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Cult Of Personality

If you are reading this, your mind immediately went to Trump and his supporters when you read the title. And yes, Trump supporters are suffering from advanced stage Cult Of Personality Disorder (or COPD) but so is just about everyone else, and it must stop. You will never, ever form rational opinions or be able to truly protect your own self interests as long as you’re susceptible to being COPDed.

Why is this on my mind? Well, it’s always on my mind but a large volume of the tweets I’ve been seeing on Twitter for the past couple of days have really highlighted the problem for me.

A couple of days ago, TMZ reported that Michael Avenatti was arrested for felony domestic violence on his ex-wife. Now I didn’t know what to think, except that I did notice that the story was light on details and that I needed more to form an opinion. We knew that Avenatti was arrested, that he bonded out, and that he vehemently denied the allegations (who wouldn’t?). Yesterday, his ex-wife came out and said that she wasn’t involved in the incident and that he had never abused her. We also found out that he wasn’t charged with a felony. So some of the story is starting to fall apart, but he was arrested so something happened. Whether that something is just an allegation or an actual crime, we don’t know. People were really fucking quick to decide that he was either being set up, or a wife beating maniac. None of those people had any more information than I did. They were all projecting the opinions they had already formed about Avenatti on this situation to create a reality that would comport with the narrative they’d already established about him.

I have to confess that it was easy for me to have no opinion on the reporting, and to want to wait for more evidence because I’m conflicted about Avenatti as it is. I freaking loved watching him throw around Trump and Michael Cohen around like rag dolls when he first entered the public sphere. He’s clearly very intelligent, and an extremely skilled attorney. And then he started to do that whole, “I’m thinking about running for president” and “the next democratic nominee needs to be a white male” crap and I realized that he’s a time bomb ticking away, destined to blow up. He’s really fucking arrogant, and entirely too cocksure about his righteousness not to implode. So I didn’t feel any sore of irrational emotional attachment to Avenatti one way or another to come to a premature conclusion about what actually happened. I’ve said this a million times, but I’m not prone to see public figures in that way.

That said, I’m still slightly susceptible to being COPDed. Slightly. When news came out about Eric Schneiderman’s history of violence with women, I was sorely disappointed. I didn’t want it to be true, but I was still in the wait-for-the-facts camp. They did come out, and I was very saddened by what I learned about him. He was one of the best AGs New York ever had. But I accepted the truth and wholeheartedly embraced the calls for his resignation.

Michael Avenatti is not your daddy. He’s also not your abusive step dad. There’s no fucking reason in the world not to wait and see what we learn. And you can all wait a few weeks for your gratification or disappointment. There’s no reason to form an opinion now. Doing so, just makes you a child. And is makes you no better than a Trump supporter.

The same thing is happening with Nancy Pelosi. Before the election, it wasn’t acceptable to criticize her because “we need to stay united until the election”. This is not the right time to talk about another speaker of the house. Now that the election is over, this same twits have made her out to be the only savior of the democratic party. She is our great leader, and she is the only person who can do this job. And if you don’t agree, it’s because of misogyny. Well, some of us want a different speaker, and we’re not misogynists. We actually have excellent reasons for wanting someone whose priorities better align with the wishes of the constituents.

When Democrats took the house in 2008, did you know anyone who didn’t want investigations into the fuckery of the George W Bush administration? I mean, those motherfuckers took us into war by lying to us. They outed a CIA agent, and did a myriad of other things that expanded the scope of executive power far beyond what the constitution lays out. Republicans gave Bush the power to essentially declare war without congressional approval, for fuck’s sake. That had to be reined in to save our democracy. But no, Nancy didn’t want to look back because anything that happened in the past isn’t a crime, and we can only look ahead. Well guess what? The path ahead was exponentially more terrifying because you didn’t want to look back. President Obama enjoyed the powers that the previous administration gave him, and he didn’t always use them wisely. That’s a different discussion. My point is that she made a huge mistake that irreparably fucked our democracy.

“But she passed the ACA, and that makes her a goddess!” She did. I’ll give her that. She fought for a better bill than what Obama and his then Chief Of Staff was willing to fight for. But precisely no one in America was clamoring for the ACA. In fact, the majority of Americans wanted (and still do) single payer (or Medicare for all). In poll after poll, Americans want either the option of buying into Medicare or straight up Medicare for all. But Nancy took that off the table before negotiations even began. So we ended up with a fakakta version of Switzerland’s (the second most expensive in the world, after the US) health care system except where the Swiss cap “administrative” costs for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies at 5%, we went with a much more generous 20%. Twenty percent. Administrative costs are all of the costs that aren’t directly spent on delivering health care. They include marketing, profits, and lavish executive salaries. Medicare’s administrative costs are 4%. And unlike in Switzerland, the ACA didn’t cap profits for medical device companies or big pharma. In fact, it extended the time that drug companies can keep their drugs (which we subsidize the development of) under patent for 50% longer than they could before.

