Warning: Though this diary will be making a case for Hillary in the GE, its going to framed in reality and not the K St creation many of her supporters seem to believe. The reason is that you can not convince people who know reality by giving an argument based on the illusion and so this diary might be slightly offensive to some of her supporters.
Read at your own risk!
This will probably end up as the most important presidential primary in our nations history, where in both parties an outsider comes from nowhere and demonstrated incredible competitiveness. For the Republicans Trump really dominated and put the others away, but on our side Bernie is going to fall a little short, which says they were more upset with their party than we are with ours. If you think about it that makes a lot of sense, since their party is considerably worse than ours, so more people who identify with it would be willing to push for something very different. Where 40-45% of the left were dissatisfied enough with the party to vote outsider, nearly 60-65% of the right felt that way.
Its on this difference I will make my case for Hillary, for in a nutshell if the left needs more evidence of the flaws with its party, I think the best solution is to give to them and get Hillary into office. The other option is Trump as President and to be perfectly honest if I thought Trump would be a good president I wouldn’t write this diary, so let me start with why not Trump.
Does anyone really know what Trumps governing philosophies are or how he will act and what he will do once in office? I am not even sure Trump knows the answer to these questions and that is his big problem, he is a complete wild card. Some may see him as some big FU to the system, others as an oligarch coming to save them from the other oligarchs and others as some pseudo-fascist want to be dictator. We just don’t know if any of those or all of them are true and we really just have to look at what we do know.
Trump is a billionaire who used his money and name recognition to capture the dissatisfaction with the party to hijack the republican nomination. Now this in itself isn’t a bad thing and say instead of Trump, the billionaire who did this was Bill Gates, who has demonstrated compassion using his money to help people around the world and convinced other billionaires to do the same. Now one could see the potential for the ‘oligarch saving us from the oligarchs’ scenario, but Trump has lived a very self serving and self promoting life, he demonstrates none of the traits one would expect in someone whos interest is helping others.
So the first real problem with Trump is that he is just self interested, but I think another real problem is how quickly the Republicans are coalescing around him, which says to me he is making deals behind the scenes with the partys power players. He is the Deal Maker and he wants to be the Republican President, so it makes sense he would be using what he considers his greatest skill to achieve his goals and work out what needs to be so the party supports him. Also the oligarch backed media has been far too friendly to him for the other oligarchs to be very concerned and even Fox News has warmed to him.
So if the oligarchs like him and the republicans like him, why should I like him, when there is no other evidence he should be a good President? The one thing I can say about Hillary, is that I know pretty well what her administration would be like and for all the issues I may have with it, I can see no reason to believe a Trump administration would be any better. So that's why not Trump, but why Hillary when you don't agree with her politics?
We all know a Hillary administration is going to be a continuation of the Republican light with socially liberal policies we have seen the last two decades, with little chance of any real fundamental changes. The thing is we likely won’t see any fundamental changes from Trump either so this election we can just assume fundamental changes are out, but we should look to how to get them in the future. Well we know the Republicans are already fed up enough for real change though its unlikely their candidate will give them any, but the left is still a little unsure and the only way for them to get to know how the party governs to get them to that point, is to give them more governing.
If Trump wins the left learns nothing about their party and we will gain nothing, but if Hillary wins, the worst case scenario is shes a terrible president and left reaches that same level of fed up as the right. In a way a Hillary Presidency is a win/win for the left, for the best case scenario is she turns out to be a good president and improves things, and in the worst case she brings us closer to the breaking point of overturning the whole system, since we are already 40-45% of the way there now. If the goal is for real change, then the fastest route at this point is through Hillary, because even if you hate her politics, those aspects you hate about them are the very things that will get us to the breaking point of getting that change. If she flips on TPP, which I believe she will, then the left will see another Dem President going into office being against such deals only to support them once in office and that in itself could be the final straw we need.
The final reason I support a Hillary Presidency is because Bernie ran as a Dem and his political movement is rooted in the ideals of the party, so should the movement take on the life of its own we hope it will, then Hillary can be influenced by it. A political movement rooted in the left will have little ability to influence a Trump administration, but if we make enough noise the party needs our votes and no matter how much they might hate to do it, they will be forced to make some concessions. That is the point of the Bernie movement, to force the political class to work for us through a populist uprising and though it would have had a lot more influence over a friendly president like Bernie, it would have almost none over Trump, but with Hilary there is a middle ground where we can force her to be a better president or at worst demonstrate the party establishment is completely unwilling.
So if our goal is real change, then out of all the options in November, be it not voting, voting third party, writing in Bernie, voting for Trump or voting for Hillary, then the best option for moving us towards real change is voting for Hillary, if for no other reason, it will give the left the evidence it needs to realize it has to go outside the party establishment to get any change.