It's more complicated than simply handing out checks, and could lead to complaints that the targeted system misses in some cases. But there are complaints now. The current stimulus proposal includes enhanced unemployment benefits, with the direct payment added to them. One fix could be ongoing stimulus checks, as proposed by progressive Democratic members of Congress.

The other arguments against stimulus checks came from conservative fantasyland. The first stated that the stock market is doing great, and that the value of housing has actually gone up, so people are doing well financially, and will simply put the $2,000 in the bank, not stimulating the economy at all. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute actually called the checks "an abomination."Are they really that unobservant, or are they merely hoping that everyone else is? Most people have stock holdings in a retirement account. The value is comforting -- until you realize that it could all be wiped out by a "market correction" the day before you retire -- but it doesn't help with the day to day expenses unless you tap into that reserve to meet an emergency need. Money you extract now needs to be made up by investment appreciation or by your further contributions so that it will be there when you do finally try to live on it. As for your home value, that's only liquid if you borrow against it, paying a bank to lend you your own money, or sell your house and have a wad of cash to live on while you're homeless.

The other argument, from conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was that FDR wouldn't have done it. His plan favors infrastructure programs to put people to work. This neatly forgets how much the New Deal programs were scorned and derided at the time, and -- more importantly -- completely ignores the pandemic that has caused the economic distress in the first place. Manchin can say that he "doesn't remember FDR recommending sending a damn penny to a human being," but FDR wasn't facing a contagious and mysterious illness that would spread through work crews gathered together to work on these projects. We're in a situation like the 1919 flu pandemic, in which the government attempted to promote safe practices like we're seeing today: masks and distance. They met with similar carelessness and opposition. I'd be willing to bet that a pandemic would have altered FDR's calculations and the types of relief offered to the people looking to him for leadership and support.

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.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.