Are you excited about the ELECTION? What a silly question! Of course you are. Of course you are not. You are compelled to reluctantly pay attention as it festers on like an increasingly disconcerting mole, whose asymmetry hints that while it might not be yugely fatal yet, it almost certainly will be later. And so onward we trudge through what would be a laughably overlong affair if it weren’t merely a painful one by now.
We’ve long since left the “fun” period of the election when it’s still early enough that the fringe candidates are still in it, and we can all have a laugh as the Hermann Cains of the world quote the Pokemon theme song in their concession speech, or as the Rick Perrys take a break from the field of candidates and step outside into the fields of Texas to denounce the creeping influence of the gays who threaten our Christian family values, unlike good Baptists like Josh Duggar.
[This ad takes on an even more surreal quality when you realize that Rick Perry is wearing the exact same jacket as Heath Ledger’s character from Brokeback Mountain. Don’t mess with Texas! They’ll co-opt your wardrobe for homophobia.]
It was still safe to laugh because you knew that the Ben Carsons were never going to win, they were just sideshows until the finalists came along. They were still removed enough from office that they weren’t really a threat. But this year, the problem is that the fringe candidate is still in it even though the hour is late, so we’ve been treated to an entire litany of crazy mistakes that would have ended the candidacy of anyone but Teflon Trump. Suddenly, the depressing reality sinks in that one of these two remaining candidates will inevitably be president.
“But wait!” you say. “One of only two candidates? There’s a third way! Have you heard of Gary Jo-“
Yes, we have. Nobody is interested apart from the roughly 10% of voters who would rather throw their vote onto the bonfire of their own vanity for the sake of feeling smugly superior when everything else burns down with it. “Don’t blame me for WW3! I voted for Gary Johnson!“
One wonders what the overlap is between protest voters interested in being part of Johnson/Stein’s shared 12% support and the roughly 65% of voters who never make it to the polls for midterms.
[Of course, the point of the clip is to denounce “lesser of two evils” thinking in a structurally broken system where candidates are fundamentally the same. But these candidates are not the same by a long shot. It makes you long for a time when people could more easily think that about their choices, when they wisely voted for George W. Bush instead of Al Gore because they thought there was no meaningful difference between the two. History has clearly validated that idea, as all those polar bears living on ice caps and all those thriving Iraqi citizens can attest.]
But don’t worry, there might only be two real candidates, but there is a third way: Obviously you should do nothing, let your efficacy wither in service to defeatism, renounce the process as rigged anyway maaaaannnnn, and abdicate all responsibility by staying home when it’s time to vote. You are a Democrat, after all.
It’s true that a lot of voters are swallowing a bitter pill right now. Bernie Sanders ran a great campaign against all odds, and most of his supporters deserve the respect afforded to people who have the courage of their convictions and the drive to contribute so fervently to a necessary political cause. Sanders’ supporters are also not given the dues they deserve for coming back into the Democratic fold, as 90% of them are doing, to their eternal credit.
But if you are in the remaining 10%, those die-hard and disaffected Bernie fans who reject their medicine, especially after your high emotional investment has returned only a bitter dividend of disillusionment, perhaps there is little left to do but go online and vent at the most obvious target: Little kids!
Yikes
It is into this angry and wounded emotional/political environment that the governor of Washington State, Jay Inslee, posted an innocuous photo of his granddaughter wearing a nice shirt that reads “Future President.” It’s just a sweet family photo of a nice little kid. (I will not reproduce it here since I am uncomfortable hosting pictures of people who do not consent to it, much less children.) Inslee comments, “I’m thrilled my granddaughter now lives in a world where she knows she can do or be anything — even President.”
If you’re a regular human being, it’s a nice and uncontroversial sentiment. It’s cool that young American girls might finally grow up taking it as self-evident that women can be presidents too, regardless of how you might feel about Hillary Clinton. There’s a dark sort of masochistic schadenfreude in reading the highly appropriate comments that the picture provoked in some Bernie Bros. Imagine that you are the governor of a major state, and every day, you wake up to go to work for people who say things like this:
And on and on.
Remember as you read this that each comment comes from grown adults responding to a grandfather’s pride in his family.
What that third comment even means is unclear, but it certainly isn’t something I’d say in response to “look at how hopeful my grandchild looks!” The commenter in blue seems to making the argument that one of the most liberal Democratic governors in the country has failed to endorse Sanders, and therefore should be removed from office for being insufficiently liberal.
A common response to literally anything Jay Inslee posts is that his status as a superdelegate is undemocratic and undermines the popular will, despite the fact that at that point [honestly it was like 3 months ago, I’m very slow], the ghost of Sanders’ campaign was predicated entirely upon convincing superdelegates to back him instead of Clinton, even though she led him in the popular vote by about three million people. So which is it? Are superdelegates a crime against democracy, or a necessary part of Sanders’ ascension to high office? It can’t be both. But we’re not here for critical thought, we’re here to yell at a man for loving his grandchild.
Just goes to show what a sellout you are. How? By supporting a woman for president? A woman who is surely going to achieve his own party’s nomination [hey, that happened since I started writing this too!], instead of the guy who wasn’t even a Democrat? What did you expect a member of the Democratic Party to do? Let’s dispel this notion that Inslee has to vote a certain way as a superdelegate. He’s not bound by the popular vote. That’s the whole point of a superdelegate.
Of course you don’t have to like superdelegates. Most people don’t. But if you’re going to criticize them for existing, you should know what they are for, at least. If the Republicans had possessed the foresight to install a similar failsafe into their primaries, perhaps we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of Donald Trump’s all too frightening candidacy today.
If you cannot see the symbolic and inspirational value of a woman being president, regardless of the woman, then I don’t know what to tell you. If your cynicism has grown so toxic and large that it has consumed your empathy, that you cannot find something innately positive in pictures like this and the reactions like it, then there is a bigger structural problem between your brain and your emotional capability than there will ever be between superdelegates and democracy.
Between Disappointment and Disillusionment
I would just like to conclude with this screenshot from the Bernie Sanders subreddit. “SandersForPresident” deserves mention for how much passion they managed to funnel into meaningful political action like voter registration, which is exactly what people need to be doing. It is not my intention to mock the well-meaning desires of politically passionate citizens who are committed to being involved with the political process. These people had good ideas and they deserve all the credit in the world for helping others to register, pushing for their preferred policies, and showing up to caucuses (which Sanders tended to win because his supporters would actually stay there for hours and hours to make their voices heard.)
For others, at a certain point you need to ask yourself if your buy-in has rendered you immune to reality, as clearly happened with this exchange following Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton. Naturally, some users suspected more sinister motivations than party unity, speculating that the Clintons were threatening Bernie’s family if he failed to endorse her:
If you think that Sanders only gave up the fight because he was afraid of getting whacked, you are well outside the mainstream of political discourse or sanity. Skepticism is fine. Cynicism is not. It sucks to lose. It sucks more to lose your soul to conspiracy theories because reality is tough. Let’s be sensible here.
AND VOTE FOR JILL STEIN!!!!!!!!
God, I’m kidding.
The Arrogance of Ignorance 