Before it Implodes

In the context of the strangest presidential race of my lifetime, I've constructed a bit of a narrative for myself about this moment.  I'm not a political scientist so don't expect conventional wisdom.  I think it all started with the financial crash of 2008, 4 cycles ago  (the second strangest presidential race of my lifetime).  By weird coincidence, the victor of a tight race between Democrats was a relative unknown who chose as his slogan Change You Can Believe In.  After 9/11 and 5 years of a catastrophic and criminal war in Iraq undertaken by the republican nepo baby president, and in the midst of a cratering economy, Hope and Change were in short supply, and the candidate who physically embodied both won (in spite of, if not aided by, his selection of the most entrenched Democrat-- a chronic unilateral bipartisan, performative punisher, and entitlement tinkerer with a Senate career stretching back to the days of Nixon-- as his running mate.)   His solid victory over a media darling phony "Maverick" careerist whose ratfucking campaign cynically threatened to put an obtuse nutjob who happened to be a woman a frail elderly heartbeat away from the presidency just to fuck over the dems who had voted for the African American over the former first lady in the primary, was the closest I had ever been to elation about the outcome of a presidential election. 

When Obama failed to deliver on either Hope or Change, opting instead to stay the course in affairs domestic and international and bail out the scoundrels whose profligacy with risk had engendered the financial crisis that he had been mandated to address while letting their underwater victims sink, it set in motion a discontent that set the stage for the populist shock of 2016 in which neoliberalism's anointed heir Hillary Clinton had to beat back a more serious left populist challenge from Bernie Sanders than anyone had anticipated in the primary only to go down in defeat (thanks in part to party defections on the part of disgruntled Sanders supporters, but more importantly to a surge in non-voters fed up with the process) to the right faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump in November.  The Democratic response was to blame Russia.  When that didn't work as expected, impeachment was tried. But as historically has happened whenever Democrats get their ass kicked by history, the ultimate effect of Trump's win was both an unhinged Trump derangement and the typical rightward lurch in an effort to court wayward suburbanites (something that seems guaranteed to happen when Republicans win, not Democrats, belying the theory of third party purity voting on the left).  

The result in 2020 was Joe Biden, whom Obama strongarmed into the winner slot of the democratic nomination when the unimpeded progress of actual primary voters was strongly favoring a Bernie Sanders victory after several of the early primaries and caucuses.  An early clue to how things might go could have been discerned from the trajectory of a number of candidates, several of whom, after beginnings more reflective of the desires of younger Democratically leaning voters were shepherded rightward by mysterious forces over the pre-primary debate season.  Among them was Kamala Harris -- a rookie Senator with a problematic history as a California DA-- who had made her name by tough challenging of Brett Kavanaugh in his beer and tear soaked Senate hearings as Supreme Court nominee (he went on to be confirmed anyway) who had started her 2020 campaign in favor of Medicare for All, even through a first debate that many thought she won by making points at the expense of Joe Biden.  With the faint whiff of the possibility of front runner status, she immediately started equivocating on how universal her universal healthcare would be, an indication of a readiness to sacrifice principles for ambition that probably contributed to the disintegration of her campaign before the first primary vote was cast-- and that likewise recommended her to be selected as Biden's running mate at the convention.   Although conventional wisdom insisted the increasingly doddering Biden was the best Democrat to challenge Trump, the truth was he was the most acceptable to forces in the Democratic party that did not want to test polls that consistently showed Bernie beating Trump in the General.  Having secured the nomination with the coordinated cooperation of the field of 2020 also-rans, the Biden campaign's strategy was heavily oriented toward suburban centrist voters, but Trump's mishandling of the COVID crisis may have destined him for a single term no matter who was at the top of the Democratic ticket.  In 2020, more came to the polls to cancel the Trump show than to renew it for another season.

In spite of the recycled feeling of a Biden presidency and an insistence on the part of the old guard that it was Biden's neoliberal staleness that voters wanted, all signs seem to indicate that the order that Biden represents is done.  In spite of a plenitude of the expected and promised deafness to those outside of the Beltway establishment (his role in encouraging Ukraine to scuttle peace talks early on and instead pursue a military victory over Putin's invasion in the spring of 2022 and his support of Israel's genocide in Gaza being prime cases-in-point) his own presidency especially in terms of domestic policy reflected the change in the air in a stealth under the radar quasi Rooseveltian agenda that his lifetime in politics could hardly have predicted.  But while neoliberalism is experiencing death rattles that make Biden appear practically sprightly by comparison, its tentacles on the order of things refuse to let go.  This is how we got here,  with party and media elites turning a blind eye to Biden visibly "missing a step" (to be charitable) in order to prolong the farce of his re-election bid until it could no longer be ignored.  And this is why, it could no longer be taken for granted that the defeat of the threat of Trump with his demonstrated knack for gaming the anti-neoliberal tide required a steady course into a second Biden term.  And lastly this is why we can look for signs to indicate whether Biden's chosen replacement, his VP Kamala Harris, would be a last gasp of a dying order, the midwife of a new age or just an incompetent flop and we are not likely to get an answer in the 100 days we have left before the General Election. Especially if she has upped her campaigning game since 2019.  We can dread.  We can hope.  We can wait and see.

