In the Democratic Primary here in the States, too much of our politics--whether centrist, conservative, socialist, identitarian, or nativist--has been driven by raw emotion. Some of us feel the sting of a nation governed by billionaires. Others feel the righteous anger of a nation that has never come to terms with its racist history. Still others fume over climate change, xenophobia, labor rights, health care, and on and on and on. I've been guilty of plenty of unreasonable fury myself the last six months.
And I feel I get it. I get how we've gotten to this fierce and passionate place in our country that we wouldn't have recognized 10 or 20 years ago. The emotions we're feeling are real, irreducible, and powerful, and they stem from undeniably important causes, even if the American public often disagree on the most basic facts. The fear, anguish, anxiety, and loss we're feeling as a nation is near-universal, and it's not for no reason that we're feeling it. And so these emotions have a validity and an urgency all their own, even apart from their causes.
But, as a fairly young person, squarely in the Millennial bracket, I am all too in touch with my emotional life. And I've found there's quite a harsh limit to what disclosure, vulnerability, empathy, and sentiment can produce. At some point, we have to move from passion to politics. It's time, for once, to be pragmatic rather than emotional, and not simply in the dullard centrist's notion of putting aside fundamental disagreements to "get things done", whatever they may be and whoever must be harmed. No, we have to get things done that are substantive, positive, and efficacious. Emotions have no place in this calculation. Passionate anger fades or turns to bitterness with time while political power and its institutions alone endure.
We can't be held in thrall purely to emotion--however valid its causes might be--as so crucial an election is upon us today. Rather, we have to go beyond our grievances and start thinking about the United States as a whole, to think about what kind of nation we're going to be living in 10, 20, and 30 years down the line, and what kind of nation we're leaving to the generations who will follow us on their own cohort-specific journey.
So as January draws to a close, with the Iowa caucuses mere days away, it's time to think about the pragmatism of the electoral situation now--bereft of emotion.
Here's where I'm coming from:
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1. Life is unfathomably difficult and hopeless for the worst off among us, except by the standards of the Third World--which is to say, the standards of abjection and subsistence. In the US, where the mean income is high but so many are left out in the cold, a small plutocracy stalls every attempt to reform this state of affairs. This isn't sentiment; it's the truth of the matter, if you'd only care to look.
And if you're left out in the cold, you might as well just die, because second chances are hard in coming. It's so hard to make it in this world without a car, or with a disability, or if you're a person of color, or if you're a poor woman who can't afford to have a child, or if you're a kid on the wrong side of the education-reformer track, or if your town has no jobs. And there's, naturally, quite a lot of overlap between all of these groups.
For those of us not in near-misery, we're still teetering on a dark precipice: If you can't afford health insurance, or, if you aren't quite poor, but you're always one catastrophe away from food insecurity, starvation, homelessness, or utter dependence, then you're hardly free from the vicissitudes of the powerful and the whims of the wealthy, which seem increasingly likely to be the same thing these days.
If you're an immigrant or an ethnic minority on the wrong side of a xenophobic working class, you're hearing what they're saying and you're afraid a little more every day of expulsion or persecution.
In short, if you're left out in the cold in America, what you really lack is freedom from fear, whether you're from the poor and afraid of falling out, or you're from the middle class and afraid of falling back. Much of the anger we've seen in this election is a simple mutation of this fear.
It's hard to make it in this world with a job, and without a job. It's hard to make it in this world with a college education, and without one. It's hard to make it in this world unless you were born along a path of success, all because we live in an unforgiving corporate feudalism in which all who wander too long are lost.
This has been a cold world for humans since time immemorial, and yet the social democracies in Europe have seemed a bit warmer and more forgiving than their wealthy-but-overworked technocratic cousin across the Atlantic.
2. So far, the Democratic establishment, led by its candidate Hillary Clinton, is the seat of power for a staunch left-neoliberal party which says all the right things on cultural theory and does everything in its power to take them away in fiscal practice. Bernie Sanders is much further to the left of Hillary, but it's clear that Hillary represents the Democratic establishment and that, even if Sanders won, he would himself have to helm this same broken establishment.
