Sophie's Choice is one version of an ages-old moral dilemma: should you participate in a dictated choice that has no good outcome for you? In the novel, Sophie’s Choice(S'sCh), the Nazis offer Sophie a poisoned chalice: pick one of your two children to be killed or we will kill both.
This reminds me of the "choice" the Democratic Party elites offer progressives. Hillary Clinton (HRC) promises to be socially (but not economically) liberal towards women, PoC, and LGBT folks. Therefore, she will not appoint social reactionaries to the SCOTUS. That is the child she will save.
However, the "but the SCOTUS" propagandists at the DNC ignore the other children. What is unspoken by HRC and the DNC is her whole-hearted continuation of the status quo: budget-busting neocon warmongering paid for by neoliberal austerity, corporate tax-dodging and outsourcing, democracy-destroying "trade" deals, and environmental destruction by fossil fuels, especially fracking. Her loyalty to Social Security is questionable, given that Bill was going to bargain it away before his "tie" got caught in the impeachment wringer (and given that another DNC social liberal, Obama, tried very hard to "reform" it). Those are the children that will be killed, even if you agree to this bargain. Like Sophie, DNC dems rationalize that the children they sell out are too weak to survive anyway.
1. Moral dilemmas
Now, moral dilemmas have not had much mindshare in the 21st century. The media are about sex and violence, not about any kind of philosophical thinking. Americans go about their business guilt-free as we destabilize and pulverize country after country. By the elite-engineered failure of the Democratic Party at the polls, we collectively condone the increasing brutality of our own country: the dismal statistics on gun violence, police violence, childhood poverty, medical rationing, structural unemployment, drug addiction, and mass incarceration.
So, if you are someone who never considers moral dilemmas, S'sCh is something for bleeding-heart liberals, not rough, tough, macho Americans. Hence the depiction of Sanders supporters as a collection of ancient hippies, limousine liberals, and privileged teenagers.
The entire thrust of the HRC campaign has been to narrow the political focus to a cult of personality, to “experience” (no matter how disastrous), to "winning", to "math". We aren't only "not seeing the forest for the trees". We are not seeing the trees for the twigs. The media attempt to erase historical context, political philosophy, and the future of the planet has been immense. I have not bought it for one minute.
While not rich, I have had the luxury of a decent education, a decent career, decent healthcare, and some chance at a modest retirement. That package allows me the "luxury" of thinking about moral dilemmas and the experience to know it is vital.
My take, and many philosophers' take, on S'sCh is to refuse to participate in what is known as a double bind. If someone else set up such a double bind, it is their responsibility, not mine. If I participate, I make myself an agent, an accessory to murder. So, IMHO, Sophie should have said nothing. The two murders would then have been on the hands of the Nazis. By choosing, she became guilty, was consumed by that guilt, and soon committed suicide - which brings us back to our very own S'sCh.
2. 107 Days
That's the time from the Democratic Convention until Election Day. During that period, Progressives will be faced with this hideous "choice" : vote for HRC or "be responsible" for Trump.
As events lock in this scenario, I'm beginning to feel like the hiker in "127 Hours". He is completely trapped, but he is so aware of his imminent demise that he eventually figures out how to cut off his arm with a dull knife in such a way as to survive. Given the current political situation, I, like the hiker, know that some part of what I take as a decent country is going to have to be sacrificed if anything resembling rule by the people is going to survive. Not sure what part - certainly not "everything but HRC's social liberalism". If we could have kept ourselves whole - i.e., done this within the current system of naked bribery and propagandistic corporate media - we would have done so by now.
3. The double bind on offer
At this point in time, I have no idea how to get out of the trap we are in; but I will spend those 107 days thinking as hard as I can. All that is certain today is that the boulder of bipartisan oligarchy has pinned Progressives down. Princeton researchers have statistically demonstrated that government policy responds to elite opinion only, not to citizen opinion. Ex-President Jimmy Carter is on the record that the US is no longer a democracy. So supporting the status quo is simply nonsense.
