#99 - Nihilism isn't an excuse to let democracy die

Megan Hunt, a representative in the Nebraska state house who successfully filibustered anti-trans legislation this year, has left the Democratic party.

“The parties are not the future,” Hunt told the Lincoln Journal Star. “The political dysfunction is extreme and at the national level, the parties are ideologically bankrupt.”

And uh, she’s right!

I can’t describe the sinking feeling I got while watching the “I’m on Team Biden/Harris” video other than: oh, we’re really not going to get a primary. We’re not even going to be told our other options, we’re going to be pummeled into the “vote blue no matter who” pipeline with incredible efficiency this time around.

My friend and I have been kicking around J.B. Pritzker running for President because he’s a billionaire who’s making some real popular policy decisions as the Governor of Illinois, and, most importantly, you can do a really great fancam set to the SZA SNL parody song “Big Boy” which is my only prerequisite for running for office as a democratic dude these days. (Fun fact, I have had to get over my weird personal associations with J.B. because the conman who ruined me and my friends’ lives when we were 21 convinced us that J.B. was his father—a detail that certainly seemed outlandish but was unconfirmable via Pritzker’s Wikipedia at the time. Anyway, I know J.B. doesn’t know about any of that, but I wonder what his thoughts on the whole mess would be!) But then, even he popped up in the video which starts off with the heavy-hitters from the 2016/2020 cycle so we know immediately we’re not getting Corey “Sweet Vegan Treats” Booker or Elizabeth “The Mommies and the Daddies” Warren back on the ballot. Do I think either of them made perfect candidates? No! But I think they do a good job pushing Ol’ (not ageism without the d!) Joe to the left and I need him to swing left at least a little bit.

Presidential elections usually follow a specific type of formula: appeal to the base, swing moderate once the primary has been secured.

But the Democrats are kind of maybe a little too loudly saying that they could give a fuck about their base. Their base doesn’t pay their bills, their donors do babeeeeyyyy! And they won’t pass incredibly popular public policy because then they would have to figure out something else to fundraise/run on the next election cycle and isn’t it just so much easier to continue to hold the bodily autonomy and rights over half the populations heads in order to spur us into a vote?

Like, I’ve bitten my tongue for a while, because of course I will be voting for whoever is running against Trump in the election. Of course I will. What other option am I being left with?

But don’t Democrats like…want to do something? All this talk of Feinstein’s “legacy” and it’s like well, where is it? Is the non-tarnished legacy in the room with us right now? The platforming of her experience of the harrowing assassinations in San Fransisco’s City Hall has been integral to her political ascension, yet her track record on gun control in the last two decades is startlingly unimpressive. Maybe when the massacre you witness becomes part of the stump speech, its more radical and urgent edges are sanded away. I hope that’s not true, but I also don’t have any other explanation for her lack of urgency to do something about guns during her stint in office. She was elected to the senate in 1992, so she’s been in the senate the same amount of time I’ve been alive for. It just feels like the legacy has had plenty of time to be written, and maybe longevity shouldn’t be valued over impact.

Also, her legacy was forever tarnished when she dismissed the climate activist children who came to her office asking her to get on board with the Green New Deal. She was too aware of the optics of the moment to appreciate that the next generation was there, was involved, and was still under the impression that their senator from the state of California gave a shit about the impending climate crisis, which will disproportionately affect the state they live in!!!

California, the largest state in the union, deserves two fully functioning, present in-the-chamber senators. It’s…something that she showed up to work again this week, but it took an incredible amount of public pressure to get her there and that pressure was derided from the second it occurred as sexist because that’s a narrative that is apparently harder for the left to spin?? But it’s not sexist to demand that someone do their job effectively! Honestly reports from her staff sure make it seem like that’s who is really running the show these days. And those fuckers weren’t the ones elected!! (Also, George Santos’s staff should be barred from politics forever along with him, they know he’s a grifter and they enabled his bullshit and I just think when you’ve displayed a complete lack of a moral compass you don’t get to get another staffing job on the hill! Yes I understand half the reps lean into their debased nature but we can and should be better than them!)

