“Just Get over It” is (usually) shallow and mean-spirited
Oh dear, sorry for this but I am once again sucked into political commentary, provoked by other persons’ commentary. Here I was hoping to concentrate on the soothing cerebral task, the Most Amazing Year in Space Ever, but my mid-brain took over thanks to following a link on The Daily Kos. It’s not my fault, but here goes anyway:
In the context of taking to task Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s sickeningly callous statements about government-funded food assistance programs (here ) brought to us by Kos Media, a number of folks commenting engaged in an argument over Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss in 2016.
Once again we heard some voices on the left telling those of us who deplored past attacks on Clinton from within her own party that we should “just get over it.”
If by “get over it” they mean drop the indignation and discuss rationally why she lost, I’m all for it. If it means take the lessons from that campaign and learn from them going forward, I’m all for that, too.
However, the usual connotation of that phrase is “stop whining over Hillary,” implying that the Clinton and her campaign deserved what they got. End of story.
Here’s why I “whine”
Right here I’m going to set aside my own aspirations for rationality, and launch into a two-target rant. Promise: I will rant a while and then try to justify my rants with some objectivity at the end.
The targets on which I am taking the sharpest aim are two individuals: Susan Sarandon and Jill Stein. In both case I believe their error was not merely political ignorance, it was personal arrogance and self-righteousness—views of themselves as carrying the virtuous torch of truth and justice against a corrupt Democratic establishment. They carried it to the harm of all.
You might want to read my footnote below* before reading further, just to know more exactly where I’m coming from: which in a nutshell is, Bernie Sanders could never win a general election. (Of course I said that of Trump also.)
First rant: Susan Sarandon
Sarandon’s position boiled down to, it would benefit to have Trump win over Hillary, because then we would have a real, consequential struggle—(a quasi-revolution?)—of Good against Evil, with Sarandon and her followers on the purely Good side.
Susan Sarandon may be a terrific actress and soldier for the political Left, but to set herself up as a pivotal player in a political movement is arrogant and dangerous. Maybe that’s what comes of being feted in Hollywood, and it’s fine for an Oscar-winning speech. But, being persistently so influential while being out of your depth is a risky combination.
Of course with simplistic policies and attacks on the status quo, you are going to get a following among young, idealistic, often ideological voters, and Sarandon, with her hard-hitting charisma, fed their dreams. And capitalized on it. But it went too far. Drawing on the enthusiasm of those voters, she gained an ever-increasing sense of self-importance. She got carried away with it, as celebrities tend to do. Do I think her initially energizing Bernie’s supporters was good? Of course. But after Hillary’s nomination, the far more important good was to deny Trump the election. And Sarandon, in her haughty purity of purpose, would not do so if it meant another Clinton presidency.
You have to wonder what she thinks of her anti-Clinton stance in view of the Trump presidency. In just one year the damage he has wrought has confirmed our expectations, and worse. We will have to live with the damage for many years to come, even if the Democrats were to take control in 2020. (Of course, the Democrats will then be burdened with the long-term consequences of Trump’s disastrous battering of the nation, of which currently the typical American citizen has little concept, nor wants to.)
Second rant: Jill Stein
Stein’s a more complicated case. She did have the courage, will, and savvy to actually get nominated as a presidential candidate. She actually had a platform, rather than just disparaging Hillary. I credit her with being more deeply committed than Sarandon. Less susceptible to a hero complex, but still susceptible.
BUT I will always fail to understand why she persisted in her campaign as it became ever clearer that the Trump really had a chance to win. Michael Moore expressed his worries all along, and when Michael Moore speaks, I listen. He has his ear to the ground of the resentful public. (With some grooming and moderation of his sarcasm [neither will ever happen], Moore could make a good candidate for the Senate.) Plus, there were some pollsters predicting a tight race that were getting ignored by mainstream media.
Is it possible that Stein had the Sarandon-like idea that electing Trump would be a net gain for the country—the net being the difference between all the bad things he could do, and the energy it would give to a counter-movement? We can measure the net now, and on balance the bad things he has already done one year into his presidency, should be enough to convince most of those who failed to vote for Clinton that they made a bad gamble.
If one were so confident that Hillary would win that it was safe to cast a protest vote, that was a misguided calculation. Once the game was on—the only real game being Trump vs Clinton—the overriding goal was to bury him. Bury him so completely that his followers would lose heart, bury him with such an overwhelming margin that if he came back with the charge that the election was rigged against him, the majority response would be to laugh.
