I was completely wrong. Any consequences I suffer, I deserve. Any consequences the nation and its people suffer, I have to answer for. That's all I have to say, or should say, today.
Maybe tomorrow or the day after for analysis of the many ways in which I was completely wrong, and how everyone who told me I was making a huge mistake was right.
Maybe tomorrow or the day after for analysis of the many ways in which I was completely wrong, and how everyone who told me I was making a huge mistake was right.
Nov 9, 2016
Oct. 30, 2016
At Least I Picked the Right Title for My Blog
Fool at Forty-
"A fool at forty is a fool for life."
No job, no wife, no kids, no home, what do I know?
Nothing, but I got some thoughts ...
Nothing, but I got some thoughts ...
Why I Voted for Jill Stein
This would've been a lot more exciting post a couple weeks ago, when I actually voted, and before the debates and the sex scandal. It's fitting to the theme, though, that I had other priorities (vacation in Asia!). What I hope you'll consider is that our lack of involvement in the political process is the root of our problems with the political establishment.
What I hope you'll do is:
1) Get an absentee ballot or exercise another option for voting early.
2) Vote for a third party candidate -- ANY third party candidate, as long as you believe in that candidate and/or his platform.
3) Share your vote on FB and encourage others to do the same -- let people know you are proud of voting your conscience and they should be, too.
Why should you do these things? I'll try to explain:
A few weeks ago on Real Time with Bill Maher, Democratic hack Max Brooks was abusing Republican shill Lanhee Chen. Maybe that's unfair. Perhaps Chen is the hack, and Brooks the shill.
Brook's hair was magnificent. It waved as he hectored Chen, his stylish, gelled coiffe barely controlling his dense, black locks' desire to curl back into their natural frizz, perfectly matching his manly, righteous arrogance. Here was the image of the complete man: animal virility, intellectual acumen, and cultural sophistication surging together in a dynamic balance that threatened to spin out of control at any moment ... yet didn't. And don't get me STARTED on his teeth! Total. Sploosh.
His argument, on the other hand? Sahara Desert. Bats flying out of a dusty old closet with doors hanging from broken hinges. Latex allergy and no lube.
I can't quote, but the theme is familiar. Trump is so bad, so dangerous, that no matter how bad you think Hillary is, it is your civic duty to vote for her, in order to save the nation, even if doing so violates your principles. Any vote for anyone other than Hillary is a vote for Trump. If you want to do your duty, you have no choice.
This slick bit of bullying can be simplified to the following inanity:
YOUR DUTY AS A VOTER IS TO NOT CHOOSE.
Huh?
It is exactly the same argument, inverted, that many Trump supporters make.
Huh.
If both the reprehensible Hillary camp and the reprehensible Donald camp* are using the same reasoning, should we trust it?
*note to self: write a sketch about an out-of-work British actor named, "Donald Camp." The twist is, he's the only one who doesn't know he's gay. Possible catch-phrase: "why in the BLOODY HELL do I have an erection!" Then everyone else looks at the camera and says, "DONALD!"
Let's remove any (horribly misplaced, in either case) loyalties to major party candidates from the equation and put it this way: anyone who's trying to motivate you with fear wants you to abandon reason. Ditto anyone who tries to motivate you with shame.
"But Ashley, it's the most important election in a generation!" Well, I've been participating in presidential elections since 1992, and in that time I have witnessed the extraordinary number of seven generations.
"This election is too important to get hung up on principles." So principles should only be applied to unimportant elections? Why bother with principle at all?
Consider the possibility that the terrible choice we face is a result of the accretion of bad but convenient choices we've made over the years because we told ourselves we had no choice. Is it possible there's been a cost to consistently abdicating our responsibility to voice our beliefs when (once every four years) we are called to do so? If our elected officials seem unresponsive and disconnected, maybe it's because we keep sending them the message, when it really matters, that we are perfectly fine with the status quo.
"But Ashley, voting for a third party candidate is just wasting your vote." Because no third party candidate ever really has a chance, right? Here's the news: Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Donald Trump is not a Republican. They're both third party candidates who had a really good shot this year.
By the way, how many people are wondering whether Bernie would've had as much trouble with Trump? How many of those people are the same people who didn't support Bernie because they thought he could never win the primary or the general? How many of them would it have taken to put Bernie over the top? (How many of them are wondering now just how long the Clinton campaign sat on the Billy Bush tape?)
But we're too busy gaming what everyone else is going to do to bother doing what we want. And by "everyone else," I mean the idiots and the moral degenerates. All the people you're better than who you have to think about before you can do what's right.