It’s honestly just fucking wild to see the discourse. “Oh we’re only calling on her to resign because she’s a woman!” I mean, here’s the thing, that’s not an incorrect statement. We are reticent to admit it, but the evidence of just how much we as a society hate women is everpresent. But sometimes I wonder if women are actually being held to the correct standards because we’re willing to critique them. Comparing her treatment to Chuck Grassley’s doesn’t make me want to keep Feinstein around, it makes me want Grassley’s ass outta the Senate too!!

The Senate is already a deeply undemocratic body. California has a state population of 39 million people. They only get two senators despite having 78x the population of Wyoming (which is just above 500,000) who also get two senators. And since we put a cap on the State Reps in the House, there is nowhere that California’s interests are actually upheld to the degree they should be there either. But in the Senate, to be down to just one person for a state that large is unconscionable.

And because of the “incumbent bump” the party base urges these folks not to retire. There’s also an incredible amount of money to be made, so why would they? There’s also actual approximation of power, the most addictive thing we have to offer humans (besides attention).

The same “bump” is the #1 reason Biden’s running again. It’s the thing poli-sci majors the world over will call me objectively silly for ignoring the power of.

But that bump is really more tied to name recognition than it is to the actual incumbency. We know this, we know that name recognition is the whole game, hence bumper stickers and yard signs. Do you know what convicted sexual abuser spent decades putting his name on every single building he ever built? He’s running again, so we should probably get some new tactics under our belts before we enter into round 2 of the world’s highest-stakes and yet somehow most boring boxing match of all time!!

Like of course if it comes down to the two of them, I’ll vote Biden. Of course. I’m not a monster, I’m not hoping for another 4 years of waking up and wondering “oh are we about to go full fascism?” in response to sadistic policies that are floated for the purposes of being cruel by an incompetent staff of white supremacists.

But where are the federal voter protection laws? Why has the only recent news cycle about the “election fraud” been a private company suing Fox News for reputational harm? Why was the January 6th committee determined to ruffle the fewest amount of feathers possible—oh, because it was headed by the nepo-baby daughter of one of the most corruptive Republican operatives in recent history? Oh and Merrick Garland’s advisor, Jamie Gorelick, is the same woman who has been at the center of corruption in American politics for over 30 years and somehow has her hand in 9/11 FBI & CIA communication breakdown, Fannie Mae’s $ 10 billion accounting scandal, BP oil spill coverup, and was mentored by Alan Dershowitz? It’s almost like the rot goes all the way down. It’s almost like Garland was never serious about rooting out corruption because it would have brought down those directly around him. Maybe even, himself!!

(And he only got the job because Garland was nommed by Obama in his final desperate attempt to make the Republicans (who weren’t performing their civic duties) confirm one last no-one-has-a-problem-with-this-moderate-nominee judge! It’s almost like we continue to blame a woman (RBG) for the court leaning so hard to the right these days when Mitch McConnell is RIGHT THERE to foist the actual blame onto! So Garland never got his hearing, thus he’s got elevated to this weird woobie status because I think we’re trying to right the slight or something but honestly, he’s a fucking terrible AG and a perfect illustration of this administration’s silly determination to not “rock the boat”. But they also fail to acknowledge that the water the boat is floating in is becoming more toxic by the second because they refuse to remove DeJoy from his bullshit role as Postmaster General despite him owning a private USPS competitor and blatantly trying to tank the mail service in this country like less than three years ago.)

I’m really not trying to be a curmudgeon, or cause despair. I think that there’s power in knowing (and I am, in fact, the first and only person to ever say that!) and I think that politics is often a “fuck that seems bad but oh well what can I do” kind of institution.

But it matters. It directly matters. And it sucks to feel like the only thing we can do is vote—because it’s actually not possible to out-organize voter suppression, and sometimes the people of Arizona rally behind a promising candidate who gets elected to the Senate and betrays them more and more each and every day! But if you can vote, you must vote. And you truly must vote for people who actually show up and do their jobs and don’t treat politics as a vanity project. Which means doing research and caring about every local election and showing up to school board meetings because the other side is organizing and they are showing up to ban books and sometimes all it takes to reverse course is by being present and showing that our side has numbers too.

