It Could Have Been Worse: On The Normalization Of Fascism

As we move from 2017 to 2018, there’s one position that I see some political analysts taking that I find more repugnant and irresponsible than others. On the one hand there are still literal Nazis who are freely walking about today targeting various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (among others), and one would certainly conclude that these drecks of humanity represent the absolute worst of who we are. But on the other hand, if the Overton Window could remain fixed far to the Left of literal Nazis, they would be an aberration that could easily be addressed by law enforcement and not by disingenuous discourse that treats all content of speech to be equal simply because the first amendment doesn’t explicitly condemn hate speech and calls for the violent end of pluralistic democracy. So I do find my stomach turns just a little more at the commentator who looks at what happened during approximately the first year of the Trump Administration and says, “2017 could have been a lot worse.”

This is, on one level, strictly speaking true. To the extent that we are not currently living in a dictatorship, wherein the various racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender, etc minorities are sent to death camps, yes it is true that it could be worse. To the extent that my face has not been eaten by a mountain lion in 2017, yes it is true that it could be worse. I frequently use the “could have been worse” mantra on a quotidian basis to try and keep a view of what privileges and blessings I have in my life, but to use that argument in this context is at best irresponsible and ignorant of the vast amount of work that went into keeping it from being worse, and at worst sympathetic to the positions and people who actively are trying to make it worse.

The single greatest asset the American people have, at this time, is the incompetence of Donald Trump as an individual, a businessman, and most importantly as a politician. His inability to form coherent sentences, let alone coherent policy, has limited his ability to enact a Muslim ban, for example. His inability to attract and retain talent has made it difficult for him to effectively get all of his horrendous policies pushed through the much more responsible career civil servants. However, there is a two edged sword to his impotence. His bumbling rhetoric and unhinged habit of lashing out can often do great damage, much like the directionless rage of a flailing animal is indeed still dangerous. What’s more, lurking in the wings are more competent ideologues who are just champing at the bit to pretend to be the adults in the room when Trump is finally vacated, while simply continuing his policies.

But I feel I’ve been rather vague, at this point. What is, after all, so bad about the Trump Administration in 2017? First off we’ve seen the ascendancy of the euphemistically labeled “Alt-Right.” These fascists have already taken the lives of people whose only crime is being opposed to fascism. Worse, the police sympathetically look the other way at fascist protesters while coming down hard on anti-fascists. Worse still, legislators in several states have attempted to pass laws in the last year to explicitly condone running over protesters with cars. The shift of the Overton Window to the Far-Right has been a steady effort for decades, but now we see what happens when a major political party feels comfortable openly embracing the worst of the worst of American society as a treasured foundation for their base. All of this is succinctly demonstrated when in the wake of the death of Heather Heyer, the president of the United States claimed that there were fine people on both sides, that there was violence on many sides, that opposition to fascism is morally equivalent to fascism, etc. Of course, it could be worse, we could have Brown Shirts marching the street, but for the moment all we have are Red Hats marching the streets.

CHIP has been left unfunded for months now, and most state programs will be lucky to get by on the funding they have through January. The Children’s Health Insurance Program should be the easiest thing to pass in the world, who could possibly oppose it? To be blunt, Republicans. Old guard Republicans like Orrin Hatch as well as the so called young guns like Paul Ryan assure us that we cannot afford such luxuries as keeping children from dying of preventable disease, because we need to inflate the military budget more and slash revenue by giving corporations massive tax breaks. Even charlatans like Marco Rubio see the benefit in at least pretending to be shocked at how crass the GOP has become at throwing the poor under the bus to give handouts to the rich because it’s gone so far. But hey, it could be worse right? At least they left in the charitable giving deduction in the tax bill… as far as anyone can tell.

The private prison industry has been booming under Trump as he funnels various DREAMers and DACA/DAPA recipients into de facto concentration camps. And before I hear people claim this is one Godwin’s Law too far, let me remind you Trump used his first pardon on Joseph Arpaio a man who bragged about what he called concentration camps, used to lock up undocumented immigrants. The window is fast closing to fix what Trump broke with the callous termination of programs that protect productive, law-abiding residents of this country, at which point we will get to see first hand how 2017 could have been worse.

Let’s next discuss judicial appointments. Trump supporters love to mention how many appointments Trump has successfully made over this first year, in part because it is one of the few metrics he hasn’t insecurely inflated. By blocking President Obama’s nominations for years, the GOP made a huge back log. You might recall that was the whole point of Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” in the first place. They weren’t blocked because Obama’s nominees were unfit, but because they had President Obama’s taint on them. But Trump, by virtue of not being Obama, has been allowed to put forward ideologically pure, young nominees, with little or no experience and the Republican Congress looks the other way only unless it becomes a televised embarrassment just how unfit the nominees are. We will get to see just how much it will be over the next decades to have judges who are ignorant of the law, rule on important issues that just don’t sit right in their gut.

On the topic of nominations, Trump’s indifference to doing his job has the upshot of leaving vacant hundreds of positions that are necessary to the competent management of government programs. It’s never quite clear if this is intentional or not. Certainly the appointments he has made seem intentionally designed to be nihilistic sledgehammers, poised to undo the basic functions of government that go unnoticed until they go unfulfilled. One can’t look at Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Scott Pruitt and imagine that these are the best our country can offer to manage our nuclear material, provide affordable housing, defend the right to quality education for all students, and prevent environmental abuse. However, Trump’s ignorance of even the most basic details of how government works is a plausible argument for why he’s incidentally destroying the various programs that everyone depends on, even if they aren’t immediately faced with that reality on a daily basis. But it could be worse I suppose, I don’t know how necessarily but I’m sure someone will inform me eventually.

I could go on like this, but even I have my limits when it comes to pedantry, so I’ll begin to wrap up by pointing out that what has kept things from being worse is the persistent resistance to Trump’s attempts to make things even worse. Trump and the Republicans tried to kill the Affordable Care Act several times, and only the dogged resistance to those callous bills kept things from being worse. Trump’s ban on military service by trans individuals seems to be overturned for the moment, and that’s because of the repeated efforts of patriotic Americans to uphold the rule of law against an administration that has open contempt for the legal process. Robert Mueller has thus far been successful in avoiding the unhinged and unfounded attacks made to try and stop the Russia Investigation, but only by repeated reporting on the facts and the dedicated effort of the people to remain informed in spite of cynical attempts to propagate “Alternative Facts.”

Look, it could be worse, and it likely will be worse in the next year. And that is because at every level the Republicans are in positions of power. All three branches of the federal government, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the judiciary all over the country are infected by a political party that has gone off the Far-Right cliff. The only way we will be able to make things better is to draw out this poison at the ballot box. The only way we could make it worse is to try and rationalize away all the huge threats posed by the Trump Administration by trivializing it, by shifting the rhetoric ever further to the fringes of the Right.

We Let Terrorism Work

We’ve just about reached the end of summer. Kids are headed back to school, families are wrapping up vacations to the beach, but there may yet be time to watch Jaws, to remind you just how close you were to dying in a shark attack at that beach. Except that’s a movie, that’s fiction, that’s not the world we actually live in. Since we entered the 21st Century, 17 Americans have died in shark attacks. To put that in perspective, approximately 200 people died each year in that time due to collisions with deer, yet Bambi isn’t classified as a horror film. And that’s just it, the reason why we worry more about sharks than deer is because it makes a more compelling and scary story, irrespective of the facts. While that might make for good entertainment, the same phenomenon is in its own way contributing to an overarching problem we face in society, particularly where culture meets politics.

Fear works as a tactic, not just for terrorists but for journalists and politicians and advertisers and hell even me. There’s no reason I necessarily had to choose that title, even though it’s ultimately the thesis of this essay, but people are far more reluctant to read something entitled “On the Repercussions of a Society Misled by Emotions.” Fear is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. We evolved the traits of fear to avoid predators and to remember scenarios that would threaten our existence. In the service of keeping people safe, fear can actually be a very advantageous emotion. However, there’s a cost associated with anything, and the cost of fear can be the loss of rationality, growth, or even just a sense of well-being.

