The Dirtbag Left You Will Always Have With You

Someone tweeted this today in reply to the question "Why do Democrats hate democracy so much?"

As you can see, ANTIFA Jeb didn't even bother to answer the original question, just robotically spewed out a typically elitist meme about the American voter.  Significantly, it's one that the establishments of both major parties would agree with.

Not "the average American," I'd say, but elite commentators.  Rich pundits say elections are all about which candidate you'd like to have a beer or dinner with, and they do love the framing of politics as a spectator sport - bread and circuses, without the bread.  Ordinary voters favor M4A and other "left" policies, but there's usually no candidate they can vote for, hence the low turnout we usually see. 

This isn't news, so why do I see nominal leftists claiming falsely that 'the voters' don't care about the issues?  This year we seem to have real alternatives to vote for in many downticket races, and that should be a positive development.  There are already numerous such people in office at all levels in the US, right up to Congress; isn't that grounds for cautious optimism, and further action to get more such people running and elected?  People like ANTIFA Jeb, who are quite common on the left, seem to prefer the status quo.  Maybe they'd like to be put in charge, so they could tell the ignorant rabble what to think.

Then I remembered something I've quoted before, from the economist Amartya Sen.  Sen was arguing against the common claim that people in poor countries don't care about political and democratic rights, a claim made without evidence by ruling elites in those countries.  Of course they ensure that their claim can't be tested, by having elections for example.

It is thus of some interest to note that when the Indian government, under Indira Gandhi’s leadership, tried out a similar argument in India, to justify the “emergency” she had misguidedly declared in the mid-1970s, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In that fateful election, fought largely on the acceptability of the “emergency,” the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate—one of the poorest in the world—showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than it was in complaining about economic poverty. To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that poor people in general do not care about civil and political rights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar) and elsewhere in Asia. Similarly, while political freedom is widely denied in Africa, there have been movements and protests about that fact whenever circumstances have permitted, even though military dictators have given few opportunities in this respect.*

To the countries Sen lists, we can now add the people of Bolivia, who just confirmed in a landslide that they prefer democratic socialism to a coup regime.  If only the average American were offered such a choice!  This year our only alternative to Trump is Obama's hand-picked candidate Joe Biden, who is the most minimal alternative and offers nothing to the average voter.  It appears to me that ANTIFA Jeb likes it that way, which means he or she is much closer to our ruling corporatist elites than he or she pretends.

Of course it's possible that most Americans really don't want that kind of freedom; but we won't know until it has actually been tried, and when anyone sneers about our ignorance and persistence in voting against our interests without acknowledging that our interests are not on the ballot, I know they're pontificating in bad faith.

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* In Development as Freedom, Knopf, 1999), page 151.

Useful Idiots

Another Democratic loyalist has gone on Twitter to rant about the evil "friends" who, "bragging about how at least they were smart enough not to vote for Hillary, voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnston."  She's the "Mayor of Zero F**Ksville" (asterisks sic) and a "2-Time NYT Bestselling Author," so you know she's not only really cool, she's really smart.  I did a little ranting myself in reply, and remembered something I left out out of my most recent post about such people.

During the twenty-five years I ran the GLB Speakers Bureau in Bloomington, people often failed to show up for panels they'd signed on to do.  I found that it helped if I sent out email at the beginning of each week to remind them: not individually, but a list of the week's panels with the names of those who were scheduled to speak.  This helped, though it didn't solve the problem entirely.  I'm not sure what would have, short of breaking down their doors and carrying them bodily to the location.  Speakers Bureau is an all-volunteer organization, including me as the coordinator, so the most I could do was remove from the mailing list those people who failed to show up too often.

But one of our volunteers, a woman about my age, objected even to the reminder messages.  Adults should honor their commitments, she declared, without having to be coddled or cajoled.  I'm not sure what she had in mind -- kick them off the mailing list the first time they didn't show?  To some extent I agreed with her, but as I saw it my first priority was not to try to force the volunteers to grow up, it was to do what I could to ensure that speakers showed up where and when we'd promised they would.  Since we didn't pay the volunteers, and were asking them to give their time (admittedly for a pleasant task, that of speaking about their lives in public), I believed a certain amount of coddling, even indulgence, wasn't out of line.  It's worth noting that this woman had some Native American ancestry, and was proud of what she saw as Indians' cultural superiority over deracinated whites; yet her position on this matter seemed to be rooted in Western Enlightenment individualism, with some Puritan punitiveness laid on for spice.