You can't expect electoral democracy to fix itself.  It won't happen.  So while we await the sortition revolution, you have to take what you can get and make the best of it.  

I Spoke Too Soon

What a month we're having.  At the start of it, we were coping with Biden's reveal during the democratic debate late last month of what everyone knew but dared not say about his fitness for re-election, the president's decrepitude overshadowing his opponent's unhinged string of lies.  After a week of watching the incumbent flail in several public fora in an effort to clear the low bar of demonstrating a modicum of remaining competence for politicking even in the face of a mounting movement within the upper echelons of the Democratic party (and the media) to urge him to step aside, it was beginning to look from my humble vantage (and to my great disappointment) like he might have weathered the storm.  To make matters worse, amid Biden's feeble but firm protestations against calls for him to end his campaign, last weekend we were treated to the spectacle of Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt with a mere nick to his ear and a killer iconographic moment.  It seemed as if all hope was lost in any effort to defeat Trump in November-- a rather bleak state of affairs given the rising specter of the very autocratic, gains-cancelling Project 2025 threatening to be instantiated on Day 1 of Trump's increasingly assured re-election among its emboldened architects at the precious interest Heritage Foundation.  I had resigned myself to bearing witness to a slow motion car crash  between now and November as Biden made daily assurances that he would resist any and every call for him to step aside.  

Daily headlines indicating that the end was near for Biden rang increasingly hollow.  It wasn't until  Obama telegraphed that he might be onboard with a different name at the top of the ticket that it felt at last like the appearance of a fracture in the wall of Biden's defenses.  After one final report of the incumbent's intention to defy the riptide of discontent with his continued bid for re-election among the elite, at long last the news came today-- it was true.  He was stepping aside from the campaign.  He had endorsed the nomination of his Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the ticket.  Thank the void at the center of the universe!

After a year of my own discontent with Biden's bid for re-election, it has been a little de-moralizing rooting for the orchestrations of the idiotic donors, media and other elites who saw nothing wrong with Biden standing for another term throughout an entire primary season in which serious challenges within the party were ignored when they weren't actively quashed, until that debate in which the problems that everyone knew were there could no longer be ignored.  When Bernie Sanders and the squad alone urged caution in switching out the winner of the primary mid-stream, it gave me extra pause.   And as a result of  acknowledgement of the particular perils of Project 2025 especially in light of the uncertainties about whether Biden would be replaced and if so who with, I found myself making arguments that came uncomfortably close to "Vote Blue No Matter Who."  If I search within myself, they were identical.  My plan this week was in fact to make another case against Third Party voting-- something that might have been easier had I not attempted to prepare myself for it by listening to some conversations online to the contrary that reminded me that if nothing else (and there really is nothing else that third parties are good for in this unfortunate winner take all system), at least they are proving grounds for policies and programs the best of which  often eventually find their way into the platforms of the duopoly-- never by themselves, but always ministered by those aiming to change the mooshiest party from within. 

It would be easy to beat myself up about the strange bedfellows I have fallen into company with in my desire to defeat Project 2025.  

But today, I dream and take a moment to rejoice.

Recent Developments

A series of unfortunate events:

Bernie Sanders Urges Joe Biden to Remain in the race - Weeks after Biden's disastrous debate performance, calls for his resignation from the ticket were coming from every quarter of the Democratic and Media establishments.  (From the Republican quarters, not so much.). While Biden himself and his organization gave no indication of any intention to comply with the elite consensus, representatives of a certain contingent of earnest resigned Biden voter kept showing up in public forums to complain about the machinations. It was true: every 3rd tier democratic operative you've never heard of and editorial board joined in on a chorus respectfully thanking Joe Biden for his service but raising intimations that perhaps it was time for him to pass the mantle to the next generation of Democrat (or better yet, younger) to a clamor.  In response to the commandeering of the ticket post primary season by a coterie of professional pols and pundits (and speaking on behalf of the bewildered stalwarts complaining of a need to stick not necessarily with Joe Biden as with the wisdom of primary voters), Bernie Sanders's appeal to leave things as voters think they left them this spring makes a populist kind of sense.  Biden's steadfast refusal to leave the ticket in any hands other than his own has for the time being caused some of the clamor to mute.  Still for about 10 minutes this weekend, before Joe put his foot down in Michigan and before the nasty incident at Trump's rally in Pennsylvania, I couldn't help but find myself daydreaming about the difference it would make in an otherwise dismal election year to have some new exciting juice replacing Biden's iron-poor blood at the top of the democratic ticket.  It didn't last.  It never does.

