The problem isn't politicians, it's elections

The Constitution established different term lengths and election cycles for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President. The president serves for four. Senators serve for six, and the terms are offset so that they don't all turn over every six years. Poor congressional representatives have to reapply for their jobs every two years. This should mean that senators and the President can work on actually governing more than campaigning to retain their positions. In a perfect world perhaps...

Partisan conflict became increasingly toxic from 1980 onward. It really went back to the Nixon years, at least in its most recent iteration, but in the 1970s and early 1980s you might actually find a Republican who supported things that were good for planetary survival and the ordinary taxpayers of this country. Think of Nixon and the EPA.

Regardless of how we got here, we're here now. At the national level, everything runs to the frantic hamster heartbeat of the House of Representatives and their two-year terms. This means that at any level a party in power has perhaps a scant year to show results that they can sell to voters who are fired up and opinionated regardless of whether they really understand any of what they've been primed to be angry about. Between the representatives competing to be the most appealing to their districts -- whatever that might mean in each case -- and the senators who happen to be up for renewal, every two years brings a bunch of people kicking the table on which delicate things have been piled.

Shakeups appeal to citizens who don't look deeply at the challenges of governing. "Throw the bums out!" That'll teach 'em! Perversely, voters will also choose to retain someone who has consistently been very bad for them and the nation as a whole -- think Mitch McConnell -- because of good advertising paid for with large amounts of shady funding.

It's hard for an ordinary working person to keep track of all of the card tricks and shell games being played to manipulate elections. The internet has made lots of information available, along with reams of expert analysis to help you out. That's only made it more confusing. The tangle makes quick, destructive solutions even more appealing than they already were. Or voters check out and don't bother to take part at all. 

Election reform is going to be tricky. While corporations are not people, money is speech. This can't help giving rich people more leverage unless campaign advertising is pinched down to a strict minimum, but even then, can the government forbid a private citizen from buying an ad to express an opinion? Not only would that invite a trip to the Supreme Court, any law to close all the potential loopholes would be too long for anyone to read and too dense to enforce effectively.

Even limiting the length of campaigns is hard. If someone wants to use their free speech to talk about an issue or a political candidate they like, can they be censored if they happen to talk about it outside of an official 6-week campaign span?

See how liberty undermines itself? Because the fledgling United States had to measure itself against the yardsticks already established in European civilization, this country had to come up with a way for its luminaries to look good compared to the kind of authoritarian figures they had defied in the war of independence. A so-called meritocracy is still an -ocracy. It's still a hierarchy that creates powerful winners who can boss around the more numerous losers. Those winners can establish generational advantages on top of the social advantages conferred by being a free white male.

Civics was just another class when I was a kid. It was not presented as the most crucial aspect of being an adult. The most crucial aspect of being an adult was earning a living. Academic success could help your standing in the search for employment after you finished school, whether it was the high school diploma that was presented as the basic working class credential or various levels of college education to move you forward in white collar and technical fields. Civic involvement was elective. You might have to serve a hitch when there was still a military draft, or show up for jury duty if you had the bad luck to get that summons. It was considered a duty to vote if it wasn't too inconvenient.

Certainly you can't participate in citizen government if you're a destitute drifter. So of course you wanted to find whatever education or training suited your temperament, to secure an income. At the same time, throughout my lifetime, and the era of the Baby Boomers in general, health care was improving, and leisure options just kept expanding. Life was good, and provided plenty of distractions from the grind of routine government functions.

There have always been political observers and analysts keeping an eye on the inevitable percentage of people attracted to government. There has always been that percentage of people attracted to government, for reasons both noble and base. We counted on the observers to report, to help us guide our choices for when we could be bothered to vote. Big targets are easier to see, so reporting can be much sparser on candidates below the state level. Also, the more likely you are to actually know a person and deal with them on a daily basis, the harder they might be to confront over a political issue. Think about tensions at family dinners when people attending have conflicting political opinions. It's just as weird when maybe its a longtime customer in your bike shop, or a guy who lives down the road from you.

Because elected officials make decisions affecting hundreds, or thousands of lives, including future generations, maybe you can't agree to disagree and remain friends.

The stakes keep getting higher because each election builds on the pile of kicked cans from the ones before. Voters are angry, anxious, and confused. No wonder that a solid percentage of them is ready to hand off to a dictator. They've been trained out of thinking for themselves over generations. The hierarchy of needs goes from survival needs to sensual gratifications. Civic responsibility isn't even a category. It can get lumped in with social connection, but you can find plenty of social connections that demand less of you and feed you mental and emotional comfort.

Campaigning has already begun for 2026. Fundraising never ends. Governing takes a back seat to public image building. Elections have become a constant distraction from actually running the country.

