thanksralph

A New Friend Turned Me On to an Old Favorite

By in thanksralph No Comments

While searching for a completely different topic, I somehow happened across this variation on an old theme:

In the 2000 Florida election, Ralph Nader received 97,488 votes, while Al Gore lost the state (and, therefore, the presidency) by 537 votes to Mr. Bush. For many Democrats here on DKos that is all they need to know. Nader cost Gore the election.

But to stop there and decide that nothing else matters is to also leave the “reality-based community” label behind, because there are many other numbers that also matter.

I’ve made many of the exact same arguments myself over the years, usually for naught. Good times, good times. One more thing I would add: if you paid attention to left/Green media in those days — and I did — you would have absorbed a consistent message: if you live in a battleground state, play it safe and vote for Gore, but if you live in a safe state, go ahead and vote for Nader (and there was even this scheme in an attempt to get the best of both worlds). Obviously, no one thought Nader had a chance to win the election. The goal was merely to win 5% of the national vote, which would allow the Green party to qualify for federal funds in the next election. In other words, exactly the sort of incremental, long-term, strategic planning that mainstream Democrats are always insisting idealistic third-partiers need to practice. Not that it saved them from entering Democratic lore as the archetype of treason.

Time for Looking Forward

By in media/propaganda, thanksralph, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Since I took rather violent exception to a couple of posts by Digby last week, it’s only right that I should acknowledge that she has taken pains to explain herself much more clearly.

The first would be through protest votes for a third party that resulted in Republican victory. (There is virtually no chance that any third party will ever gain real power short of a fundamental change in the way we elect our representatives, so protest is all it will be.) It’s been done before. And if you can live with the idea of voting in a Republican party in the thrall of extremists that make Bush and Cheney look like Rockefeller Republicans, I suppose that might be the way to go. I won’t judge you, but I am personally unwilling to put the world through any more of this failed right wing experiment at the moment.

Ain’t got no major problem with that. And it seems clear that in her original post on this topic, she conflated the “cynics” she was attacking with the Nader supporters that TBogg was specifically attacking in the post of his that she enthusiastically linked to. I suspect she probably had bloggers like IOZ in mind, given his relentless needling of her, but didn’t want to name anyone in particular. Me, I think it should pretty easy to ignore that sort of jeering if you want, unless your conscience is telling you there’s a good deal of truth in what he’s saying. Looks like the strain of trying to keep the faith in the Democratic party is wearing on her. But anyway, best of luck to her in trying to do that. I’ll also say, with no sarcasm at all, that it would probably be easier to do that if she’d stop trying to reconcile the reality she sees with the rose-colored history she seems determined to hang onto.

There’s still the issue of how exactly you expect your party to not take you for granted when you take every opportunity to assure them you’re too terrified of the possibility of Republicans returning to power to even consider being unfaithful with your vote. Millions of evangelicals stayed at home in 2000 because of the news of Bush’s drunk driving arrest decades earlier; you guys can’t at least convincingly threaten to do the same over all the shit Democrats have handed you? If you’re not willing to make some basic demands and walk away when they’re not being met or at least taken seriously, you are not going to be respected or considered. This is just common sense and a basic understanding of human psychology; why does it seem so foreign of a concept here? Perhaps because of rhetoric like: “extremists that make Bush and Cheney look like Rockefeller Republicans”.

See? Once again, the fearmongering starts ramping up. Yes, I know, we were dead certain that the last group was going to start World War 3, cancel the 2008 elections and declare Cheney Dictator-for-Life, but this time…! Take…a…deep…breath and say it out loud: the country will survive Republicans in power again. Rinse and repeat. The country has been through a civil war, an actual civil war, and come out intact; I think it can handle most things short of nuclear war (and let us not forget which charismatic, young, intellectual Democrat got us closer than any other president to an actual nuclear exchange). Bargaining is much easier when you’re not hyperventilating.

I’ll say here that I’ve always voted for Democrats as well when I have voted, but I don’t begrudge anyone else feeling like they have to stick to their idealistic principles. I push back against thanksralph!ery because one, it’s flat-out incorrect to blame him for Bush getting elected in 2000; and two, it’s bullying, plain and simple. When you ignore several other, larger, more worthy targets of your anger in order to go after a smaller, weaker one, it says a lot about your own weakness. It’s misplaced aggression, a sign that you’ve internalized your own lesser standing and are now just looking to make yourself feel better by kicking someone even lower than yourself. It’s ironic to see how quickly all that “stupid, dirty, pothead hippie” rhetoric comes into play when respectable suburban liberals want to start bashing Greens and Nader supporters, especially given how these same people never get tired of preciously calling themselves “dirty fucking hippies”. And yeah, ask any kid who grew up with an Angry Dad Who Knows What’s Best For You, So Listen Up, Goddamnit — how often did that attitude inspire respect and deference?

