Hillary, Bernie, and Me

I was a strong and early supporter of Bernie Sanders, especially the Bernie Sanders of the early campaign: the guy who took the high road, who spoke truth to power, who organized at the grassroots and refused to engage in negative campaigning. The guy who said on her worst day Hillary Clinton would be a better President than any of the Republicans.

But I have a confession to make: I never thought he’d win.

It wasn’t lack of faith in the message or devotion to the agenda he espoused. That faith and devotion is what drove my support. To me Bernie Sanders was only a vehicle for getting the word out and starting to organize. It was clear the man himself was an imperfect vessel (he is, after all, a career politician). It was also based on a cold, hard political calculation. Remember the incident in Seattle about a year ago, when two #blacklivesmatter activists stormed a stage he was set to speak on? The way Bernie and, more importantly, his most ardent supporters handled that told me all I needed to know. However you stand on the incident, nobody gets the Democratic nomination without support from African-Americans. And while Bernie has done a great job of mobilizing younger African-Americans, they were outnumbered by their elders, who were less willing to take a chance.

Still, I advocated, and donated, and when the time came I caucused. All along I tried my best to keep to the high road the Bernie Sanders of the early campaign laid out.

Sadly, my candidate chose not to. Somewhere along the way, some subtle threshold got crossed. It was about Bernie now. Bernie the man, the visionary, the leader of a revolution, though what the revolution meant or would look like was never made clear. He started throwing punches, insisted he was going to win despite the fact that the path to victory only got narrower and less likely with every primary and caucus, even the ones that he won.

Continue reading “Hillary, Bernie, and Me” →

This Is What Democracy Looks Like, a Report from the Washington State Caucuses

Will Rogers once joked “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.” It’s as true today as when he said it, as I was reminded when I attended the caucus held in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a neighborhood so liberal our local City Councilmember is Socialist Kshama Sawant.

The caucuses were scheduled to begin at 10 am, and as someone who hadn’t pre-registered I was encouraged via text message by volunteers for the Sanders campaign to arrive by 9 am to make sure I got my paperwork filled out in time to properly participate in the caucus. I thought that was probably a good idea, but I got a wee bit tipsy the night before, and didn’t make it til 9:30.

The caucus was held at the Century Ballroom at the corner of 10th and Pine, a giant space usually reserved for Salsa, Swing, and other couples-style dancing. It occupies most of the second floor of the old Oddfellows building, a large, old structure smack dab in the heart of one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most liberal cities in the US.

When I arrived, the line to get inside was already around the corner and down the block almost to Pike Street. I was immediately grateful to have brought a thermos of coffee and a book. Continue reading “This Is What Democracy Looks Like, a Report from the Washington State Caucuses” →

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” →

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.

Fourteen Years After

I wanted to write something about 9/11 today, even though most anything worth saying has been said and said again many times over the years. I think in the end my hero Charlie Pierce got it right when he wrote that “the sad, lasting legacy of that day 14 years ago today, and of all the different things that have been made of it since then, is that it is the day that America finally went mad.”

It’s hard to refute that, from where I sit. Like a nose-punched bully, we ran rampant, and the damage we did to ourselves and the world will take a very long time to repair. We are now an America that’s tortured, that’s executed our own citizens by drone strike without due process of law. We spent a trillion dollars to go to war with a nation that didn’t have anything to do with the attack (and continued our strong alliance with the nation most of the hijackers were actually from), and made room for the Islamic State to come into being when we left at the behest of the government we installed. Domestically, we went from a proto-fascist state where folks with the wrong t-shirts were escorted away from political rallies to a failing state whose political process has been hijacked by a faction who doesn’t believe government should be allowed to govern. And those are just the highlights.

Despite the patriotic memes in my facebook feed, I don’t want to remember 9/11. I don’t want to remember the fear and the pain and the determination to exact vengeance.

No, I want to remember the days and weeks after, when the divisions between us fell away. When we weren’t Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives but Americans united by grief, shocked out of our petty disputes and tribalism by this unthinkable enormity. I want to remember how we all came together, how the world was ready to rally behind us. I want to remember the moment when it seemed possible we could make something good out of this horrible tragedy, when our common humanity united us and we were kinder and more real with each other.

A lot has happened in the fourteen years since then, and those days when what united us was stronger than what divided us seem very far away now. But it’s important we remember them. It’s vital to our well-being, both as a nation and as individual human beings. Because we’re all in this together, whether we remember it or not.