Think of all the good people you might have voted for if it just hadn't been for those fly-over state folk, those East Coast intellectuals, those West Coast freaks, Bible thumpers and carpet munchers, crack-addicted Welfare queens, gun-toting, cousin-fucking racist rednecks, closet-case conservatives, and worst of all, the limp-wristed, artsy types. You'd think they'd all cancel each each other out, but no, they've managed to fuck up every election, ever, for us good, reasonable people.
Don't game the stupid people. Just don't be the stupid people. No choice is not a state of freedom. Constant fear is not a state of freedom. You are not a victim of a pathological system, perennially bad binary choices, a distant, unresponsive government, mega-corporations with too much influence. You chose all that. Because you chose to accept the narrative of that system's guardians, who, quite naturally, act out of self-interest.
That both Democratic and Republican leaders have resisted the rise of Trump is proof that they share interests in excluding fresh ideas, and fresh sources of democratic input. The odd dance of the Republican leadership awkwardly lurching toward more general support for him (and then, with palpable relief, away again!) is further proof.
Beyond the disaster of a Trump presidency against which so many who are entrenched in the power structure desperately warn us, lies a disaster which they fear much more, but could actually be a kind of deliverance for the average Joe: a totally new dynamic of building support for national candidates. A new paradigm of coalition building in which mass manipulation is less important than policy focus. The splintering of news sources, the accessibility of independently verifiable information has the potential to result in a better informed, principle-driven electorate.
But of course the availability of information from many different sources, the dissolution of information authority, and the sheer, unmanageable volume of information has the danger of pushing political views further into the realm of conspiracy and paranoia. Consider, though, that this may be largely a function of the fact that there are many policy opinions held by a majority of Americans that are not reflected in actual policy. An electorate that has no influence has no reason not to be paranoid.
To say it another way, the best way to combat wild political speculation is to engage in effective political action. It's called voting your conscience. If we are indeed in the Information Age, then it is more important than ever to stand up and have our beliefs counted.
I think a few of the most important domestic issues facing the country are mass incarceration, race relations, police brutality, the erosion of civil liberties, and intergenerational poverty. What policy could address all of these issues?
Ending the War on Drugs. Not once in the discussion of police shootings of unarmed blacks or the BLM response has either Trump or Clinton addressed the role of the War on Drugs in all this. This despite the fact that while being a stunning failure as regards its purported goals, the War on Drugs, since being declared, has been the primary tool for the oppression of blacks in particular, and minorities and poor people in general, not to mention the main reason that you, dear reader, are about 5.5 times more likely to be imprisoned in this country than you would have been 36 years ago.
Clinton talks vaguely about racial sensitivity, and VERY carefully about police training, Trump talks about law and order. But as Trump has so astutely pointed out, if you can't even name the problem, you can't solve it. The single greatest abuse of state power over the last 3-plus decades and neither of the two leading candidates even addresses it, even though one of its direct symptoms is currently the biggest story in domestic politics!
How interesting to discover, then, that the third and fourth leading candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein both propose ending the War on Drugs. Perhaps that's because they are both focused on policies that will improve the lives of our citizens rather than gaming the idiots and serving wealthy contributors.
Here's what I think. This election is not a crisis of two shitty candidates. It's an opportunity to make other parties relevant.
If it is the case that we will, for certain, elect one of two bad candidates (it is), then voting for either one will not have any effect on that outcome. In that sense, your vote for either major party candidate will be wasted and, potentially, you will contribute to the mandate of bad president.
On the other hand, though we don't have the power to avoid electing either Hillary or Donald, we do have the power to steal the mandate! We do that by voting third party. Which third party? It doesn't matter, they all have the same effect! A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Donald unless you actually vote for Donald. You can vote against both!
#STEAL_THE_MANDATE
Is that how that works?
And the best part is, you can hurt whoever gets elected while voting your conscience. There's a Constitution Party candidate, if that's your thing. There's an actual Republican with conservative values, Evan McMullin, who's a decorated veteran -- that's the kind of candidate a lot of people wish they could vote for. And they can! He's on the ballot in a lot of states.
Do yourself a favor, go on ballotopedia.com and while you're there, please confirm for me that there are officially 1,896 candidates for POTUS in 2016! Did I read it wrong? Of that extraordinary number, there's between 4 and 6 on most state ballots, and I'm pretty sure you can write in whoever you want on all or almost all of them. There's a candidate that's just right for your out there, I promise.
Do you want to send a message? Do you want your vote to matter? Do you want to have your policy concerns -- not the ones that the crap two-party system buffet offers, but YOUR policy concerns -- do you want to have them acknowledge and addressed? This is your shot.
