This is the third in a series of diaries in which I revisit the most common maddeningly witless memes with which I've been confronted on dKos over the past decade.
The first entry dealt with people who are so fucking delusional that they believe America can somehow "win" in a global economic cage match, because we Americans are just, you know, special. It's the kind of thinking that should only be able to happen in the brain of a right-winger, but somehow, through the magic of tribalism, manages to infect minds of every political locus. There is one, and only one, way for us to maintain our dominance, and that is to ruthlessly slaughter our competition and/or their clients. Personally, I'm not up for that.
The second entry dealt primarily with the dimwittery that is MMT advocacy, and secondarily with MMT itself -- though MMT itself is so dull and unremarkable as to render its rebuttal an exercise in excruciating dullery. My final comments in that diary were a dismissive bug-slap at a guy whose next-to-last comment was largely made up of denying that any MMTr has ever said any of the things that I claimed MMTrs were saying all the time, and whose final comment was a textbook example of everything that makes "arguing" with an MMTr an exercise in zen.
But that is all behind me now; I have said my last on those matters. This third entry in the series addresses one of the most repulsive, craven, anti-democratic, status-quoist, conventionally-wise, received (rather than conceived), memes in the world of modern American politics: The False God Electabiity.
To begin with, whatever criteria might render someone truly unelectable, nobody can enumerate and quantify them. Usually, there is no science whatsoever to support the denunciation. Somewhere in the hyper dimensional space of candidate attributes there are twisting multi-dimensional surfaces that separate the clearly unelectable (Charles Manson) from the inexplicably electable (Dick Cheney) -- and all claims to be able to delineate those surfaces with any precision at all are bunk. Such opinions express neither knowledge nor fact, but either the irrational fear or cynical aim of the denunciator; "Unelectable" is a charge that can always be leveled against almost any candidate -- and certainly any candidate who has any chance of effecting any kind of important political or social reform.
I've seen two Presidents elected who were widely believed to be unelectable: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Reagan at least had charm, looks and a limited wit; and you can find 70s-era video of him on Firing Line in which he's coherent and well-spoken. Younger folks, their political sensibilities informed by the republican primaries of 2007-8, 2011-12, and 2015, may chuckle to hear that in the summer of 1980, Reagan was thought by many to be too daft, too eager to go nuclear, basically too fucking crazy and dangerous to be elected president. Yet he was less crazy and less dangerous than almost anybody who has participated in a Republican Presidential debate since W was elected.
W, on the other hand ... well ... yes:
a. A cruel sociopath, as documented from adolescence through his gubernatorial "service".
b. A dismal failure at every undertaking for which he had ever taken responsibility, an anti-Midas turning all he touched to dross.
c. A semi-reformed but unforthright abuser of alcohol and cocaine.
d. A chickenhawk who avoided a war for which he cheered, then skirted the obligations he accepted as the price for his cowardice.
e. A rhetorically hapless, shallow poon hound of dubious intellect, whose primary qualification to the office was, per the anointment of the media, that his fine mediocrity posed no challenge to the inferiority complexes of ordinary voting folk, in those contemplative moments when they might fantastically imagine themselves tossing back longnecks with their oligarchs.
I understand that people don't like to admit that matters in which they take great interest are often impervious to their own, or for that matter anybody's, analysis; thus our body politic is well-populated by analysts, professional and amateur, who perpetually deceive themselves as to the chasmic divide between the thin, fractured, shaley shelf of their opinions upon the one side, and the solid, vast, granitey Canadian Shield of reality upon the other.
Elections, Nate Silver’s predictive wizardry notwithstanding, are non-linear dynamical systems. In practice, that means that small events can have big effects. It also means that anybody who thinks they know in advance how a campaign will evolve, or how the election will eventually resolve, is a fool or a liar. In the realm of election analysis, there is only opinion. Certainly, some opinions are more informed and/or reasonable than others, but in general “more informed” means “more familiar with historical cases,” and “more reasonable” means, “more or less consistent with whatever is understood about historical cases.”
The difficulty with such informedness being:
A. Nonlinear dynamical systems can be arbitrarily sensitive to extremely small variations in conditions (ref: “the butterfly effect”).
B. This year is never the same as last year — an infinitude of conditions have changed between now and any historical case, many of them by very large quantities.
C. There are events that are completely unpredictable (ref: Black Swans).
No election is ever over until the last ballot has been counted and the last challenge resolved, because at any moment, a game-changing event can occur.
“Unelectable” is normally (and boring, and stupidly, and wrongly) applied to someone who is either:
A. Too publicly criminal
B. Too publicly immoral
C. Too personally off-putting
D. Too apparently insane
E. A member of a group against whom such substantial bigotry exists that "The American people are not ready for a President." Of course, that's an always-changing target. Black. Jewish. Female. Gay. Atheist. Transsexual. Catholic. Mormon. Whatever.
or
F. Too “out of step” with American political philosophy
As far as A through C are concerned, it’s unclear where the limits might possibly be thought to lie. It’s conventional to think that tolerance for the criminal, the immoral, and the charmless varies regionally — that Louisianans, for example, take criminality (both in and out of office) for granted in their elected officials. Mostly, this strikes me as self-congratulatory chauvinism. No electorate in the union was ever more self-satisfiedly smug about their tradition of “clean politics” than Wisconsin; yet former Governor Tommy Thompson was cheerfully, if relatively benignly, corrupt, and currently the executive and both houses of the legislature are controlled by individuals who are as deceitful, as self-interested, as dedicated to corruption, and as shameless about all of that, as any in the nation — and they’ve all been reelected one or more times after having revealed to the populace the oily blackness of their ugly souls.