Trump Iconography Enhancement - I’m hoping the full account of what transpired in Pennsylvania this weekend comes out soon to militate the assured sympathy vote.  It’s almost a little too perfect.  How did just the ear get clipped with semi-automatic fire?  Lucky motherfucker?  Or did Jesus intervene? Suffice it to say the annoyance factor of campaign 2024 continues to pile on.*  (If Biden had left the ticket by now would Trump's ear be intact?)  Before the Trump incident, I watched a debate between Cenk Uygur and Allan Lichtman on whether Biden should drop out.  Lichtman (one of those perennial NPR and PBS consultant types) is the guy who developed 13 “keys” that he claims are more predictive than polls.  He’s predicted every election since 1980 except 2000 (for “excusable” reasons) — in 2016 he thought Trump would win the popular vote too; otherwise he’s been spot on.  Lichtman insists Biden’s keys favor him.  The two strongest of them for Biden this year are incumbency and an uncontested primary <easy... count to 10...> neither of which would transfer to Kamala Harris (or any other replacement) if Biden merely exits or is expelled from the race.  Lichtman is so beholden to his keys that he thinks the best way to replace Biden on the ticket would be for him to resign the presidency so that incumbency could transfer to Kamala through proper channels. Uygur has been predicting a Trump blowout for a long time—it’s why he ran for that brief moment back in winter—and he’s of course urging the dems to switch to somebody-- anybody-- whose brain is not half gone (to use Uygur’s words.)   And of course Biden doubled down on remaining the candidate.  For about 5 minutes this weekend, before all of that I was daydreaming about a shake-up in the dem ticket generating some deserved excitement as the only means of deterring a Trump victory.  I’m hopeless now.  I wonder if any of Lichtman’s keys got re-set by Trump’s propaganda windfall. 

Project 2025 Comes Out of the Closet -  Kevin Roberts, president of the anti-American Heritage Foundation, the main architect and steward of Project 2025 recently explained on Steve Bannon's podcast the high hopes that he and his cohort have for what a Trump re-election will mean: "...we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” I have 0 respect for Dems—nevertheless, it’s looking like it’s once again for the third election in a row either the Dems or Trump; and Project 2025 underlines for me which of those 2 has to win, whether the name on the ticket is Joe Biden or Howdy Doody.  (At least this is the panic I find myself in lately.)   I am less and less convinced that my panic is a) typical and 2) necessarily warranted, as I realize I might be more panicked than necessary due to problems of personality, intellectual shortcoming and character in myself that are exceptionally egregious.  But as of today I can’t see myself, given the incredibly flawed system we have, not voting against Trump, which I equate with voting Dem.  I also think, and could be wrong but I’m feeling more and more like the way to stick it to the duopoly (this duopoly, the American anti-democratic system of elite maintenance of itself) is really to commandeer one and or both of the parties and force them to bend correctly to the people’s will.  This strikes me as a more realistic and productive way to fritter our time until the sortition revolution than offering a third party as a landing (and dying) place for the votes of the malcontented.

J.D. Vance for Vice- Trump is officially nominated and has named former hillbilly, Trump skeptic/explainer, and venture capitalist J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Vance is a horrible muppet of Peter Thiele, but in light of everything else this has the impact of a grain of sand thrown into an abyss.

Do you count 8 of Lichtman's keys that apply to Biden in his present state v Trump?  I don't. Even if you grant that Dems did not allow a contentious primary, a primary is a rather arbitrary time frame.  There is contention now for Biden's removal from the ticket.