The analogy I'm drawing here will be evident, I hope.  As I wrote before, I agree that voting is a citizen's duty, one I carry out myself; but there are no direct consequences for not voting, and I'm not sure there ought to be.  But we also need a "None of the Above" option on the ballots, with consequences for the candidates if they can't beat NOTA at the polls.  In the meantime, it's reasonable to remember that voters are volunteers, even if that means voluntarily carrying out a duty.  And none of these frothers have shown me any reason to believe that berating the voters will win them over.  Just on general principles, I would expect it to have the opposite effect.  If you're not feeling particularly motivated to go to the polls, and some crank is calling you names for not loving their crummy candidate, why not just stay home?

For that matter, I thought the parties recognized this.  A lot of their volunteer work is aimed at making it easier to vote, recognizing that there are barriers.  This is not the airy-fairy fantasy of an aging hippie, it's what the parties actually do.   Do they still offer voters rides to the polls, or is that coddling and spoiling them, when they should act like adults and crawl on their hands and knees to the polling place, grateful to cast their vote for whatever corrupt hack the party leadership has in its wisdom placed on the ballot?

So I wonder who appointed people like Kathy Griffin and Stonekettle the Tough Love enforcers of the Democratic Party.  Are they useful idiots for Trump?  Or are they secretly, as I suggested sarcastically in a reply to Griffin this morning, being paid by Putin to depress Democratic turnout?  It's one thing to be uninspiring, and quite another to actively drive people away from the party.

This Misconduct Will Go On Your Permanent Record; or, In Your Heart You Know He's Wright

The midterm elections are only a few months away now, and they won't be pretty.  I saw this on Twitter a few weeks ago, and I'm still seething over it, so I might as well write about it and get it over with, as Michelle Wolf said.

I thought I recognized the guy who wrote this, so I linked to it on Facebook and asked my ambivalent Obama supporter friend.  Sure enough, this is the same frother we've disagreed about before.  My friend had gone so far as to post the guy's Facebook posts to my profile page where they'd be harder to ignore.  I think he was hoping to give me a stroke.  I finally asked him firmly to stop posting them to me.  It's a mark of our long friendship and mutual respect that I didn't just unfriend him.  After confirming the guy's identity, my friend asked me to explain what I don't like about the tweet.  I made a couple of false starts, but found I was too angry to be coherent and relatively succinct.  Not until the past week did I figure out how to put my disgust and anger into words.

First I should say that the person he was responding to should probably not have used the word "inspirational."  It's a red flag for DNC loyalists, and allowed Stonekettle to dodge the point by focusing on it.  I looked around Stonekettle's Twitter page and found also that I agreed, narrowly, with a tweet in which he declared that voting is a duty not to be lightly shirked.

(I notice, by the way, that he likes to brag in tweets about all the people who criticize him, block him, unfollow him.  If that were proof of political virtue, Donald Trump would be even greater than Stonekettle.  Which is why I'm not linking to the tweet itself, just posting the screencap.)

Having given him that much, however, I must point out again that Hillary Clinton decisively won the popular vote.  Just to keep it on Stonekettle's simple-minded level, we owe the Trump presidency not to non-voters but to the wisdom of the Framers and their creature the Electoral College.  (Some of his other tweets indicate that he's aware of this, but doesn't let it distract him from his ragegasms.)  True, not everyone voted for Clinton who could have, some didn't vote for a presidential candidate at all, but that would have been true even if she'd won.  Like other party loyalists, Stonekettle blames it all on nonvoters, and ignores Clinton's arrogance and certainty that she couldn't lose; DNC malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence; and other factors that had at least as much to do with her defeat as nonvoters.  But even those wouldn't have mattered if not for the Electoral College.

