A Dialectic, ft. Eric Chase

The inestimable Matt Cotton asked me whether I wouldn't like to write a spot on his blog, Wheat State Pravda. I found this confusing for any number of reasons, not least of which is that I don't know what pravda means. My wife tells me it means "truth". I feel I must believe her, as it would just be too ironic if she were lying.

The chief reason for my confusion, however, is that this is to be a politically-motivated blog and, for the most part, Matt and I tend to agree. I do love to read my terribly clever and erudite writing, however, so in attempting to find something to write about, I perhaps naturally gravitated toward finding those points on which we did not agree.

One particularly telling example: to put words in his mouth, Matt believes in a grassroots, electoral solution to the various woes facing our country¹. I believe that the only way systemic change will happen is if that system collapses and is rebuilt, painfully and painstakingly, brick by brick. Otherwise, it's simply too broken.

Something like that. More so maybe that I’m willing to turn the mechanisms already in place against the system, because I think that doing so is better than the solution of violent revolution. I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like to live in rubble lately, maybe it’s opened me to the idea of moving the existing bricks around until we achieve the desired result. We’re playing two different games of Tetris. But I agree that we have come to rather wobbly point as a nation as a whole.

Most people are stupid, apathetic, cynical, jaded, or some combination thereof. Most of the rest are party loyalists. The kind of numbers and the necessary will to affect real, needed change just don't exist. Consider that only six senators have been elected to the US Senate as independents since 2000, five of whom switched from one party or the other, the sixth of whom is Bernie Sanders. Consider also that, on the state level in both Houses of Representatives and State Senates, only 31 currently serve as third-party members (out of a total of 7,383). Further, of the 34 states needed to call an Article V Constitutional Convention to amend the document, only five cite campaign finance reform as their objective²

The illustrious interlocutor called Cotton also pointed out in his most-recent entry Hillary Clinton's (hereafter: Hil-dog's) massive superdelegate lead on Bernie Sanders³. Without specifically saying so, Matt intimated his distaste bordering on disgust with the Party elite exerting so much control on the primary process. There is an argument to be made that the parties probably should serve the people, but the truth of the matter is that they don't, and are not required to. The Democratic and Republican parties (and any others, for that matter) are not legally obliged to bend to the will of the people in the primaries. In fact, superdelegates exist specifically as a potential check against such a situation as the party sees fit.

I think you actually make a really important point here. Party’s are political apparatuses designed to secure and wield state power: it’s maybe useful to think of them as “states in waiting,” and the state is always going to put it’s self-interest as priority one. States are also a mechanism designed to chew up people and spit out things powered solely by good intentions. The rationale behind superdelegates this election has helped me understand through real experience. It makes getting anywhere close to the real levers of power within the existing system, you have to be will to put the interests of the party above the will of the people. From a strict strategy perspective, I can understand it.

And realistically, that's how it should be. There are any number of logical reasons for this, very few of which are nefarious. The party wants to protect itself, and put the most electable candidate up for the Presidency. Suppose closer to the end of the primary season it is discovered that Sanders was being bankrolled by Israel, and that he was going to use his position as President to declare war on Iran. [I want to be very, very clear: I don't believe that to be true, at all. It's just a hyperbolic hypothetical.] It looks like he's going to win the nomination by popular vote: the only option for the party to take is to use the superdelegates to overcome his lead. Remember: the party desperately wants one of its own in the White House.

And by one of their own, you mean a capitalist.

             

Consider the matter also from the perspective of the party in a less extreme way: Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist, and that word and its concurrent ideas (understood or not) are totally repugnant to the Right. What does that do to the voter turnout, and the subsequent fortunes of the Democratic party in the general election? Twist it around: if Trump gets the nomination on the GOP side, would you not vote and encourage your friends and families to vote just to help make sure that his presidency never came to be?

I do agree here, no matter the outcome of the Democratic side, this country’s electorate has to overwhelmingly defeat Trump in a general election. Until he is their official nominee I will continue to be cautiously optimistic that the GOP will nominate someone slightly less terrifying to nationwide electorate, though I can’t help but think that the 80% of the country that aren’t his supporters are just licking their chops at the thought of him on a debate stage against a Democrat. If we don't get the chance to BOO him into a wide-eyed frothing frenzy that ends with him yelling “I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU” before a hush settles upon the crowd (I give this 3:1 odds on this exact scene legitimately happening if he wins the nomination, any takers?), I am going to feel just ever so slightly like we missed a golden opportunity for comedy. Yet as much as I want his campaign to be some sort of joke or bad dream, it isn’t anymore. There are people coming out of the woodwork to support him by buying his hats and shouting at brown people that protest his rallies. As yesterday, he just won his second primary in South Carolina. This is the America in which we currently reside. This is going to be our lived history. It’s time we start at least having the conversation about what the Trump campaign represents: American Fascism.

Fascism is corporatist—I think Trump’s record on eminent domain is enough to prove that—and revolves around a strong man persona. It also creates vast swaths of imagined internal and external enemies that deflects any blame away from how insane actual policies are. And with that in mind, I’m going to go ahead and make the comparison. I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler here; I’m comparing him to Mussolini.

