Rocky Horrors

Debra Messing is at it again.  She can't seem to let go of the notion that Susan Sarandon is responsible for Trump being in the White House.  What did Susan Sarandon do?  She inserted herself in earnest once again in the 2020 Democratic primary by publicly endorsing Bernie Sanders' candidacy.  After Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, Sarandon, who had already fallen out of love with Clinton in 2003 when the then New York Senator voted for the Iraq War,  publicly urged the disaffected to vote with their feet and abandon the ship of the Democratic party.  Her own vote was for Green candidate Jill Stein, but she intimated that even Trump would be a safer pick than Hillary Clinton.  Less fracking, she predicted; less war. 

Like Susan Sarandon, I was bitterly disappointed after the 2016 primaries.  It was hard not to crash after soaring on an unprecedented opportunity in my lifetime to dream with some realistic hope about an opportunity to vote for a Socialist in the General Election.  When Sanders conceded, I remained unenthused about his challenger, the nominee, and briefly, quietly contemplated abstaining from voting for president in November.  But on listening to the arguments of Stein, Sarandon and others and especially due to increased exposure to the cesspool of Trump, I was not convinced.

I have no regrets about voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump in 2016, but neither do I harbor any special animus toward Susan Sarandon, at least, for voting her conscience.  Her supporters are right - Sarandon has many times over earned the respect of those on the left for putting her beliefs into action consistently for years.  I have never thought (for longer than an instant or two anyway) that Trump's election is owed to Sarandon's abstention from voting for his most serious opponent.  In the fight between Sarandon and Messing, my money is on the actual fighter.

Where I disagree with Sarandon's 2016 stance is not out of blame for Clinton's loss.  Rather it is with the notion that anyone with eyes open about Donald Trump before the general election can be excused for shirking in the effort against him.  Pissiness about Bernie Sanders' loss in the primaries is an especially feeble excuse considering Sanders' own commitment to Clinton's campaign following her nomination.  But by all indications at the time, Susan Sarandon's withholding of support for Clinton was due to a confidence in her impeccable moral purity that constrained her from participating in a Clinton victory, a purity that was no doubt persuasive and influential-- and certainly encouraging-- to some small percentage of similarly disgruntled Bernie supporters in swing states.  I've talked about my feelings about  the begrudgers, but I have to confess I reserve a special place in my personal conception of Hell for the saintly abstainers who actively sought to side with the Trump voters against Clinton in the wishful belief that Trump's blatant horribleness would "heighten the contradictions" inherent in the system and perhaps instantly foment revolution.  What made them so singularly special that they could be excused from the duty to vote responsibly, heedless of the Republican congress that Trump, if he won, would have at his disposal?  How bad does the greater evil have to be to vote for the lesser evil if Trump is not it?  How come they got to vote for the dreamy far out radical?  Why was it up to me to vote for the war-mongering fracking neoliberal in an effort to save our mutual society from the fake tanned, pussy grabbing, incurious, racist fascist bastard?

Is the effect you're getting the effect you want?  Was Susan Sarandon wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016?  Was she hoping to signal a greater virtue in voting for Trump?  She is a dramatic actor.  I now suspect she was just being dramatic.   An interview with The Guardian in November 2017 if accurate and fair strongly suggests that far from being a super virtuous superwoman of the left whose vote for Jill Stein was too superior for its mighty purpose to be comprehensible to mere run-of-the-mill pants shitters who voted for Clinton to avoid Trump (I include myself), Susan Sarandon was a common naïf who assumed Clinton was going to win and was compelled to use her public platform to make clear that she wanted to claim no part in it.  In spite of her bluster about how Clinton was more likely to start a war and to pursue frantic fracking than Trump, in the Guardian intereview, she referenced the safety of her district for Clinton among the conditions that enabled her protest.  Explaining her stance in the general election, the article quotes her as saying, "Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein."  She has this to say about her widely cited argument in an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC in the runup to the election that Hillary Clinton was "more dangerous than Trump":

I don’t mind that quote ... I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.

Acknowledgement that Clinton would be smoother (if not by much) than Trump doesn't sound like a pure belief in Clinton surpassing the danger of Trump.  The virtue is cast in doubt even more by the argument that Clinton was going to win anyway.

 In other words she spoke one thing publicly but justified her actions on a faulty foundation of the tragically mistaken belief about what the outcome of the election would be which in 2017 she apparently indicated regret in having wrong.  Could her story be unique?  The humanness of her mistake (if the impression left by the Guardian article is fair) gives me an odd kind of hope.  I don't doubt that there were some small number of Clinton abstainers who genuinely evaluated Clinton's capacity for malevolence as on a complete par with if not surpassing Trump's.  But Susan Sarandon, who is as virtuous as they come in leftist politics, appears with hindsight at least (which is 20/20 mind you) to not be among them. 

What about Debra Messing's intentions?  Does she want a mea culpa from Susan?  Does she want to lock Sarandon's support for whomever the Democrat is in 2020?  I suspect she's just being dramatic -- and hoping in the process to preemptively ridicule the wasting of votes on anything other than anti-Trump in 2020*.   But based on the frantic righteous (and absolutely correct) defense of Susan Sarandon that Messing's repeated attacks inspire, I'm not so sure she's helping her own cause.  Let's get the best candidate for 2020 now, and stock up on outrage until we need it. It's too late from a planetary perspective to quibble over purity displays in the general election.  It's too early politically to do anything but get the nomination right.
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* Would Debra Messing support the ticket in November even if the nominee were Bernie Sanders?  I'd really like to know.