I once asked a thanksralph!er why they blamed the 90-odd thousand Nader voters in Florida – who, by definition, were not Democrats – for costing them the election while studiously ignoring the 200,000 Democrats who crossed over to vote for Bush. The answer: those were Democrats In Name Only and old Dixiecrats who had never bothered to change their party affiliation, but since most of the Nader supporters were lefties, they should have been willing to support the Democrats (and they were obligated to even if they didn’t want to). Apparently, conservative Democrats have irreconcilable differences with the party and aren’t worth bothering with, but extremely liberal Democrats, Greens and independents are just spoiled brats who need a lecture and a spanking.

Got that? Democrats aren’t really Democrats. Which people really are Democrats, though? The people who aren’t Democrats. Even Zen Buddhists would throw up their hands in despair over a koan like that.

I remember in 2004, when the whole pwoggiesphere spent months and months obsessing over Nader running again, spewing all the venom and vitriol they could at him and anyone thinking of supporting him again. Of course, he had no discernible effect upon that election, but still, more than 50% of the population didn’t bother to vote. You’d think, if the pwoggies had even a glimmer of self-awareness, they’d have taken away the lesson that their time might have been better spent trying to convince some apathetic non-voters to give it a shot rather than preaching to the choir and trying to extirpate all the heretics, but you would be wrong. Here we are again, with the emphasis being placed on trying to scare people to death over the possibility of Republicans in power, rather than stress the positive accomplishments of the past year that might persuade people to actively support the Democrats.

Oh, wait…

Don’t Mourn, Organize!

By in thanksralph, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

For all of you who wrote emails to excoriate me for my earlier post about the endless whining over the broken system, I really, really need for you all to read Noam Chomsky and then come back and we’ll talk.

– Digby, hastily backpedaling

You keep invoking that man’s name. I don’t think you know what it means.

No, really, I have read all his political books, and I read his talks and essays on his website all the time too. So what do you want to talk about?

Let’s start here. See if you can detect a, um, slight difference in tone:

Pick up your muskets, kids, or STFU.

– Digby

Grow the fuck up.

– TBogg, approvingly cited by Digby

Grow up.

– Matt Yglesias

Matt, bubby, it’s “grow the fuck up.”

– Sir Charles

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

– Noam Chomsky

Well! One of those, at least, was refreshingly reasonable and mature, even accepting of the idea that other people might not see it his way.

That man has been involved in politics longer than any of you, faced more hopeless struggles and setbacks (including the possibility of severe jail time for protesting the Vietnam war), and invested more time and energy worldwide into causes we all hold dear, even as mainstream liberals – much like yourselves – have done their best to piss all over him for the last several decades in order to make themselves look more appealing. And as far as I’m aware, he’s done it without ever condescendingly treating people like immature and unrealistic little kids who need some authority figure to take them by the ear and beat them into understanding what’s best for them. I mean, hey, you’re the savvy “realists” here; you go right ahead with this can’t-miss strategy of insulting and guilt-tripping people into the voting booth when they refuse to buy into your fearmongering Armageddon scenarios. That is, unless you want to do some hard, thankless work and invest countless hours into repeating the same patient encouragement to an endless line of people who are disheartened, demoralized and looking to vent about it.

Like he has. For decades.

What? You thought it would be easy or something? Really, all it takes is some grumbling from readers and the possibility of midterm election setbacks to make you folks go bug-eyed and start foaming at the mouth? Weak, man, very weak. Maybe you guys should just stick to pet pictures and dick jokes.

What precipitated my post is an intense impatience with this endless, cynical posturing about how everything’s rigged and there’s no point in anything. That’s fine if you think that, plenty of people do, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why you aren’t watching a sporting event or playing a video game instead of commenting on a political blog. The only thing I can assume is that you want to bully people who still give a damn and that’s just jackass behavior.

