A Quick Note on My Political Praxis, That Others May Find Useful

There are candidates and politicians I like better. There are candidates and politicians I like worse. None are perfect, because all are fallible human beings who willfully and routinely put themselves in a position to make morally gray choices, often if not always among options of which none are what a regular person might call good. And though I do believe character matters, ultimately, my fealty is *not* to individual candidates or politicians.

My fealty is to a platform of policies. Policies which in turn reflect my ideals.

Save the environment. Take care of everybody. Leverage the potential and talents of the entire human population. Minimize unnecessary suffering, maximize general prosperity and happiness. Make room for everyone to participate, thrive, and matter.

You know, bend the moral arc of history toward justice. Save the world. Eat the rich.

Just kidding on that last one. Mostly.

Anyhow, when I approach a political question – like how to vote, which party or candidate to support, where to donate whatever time and money I have to spare – I ask myself a simple question:

Which of the choices realistically brings me closer to the world I want to help bring about? Even if it’s not that close. Even if it’s a lesser-of-two-evils situation. Put it in the grand context, sink it into my lived historical particularity. Which choice moves us closer to the future progressives and liberals and, well, anyone left of wingnut these days want.

Because let’s be real: the stakes are as high as can be. Half the population on the verge of losing their bodily autonomy. Majority rule, hell, rule for the benefit of any but the richest and worst among us, threatened, along with the tattered remains of our democratic traditions. The planet we all live on heating up, soon to be past the tipping point and shit getting all kinds of fucked up. We need to be making big strides. Barring that, baby steps. Anything to start the momentum moving the right direction.

And we need to be pragmatic about it. Because our ideals – and the stakes – deserve no less.

No Safe Space for Them

Thinking about Ijeoma Oluo’s Medium piece and something my friend said last night on Facebook, about things we on the left can do outside of (the still absolutely vital and necessary work of) GOTV in November and beyond. I’m thinking also about GOP Senators and White House officials being confronted in elevators and hounded out of restaurants, and how much news it makes and how much it seems to rattle them when the effects of their actions are brought home.

And, you know, it makes sense. These are people who are used to the world being their safe space. That’s why they always piss and moan about civility when backlash from their day job spills over into their personal time. That’s how they can do what they do – it doesn’t touch them, most of the time. And when it does, oh how mightily they whine.

So I think we should keep doing stuff like that, because it’s clearly working. I am not, to be clear, advocating violence, even if I can sympathize with the temptation.

But turnabout is fair play, and seeing how their policies and political goals create a general atmosphere of threat and uncertainty for everyone not like them, I think it’s only fair they should get a taste of that in their own lives.

Will it change their minds, or policies? Who knows? Probably not. But it’s time those policies start costing them the way they cost so many other people.

Quick note on Joe Manchin (D?-WV)

I know, I know, he’s like, practically a Republican, and it’s super disappointing he didn’t vote against cloture for Kavanaugh. I fking hate it, too.

But when the confirmation vote comes up, if his no vote makes it 50-50, I want him to vote yes, and you should, too, much though it may gall you. Because the shitty reality is that Kavanaugh’s popular in WV, and Manchin’s vulnerable. A tie means confirmation, because Pence casts the tie-breaker, making Manchin’s no vote symbolic at best. It’s likely to hurt him politically without accomplishing anything concrete.

Why do we care? Because the D after his name is meaningful. However individual members vote, who holds the majority confers a great big fucking fuckton of power (it’s why McConnell’s been able to wreak so much havoc since we gave the Rs the majority). Committee chairmanships, investigations with teeth, SETTING THE LEGISLATIVE AGENDA. Whatever can be done to make that more likely is what needs to happen right now, and fuck us all if it makes us sad. If we’ve learned anything these last two years, I hope we’ve learned that much, at least. You can’t do shit if you can’t work the levers.

It ain’t pretty, and it might not make you happy. It sure AF doesn’t make me happy. But we’re in a fight for our lives, our country, and the future of life on earth right now. There’s no more sacrificing tomorrow for someday. No more making the perfect the enemy of the good, or the good enough, or the best we can do right here right now. We might once have had that luxury, but if we did, we have squandered it. It’s gonna be trench warfare and suck for the foreseeable future, and every goddam inch counts.

So says this pragmatic progressive, who desperately hopes you agree.

I Know Who Wrote the NYT OpEd

You know, it occurs to me that in a meaningful sense we already know who the anonymous OpEd writer is.

It’s the entire Republican party.

I mean, it’s been pretty clear all along that what the OpEd writer described is what’s happening. Trump is an unhinged, uncurious madman with the impulse control of a hangry threenager and even less understanding of how the world works. He spends most of his time watching TV and tweeting while the staff does the whole running the government thing, which has devolved to playing day-care damage control and occasionally putting something from the wildly unpopular GOP wish list in front of the child-in-chief to sign.

I never thought I’d say this, but Donald Trump may not have been entirely wrong when he tweeted ‘TREASON?’ How else describe ignoring the President’s orders, or picking and choosing which ones to execute and which ones to blow smoke up his ass about?