But seeing as I did mention terrorists, we need to remember why they’re called that. Terrorism operates on creating the sense that it is a much larger problem than reality would have us believe. Now, each life that is lost before its time is a tragedy, not only to the victim but to their families and their friends and those close to that tragedy. I would never want to diminish the real pain that those families feel, particularly because we as a society do not allow them the basic dignity that we allow families who grieve after a collision with a deer, which is to say silence. The families who survive victims of terrorism are never allowed a respite, never allowed a chance to heal in modern society because everywhere you look you can see images and stories of terrorist attacks. They are in the news, to be sure, but they’re on TV and on the radio and in the movies as well. Like a child who keeps picking at a scab, we never let these things heal over because somewhere in the world there is always some story that refuses to go unheard.

In a world that is as interconnected as ours, it becomes effectively impossible to avoid hearing about tragic stories 24/7 in real time. This is because in a world with more than seven billion people, almost all of whom can share their stories at the speed of light, the moment there is an explosion in Mumbai we hear about it in Memphis, when there is an attack in Paris we see it on screens in Phoenix, the moment there’s an earthquake in New Zealand it’s reported in New York. To be sure, we see the best of our common humanity when these stories come out as people donate to charities, volunteer their time, or even show solidarity on social media, but there is a cost as well. The constant barrage of news about attacks and violence and unending war gives a sense that each of these tragedies are part of some great and terrible monster lurking just out of sight. This is all the more terrifying because it simply isn’t true, because in spite of reality this ogre ceases to go away.

It is true that there are terrorists, it is true that they attack innocent victims, but it is not even remotely true that groups like ISIS are very powerful or winning or are some new threat. Terror tactics are as old as war; Genghis Khan avoided many battles by simply scaring opponents into submission. Modern terrorism has been around since the 19th Century and in my lifetime it has been getting less prevalent, not more. ISIS has been on its heels for months now, they will undoubtedly kill and maim more innocent people, but their time is drawing to an end. There will undoubtedly be other groups that emerge, who look and sound very much like ISIS and they too will meet the same fate of all terrorist groups, they will die out. It is quite difficult to promulgate a movement that instructs its people to kill themselves. But they seem like a huge threat. They seem like a humongous boogeyman because it’s always talked about, like an urban legend. And like an urban legend, the origin of the story is ultimately less important than its repetition and its corruption in the ears of the next person who hears it.

We live at a time when more information is available to more people than at any point in human history, yet we feel that people have gotten less intelligent. We live at a time when wars are less abundant and less deadly than at any time in human history, yet we feel less safe. When people claim that there has been an increase in the deaths of cops, it’s only true in the sense that 2015 set a record low for police fatalities and 2016 isn’t poised to beat that record. The fundamental problem is that so many of us, too many of us have learned how to shut up opposition. With all the information of humanity at our fingertips, too many choose to sift through only to the opinions that agree with their own, plugging ears against the whole truth. Attempts to present facts and evidence are met with faux skepticism that rests on the comfortable delusion that there’s no way I could be wrong and anything you might put up as a contradiction to that point is necessarily biased and inaccurate.

I don’t want to hearken back to the Bush Administration too much by saying that allowing ourselves to become divided and scared in this way lets the terrorists win, but when I hear the rhetoric coming out of the mouth of the GOP’s presidential candidate, I hear someone capitalizing on terror tactics. The assertions about immigration across the Southern Border are at their best when they’re only misleading, but are more often utterly devoid of truth. For some years now net immigration has been going into Mexico, not into the US. President Obama, far from being a president of open borders, has set the record for deportations. Immigrant communities, even those who are undocumented, commit crimes at lower rates than the wider population. But none of that matters, truth doesn’t matter, what matters is that people can be made scared and if they can be made scared enough they’ll buy snake oil cures and false promises.

The knee jerk reactions, on both sides, to pesky facts makes it impossible for quite a few to take it all in and see the world as it is. We are not facing threats on the level of the Great Depression or World Wars, in fact this is probably as good a time to be alive as there has ever been and tomorrow brings ever brighter promise. People listen to that and hear naivety, they assume that the world must be much darker and grittier because that’s what the movies look like. People assume that cynicism is equivalent to intelligence and so ignore the reality of the world we actually inhabit and in so doing allow themselves to see scapegoats and demons at the gate, instead of human beings.

This much is not new, it’s always been a struggle for us to see all our fellow men as human beings. We’ve demonized based on race and ethnicity, on religion and political party, on class and regional differences, on gender and sexuality. I would not point to America in 1960 as emblematic of a more unified time, nor 1860 for that matter. We’ve always had our divisions and we’ve not always been able to live with those divisions peacefully, but when you look at how far we’ve come it can give you hope that we’ll make it as far as we need to go. The Millennial Generation is the most diverse and among the hardest working generations to ever be alive. Yes, despite stereotypes to the contrary, it’s not every generation that accepted the challenge of seeking higher education on this scale, yet was still willing to accept unpaid internships as the prize.

There is quite a lot to be optimistic about, there’s quite a bit to be happy about, and none of this takes away from the reality that there is still so much inequality and injustice that needs to be accounted for. The world is hard but we’ve overcome much worse and the only thing that could possibly allow all that we’ve built to collapse is “fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” See, this isn’t a new threat we face, and what was true then remains true today. But when the truth doesn’t matter, when humanity becomes a secondary concern, when we let ourselves be prey to fear and ignorance and greed we let terrorism work.

Lock Him Up

America has been presented with two starkly different visions of America as it is and as it can be. In the aftermath of two party conventions we have seen a Democratic Party that represents all the people: white men and black women, trans Americans, Muslim veterans, rich independents, working class Hispanics, and yes even displaced Republicans. The rallying cries of each and every speech spoke not only to the challenges we’ve overcome as individuals and a nation, but the inspiring message of America that remains today an exemplary vision of opportunity. What’s more the DNC positioned itself as the party of true patriotism, dedication, service, and action to bring about a future that creates a more perfect union that is truly inclusive of all Americans. This is why one of the most repeated chants at the DNC was “USA USA US,” without any shred of cynicism or feigned patriotism.

By contrast, while the closest they came to patriotism was putting a ridiculous number of flags behind their speaker, the most clear and determined chant that came from the RNC was “Lock Her Up!” Speech after speech portrayed America as a dystopian wasteland, mere days away from being turned into an Islamic dictatorship if it had not already occurred. It felt, at times, like a scene ripped out of the pages of “A Tale of Two Cities,” complete with a show trial, whose sole purpose was to let the mob unleash their fury on supposed enemies of the state. Or else it was the 2 minutes hate from “1984,” allowing the masses to shout how much they hated the traitors of their beloved Big Brother with the tiny hands. I bring this literature up, not simply to counteract the assault on the English language that is the unfortunate verbiage of the Republican nominee, but to point out that we’ve seen these kinds of vicious and heartless assaults on the idea of justice before and it’s worth remembering as we move forward.

The Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, lambasted Hillary Clinton as a criminal for her actions as Secretary of State. During this vapid exercise, Christie did not actually put forward a case that would lead to any actual decision of guilt, which is fitting because despite hundreds of millions of dollars to back up decades of baseless accusations, Hillary Clinton remains exonerated of the repeated attacks on her character. This is indicative of one of the real differences between Hillary Clinton and the Republican nominee. She isn’t in jail because she is proven not guilty time and again, despite a well funded effort to try like hell and come up with something, anything that might stick. He isn’t in jail because he can afford to settle out of court or pay whatever fine gets slapped on his wrist when he discriminates against black tenants, defames Native American tribes, defrauds supposed students, and reneges on countless deals with contractors and funders alike.

Yet you didn’t hear the DNC chanting “Lock Him Up,” you only heard accurate assertions that he is not as successful a businessman as he portrays himself, he’s not an honest dealer, he’s a dishonest campaigner, he’s a self-professed chauvinist, and he’s a thin skinned narcissist only capable of caring about himself without a clue on nuclear policy, foreign policy, economic policy, trade policy, military policy, etc. You didn’t hear “Lock Him Up” at the DNC because that was a meeting of adults from across the aisle who simply want America to remain in one piece at this point. You didn’t hear “Lock Him Up,” because the message of the DNC was not to debase the American people by giving into hatred but to stand with proud defiance like the Khans for all the things that have made, do make, and will make truly great.