 

~~~~~

* Do any of those insisting there is no place in this country for political violence read history?  Is history trying to tell us something?

Waking to a nightmare

 Four years ago, at this exact stage of the 2020 election cycle, Joe Biden was ahead of Donald Trump in national polls by 9 percentage points.  His worst polling in July 2020 had him 4 points up.   This year, in a year of bad polling news, Biden is 3 points behind Trump -- a point of comparison adding extra concern for Democrats in light of Biden's abysmal debate performance of a couple of weeks ago.*   It's easy for Dems to tell themselves the bad polling and Biden's debate performance are related-- it's a good story that reflects less poorly on Dems for supposedly not seeing it coming (if you can believe that they did not see it coming for 4 years and weren't furiously crossing their fingers that it wouldn't blow up before November).  The truth is that the  truism peddled by Democratic operatives that Joe Biden was the only candidate who could beat Trump in 2020 and would be the only who could do so in 2024 was a lie that the faithful losing faith were proffered to hang their last remaining willingness to believe on.  The lie has been inconveniently exposed by the incumbent himself.  Joe Biden has failed upward his entire career.  A serial plagiarist, liar, constituent glommer, bald-faced donor pleasurer,  unilateral bi-partisan hack and perpetual also-ran for decades, I fully expected him to stick with his pattern of self-implosion in the 2020 primary season-- an outcome that seemed assured until Barack Obama stepped in after a string of Biden losses in the early states and strong-armed the competition to step aside for his former veep.  To my eyes, Biden was already creaky and leaky by that point, so it did not surprise me that he chose the strategy of remaining out of view of the electorate throughout the spring and summer.  And I thought then that surely the Biden self-own was coming.  But instead COVID happened and Trump, who could have used the excuse of his essential outsider status to become a hero and vanquish COVID while keeping people well and housed and taken care of, screwed it up so badly that Biden actually crept by him in the general (Trump's post-election fabrications to the contrary).  

Well it seems that for his grand finale, Biden has opted for an epic return to form.  As for the Dems now crawling over each other to urge Biden to step aside from the re-election campaign he already sealed the nomination for, what do you make of a party that enables a plainly deteriorated candidate to complete a charade of a primary in utter silence only to let the candidate twist in the wind in front of a nationwide audience,  and only then to clamor for someone else at the top of their ticket?  Were they asleep before?  Are they bullshitting us now?  Why would anyone trust this sleeping bullshitting party that has only one goal (to defeat Trump) and no plan to carry it out?  

This is not to let the media off the hook.  (Including many of the left alt media).  I don't have the stomach to actually watch the circus except when compelled by morbid curiosity (and was mercifully mostly unable to avail myself of a television to even catch a glimpse by accident on my recent vacation).  But my spidey sense is that the panic has permeated the class.  I just think it’s the most disingenuous panic I’ve ever seen. More like they’ve been meaning to do something about this but couldn’t get their shit together until no one could deny there was a problem.  This ranks with some of my worst fuckups from adolescence.

The sad truth is, the near universal goal of democratic voters to defeat Trump is at this late stage both the single most important thing that nose-holding democratic voters can hope for from this party, and a critically imperiled possibility thanks to the chronic Beta-nature of professional Democrats.

In an alternate universe, Joe Biden voluntarily steps aside soon in some dignified fashion and is replaced by-- it almost doesn't matter who or by what process-- let's say a strong and sturdy hatrack.  Instead of coasting through the remainder of the campaign with eyes covered and letting the chips fall  where they may (as surely Biden himself could just as easily still manage), the message becomes "Vote Hatrack for Economic Security; for investment in Planet saving technology; for universal freedom of choice to parent or not and the means to enable it; for peace in Ukraine and in Gaza and more peace in general in the world;  a fix to a broken political system and judiciary; and an invitation to Americans and American well-wishers the world over to help re-shape the direction of the country to ensure a better future for all." thus ensuring a resounding victory in November and the start of a brand new Hatrack era come January.

In this universe, anyone who has been informed of the fascistic chaos that Trump and his enablers have planned instead in the event Biden loses four months from now, must come to grips with the stark reality that Trump cannot win.  This is not alarmism-- we have seen it coming for years.  The European surprises of the past weekend in the UK and France (and also in Iran) bucking the global trend of illiberal fascistic nationalism would seem to give some hope for November in the US.  But the US is not the UK or France.  Coalitions of the left are not possible.  As luxurious as third party voting is, saying that it is not recommended except in the most certainly bluest or reddest states is to my mind saying third party voting is a rather frivolous and pointless luxury we can't afford in any state (given our current entrenched and stupid winner take all duopoly).  Instead, we need to elect whoever is not Trump in November and if we are serious about change, start immediately to build the solidarity on the left to push whoever is at the top of what comes next toward the world we are all trying to build.  That message you want to send to the duopoly by voting for Jill Stein in Flea Butt, Idaho on some Tuesday in November is a fart in the wind compared to the message we can send together shoulder to shoulder in the street with one of those spineless Democrats in the White House.  

We tried to tell you when it was not too late.  It's too late.

~~~~~

* Figures the day I go on vacation.