That I’m glad they’re doing it is beside the point. I think it’s great they agree with my own assessment, which is that Donald J Trump is singularly unfit for the office he holds. But it’s the *not* invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that’s the Constitutional crisis here. As so many others have said, if you know the guy in the Oval Office is unfit, the Constitution has remedies for that. Use them.

But that’s not the GOP’s way of doing things anymore. Between gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the way they worked (and then changed) the rules of the Senate, the Republican party has made it crystal clear that they’re neither competing for office nor governing in good faith and in accordance with the principles of American democracy. They are, rather, wholly fixed on enacting an extremely unpopular policy agenda in service to their billionaire donors, and they’ll do it by hook or by crook.

Which brings us back to their Devil’s Bargain with Trump. Sure, he’s unfit. Sure, he’s as bad at the job as a person could be. Sure, he requires the same kind of management a toddler with an assault rifle requires. But they decided, same as the anonymous OpEd writer, that all that was a price worth paying so long as they got to ram through their anti-democratic, anti-American agenda. They got their giant tax cut for the 1%, they got to sell off public lands and roll back basic regulations that keep the air breathable and the water safe to drink, they’ve packed the judiciary with conservative ideologues and activist judges. Hell, they are, right now, ramming through a lifelong Republican political operative, who cut his teeth in the great Clinton Penis Hunt, then worked in W’s White House during the torture years (and oh, so much more), in a process so obviously rushed and rigged it would make Pinochet blush, onto a lifelong position on the Supreme Court, where he’ll help deliver the rest of their unpopular agenda (hello gun rights, goodbye abortion).

So yeah, color me unsurprised that they’re undermining their own President, whom none of them liked or wanted, but whom they hitched their stars to, nonetheless.

It might have been a specific person who wrote that OpEd. But the whole rotten party is implicated. And there’s nothing heroic about it.

Impeaching Donald Trump

Oh, man, would I love to see that happen. I mean, set aside my deep, abiding, decades-long dislike for Donald Trump, who not only represents but literally embodies the absolute worst in both human nature and late-capitalist rape-culture patriarchy. The man is just absolutely terrible at the job. I mean, after Abu Ghraib and torture and our pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation that – however awful a regime Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, and it was awful – had not attacked and was not going to attack us; after dropping the ball on terrorism and the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina; after firing so many US attorneys for not prosecuting Democrats and trying to privatize Social Security and all the other terrible things George W. Bush did in office, I didn’t think we could ever have such a terrible President again. But I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong.

I’ll spare you the litany of his crimes and incompetence. You’re either well enough aware I’d just be re-traumatizing you, or you’re hate-reading this and won’t believe any of it. Suffice to say, when they told me when I was growing up that anyone could be President, I should have realized it was as much warning as patriotic bromide, and been more diligent in my citizenship.

But we are where we are, and with the midterms coming up, it’s more important than ever to get out and vote, and to flip one or both houses of Congress so as to provide the checks and balances that are supposed to be the main feature of the world’s greatest democracy.

And let’s be real. Even if we flip both House and Senate, and fill them with Democrats, it’s going to be tough as shit to get anything done, because veto-proof majorities aren’t likely to happen. Hell, flipping the Senate isn’t likely to happen (though it’s probably likelier than it would be without Donald Trump in the White House). But even just flipping the House gets us an institutional brake put on the tax cuts and over-deregulation that is the GOP’s stock in trade.

And the investigations, oh the investigations. Into Russia’s Cyberwar on us, in 2016 and beyond. Into the Trump family’s shady financial and business history. Into – if we push hard enough – all the backroom dealing and chicanery that drives our policy choices. That alone would make it all worth it.

But impeachment? It’s a red herring.

I mean, sure, it would be gratifying. It would even be justified (hello emoluments, hello self-dealing, hello unregistered foreign agents). But in the end it would be a hollow victory. Without 67 Senators willing to vote a conviction on all those high crimes and misdemeanors, it’s no more meaningful than when the Republicans did it to Bill Clinton in the ’90s. A symbolic gesture. A feel-good moment, which accomplishes very little.

And even if we did succeed in removing him from office, what does it get us but President Mike Pence? Who, while decidedly not smart, and a real jerkwad, is at least politically savvy enough not to keep destroying the GOP and the conservative brand. I mean, unless those aforementioned investigations turn up something so horrible that we take Robert Reich’s suggestion – as unlikely as it is appealing – to annul the results of the 2016 Presidential election, I think we’re better off with Donald Trump right where he is, making noise, accomplishing nothing, and shrinking the Republican party down to the hardest of hardcore white supremacists, Christian Dominionists, and oligarch/kleptocrats. Besides, if we get rid of Trump, that open up the field for a smarter, slicker, more eloquent fascist to run, one who won’t have his handicaps or record of failure.

No, painful as it will be, I think we’re best off with Trump as a lame duck keeping the seat warm til January 2021.

And once we’ve voted him out? Well, I for one can’t wait to see his ass perp-wallked to the federal pen, where he can spend what little is left of his life regretting the choices that led him there, and we can get down to fixing all the things he’s broken, and some other things, too.