The New York Democratic Party is in absolute shambles, and the guy in charge refuses to admit he did a bad job. But New York is the reason we lost The House. It’s tragic, but it’s simple. George Santos lied his entire election and the DNC couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger and share their oppositional research. And we’re so scared of conversation and losing the gubernatorial race that Hochul was allowed to float her way through the primary and, again, when it’s a Dem vs. Facist on the ballot I’ll vote Dem each and every time but my resentment is building because I’m aware they’re dangling me over the crocodile pit on purpose so that I’ll acquiesce my vote to their bullshit candidates.

Like, Hochul is a terrible governor. Her budget sucks, she’s corrupt and pretty blatant about it (looking at you $500 million taxpayer-funded Buffalo Bills stadium rebuild and $300 million investment into horse racetracks) (real Guys Girl (/derogatory) energy tbh!!!!). She was the Deputy Governor to Cuomo who was removed from office for sexual harassment, and look it’s not a woman’s fault if her boss is a skeeze, but he wasn’t her boss, he was her running mate. And maybe if she didn’t continue to surround herself with men who hate and harass women I would be willing to give her some grace, but tbh I think she’s a bad person who doesn’t care about other people and is in this for her own personal gain of money and attention! She’s the first woman to govern New York and I don’t even get to be a little bit in awe of the fact we finally got a woman into that position because she sucks and stepped on the backs/necks/heads of other women to get there!!!!

We see this corruption, we see the lack of interest in doing anything about it, we get disheartened and write the entire system off, the rot spreads, and it gets harder to convince people that this rotten twisted mess of a thing is worth protecting, worth investing any emotional energy in.

But it’s the most important thing we can do, and it’s so important to not get dissuaded by their tactics. They want us to look away, they want us to stop making connections, and they want us to just trust them.

The thing about politics in America is that right now, it’s for no one.

These are deeply serious times and yet when they finally focus on an issue, I truly can’t tell who these Representatives even think they’re appealing to.

I’m interested in the anti-trust laws that were broken in the merger of LiveNation and TicketMaster. I’m absolutely willing to watch a hearing and find out how the merger was even allowed in the first place, and what we’re doing to hold companies accountable for the lack of consumer protections.

But what I get for tuning in is a bunch of cringey ham-fisted Taylor Swift quotes being thrown around because everyone’s staff has advised them that it will help them ~go viral~ and like…no it won’t? At most, we got a supercut on some content farm twitter and rolled eyes in the replies.

Who is that for? Are they trying to appeal to Taylor Swift fans and mistakenly think they’re still 15 because millennials haven’t really aged in the public conscience? Like, ostensibly, I am who that’s for. I love Tayla and I’m politically motivated enough to tune in. But I hated it and so did everyone else I talked to because it was so transparently, uh, bad. It was lame!

It’s debasing to them as politicians and the seriousness of their message. I hope my governing bodies are populated with people (and staff) who are smarter than me and that is simply not how I’ve felt in years!

You know what works online? Authenticity.

Be a wonk policy nerd! Post a video every day outlining the options the Senate has for holding the Supreme Court accountable for the ever-piling corruption allegations and what your office is doing to move that forward. Be like, effective. I promise being good at your job will do more for public opinion than nailing the line reading of “we are never ever getting back together”!

We, the people, did what they told us to do. What they said they needed in order to help. We got them into the presidency, we got them the 50 seats in the Senate and guess what? They still can’t confirm judges as quickly as the Republicans were during their reign of terror becaaaaause Feinstein is on the committee and her vote is needed for moving the judges through the approval process!!! And we can’t even mention the broken filibuster because it’s faded so far from national conscience but we shouldn’t need a supermajority to move shit through in this country!

So like, voting can’t be the only solution and also we need a better-informed electorate who maybe sees it as part of their civic duty to do some research and find news sources that aren’t owned by Sinclair.