3.1 Trump/GOP
Of course, the billionaire-fellating GOP have never had any use whatsoever for the middle class, much less the New Deal/Great Society programs that support it. I distinctly remember Pat Buchanan railing in 1992 that "this Long Parliament must end" - treating sixty years of legitimate Democratic control of Congress as a peasant hijacking of a royalist country. The GOP hatred has been ongoing since before I was born.
So, no wiggle room on that side of the boulder. Only schadenfreude that the total hypocrisy of their fundamentalist religious bullshit and the bogus claims of non-racism and non-sexism have been completely destroyed by Donald Trump's success. (BTW, the Culture War is total bull. The elites don't care. Look at Giuliani, Trump, Lindsay Graham, all the pedophile megachurch pastors…) If elected, Trump will have fun eviscerating the GOP establishment, but only to replace it by his own gang of like-minded looters, grifters, and cronies with a proto-fascist tint.
3.2 HRC/DNC - the real core of the Progressive S'sCh
There is no wiggle room on the Democratic side of the boulder either. I have experienced first hand that the corporate-funded Third Way leadership of the Democratic party despises the party's left wing. Over the last 24 years, both Clinton and Obama have treated the left wing like pariahs. The 2004 progressive incarnation of Howard Dean was the victim of a media assassination. (Dean's new corporate incarnation - meh.) In the 2016 primaries, Bernie supporters - the activist base of the Democratic Party - have been ignored, dismissed, defrauded, insulted, condescended to, and generally told to drop dead by the DNC shill Debbie Wasserman Shultz and by the corporate media.
When Rahm Emmanuel (prima facie evidence of the complete amorality of said "leadership") was Obama's chief of staff, he called us "retards". Obama never spent a dime of political capital on the left. He let Wall St. completely off the hook for 2008 and let OWS be smashed with help from DHS. He never showed up in Wisconsin when Democrats were resisting the Walker takeover. He ran roughshod over modestly leftish proposals in his quest to be "bipartisan" with people who were trying to politically murder him. He also attempted to begin the dismantling/privatization of Social Security - a classic GOP and Clinton endeavor.
I will not use the euphemism that Obama was "disappointing". On all matters except selectively slow-walking the neocon militarists, he was a complete phony. Like HRC and the DNC, he is a corporatist.
3.3 Choosing - NOT!
So, when the corporate elite dictates this hideous S'sCh: vote for HRC or "be responsible" for Trump, I refuse to participate. A vote for Trump is a vote for a nationalist, proto-fascist dictatorship and continued crony capitalism, racism, sexism, and decay. A vote for HRC is a vote for continued neoliberal austerity, the global race to the bottom, the corporate coup against democracies, and endless neocon wars. A vote for HRC when Sanders could easily defeat Trump is watching the villain pour water into the desert sand in front of a dehydrating prisoner.
Neither Trump nor HRC gives a rat's ass about the environment. Witness Hillary's (and Obama's) support for the TTIP, which (thanks to a leak) we now know completely undercuts even the toothless environmental volunteerism of the Paris Treaty.
I am desperately looking for some alternative that works. Why? Because I want to avoid:
4. The Death of Most Things
To younger people, this may seem like just another election, with candidates worse than usual, but just another election. Many of them may think that social institutions will continue as they have been. That is exactly what many people thought in 1788 France and 1913 Europe.
I have been following politics for fifty years. For 35 of those years, I have watched the right wing in both parties: demolish government regulation; loot the middle class; build up the military, the police, and the prisons; overthrow popular governments around the world; and destroy the environment for short-term profit.
But, this year is different. It's not just another body blow; they are going for the kill shot. This year is the last chance to stop the corporatists before we go over the cliff, before we go beyond the event horizon, before we pass a point of no return, before our moribund body politic finally dies. This is the year when neither the middle class nor the environment can hold its breath any longer, especially since worse is coming to both — because the TPP is likely to be rammed through by a lame-duck, corporatist-to-the-core, Obama and a “bipartisan” Congressional coalition after the election.
Let's be clear about what I mean by the "imminent demise" I mentioned in regard to “127 Hours”. We are looking at the death of the environment, the subjugation of democracy to corporate veto, the irreversible imposition of a computerized police state, and the probability of a neocon-provoked nuclear war. For those who need these things spelled out, I cover those items in great detail in the Appendix.
