Establishment policy operatives tell us that we ought to stick to the middle of the road anyway, because the candidates who hang out there "know how to govern." By which they mean: they have long been taken into the bosom of the system, they have proven themselves entirely willing to lease their souls to corporate donors, they have demonstrated their fealty to a system that values loyalty above any other virtue.
I am disturbed by the number of postings I've seen on Facebook and elsewhere in which erstwhile progressives say that Bernie Sanders is "unelectable" and urge their friends to support Hillary Clinton because she knows how to play the game. This is such a self-fulfilling disaster: what makes Bernie appear unelectable is the number of people who say they would vote for him on the merit of his positions, but having absorbed the distorted notion of reality that shapes our money-driven elections, have decided that the merit of his positions should take second place to a very strange criterion, comfort and coziness with a corrupt, broken system.
They come up with rationales that are predictions rather than observations grounded in experience. For instance, the idea that Sanders can't win with voters of color, and that Clinton's policies have endeared her to those same voters. Listen to Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, in a recent podcast interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick. (The segment with Garza starts at about 26 minutes in.)
Garza talks about the Clintons' role in setting this country on a course of mass incarceration, pursuing "this very robust agenda around criminalizing black people"(by) passing and championing this landmark 'three strikes' legislation, which actually incarcerated more black people than at any other time in history; and they also did something that was overwhelming, which was to dismantle state supports for families to be able to thrive, or just at the very least, survive." She condemns Hillary Clinton's evasion, defensiveness, and dismissiveness in response to the question of why she changed her mind.
"I definitely plan to vote," said Alicia Garza. "I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I'm not voting for any Republicans".I do think it's troubling that we do something in this country, that we go, 'if you don't vote for the appointed ones, everything is going to go to hell.' That's not actually true. What is true, certainly, is that there are multiple things that it's important for us to make decisions about, and the President is one". But I also want to be clear that for black people in this country, to demand allegiance to a candidate that has deliberately lessened their quality of life is irresponsible."
None of the candidates is perfect. Indeed, as soon as you take a step back, the whole idea of electing a single individual to govern, of the sort of symbolic monarch the President has become, seems ridiculous. Whomever becomes President is instantly embedded in a mass of advisors and pressure-groups, making the most important question not who a candidate appears to be, but to whom that individual listens and is beholden. This time, there's a clear choice.
So long as our electoral system is imprisoned by money, the voices of "realism" will exhort us to support a candidate who knows how to please the possessors of entrenched economic privilege--the same people who overwhelmingly possess the racial and gender privilege that for them makes playing the system a winning game.
I lived through Reagan and have been fortunate enough to live into a time in which social action for equity and justice have once again arisen. But I dread the prospect of living into the farce that history will become if we don't think for ourselves. At the turn of the year, as I asked friends to say how they felt at the prospect of 2016, despite the formidable obstacles we face, every one of them took heart from the impressive and growing movements for climate justice, racial justice, gender justice, and more. So do I. But I'm still worried. As different as today's politics are from 35 years ago, our situation in some ways resembles the period before Reagan's election: a robust and diverse progressive movement, and an unabashedly right-wing candidate who seems too much of a joke to believe.
We have an opportunity. The challenge is not to mistake for reality the propaganda of a deeply sick system that cares more for its own perpetuation than for justice, for equity, for the well-being of the people. There are two ways to be lulled asleep this time around: believing the lullaby of the system, that realism requires us to support a candidate who has already helped to establish policies that lessened our national quality of life; and failing to heed the warning of history repeating itself.
Here are two Seventies stars, the late David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, in isolated a capella tracks from a song they cowrote, "Under Pressure."(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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