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.

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.

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.