The conventions are now long passed, but we still hear the echoes of the two narratives that were outlined in Cleveland and in Philadelphia. At every speech that the Republican candidates have made since being appointed the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees, the crowds have invariably broke into chanting “Lock Her Up.” The Republican nominee himself has only recently stopped attacking the Khan family, just in time to kick a baby out of his rally for having the gall to cry. In contrast, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine have been out talking with Americans about their positive vision of an America where the parents of war veterans are consoled and not chastised. In retrospect, this tragic episode was a perfect distillation of the reality that the Republican nominee is not merely a failure in political rhetoric, but that the assault on “political correctness” is merely a shorthand for an assault on basic human decency.

People who don’t want this madman to be let anywhere near the decision room breathed a sigh of relief when the polls showed a stunning lead for Hillary Clinton, showing strong leads in every swing state, winning traditionally Red states like Georgia and making other conservative strongholds like Texas and Utah competitive. Yet this respite is something of a wakeup call to those of us who’ve been asking how this was ever even close. These polls show not only that many people in America still are not willing to call out this deplorable facsimile of the Republican party for what he is, but that it takes something as dramatic as those two weeks of conventions to really get America to realize what the choice is between. Too often, this race has been painted with an utterly false equivalency, a race between two evils so similar it’s distasteful to choose between them, and that simply isn’t the case.

Most years we have the choice between two politicians who are less than ideal, but otherwise competent candidates. Most years we have to make a choice between two candidates who are just a little too conventional for their own good and so the choice seems arbitrary and unpleasant, but not this year. 2016 is a referendum on the very premise of a decent society, between the competent leadership of a longtime public servant or petulant tyranny. This should not even be a decision to anyone who enjoys waking up without seeing radioactive fallout. I fail to see how I can be hyperbolic when the nominee of the Republican Party has repeatedly shown that he not only doesn’t understand what our nuclear arsenal is or that he has no interest in learning about it, but that he is potentially willing to act on his ignorance on a whim.

This is my home and the nation I love, so irrespective of what we the people decide in November, I have every intention of helping our leadership move toward policies that make people more prosperous, more secure, freer, and more engaged with democracy itself. The trouble is that whereas I can see clearly how Hillary Clinton can steer the nation toward greater access to healthcare, toward a more competitive economy, etc; I can not imagine how the current Republican nominee for the presidency could possibly leave the world any better than a smoking crater. I wasn’t the biggest fan of President Bush, but I trusted he knew enough about government and cared about other people that he wouldn’t lead us toward armageddon. I have many disagreements with Mitt Romney over what constitutes sound policy on any number of topics, but I believe he is a devoted husband and statesman who would work toward the nation’s interest as he saw it and not simply his own interests. When faced with the choice this year, I find it unsettling that there is any state in the Union that could even consider this year’s nominee as viable, particularly when so many within his own party don’t think he is. Even someone like Rick Perry is so ill at ease with his party’s nominee that in his convention speech he uttered the name of that nominee the same number of times I’ve used it in this essay.

Unless the justice system finds him sufficiently guilty of the many real crimes he has committed, we obviously should not “Lock Him Up,” nor should we start chanting it. The rule of law doesn’t endow a mob with the power or right to decide who is guilty and who is not. But democratic government does endow the people with the right and the responsibility to choose who our leaders will be and what vision we as a nation wish to pursue. We can ill afford to fail at this basic responsibility, particularly when the choice is so ludicrously obvious.

Our Enemy

There was once a man walking down the pier of a coastal town to look out at the ocean the day after a huge storm. The man noticed a young child picking up objects from the beach and hurling them into the ocean with great purpose. The man yelled to the child to ask what she was doing and she yelled back that the storm had washed ashore hundreds and thousands of starfish, that they’d become stranded on the beach, and with the sun getting ever higher in the sky they would surely die if she didn’t throw them back into the ocean. The man did indeed notice the beach was strewn with starfish some of which were perceptibly still moving. The man, still perplexed by the situation, retorted that there was no way she could save them all, indeed many were already long past hope. What difference would it make to all those starfish she wouldn’t be able to save in time. The child paused for just a moment and retorted “to those I do save it makes all the difference in the world,” and she went straight back to throwing the starfish into the ocean. The man considered her point and joined her on the beach, throwing the starfish back into the ocean one at a time, saving as many as they could.

I first heard this story in a sermon when I was a kid. I’m sure it was told a bit differently, and I don’t necessarily remember what the main point of that sermon was, but it’s always struck me as a powerful image that just won’t leave the back of my mind. This story pushed its way to the front of my mind today after I felt depressed from the news of the mass shooting in Orlando. Actually it wasn’t so much the news itself, it was the certainty I felt in my heart that in spite of the lives lost, in spite of the grieving families, in spite of all the words and acts of mourning and compassion that nothing will be done to stop such tragedies from happening again and again and again. After all, if America was complacent enough to not let the deaths of school children be a line in the sand, what hope is there that the deaths of adults in a gay bar would spur any action?

It is that painful sense of futile inevitability, which comes from having seen this show before so many times, mixed with the realization that for the same reasons why the LGBTQIA community was targeted in the first place, there would be no call to save some crowd of queers. To be sure, there were indeed the same voices condemning gays to burn in hell, the same self-satisfied glee that other humans were suffering if only because of the people they loved, yet there was something different this time to give a little hope. For the first time in a few years, at least, I’ve allowed myself to feel just a small glimmer of hope in the wake of such a terrible tragedy, because many voices that had once railed against homosexuals, a surprising number of people who had remained silent before as Americans were shot down began to take their stand because this event broke their hearts too.

Hope. Hope has been a dangerous word for the last few years because it has seemed like every step forward has been met with a significant step backward. On one day we see the Supreme Court rule in favor of marriage equality and on the next day we see states draft legislation to entrench bigotry. We see the economy do better as unemployment goes down and we see the gulf between rich and poor gets wider. As the world grows more peaceful we are inundated with images that remind us that there are still children losing parents, still parents mourning children. And throughout all of this, hope can cut deep inside as it seems like it might be a worthwhile luxury to resign ourselves and stop the disappointment, to stop allowing ourselves to give into a false hope. Yet as Barack Obama defiantly challenged us in his first bid for the White House, “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

We have many enemies that challenge the progress of this nation, many enemies who make hope a painful choice, but we too often obstruct ourselves by misidentifying who those enemies are. Right now we’re having a fight over whether we can enact any meaningful and basic gun control to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people. This has been repeatedly hampered in the past by groups like the NRA, who fund politicians to fight bills that have wide public support and would make us safer, and would let us live freer in the tempered confidence of that security. But the NRA is not our enemy, the gun owners of America are not our enemy.

The perpetrator of this slaughter has been identified as Muslim, he supposedly did this act in honor of ISIS. We are still embroiled in a bitter fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Taliban and so many other groups who claim to represent Islam. They do not represent the Muslims I know, the Muslims I’ve broken bread with, the Muslims who contribute to this country and make her a great nation. Our enemy is not Islam, our enemy is not Muslims and we do ourselves a disservice, we make the struggle that much harder when we define us and them to exclude the very people most harmed by groups like ISIS. They are not our enemy.

Our enemy is ignorance, our enemy is want, our enemy is fear, our enemy is indifference. Our enemy is the cold, heartless lack of compassion, the willingness to do nothing in the face of injustice. Our enemy is complacence in the face of adversity and the inability to do that most American of things, to hope. We can’t stop every criminal and we can’t stop every crime, but that is not a deterrence from stopping any criminal or any crime. Our military, our police, our defense forces work tirelessly gaining victories we will never hear about because they did stop murderers, they did stop those who would break the nation’s heart. To be American is to see the world as it is with all its flaws, to see the sum total of all our successes and our failures and to not only believe but to know deep within us that we can do better, that we must do better, that we will do better. To be American, and paraphrase an Irish writer, is to dream of things that never were and to ask ‘why not?’

Our national hope is at once our great strength and our great challenge. We have seen how much our nation’s hopes have achieved and so we become complacent in the knowledge that it will all be sorted out some day. None of the great strides this country has made came out of a vacuum; it came from the dedicated work of real people to not accept the status quo and to not accept the promise of tomorrow, but rather to demand that it come today. This was as true when Dr King challenged the complacent in the 60s as it is today. “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’” The beautiful words and promises of people who were once willing to fight against the dignity of all human beings is a great beginning, but it is not the end, it cannot be the end. Now is the time that we transform hope into action and action into victory against the real enemies of our nation.