Those problems will NOT be fixed by a status quo Democrat or by any Republican - because, to them, this list is a list of features, not a list of problems. I have watched bipartisan warmongering, bipartisan bailouts of Wall St., bipartisan trade deals, bipartisan assaults on the social safety net. The agenda of both wings of the corporatist party is clear to anyone not brainwashed by the serial cults of personality (Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Clinton again.)
5. Cutting off our arm and surviving
As I said above, at this point in time I have no idea how we literally, as a country, as a planet, survive this moral dilemma. We have 107 days to either come up with a solution or die as a country. I have a few half-formed thoughts:
On the election:
1. The paired voting suggestion - Dems and GOPers pair off and vote for none of the above. (Greens, write-ins, whatever).
2. If the GOP runs Mitt or someone else as third party, start a fourth party or move en masse to the Green Party. A four way election will really shake things up, but it could also hand the government back to the GOP insiders via the Electoral College.
3. Massive civil disobedience at polling places. Delegitimize the election. Get anonymous to expose the crooked voting machines.
4. Refuse to vote, then sue for lack of plurality. However, we already tolerate 10% turnout in primaries. There are no quorum rules for elections.
Non-election activities:
1. Can we make voting for TPP/TIPP/TISA treason? These treaties give foreign companies the right to overthrow government regulations and loot the treasury. The TPP will bring the Greek “solution” to its signatories:
In 1967 it was the tanks that foreign powers used to end Greek democracy. In my interview with Philip Adams, on ABC Radio National’s LNL, I claimed that in 2015 another coup was staged by foreign powers using, instead of tanks, Greece’s banks. Perhaps the main economic difference is that, whereas in 1967 Greece’s public property was not targeted, in 2015 the powers behind the coup demanded the handing over of all remaining public assets, so that they would be put into the servicing of our un-payble, unsustainable debt.
- Yanis Varoufakis
2. Regardless of the election, plan for the imminent next financial crisis so we are not "shock doctrines" again.
3. As Chris Hedges suggests, abandon politics and turn to direct action: sit-ins against fossil fuel activities, a revival of OWS after the inevitable next financial meltdown, continued support for Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
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Those pathetic dull knives are all I have. I'm hoping like-minded folks can contribute their own ideas. Responses will be treated like a brainstorming session: only positive, helpful suggestions will be responded to. That means, don't even criticize someone else's idea. Just ignore it and put your own positive idea on the table.
To supporters of the status quo, you don’t get to tell me how I vote. You don’t get to tell me how I respond to a moral dilemma you refuse to even acknowledge. I will ignore negative responses. I suggest you read the Appendix. It is a list of all the things you ignore in your rush to Thelma and Louise America. I suggest all the neocon hawks, start with Section 5, on the utterly worthless next generation of military hardware.
APPENDIX
A.1 The Death of the Environment
I know that four more years of climate change kabuki theatre, with fossil industry denialists still allowed to spread lies, is likely to push the climate past the point of no return. From ice melt to extreme weather to ocean acidification and de-oxygenation, the planetary ecology is dying, and dying faster than predicted. The ice melt is releasing huge amounts of methane from permafrost. If warming continues, methane hydrates from the sea floor will add to the runaway greenhouse effect. Natural gas for power has proven to be a leak-ridden nightmare that probably adds more greenhouse warming than it saves - because unregulated industry is too cheap to build leakproof pipelines and keep facilities like Porter Ranch in good repair.
Fracking companies have been allowed, despite fierce local opposition, to use huge quantities of valuable fresh water and to poison aquifers, while creating enough small earthquakes to wreck property values in fracking regions. Immense amounts of natural gas were wastefully "flared off" in the quest for fracked oil. That's what happens when short-term profit is your only metric.
Climate-induced drought has caused intense pumping of aquifers in California, the depletion of Lake Powell, and a tremendous drop in the Ogala Aquifer. We are burning non-renewable water resources at a rate that will lead to agricultural collapse in a few decades.