The current Democratic establishment--birthed as it was as the Soviet Union was falling and as the United States was in the midst of issuing decades of anti-socialist propaganda towards its own citizens--has given no indication that they will ever decide to represent a humane, popular, moral agenda of social democracy. Furthermore, most of the Democratic operatives, with their smug elitism, now take my generation's votes for granted, despite that we would clearly prefer such a social democracy. Our votes are treated as unserious, impractical, and naive. We who feel most acutely the difficulties of this world also feel most acutely that those difficulties have stopped mattering to most of the people who matter in the Democratic party.
We've seen two major popular uprisings in the Democratic base the past two years--the Ferguson/Baltimore demonstrators, and the Sanders supporters. Both of these were spearheaded by committed young people who wanted a brew a tad stronger than the tepid Occupy, um..., tea. The Democratic establishment warmed to BlackLivesMatter only when they could put some of their own people in charge (e.g. Deray McKesson from TFA, a political backbone of the charter-school movement), and only to the extent that those folks don't get out of line. And the Dems still really haven't warmed at all to the Sanders people--whom they treat with condescending scorn as angry harassers, naive outsiders, and conspiracy theorists, even when the only consistently-held conspiracy is that people who receive money from finance and pharmaceutical companies will act in the interests of those industries.
The Democrats are so out of touch. All they know how to do anymore when they meet an opposing force--even one of immense populist potency and social justice--is to triangulate and compromise to the right, and to co-opt, colonize, concede, or marginalize the left. Since the ascendancy of the DLC in 1988, they've never met a good idea on the left that they actually liked enough to advocate nor to implement--they can be forced, if absolutely necessary, but they don't actually believe in the ideal of a social democracy or of a society which lacks a permanent underclass. Whether they lack the imagination or the spirit to believe in such a society is beside the point. What we know is that they act in the interests of the richest individuals and corporations in the United States, and not in the interests of the poorest individuals or unions.
The Democratic establishment has revealed itself to be close in spirit to the New York Times editorial page--boomers dissembling about civility and looking for any excuse to avoid the central questions of our time. They read Piketty and Stiglitz on inequality and cluck and shake their heads. They read about the uncompromising GOP which wins every battle and how important it is, therefore, to compromise. They seem to be wounded by genuine engagement that isn't conducted with the respectful civility of an Aaron Sorkin play about Franklin Roosevelt--as if all of that silly uprising nonsense should have ended with the air controller strike. Occupy is nice, but can you clean up a little bit and go get a job at Goldman or Blackstone? They're not such bad people there. They're not. In short, Democrats like Black Lives Matter and think it's tragic what that cop did, and they can offer a few BLM/Sanders people a job, but they are as deathly afraid of any Republican of a good old-fashioned mass movement.
3. So here's the ultimatum: The Democrats either need to shift quite a bit further to the left than their party leaders have signaled they'd be comfortable with in this general election, or I simply cannot vote for them. I'm not too proud to beg, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna vote for you. I can't see myself voting against the Democrat; more likely this "protest" vote would take the form of a third-party candidate. I say "protest" in quotes because it's not simply symbolic--it's proof-positive that I did not treat your bad candidate's inadequacy with "Millennial disengagement", but with dispassionate rejection. It's information for the technocrats to process, to do with as they will, no more and no less.
4. If a Democrat can act like my generation of young and legitimate disaffected individuals exists, can make a sincere effort to court the poorest people in our society with an agenda, promises, or can give some genuine and public demonstration of good faith on that front, then I'll vote for them. And I might even work for them. I might even try hard to get them elected. It's that simple. Give me a good reason to vote for you, and I will vote for you. Please stop making this so difficult.
One of the most egregious things about the DLC/Obama era is that they publicly shame poor mothers and black fathers and take all the credit for their efficacious victim-blaming. The Romans make a desert and call it peace. The Democrats help to make an underclass and call it reform. That in and of itself isn't so bad, but then they turn to their victims with smug self-confidence and tell us to our faces that it was just politics, and "we're really on your side!"
So, they tell us, we shouldn't shame them for their debased pride. They bragged--and found it in their interests to brag--about mass incarceration and welfare reform, until very recently. The Democrats can be tough on crime too! If that's what you're telling us to get elected, why should I assume you won't go twice as far when you're elected? Seriously, tell me, beyond just trying to appeal to me, what exactly I'm supposed to do with the pride you took in demonizing the hard-working underclass that you continually have conspired with Hayekian Republicans to create?
