About This Whole Hillary/Bernie Thing

So, let’s get started by placing your humble correspondent in context. I am a supporter of Bernie Sanders. I give him money every month, and when Washington State holds its Democratic caucuses in a week or so, I’ll be there, standing with other Sanders supporters. I think his run for the Democratic nomination is one of the most important political developments of my lifetime. His overarching theme of wresting the apparati of state and nation back from the oligarch class and putting it to work for the common good makes my heart soar. His indictment of the warping effects of money in politics is trenchant and is clearly resonating in the hearts and minds of millions of citizens. He’s given a voice to ideas and positions I think many of us despaired would ever be so clearly articulated on the national stage, and his grassroots organizing campaign has upended the conventional wisdom about running for office without the assistance of either SuperPAC money or mainstream media coverage.

And, frankly, he’s losing.

It’s not over yet. It is at least theoretically possible for him to overcome the odds win a majority of pledged delegates (superdelegates would, I think, fall in line at that point, as they did in 2008, when President Obama overtook Hillary Clinton). But it’s really, really unlikely. By the accounts I trust, he’d need to win something like 60-40 in every one of the remaining contests to make up his current deficit and come to the convention in Philadelphia with a winning majority.

I hope he does. But I don’t expect he will. The odds are overwhelmingly against it.

That said, I don’t think he will — or should — drop out of the race. For one thing, the message he articulates deserves as wide a hearing as can be accomplished, and the longer he stays in the race, the better he’ll be able to do that. The more attention he can bring to the fundamental causes of wealth and income inequality, the more acceptable talking about it becomes in the national discourse. Which means maybe finally we’ll be able to do something about it. And the more he talks about what Democratic Socialism actually means, and the policy choices that fall within its penumbra, the more the national discourse will be empowered and/or forced to give them a fair hearing.

Every vote Bernie gets and has gotten only makes that case stronger. And the grassroots organization he’s built can accomplish a great deal going forward, whether or not he gets the nomination or is elected to the Presidency.

But the odds are that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. Not only that, and despite the gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair that is my facebook feed these days, the odds are that she will be our next President.

And I’m okay with that. Continue reading “About This Whole Hillary/Bernie Thing” →

Trump Trolled

I know a lot has happened in the days since the confrontation in Chicago between protesters and supporters at the cancelled Trump rally. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and come to a conclusion that, while I’ve seen it hinted at here and there, I haven’t seen anyone explicitly say.

The whole thing was a conscious ploy by Trump, and the progressive left fell for it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I found it as uplifting and heartening as any two-fisted, red-blooded American progressive to see pushback against the animus and incitement to hatred and violence that is Mr. Trump’s stock in trade. But the triumphalist notes that have been sounded are, to my mind, misguided, because Mr. Trump laid a trap and we walked right into it.

Here are the dots I’m trying to connect:

Trump plans a rally, not only in Chicago, which is as strong a Democratic stronghold as there is, but he also does it at a large, diverse public university, where he can be guaranteed a large number of protesters. Keep in mind that Chicago is also undergoing some pretty major race-based conflict lately.

Protesters show up in large numbers, many of whom manage to get inside the venue.

Fights break out inside, as rightly incensed protesters, many of them POCs, are put in close proximity to Trump supporters, who’ve been fed a steady diet of racist hatemongering and calls to beat up protesters. Footage is captured.

Trump cancels the rally, claiming the Chicago Police Department has advised him to do so (a claim later proved false).

It seems like a defeat, but it’s anything but. Because now Trump can claim, however falsely, that it’s the protesters who are causing the violence at his rallies, and he has footage that can be spun to support the assertion. Not only that, but it plays into his narrative of white victimhood, because here’s all these white folks just trying to peaceably assemble for a political rally, but they can’t because these violent protesters came and shut them down and started fights and just generally disrupted the rally, denying Trump his right to free speech and his supporters their right to peaceably assemble. He gets to look like the good guy for calling off the rally so as to prevent violence, and it only bolsters his support among his followers, whose narrative of white victimization, however misguided, has been reaffirmed. Polling confirms that it worked.

Then Trump gets to go on TV and make the narrative about how violent protesters are disrupting his otherwise peaceful events, derailing the more general (and true) narrative about his stoking of racial resentments and his proponence of violence as a solution to it. And now he’s got the footage to prove it, or at least he’s got footage that reaffirms his narrative of white victimization.

Fuckery that it is, you have to admire the slickness of it.

