Knock It the Fuck Off
Every day on Twitter I see smart people who I respect dumping on one or another of the Democratic candidates.
Sanders for being cozy with left-wing dictators; Warren for being insufficiently socialist; Klobuchar for having prosecuted drug crimes; Buttigieg for taking money from rich people and for his lecturing; Biden for the stains on his record and for being weird; Steyer for being super-rich; Bloomberg for being even richer and for stop-and-frisk; Yang for… something, probably. (I forget).
I have a favorite, and a second and third choice. And so do you, and ours might not match.
Odds are that your favorite is not going to be the nominee. And that nominee, whoever it is, needs to not have been already labeled a garbage candidate by you and by everyone who's favorite he or she isn't.
Here's the thing: we're fighting to stop the spread of right-wing extremism. It will get so much worse if we reelect the president. It has to be stopped now. No other issue matters, because nothing else can be done without doing this.
Things I Don't Care About
I don't care about Medicare for All or beefing up the ACA. I don't care about free college. I don't care about legalizing marijuana. I don't care about immigration reform. I don't care about rolling back the corporate tax cuts.
I don't care about any of the wonderful liberal and progressive policies our candidates propose — because they're not going to get through.
(Well, I do care about them, deeply, but the point stands.)
It's not that it would take 60 Democratic senators — it would take more like 65 or even more, and that's not going to happen. We can elect the most wonderful progressive person ever and they'll just beat their head against the wall.
There's no magic coming. There's no amount of will-of-the-people that will move Republican senators. All of the policy we talk about is just fantasy.
I also don't care where the candidates' money comes from. In fact, I want it to come from everywhere and I want to see enormous fucking rivers of it — because we're going to need it to beat that corrupt asshole, our current president.
The Only Thing I Care About
Our job is to stop fascism here in America.
And then we can deal with it in the rest of the world.
I have plenty of doubt about what's the best way. Will we turn out people who don't usually vote? Maybe. But, the thing is, those people are people who don't vote. And there's no guarantee that, if they did, they'd vote our way.
But maybe there is an untapped well who can be energized and inspired?
Or… instead, will we be able to persuade people in the suburbs who normally vote Republican? In this polarized country, can anyone anywhere be persuaded? I don't know. But maybe?
If you think you know the answer, I'll tell you you're full of shit, because you don't know and I don't know.
Here's what I do know, though: we all need to be prepared for one of these candidates becoming the Democratic nominee, and we need to not have half of us hating that person already.
Because none of them are right-wing extremists. They're all good people who will do their best to get good things done (and fail, but still).
This is the only thing that matters — they would all, every one of them, turn us away sharply and swiftly from the abyss we're looking at right now. Even the ones who are not your favorite.
So cut it out.
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