Democrats and Republicans alike are elected and reelected in spite of conspicuous personal and civic failings. Marion Barry. Ted Kennedy. Mark Sanford. Rick Scott. Scott Walker. Bill Clinton. Alcee Hastings. Rudy Giuliani. I do not think that the electorate forgives the criminal or immoral; I think the electorate mostly doesn’t care.
As far as off-putting goes, well … who could be more abrasive than Christie or Giuliani or McCain or Emanuel, or more bland than Gray Davis or Jim Doyle (former governor of Wisconsin) or Tim Pawlenty, or more creepy than Dick Cheney or Rick Scott or Ted Cruz or Scott Walker? Yet, all of these politicians persuaded statewide electorates to vote for them.
A popular argument is that such counterintuitive successes do not scale to the national level, as seen in the imploded campaigns of McCain, Walker, Giuliani, and Pawlenty; but that is a weird position for any citizen of a country that elected (sort of) George W Bush, and then re-elected him (sort of) despite his having presided over the most spectacular security failure in the nation’s history (it took serious fallability to out-fail Pearl Harbor), followed by the most spectacular foreign policy blunder in the nation’s history, all in the context of an orgy of crony MICatilism.
I haven’t much to say about item D, other than to observe that most Americans are delusional with respect to many things, most of the time. I don’t know how crazy someone would have to be before they would be too crazy. By “insane”, I don’t mean “suffers from a mental illnes/disorder that ought to be treated”: if we eliminated all of the sociopaths and alcoholics from federal government, who would be left to govern? Rather, I’m referring to more acute delusional cognition, a la schizophrenia or serial murder. (I’m also excluding one type of serious acute delusional cognition — the delusional state of mind induced by romantic infatuation, which permits people to believe that somehow their amorous activity will go unnoticed. Ref: Sanford.) Reagan was well along in senile dementia by the time of his re-election, yet the evident deficits — e.g., his inability to distinguish between actual historical events versus the plots of movies in which he had appeared — was simply shrugged aside by the media. Governor LePage of Maine appears to be deeply reality-challenged at times.
E is so evidently Boring, Stupid and Wrong that it doesn't deserve discussion, other than to note that it can be tightly connected to any of A, B, C and D, since bigots often explicitly assign those characteristics to the targets of their hate.
Which leaves us only F. Oh, F, F, F. The thing about F is that unlike A, B, C and D, F operates only in service of Evil. F is anti-progressive. F is all about FUD. Frighten the primary voter, and meaningful progress can be averted indefinitely. Sure, anti-progressives use A, B, C and D as a mode of character assassination. Dennis Kucinich was derided as unelectable because he was short (C), odd-looking (C), undiplomatic (C), believed in flying saucers (D), and vegetarian (D? D? E?). Ultimately, though, he was labeled unelectable because the list of proposals in his platform was too, too far, far out. Which was and is bunk. Over and over again, polls show that the public is far more progressive than almost any of the "serious" candidates with whom they are presented -- which is exactly why those candidates must be marginalized by the pundits, the media, and even kossacks, all staunchly, if unwittingly, in the service of fascistic oligarchy. Persuade the voter that they must vote, not for the policies they prefer, but for the electable candidate -- that their own policy preferences are unpopular -- and you can stymy progress.
The narrative of an election is driven by the pundits — the average opinion of the average voter is neither informed nor reasoned, but simply received, as a meme upon which the media have momentarily seized. We have no scientific model for what gives any such meme cultural legs. The Dean Scream is generally understood to have destroyed Dean’s campaign for president — though of course, there are many here among us who assert that Dean was in any event unelectable, rendering irrelevant the media distortion of both the event and what the event told us about the candidate. Such ideas are boring, stupid and wrong. If you are thinking them, stop. Free your goddamned mind.
If you insist Bernie Sanders is unelectable, then as far as I'm concerned, you are Boring, Stupid and Wrong. And if you insist that Hillary Clinton is unelectable, then as far as I'm concerned you are Boring, Stupid and Wrong. If you insist that Kucinich or Spitzer or Carson or Santorum or Trump or even Sarah OMFGAYFKM Palin is unelectable, then as far as I'm concerned, you are Boring, Stupid and Wrong. You think yourself to possess knowledge you cannot possibly possess. You think, wrongly, that the electorate is a predictable thing, that the media have predictable and fundamentally constrained capacity to alter the perceptions of the electorate; and generally, you mistakenly believe that some unscientific bunk that was babbled out somewhere by some sagacious pundit was anything other than an expression of that person's own misbegotten fear and uncertainty and doubt.
Electability: Boring, Stupid, Wrong.