Let's not forget that in 2008, Obama, with 52.9%, won the popular vote by almost 7 points -- a clear mandate. He also had a supermajority in Congress, and he still couldn't get the version he wanted of the Affordable Care Act passed. ("How to bungle a supermajority by trying to cultivate a reputation for bipartisanship that no one but you gives a shit about because you're already gaming your legacy two months in" may be the subject of a future post.)
Right now, Nate Silver has Hillary at 49.6% and The Donald at 43.5%. Neither candidate is cracking 50. A mere 5-point uptick in third-party votes (assuming they all come from Clinton, which is nuts, but go with me for a bit) and both major candidates are in the low 40's. Thing is, I think we could go lower.
First of all, unhappy Hillary voters can stop worrying about Trump. Even when they were almost tied in the polls, he never had a likely electoral path. Never. Second of all, unhappy Trump voters can stop worrying about winning. Trump choked in the debates, the sex scandal happened, and he needs so desperately to have it always be about him that he can't mount a sustained offensive against Hillary's myriad abuses/failures. Also the anti-whining candidate probably shouldn't whine so much.
Real Republicans can stop worrying about their future as a major party and realize their coalition died in 2008, and as a party that could elect a president, they've been running around with their heads cut off ever since.
Romney was a perennially annoying billionaire bozo candidate who got anointed during what the Republican leadership knew was a hopeless cycle so he'd finally go away. What they didn't know is they'd never be anointing anyone again.
Cruz wouldn't have been their choice. Kasich is too moderate and totally unexciting. They didn't push Rubio until they realized Trump was actually happening, which makes sense, because although he's a blank slate with some fresh-faced, jerk-off fantasy appeal, he's got zero substance and a big, not-so-secret secret that would've been blown onto the election dance floor with giant fans this fall at just the same time we actually got the Billy Bush tape.
"But Ashley, how could the Democrats have gotten away with gay-bashing?" I'm guessing the same way they get away with race-baiting?
My point is, the various components of the old Republican coalition are so at odds with one another that all they can say as a whole is, "no!" That's what the Trump candidacy is! Everyone can relax. Sorry to disappoint the SJW's out there, but Trump didn't arise because America suddenly got more racist. And sadly, we didn't elect Obama in 2008 because we suddenly gotten less racist.
We want something new. That has been the driving force behind the election of every new president since 1992. Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all relative unknowns in national politics when they started their campaigns.
But since Bush I, both incumbents have won. This may seem to contradict the novelty principle, but first of all, contradictory impulses can and do operate within voters, and which impulse carries the day depends on circumstance. Voters are likely to validate their last choice by repeating it, an option they only have when an incumbent runs.
The desire for stability and change are in constant tension, but in most modern presidential elections, stability has been the dominant drive. Since 1932, if we combine the Truman/Roosevelt, Kennedy/Johnson, and Nixon/Ford administrations, we have had only two single-term presidencies. One has to wonder how many fewer changes in leadership we'd have had without term limits.
But if the desire for change is replacing the desire for stability as the primary motivator in presidential elections, an incumbent loss would be a very strong indicator. Which makes 1992 such an interesting election. The incumbent was challenged by two relative unknowns, one major party, one third party. In each election with an incumbent since, the incumbent has run against warhorses of the opposing major party, each of whom had run for president before. And in each election since, the CPD has excluded third party candidates from the debates. There's not been a lot of choice for change, and to a large extent that has been by design of the guardians of the two-party status quo.
How many more changes in leadership would we have had since 1992 with meaningful coverage of third party candidates? Never mind changes to disastrous policies that have been pursued without interruption by Republican and Democratic administrations alike -- nation-building, regime change, destabilization, the expansion of executive authority and the erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security -- since the 1980's? (I won't say what Johnson and Stein have to say about such issues; I will encourage to you read their platforms and find out!)
Here's the great news: I believe the dissolution of the Republican Party, the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and the persistent unpopularity of the "inevitable" Hillary are all proof that the American electorate wants change. And however inchoate that desire is, it is an admirable desire, in that it calls for change away from our government's many long term despicable and failed policies. The much maligned American electorate, in its aggregate, has intelligence and morals.
If you believe otherwise, then we deserve tyranny, and whether it will be the xenophobic tyranny we are told to fear from Trump or the socialist tyranny we are told to fear from Hillary matters very little. Whichever 40-odd percent of 300 million you think is irredeemable is a large enough sample of humanity to conclude that you lack faith in the species.
