Return to Gone Away

Still too early, but there may be one in my future....

I'm not (yet) a supporter of Beto (I did support him in his Senate campaign), because I'd still rather see him run against Cornyn and take the Senate seat, where I think he'd do more good as one vote among 100, than a non-vote in the White House.

Unless he can pull an LBJ; but I don't expect that.

I'm still more liberal/progressive/radical/what-have-you in my politics than anyone I know.  I'm against prisons, period.  I'm for complete equality and equity by leveling downward (first of all will be last and servant of all, after all), etc., etc., etc.  I mean that stuff.  I believe it.  I think it sound, wise, the best basis for human society, period.  It is the vision that draws the nations to the holy mountain of Isaiah so they won't study war no more (a slap at Solomon the weapons merchant, but don't get me started).

But I'm also tired of all-or-nothing politics.  I don't blame Trump for that; I blame Newt Gingrich.  Or maybe the people so disappointed by Barry Goldwater they decided to burn it all down, and it just took them 50 years to get close enough to doing it.

Will Mitch McConnell quit the Senate in disgust and despair?  I've seen the punditry on that; I put it in the same category as Ivanka/Jared/Melania are actually appalled by Donald, not supportive of him.  Wishful thinking, in other words.  Every time you think he and/or the GOP Senate can't to any lower, they get out the shovels, and show no concern with doing so.  If McConnell is concerned, it's with the fact Trump is more popular than he is in Kentucky.

Dese are de conditions dat prevail.

Personally, I'm more aligned with Warren or Sanders than anybody else.  I'm probably well to the left of both of them.  I also know my positions, or theirs, would never survive contact with governmental reality, and wouldn't move the country leftward by the experience of them in office, but quite the opposite.  LBJ, after all, got Medicare passed.  Now even Medicare for all is considered too radical for much of America.  People conditioned by 5 decades of GOP propaganda want to keep government out of their Medicare; they don't want everyone else to enjoy it.  We aren't told Social Security can be fixed easily by taxing the rich (a small increase, not one designed to drive them all off-shore), we are told it is doomed to fail and start planning to do without it now.  We don't see those two programs as socialism at work; we see socialism as the thing that ruined Venezuela, or that Millenials embrace because they've been so screwed by student debt and not enough white collar jobs (the despair of the Depression redux, in other words; and capitalism unleashed will once again save us).

LBJ gave us PBS, and now we've choked it down so tightly it has to spend as much time fundraising as it does broadcasting, just to have enough money to buy some more shows from the BBC.  LBJ gave us the space program successes that we don't want to pay for anymore.  LBJ gave us highway beautification; we want more billboards.  LBJ gave us improved education standards; now the solution lurking in the wings is to scrap public education in favor of "charter" schools and publicly funded private schools.  LBJ inspired us to educate everyone; now we want to "teach to the test."

Tell me again that this time, a liberal firebrand in the White House will inspire the nation to pursue the angels of our better nature and bring about the Millennium we were promised when Kennedy was leading us all into Camelot.

Will a Democrat be better than a Republican in the White House?  To be sure, so long as we break this cycle of electing a President from one party, a Congress from the other.  Didn't anybody notice the GOP took over Congress when Trump was elected?  That was no accident, and it wasn't the idea everyone voted for.  Everybody and his uncle expected Hillary to win, but didn't want her to have Congress do.  Divided government works, donchaknow?  It works to keep government out of your Medicare and from investing your Social Security in the stock market (as well as not expanding the former or raising taxes on the rich to fund the latter).  America voted for divided government 3 years ago, and then got what they didn't think they'd voted for, because how could a fool like Trump win?  Last November America went for divided government again; a divided Congress that couldn't mess with Trump too much, but also that wouldn't let Trump continue to be the enfant terrible that 70 year old man is.

And a Warren or Sanders in the bully pulpit is going to do what?  And is not going to get a Congress watched over by Mitch McConnell, or worse?

Which, I know, is not much reason to vote for Beto; it's not much reason to vote at all.  President Donald Trump is the reason to vote at all; not voting is what got us into this national, even international, mess.  We have a president who sounds like the President of Venezuela, except the latter blames the U.S. for his failures, and the former blames CNN and the Democrats.  We don't need another conspiratorial lunatic in the White House.

But neither do we need to believe a savior will arise and save us from ourselves.  As somebody pointed out, the last time a Presidential candidate lost a major political race (I think it was for the Senate) and then rose to enter the White House, that candidate was Abraham Lincoln.  So it could turn out well; it could turn out poorly.  Lincoln was not the anti-slavery avatar we might wish today he was.  He simply wasn't, by the standards of his day, that radical.

Maybe radical is a good idea in theory, not that good an idea in practice.  Or maybe I'm just too Niebuhrian for my own good.