My state went to the polls on 4/26 and as I’d stated over and over and over again, I declined to cast a vote for one of the two frontrunners in the Democratic race, choosing instead to write someone in. I apparently was the only Democrat in my small Central Pennsylvania borough to do so (if you’re curious, Hillary and Bernie split evenly there, but Hillary had the edge. Also, when I questioned the revolution and was told to ask my neighbors about it late last year, I told them most of my neighbors were voting for Trump, which is what happened.)
I’m not going to re-litigate why. I will be voting for whoever becomes the nominee in November instead of against Trump and will be extremely happy to do so. Sitting out though let me observe some things. Rest assured, I don’t consider any of these observations groundbreaking or new. I expect some psychologist knows all this stuff.
Observation: Liberals[i] are more than capable of creating their own reality, as the Republican quip goes.
Observation: We are very well trained at hating things. One has to be carefully taught, after all.
Observation: somehow, after being coded as closet Republicans for most of the decade, independents are now liberals.
On creating our own realities: Lookit, one candidate is a lot closer to 2026 than the other. Saying this candidate is losing, as I’ve seen some state with zero sense of irony when they later claim to be “reality-based”, is simply creating your own reality. I’m aware that 2383 is the number needed for nomination. Now the candidate who is mathematically behind still could get to 2026 (and 2383) on their own and with help from the super delegates but the reality is one is ahead and one is not.
There are lots of other ways some progressives create their own reality, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. The reason why everyone seems to do this? We’re people, and we have powerful cognitive biases, hundreds of them, that are very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome without a great deal of work. How many of us reject information from certain sources because the source does not fit our preconceptions? Or we accept what a source is saying because it fits our preconceptions? Pretty much all of us do.
While I doubt the Republican who said it realized it at the time, given that party’s lack of a grasp on any science, “we create our own reality” is a pretty real psychological concept.
On being very well trained to hate something: Decades of Clinton-hate and decades of programming to despise the word socialism have led people to pick their sides and deal harshly with the other. Talk about a created reality!
Damn, do Americans react poorly to the word socialism on the Left and the Right and at some point Ima need you folk to grow up about it. The thing is, Mr. Sanders has some very good ideas that are just good common sense. Like free college.
Listen, on college, I think the US has taken a stupid path. So many jobs that 20 years ago did not require a degree now do so. Therefore, we’ve decided that everyone should go to university, and expect them to borrow heavily to pay of it. I see no sign whatsoever that this trend will abate, nor have I heard any policy recommendation, from anyone, to abate it. It is a cultural force that will require some real hard policy work to fix. An administrative assistant does not require a 4-year degree, people, and yet, I see this as an absolute requirement in jobs ads. Since this trend won’t abate, it is logical that we make college as low cost as possible (Clinton’s plan) or even better, free, as Sen. Sanders proposes.
I think free college is great and how to pay for it is a relatively minor concern—after all Congress found the real cash money to pay for the F-35, a plane the Pentagon doesn’t really want. The 33% match the states will be required to pony up is indeed a concern, but not insurmountable. Students in states who balk can simply move to a state that didn’t, fulfill that state's residency requirements, and then boom: get them some free uni. My biggest concern here is increasingly students are leaving high school and headed for college only to take classes that cover things that should be covered in 9th grade, and they have to pay out the nose for the privilege to do so. It’s not fair to the student or the university, and degrades the quality of public higher education. If and when we make public college free or low-cost, we have to fix grade 9-12 education. It will still be just as unfair to the student and the university, even if it’s free, to have to sit through basic, high school level work. And how to begin to fix this? Encourage the trades---and make those trade schools free or low-cost 2 like they do in Germany.
Higher education tuition is free there, although many Germans don’t go to university, because they don’t have to. Thriving trades exist, with thriving vocational schools. German students are siloed at the high-school equivalent level, so students who don’t want to go to university (or simply don’t have the aptitude for it) still have options and won’t break the bank to do so. The German tertiary education system is pretty cool...I mean no German student is going to leave higher education broke because their states and nation have decided it should not cost them much, if anything. What does this whole thing have to do with socialism? Germany is far from it. It is a thriving and wealthy capitalist social democracy, the 5th biggest economy in the world last time I checked. It leads in many areas; its products are exported globally. In fact, I enter my payroll on a German-made software system. Free tuition at places of higher education enable Germany to thrive so. Students leave higher education, not having shelled out tons of money, and can immediately contribute to the growth and sustainment of the national economy when they’re employed. Their incomes aren’t eaten up by crushing student debt. It is to the benefit of the entire nation. We’re so well trained to hate the word socialism that we deride Sanders’s plans and some of his extremely common sense ideas on their face without critically examining them.