That is the ugly message Hillary and Trump share: "there is a large, despicable portion of the American people which is to blame for our problems and if you elect me, I will use all my power to marginalize those people, and remove their pernicious influence." The great rope-a-dope of national politics is that the guardians of the political establishment, by shifting the focus from policy to people, have managed to cast the American people as their own worst enemy. To put it in the revolting language that PC dolts will be able to understand, they've convinced us to "otherize" ourselves. And anyone who tells you that you do not have the choice to vote your conscience is participating in this deception, even if only unwittingly.
Hillary says half of Trump supporters fall into the basket of deplorables. (Definitely a future post on why "basket" is the real problem word in that phrase.) But I say 100% of the major party presidential candidates fall into that basket. And if you want to know how many people feel that way about Hillary, combine Bernie supporters and Trump supporters and see how much national support she really has.
Or flip that for Trump, and then take away all the people who support him in spite of his terrible/nonexistent policy positions, and his reprehensible statements, take away all the people who have a horribly misplaced faith in the application of business principles to the running of government, all the people who just want someone who's not a career politician, all the people who like someone who speaks from the gut and doesn't sound like everything that comes out of his mouth has been focus group-tested. Take all those people away, and then exercise a bit of compassion and understanding for the people who don't really have hatred and bigotry in their hearts, but do feel targeted because of their identity, by rhetoric from the Left like, "whiteness is blindness," which is just as racist, unconscionable, and divisive as anything coming out of the Alt Right -- take all those people away, and then you'll have a clear picture of just how horribly bigoted this country is in its sentiments. The answer is not very, except when we're afraid, and considering each other as large, undifferentiated groups.
So let's step back from notions like, "the fate of the nation is in our hands," that tend to make us fearful. Let's try to imagine Hillary and Trump supporters as mostly well-intentioned individuals of varying descriptions who have a perspective on their choice that we cannot: their own. And let's imagine ourselves as people who have the power to influence presidents -- because that's what we are.
Back to my recommendations:
1) Get an absentee ballot or exercise another option for voting early.
I will only vote absentee from here on out. Why? Because when I went to the board of elections, I was determined to vote that day, and be done with it. But when I was given my ballot along with information on all the candidates and issues and directed to a room where I could take as much time as I wanted, I realized the office would close before I could possibly absorb all the material in a reasonable way. I ended up taking probably 12 hrs over the course of 3 days to vote -- and I still didn't feel as well informed as I should have been. But I did feel that for the first time in my voting life, I had put an appropriate amount of consideration into my vote.
This is something every citizen can do tomorrow to improve the quality of decision-making in our elections, and thus the quality of who we elect, as well as the referenda we pass. We worry so much about the role of big money in elections, but there is an immediate, non-legislative measure that is not a solution, but certainly can reduce the influence of paid advertisements: take more than five minutes to vote. Take all the time you need by voting absentee or voting early.
2) Vote for a third party candidate -- ANY third party candidate, as long as you believe in that candidate and/or his platform.
One stat, which may make what I'm proposing slightly less crazy: according to one of the huge number of articles about how unpopular they both are -- which I picked for being on the first page of Google and easy to scan, (I also liked that they used pre-convention numbers) -- "23% of Americans have an unfavorable view of both Clinton and Trump." The numbers are there to push both these assholes below 40%. That would be a great message to send, and a great vindication of us, the American electorate.
And, as I said, you get to vote your conscience! This is not rank idealism. I think some of Jill Stein's policies are terrible ideas (hello, reparations!) But she is the candidate whose policies, as a whole, most agree with my beliefs. If you're a Democrat who had to choke back bile when the party became the Republican Party Lite with the election of Bill Clinton, if you gagged at the passing of DOMA, Welfare Reform, NAFTA, Three Strikes You're Out, the authorization for the use of force in the Second Iraq War, The Patriot Act, expansion of drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, foreign and domestic spying, forced deportations and punishment of whistleblowers, you may recognize some of your old party's principles in her platform. Thing is, you can't simultaneously hold Democratic principles and the view that the rest of the country is too stupid for you to risk exercising those principles.
3) Share your vote on FB and encourage others to do the same -- let people know you are proud of voting your conscience and they should be, too.
Or whatever social media platform. If Twitter helped start the Arab Spring, maybe it can start the American Spring. OK, maybe that's a bad example.
The point is, the sense of inevitability that now attaches to the election is resulting in voter and candidate complacency. But if #STEAL_THE_MANDATE becomes even a little bit of a thing, we could increase turnout and we might be able to make the two monkeys dance a little. We can put real pressure, not polling pressure, but votes already counted pressure on them. The key is bravely stating who you voted for.
