March 17, 2022
Cathedral City, California
Nah, just kidding. This won't be different.
Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem. It's just people throwing words around, right? People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders. It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.
Well, no. Not really. Politics is, in fact, idealism. Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally. And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus. That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.
By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good. I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride. They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.
Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids. More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.
The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor. Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we have been, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we can be. But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others. That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries.
However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.
I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections. But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all? Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls. They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point. In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all. They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today). But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican? Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect. I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people? I think not. However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal. Republicans don't even pretend to be.
(A word here about foreign policy. Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly. This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy. We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid." There are a few slim differences, I guess. Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary. Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place. But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)
Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots." That they are, for sure. But why? First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party. Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible. But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible). That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease. Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining. The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats. Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order. These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution. So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots. But they're white, and proud of it. And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things.
Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face." The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be. This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is. Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote. This they did despite Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination. That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist. The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War. I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election. Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united.
So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots. I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well, seem to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds. I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right? They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans. This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass. Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties. LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats. Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans. And so on. In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be unable to decide between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker. Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies. Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.
The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that. This belief relieves them of having to think and choose. I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do. A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won. But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate. And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.
So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for: please don't vote. Watch American Idol instead.
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