The Syrian civil war is widely acknowledged to have been provoked by a major drought; and such droughts are projected to only get worse in the Middle East over the next few decades. Saudi Arabia was forced to suspend farming, probably forever, because it has pumped its ground water reserves dry.
A.2 The Death of Democracy - Economics
I know that four more years of domestic and foreign looting and politician purchasing by an increasingly unchallenged billionaire class and its corporate media will crash the global economy and usher in an era of demagogic authoritarianism. Donald Trump is a precursor of the kind of "politics" that will be on offer from both parties. No one will have policies, only enemies and scapegoats.
On the government front of economic issues, the leadership of neither party will acknowledge that the super rich simply do not pay their fair share of taxes. We keep the hedge fund tax rate at 15%. We keep the maximum tax brackets well below the Reagan Era. We do nothing about overseas tax avoidance ala the Panama Papers. Obama, by Executive Action, barely prevented "tax inversions" from further reducing revenues. We have not prosecuted TBTF banks for the 2008 crash, and speculative leverage is approaching 2008 levels again. The leverage on franking companies has collapsed, and the banks are desperately scrambling to cover their losses in that Ponzi scheme.
On the market front of economic issues, we have allowed zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) to continue for eight years. This has destroyed price discovery - a foundation of market economics. If any connected person can get a 0% loan to fund whatever, and get more loans to roll over non-performing debt, then how can any company's true valuation be discovered? Because ZIRP gives zero return to honest savings, all the money flows into the stock and real estate and commodity markets, where it creates bubbles and speculation and turns Wall St. into a crooked, insider-trading gambling casino.
On the political front, we have accepted the Big Lie of austerity. The Panama Papers show how much money is hidden - money that could pay the bills. Greece shows that austerity is nothing but a form of looting - privatize what we want to buy cheaply or we will wreck your economy. The oligarchs simply don't tax themselves. They demand more and more tax breaks, no matter what government services must be shuttered to pay for them. If we taxed the rich their fair share, there would be no need for austerity.
A.3 The Death of Democracy - Politics
Over the last thirty years, the bipartisan stacking of the judiciary - the GOP relentlessly block Democratic appointees, while Democrats spinelessly approve GOP appointees, no matter how radical - has turned the Federal judiciary into a right wing activist machine. It has deliberately destroyed hundreds of years of precedents, legalized political bribery, castrated organizing rights and class actions and effectively reviving the Lochner Court, and barely allowing Obamacare to proceed after having crippled its implementation.
Now the GOP have decided to ignore their Constitutional duty to vote on SCOTUS nominees. Their disrespect for the rule of law stinks to high heaven. But the corporate media barely mentions this flagrant politicization of yet another basic function of government, following on totally political government shutdowns. The message is that democracy can be intimidated if you have enough money and media.
Having already paralyzed the Federal government, Big Money has moved on to completely capture the state governments. State after state is looted and wrecked by GOP governors following the ALEC playbook: Wisconsin, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Kansas, Alabama. Taxes are slashed, education is attacked, government services are defunded and privatized. Voter suppression is institutionalized. Religious freedom laws and abortion restrictions make a mockery of women's rights, equal rights, and separation of Church and State.
After six years of DWS at the head of the DNC, Democratic losses at the state level are fatal. Many states have been turned over to oligarchs like the Kochs, Bruce Rauner, Rick Snyder, and Rick Scott, or any other billionaire (e.g., Tom Tillis) who wants to try his deadly libertarian experiments out in his personal playpen for his personal profit. Meanwhile, DWS goes to bat for the loan sharks who call themselves "payday lenders". Pay to play politics is here to stay, and that's not democracy.
A.4 The Death of Civilization - Military Policy
I know that four more years of funding the MIC and the intelligence community at increasing levels will probably start World War 3, unless it bankrupts us first. We have troops and missiles at the shrunken border of Russia. We are confronting China about navigation rights off the Chinese mainland. We are in their backyards, and yet, somehow they are the aggressors. We are provoking nuclear powers that do not buy our bullshit. It could well end in nuclear war.
