Just to be clear…
I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly.
We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years. One could make an argument for the last 70, but I think it became alarming with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Disclaimer: I voted for Reagan the first time. Like too many people, I was swayed by the optics, by the substanceless bluster. And Reagan made the usual slew of claims that he would not do this or that, to mollify those who, conservative as they might have been, were content with a great deal of what was in place since FDR.
But Reagan put our economy on the track to suffer recurrent bubbles, resulting in higher paydays for those who knew how to play the market, and increasing disparities in income, and a degradation of middle class security. He was the first Republican president whose policies left us with a huge debt and a deficit that became a political football for the next 9 election cycles, a problem no one in the GOP wanted to solve because it was too good to run on.
Reagan brought a religious element into national politics that has brought us to a point of division as bad as the one that caused the Civil War, all in order to leverage a particular kind of political opportunism that pumped ether and adrenaline into issues that had never been controversial before, issues which went on to become talking points no one wanted to actually solve because they were such excellent campaign issues.
Reagan started the whole denigration of a federal government that had till that point worked miracles in terms of public service since the 1940s. All in the name of dividing the states and permitting a partisan war that served the interests of Big Money.
After Reagan, the allowable agendas shifted to the right and even a centrist like Clinton found himself unable to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which took down the last bulwark between commercial and private banking that led directly to the 2008 collapse. The weak legislation passed to make up for what had worked perfectly well since the 1930s received death blows in the form of Supreme Court decisions on the side of Money, primarily Citizens United, which in the 1960s and 70s would have looked like sheerest nonsense to D.C.
All of which brought us into the era of politics which saw unbelievable increases in campaign spending, an environment in which the primary job of an elected official is always the next campaign (perpetual running), and a deterioration of reliable information sources which has given us a toxic media ecology that has very little to do with substantive policy.
Hillary Clinton was buried under an unrelenting media avalanche which should have had no traction. They kept bringing her back for Benghazi. She never pleaded the Fifth (one of her aides did, but Clinton herself never did), and the last time she sat for 11 hours. The fact is, if the Republicans, who were in charge of these investigations, could have found something, why didn’t they? Because wrapping it up would have taken one of their campaign issues off the table.
We are living in an absurd period.
It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask, how is the average citizen supposed to know what to believe?
In specific, it’s a huge task. But when it comes down to identifying legitimate issues from bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard.
We have politicians railing against tampon distribution in schools. Really? Are you that hard up for a campaign issue?
This is simple, at least for me. Those who continually attempt to deny voting rights to various groups are the enemy.
Those who seek to strip rights from otherwise legitimate groups are the enemy.
Those who continually tell you who to fear, especially with no evidence to support their positions, are the enemy.
Those who support book banning, under any circumstances, are the enemy.
Those who refuse to acknowledge the chief components of violence are the enemy.
Those who reject science are the enemy.
Those who back corporations instead of neighborhoods are the enemy.
We can go on. And, unfortunately, there are people who wholeheartedly support the enemy. In the absence of a larger perspective, their personal intolerances and knee-jerk fears supplant coherent thinking. All of these things are the trademark today of one party. For the first time in my life I am rejecting any Republican out of hand. The GOP is, in my opinion, on the wrong side of history—indeed, civic morality—on every issue.
And for the moment it appears they are finally beginning to implode from it.
The cherry atop the sundae is Trump. I have never been so dismayed by the categorical blindness of so many of my fellow citizens over something which should be obvious to a child. The man is a trash fire. He managed to accomplish two things during his presidency (three if you count packing the Supreme Court with ideological drones): another enormous tax cut for the top 1%; a tariff program that set the stage for all the distribution nightmares triggered by a pandemic he then refused to take seriously until the situation was dire (which set us up for the inflation we are still trying to contain); and, though this was unofficial, chaining the GOP to him in such a way that he is still telling them how to vote even though he is out of office…which led directly to one more failure in congress to deal with the immigration problems he exacerbated. Why? Because, like so much else, it is too good an issue to solve.
He has stated pretty much unequivocally his desire to be a dictator. For a day or life makes no difference to me, he treated it like a joke, but his actions around January 6th show clearly that he’s one of those politicos who believe he only has to win one election and he should be there for life.
It is part of the incoherence of his supporters that they will not understand reality. Biden has performed incredibly as president, and yet none of the MAGA camp can tell you what he has done much less why it should be seen as bad. The repeated canard that Biden has and is destroying the country is so blatantly untrue, yet people—many of whom have benefited from Biden’s programs—believe in their bones that we are about to collapse, when the opposite is true.
And then there are those who like to position themselves as somehow morally superior who refuse to consider voting for either because, a pox on both houses. This is little more than a refusal to accept how politics function and an excuse to not compromise, without which we have the gridlock we are all so justly tired. Third parties never do anything but sow chaos, at least when they come out of the gate going for the top prize without having done the decades long work of grassroots community building. People like that keep their gaze fixed on the presidency while their local school boards end up run by religious zealots who prefer a high teen pregnancy rate and rising STDs to actually dealing with the problems as things which can be solved and, oh, while they’re busy with Abstinence Only nonsense they’re trying to ban books and shove the Ten Commandments into the classroom. They don’t, by the way, do that because they think these things will help, they do it because they want the problems shoved back in various closets, the costs notwithstanding.
I want more people to vote and for it to be easier for them.
I want books of all kinds available to everyone.
I want women to be equal not just before the law but before the community.
I want wealth to remain in communities.
I want us to stop burning the planet down in the name of a few more points on the Dow.
I want people to be cared for without it bankrupting them.
And I want Being American to mean everyone, not just code for Being White.
I want the stupidity to end.
Now, that last one, I realize, may be hoping for too much. But we might start by actually educating kids rather than just trying to make them conform.
We might start by getting rid of those who traffic in intolerance just to hold office.
Big job. Maybe we should actually start by stop mistaking political expediency for being fair.
So, yeah, I’m voting for Kamala. Not because I expect her to magically solve all the problems. If she solves one it will be an achievement. But the other guy—the other Party—seems uninterested in solving anything. Rather, they’d like there to be a few more, so they have something to get their base stirred up and keep voting for them.
See you in November.