The USA has left the free world

 The Trump administration and their manipulators behind the scenes have succeeded in their long cherished dream of separating the United States from its alliances. The stated goal was to save money and concentrate our power at home, but the real effect will be instability and weakness.

By supporting the bullies, the Trump administration hopes to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and expand economic opportunity for predatory capitalism and destructive strip-mining of resources. Look at how they supported the bully Netanyahu, pushing to ethnically-cleanse Gaza to make way for luxury real estate development, and now ally with Russia to trample Ukraine and steal their mineral resources.

The idiots in power and the idiots who supported them took American power and privilege for granted. They believed that they couldn't hurt it, they could only turn it to their advantage. They're too ignorant to understand that diplomacy functions on many levels and in seemingly unrelated ways. The same goes for demonstrations of power. They're obsessed with big explosions. They have no respect for, or even awareness of, the intricate balance of international relations. It's all about short term transactions with them.

You wanted representative government and you got it. Most average citizens don't understand any of that shit either. Thing is, you can admit that you don't understand it and still respect the people who do and the skill they exert to keep this ponderous mess of a country lurching generally in the right direction without bumping into anyone hard enough to start a massive conflagration.

We may not survive this. We certainly will come out in worse shape than we were in before this asinine experiment in greedy betrayal of our own citizens and our allies abroad by a regime of traitors. May their memory be hated forever.

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.

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.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.

Republican Suppression of Women

 The Republican Party has steadily advanced a campaign to drive women out of positions of power in public and corporate life. But have they, really?

From Phyllis Schlafly onward, the trend has tilted to dump women back into dependent, subservient roles in which their only power comes from their ability to manipulate their heterosexual husbands. Some factions of the party now openly seek to reduce the ability of women to register to vote. A few even talk about repealing the right altogether.

A snippet in a summary of Mitch McConnell's career caught my eye. A woman named Janet Mullens, who worked on his senate campaign in 1984, was quoted as saying, "He intuitively knew that women worked harder to prove themselves. He was woke before woke, I guess."

That's not woke. That's exploitation. Republicans have kept it so that many women would be discouraged from trying, but the few who do try will be so incredibly motivated that they will do four times as much for two-thirds the pay, provided you start them off at half pay first so that two-thirds looks like significant progress.

Sexism being rampant in the male, regardless of party affiliation, Democrats have been slow to inch in the direction of full parity and respect. That said, they've advanced a bit further than the right wing on this, because their definition of liberty encompasses a more realistically diverse population. But the sentiment will remain in the male psyche. Guard against it always. "Not all men" think that way, but the attitude has centuries of cultural reinforcement.

The question boils down to whether allowing all roles eliminates some by default, and how the women filling those roles will be fairly compensated. A woman who chooses to remain childless or delay reproduction to pursue a career or other interests should not devalue one who chooses stay at home with the kids. The reverse is also true. But it keeps getting framed as a war between two monolithic positions. That's without even factoring in sex and gender diversity that further complicates the binary choices so beloved of simple minds.

Compensation extends beyond a paycheck. We've lost sight of that in this world where billionaires strive to become trillionaires while we all watch from below, some in admiration, some in horror. The very fact that no amount of money or power seems to be enough shows that what they devour is almost instantly digested, leaving them craving more. If it was just drugs or sugar, they wouldn't be hurting as many people, but its the lifeblood of economies they're guzzling with vampirish lust.

There's more than one way to play the game. Women seeking power or proximity to power work their way into the existing system as hardworking servants or bejeweled decorations. Many of them you see today on the right have themselves made into caricatures of femininity, to the extent that's medically possible. Sorry, Marge. You'll have to get by on CrossFit and crazy. But the others go for the boob jobs and hair extensions along with their semiautomatic weapons and flamethrowers. They leave behind a trail of dead dogs and goats, sticky puddles in theater seats, and other attention seeking behavior to prove that they are no shrinking violets. Will there always be a place for them in this and every future conservative administration? Or are they energetically building their own prison? And are they secretly looking forward to that?

No woman could stay in the Trump administration without deferring to Big Daddy. As feisty as they act, it's still in the framework of what makes a girl attractive to the menfolk. "Hell, she can shoot a gun, change the oil in her pickup truck, cook supper, and still fck my brains out that night and tell me I was great!" Yeah, then she spends a suspiciously long time shut in the bathroom with her "electric toothbrush," but let's not pick at it too much.

From the women's side, flirtatious behavior is the dangerous game they use to make the men feel generous. Occasionally they'll get too close and have to put up with sexual assault, but that's just part of being a large-animal trainer. You're going to get stomped, or kicked, or bitten sometimes. Maybe some of you die. It's a small price to pay for keeping men manly. 

