Monthly Archives: November 2016

Bernie Sanders’ Fandom is Making S*it Up Again

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

A lot of Bernie supporters on my feed saying that he would have won handily in the general election, expressing their utmost resentment for the DNC primary and “The Media”(tm).

Speaking as a Bernie primary voter, you can miss me with that. I think he would have done worse.

You can talk about how polling showed that he would have done well in a head-to-head against Clinton and Trump, but 3 things:

  • why did he lose so many open primaries against Clinton?
  • Why were most of Bernie’s wins in the caucus states?
  • Why did so many Bernie supporters resent that the New York primary was closed to registered Democrats, even though he lost so many open primaries?
  • How would Bernie have performed in terms of Electoral Votes as compared to the popular vote?
  • Why weren’t those Republicans who saw Bernie as the non-Hillary present in the open Democratic primaries in the Southern states like Georgia?
  • How were open primaries rigged?

You cannot make Afro-American Democrats love Bernie any more than how we voted in the primary, especially not within a year.

In the end, Afro-Americans were not the deciding factor between Clinton and Trump, and the bet on the Latinx vote came up short. Trump won because he carried the Euro-American vote across all class divisions, and the Euro-American vote dominates the Electoral College, not the popular vote.

So much of Euro America made this decision, especially the Euro working class, out of a reflex for economic and political security of their position in the world and against constraints of decency, and their decision is reflected more in Trump’s share of the Electoral College than in his current share of the popular vote.

Bernie would not have filled that hole because he came too late and assumed wrongly that so many demographics would gravitate to him with immediacy. Hillary did her best to compensate for this hole, even in working an entire “ambitious” political life toward this goal, but came up short.

Trump is the president that Euro America deserves, and the political system is rigged in Euro America’s favor since the Electoral College was established in its current form in 1803. He’s a man of his time, and the Euro-American men and women who voted for him will own everything that this Republican presidency and Congress will enact and appoint over the next four years.

To imply that Bernie would satisfy this urge is disrespectful to the man himself. It is a projection of your fantasies onto someone who tried and failed to build a sustainable voter base. It is a projection of your fantasies upon voters who clearly sided in the GOP primary with Trump because they liked his gutter nationalism, that maybe those misinformed voters would have seen the light of Bernie in the general election if he had been the Democratic nominee.

No. Euro America did not deserve Bernie. Euro America did not deserve Hillary. Euro America did not deserve a continuance or progression of the best policies of Obama’s 8 years in office.

Euro America knows what Euro America wants. Let Euro America have it.

No Gloating

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

As per Edric, I do not wish to gloat when Hillary wins tomorrow or Wednesday morning.

I will celebrate, eat, drink, dance, calm down…decompress…slowly.

I will likely spend the whole day Wednesday sleeping, thinking about what movie to watch at the theatre (likely #DoctorStrange in 3D) and finishing my slideshow for a #Nerdacon panel.

I will be waiting for someone to respond to my post-election job applications.

I’m not interested in gloating. I don’t think much that is favorable about Trump, but the people who have voted for him or will vote for him tomorrow will still be with us on Wednesday.

We will have to work differently than we did under President Obama. The racism and sexism exhibited by both his most ardent supporters and his Republican opponents over the Obama years will still be exhibited in different doses.

But those who voted for him over economic anxieties should not be left behind in not only explaining our economic limitations and dead ends, but charting a course forward to overcome those limitations.

Those who voted for him over their being de-centered in the future of the great American narrative – by sex, gender, sexual orientation or, as egregious as it is, race and skin color – will either find a way to navigate this landscape, hopefully by recognizing their privilege and helping to build a new, more equitable, more domestically compassionate status quo, or will retreat into an organized but dysfunctional socio-economic dystopia of the mind. I’m already doing what I can to dispel that dystopia for the fallacy it is, and to show that everyone should have an equitable role to play in this country, and an equitable chance to play that role.

We live in a small world, and we live in a big world. Our place is not assured, but we will write our own futures. Let’s write futures which will reach out to people who are not like us in shared background but who have the goal of comforting the afflicted, even if this disturbs and rouses the comfortable to wakefulness.

For me, it’s not enough to vote, or to share social media posts, for the causes I care about or the candidates most qualified to make good of those causes.

It matters to call, text, knock on doors, enter data on the people I’ve contacted, and do it all again every day until your candidate is elected or loses.

It matters to connect and work with every person who wishes to contribute a small chunk of their lives to this campaign.

And it matters, after the campaign is over, to want for more, for better, for yourself, for your neighbors, for your world.

Whatever happens, here’s to the next campaign.

I disagree with this.

  1. Not even Bernie Sanders would qualify as a left-wing Trump, no matter how many comparisons were drawn between them or how many folks had wet dreams of a Trump-Sanders debate.
  2. a left-wing Trump would have to be sexist AF and adept at racist dogwhistles (*hinthint* “BLASTED ZIONAZI BANKERS” *hinthint* “Asians tuk er jerbs”). That would gut the Dems in the Black third of the South, so why even try?
  3. The closest I could imagine to a left-wing Trump is George Galloway, and he’s a British MP who got kicked out of Labour.

African-Americans Who’ve Ran for Governor

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

To date, I’ve been able to find 8 major-party nominees of African descent for governor of a U.S. state, over the spread of 6 states:

  • Douglas Wilder (Virginia Democratic nominee 1989, elected 1990-1994)
  • Deval Patrick (Massachusetts Democratic nominee 2006, elected 2007-2015)
  • Johnny DuPree (Mississippi Democratic nominee 2011, first AA nominee since Reconstruction)
  • Robert Gray (Mississippi Democratic nominee 2015)
  • Cleo Fields (Louisiana Democratic candidate 1995, Louisiana has no primary system)
  • Bill Jefferson (Louisiana Democratic candidate 1999)
  • Theo Mitchell (South Carolina Democratic candidate 1990)
  • Anthony Brown (Maryland Democratic nominee 2014)

Compare this to:

  • 36 elected governors of Irish descent
  • 21 elected governors of Ashkenazi Jewish decent

Not bad for two other ethnicities who were once considered non-white by White America.

But it’s emblematic of how adrift Democrats are at the moment in the South, and just how much we have failed in representing and accommodating one of the most and longest-politically-disadvantaged ethnic groups in this country.

Building on the #WEBDuBois quote Edric just posted:

Reading DuBois’ critique of both parties in 1956, one has to understand what the parties represented in that period. The Democrats were still a very racist political party which appealed to the White working class. The Republicans, by comparison, were mostly indistinguishable from the Democrats except in their Lincolnian heritage and their more concrete adherence to free-market ideals. Republicans in the South were struggling to arise as an appreciable political force, becoming plastered in its declining years as the “Negro Party”.

Fast-forward to today. The Republicans are dominant in the South and are a very racist, white-identity-obsessed party. The Democrats in the South are struggling to arise as an appreciable political force, and are now becoming consigned to “Negro Party”, permanent-minority status. Outside of the South, the parties are more apart than ever before, except on many of the matters which DuBois touches on in this letter. Some things have never changed, and some things have changed party affiliation.

8 years ago today, #BarackObama was elected president of the United States.

I remember that he had the wind at his back during that campaign. His campaign, his presidency and his brand has changed the trajectory of the Democratic Party in the post-LBJ era.

I think Hillary Clinton will lead under this reality as she tries to leave her own mark. I don’t think we’ll go back to the 1990’s. I don’t think it will be possible. Our expectations are greater than back then, and Obama has made good on too many of them for us to revert back to that period.