Hope invites pain and there will still be heartbreak in our future. To demand change is to run headlong into a brick wall again and again and again in the hopes of making a tiny chip so that the next person can make a still larger chip in that wall, but it has proven to be the only way we ever earn the things worth fighting for. We will win and we will lose and we will dust ourselves off to try again. And though we can’t win every fight, though we can’t save every life, it’s worth remembering that for all those we do save it makes all the difference in the world. That is why we keep trying, that is why we keep hoping.

Eduard Bernstein

Much has been made over the fact that Senator Bernie Sanders is the first socialist to have a legitimate shot at winning the presidency. And throughout the campaign, Senator Sanders has been adamant in clarifying that he is a Democratic Socialist. This is a rather important clarification because socialism is an incredibly broad label. It can describe Extremist Right groups like the Nazi Party, to Extremist Left groups like the Communist Party of the USSR, as well as a wide array of moderate ideologies that underpin modern welfare states and even the most beloved programs of the United States government, i.e. Social Security and Medicare. Democratic Socialism has emerged, to use a Hegelian style of discourse, as a synthesis between the ideals of socialist movements and the realities of market driven economies. In fact, the very first discussions about Democratic Socialism emerged as a direct result of the named successor to Karl Marx and his realization that despite the failure of socialist revolutions to even take place, the life of the average worker was improving. This man was named Eduard Bernstein and his break from the Marxist orthodoxy is one of the most relevant stories for the American Left to remember as we approach the end of the primary season.

“The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.” -Eduard Bernstein. Marxist socialism was a reaction to the horrible conditions of the industrial revolution, which saw the lives of countless millions ruined in the pursuit of wealth for a select few. First, as the wealthiest echelons of society bought up lands that had long been the livelihoods of tenant farmers since time immemorial, forcing them to seek work in the cities. Then those cities became filthy, dangerous places to live as men, women, and children worked endlessly long days in dismal conditions for the meagerest of wages. It seemed, therefore, inevitable that the people who were suffering under such conditions would rise up to demand justice and a greater share of the immense wealth that was being funneled to the top. But it never happened. There was never a great proletariate uprising in the UK or Germany, where Marx was convinced it would happen. In fact, as the industrial revolution continued, the life expectancy of workers slowly went up. The population boomed as food and consumer products became more abundant and affordable. And though there were still many problems facing the factory workers, unions were proven time and again to be effective advocates for higher wages, more reasonable hours, the end of child labor, etc. This threw a significant wrench into the theory that had convinced so many people that revolution was just around the corner.

When Marx died, he pointed to Bernstein to continue his advocacy for “scientific socialism,” and for the workers’ revolution. Still the revolution never came, yet in many ways the combination of the invisible hand, unions, and government regulation were doing their job of correcting for the market failures that had earlier plagued the changing economy. But there were still significant problems. To say that the lives of workers improved is not much of an achievement, as it’s hard to get much worse than 18 hour days, 7 days a week in a mill for a starvation wage in a society plagued with smog, tainted water, and questionable food quality. Faced with this reality, socialists of the time were forced to choose between fighting for the goal of “scientific socialism,” i.e. the workers’ revolution; or else fighting for the movement itself, i.e. the advancement and flourishing of human life in the face of market pressures to the contrary. By choosing to pursue the latter, Bernstein effectively laid the foundation for what would become every ensuing Democratic Socialist, and Social Democratic, movement that has since been founded.

This was not a popular choice at the time. To many followers of Marx it was as if the Pope himself had rejected Catholicism. Communists favored the continued pursuit of the final goal, and had success only in countries where Marx was actually convinced the revolution couldn’t come, e.g. agrarian Russia and China. The results are astonishing between what happens when you pursue the movement in countries like the UK or France or Germany that have significant socialized institutions, versus what happens when you pursue the final goal in countries like China, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. And I bring this up because I see a strong parallel among supporters of Bernie Sanders who are struggling with the realization that the revolution isn’t coming.

As someone who supports Bernie Sanders, who’s contributed to the Sanders campaign, who sports Bernie swag, and who voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in the Nevada caucus; I am in the uncomfortable position of recognizing that the goal is untenable, but the movement remains and is worth fighting for. The movement in the United States is now inextricably linked to the Democratic Party and increasingly dependent on the election of Hillary Clinton. I do not begrudge a single person who supports Bernie every single day and on every single election up until the convention, because he represents a voice that needs to be heard across the country, but I cannot support any attempts to throw the baby out with the bath water once a nominee is chosen.

Too many of Bernie’s supporters view his election as the only thing worth fighting for, and that goal is worth throwing away everything he has fought for. If you care about universal healthcare, that won’t come about with a Republican led government. If you want high quality education from pre-k to university to be the birthright of every American, you can’t allow Trump to win. And even if all the policies took a back seat, even if the only reason you supported Bernie was because he’s the most honest and decent candidate, then there is still no reason you should ever support Trump over Clinton.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it, well maybe eight times, Democrats are absolutely terrible at politics. This is most evident in the reputation of Hillary Clinton. Say what you will about Secretary Clinton, and I have made my criticisms known, but any person who claims that she is fundamentally dishonest, or at the very least less honest than Donald Trump, has no idea what they are talking about. Every candidate on the Democratic side has the starting advantage of living in the real world, where America’s economy is doing pretty well, and doing fantastically well compared to the world stage. Unemployment is down, wages are rising, since Obama has taken office there have been more Americans killed by infants than terrorists, and more people have health insurance and a college education than at any point in US history. The Republicans apparently have never heard of facts or statistics or reality and so they are forced to paint delusional parodies of America that need to be completely overhauled to “make America great again.” But even beyond that starting point, as a candidate Hillary Clinton is, depending on exactly how you assess it, either the most honest candidate outright or tied with Bernie for that honor.
Politifact is a well trusted organization to fairly look at the claims that are made on the trail and despite a couple of “Pants-on-Fire” ratings, which Bernie lacks, she has more out and out true statements than Bernie and fewer false statements in general. You can disagree with what her positions are and heck you can even pin her for changing some positions, but on the whole she has always been a better than most politician. And this is again why I have to say how annoyed I am by how bad at politics Democrats are, because despite a strong record of honesty, decency, and standing up for people who don’t have the loudest voices in this country, she has been branded as dishonest, Machiavellian, and a tool for moneyed interests. Despite being a brilliant example for young women everywhere as a model for what can be done even in the face of dogged and sexist opposition, she is maligned, not for her own personal failings, but for what her husband did. You can spin stories and cherry pick evidence to make the stories seem more compelling, but the only reason we’ve gotten to this point is because of the dogmatic conservative opposition that labels anyone to the Left of Margaret Thatcher as a socialist, and even Maggie would need to explain why she didn’t kill the NHS. The attacks on Hillary Clinton are usually baseless and needlessly vicious just to score political points; and what is the end result of this tarring and feathering? It certainly isn’t a more viable path for Bernie and it sure as hell isn’t an easier path toward the solutions he’s espoused.

Now let’s compare her to the now presumptive nominee of the GOP, Donald Trump. I have a job that forces me to listen at length to his speeches, such as they are, and to the extent that they are intelligible they are demonstrably wrong. He makes up numbers from the size of his crowds to the number of undocumented immigrants in this country, inflating the actual numbers by 3-10 times what reality would dictate. He declares that he has support from analysts and experts for his deranged policies that simply aren’t there. He asserts that his policies are feasible, they are, and would solve the debt crisis, which they wouldn’t, and ultimately even if they didn’t it’s ok because he likes to play with debt and bankruptcy. He has more “Pants-on-fire” ratings than any other candidate who has ever run, and so far Politifact has only labeled 3 claims of his to be true, one of which being that Putin is popular in Russia. He is wrongheaded and dishonest, but people think he keeps it real. I don’t know what reality he’s keeping but it’s not this one and frankly it’s never even consistent to one alternate reality. He has flip-flopped on more issues in the last year than Clinton has in a lifetime: from abortion to the Iraq War, from universal healthcare to public education, from the minimum wage to the use of nuclear weapons on our allies. But because the conservative establishment has done such a great job at convincing people that Political Correctness is dishonesty and therefore the antithesis to it must be honesty, he gets to baselessly claim he is the clean and honest one compared to Hillary Clinton.