The tyranny of normality demands that women be that way and support men being locked into the hierarchical world view that has framed every power structure among religions, nations, and corporations throughout history. You're either climbing the ladder or you're one of the rungs being stepped on. It remains true as long as we decide that it must be that way. Perhaps it is genetically inescapable, as conservatives have long asserted. I wonder, however, what some of the shrimpier members of the alpha male booster club would do if they were trapped naked in a locker room with a handful of larger assailants bent on power-raping them to assert dominance. Just you and whatever you were born with, against them. No weapons, only strength and whatever skill you have chosen to cultivate for your physical defense. This is the world you chose.

The bullies are in charge of the playground now

 A minuscule majority of the voters who actually bothered to show up in November, 2024, put into office the worst executive branch in American history, and paper-thin majorities of GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

In "A Christmas Story" the narrator states that "in the kid world, you're either a bully, a toady, or a victim." In a momentary triumph, Ralphie beats the bully so badly that if it happened in a schoolyard today he would be charged with aggravated assault. Many of us smaller, nearsighted boys had similar experiences growing up, though perhaps without Ralphie's primal ferocity.

In the adult world, bullies organize. The fascist movements of the 1930s were just super organized bullies. The regime in the United States today formed a coalition of narrow-minded bullies, because narrow minds are easier to capture and control. The coalition will fracture, because the factions want different things, but it won't happen soon enough and completely enough to save American stature and power in the world.

The tech oligarchs want to use up the Earth to build their starships and leave behind the dead weight of people they consider inferior. It's a grand sci-fi fantasy. Thus they are strip-mining the government for resources that can be transferred to them in contracts and subsidies, making those inferior people subsidize their greatness through our taxes.

The ideological bullies include the Christian nationalists who want to cement the patriarchy and the libertarians who just don't want to pay taxes. There's some overlap between the libertarians and the religious dictatorship, in which male libertarians feel adequately  liberated as long as they can control their subservient women and shoot nearly anyone who pisses them off. But true libertarians want everyone to be able to shoot anyone who pisses them off, and to make bank on all of the toll roads and other privatized services that are going to be so wonderfully efficient and profitable.

The oligarchs consider nations to be tools to help control labor costs in the short-sighted grovel to control what's left of the planet's resources. The libertarians imagine exuberant anarchy in which they always manage to draw faster and shoot straighter in a world no longer encumbered by law enforcement.

To beat these bullies will take more than a single Ralphie to go berserk. It will take more than a handful of Ralphies to administer the beat-down. It will take the impossible dream of millions of ordinary voters getting together to defeat the voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ignore the oceans of money that the oligarchs will use to flood the election with advertising. It will take damn near all of the indoctrinated toadies defying the demographics that put them all in weird, sprawling voting districts and voting against the candidates that we all know were anointed for them.

The toadies think that they're bullies. Remember Scott Farkus's shrimpy little sidekick trying to exchange shoulder punches with him? "Scut" escalates until the little guy gives up. And when Farkus goes down, Grover the toady has no one. All he can do is run, and threaten to tell his dad.

The toadies of the current regime haven't been abandoned yet. The bullies are still in charge. Their little cheerleaders keep wearing the clothes and displaying flags and stickers. In the administration itself, politicians like Marco Rubio, who once considered himself a presidential contender, shames himself and his country as the Secretary of State. Republican senators and representatives abdicate their responsibility to stop the bully in chief because they support and expect to profit from the devastation.

The victims are starting to mount up. They're not the legions of illegal immigrants that the presidential campaign assured its followers would be marched onto cattle cars and made to disappear. It's thousands of federal employees, most of them far from DC, who, until yesterday, contributed vital funds to the local economies where they were working and living. It's workers at businesses who just had federal contracts canceled. It's veterans losing health care and mental health support. Thank you for your service! The silence of Republicans about the betrayal of veterans proves that Donald Trump was hardly the first person to consider them "suckers and losers." These are added to the casualties of Republican health care and reproductive rights policies who have been adding up since the midterm elections of 2022.

Victims include any of us who like to visit national parks and forests. Do you like good roads? Enjoy the state of the pavement now, because this is the best it's going to be for the foreseeable future, unless you happen to live near a rich neighborhood or along a route important to the burgeoning private space industry. The rest of it can crumble and rot in the name of tax cuts and deregulation.

Anyway, as long as the regime leaves the forms of democracy in place to set the stage for their sham elections we have the power to surprise the shit out of them by voting en masse for their opposition. That may lead to the sort of accidental deaths that plague opposition candidates in Russia. Then I don't know. 

I'm just glad that I never had kids. In the meantime, whether you have kids or not, it's time to step up and vote in favor of the younger generations. They deserve a planet that hasn't been hollowed out and burned over, presided over by bullies.

Final note: being asked or even required to accommodate people who diverge from an exclusively white, male, hetero stereotype is not bullying. It's the opposite.