It will be hard to get over what happened to Elizabeth Warren.
“It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her.”
https://gen.medium.com/it-will-be-hard-to-get-over-what-happened-to-elizabeth-warren-4b2e11b71a4b
In 2003 or so, in the height of the Bush II era, when you were ‘with us or with the terrorists’ and the Iraq War was in its first Friedman Unit, I went with my friend Jonny to an event called Drinking Liberally. As you might expect, it was held at a bar, and the idea was for liberals and progressives and so on to gather together and drink, bond, commiserate, and strategize. George W Bush was at the height of his power and popularity, and the various candidacies to replace him were in their beginning stages. I remember we all sat around a big table, with another rank of folks standing behind us. At one end of the table were these two dudes in sweaters doing their absolute best to hijack the conversation, talking over people and extolling their liberal-than-thou bona fides.
Their main point, aside from smug self-satisfaction? That the key to the Democratic party getting back into power was to get rid of all these centrists and DINOs, so the ‘Democratic wing of the Democratic Party’, i.e. its most liberal faction, could ascend to power. By some sort of Underpants Gnomes calculus, this was supposed to lead us to victory in 2004.
Let me say that again: shrinking the party to its hardest hard core of (let’s be honest, white, mostly male) progressives would somehow lead to electoral victory, where the key is to convince the most people to vote for you.
I believe the technical term for that is magical thinking.
I’d love to forget those two smug assholes. Hell, I’d love to forget the whole Bush II era, when conservatives started trying on their brown shirts and jackboots in earnest, and fucked shit up so bad these racist-ass United States actually elected a black man President. And it seems I’m not alone in that. To be honest, it seems like half the damn left forgot the lessons we should have learned back then, which is a big part of what made Donald Trump possible.
Which brings me, sigh, to Bernie Sanders and his ‘political revolution’.
In 2016, I was a Sanders guy, right up til it became mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination. I was thrilled to see someone bring the kind of deep progressive policy and political goals and rhetoric I, a lifelong progressive, had been wanting to see in mainstream discourse ever since I was old enough to vote and engaged enough to pay attention. Even when he didn’t win, I was thrilled when his rhetoric and platform did indeed cross over into the mainstream. I was less thrilled than the candidate himself, who crossed the line somewhere from someone whose goals and interest were driven by principle to someone whose principles were driven by his goals and his self-interest. But that seems to be most politicians, so it’s if not forgivable then not a deal-breaker on its own.
But Bernie Sanders political revolution’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it’s an insurgency defined as much by its opposition to the institutional Democratic Party as it is by its positive political and policy ambitions. Which, if you’re running for the Democratic Party’s nomination to be President, with the institutional backing that comes with it for a general election, is kind of a problem.
Yes, the party leadership has probably coordinated in response to Sanders’ rise. Which is, you know, their job and all that, conspiracy theories aside. But so, apparently, have the voters, who yesterday — and much to this Warren supporter’s chagrin — coalesced around Joe Biden, FSM help us all, as the last man standing/consensus choice.
Turns out snake emojis and sneering contempt for people you’re going to need later on isn’t the best strategy for building coalitions.
Look, temperamentally and policy-wise, I’m firmly aligned with Bernie Sanders (I’m even more so with Elizabeth Warren; the misogyny and deliberate erasure that handicapped her campaign will have to be a whole other post, though). We do in fact need radical change, even radical-er than Bernie himself calls for (ain’t a goddam thing gonna pass as long as there’s a filibuster in the Senate). But you know what we need to get that radical change passed into law? A great big fucking coalition, not all of whom are going to be hard core progressives who only identify as Democrats in Presidential election years.
I told those two guys all those years ago that much as I agreed with them on policy, you can’t get shit done if you don’t have a majority, and you don’t get a majority by telling people they’re sellouts or assholes if they don’t believe just as you believe, just as hard as you believe it. Almost twenty years on, looks like I’m still over here in the corner, saying the same goddam thing.
My favorite thing about the primary election cycle in 2020 has been the mainstream media being forced to acknowledge how a few tiny, mostly unrepresentative states’ early calendar placement warps their coverage of the entire primary season. Seriously. Like, as of now, Bernie Sanders, the front-runner, has 58 delegates. Joe Biden, the establishment favorite, has 50. Elizabeth Warren, my preferred candidate, lags at 8. Mike Bloomberg has 0, but he does have $60,000,000,000.