I remain a Bernie supporter, and if I had it my way he would be the Democratic nominee, but so far more people have voted for Hillary Clinton, more delegates have been earned by Hillary Clinton, so yes more Super Delegates have been pledged to Hillary Clinton and that’s fine. I am not in the business of hero worship, I live in a pragmatic and real world where we have significant problems, even as things are getting better, and we need to actually try to fix them. The Bernie Sanders election is nothing, the Bernie Sanders movement is everything. Any person who feels the Bern, should feel ashamed if they profess that they would rather vote for Trump than a fine candidate like Hillary Clinton. Because the only thing that could actually stop the movement in its track is the success of conservatism even with the most despicable and disgusting candidates they have ever fielded.

Restroom Access

The vindictiveness of politics these days is really getting to be overwhelming. We’ve become numb to the idea that government can do anything helpful since President Reagan assured everyone that government was the problem and went about inspiring a generation of extremist politicians to prove that point. It’s come to the point that there is a significant number of people on both sides of the spectrum who think that we need to simply overthrow the current political system to either start from scratch or somehow live without any central authority to maintain the military, justice system, transportation system, public education, the social safety net, etc. But I didn’t realize quite how petty, shortsighted, and simply stupid the national discourse had become until I was struck with daily reports on bathroom bills and the ensuing controversies that have come about since their passage in states like North Carolina.

At a time when the United States has a significant debt and only barely manages to convince a majority of politicians to actually address the problems of debt ceilings, leave along deal with it responsibly; at a time when the United States is embroiled not only with an international struggle against the threats of terrorism, but the resulting refugee crises; at a time when national campaigns are inundated with countless fortunes by undisclosed special interests, and the polls are being ever more barricaded against honest citizens, some of the leaders of state governments have seen fit to enact legislation to monitor who uses a toilet. Apparently I had been blissfully unaware of the epidemic of transgendered people going to the restroom. Now maybe it’s because I have Crohn’s and so I am just keenly aware of the phenomenon, but these politicians are full of shit.

Researchers on both sides of the aisle have wracked their brains searching for any instance when a transgendered person ever used a protected status law to shield them from persecution for preying on small children, mostly because it’s virtually impossible to find an example of a real trans person abusing a child in a public restroom. What’s more the laws that have been passed are, by their own design, unenforceable because there is no fund set up to equip bathroom monitors to cover each and every lavatory door and demand birth certificates from those members of the public, who might dare to use a public restroom. These are punitive and petty measures that one might generously call a solution without a problem, but it is in fact a shell game covering up what the real problem was. The problem here was not that anyone was really disgusted when they went to a restroom to find they shared it with a transgendered person, because in my experience people tend not to make any eye contact in public restrooms, let alone take the time to scrutinize the original gender of all individuals in those restrooms. The problem was that a small subgroup of politically powerful religious activists felt that they’d been slighted by the advance of the LGBT communities and wanted to feel that they were on the right side of a battle that does not exist.

The thought seldom occurs to people these days, when it comes to politics, that it might be worthwhile to weigh what the real issues are and what responsible policies would be to solve those problems. Instead we are inundated with rhetoric that assures us that the only things worth fighting about are A) Who is to blame for any given problem and B) how can we punish them? On the Left we want to ask who is to blame for climate change, who is to blame for income inequality, and the answer is quite often a handful of moneyed conservative boogeymen like the Koch Brothers. On the Right the questions are usually more like who’s to blame for unemployment, who’s to blame for bloodshed, and the answer is quite often “foreign” groups like undocumented immigrants and Muslims. So we both design legislation that is designed not to solve the problem in either the long or short term, but to merely punish the people we blame and hope that the rest just sorts itself out. I do not pretend to be above this sort of thing, as I have most certainly found it satisfying to seek out appropriate scapegoats, but I am doing my best to stop because I see that it simply isn’t an effective problem solving strategy.

But it is also crucial that we do not let everyone off the hook by pretending that it’s a pox on both our houses and everyone bears the same amount of culpability. There clearly are people and groups of people in this country who are more responsible than others for pushing policies whose sole purpose is to hurt people and solve nothing. I am merely saying at this point it does us no good in the task of solving the real issues of our nation, and our planet for that matter, to devote all our time and energy giving into the retribution against those responsible. And these bathroom bills are the absolute bottom of the barrel, because if people were interested in solving even a small problem there is one that concerns restroom access.

It is a common occurrence to see restrooms in businesses marked with the notice “for employees only.” This makes sense, as it is private property and the proprietors want to limit the abuse of their property as much as possible. If you are the average person it can be a slight annoyance when you do have to go to find that you’ll have to keep looking for a place to go; however, there is a problem in America if you are someone who is routinely in situations where you simply cannot wait to find ever rarer public restrooms, in a country that routinely defunds anything public. I’m talking about the real Restroom Access Act or Ally’s Law. Several states from Massachusetts to Texas, but by no means a majority of states, have passed such laws that allow certain individuals with chronic bowel diseases to have access to restrooms of retail establishments when emergencies strike.

If this seems like a quite narrow issue to get hung up about, it certainly is. But when compared to the nonsense issue of these persecutory bathroom bills that do nothing to promote safety of children in practice, and serve only to further marginalize a group that is already more likely to face discrimination and violence on a daily basis, it is of monumental, real world importance. Yet this niche issue that would help real people is ignored and the disgraceful one that hurts real people is the one making constant news. And since we are going to waste days, weeks and longer on issues that do not even begin to tackle the larger problems we face as a society, it might as well be one that actually provides some relief to people.

I am perfectly willing to spend my time debating and negotiating in good faith with people who have significantly differing opinions than my own on issues of consequence, because that’s ultimately the only way we’re going to be able to come together as a society and create workable policy that most of us can at least stomach. I am not, however, willing to continually waste time on the vanity projects of those who simply want to punish people without a second’s thought on how to solve real problems. I am not, for instance, willing to debate whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution in biology class in the 21st century; nor am I willing to debate whether the US should include torture and other war crimes in our rules of engagement. I am willing to debate how we can best use public funds to provide the highest quality education to our nation’s children, and how we can best use our public funds to create a military that is strong enough to keep the nation secure and our soldiers as safe as possible.

Our nation was never perfect, our politicians were never perfect, which is incidentally why our Constitution makes it the national goal “to form a more perfect union,” among other goals. So perhaps it is just the bias of being in the moment without the possibility of rose-tinted nostalgia to soften the edges, but it just seems like politics has grown more petty and vindictive recently and I’ve grown tired of it. We need a significant change in how we approach national discourse and what laws we pass, because government isn’t always the answer, and indeed can sometimes be the problem, but can also be the answer, when the people working at it are working in good faith. Until that happens it seems that we’ll all be mired in the reality that our politics, our politicians, our political discourse are all right in the crapper.

The Eternal Sin of Poverty

For the last news cycle or so, the media has been fixated on the comments made by the Republican frontrunner concerning abortion. Apparently, the candidate, who has thus far garnered the most votes and the most delegates in the Republican contest, thinks that the only way to curtail abortions in this country is to have some form of punishment for the woman in question, though he did stop short of prescribing a punishment for the man. Setting aside the very likely case that this was an uninformed comment made off the cuff, a comment that he has already been forced to back off from, and a comment that stands in the face of positions he once held in the not too distant past, I want to talk about the reactions we’ve seen from the Right in response to it. If any reaction to this ridiculous policy position contained the words shock, surprise,” or any synonym there of, without a negating phrase before it, then that person clearly hasn’t been paying attention or is being dishonest. This comment is only notable in the same sense that the rest of Trump’s campaign positions are, because it tears down the facade of dignity that the GOP so often likes to carry around by bluntly describing what the conservative position has been for years.