Even if voting third party doesn't have an effect before the election, it will certainly have an effect after the election, as even a mark as low as 10% will be a huge story. Or should I say, "Uge!" Donald Trump, oddly enough, may end up being the hero in this story, and I'm willing to make this wild and very specific prognostication, if for no other reason than I hope it will have an incantatory effect:
When he founds Trump TV, the news division of which will be the outlet for all the disgruntled voices in American politics, Donald Trump will actually do something to make America great again. He will hold presidential debates to which more than two parties are invited. He will never let go his belief that the whole thing is rigged and that he can do something about it.
He shouldn't. And neither should you.
What I hope you'll do is:
1) Get an absentee ballot or exercise another option for voting early.
2) Vote for a third party candidate -- ANY third party candidate, as long as you believe in that candidate and/or his platform.
3) Share your vote on FB and encourage others to do the same -- let people know you are proud of voting your conscience and they should be, too.
Why should you do these things? I'll try to explain:
A few weeks ago on Real Time with Bill Maher, Democratic hack Max Brooks was abusing Republican shill Lanhee Chen. Maybe that's unfair. Perhaps Chen is the hack, and Brooks the shill.
Brook's hair was magnificent. It waved as he hectored Chen, his stylish, gelled coiffe barely controlling his dense, black locks' desire to curl back into their natural frizz, perfectly matching his manly, righteous arrogance. Here was the image of the complete man: animal virility, intellectual acumen, and cultural sophistication surging together in a dynamic balance that threatened to spin out of control at any moment ... yet didn't. And don't get me STARTED on his teeth! Total. Sploosh.
His argument, on the other hand? Sahara Desert. Bats flying out of a dusty old closet with doors hanging from broken hinges. Latex allergy and no lube.
I can't quote, but the theme is familiar. Trump is so bad, so dangerous, that no matter how bad you think Hillary is, it is your civic duty to vote for her, in order to save the nation, even if doing so violates your principles. Any vote for anyone other than Hillary is a vote for Trump. If you want to do your duty, you have no choice.
This slick bit of bullying can be simplified to the following inanity:
YOUR DUTY AS A VOTER IS TO NOT CHOOSE.
Huh?
It is exactly the same argument, inverted, that many Trump supporters make.
Huh.
If both the reprehensible Hillary camp and the reprehensible Donald camp* are using the same reasoning, should we trust it?
*note to self: write a sketch about an out-of-work British actor named, "Donald Camp." The twist is, he's the only one who doesn't know he's gay. Possible catch-phrase: "why in the BLOODY HELL do I have an erection!" Then everyone else looks at the camera and says, "DONALD!"
Let's remove any (horribly misplaced, in either case) loyalties to major party candidates from the equation and put it this way: anyone who's trying to motivate you with fear wants you to abandon reason. Ditto anyone who tries to motivate you with shame.
"But Ashley, it's the most important election in a generation!" Well, I've been participating in presidential elections since 1992, and in that time I have witnessed the extraordinary number of seven generations.
"This election is too important to get hung up on principles." So principles should only be applied to unimportant elections? Why bother with principle at all?
Consider the possibility that the terrible choice we face is a result of the accretion of bad but convenient choices we've made over the years because we told ourselves we had no choice. Is it possible there's been a cost to consistently abdicating our responsibility to voice our beliefs when (once every four years) we are called to do so? If our elected officials seem unresponsive and disconnected, maybe it's because we keep sending them the message, when it really matters, that we are perfectly fine with the status quo.
"But Ashley, voting for a third party candidate is just wasting your vote." Because no third party candidate ever really has a chance, right? Here's the news: Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Donald Trump is not a Republican. They're both third party candidates who had a really good shot this year.
By the way, how many people are wondering whether Bernie would've had as much trouble with Trump? How many of those people are the same people who didn't support Bernie because they thought he could never win the primary or the general? How many of them would it have taken to put Bernie over the top? (How many of them are wondering now just how long the Clinton campaign sat on the Billy Bush tape?)
But we're too busy gaming what everyone else is going to do to bother doing what we want. And by "everyone else," I mean the idiots and the moral degenerates. All the people you're better than who you have to think about before you can do what's right.
Think of all the good people you might have voted for if it just hadn't been for those fly-over state folk, those East Coast intellectuals, those West Coast freaks, Bible thumpers and carpet munchers, crack-addicted Welfare queens, gun-toting, cousin-fucking racist rednecks, closet-case conservatives, and worst of all, the limp-wristed, artsy types. You'd think they'd all cancel each each other out, but no, they've managed to fuck up every election, ever, for us good, reasonable people.