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In sum, I really, really want to support the Democrats, but they've given no indication they care about my engagement, my values, or, in the final tally, my country--at least beyond their donors in the upper class and their middle-brow upper-middle-class. They expect my generation's vote despite doing nothing to show they'll even bring our concerns to the table, much less to the president's desk. Again and again and again they disappoint us, and again they chide us for not voting. They get in the pages of the Washington Post and write an op-ed about the staggering entitlement of the Millennials. Won't they ever learn to deal with reality?
And I guess, increasingly, I've come to accept that my answer is no: I can't accept this reality--I can't accept this country--until it begins to act in basic consonance with any of its stated values. And it seems that Democrats, while responsible stewards of what is left of our republic, don't really want to act that way. They simply want to maintain a stable position on their own little island of influence while the sea level rises imperceptibly every year. The wonks propose increasingly toothless agendas and technocratic trickery in service of pathetic candidates and reforms.
Liberals are seeking to salvage the country by becoming a group with such an unremarkably small and copacetic vision that no one will mind their presence, and in a way they've succeeded wildly. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' vision of the hereafter in The Great Divorce, where sinners, in their self-imposed smallness, fall through the cracks of heaven.
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Despite the anti-poverty rumblings and the outrage that might be detectable in the preceding discussion, I'm not exactly a Jacobin wanting dead counterrevolutionary bodies in the street, nor a revolutionary seeking any Romanovs to smother. It's not emotional, it's not hateful, and I'm amenable to compromise. These are loose demands. But that compromise should come from a place of genuine necessity and not deception or naked power-brokerage. Hillary is making noises about repealing the Hyde Amendment, and good for her, and good for Bernie for voting against it. But they're running to become the successor of the president who allowed the most striking and most unkindly iteration of the Hyde Amendment in one of his more egregious compromises. It's so wearying to read all day about the rights of women and find, just before you close your eyes that night, that all your work was for nought, women across the country condemned to a harder life.
I use this example to point out that in and of itself, my trouble is not about whether the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. I'm not so naive to think a nominated Sanders might not tack right himself in the general election, because at the end of the day, it's his job not just to run but to win. What's more, I understand that Washington is full of sophisticated political scientists who can lecture you for an hour about the Median Voter Theorem and how it's so important to be just to the left of your Republican opponent, who will, of course, be swinging left to capture the same swath of Median Undecideds. I get that politics is more of a team sport, like cycling, than a pure marathon of individual candidates' wills. And I get that the well-educated Harvard graduates carefully whispering in each candidate's ears just want the best for all of us, because they know that we on the left can all make things easier for one another if we just follow these simple rules of power and compromise once in awhile. As a political entity, Washington is myopic and technocratic, and even a major shift in their calculations will be just that--a shift, not a fundamental challenge.
So yes, these are loose demands I'm making, and perhaps some part of me also recognizes that it's absurd to hope the aristocratic echochamber might pause to "lean-in" from their virtual-reality Vader-eggs in Davos to listen to a guy who can barely write a half-decent sentence. But I don't think my absurd desire to be heard reveals absurd desires: My demands are rational and not driven by emotions. I will vote for the candidate I do believe in and a half-vote for the candidate I don't believe in. And while many of us will ultimately hold our noses and cast a ballot for the nominee no matter what, I'm willing to bet that what I'm saying is the spirit of my disaffected generation of young social democrats. I'm willing to bet that this is more or less the logical underpinning of all our apparent fickleness and sentiment.
It's very simple: We won't show up for another wolf in sheep's clothing. We will not skip work or school or organizing or our otherwise-difficult lives to cast a ballot for someone who isn't really going to ameliorate our nation's problems. Some of us would rationally prefer to starve. We're on a decades-long, involuntary hunger strike for basic dignity, and every year more and more of us realize it. This is the calculation we've made, and now that we've made that calculation, we cannot act otherwise. Anger doesn't enter into it. It's time for those of you in positions of power to realize this, not simply to rationalize it. We are dying, and we will not stop dying until you help us fix the mess you helped to create. As soon as you recognize it, you will have so much power, and in service of a just cause. But until you do, you will have neither power nor justice nor will you deserve it.
In Wisconsin, the leaves will be falling as November approaches. Unswept oak leaves, once young, die and decompose and deposit tannic acid into the ground, harming the topsoil and grass.
The grass and flowers that might have flourished and thrived--if someone had only swept the leaves away!--will be stunted, sparse, and discolored the following spring.
Chemistry takes its course regardless of our laments.
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