A Pragmatic Idealist’s Guide to Caucus/Primary Season

Call me liberal, progressive, whatever you like. Parse it how you will, I occupy somewhere most of the way to the leftwards end of the political spectrum. If I had to self-label, I’d probably call myself a Social Democrat. My ideal economic arrangement would be using the productive capabilities of capitalism to achieve socialist-style ends (something along the lines of Iain Banks’ notions about the Culture in his novels, which can be summed up at the organizational level as ‘socialism within, capitalism without.’). Politically, I’d like to see a strong democracy in which participation by an informed citizenry with a liberal education, historical and scientific knowledge, and critical thinking skills ran the show. I’m in favor of single-payer universal healthcare, a guaranteed basic income, and top marginal tax rates approaching ninety percent (I’m also in favor of allowing folks to assign how their tax monies are spent, at least within a set of broad categories). I’m not against people becoming wealthy, but I think that option should only open up once the floor has been raised and guaranteed, for everybody.

So that’s where I’m coming from, in case any of the ten or fifteen people who read this blog didn’t already know. And I think there are lots of folks who’d agree with me, though the kinds of views I espouse don’t get a lot of play in the mainstream media.

So, given the rapid approach of primary and caucus season, what’s a pragmatic idealist to do? Continue reading “A Pragmatic Idealist’s Guide to Caucus/Primary Season” →

A Strategy of Containment in Oregon

So a bunch of domestic terrorists have seized a wildlife refuge in rural Oregon. They say they’re peaceful but armed (and willing to kill and die), have provisions enough to last a couple of years, and they’ve invited like-minded “patriots” from across the country to join them. They are, by any sane definition, engaged in sedition, and attempting to undermine the political and philosophical underpinnings that make the United States of America possible.

So what do we as a political commonwealth do about that?

It’s very tempting, even from where I sit, to say “Well, if a fight’s what they want, we should give them one. They got away with it last time, and now they’re doing it again. If we don’t slap them down now, they’ll just keep doing it.” After all, the notion that a company-sized force of irregulars could hold their own against a determined assault by the Oregon National Guard or pretty much any branch of the US military is laughable on its face. And while I’m sure the soi-disant patriots involved genuinely believe in their hearts that their long guns and the Second Amendment guarantee their liberty, it’s actually the social compact and the tenets of our political commonwealth that do that, as they would no doubt discover to their brief but lifelong chagrin should it come to any sort of violent confrontation.

The problem is that that’s what their leaders probably want. They want to be martyrs, like the Branch Davidians before them, the spark that will ignite the revolution of long oppressed yet heavily armed Christian White Men who’re frightened to death of long-term demographic trends that will undermine their assumed and inherited hegemony of the US of A. Should the National Guard or the BATFE or any federal agency whatsoever engage, they’ll win the battle decisively and quickly, and start a war that’ll last lifetimes.

That’s why the Bundy brothers’ father Cliven got away with it last time. And thank whatever divinity you pray to we have a President whose prudence outweighs his pride for that.

No, it’s not really an option to storm the gates, satisfying though it would be in the short run, and easily as it might be accomplished. In that sense, they’re like Daesh: fighting them on their own terms only strengthens them.

So what’s to be done?

My answer is there in the title of this post. Let them have their occupied visitors’ center. Let anyone who wants to come join them in their white Libertarian Patriot Paradise do so. Let them prove the workability of their social model and survive as they can off the land. Let 100+ men share a single bathroom (ok, two, since I’m guessing they aren’t going to need to set one aside for ladies), and eat canned beans everyday for a year or two. Let them show us how the land can sustain them, all by itself, without a social compact or government to allocate its fruits.

Just don’t let any of them back out. Not until they’ve learned their lesson, and voluntarily surrender.

I’m betting that it won’t take more than a couple of months before a stint in federal prison starts to look right appealing in comparison.

Keep Calm, Everyone

I don’t even have to look to know that right now the internet is exploding with speculation and finger-pointing with regard to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Whoever turns out to have done it, what we all ought keep in mind right now is that the purpose of terrorism is to cause terror. It’s to put fear in the hearts and minds not only of the immediate victims, but of everyone.

We can’t let that happen.

People make bad decisions when they’re afraid. Just look how far off the deep end we went here in the US after 9/11. We passed the Patriot Act and then started an unrelated war on the flimsiest of pretexts, a war where we lost our soul by torturing prisoners and that cleared the space for ISIS to come into being. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What happened is terrible. And I hope the French catch whoever did this. I think they will. They’ve closed the borders and President Hollande said they know who they’re looking for. And in spite of the American habit of bashing the French, they’re more than capable of handling this, and I have every faith that they will. As should you.

As the hours and days pass, we’ll learn what happened. Who did this and why. Until then, what’s important is to keep calm and not jump to conclusions. This is the world we live in now, and until we know more all there really is to do — unless you are actually in Paris — is to stand in sympathy and solidarity with our friends and allies on this tragic, tragic day.