The MIC will be able to get their money because, in spite of Americans being sick of 15 years of ruinously expensive, counterproductive foreign wars, the people no longer have any say about how the Federal Government funds the military or decides upon a military intervention or a drone strike campaign or a destabilization campaign or an economic embargo. What little control Congress hadn't abdicated to MIC lobbyists, it has handed over to the Executive.
The police have been militarized, and coordinate with the creepy, corrupt, and incompetent DHS. "Fighting Terror" is the excuse for removing civil rights. Legitimate anti-war, anti-police state, anti-militarism, pro-regulation political movements are infiltrated and disrupted. Protestors and reporters are kettled, pepper sprayed, and assaulted. Even worse, we have black sites, like Rahm Emmanuel's infamous Homan Square operation where people are held incommunicado. The police routinely assault and murder People of Color and are rarely even disciplined, much less taken to court. The court system at all levels either ignores or supports these anti-democratic behaviors. This naked intimidation explains why there are no effective protest actions against the militarization of America, despite its ruinous effect on our democracy, our finances, and the stability of the world.
US foreign policy, especially under Hillary Clinton and her team of neocons, has been aggressively provoking China and Russia, running "Color Revolutions" and "hybrid wars" in Eastern Europe and South America to rollback democracy and reinstate local oligarchs (and neo-Nazis in the Ukraine). The intelligence community runs the neoliberal soft-coup/looting agenda in Latin America (see Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela). In the Middle East, we are backing the fundamentalist Sunnis against the Shias, and spreading terror all over Africa from the failed state of Libya (failed due to the assault engineered by Hillary Clinton). We have troops in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (against the government's orders), and Yemen (supporting the Saudi demolition of that society). The EU has been destabilized by a refugee crisis engineered by the megalomaniac Sunni fundamentalist, Ergodan. And, it has been pressured by the US into a self-destructive embargo against Russia.
That is how America spends its money - killing people, bullying nations, looting the powerless, allying with dictators, neo-Nazis, and fundamentalists. Our foreign policy has been run by neocon warmongers for the entire century. The rest of the world sees the US as the prime instigator of instability and warfare. They see the Chinese, Russians, South Americans, the BRICS countries, and the murderously assaulted societies of the Middle East as victims trying to defend themselves from US corporate/military takeover.
A.5 The Death of Democracy - Military Spending (i.e., looting)
The US spends more than $1 Trillion a year (more than half of the government budget) on the military. To do this, it allows rotting infrastructure, outsourced manufacturing, massive wage depression via illegal immigrants and H1B holders, crooked privatized government (especially debtors prisons), and massive unemployment and underemployment. As more people wake up that we will "rebuild" Iraq (i.e., pour money into our corrupt DoD contractors) but let Flint Michigan rot, we come closer to a complete loss of faith in our governing institutions - which can only benefit rightwing demagoguery.
While we say our military is the best - based on how much money it spends, most of that expenditure is pure waste. We maintain somewhere between 500 and 1000 overseas bases, with some 200,000 people deployed overseas at any one time. Lucrative, often no-bid, contracts for base construction, local improvements, and logistic support consume much of the military budget.
What is left is lavished on worthless, gold-plated weaponry like the F-35, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Zumwault Class Destroyer - all of them panned as worse performers than their predecessors. Meanwhile, the number of ships, planes and soldiers has been on a steady downward trend. We sent two (yes, two) F-22s to Poland to impress the Russians. (BTW, the F-22 is called "the asphyxiator" for its problems with the oxygen supply for the crew.) When it comes to people, however, the military spends very little: soldiers are on food stamps, and the VA is drastically underfunded. Gang members sign up to fight so they can get combat skills to use back home.
Meanwhile, despite the F-35 and all the other gold-plated trash, the Pentagon is shocked and concerned at how good Russian weapons and pilots are. The Air Force is wetting its pants about flying against the S-400. The Navy is worried about supersonic cruise missiles (which the Chinese also have). It is disputed whether or not the Russians completely jammed an Aegis missile system in the Black Sea. The only explanation for this unseemly fear by the most expensive military in the world is that we paid for crap and we paid to pad the profits of the MIC.