To win the nomination takes 1,991. Tomorrow, 1,357 are up for grabs. A week later, 365. A week after that, another 577. Which gets us to 61%, according to Vox.
All of which is to say, this isn’t over, however convenient it might be for the media’s preferred narrative.
And hey, if Sanders or Biden or Bloomberg’s your guy, then by all means, vote for your guy. That’s what we’re supposed to do, come the primary season. For what it’s worth, I’d have said the same about Buttigieg and Klobuchar, if they hadn’t dropped out.
But if your guy isn’t a guy at all, if your candidate, like mine, is Elizabeth Warren, then you should vote for her.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren is far and away the best candidate on the merits. She not only understands the depth and breadth of the problems facing us, from incipient climate disaster to the drivers of wealth inequality to the descent into authoritarianism and white nationalist fascism our oligarchic overlords have decided is more in their interest than the messy unpredictability of democracy, where the mass of people they’re the cancer on might decide it was time for a bit of elective surgery. In addition to her well-developed and wide-ranging arsenal of plans, her singular focus on rooting out corruption and getting rid of the institutional brakes — like the filibuster — that keep change from being enacted is our best chance at reversing the trends that are destroying us. And her deep, complex understanding of the powers — and limitations — of the Presidency would make her a more effective Executive and Commander-In-Chief than anyone else in the field.
That much, to me, is obvious. But a whole lot of people seem to think it’s time for her to get out of the way so we can figure out which white man in his late seventies to put up against the white man in his late seventies currently driving the country over a cliff into a dumpster fire that is also a toilet we’re going down the drain of and which will dump us, eventually, in Hell. If it hasn’t already.
The problem, we’re told, is she’s a woman. Not that the people telling us that are sexist. Nor, for the most part, are the people listening. Far from it. They’re not prejudiced at all. It’s those other, other people. The ones who are prejudiced and sexist, who are the problem. It’s a sad calculation, but we must bow to pragmatism, and accept the prejudices of those we’ll have to educate more later for now.
To which I say, all my bollocks. Because it’s not pragmatism being bowed to in that calculation. It’s prejudice. It’s sexism. It’s the same old self-fulfilling prophecy. Put it like this: if your reason not to vote for a woman is because you’re afraid other people won’t, you’ve surrendered to sexism without a fight, no matter your personal convictions.
To be honest, I think that capitulation is even more sexist than being a misogynist prick who actively works against women’s agency and representation. Because that guy, at least, is honest. He’s standing up for what he believes in, even though what he believes in is wrong. The person who concedes in advance to that guy is not only declining to stand up for what they believe in, they’re declining to say that guy is wrong. They’re letting perception, someone else’s preferred narrative, drive their choices, when the reality is that possibility’s still wide open.
To me, Elizabeth Warren’s the best candidate running, hands down. She has the best ideas, the best story, the best mind, and would, to my estimation, be the effective, transformative President our country, and history, need. If you think elsewise, that’s fine. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to vote for her this primary season because I’m afraid she might lose because of her gender.
Like the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina — with all due respect to the voters of those states — the perception that America is too sexist to elect a woman President is just a perception, one rooted more in the interests of those most invested in a status quo that needs to change than in reality, present and future. I, for one, am not gonna let it warp my actions, and goddamnit, I don’t think you should, either.
Vote for Elizabeth Warren.
“It is a bit sad that that they’re trying to reduce the campaign to two post 75-yr.-old white men, but this Democrat will gladly go to bat for either of them — and if it does come down to those two, hopefully they’ll choose Warren or some other younger/black/female choice to build unity.”
“Elizabeth Warren gives me hope because I know she sees me and I know she listens to me,” Pressley said. “That’s clear, given the policies that she’s developed in her vision for the country. It’s one that it’s a world that we deserve to live in. It’s the world that I want my 11-year -old daughter to inherit. She’s a partner. She keeps her promises. She’s a good student. And she has a racial justice and equity lens. She’s been very intentional about the development of that.”
https://www.theroot.com/ayanna-pressleys-pitch-for-elizabeth-warren-1841981729
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