And it’s not fair, and the powers that be have done their best to make it impossible to escape the narratives that this IS our best option and progress is linear. Things aren’t better today politically than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Mostly because the corruption is being committed by the same fucking people because we haven’t held anyone accountable in decades so it’s just a big festering wound in America. And also, Citizens United.

They got rid of local papers on purpose, they’re trying to make the public as uninformed as possible. And when I start saying this shit I know you start to hear the sound of tinfoil being crinkled into a hat but I promise, they’re pretty blatant about their whole schtick. It’s not just the right that wants to keep the republic uninformed, the left has realized they benefit from a mass-deluded population as well. (Just not quite as well.)

And that pisses me off. And I refuse to fall for it. I will be an informed citizen and they can’t stop me!!!!

But the future that I see Republicans pushing towards is terrifying and beyond parody of retrograde. I’m genuinely terrified of what’s going to happen to public schools in the near future. The curriculum has been tanked, standardized testing is acknowledged as bullshit but remains as prevalent as ever, and now teachers are beyond hamstrung and I can’t blame any single one of them for quitting but it’s also very clear to me that this is a concentrated effort to decrease the number of teachers in such magnitude that there won’t be public schools full of teachers with degrees in their field soon. Like soon.

And when there are no teachers, what happens? The kids get put in auditoriums with “monitors” and attend virtual school on their laptops, an education that we know is subpar? Or, they get homeschooled? And that is uhhhhh variable in terms of efficacy!!

The homeschooling push in this country started in the 50s during the desegregation of public schools. A lot of the curriculums (and certainly the free ones) are created by evangelicals who encourage the large families in their churches to raise their children as soldiers of god and then those kids never receive a proper education but they do get to read the Bible for six hours a day and hey maybe the daughters get to learn but also maybe they just get to learn the bare minimum and then spend time learning “wifely duties” around the house. And that again sounds extreme, but a lot of them actually document it via family vlogs these days! We don’t need to watch the Jesus Camp documentary to find this shit out, they’re posting it themselves.

I honestly have a big problem with religious schools in general, what’s happening at a lot of the Yeshiva schools in New York City is appalling—children deserve an education, and denying them that is a violation of their human rights. Catholic schools too, g’bye! Private education is not the solution. Robust public policy that protects the most vulnerable students and therefore has resounding benefits for the rest of the students is!

And the rights of children do matter. I’m constantly haunted by a segment on WNYC from April 2020 where social workers from NYC schools talked about how they’re navigating working with children who were now stuck inside their abusive households. School is a safe haven for so many and the thought of it disappearing breaks my heart and honestly my brain a little bit—I just kind of assumed certain things weren’t up for discussion in modern society, like the fact that compulsory education is good and necessary and one of the massive tenants of human rights and especially women’s sovereignty.

I just think, actually no, I know there are more of us than there are of them. They know it too. That’s why they’re so scared.

That’s why they send thousands of cops in riot gear to peaceful protests.

I keep getting stuck on this idea that those who are corrupt think they’ve outsmarted the rest of us. Like they figured out the secret to winning the game and believe we’re all too naive to do the same. It’s very much the same idea as the tech bros who just can’t believe no one tried to purposefully bankrupt a living industry in order to exploit workers in a worse-but-app-based version of it that is unsustainable. Like, it’s not that people couldn’t figure out how to swindle millions from investors for a fake blood machine, it’s that we wouldn’t because that would be a waste of our time and other people’s resources.

I don’t want to “hack” life, I want to live it in a way that does as little harm to my community as possible because my definition of a life well lived is one that is deeply human. I do not want to forgo my humanity for money, actually!

I can’t take money with me, it’s a fake thing we’ve all agreed is real but its value is not even tied to rare minerals anymore so really it’s just become an excuse to play a fun party game where I challenge an economics professor to explain what money is in a single sentence.

Creating overly-complex “well you just don’t understand the ramifications of ending the stock exchange because that keeps this market stable blah blah blah” is weaponized competence. I simply do not care! Everyone should have housing. I don’t care if some developers make less money in the push to have that happen, everyone gets a house. Everyone. No exceptions! It’s actually that simple. Complicating it is just a way of obfuscating their desire to continue to exploit the corrupt systems they created. “Oh some people will get cheap homes who can afford to pay more—” good. Maybe they’ll use some of that money to buy goods and services from local businesses. As long as those who need them get them, I’m actually not worried about anyone else trying to exploit the system a little bit. They can have some exploitation of government-funded housing, as a treat.