With winks and nods the Republican Party has become quite adept at enacting policies that, when looked at with clear eyes, would be widely considered immoral, unproductive, and simply wrong. This is true of failed economic policy that always promises to trickle down wealth and prosperity to the masses, but only ever lines the pockets of the investors at the very top at the direct expense of the workers who find themselves with lower wages, less workplace security, fewer opportunities to move up, and little to no chance of forming a union that might fight on their behalf. This is true of failed education policies that strip funding from schools, deprive students of accurate information, require teachers to shoulder ever greater burdens for the sake of their students, and further entrench already existing lines between rich and poor/black and white. This is true of failed environmental policies that allow well endowed businesses to poison water supplies, cause earthquakes with fracking, and let loose endless carbon at levels that threaten our ability to live on this planet. This is true of failed defense policies that have us spend billions on weapons that don’t work, spend billions on wars that we can never win, spend billions on arms sales that only create new and better supplied enemies of the future, and cost this nation and her families young men and women who die nobly defending their homeland in foreign entanglements that never end. This is true of so many policies foreign and domestic that should serve only to prove that the extreme conservative policies of today’s GOP do not and cannot work; however, the continued support of conservative politicians should be some indication that the truth is not being relayed in its totality.

The Republican Party operates on one fundamental tactic; there is us and there is them, and they are the root of our problems. They can change as suits the need of the GOP in any given election year. This year they tend to be Muslims and Immigrants, particularly those who speak Spanish. This is a very effective tactic, because you don’t need to actually go into any detail about how your proposed policies would actually solve anything, it’s just common sense that if we got rid of the problem people then there wouldn’t be any more problems. Taxes got you down? Then we just need to get rid of the IRS. Economy a little sluggish? Just get rid of those lazy immigrants who’ve taken all the work. Feeling like the world isn’t very secure? Just kill all the Radical Islamic Terrorists. Think abortion is a problem? Well, let’s just find some way to punish all those involved with abortions.

These positions don’t need to be backed up with any form of reality and frankly it would be better for all involved if we were shielded from the facts that someone needs to collect and enforce tax law, net immigration with Mexico is going into Mexico, more Americans are killed by Christian terrorists than Muslim terrorists and in both cases they are rare events, and one of the most likely demographics that is likely to actually get an abortion are the groups most likely to oppose it, Evangelical Christians. But the point of these policies isn’t to solve problems it’s to condemn and punish the wicked, whoever they are, because it sure isn’t us. John Kasich may act like a Victorian dandy, fainting at the mere prospect of doing something as extreme as punishing women for abortions, yet he has already done more to punish women for abortions than Trump. As governor, Kasich has banned all abortions after 20 weeks, which is arbitrary in itself, but also has no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, in spite of his claims that those are the exceptions he makes. During his tenure as governor, the number of abortion clinics has been cut in half, meaning women have to travel ever longer distances to access a safe and may I remind you legal medical procedure. This is the moderate conservative position now? This is not punishing the woman?

Ted Cruz is, of course, no better on the subject. As solicitor general of Texas he was instrumental in defending some of the most draconian laws that above all punish the woman. And let’s be clear having an abortion does not mean that the woman in question won’t have children at some point in her life. I mentioned Evangelical Christians as a demographic that is very likely to have an abortion, but there is one that tops the list, women with children. See I find it telling that politicians like Kasich and Cruz have gone out of their way to attack Planned Parenthood, because that really is the conservative position, to attack family planning. I think it is better when adults make informed decisions about bringing children into this world, because raising children is incredibly difficult. I have all the respect in the world for my sister and brother in law, who are raising two beautiful kids, because damned if I know how they are able to do the work of parenting day in and day out. Potential parents need to know the realities of raising kids, the financial realities, the medical realities, and everything else. It’s not fair to the parents and it’s not fair to the kids to force anyone to make life changing decisions. Yet the repeated calls from conservatives have been heard and instead of trying to help families plan for their futures, so many state governments choose instead to punish the woman.

Every trans-vaginal ultrasound, every incarceration of a woman who simply had a miscarriage, every unnecessary requirement on clinics that forces women to travel hundreds of miles and take several days out of their lives just to have a legal medical procedure is, in its final sense, a punishment on women for the mortal sin of seeking an abortion. But there is a still worse sin among the conservative ranks, the one eternal sin. If the GOP had its way and every pregnancy were brought to full term, what then? Well that would just be the beginning of the hardships that face the women and children who are so unfortunate to be poor. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the GOP has declared war on high quality, low cost health care. By defunding food assistance programs the GOP is waging war on those families it required to come into being. By defunding the schools the GOP is shackling that family, and by cutting any number of new holes in the safety net, the GOP condemn countless to the impossible task of pulling themselves by their own bootstraps.

But the human spirit is an incredible thing, and every once in a great while some exceptional individual will climb out of poverty, in spite of every hurdle and every disadvantage that was unjustly put in their way by conservatives who shut down every possible means of advancement. And that exceptional individual will be held up by the conservatives as proof positive that all the assistance programs aren’t necessary for those who just grit their teeth and try real hard, even as so many go hungry and shiver in the cold, all while trying to coo yet another unwanted child into a restless sleep. The fact that all these problems still exist doesn’t matter in the least, because the GOP has done its task in punishing the one eternal sin, that of poverty. If there is one group that earns more scorn than any other it is those moochers, the 47%, the takers, parasites and leeches. I am sure that there is a conservative pundit or politician, who can wax poetic about how I have the motives all wrong, that the failed conservative policies are actually so effective in lifting people out of poverty, but it’s all the same innuendo and euphemism that has let them already enact these terrible policies in the first place. The exact same policies that, when they are spoken plainly by an offensive, loud, ignorant brute like Trump, instinctively make people on all sides of the spectrum react with truly righteous disgust. But it’s not enough to identify bad actors or to be repulsed by bad policy. We need to look at what works in actually helping people and combatting the problem, which only begins by being honest about our own iniquities.

Vox Populi

I want to take a moment to say something that may seem shocking in progressive circles. In the unlikely event that Donald Trump wins the support of a majority of American citizens this election I will not be moving to Canada, I will not support a military coup to overthrow him, and I will not call for impeachment hearings unless he actually commits an impeachable offense. I say this because I am an adult and perhaps more importantly because I am an American regardless of who my commander in chief is. In no way does this mean I will work any less diligently to stop someone like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or any of the crazed right wing zealots who have descended upon this nation like locusts, to steal a turn of phrase from the aforementioned Cuban Canadian American ideologue. I intend to do my part to get American citizens to vote for qualified and sane candidates, while exposing the wrongheadedness that now pervades the GOP. But if at the end of this cycle a majority of Americans support the other guy, I am going to do my best for my country first and that means accepting the will of the people. Because, in the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Every high schooler, who has gone through civics, will snidely say that the United States is not a democracy, it’s a republic, but as so often is the case the lessons we learn as children are just a little less nuanced than reality demands. It is indeed true that we are not a direct democracy, because who has the time to vote on every matter anyway? In actuality the reasons why we are not a “true democracy” have more to do with the sensibilities of the people who wrote Constitution than it does with a concern for the busy schedule of the average citizen. We have a representative democracy with a strong legal condition because of two competing premises. On the one hand, our government is based on the premise that legitimacy arrives from the consent of the governed, that it is we the people who declare what form of government is acceptable, and that it is we the people who are ultimately responsible for the stewardship of that government. However on the other hand, our government is based on the premise that people are imperfect and potentially dangerous when riled up into a mob, which is why above all else the Constitution seeks to ensure that along with curtailing a conventional tyranny that we curtail the tyranny of the majority. Of these two rather conflicting premises, the founders seemed to think the latter was more integral.

It may not be surprising but the interests of a handful of landed, pseudo-aristocratic white men are not necessarily the same as the entire population of a diverse nation. The Constitution, as much as it is a brilliant legal framework for a modern democracy, also includes many profoundly undemocratic elements that were expressly designed to protect the interests of the men who wrote it. This is not, however, to say that these undemocratic elements are necessarily wrong or bad, just to point out that the origins of such contrived concepts as the electoral college were not merely the result of practical limitations of long distance information transfer in the latter part of the 18th century. The inclusion of indirect elections for the President and the Senate, as well as the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, is a direct challenge to the assumption that the citizenry is capable of choosing the people who are entrusted with writing, interpreting, and executing the laws under which we live. Nevertheless, this is a representative democracy, at least in principle.