The ACA was a fakakta plan that was better than the shit show we had before. And with precisely the same number of republican votes, we could have gotten Medicare for all. At the very least, if democrats had opened negotiations with Medicare for all, we could have gotten something more robust than the ACA. But Nancy couldn’t do that because she had to protect the corporate donors.

She is very good at being Speaker. She knows how to whip votes, and she never brings a vote to the floor that she isn’t going to win. That makes her exponentially more competent than Chuck Schumer, who couldn’t even keep his caucus in line when it came to appointing a rapey, beer loving boofer to the Supreme Court. But her agenda does not support my self interests so I don’t support her.

I don’t have to make her the devil or an angel to have my opinion. She’s both very competent in the job of speaker, and very bad for me in that position. So I would be willing on taking a chance at someone who might not be as good at the job, but whose agenda doesn’t include bullshit like pay-go, which hurts me personally.

In making decisions like an adult, you have to look at all of the evidence before you (or wait for it all to come in) and then weigh the pros and cons. You do not delete the cons and overstate the pros (or vice versa) to make it easier on yourself. When that is your practice, you’re most definitely going to fall into the cult of personality disorder trap and it doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you fall.

You can’t accuse Trumpistas of doing exactly what you’re doing.

FDR committed one of the most abhorrent atrocities in US history when he interned the Japanese and he single handedly created the middle class in America by being a traitor to his class. You have to acknowledge both of these things when deciding how you feel about him as a president. I have my thoughts, and I’m happy to have an intellectually honest discussion about him and a myriad of different people and topics.

I’m just despondent over the fact that Americans aren’t capable of this anymore. I know it’s not easy not to fall for a cult of personality, but we have to try harder.

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This Is Not Winning

I feel despondent this morning. I know that a lot of people are celebrating because democrats took the house, but they shouldn’t be. Democrats barely took back the house in an election where they should have picked up between 30 – 60 seats. If you’re a democrat, you should be panicking right now because last night does not bode well for 2020 or for the future of the democratic party. Democrats only “flipped” two republican districts last night. Every other “flip” wasn’t a flip. They were all republican districts where Hillary won in 2016. They were already ‘Never Trump’ districts. In two horrid years of cruelty, hatred, lies, and corruption, Trump lost virtually no support. Contrast yesterday’s election to 2010 when democrats lost sixty-three house seats. Right because obviously, giving more Americans access to health care is more abhorrent than ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers. This is not winning.

I know you think I’m nuts right now but hear me out because the last time I felt panic, I was right (you need to read that piece). I despair because last night was a disaster that perfectly followed the disastrous arc of the past twenty-five years. This is it in a nutshell: for democrats to win, they must run the most charismatic, accomplished and likeable people on earth (literally). Republicans win with complete garbage candidates. They don’t need to be smart, likeable, or accomplished. Democrats only win when they put forth people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, in addition to being preternaturally charismatic, rose out of single mom households (among other disadvantages) to ascent to the most powerful position in the world. Republicans run trust fund babies who have failed at everything they’ve ever done in their lives, and who have literally spent no time preparing themselves for a job as important as President Of The United States and they win.

Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. There couldn’t possibly be a bigger chasm in the quality of these candidates. Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis. Same thing. There’s no comparing these people on intellect, accomplishment, and quality of character. And yet in both cases, the shit rose to the top. I know it’s easy to say, “Well, it’s Texas” or “it’s Florida” but that’s bullshit and that kind of thinking isn’t going to help solve the problem. The demographics in both states should equal democratic victories and yet, Florida is going the other way.

Instead of flippantly writing off states like Texas and Florida as hopeless, you should be asking yourself why so many people aren’t showing up to vote. Yes, the Latino populations in both states showed up in much bigger numbers than in the past but they didn’t show up in enough numbers. Why? Why, in the era of Trump did that happen? He literally has a gun pointed at the head of every brown or brown adjacent person in the country. Poor white people continue to get poorer, and they continue to be the largest demographic entering the poverty class. So why aren’t these people showing up?

If you’re answering that question with flippant derision for the non-voters, you’re not correctly assessing the problem and will therefore never fix it. Some people don’t vote because they simply can’t do it. They work, and they just can’t make it happen without losing money they desperately need. A bigger (I believe much bigger) block of people don’t vote because they genuinely believe that their bottom line is unaffected by who wins. Those people are largely not wrong.

If you’re reading this, you’re much more engaged in politics than the vast majority of Americans. I want you to try and unknow what you know for a minute. Put yourself in the position of someone who lives paycheck to paycheck and whose time is consumed by the challenge of feeding their kids. That person is making significantly less money than they were thirty years ago since the cost of milk has risen and their wages have been steadily going down. There is simply no time to study political platforms and ballot initiatives, and none of that stuff has made a positive difference in thirty years anyway.