It does matter, however, that the Democratic leadership abandoned down-ticket races, and that's why  we have "McConnell, Ryan, and Neil Gorsuch," along with all the other Republicans who now control Congress, most state governments, and much of the judiciary.  Gorsuch was a poor choice for Stonekettle to mention, because he couldn't have been confirmed if numerous Senate Democrats, including Joe Donnelly from my state of Indiana, hadn't voted for him.  If we're going to talk about voting, let's not forget that.  It's also Democratic politicians' duty to block Trump's terrible nominees -- Gina Haspel, for another, whom Donnelly also voted for.  Doug Jones, who narrowly defeated the awful Roy Moore and saved us from the horror of having a Trump supporter in the Senate, promptly voted for Trump's budget deal.  What is the point of voting for and even electing Democrats if they're going to vote Republican?

The "inspirational" thing is funny, though, because Democratic loyalists tried very hard to convince themselves that Hillary Rodham Clinton was inspirational.  It's all right, it seems, to be inspired by a political candidate if she's been properly rubber-stamped by our Benign DNC Overlords.  Clinton especially inspired many women, because she showed that a woman could be nominated by a major party to run for the highest office in the land -- and be defeated by Donald Trump.

The hapless person whom Stonekettle schooled had a valid point, though.  Even granting that voting is a duty, I can't think of any better way short of overt voter suppression to discourage voters from voting than to attack them as a bunch of lazy, entitled losers who are to blame for the opponent's victory.  (Though if Clinton had won, would those who voted for her be to blame for all the crimes she would have committed as President?  Just asking.)  Democrats like to attack even those who vote for their candidates, if we don't also adore them -- if we're not inspired by them, in other words.  I don't change my vote because the party operatives are assholes, but not everyone is as mean as I am.  Voting may be a duty, but it can be an onerous one,, and downright impossible if you encounter organized efforts to stop you from doing it.  If you know that the candidate who demands your vote feels no obligation to you after she or he is elected, it's understandable why many people decide to give up.  The duty of a party is, first, to provide candidates who will be responsive to those who voted for them; and, second, to help voters vote for their candidates, not to discourage them.  Stonekettle, like so many Democratic attack dogs, is indifferent to the first duty and hostile to the second.  He'd be unimportant if there weren't so many others like him, all of whom we're going to hear from in the next five months, and probably afterward.  They're preemptively preparing for a Democratic defeat this November.

Ironically enough, numerous more "inspiring" Democrats are running for office, and some are winning, despite opposition and obstruction from their own party.*  Stonekettle is surely aware of them, but he figures that the same old memes and tropes will suffice to kick the rabble into line.  That should also be taken into account, don't you think, when we're piecing out responsibility for Trump and the Republican control of our government?

I agree with Nina Illingsworth.

* P.S. I disagree, however, with one of the people quoted in this article, Ammar Campa-Najjar:

“Certainly, not everything [Obama] did I agreed with, during his presidency,” he said. “But he definitely was the hope-and-change candidate. The fact that someone like him could be elected made it feel like the America we love and idealize is within our own reach, if someone like him could become president.”

I think that far from being a role model, Barack Obama should be viewed as a cautionary tale: yes, "someone like him could become president", but only by selling out to the worst elements in American society, those who are determined to ensure that positive change never occurs.

Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other

I doubt it myself: More likely Americans will just hope for a new president they can deify, while demonizing the one currently in office.  Republican loyalists always found it easy to remember that Obama was human, and Democratic loyalists can see Trump's feet of clay without corrective lenses.  The hard part is not to deify the president you support, and most people seem to find it not just hard but impossible.

This meme, whose creator apparently removed it from Twitter after it was criticized, fits in nicely here:

The most obvious point the meme's maker overlooked was that he or she was describing Donald Trump.

I have to wonder whom it's addressed to.  Many liberals and progressives took exactly these points into consideration when they voted for Clinton.  Clinton won the popular vote; she only lost in the Electoral College.  Those who voted for Trump and tilted the Electoral College in his favor were mostly not, as far as I know, liberals or progressives.  So this appears to be just one more party-loyalist attack on the thought criminals who Let Hillary Down, though it's not clear just how they (we) did so. Things have come to such a turn that a loyalist like this could admit, if only rhetorically, that Clinton was not a very inspiring candidate, and so on.  That's of no importance.  More important is that whoever made this still has no idea what went wrong.