Don't game the stupid people. Just don't be the stupid people. No choice is not a state of freedom. Constant fear is not a state of freedom. You are not a victim of a pathological system, perennially bad binary choices, a distant, unresponsive government, mega-corporations with too much influence. You chose all that. Because you chose to accept the narrative of that system's guardians, who, quite naturally, act out of self-interest.
That both Democratic and Republican leaders have resisted the rise of Trump is proof that they share interests in excluding fresh ideas, and fresh sources of democratic input. The odd dance of the Republican leadership awkwardly lurching toward more general support for him (and then, with palpable relief, away again!) is further proof.
Beyond the disaster of a Trump presidency against which so many who are entrenched in the power structure desperately warn us, lies a disaster which they fear much more, but could actually be a kind of deliverance for the average Joe: a totally new dynamic of building support for national candidates. A new paradigm of coalition building in which mass manipulation is less important than policy focus. The splintering of news sources, the accessibility of independently verifiable information has the potential to result in a better informed, principle-driven electorate.
But of course the availability of information from many different sources, the dissolution of information authority, and the sheer, unmanageable volume of information has the danger of pushing political views further into the realm of conspiracy and paranoia. Consider, though, that this may be largely a function of the fact that there are many policy opinions held by a majority of Americans that are not reflected in actual policy. An electorate that has no influence has no reason not to be paranoid.
To say it another way, the best way to combat wild political speculation is to engage in effective political action. It's called voting your conscience. If we are indeed in the Information Age, then it is more important than ever to stand up and have our beliefs counted.
I think a few of the most important domestic issues facing the country are mass incarceration, race relations, police brutality, the erosion of civil liberties, and intergenerational poverty. What policy could address all of these issues?
Ending the War on Drugs. Not once in the discussion of police shootings of unarmed blacks or the BLM response has either Trump or Clinton addressed the role of the War on Drugs in all this. This despite the fact that while being a stunning failure as regards its purported goals, the War on Drugs, since being declared, has been the primary tool for the oppression of blacks in particular, and minorities and poor people in general, not to mention the main reason that you, dear reader, are about 5.5 times more likely to be imprisoned in this country than you would have been 36 years ago.
Clinton talks vaguely about racial sensitivity, and VERY carefully about police training, Trump talks about law and order. But as Trump has so astutely pointed out, if you can't even name the problem, you can't solve it. The single greatest abuse of state power over the last 3-plus decades and neither of the two leading candidates even addresses it, even though one of its direct symptoms is currently the biggest story in domestic politics!
How interesting to discover, then, that the third and fourth leading candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein both propose ending the War on Drugs. Perhaps that's because they are both focused on policies that will improve the lives of our citizens rather than gaming the idiots and serving wealthy contributors.
Here's what I think. This election is not a crisis of two shitty candidates. It's an opportunity to make other parties relevant.
If it is the case that we will, for certain, elect one of two bad candidates (it is), then voting for either one will not have any effect on that outcome. In that sense, your vote for either major party candidate will be wasted and, potentially, you will contribute to the mandate of bad president.
On the other hand, though we don't have the power to avoid electing either Hillary or Donald, we do have the power to steal the mandate! We do that by voting third party. Which third party? It doesn't matter, they all have the same effect! A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Donald unless you actually vote for Donald. You can vote against both!
#STEAL_THE_MANDATE
Is that how that works?
And the best part is, you can hurt whoever gets elected while voting your conscience. There's a Constitution Party candidate, if that's your thing. There's an actual Republican with conservative values, Evan McMullin, who's a decorated veteran -- that's the kind of candidate a lot of people wish they could vote for. And they can! He's on the ballot in a lot of states.
Do yourself a favor, go on ballotopedia.com and while you're there, please confirm for me that there are officially 1,896 candidates for POTUS in 2016! Did I read it wrong? Of that extraordinary number, there's between 4 and 6 on most state ballots, and I'm pretty sure you can write in whoever you want on all or almost all of them. There's a candidate that's just right for your out there, I promise.
Do you want to send a message? Do you want your vote to matter? Do you want to have your policy concerns -- not the ones that the crap two-party system buffet offers, but YOUR policy concerns -- do you want to have them acknowledge and addressed? This is your shot.
Let's not forget that in 2008, Obama, with 52.9%, won the popular vote by almost 7 points -- a clear mandate. He also had a supermajority in Congress, and he still couldn't get the version he wanted of the Affordable Care Act passed. ("How to bungle a supermajority by trying to cultivate a reputation for bipartisanship that no one but you gives a shit about because you're already gaming your legacy two months in" may be the subject of a future post.)