Blink. Blink. You know, one could suggest that the thanksralph!ers, the people who never pass up a chance to bash actual leftists while stroking themselves silly for being “dirty fucking hippies” (even if they are suburban-dwelling professionals driving their SUVs to Starbucks), the people who devote their time to preemptively blaming anything bad that happens politically for the next decade on insufficient enthusiasm for Democrats, and other sundry apologist assholes who have jettisoned every last bit of idealism, are actually the ones guilty of bullying people who “still give a damn”. And again, maybe those cynical complainers are just venting their frustration, since they know their elected officials don’t give a bouncing fuck what they think.

Sure, sometimes political compromise has worked for the best, and sometimes what looked worthless at first turned into something better over time. By the same token, however, sometimes it’s been the fanatics and the idealists who refused to sit down and shut up who made things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Thanksralph!

By in augean stables, extraordinary popular delusions, ohferfucksake, thanksralph No Comments

I’ve never been much of a fan of August Pollak. I would occasionally follow links to his site from Tom Tomorrow, but didn’t find anything compelling enough to make me a regular reader. But I was pointed to this cartoon the other day, which has gotten a rise out of me.

Not being a regular reader, at first I thought this was actually a funny jab at the herds of obsessive N8r H8rz who will never let go of their favorite counterfactual history story. I guess it counts as a little extra humorous irony to realize that no, Pollak himself is one of those assholes who was so eager to make Joe Lieberman the vice president, and he’s being completely serious here. His first cartoon of the Obama presidency is one more sneer at Nader voters from eight years ago. His first cartoon of this oh-so-historical epoch of hope ‘n’ change is one more cheap shot aimed at settling the score with heretics who dared deviate from the Democratic party line eight years ago.

I know this issue has long since entered the mythic stage – mythic, in the sense that it’s not about facts, it’s a story that gives meaning to people and explains their position in the big scheme of things. As always, people like to put themselves at the reasonable center of things, with the “extremists” on either side of them – or, as America’s greatest philosopher George Carlin pithily summed up in a vehicular analogy, everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. But still, it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to grasp a few things:

Of all the actors that influenced the outcome of the 2000 election, Nader played one of the smallest roles. You could just as easily single out a dozen other things that, taken individually, could reasonably be credited/blamed for that result. First and foremost, you could actually blame the people who stole the fucking election – you know, the Republicans who staged fake voter riots made up of campaign staffers to attempt to give an impression of a public opposed to the recount, the people who illegally purged thousands of black voters from the rolls in Florida, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, and the Bush family buddies on the Supreme Court.

You could, à la Bob Somerby, attack the media for their catty high school-like treatment of Gore, and for their portrayal of him as the sore loser, the spoilsport who needed to step aside for the good of the nation. Or you could even criticize Gore’s own weak campaign, his halfhearted feints towards populism, and his inability to win his own state of Tennessee.

You could blame the 200,000 registered Democrats in Florida who voted for George W. Bush rather than the 97,000 Greens who voted for Nader. How is it that a party so feeble and inept as to not even be able to count on the support of its own fucking registered members has the chutzpah to act entitled to the votes of people who don’t even identify as Democrats? On that note, instead of taking as an article of faith that those Greens would have voted for Gore otherwise, you could try thinking for a few moments before realizing that most likely, they just wouldn’t have voted at all. They were probably only voting in the first place because of Nader being on the ballot, given that they saw the system as a hollow fraud representing the two wings of the Big Business party (and man, haven’t Congressional Dems like Nancy “Impeachment is off the table” Pelosi and Harry “Give ’em head” Reid done so much to prove that theory false these past few years. I suppose the party’s systemic windsock behavior is Ralph’s fault, too.)

Speaking of non-voters, you could blame the 60% of the electorate who didn’t bother to vote at all, especially since it’s more than fair to assume that out of such a huge number, there had to be enough people in there who were perfectly fine with the idea of four-to-eight more years of the same policies, but just didn’t bother to get off the sofa. But no, that might smack of “elitism”, and nothing scares the party built on vapid DLC marketing slogans, p.r. and compulsive focus group polling more than the thought of being judged condescending towards the consumers. Forget I said anything so crazy.

What cracks me up the most is how this endless obsession with berating Greens suggests a fundamental insecurity among these kind of heresiologists. They’re apparently aware that their party has an image as a 98 lb. weakling that would rather attack its own base than fight back hard against Republicans, but rather than address that and actually give people a reason to be proud of belonging to it, they rely on the “lesser of two evils” mentality to carry the day while simply enforcing orthodoxy and trying to hector and guilt-trip the actual left wing of the party into supporting it.