11 February 2016
AFTER NEW HAMPSHIRE-or-WSP’S FIRST FORAY INTO ELECTION COVERAGE
“Nearly a Third of New Hampshire Republicans Affirm their Support for Institutional Racism, Global Imperialism, latest Poll Shows”
In a statewide poll trusted for its
accuracy and dependence on actual ballot casting (colloquially referred to as a
“primary”), residents of New Hampshire this week affirmed that they think that
America has come too close to addressing the underlying racial politics
inherent in its legal codes in recent months, hoping that their preferred
candidate can safely steer the country back toward the New Jim Crow status quo
over the next four years. Many of those polled also expressed fears that,
despite spending more GDP per capita on defense spending than any other state
on the face of the earth, that the United States has taken a dangerous step
backward from inflicting indiscriminant violence on people of color the world
over in order to protect vague “interests” which are largely tied to the profit
margins of US-based corporations. 32% of NH voters also confirmed that misogyny
is an Integral part of their worldview, arguing that a man saying things that
cast women as having an inherent value lesser than that of men should not
discredit him from pursuing the highest office in the land. “Look, I’m not
saying that he has all the answers,” one man exited the polls, “but it is
encouraging to see that, like me, many Americans are coming around to the idea
that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Americans can do
anything, and I for one would like to see an American take on fascism in 2016.
I bet we’d knock it out of the park!”
Other republicans in the Granite State
were much more wary. Many detractors from the winning camp said they had hoped
to consolidate support around a different candidate that would be far less up-front
with these objectives, arguing that pursuing these objectives through back
channels away from the public gaze has proven just as effective if not more so
in the past, especially as in a general election the GOP has struggled to
convince women and ethnic minorities that they won’t pursue policies directed
against them immediately on coming into office.
For those of you that have been following the 2016 presidential race, at the
start of February we officially entered the primary/caucus season, which means
that the spectator sport of American politics has officially stepped out of
“spring training” and into the regular season. This is the time where wins in
the polls start to matter, and where dedicated fans turn out in droves with big
foam fingers that affirm “My Candidate is #1!” (I wish I was making that last
part up, but apparently those were on hand during Donald Trump’s victory speech
earlier this week in New Hampshire).
There are a lot of problems with the way these
first-in-the-nation primaries are conducted—from the archaic methods of the
Democratic method of caucusing in Iowa (i.e. “what could possibly more
democratic than a coin flip to decide the winner?”) to the sheer makeup of the
electorate (i.e. “how else could we possibly gauge the attitude of one of the
most diverse nations on earth than by polling some of the most homogeneously
white communities that we can find?”). I, for one, welcome the period where I
can’t possibly participate, so instead just get to sit back and watch and, of course,
critique.
If you’ve been paying attention, there has been a LOT worth
talking about, on both sides of the aisle. That little Onion-esque rant against
Trump earlier is actually, I think, the least interesting development in the
race right now. That’s self-evident to pretty much everyone who isn’t in
Trump’s camp, and I assume anyone who IS in that camp is just wildly unaware
that the rest of the country views them with the same revulsion self-respecting
people have for the KKK. If you’re not convinced, just let listen to what his
supporters have to say:
For me, while the GOP continues to implode on the right and
argue about how much torture is acceptable (a wide range from “most of it” to “ALL
OF IT, ALL THE TIME”), the most important debate in American politics today is
the one emerging around the direction of the Democratic Party. In my mind, this
debate that emerged during the town hall in New Hampshire, the “what is
progressive, who is progressive?” fight is for the very soul of the party. I
think there is actually the potential for a level of schism here on the scale
of that wrought on the Republican side by the growth of the Tea Party in 2008.