Right now, Nate Silver has Hillary at 49.6% and The Donald at 43.5%. Neither candidate is cracking 50. A mere 5-point uptick in third-party votes (assuming they all come from Clinton, which is nuts, but go with me for a bit) and both major candidates are in the low 40's. Thing is, I think we could go lower.
First of all, unhappy Hillary voters can stop worrying about Trump. Even when they were almost tied in the polls, he never had a likely electoral path. Never. Second of all, unhappy Trump voters can stop worrying about winning. Trump choked in the debates, the sex scandal happened, and he needs so desperately to have it always be about him that he can't mount a sustained offensive against Hillary's myriad abuses/failures. Also the anti-whining candidate probably shouldn't whine so much.
Real Republicans can stop worrying about their future as a major party and realize their coalition died in 2008, and as a party that could elect a president, they've been running around with their heads cut off ever since.
Romney was a perennially annoying billionaire bozo candidate who got anointed during what the Republican leadership knew was a hopeless cycle so he'd finally go away. What they didn't know is they'd never be anointing anyone again.
Cruz wouldn't have been their choice. Kasich is too moderate and totally unexciting. They didn't push Rubio until they realized Trump was actually happening, which makes sense, because although he's a blank slate with some fresh-faced, jerk-off fantasy appeal, he's got zero substance and a big, not-so-secret secret that would've been blown onto the election dance floor with giant fans this fall at just the same time we actually got the Billy Bush tape.
"But Ashley, how could the Democrats have gotten away with gay-bashing?" I'm guessing the same way they get away with race-baiting?
My point is, the various components of the old Republican coalition are so at odds with one another that all they can say as a whole is, "no!" That's what the Trump candidacy is! Everyone can relax. Sorry to disappoint the SJW's out there, but Trump didn't arise because America suddenly got more racist. And sadly, we didn't elect Obama in 2008 because we suddenly gotten less racist.
We want something new. That has been the driving force behind the election of every new president since 1992. Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all relative unknowns in national politics when they started their campaigns.
But since Bush I, both incumbents have won. This may seem to contradict the novelty principle, but first of all, contradictory impulses can and do operate within voters, and which impulse carries the day depends on circumstance. Voters are likely to validate their last choice by repeating it, an option they only have when an incumbent runs.
The desire for stability and change are in constant tension, but in most modern presidential elections, stability has been the dominant drive. Since 1932, if we combine the Truman/Roosevelt, Kennedy/Johnson, and Nixon/Ford administrations, we have had only two single-term presidencies. One has to wonder how many fewer changes in leadership we'd have had without term limits.
But if the desire for change is replacing the desire for stability as the primary motivator in presidential elections, an incumbent loss would be a very strong indicator. Which makes 1992 such an interesting election. The incumbent was challenged by two relative unknowns, one major party, one third party. In each election with an incumbent since, the incumbent has run against warhorses of the opposing major party, each of whom had run for president before. And in each election since, the CPD has excluded third party candidates from the debates. There's not been a lot of choice for change, and to a large extent that has been by design of the guardians of the two-party status quo.
How many more changes in leadership would we have had since 1992 with meaningful coverage of third party candidates? Never mind changes to disastrous policies that have been pursued without interruption by Republican and Democratic administrations alike -- nation-building, regime change, destabilization, the expansion of executive authority and the erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security -- since the 1980's? (I won't say what Johnson and Stein have to say about such issues; I will encourage to you read their platforms and find out!)
Here's the great news: I believe the dissolution of the Republican Party, the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and the persistent unpopularity of the "inevitable" Hillary are all proof that the American electorate wants change. And however inchoate that desire is, it is an admirable desire, in that it calls for change away from our government's many long term despicable and failed policies. The much maligned American electorate, in its aggregate, has intelligence and morals.
If you believe otherwise, then we deserve tyranny, and whether it will be the xenophobic tyranny we are told to fear from Trump or the socialist tyranny we are told to fear from Hillary matters very little. Whichever 40-odd percent of 300 million you think is irredeemable is a large enough sample of humanity to conclude that you lack faith in the species.
That is the ugly message Hillary and Trump share: "there is a large, despicable portion of the American people which is to blame for our problems and if you elect me, I will use all my power to marginalize those people, and remove their pernicious influence." The great rope-a-dope of national politics is that the guardians of the political establishment, by shifting the focus from policy to people, have managed to cast the American people as their own worst enemy. To put it in the revolting language that PC dolts will be able to understand, they've convinced us to "otherize" ourselves. And anyone who tells you that you do not have the choice to vote your conscience is participating in this deception, even if only unwittingly.