Anyway, I’m not going to let CNN anchor/Vanderbilt Heir Anderson Cooper tell me I’m “siloing” myself by disagreeing with the network he makes millions from (which, he doesn’t need because his ancestors already exploited people’s labor enough for generations to come but he just loves being a celebrity guys it’s not his fault he’s addicted to attention!!!) for platforming a convicted rapist days after the conviction and allowing him to further denigrate the woman who survived. I don’t care that he was an illegitimate president who is running again because he’s literally a Russian Op. If anything, that in fact, makes it worse!

Anyway, I want the Democrats to do something, to prove to the general public that they’re not just hoping to slide through by being slightly less corrupt than their Republican counterparts. I want them out there, all the time, every day, committing to democracy because that’s what they promised us. And if they lied, I don’t want them in office. Oh, and I want a way for the public to hold referendums to remove public officials who do not functionally perform their jobs.

I don’t want people with ego’s running this country, I want incredibly generous community-oriented organizers who have a vested interest in continually solving problems rather than perpetuating them to satiate their donors.

And if “legacy” is standing in the way, we need mass ego death amongst the politicians. Because honestly, we’d have an easier time getting to the root of Clarence Thomas’s increasing corruption if we weren’t having to tiptoe around the fact that the current president was a direct factor in Thomas getting on the court in the first place. And it’s not an election year, but it’s close enough that we don’t want to remind anyone that Biden has a spotty history because we’re all agreeing to the mass delusion that he’s the “best candidate” we have. We didn’t even trot out the other options this time!!

I’m really not trying to be nihilistic and I really want to be a participant to the nth degree when it comes to progressive politics that make everyone’s lives easier. I don’t give a single shit about the profits of insurance companies. I truly don’t! Get rid of it. Give us blanket medicare. Give it!!! Please? Can we please have protections that enable us to afford to keep our bodies in decent shape without having that tied to a workplace so that bosses can use it as a bargaining chip to keep us fearful of being fired??

Feels like that’s what a functioning democracy has.

Anyway.

Really incredibly thankful today and every day for the teachers who show up to teach at public schools despite dealing with an upsettingly terrible combination of useless administrators and screen-addicted parents/children, thankful to all of the union organizers and members who bravely sign up and join, thankful for all of the activists who show up to protest and encourage their friends to come with them, thankful for the people who run in their local community elections, thankful for those who show up in any capacity because they know their presence matters and it will take coalition-based efforts to actually create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

And, for me, knowing that does mean doing things that are going to make me uncomfortable, it does mean getting better at communicating my point with folks who don’t agree with me, and it does mean a commitment to emotional discipline.

The other option, the stick-my-head-in-the-sand option seems easier, but ultimately will eat my soul SO not actually easier or even really an option.

I don’t want to complain, I want to make change. I want to link together all of the shit that feels wildly out of my control so I can parse who is actually deserving of my vitriol. And then I want to hurl them and their deregulatory asses into the sun!

The parties, these parties, are not the future. I think it’s going to be a wild ride while we find out what the new shape of the future looks like, but I think whatever is coming is inevitable because there’s too much suffering to allow this broken system to continue.

Articles Mentioned

Nebraska Sen. Megan Hunt ditches Democratic label, registers as nonpartisan - Lincoln Journal Star

Team Biden/Harris Video - Twitter

Running Out The Clock - Gaslit Nation Patreon Podcast

Sarah Kendzior Twitter Thread on Garland & Gorelick - Twitter (can’t recommend following Sarah on Twitter enough, also her books are incredible and I urge everyone to read They Knew!!)

New York Democratic Party Chair Takes No Responsibility - The Intercept

Hochul’s Ex-Adviser Has History of Sexual Harassment Complaints - New York Times

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money - New York Times

Anderson Cooper being a shill for CNN - Twitter