Here we actually see a real grassroots campaign (not one with an *financed by
Koch Industries beside it) with real momentum getting farther and farther
afield from the democratic mantra of the last twenty years, which I surmise to
be something like “at least we’re more left of the Republicans.” What it’s
revealing is that a truly progressive movement has been waiting in the wings
all along, and that if they come together, they have real political clout. At
the start of 2015, no one could realistically imagine a democrat losing to a
republican simply because the demographic math simply couldn’t produce a Republican
president without the Democratic Party splintering. I don’t think anyone saw it
coming, but all of a sudden many establishment democrats are seeing their worst
fears realized.
So, the
Democratic primary has officially gotten serious. No one, when he announced his
campaign, saw Sanders doing little more than drag the conversation to the left
on the debate stage. Now the Sanders campaign is standing toe to toe with one
of the largest political machines ever mobilized in modern American history.
Now the conversation is really starting to get down to the issues that separate
the two candidates, rather than what unites them, and the differences are
striking. In addition, the rhetoric being used is getting increasingly heated.
One of
the trends that emerged over the last week in the buildup to New Hampshire was
a shift by the Clinton campaign to cast the choice between Clinton and Sanders
as a matter with a gender component, particularly focusing on the question of
who was running a feminist campaign and whether or not attacks on Hillary if
the Sanders camp was misogynistic. Hillary’s husband, our former President,
“the comeback kid” Bill Clinton also took to the court of public appeal to
defend his wife from what he sees as sexist attacks from the Bernie camp. The
unfortunate reality for Sanders is that there absolutely does seem to be a
contingent of “Bernie Bros”—and yes, I’ve seen them with my own eyes, they are
awful—whose first unsophisticated foray into politics seems to be little more
than hopping on the bandwagon of a candidate’s spiking popularity, and have
never taken a sincere look at how they and their actions fit into the wider
matrix of American political life. Here in Lawrence, I know the types of guys
that pledge to fraternities that might be Bernie supporters. They are certainly
not socialists. They come from Johnson County, the wealthiest county in the
entire state, and very few if any have ever looked internally to check their
white male privilege. I actually agree with the critics here, I do think they
detract from the message the campaign is trying to promote. I personally would
like to see Sanders himself address his own camp about their conduct, but amid
the real politik concerns of a close
election, that probably won’t happen any time soon. I’m sure that’s why Trump
hasn’t called on his supporters to stop being so openly Islamiphobicohwait.
That’s the thing, though, is that
these are conversations that need to be had, but during an election year
everything gets skewed to look like either pandering, ad hominem attacks, or crass PR schemes—it’s hard to take any
conversation on gender or race or class seriously unless it comes from a place
of deep sincerity, openness, and vulnerability… of which of course you see so
much of in modern presidential campaigns. I mean, I myself am not female so I
maybe can’t speak to this, but is it not a little insulting to someone to argue
that you have to vote a certain way because of your sex? (or ethnicity, for
that matter. More on that to come.) Madeline Albright recently came out and
said that “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other
women”—aka Hillary Clinton. How sincere is this sentiment? Is it one you agree
with? I doubt she truly meant that she wished women were voting to elect Sarah
Palin as the first female Vice President of the United States, or for Carly
Fiorina if she had won the Republican nomination. This is the type of
conversation that we need to be having outside reelection season, because in
the midst of a tight presidential race it feels all too much a plea for votes,
rather than an earnest and heartfelt appeal against misogyny (and that’s not to
say that it isn’t, but unfortunately in an election year all visible light in
the spectrum is skewed through that lens). At least we haven’t seen any attacks
on the Sanders campaign that could be called anti-Semitic—by the way, did you
know that Sanders was the first ever Jewish candidate to win the NH primary,
and would be our first Jewish president? I’m personally glad that’s not part of
the campaign. Identity politics should not be the end all be all. The real danger
facing the dialogue of the democratic campaign is reduction; that the more binary
this choice is portrayed as, the less we are voting for what actually matters.