Which leads me to my next point: now I’m going to compare him to Hitler. I’m not going to comment on it in any sort of asinine 1:1 comparison, but I need him for the history lesson. Because to play devil’s reactionary advocate here, we need not forget the lessons of 1933. That’s right, what I really want to compare is the Weimar Republic before that entity was destroyed following Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship and the United States in 2016. Trump’s disposition towards the American Constitution seems to be no better than Hitler’s toward the Republic’s. And the only reason he rose to power in the first place is because the German left splintered into two camps—the militant and radical left. In Joseph Stalin’s long history of foreign policy missteps, this was a big one, the Comintern was directed to focus its energies on weakening the social democrats rather than working together against the burgeoning right. 

I’ve already come to terms that in November I have to cast a vote for Hillary as a kill-switch to Trump in the White House, that’s something I can live with. If we want to focus about making a political revolution short of violent uprising, I’m all for it. If the Democratic Party as we know it doesn’t survive this election cycle, I’m there, but it can’t be at the cost of letting him win. This campaign is doing wonders of exposing the rot at the core of the DNC, and it’s something 4 years of a Clinton presidency will probably drive home to anyone paying attention. We need to be ready for the possibility that Bernie isn’t going to get this nomination, and we need to start thinking about how to channel the anger of all the people that are going to be pissed as hell at that fact.

I think we are on the edge of something major, politically speaking, something potentially seismic. Parties will continue to operate in the current system exactly as you have described. Again, here we agree—parties are the state in microcosm, and in the language of states power is a 0-sum game.

The political parties don't exist to serve the people, they exist to protect themselves. Even if the Parties or their leaders really believe they're representing the best interests of their voters (which seems doubtful given the current state of campaign finance law), their perspective on how to do that is rooted in self-preservation. After all, in a two-party system, you win or you lose. The superdelegate lead that Hil-dog has is understandable and, in a perverse way, necessary. Which is worse, Hil-dog getting the nomination due to superdelegates, or Sanders getting the nomination and losing the White House? This might seem to be a false dichotomy, but in terms of electability, Hil-dog is the better option. Why wouldn't the party try to protect itself?

Full disclosure: if I vote, I'll be voting for Bernie, though not with a very clear conscience. As stated above, even if Bernie is elected he will accomplish very little of what he wants to do without a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Electing him to office would essentially be voting for more gridlock, probably even worse gridlock. What happens then? For my money, the only thing that can defeat this immobility is a crisis of considerable proportions, one which either causes or has the potential to cause a systemic collapse⁴.

Here again, we’re in agreement. Jaron and I went to a rally here in Lawrence recently, and I wasn’t much impressed. Bernie rallies that I’ve been to are more like really bad music shows—a bunch of undergrads who’s political views were shaped by memes on the internet. It’s an immature understanding of politics, and while I’m glad they’re lending their support to the electoral math of the thing, we need to have some serious talks about consumerism and how it pertains to their day to day lives and political views. But I digress. I also am disgusted by the Kansas political process, which makes me register as a Democrat to even participate in the primary—the #BrownbackRegime has some of the strictest voter registration laws too, so my wife and I will both have to show our birth certificates to even register to vote in Lawrence.

I may fairly be accused of cynicism, or a defeatist perspective. I'm no doomsday prepper, yet even in the face of such criticism I would urge any readers to keep a weather eye on the horizon. Be it the current slow-motion global economic meltdown; the possible break up of the EU later this year when Spain loses Catalonia, the EU loses the UK, Italy's largest bank Unicredit collapses and plunges it into a deep depression; the destabilizing collapse of governments around the world as their major source of income – crude oil – remains alarmingly unprofitable; the inevitable food riots caused by a combination of climate-change-driven drought and flooding and the UG-99 wheat stem fungus; or some other sort of natural disaster or manmade disaster intentional or not, a shock is coming. And when it does, things are going to change, either out of necessity or human nature.

And with that, we’ll leave off. Until next time, comrades! 

Thanks for reading.

1 In brief, these woes include elitism, racism, corruption, the two-party system, Republicans, Democrats, Republicans, and sexism, among other things. That's all just in the most recent entry, which I strongly suggest you read if you haven't already.

2Currently, 29 states have "standing calls" for a convention; most want a balanced budget amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_applications_for_an_Article_V_Convention#List_of_State_Applications_for_an_Article_V_Convention

3Matt linked to a useful resource discussing what a superdelegate is, but if you're unfamiliar with the term, a superdelegate is a higher-up in the party's structure who can cast his or her vote for any potential candidate the choose, regardless of what their state's voters decide. It's the party-level equivalent of the electoral college, though superdelegates generally vote according to their state's wishes.

4In the interest of brevity, I won't try to make the historical argument for the inevitablity of shocks or the benefits they provide (long-term) in this entry. It is an interesting discussion, though, that I hope to take up later.