My mother said something to me once that has informed much of my political thinking in the years since. Back when Ollie North was being held up as some kind of hero. “No one wants to tell the truth more than I do” North who worked diligently on Reagan’s behalf to deceive Congress and deliver weapons into the hands of people who used them on schools and clinics. It baffled me that people could find his actions not only defensible but somehow heroic and honorable. When I opined that in my opinion he should be court-martialed and shot for treason, they looked at me as if I’d just stepped out of flying saucer and didn’t understand. “He violated his oath as an officer.” He made an oath to defend the Constitution. What he did broke that oath.
A lot of people didn’t understand me. I certainly didn’t understand them. And then my mother pointed out, very simply, “Most people can’t be loyal to an idea, they can only be loyal to a person. Even very smart people.”
Meaning, Ollie was loyal to Reagan and anything else didn’t matter nearly as much. He didn’t have the capacity to see beyond that, to the importance of abstracts—or law.
I’m looking at the Bernie or Bust folks and wondering if some version of that isn’t at work. They have invested in a man and a movement. Interestingly, though the man has moved on—like an intelligent, well-informed human being who understands there is more at stake than his success or failure—many of his followers can’t. It would seem on the face of it that they have been captured by the inverse of my mother’s dictum and have pledged their loyalty to an idea rather than a person, but I don’t think so.
Because Sanders is still championing an idea, one they seem not to get. That the system must be allowed to work and that right now letting it do so in order to achieve the kind of results that will keep the country from further fragment and possibly see its dissolution it is time to act pragmatically and reasonably. That the problems we face today are from the system not working and for a very simple reason—people don’t vote. Sometimes they can’t and that needs to be addressed, but often they just won’t, for any number of reasons. (I remind people all the time that the Tea Party gained control of Congress based only on around 21 to 23% of the eligible voting public, because the people who might have kept them out stayed home.) That his revolution is one to make the system work as it should—not destroy it in order to erect a new one. And with that in mind, in another four years, you’ll all get another shot. Or eight. That’s the way it works. Bernie’s idea is not that the system has failed but that it has been ignored and poorly used—and we let it happen. But endangering that system right now by abetting the election of a walking clusterfuck could do far more harm, possibly permanent damage that might see that opportunity to bring this to the stage again die.
The other side of the coin is the sheer hatred of Hillary Clinton. So it would seem that the obstinate, short-term loyalty being shown is still about a person.
A person who is being abstracted out of reality and turned into a symbol while the walking talking breathing man is in the process of being relegated to the bin of Also Ran and treated like an aging uncle who has apparently lost touch with what’s important.
You want the revolution to work, go home and start electing city council members, state senators, mayors. Start with county commissioners, sheriffs, D.A.s, circuit attorneys, and local judges. We have become addicted to the notion that for something like this to work it must be top down, even as we’ve been complaining that top down (trickledown) policies are anti-democratic and elitist. Bernie started something. It can be brought to fruition through the hard, unglamorous work of electing local representatives and building it from the ground up.
But not if you break the system by facilitating the election of Judge Dredd.
In the meantime, pay attention. History has just been made. I know, I know, you don’t trust Hillary. Has it occurred to you that much of your distrust is a result of lies fed you by the very people you are presumably trying to work against by championing Bernie’s revolution?
That aside, frankly, you don’t have to trust Hillary. She will be, as all presidents are, an employee. A public employee. And you have the power to regulate her job performance through your representative in Congress—if you get out there and elect the ones you wanted. She will still have to work with Congress, you know, and when the system works as it can—and as it should—she can only do what she is allowed to do by virtue of that system.
In the meantime, an Idea has been made real. A woman is a viable candidate for president. This is a symbolic moment and in all honesty Hillary was going to be that candidate because to date she’s the only one who has been able to marshal the necessary forces to make it real. The next one will be easier, but there has to be a first, and Jill Stein was never going to be her.
You’ve got four or eight years to build the foundation for the next candidate, but that won’t happen if you go home in a petulant snit and piss and moan about how you were betrayed and then cast a protest vote that gets Sauron elected. Classic cutting your head off to spite your neck.
So I ask you, what is it you think Hillary might do that would be so bad it would justify the stupidity of assisting Trump into office?
A rhetorical question. It is just possible she’s not the terror you’ve been led to believe she is.
All the rest is politics.