Some responses on Twitter indicated that the mememaker, faced with these and other criticisms, has deleted the tweet in which it appeared, saying that all they meant was that we should be good to each other, or some such vacuous prattle.  But this sort of barely passive-aggressive attack on the voters he or she pretends to be appealing to is the exact opposite of being good to each other.

... Posting has, I confess with tears and in sackcloth and ashes, been sparse around here lately, and I'm afraid it's not going to improve much very soon.  I may be moving to a new residence, and while everything is up in the air I'll be even less likely to write.  But I'm still alive and functional, at least in principle.

P.S.  Seth MacFarlane reposted the "Dear Liberals and Independents" meme on Twitter.  Someone replied with a corrected version:

Of course, that won a scolding from a Clintonbot.  Maybe a meaner version of the meme is called for.  I'll give it some thought.

Thank You for Pressing the Self-Destruct Button

It turns out this meme backfires on itself, as so many do.

I didn't notice at first that it's partly an exhortation to vote for the lesser evil if that will "shift your country as much closer to your ideal as possible."  That's pretty funny right there, since Dem loyalists were furiously denouncing the Lesser Evil option so recently.  I guess that if you don't actually say the words, it's okay.  (But if you say them three times quickly ...?)

The main thing, though, is that the meme amounts to a denunciation of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the DNC, and Democratic partisans.  Clinton most of all, though, who put her determination to be President ahead of every other consideration, including the probability that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump.  Her ego, her entitlement, her notion that it was her turn now.  I can't think of a better example of "extreme individualism."  To ensure that she won the nomination, she played dirty, which some of her fans even thought amusing.  It's their party, after all, one such person wrote, which at least was honest: the party belongs to its elites and big donors, not to the rank and file who do the scut work of making phone calls, knocking on doors, driving voters to the polls -- let alone the voters themselves.  It's not about you, you individualist with your silly notions of government by the people.   Don't believe the fairy tales the elites told you, that elections are meant to choose the best candidate for office.  Don't believe the fairy tale drummed into your head since childhood, that American values and ideals have anything to do with the running of our government.  It's like the Bible: you're not supposed to take it literally, just have faith in your leaders.  Just don't reject the fairy tales during election season, or in the hearing of the real owners of the party.

I guess I'm more or less functional again, after spending a day walking around feeling stunned.  I needed to write to find out what I thought about Trump's victory, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know what I thought.  I stayed off Facebook yesterday, and timidly logged in today.  Before long my liberal friends' reactions had me angry again, and I was back in the fray.

Most notable, as I expected, were Democrats blaming everybody but themselves for the debacle. Paul Krugman was apparently leading the charge, but I hear Rachel Maddow was in there too.  If I'm not mistaken, that was one of the tendencies that drove Germany into the hands of the Nazis.  Did Germany lose the Great War?  It wasn't their fault, it was the Jews and the homosexuals and the Reds stabbing the Fatherland in the back, and women spitting on Our Troops.  Did Hillary lose this world-historical election?  It wasn't her fault, it was the Bernie Bros and Julian Assange and Jim Comey and all the haters who made voters stay away from the polls.

Most entertaining are the Dems who yell "Don't play the blame game!" when their own attempts to play the blame game are rebutted.  We can blame everybody, but don't you dare blame us -- that's being judgmental.  We aren't being judgmental, we're just pointing out who stabbed Hillary in the back...  Really, they are acting as we were warned Trump's followers would react if he lost.  I imagine I'll be seeing a lot more of that.

Meanwhile, what to do?  I don't have any answers, but some writers are making sense.  There are others, of course, but these two were close to hand.  It's alarming that so many liberals and progressives and near-rightists and neoliberals are freaking out, lashing out almost randomly, but that was only to be expected.  I can't go on, I'll go on.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter the Voting Booth

There's a strange article at the Hankyoreh today, full of parallels to and implications for American politics. Ahn Chul-soo, an academic and software tycoon with political ambitions, told an audience made up largely of students that if you want change, you have to vote.