On the Clinton-hate, well that’s easy. One can read all sorts of screeds about her and how apparently evil she is---from progressives. Some of the greatest I’ve read, even here, are:
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She’s a republican. (what?! lol! )
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She’ll start WWIII (what!?)
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She’ll cause us to go extinct because she’s anti-environment (I seem to recall a small group of diarists here calling her the “eco-candidate” back in 2008, but ima just sip this tea)
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She’s evil incarnate (ok what?)
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She and Trump (or alternately Cruz) are the same (lolwhat) or even better, she’s a hawk where Trump’s a dove (and anyone who says this, I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.)
And on and on and on. These are samples of things I’ve read so-called reality-based people state here and elsewhere on the internet, in addition to relitigating Whitewater and, of all things, Vince Foster.
There certainly are valid criticisms of her (of which I have many). But some of y’all just viscerally hate her. I, on occasion, do read those little subreddits. Yikes.
Hatred of this caliber I expect from the Right. It disturbs me to see it on the Left, and I feel a great deal of the outright hatred of her, like the hatred of Sanders and his so-called socialism, is because we’re well trained by media to do so, the same media each camp claims is giving the other a totally free ride. Talk about a created and constructed reality. (The reality here is they’ve given Mr. Trump a free ride, even whilst they moan and cry at how mean he is to them.)
On Indies suddenly being liberals now: This one is hilarious to me because for most of this current decade, the joke has been “an independent is someone too embarrassed to admit they are a Republican.” It’s an American version of the Shy Tory. But because Sen. Sanders attracts the Indy vote in those states (foolishly, in my opinion) who allow open primaries, they suddenly are progressives. Really?
It’s fair and accurate to call Indies anti-establishment—someone who wants no part of either established party more than meets the definition. But they’re suddenly liberals now? I’m not buying it—but if someone shows me the Carfax and backs that Carfax up with data, I might accept the data as fact. But it’s not fair the voters who belong to parties choose the candidates for the general?
I mulled over this one for some time. I wondered why other developed nations do not devolve into the internecine bickering that we do every four to eight years. The Canadians just had a calm and measured general election where they tossed a poorly performing and truly obnoxious conservative majority government for a liberal one (one can use the big C and big L and little c and little l here interchangeably).
Canadians don’t have primaries. Party voters and members choose candidates who then stand for the general election. It also helps that they’re a multiparty parliamentary state although two parties there dominate. They’re pretty different than us and our Presidential 3 branches system, but even amongst nations that have governmental set ups like ours, it’s hard to find a primary election system close to ours. We are unique. Exceptional (ha!) even.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that an individual who wishes to vote to choose any party’s candidate nominees, for any office, should join that party. I’m not even sure how this became a progressive bugaboo—the most progressive party in the nation, the Greens, has closed caucuses, and probably would peevishly resent a bunch of Democrats coming over to vote in theirs (if they had ballot access, and there is something to be said about that, but we’ll save that for another time.)
But people, even people who likely had better public school educations than I because they’re older, seem to forget that the parties once chose their candidates without the voters even being involved. This is still the overwhelming case in places far more democratic than the US. Primaries, by their nature and definition, are not fair and will shut people out---we Democrats are rightly in most states shut out of Republican nominating contests, because we are not Republicans, and vice versa. They also are “undemocratic” because they, like the Electoral College, have a measure to block direct democracy. One indirectly (and directly in some states) votes for a delegate, and then that delegate presumably casts a vote for the nominee you want. States won and popular votes don’t really tell the best story, especially since some states have caucuses, which shut people out and are very much extremely low-turnout by explicit design. Instead of people providing solutions for this to make primaries a bit more fair, people would rather trade in conspiracy theories about exit polls (Tim Robbins could not be more wrong), or tell me states won now matter for the fall (nope, they don’t), or that the popular vote matters in this contest (it really kind of doesn’t), or various national polls mean anything when the contest is a month from ending (they mean nothing.)
In the end I did find a way to vote for both, as they’re both qualified and have a number of great ideas in moving the nation forward. In PA one votes directly for delegates as well as for President, up to 6, and I chose 2 from each. But I’m not forward at having to do this again in 2020/2024. It doesn’t seem remotely healthy for democracy to have a 2+ year long Presidential election cycle. I might permanently choose to sit out picking a nominee for President if reforms don’t happen by compressing the length or we don’t calm the hell down about this.
Oh, and whoever emerges as the winner in June is the one I shall vote for in November, end of story. Either will do nicely at sending Trump back to NYC where he can return to failing at more businesses and being a total fascist racist without apparent consequence , and either of our candidates would do quite nicely for eight years in the Oval Office.
[i] I use liberal and progressive interchangeably because I consider them to be the exact same thing.
2. I’m aware much of vocational education has been privatized. There probably are solutions here that don’t involve full nationalization, like hefty, hefty granting programs, NOT loans.