I remember the 2000 election like it was yesterday. As the court battles heated up, I remember thinking that if George W. Bush had any integrity at all, any commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy, he’d be the first to insist on a fresh round of elections. Of course, Bush had none of these things, and the election ended in a judicial coup d’etat.
There was, at least, some comfort in being the noble losers. The Democrats insisted on a full recount, after all. We stood for democracy.
A few years ago, when Jimmy Carter declared that we no longer had a functioning democracy, I understood its point — we had just completed an almost unprecedented presidential campaign in which there was no actual primary on the Democratic side — but I thought he was being a little hyperbolic.
A few days from the beginning of 2016, and now I think he was being prescient.
I’m not going to get into the strengths and weaknesses of either major Democratic candidate here. The candidates themselves are almost irrelevant, and there has been and will continue to be spirited debates on that point.
What really matters is that one candidate has conspired with the head of the DNC to subvert the democratic process itself by preventing the majority of the public from being informed about the candidates and the issues. Content to bank on the public recoiling from the parade of outright fascists on the opposition slate, if only by a dangerously slim margin, the Clinton faction in Washington has done and continues to do its best to bypass the oversight of the American electorate.
And really, that’s still not the core issue. It’s brazen, to be sure, but not any more fundamentally anti-democratic than the Bush coup d’etat or Nixon’s Watergate conspiracy. We are, in fact, supposed to reach that conclusion. The strength of the Democratic brand, distilled to its raw essence, isn’t any particular principle beyond the banal process of promoting amiable public personas to the millionaire’s club of the legislative and executive branches. No one is surprised by the current president’s continuation and expansion of the Bush policy of targeted drone assassinations, collateral damage be damned. Hardly anyone cares about the ongoing expansion of state surveillance and the criminalization of naive whistleblowers and their quaint insistence on the rule of law. Hell, a sizeable chunk of the population wasn’t even alive the last time the Federal Reserve and other regulatory agencies weren’t stocked floor to ceiling with the people they were once supposed ro regulate. The Democratic Party is about electing Democratic politicians, and there is no principled stand that cannot be retreated from in a heartbeat if the polls numbers soften.
The core issue, and what seems genuinely new to me, is that more than two thirds of Democratic voters — in the party base, no less — are totally okay with the sabotage of the Democratic debates and primaries by the DNC. Oh sure, I know plenty of Clinton supporters have publicly lamented Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s behavior, and a handful have probably expressed their disapproval directly to the DNC. But here’s the deal: if you’re still a Clinton supporter despite the HRC-DWS attack on our system of government, you’ve placed your candidate ahead of a functioning democracy in your list of priorities. And if so, you should be ashamed of yourself.
It’s okay if you want to argue that we must elect Hillary Clinton because the other side consists of batshit insane no-longer-closeted fascists. “We’re not as bad as the Republicans” has often been a winning, if sickening, platform for the Democratic Party. But it’s not okay if you shrug at the DNC’s sabotage because we can’t risk giving voters an informed choice lest they make what you think is the wrong decision. It’s not okay for the leading candidate of our party to let the situation pass unremarked upon for her personal gain at the expense of American democracy. All the rec list diaries about Hillary’s “grace and poise” mean about as much as their Filipino counterparts did while they were praising Imelda Marcos and her sham democracy.
And to turn from fawning admiration for this unethical, un-American farce to slander the opposition and to question their patriotism on the basis of a few ginned-up, unscientific polls on a fucking blog to tar millions of Democrats with the slanderous accusation that we intend to sit out the election to the benefit of Adolf Trump is just disgusting. Especially coming as it does from people who were quite loud in their insistence that they would sit out the 2008 election because Barack Obama interrupted the last attempt at a Clinton coronation. I’ve even seen a few of you call these imaginary legions of anti-democratic Sanders supporters PUMAs, smugly secure in the supposition that no one reading it remembers 2008 or knows how to work Google. And to be fair, it’s a cynically artful touch.
The sad part is that it will probably work in the end.
It will be a Pyrrhic victory, of course. The far right will have cemented its position as utter lunatics who nonetheless embraced an open, democratic primary, while the Democratic Party will have removed any doubt that it has any principle beyond victory, even if the only prize is having a D next to the smug face of the figurehead responsible for rubber-stamping the powerful interests she spent a lifetime of care not to disturb.
The last Republican administration thought the Geneva Conventions were quaint. Evidently, the frontrunner for the next Democratic administration — and her supporters, without whom she would not be the frontrunner — think the principle of a democracy based upon an informed electorate is quaint. I couldn’t stomach that from my candidate, but perhaps you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.
Don’t worry about the election. In stark contrast to your slimy propaganda, I and almost all other Sanders supporters will show up in November to vote against whatever horror slithers out of the Republican convention.
But I’m done with the Democratic Party. I can deal with a lackluster candidate. I can even deal with a deeply unethical one every now and then. But I cannot deal with a party whose leaders and the majority of its rank and file show open contempt for the democratic process. That’s why I’m not a Republican. I had hoped for better from the Democrats.