The United States does have something of a centuries long pendulum swing back and forth between more or less democratic states of being: the enfranchisement of more citizens and the direct election of senators on one side and the consolidation of certain powers into unelected departments on the other. However, at the end of the day the average citizen is empowered with certain basic rights and related responsibilities. The fact that we have a right to vote should not be taken for granted, though it sadly has. In theory, each congressman and woman has a term limit, and every other year we determine if they’ve reached it. In theory, we can recall politicians even sooner if they are not meeting the standards of their constituents. Yet we know in practice that the vast majority of incumbents will be reelected because they are either unopposed outright or virtually unopposed due to a system that heavily favors the incumbent. But even that is not the real problem.

The reason why I can comfortably say that the election of a president, with whom I profoundly disagree, has no effect on whether I continue to live in the United States is because I live in the United States. By this I mean that in other countries the election of a president would have a direct and tangible effect on the lives of the average citizen, but not so in the US. Our president is not a dictator, is not a monarch, is not a tyrannical autocrat, much to the disagreement of the modern GOP. And I don’t just mean President Obama, I mean the office of the president is not terribly powerful when it comes to domestic issues. The Affordable Care Act was passed by Congress and was remarkably different from the plan Obama ran on. The victories on marriage equality came from the Supreme Court and not the president’s pen. The president has great power when it comes to foreign policy, but not so much at home. So unless you are a part of the military you probably wouldn’t notice who is the president on a day to day basis; not so with local and state governments.

I feel like I’m doing a disservice by writing this now, during a presidential cycle, because while it is important to vote, this is already the time that most people are likely to vote anyway. Or rather, presidential elections are the times when American citizens are most likely to attempt to vote at any rate. Many Americans, who are legally entitled to vote, won’t be allowed to vote in the coming election or subsequent elections if things don’t change soon. See, while everyone was busy crying wolf about the progress that has been made under the Obama administration, there has been an effort to make voting as difficult as possible for people that aren’t likely to vote for Republican candidates. At the same time as state governments have been passing laws requiring specific state IDs to vote, they’ve been closing offices allowed to provide those IDs in communities that happen to be poor or inhabited by ethnic minorities. These aren’t the result of an executive order or even the product of one of Congress’s less glacial periods, but the work of state legislatures and governors who seek to have only the voice of people who agree with them heard. And that’s a perfectly understandable ambition, after all wouldn’t it be just so easy to govern if it weren’t for all that pesky dissent, but this is the tyranny of the temporary majority that the founders expressly wished to prevent.

I can accept a government that I didn’t vote for, but I can’t accept a government I couldn’t vote against. What we face is a democracy in line with the values of Kim Jong Un, where you can have any opinion you want, just so long as it’s the party’s. And let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Democratic Party that is trying to strip Americans of their voting rights. We are facing a fundamental crisis of our democracy if, on top of all the other structural failings that make it so hard to uproot the bad elements of our government, we choose to let one side silence all opposition and deny undesirable citizens their votes. The voice of the people is indeed worth protecting, even if it is disagreeable, because if not for the full force of the electorate how are we supposed to keep the power structure in check and how is our government supposed to be viewed as in any way legitimate?

Voting is important and elections always have consequences. People have fought and died for their right to vote, yet we’ve given it away so easily. The calls to suppress voter turnout are coming only from the Right and they degrade the very concept of a democratic government by undermining those who try to elect a Democratic government. And this should indeed scare the members of the GOP, who are now faced with the reality that they can’t get back in control of the asylum. The only hope of Republicans trying to get anyone but Trump elected is the Democratic Party, but they’ve shot themselves in the foot by trying to enfranchise their most extreme elements at the direct expense of the American Left. So now it seems we’re heading toward a rather tragic test of our democracy, to see if the voice of the people is still enough to drown out the voice of tyranny in all forms, at all levels.

All the Small Government We Can’t Afford

“When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11. Now aside from being one of the two Corinthians Donald Trump spoke about this seems as good a was as any to dive into the major problem I have with the foundational principle of conservative economics. How’s that for an introduction? When I listen to conservatives speak on just about any topic I hear a level of certainty and oversimplification that makes me immediately skeptical of the claims. To be blunt, I believe that they are reasoning as a child does, seeing the world in perfect black and white, without ever acknowledging that the world is complicated and that moderation is almost always the proper tack to take. This is chiefly expressed in one of the most often heard refrains in conservative circles “that government is best, which governs least.” Irrespective of whether or not these words came from Thomas Jefferson, they are wrong.

Near as I can tell the government that governs best is the government that governs best. Tautology? Technically no because I didn’t even bother to rephrase it, but in principle yes, yet that doesn’t take away from the reality that there is no hard and fast rule that applies to the appropriate size of government for all cases. There are times when we want government to stay out of our lives and especially out of our bedrooms and there are times when we want government to have a small regulatory role, just to maintain a level playing field while principally staying out of our way, but there are indeed times when we want the government to be a big player. This is not some alien concept to conservatives, who supposedly think that there is no such thing as too big a military budget or too much spent on arming police with military surplus. As a progressive I would argue for more government in some places that a conservative would not be so supportive, but I think if we’ve learned anything from the last decade or so it should be that we need to find some happy place in the middle because we’ve been experiencing the trouble of too little government all over.

As a friend of Dorothy, I find it appropriate to begin by talking about Kansas. What’s the matter with Kansas these days? Well to be pithy, they aren’t paying enough taxes. Sam Brownback has promised for years that his conservative experiment would give conservatives the kind of proof they needed that their principles are sound, and for years he has given conservatives plenty of evidence that they might want to consider the destructive capability of their side’s extremism. Kansas has trouble keeping their schools open, which is going to hurt them even more down the road, but right now just means that any person thinking of moving to Kansas for work is going to have to second guess raising a family there. Kansas has racked up huge debt, which makes prospective employers skeptical about the long term stability of starting up or expanding businesses in Kansas. This is most clearly evident in the loud and growing calls from business owners themselves calling for tax hikes and closing the LLC loophole. This might just be because it does no good for a business to save money on taxes when they are going to be wasting that money navigating their goods around crumbling infrastructure for instance. Nevertheless Governor Brownback has doubled down with his commitment to lead his state into the poorhouse, to prove a point that smaller government is better, regardless of what happens in the real world.

And I’m not arguing that the polar opposite would be ideal, because that’s just as wrong. Our political discourse has become so binary that it becomes impossible to actually work toward the common good, and I fall into this trap myself. Not all conservatives support Governor Brownback, which again is why he’s facing quite a bit of opposition as a result of his extremist positions. The biggest enemies of extremism are often not from the opposing side, but from the more moderate elements of that same side. George Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, he fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, and yes even communists. Nevertheless, he saved his most scathing critiques for the kind of authoritarian communists who represented a violent extreme of socialism. This didn’t make him a conservative by any stripe, but when you are defending an argument there’s nothing more destructive than the person who claims to be on your side and is wrong on just about everything. This is why I am virulently opposed to communism, regardless of its supposed promise on paper. When you remove the autonomy of the individual and the incentive to work for more, you take away the most powerful creative engine humanity has ever known. I just wish American conservatives were as dogmatically opposed to the extremists within their own ranks.

Which brings me right back to the problems Americans face as a direct result of the premise that the problem is always the inflated size of government. The citizens of Flint, Michigan and St Joseph, Louisiana face the damning evidence of the ultimate cost of smaller government every time they turn on their water faucets. It was a poignant observation that “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” And it is true of many other parts of our lives that we expect our government to take care of; the up front cost of these benefits pales in comparison to the ultimate costs of not having them at all or not paying for the upkeep. The money that was “saved” by changing the water source for Flint is nothing compared to the costs they now face in putting in an entirely new plumbing system for the whole area. The price of dealing with EPA or FDA regulations to keep air, water, land, food, etc clean is a drop of water compared to the hospital costs and funerary costs from making these organizations toothless. And we can have adult conversations about when these organizations go too far in making decent businesses suffer under overburdensome regulations or highlighting when they become wasteful with our tax dollars, but it gets increasingly difficult to hear the argument coming from the extreme Right as anything but a justification for really bad and costly business practices.