My father was a blue collar immigrant who supported my family solely on his income until about the mid 80s. We came to this country in the early 70s with no money, and my father bought our four bedroom house in an upper middle class neighborhood in the bay area for around $25,000. He was a chef so he worked twelve hour days, six days a week. Does anyone think it would be possible for a non-college grad to work enough hours to support a middle class family on one income today? Do you think that that a college grad can support a middle class family on one income today?

That’s just not a world that we live in anymore. The opportunities are shrinking and people are working harder than they have since the (first) robber baron era of our history. And it doesn’t much matter which party is in charge. 85% of Obama’s recovery went to the top 1%. Does that sound like a situation that would inspire struggling Americans to take time out of their days and lose money to show up and vote for more of that? Yes, democrats gave us the ACA but that was only ever going to impact a maximum of 10% of Americans. Compared to Social Security or Medicare, the ACA was breadcrumbs for the working class. And frankly, it came after Bill Clinton completely fucked welfare so I’m not sure this was much of a net gain for the working poor.

You can put on your partisan blinders and disagree with that all day long, but that isn’t going to change the fact that nearly half of eligible voters didn’t show up yesterday. In an election where the stakes are higher than they ever have been in my lifetime, nearly half of voters were no-shows. In a time of unprecedented cheating, lying, stealing, and hatred, half of Americans couldn’t be fucked to show up.

You can blame them, or you can think about why this happened and how to fix it. You can celebrate a hollow, non-victory and pretend that everything will be fine in 2020, or you can see the reality of the situation: last night was not a good night for democrats and it lined up with twenty-five bad years for democrats. The quarter-century downward trend was not broken yesterday.

This trend will not change as long as democrats talk about being for the working class while taking money from charter schools, AIPAC, and big pharma. Throwing pebbles at a tidal wave of policies that are crushing the working class to slow it down is not good enough anymore, and it never will be again.

I am not an emotional person when it comes to politics. I’m actually not emotional in general. I possess that classic combination of high IQ and low EQ so I’m generally not as emotional as most people. I’m particularly unemotional politically. So when I supported Bernie in the 2016 primaries, I didn’t feel like he was my daddy and I didn’t let how the DNC treated him effect my objective of protecting my own self interest in the general election. I vociferously advocated for Hillary when I needed to. So when I say that a virulent strain of Berniecratism is what the democratic party needs to survive, I say so objectively.

Here’s where many of you get angry and unfollow me because you don’t want to hear it. I would hope that you would instead engage in a respectful discussion with me, but if your opinions are so fragile that they can’t be exposed to differing opinions then by all means, keep doing what you’re doing. But if you enjoy having your opinions challenged because that’s how you form solid opinions, then read on and discuss!

Bernie took 43% of the votes in the democratic primary, when he wasn’t even really running in earnest until after the Iowa caucus had happened. He did it by putting together a broad coalition of support from independents, conservatives and liberals. I’m sorry, “Never Bernie” people, but his supporters were never Hillary’s to begin with. Your ire should be directed at all of the Obama voters who either didn’t show up to vote, or voted for Trump because they were on your “team” at some point in time and now they’re not. Hillary wasn’t the first democrat to lose PA since 1989 because of Bernie or because of Putin. She lost PA because she wasn’t speaking to the issues of the working class and because despite Obama’s rhetoric, he didn’t deliver for them.

Trump was obviously completely fucking full of shit, but he was speaking to working class. That’s just a fact. And full-of-shit republicans are always going to beat corporatist democrats. Wanna know why? Because of Orwell’s ‘two minutes of hate’. Republicans aren’t afraid to literally tear this country apart with bullshit wedge issues to win elections. This is a tactic that has worked since the beginning of time, and will work as long as the last two humans on earth exist. So unless democrats are willing to sell out Americans and point to a group of people to hate, they’re not going to build the kind of coalition they need to win elections.

100% of all of the democratic presidential hopefuls for 2020 have expressed support for Medicare for all. Hillary wouldn’t go there in 2016. She was for “universal healthcare” which is a nebulous term that can mean any number of different (some bad) ideas. Every democratic presidential hopeful is talking about a $15 minimum wage. All of them. Hillary had to be pushed into going up to $12. Democrats know that Bernie’s way is a winning strategy. I’m just not sure that they know that they need to be authentic about it. You cannot be an authentic populist if you’re beholden to any corporate interest. It’s just not going to work, unless you’re willing to prop yourself up on a ‘2 minutes of hate’ base.

Democrats are in deep trouble, and Nancy Pelosi’s pay go agenda is not going to hold the majority of the seats that democrats won last night. Democrats largely won in republican “never Trump” districts. In other words, these were traditionally republican districts where Hillary won because Trump was a bridge too far. When Trump is gone, we should all expect those districts to come home to the GOP unless democrats start doing something meaningful for the working class.

I’m sorry to be the downer today, but I really feel a high level of despair for where we’re headed. Nothing about what happened last night makes me optimistic about the future of this country. You would be wise to join me in my concern.

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