And I
mean, as Sanders & Clinton ever so tersely agreed upon during the NH town
hall debate, the campaign on the democratic side is not so much about
personality, or the gender or personal belief structures of the candidates, but
about “the issues.” The unfortunate reality is for Hillary is that in my mind
(and apparently in the minds of many others), “the issues” is where she has
been consistently the weakest in this campaign. Her foreign policy chops and
her “plan for ISIS”—points that may endear her with the older electorate—just
don’t resonate when so any of us think that it was our insistence on dropping
bombs on the Third World has given rise to Islamic extremism in the first
place. Her support for the LGBT communities comes off less as noble but as what
is simply expected of a candidate in 2016, and ultimately a little shallow to
an educated electorate that understands gender politics as closely tied to
other dialogues of class and race. Clinton has done little to persuade anyone
that she is a friend to the entire LBGT-queer community, rather than just the
white, middle-class homonormativity that has finally been accepted enough to
become a part of primetime TV, while black trans members of this country are
marginalized and even regularly lose their lives to a culture of discrimination
and indifference.
It seems like more and more too, that people are coming to
understand just how much of the expansion of the powers of Wall Street being
greatly expanded in the 1990s (under her husband’s administration) have helped
lead to the current political crisis of the post-Citizen’s United world. It’s
something her apparent ties to major corporate entities like Goldman Sachs, or
even just looking at who her supporters are, not even in the “campaign
contributions” sense of support, but rather just the tax bracket of the people
who are casting ballots for her. The people her message is resonating with have
been treated very well by the status quo, it’s no real surprise that they
support Hillary over Sanders. Change, after all, is scary. Citizen’s United
isn’t the only thing terrifyingly un-democratic about the current election
cycle, however. As we hurtle towards the conventions, be sure to familiarize
yourself with the role of “superdelegates” in the election process. The Hill broke the story first, but NPR’s
report is a bit better vetted, so I’m going to post the link to it instead. If
this doesn’t rankle your hackles, I don’t know what will. I’m certainly not
gruntled about it.
I think there’s a reason the we distrust “the elite” in this
country, and I think if you get right down to it we tend to understand that
there’s no way you get that far ahead of the game without stepping over a few
shattered dreams . The Clinton’s became the darling power couple of
establishment democrats because it was the legislation they supported that
helped make a lot of their friends rich, while quietly disenfranchising
millions. I’m not just talking about Bill Clinton’s literally liberal economic
policies, but also the expansion of the prison industrial complex that really
hit a boom in the 1990s. Twenty years later, we’re still seeing the effects of
those programs, and as the chain of historical cause and effect becomes clear, it’s
hard to not get a bit upset.
It's no small story that one of the key linchpins in Clinton’s campaign is her
support among black voters. Actually, before we do that, can we talk about how
awkward it is that politicians, reporters, and pundits all just somehow operate
under the assumption that “the black community” is so homogenous that it can
only vote one way? Or that the “black vote” or the “latino vote” is something
that needs only be courted? If you watch the news cycle, that’s all we really
get—Bernie is visiting with Al Sharpton, Killer Mike has endorsed his campaign,
Clinton abandoned her losing effort to spend time in Flint… but when it comes
to policy, when it comes to the debate stage, we get a far less substantive dialogue.
It feels way too much like its an issue that’s too edgy, that we don’t want to
talk about it, to step on any toes. Here’s where I feel like the democratic
side, both Sanders and Clinton alike, have failed to sufficiently shift the
narrative. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bernie’s economic message implicitly
supports minority communities of all stripes, but I still feel like he fails to
really steer the conversation toward the major issues of race that face this
country today. I know that at the moment Hillary enjoys a large lead among
black voters, but I don’t think anything is set in stone yet. I personally
think that they, like me, are waiting for more—because there is a lot more to
be said.
