Hey look, it's an article on the Internet.
The web site OnTheIssues tracks where politicians stand politically, based on their record, public statements, et cetera. They score politicians on a VoteMatch survey (correction: not based on all their collected data --Caj) to produce summary graphs that roughly mark where candidates stand politically. Here, for example, is their graph for Joe Lieberman:
I don’t know about “Joementum," but I don’t see a lot of Joement of Inertia here.
Before you scroll down, I want you to imagine where you think today’s candidates are placed, on that map, by the OnTheIssues scoring system. Don’t go nuts, just guess where you’d find a few people: Bernie, Hillary, Trump, Bush. Point where you think they are based on what you’ve read.
Once you have some idea, scroll down. I’ve combined the graphs of a bunch of candidates into one picture so you can see where they were ranked as of yesterday.
Now let me warn you, it’s just dots. I put red for the Democratic candidates and blue for the Republican ones, and I haven’t labeled them. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get all the Republicans either—-I know I left off Kasich, because really who the Hell cares—-and a bunch of them are overlapping the same spot so I can’t even remember how many I placed.
Anyway, enough filler. Here’s the graph:
Look at the picture.
So Lieberman is now green. The blue dot in the middle square is Chris Christie, and the one blue dot in the “Libertarian” quadrant is of course Rand Paul. The rest of the Republicans fall in the right wing, several in the same location.
The chess king on the left side, of course, is 44th United States President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama.
The red dots are Sanders and Clinton, with Sanders in the corner. I left out O’Malley, but right now they place him to the right of Clinton, flanking the chess king.
What does this mean, and why am I showing it to you?
I suppose the obvious implication is that we on the left “are not as divided as our politics suggest,” to quote twice-elected leader of the free fuckin’ world Barack Obama (I’m sorry, I just never get tired of pointing that out.) Our primary candidates are only a few steps from one another on this chart. We’ve seen a lot of shouty rhetoric painting a vast chasm between the candidates, so vast that some people treat them like separate parties and vocally refuse to vote for the candidate they don’t like. But look at the picture.
Here’s what I hope you will do to keep your sanity over the next few months: save this image, and look at it. When some dingbat tells you that Hillary Clinton is a Republican or GOP-lite, just look at the fucking picture. Don’t get wound up, don’t waste your time arguing: let those people have their echo chamber of Facebook posts and we can have this snapshot of reality.
And that goes the other way, too. If someone tries to tell you that Bernie Sanders is in the pocket of the NRA… I mean c’mon, really? Christ, look at the fucking picture. Look at it. Sure, sure I know about his voting record from back when, but if anything, that shows how much a vote actually contributes to someone’s politics. It’s easy to zoom in on a data point and see something very different from the big picture.
Finally, if you get into a pie fight yourself, and you’re about to post something provocative and hyperbolic about one of the candidates, one of our candidates, please try to look at this picture, and while you are looking at this picture, read your comment out loud.
This is not an appeal for Civility
I’m not asking for everyone to be a little more polite or to give their opponents more credit. I’m not telling you to look at the picture so that we’ll all join hands and be nice to each other. I expect tempers to rise and people to fight, and for some people to be rude.
In fact, I couldn’t give half a crap about anyone’s lack of civility, and I don’t think we really need to clamp down on it. I might not vote your way if you appeal to me with insults, but I don’t think your insults are a crisis that needs to be addressed. This is because
- This is the Internet, not a padded romper room;
- This thing happens every election year, and asking people not to lose their temper in primary season pie fights is like asking people not to cheer at concerts or cry at funerals;
- I actually want to know who the jerks are, and when we allow people to act like jerks it actually provides readers with useful information;
- In my experience, some of the rudest people are also the most thin-skinned, and quick to accuse other people of being the truly nasty ones. This can make it a pointless and baffling exercise to enforce any rules of civil discourse.
So I actually don’t think we need to tone it down very much. When it gets too much for me I simply stop reading the Rec List, remind myself that it’s a free country, and realize that whatever people fight about, I really like both candidates very much—-so it’s not like the free world hangs in the balance.
No, the reason I want you to look at the picture is to ensure that we don’t lose track of reality, and specifically that we don’t let bogus ideas undermine the entire Democratic process. Bogus ideas like:
- Claims that the Democrats are no different from Republicans, or that specific Democrats are no different from Republicans;
- Claims that the party itself is a corrupt and sinister entity rigged by “the oligarchy” or whoever.
- Claims that progressive organizations, like unions, have been bought out because they endorsed someone you didn’t want them to endorse;
- Conspiracy theories that the primary is being rigged, etc.
When rhetoric goes that far down the rabbit hole, when it spreads among the general public, it puts us at risk regardless of who ends up as the nominee. Do you really want to enter the general election in a climate where your average Facebook user actually believes this sort of stuff?
Hell, the mission of this site is “more and better Democrats.” Whoever wins the primary, we fight to elect the Democrat, working with everyone else to get out the vote. What would any of these claims imply about Daily Kos?
I say, be as rude as you want---A spirited and even bruising battle for the nomination is fine, even if people resort to shouting and the inevitable exaggerations---but we need to stay reality-based, and we need to recognize the harm that results from rhetoric that takes us far from reality. Kos banned conspiracy theories not just because they were wrong, but because they were harmful.
The reality is that we have two candidates who differ somewhat on policy, but whose politics are close enough that either would make a great nominee on those grounds. Just remember how frequently you heard the candidates say “I agree with ____, but...” in the debates. Would they talk like that if they were on opposite ends of a political spectrum?
Edited to add a note about the opening diary image: that’s a screenshot from a short web page that was written in Microsoft Frontpage, with a bunch of H2 and H3 tags that are never closed, progressively enlarging the text to hilarious levels.
It’s been fixed, but you can find the old version on the wayback machine. I recommend scrolling down while listening to Ravel’s Bolero.