As with Sarandon but to a lesser degree, I attribute Stein’s failure to come to her senses a matter of self-importance grown to a power trip. OK, she carried the standard for the Greens, and that was great up to a point, but there’s little justification for her going so far beyond that point. The only explanation for me is that she ended up caring more for her prestige than for the good of the people.
(I don’t think the same of Clinton because she’s had her fill of prestige and celebrity in her life. She’s not moved much by that any longer; she’s more interested in results. Achievable results. In my humble opinion, her whole career shows that.)
Lest you think Stein was not a factor in the final tally, in both Michigan and Wisconsin Stein had more votes than Trump’s winning margin—in Michigan, approximately 51,000 to 10,700. See it here.
The Stein supporters’ take on this was that Stein voters would never have accepted the binary choice (a property of the rigged system), thus would not have voted at all. Why that would have been much better for the Democrats, I don’t quite get, since it was people like Stein who persuaded them that voting for Clinton was a deal with the Wallstreet devil—no better than voting for Trump. . . “not a dime’s worth of difference between them,” as George Wallace was fond of saying.
The Lessons (rant mode quieted)
There, I got all that off my chest.
It’s not very complicated:
Protest votes, when you are faced with the possibility of a monster getting elected to a highly important office, are futile cries in the dark. It’s a sad fact that the two-party system is so entrenched in our politics that there’s no uprooting it at a national level, and at most states’ level. That change has to come from the ground up, and in when you reach an elevation, unsupported from the ground, where your protest vote (or non-vote) may lead to disasters on many fronts, you have to give up your purity.
The complicated part is when it comes to conveying to possible voters, mostly young, whose ideology and willful purity of purpose blinds them to the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils when the greater evil threatens catastrophe. (I’m saying the lesser for them; Hillary may be flawed, and ran a sub-par campaign thanks to her too-young campaign manager, but evil is not even close as the right adjective, no matter what Susan Sarandon says.)
I don’t especially fault the new and younger voters for being foolish. I was once one of them. I blame those who egged them on, as the risk of a Trump election grew greater.
Therefore idealists must be warned about the risks of seduction by persons of self-righteous bent, which is often the case of fringe candidates or their supporters. That’s why we have to not “get over” what happened in 2016— and 2000 as well, when a self-important Ralph Nader turned the ship of our nation toward more destruction and waste. All of us make mistakes in our lives, but it matters when your mistake can lead to atrocities, and that’s what Nader is culpable of.
Those things are real, as proved in 2000 and 2016, not hypothetical, and they should be remembered. Those are lessons worth pointing to as long as we still have a democracy to save. If it involves examining individual personalities, there are times when you have to take the gloves off.
=============== footnotes follow =====================
* I still believe Hillary was the most electable choice for the Democrats, despite several polls showing Bernie running ahead of Trump in a one-on-one contest (and with Clinton losing). The defect in those polls was that they didn’t and couldn’t show what would happen if Bernie did get nominated. It would swing the conservative propaganda guns away from Hillary and toward Sanders with devastating effect. Free higher education? Free health care? I, and probably you, think those are great goals, but in the U.S. election of 2016 they would prove his undoing (actually, I’m for free higher education, but not for all; there ought to be a sliding scale with means testing, such that those in the lower economic strata get it for free, while those in the upper-middle class and richer should contribute significantly. It’s a wealth gap reducing strategy). Those positions would fly with most Democrats, but once subjected to Republican attacks would lose the votes of centrist independents, the largest bloc of voters, such as those that made the difference in the 2017 Democratic wave in Virginia.
That’s in addition to what personal dirt they might have dug up on Sanders—nobody’s private life is perfect—and even if it weren’t especially dirty, they would distort and exploit it for all it was worth. That’s how they operate—the ends justify the use of whatever weapons they can bring to bear.
Incidentally, I’m sure the Republicans didn’t bother targeting Sanders prior to the nominations because he was their preference for the general election, figuring he’d be beatable once they’d given him a pummeling.
For what it’s worth, I sent a lot of contributions to Bernie early on (proportional to my modest budget), but as the convention grew closer I stopped. Fine for him to pull Clinton to the left, but once that meant his possible nomination, it was time for him to step aside.