“Active voting is practically the only way to go from an old system to a new one and reflect the values of the future,” the dean of Seoul National University Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology said.

The reason why the article is strange is that the reasons Ahn gave for voting sound more like arguments for de-emphasizing voting. For example:

Ahn previously urged voting just before the Seoul mayoral by-election October 2011, citing the example of the US civil rights activist Rosa Parks (1913~2005).

I don't doubt that Parks thought voting important, but she isn't famous for voting: she is famous for breaking the law by refusing to move to the back of a city bus, thus setting off a boycott of the Montgomery Alabama bus system that led to its desegregation. Change in that instance, as in others, came about not from voting, but from direct action.

Voting was not an option for Parks at the time anyway, since Jim Crow practice effectively excluded blacks from voting in Alabama. This article tells how Parks had registered to vote in 1942 but never received her voting card. But it makes another typical error, saying that she "refused to give up her seat that day not because she was tired, not because she was looking for recognition, and not knowing that her actions would spark a movement. Instead, she refused to give up her seat because she had courage, passion and an extraordinary commitment to end the injustices endured by her community. In doing so she showed all of us that you do not need to hold political office, nor be wealthy, nor famous to change the world." The movement was already in existence, and Rosa Parks knew it: she was already a committed activist who knew that change happens not by one person committing a dramatic act, but by many people working and acting together. Similarly, an obsessive focus on voting -- on the isolated individual in the voting booth -- distracts people from organizing.

But in the meantime, what good does voting do if you can't vote? Ahn conveniently forgot that the end of dictatorship in South Korea came about not through voting, but through mass mobilization of citizens, including civil disobedience.

Ahn also mentioned the example of California as described in US journalist Fareed Zakaria’s book “The Future of Freedom.” In California, where direct democracy is strongest in the US, a number of bills have been put up for referendum voting, but the real influence is enjoyed by wealthy interest groups that have the opportunity to promote their position through television advertisements and other media. As a result, the voting outcome is generally in line with the wishes of the wealthy interest groups.

Ahn characterized this as the “old system.”...

If Ahn is right about the influence of the "wealthy influence groups," then again, measures other than merely voting are necessary to keep referenda from being bought by the rich. What does he propose, having a referendum on the referenda? It's a safe bet that the "wealthy interest groups" are ready and able to block any changes in the system, whether in California or in Korea.

Ahn Chul-soo confirms a lot of my darkest suspicions about academics and software tycoons. (Would you want Bill Gates in political office? I sure wouldn't.) They must have TED Conferences in Korea, because Ahn's exhortations sound a lot like the TED videos that friends have insisted I watch: gaseous, platitudinous, superficially plausible but seriously flawed under inspection.

I don't say that people shouldn't vote. I've never missed a Presidential election since I became eligible to vote, and I have also voted in off-year elections most if not all of the time. As I've gotten older, I've voted less from conviction than because it's not difficult to do, and it allows me to criticize incumbents without being distracted by party loyalists -- at least, not being distracted by them too much, since they generally don't hear when I tell them that I voted in 2008 and 2010, and that in fact I voted for Obama. They simply refuse to hear or engage criticism.

In the US this fall, voters will be faced with a choice between two great evils at the Presidential level, and often with little more real choice in the states and municipalities. Unlike Democratic operatives, I don't blame people who can't muster the energy to go to a polling place, knowing that the outcome will be bad no matter who wins. That's especially true for voters who will face a gauntlet of barriers meant to keep them from voting because of their color or class, or who find it difficult for whatever reason to get to a polling place. If I were advising them, though, I'd remind them that both parties offer rides and support, and they should take advantage of it. Vote, but without illusions -- and then think about what can really be done to bring about change. One of the worst things about Obama -- and paradoxically the best at the same time -- is that he will have dashed the hopes of many naive voters who believed that voting the rascals out would make things better: they got new rascals, including in the White House. Abandon hope, abandon illusions, and think about real change and how to produce it, so that voting will someday have meaning.