The Best of Both Possible Worlds

I have always referred to myself as a pragmatic progressive. Progressive because of the policy goals and political ends I think best pursuing, pragmatic because I’m not super particular on how we get there, as long as we do. I often find ideologies interesting, but ultimately I think they do more harm than good, because they circumscribe what is thinkable. Also, they often work best on paper, and while theoretical space is a useful tool for playing and working with ideas, the lived world of actuality is almost always too complex for ideology to usefully encompass.

At the end of the day, though, I’m much more interested in (and motivated by) ideals than ideology. And I’m much more inclined to use them to pick ends than means, though they do very much play a role in both.

So, what ideals drive me, politically speaking? What political ends do I seek?

It’s pretty simple, really. I want everyone – by which I mean literally all humans – to have all the tools, education, and material support they need to prosper and thrive, individually and collectively; the opportunity to do meaningful work (whatever that means to them); and the material, cultural, social, and spiritual means to pursue and find happiness, again both individually and collectively.

Pragmatically, it seems to me the best way to get there is a combination of two systems of societal material allocation that often seem at odds: socialism and capitalism.

Both have virtues and shortcomings. Continue reading “The Best of Both Possible Worlds” →

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.