Some interesting articles on the matter, if you’re into
further reading:
This was a particularly interesting piece, I thought, as I
was writing this—hit close to home:
That
last article really struck me, as it points to something that we all too often
forget. How do you trust in the promises of politicians that will ultimately
serve as agents of the state that has continued to marginalize you because of
the color of your skin? I really have been somewhat awestruck at this… how the
fuck is everyone on the campaign trail not trying to make the story of Flint,
MI the center of this campaign? As more and more on the matter comes to light,
we learn that Flint lawmakers knew the risks of drinking their lead poisoned
water for nearly TWO YEARS, while still
sending out public announcements saying that said water is OK to drink. In
a town that is majority African American, this apparent disregard for the well-being
of citizens or for the basic upkeep of the civil contract between the
government and the people… it’s just staggering. Go google “the Tuskegee
Experiments” if you want to get a sense of just how troubling this trend is (as in, this isn’t the first
time black people were deliberately lied to by a government unconcerned with
their well-being). I heard in a story one Flint-stone (that’s what those who
have stayed despite all the troubles have started to refer to themselves, apropos their resolve) who was ready to
call it like she saw it: that the deliberate poisoning of a majority black
population, particularly the young who were most susceptible, reeks of genocide.
It sounds like a ludicrous charge to bring against a state government in
America in 2016… but I have to admit, it’s where my mind went as well.
This is systemic racism at its most
pure and unadulterated level (though the City Council of Ferguson recently
fought hard to take that title back, but at least they’re getting sued for it).
So even when Hillary goes to Flint ahead of the South Carolina primary, there
seems to be no substantive policies within the Clinton platform that would
address how to prevent this from happening again in the future, or how the
Clinton administration would come to the aid of Black Belt communities in the Deep
South where this has been a problem for literally decades. For that matter, I’m
not satisfied with Sanders’ response to it either, but I have hope for the
movement he has inspired in that respect.
This is the part where I’m just going to flat out voice my
hopes for a political revolution. Because what Sanders is calling for goes so
far beyond just this presidential race. Bernie’s campaign shows just how
antiquated and absurd a two-party democracy is in the modern world. The
partisan nature of the current political climate is because we’ve only had 2
messages that we’re supposed to choose between for so long, which do you think is the lesser of two evils?
The political revolution Sanders has called means overturning the whole apple
cart. His campaign has affirmed that true grass roots fundraising can compete
with super PACS, that someone with a clear message who’s willing to stand up
for their convictions can coalesce support behind them and compete in elections
long thought beyond their grasp. The political revolution doesn’t end with a
Sander’s presidency. For Sander’s long term goals to be successful, it’s time
for all the self-described socialists to come out of hiding, to find their own
message as it applies to where they live, and to run for city council like
Kshama Sawant in Seattle, or for mayor like #BLM activist DeRay Mckesson is
doing in Baltimore, to take back the state legislatures and the governorships
from the establishment and start making our bids for the House and Senate. This
is not going to be an easy process, and if it’s going to be successful,
maintaining momentum is key.
I think more than anything what is happening in the Sanders
camp is that a generation of voters, my generation, is finally coming to terms
with the fact that doing nothing hasn’t worked, that apathy and snark hasn’t
changed enough minds, and that to be smugly anti-political can only be
sustained for so long. That if we want things to change, we’ve got to finally
stand up for something. We’re starting to put ourselves out there, and as we do
we see that the demographics seem to finally be shifting in our favor. We are,
in my reckoning, are the most critical generation since support against
American imperialism and against civil inequalities came together to form a
generation of critics in the 1960s. We were a generation that was raised in
churches, yet were unsatisfied with the addendums and fine print, to the
contradictions attached to the message of love that we found there. We were the
generation that learned in school, on the playground, that violence was never
the answer, and then watched George Bush and Co. invade Iraq under false
pretenses, leading to the death so far of over 1 million Iraqis and laying the
foundations for the retaliations against the West by the Islamic State. We are
as attuned to the vast hypocrisies of American life as any mass of people that
has come before us. We form and share our ideas in a way that was hitherto
unthinkable—we are online. I know that sounds contrived at this point, but
seriously, our lives are molded more by technology than we care to admit (says
the man writing the blog post). It’s just something that has seemed to further
complicate the political scene in ways that no one is quite able to predict and
certainly not control yet. And we need to capitalize on it.