And since I did also mention a town in Louisiana in that last bit, it’s worth mentioning that Governor Brownback wasn’t alone in experimenting with just how small government can be. Louisiana is in the midst of a huge debt crisis, one that ushered in the end of Republican leadership statewide. Former Governor Bobby Jindal sold off government property, sold short public institutions like schools and still couldn’t pay for his massive tax cuts. As even more salt on the wounds, the current low oil prices that conservatives have been saying would be a godsend for the US economy are a part of the reason why Louisiana isn’t getting enough revenue to pay for the long term environmental damage done to Louisiana by the fossil fuel industry. All the money from the BP spill settlement doesn’t rebuild the coastline that has been eroding for decades, doesn’t stop the rising water levels, and doesn’t fill the state’s coffers. But it would be a wonder if, after Jindal’s time in office, the schoolchildren of Louisiana have even heard of climate change, leave alone evolution.

Cutting the size and scope of government was supposed to solve all ills, but like any supposed cure-all it has failed to live up to the hype. Again it’s not because cutting taxes or regulations is always a bad idea or because government should always grow exponentially, it’s because by definition too much or too little of anything is not ideal. I like keeping my own money when I get my paycheck, but I also like being able to drink my tap water without getting sick. I don’t want to see my tax dollars wasted on extravagant and wasteful government programs, but I do want public education to be free and available to every child in this country because we’re all better off with an intelligent populous. If the solution is always to cut government and taxes we’re going to be saddled with huge debt at least, and as we’ve seen across the country that is really the least of our problems. I’m all for government getting out of the way of the individual, but there’s a limit and we really need intelligent conservatives to stand up to the extremism that paints their entire movement in a really bad light. Are there problems with government spending too much? Sure, just look at Illinois’s debt crisis, but there are things we want government to pay for and it has to be paid for one way or the other. So let’s stop pretending like the only problem is that governments spend too much money, because that is something we can ill afford.

The Aftermath

I had been trying to square the circle of how Republican doomsday predictions can be so severe at a time when unemployment is down, wages are rising, America is not embroiled in large wars, our major competitors are going through economic slumps, more people are insured, and the benefits of modern technology are more widespread than at any time in human history. Obviously there’s the political narrative to it, because why would the average voter jump ship to the Republicans if the Democrats have been doing so darn well steering the ship of state. But that only works if you can paint a convincing case that country really is doing so poorly that it needs to be made great again. Yet there are undoubtedly a great many people who see the world not as rosy but as bloodstained and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the GOP was so convinced that it was the end of the world, and then it struck me. It is indeed the fiery end, but not for the world and not for the United States. This is the Republican Armageddon.

On Sunday the Republican Party will celebrate its eight score and second year as an American political party. In its prime it put forward such great presidents as Abraham Lincoln, who led the Union through the Civil War and led to the abolition of slavery; Theodore Roosevelt, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and invited the first black man to be a guest in the White House; Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War and integrated US schools; and George W Bush, who once choked on a pretzel. Actually to be fair to President Bush, for all the many things I disliked about his administration, his devotion to Africa has undoubtedly saved millions of lives and lifted many more out of dire situations. It seems incredible now to imagine that the people currently putting (R) after their names have anything to do with any of these policies that helped real human beings who may just have had complexions darker than a cup of milk. The party of Frederick Douglass, the party of Booker T Washington, the party of Sojourner Truth is dead. Too bad it didn’t make it to the bicentennial.

The GOP was once founded on the principles of equality alongside the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement, progressive reforms like that of TR’s trust busting and environmental policy, and even just simple but effective government like that of George HW Bush administration. But all that good and decent history doesn’t phase the modern GOP for even one second, because as far as they’re concerned there have only ever been two presidents: Barack “Satan” Obama and Ronald “God” Reagan. For those of us who live in reality we can accept the fact that both of these presidents have done some good things and some bad things and when weighed against each other’s record it should seem clear that President Obama gets the better of it. The Obama Administration didn’t sell arms to the Iranians, that would be the Reagan Administration. Obama has cut the deficit year after year, while deficits under Reagan shot up so much it ruined President Bush’s tax pledge. And whereas the Reagans were willing to sit by while thousands of Americans died from complications of HIV/AIDS, the Obama administration has expanded insurance coverage and done more for the LGBT community than any other president. But of course it’s Obama who is the devil in the GOP, because it is their apocalypse after all, and he is just the scapegoat du jour.

If it were just a matter of the GOP putting forward candidates that I find detestable, that would not be some great departure from their basic MO in the 21st century. Between Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker etc it’s been a veritable rainbow of candidates who vomit at the sight of a rainbow flag. I’ve almost become desensitized to the religious rhetoric so extreme that Bob Jones himself would feel ill at ease being seen with these people. But what is different here is that the Republican Party has finally become self aware, and it shows in the little cracks that pop up even if they try their best to cover up the underlying problem. At no point in the 2012 race or the 2008 race did a significant percentage of the party ask itself “what have we done?” Even though these were the races that gave us the 47%, death panels, Obama is an Arab, and Sarah Palin. Nope, it took being faced with the choice between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump to force the politicians and a significant number of Republicans to realize that the chickens have come to roost and the nest can’t handle it.

It’s at this point that inevitably someone will claim argue that the Democrats also have undesirable candidates, and while it is true that many in the Democratic Party would never have seen either Bernie of Hillary as their first choices for president, neither of them are so universally loathed by their coworkers as Cruz or just so blatantly absurd as Trump. You might be able to find one or two Democrats who will say on record that they intend to just stay at home for the election, but there aren’t entire campaigns and superPACs being created to enlist candidates who weren’t planning on running or to create a third party in the event that the other guy wins the nomination. In the same way that the movement to shut down the government was completely a Republican problem, the whole danger of imploding the party is entirely a Republican issue.

Normally I would try to calm the talk down and start offering constructive ways to fix the problem, but it’s too late for that. At this point it would be like telling the GOP to cut the red wire when the timer is flashing 0:00. There is still an entity that calls itself the Republican Party and there are still people who claim to be Republicans, but it’s not the party of Lincoln or Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Bush. Hell, given some of the borderline liberal policies of the Reagan administration it’s not even the party of the Gipper anymore either. This is the party of ever higher walls, bludgeoned reporters and protesters, KKK endorsements, Planned Parenthood shootings, routinely shut down government agencies, closed schools and hospitals to pay for lower taxes, and all the other goodies that come from this shadowy group that still clings to the letters GOP. It’s no wonder the Republicans think we’re entering a post-apocalyptic dystopia, as far as they can see it’s already happened.

There is a bright side though, and the most conservative of this Mad Max world are not going to like it. In spite of everything, the Obama administration has not only kept this country moving forward, but ultimately has left it far better than it was found on January 20, 2009. With the help of even some RINOs the Democrats have been able to get quite a bit done in two terms, even with the unprecedented obstruction that has been the hallmark of the GOP throughout Obama’s tenure in the White House. And better still it is that very obstinate strategy that is going to cement all the progress that has been made during the Obama administration. As he is wont to do, President Obama chose a conciliatory tack with his Supreme Court nomination. He has selected Merrick Garland, whom Republicans have approved previously, as a moderate to fill the vacancy in the hopes that the GOP might do the reasonable thing and actually do their jobs in the Senate. They have no plans to do so; therefore, they have committed themselves to having Scalia’s replacement be a fierce liberal lion chosen by the next Democratic president and approved by what seems increasingly likely to be a Democratic Senate.

The real tragedy is that the Republican Party was once a source of pride for this country, a fringe political party that was born out of the noble goal of ending slavery that became one of the two national political parties that dominated the American political spectrum. The terrible irony being that it used to be the Democrats who were saddled with the racism and bigotry that has now eaten the GOP from the inside out. It should come as no great shock why Republicans have such a fondness for the “good old days” because for the GOP that is indeed all they have left. There is an elephant corpse in the room that needs to be addressed and I can only hope that whatever replaces it takes to heart the lessons that need to be learned from this collapse. I can only hope that in the aftermath America is treated to a party as fundamentally good as the Republican Party was at one point. Until that point, we all just have to hope that enough adults still get elected to office so that we can continue the sane policies of presidents like Barack Obama.