Hillary says half of Trump supporters fall into the basket of deplorables. (Definitely a future post on why "basket" is the real problem word in that phrase.) But I say 100% of the major party presidential candidates fall into that basket. And if you want to know how many people feel that way about Hillary, combine Bernie supporters and Trump supporters and see how much national support she really has.
Or flip that for Trump, and then take away all the people who support him in spite of his terrible/nonexistent policy positions, and his reprehensible statements, take away all the people who have a horribly misplaced faith in the application of business principles to the running of government, all the people who just want someone who's not a career politician, all the people who like someone who speaks from the gut and doesn't sound like everything that comes out of his mouth has been focus group-tested. Take all those people away, and then exercise a bit of compassion and understanding for the people who don't really have hatred and bigotry in their hearts, but do feel targeted because of their identity, by rhetoric from the Left like, "whiteness is blindness," which is just as racist, unconscionable, and divisive as anything coming out of the Alt Right -- take all those people away, and then you'll have a clear picture of just how horribly bigoted this country is in its sentiments. The answer is not very, except when we're afraid, and considering each other as large, undifferentiated groups.
So let's step back from notions like, "the fate of the nation is in our hands," that tend to make us fearful. Let's try to imagine Hillary and Trump supporters as mostly well-intentioned individuals of varying descriptions who have a perspective on their choice that we cannot: their own. And let's imagine ourselves as people who have the power to influence presidents -- because that's what we are.
Back to my recommendations:
1) Get an absentee ballot or exercise another option for voting early.
I will only vote absentee from here on out. Why? Because when I went to the board of elections, I was determined to vote that day, and be done with it. But when I was given my ballot along with information on all the candidates and issues and directed to a room where I could take as much time as I wanted, I realized the office would close before I could possibly absorb all the material in a reasonable way. I ended up taking probably 12 hrs over the course of 3 days to vote -- and I still didn't feel as well informed as I should have been. But I did feel that for the first time in my voting life, I had put an appropriate amount of consideration into my vote.
This is something every citizen can do tomorrow to improve the quality of decision-making in our elections, and thus the quality of who we elect, as well as the referenda we pass. We worry so much about the role of big money in elections, but there is an immediate, non-legislative measure that is not a solution, but certainly can reduce the influence of paid advertisements: take more than five minutes to vote. Take all the time you need by voting absentee or voting early.
2) Vote for a third party candidate -- ANY third party candidate, as long as you believe in that candidate and/or his platform.
One stat, which may make what I'm proposing slightly less crazy: according to one of the huge number of articles about how unpopular they both are -- which I picked for being on the first page of Google and easy to scan, (I also liked that they used pre-convention numbers) -- "23% of Americans have an unfavorable view of both Clinton and Trump." The numbers are there to push both these assholes below 40%. That would be a great message to send, and a great vindication of us, the American electorate.
And, as I said, you get to vote your conscience! This is not rank idealism. I think some of Jill Stein's policies are terrible ideas (hello, reparations!) But she is the candidate whose policies, as a whole, most agree with my beliefs. If you're a Democrat who had to choke back bile when the party became the Republican Party Lite with the election of Bill Clinton, if you gagged at the passing of DOMA, Welfare Reform, NAFTA, Three Strikes You're Out, the authorization for the use of force in the Second Iraq War, The Patriot Act, expansion of drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, foreign and domestic spying, forced deportations and punishment of whistleblowers, you may recognize some of your old party's principles in her platform. Thing is, you can't simultaneously hold Democratic principles and the view that the rest of the country is too stupid for you to risk exercising those principles.
3) Share your vote on FB and encourage others to do the same -- let people know you are proud of voting your conscience and they should be, too.
Or whatever social media platform. If Twitter helped start the Arab Spring, maybe it can start the American Spring. OK, maybe that's a bad example.
The point is, the sense of inevitability that now attaches to the election is resulting in voter and candidate complacency. But if #STEAL_THE_MANDATE becomes even a little bit of a thing, we could increase turnout and we might be able to make the two monkeys dance a little. We can put real pressure, not polling pressure, but votes already counted pressure on them. The key is bravely stating who you voted for.
Even if voting third party doesn't have an effect before the election, it will certainly have an effect after the election, as even a mark as low as 10% will be a huge story. Or should I say, "Uge!" Donald Trump, oddly enough, may end up being the hero in this story, and I'm willing to make this wild and very specific prognostication, if for no other reason than I hope it will have an incantatory effect:
When he founds Trump TV, the news division of which will be the outlet for all the disgruntled voices in American politics, Donald Trump will actually do something to make America great again. He will hold presidential debates to which more than two parties are invited. He will never let go his belief that the whole thing is rigged and that he can do something about it.
He shouldn't. And neither should you.