My personal vote is for Bernie, not because I think he’ll be a power broker in the Oval Office, or even that he’ll “get things done”--he’ll face the stiffest opposition in congress since the racist Tea Party backlash against President Obama in 2010, and the right is going to be just as glad to make a straw man out of a socialist Jew as they did a black man in office. If the longshot does happen and he does get elected, Bernie Sanders will probably be a one-term president, and if we’re lucky, he’ll get to make a supreme court justice appointment or two, and maybe find a way to push back against Citizen’s United or break the stranglehold of corporations over the American political system—all important steps toward political revolution, but not the end goal. Even if Clinton wins, not all will be lost. The momentum that Bernie has helped unleash simply can’t just dissipate. I for one won’t let it. I’ll only be happy when I see the two party system—which has given unlimited authority to the dictates of US imperialism, which has repeatedly failed American communities of color, which has allowed for the unrestrained growth of predatory capitalism—smashed and broken at our feet. I am a socialist and proud of it, god damnit. I want a party of my own. I want to live in a country that I can believe in for a change.
PERSONAL UPDATE
So it feels good to post again. For those of you who don’t know
already, I recently took on two jobs: one as a substitute teacher, the other
with Boys & Girls Club (at their Teen Center… middle schoolers). I already
had to cut back hours on the latter. After careful consideration with my
advisor at UW, and just 1 weeks’ worth of experience, it became abundantly clear that
there would be no way that I would have any energy to work on a dissertation,
let alone have a social life or even really have time to think. And I missed
the thinking, and particularly the writing. This week has been a bit of a
return to form.
With Jocie having full days of school and class, any day I
don’t have a sub job feels kind of like a worthless day. But they do give me
time to go to the library, and to jot down my thoughts toward this prospectus
that is due on February 21 (the rough draft of which will probably serve as my next posting, since its already almost done and I have to write it anyway). They also give me time to play video games
and disc golf on my own personal 10-hole course that I invented in my backyard
(well, the park in my backyard). At the moment, the bills are still getting
paid. Hopefully the workload will pick up as the end of the year approaches. It
does make me feel a little bit like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, student
radical doing the bare minimum amount of work to socially subsist all while
fervently trying to make sense of all the ideas in his head. If only there was some
sort of mid-19th century Russian publishing house that wanted me to
write a story that paid by the page, then I could write the 1100 page baggy
novel that will change American literature for all time… If only…
As I was giving this piece its final touch up, I was
listening to the latest debate. I have a new appreciation of how hard it is to
be an up-to-date political writer, the political stage has shifted so much in
the 48 hours since I started writing this piece that it makes my head spin a
little. I could write a whole piece about just this debate itself—both
candidates had some good sound bites, and Clinton definitely refined her
message a lot to speak to a lot of the things I mentioned above, but it still
doesn’t feel entirely ingenuous. I don’t know that this will be a recurring
trend.
I have, however, reconsidered my approach to what my little rag is going
to be. I have learned working on that blasted Making a Murder piece, that writing to one's own high standards can be frustrating, and when you can't quite settle and be happy with one train of thought, it can be incredibly frustrating (I promise I'll return to it one day, it just won't be quite as topical anymore. Maybe that's for the best). I also know, however, that I have a wealth of incredibly intelligent friends, many of
whom write themselves, be it for school or otherwise, and I’ve decided that it
might be worth it to try to bring some of their perspectives in. I guess you could
say I’m opening the call for correspondents, to make this more than just a
blog, but a platform through which you could put your voice out there, if you
want to. My good friend and current Mongolia resident Eric Chase has gracefully
agreed to give it a go, and I sincerely welcome his voice to this page. If you
want to join the Wheat State Pravda team,
in whatever small capacity, just let me know.
Anyway, I’ll wrap things up there. Until next time, Comrades….
-MDC
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