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Monday, January 25, 2016

Sorry To Upset You All

But, yes, I do support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders as the inevitably disappointing sociopath I hope to be to the left of for the next four to eight years in the White House.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how you will only support Hillary and wear blinders to her current and past corruption. And yes, I am a Demo but not a Marxist collectivist such as yourself.

Dale Carrico said...

Since I have repeatedly expressed my admiration for Sanders as a Senator and since I have repeatedly said I will both support and vote for Sanders if he is the eventual nominee -- though with great trepidation about his electability in an election the stakes of which are raised enormously both by the fragility of Obama's accomplishments and the present surreal debasement of the GOP field -- your statement that I *only* support Clinton is plainly wrong.

I do prefer Clinton as nominee. In this I am like millions of other Democrats who are impressed by Clinton's knowledge, experience, dedication to causes many Democrats hold dear, and who want a woman in the White House fighting in public ways to protect women's access to healthcare, equal pay for equal work, paid family leave, an exposure and end of rape culture, and an emphasis on the indispensability of supporting women and girls in the development of a flourishing planetary society.

Like Sanders I identify as someone on the social democratic to democratic socialist spectrum, and most construals of "Marxist collectivist" don't accurately convey my positions. I can't know exactly what you mean by that designation -- it is true that I advocate for universal healthcare, education, and income payed for by steeply progressive taxation and that I believe many key common and public goods should be administered by and for the public rather than for parochial profit-taking. I teach Marx in critical theory classes at the University level and I actually know what he said, after all.

Clinton is a competent and connected progressive pragmatist with a voting record not much less liberal than Sanders' own, and like the politics of the Democratic Party in general Clinton's politics have shifted leftward and I hope will continue to do so under pressure from organized movements from her left in which I, and perhaps you too, will participate. I am to her left as I am to the left of the country and to any electable president in my country, and I supported Obama over Clinton in 2008 as I would support a third Obama term over a first Clinton one now if that were an option. It is not-- or more to the point, a Clinton administration looks to me like the best defense of the legacy of the Obama administration available to us.

I can't say that I have been thrilled with everything Clinton has done in her career, and I was not a great fan of her husband's administration. Quite a lot of what is being called Clinton's "corruption" in the current silly season is patently idiotic nonsense from pampered narcissists whose purity politics play out in a symbolic field rather insulated from the real consequences in real lives of election defeats to white-supremacist patriarchal plutocrats in the GOP.

You are of course free to differ with my calculation as to the electability of the superannuated, grumpy, disheveled avowed socialist (all of which I am too) Sanders vis-a-vis Clinton in the America we actually live in, or the feasibility of his implementation of single payer healthcare and breakup of the big banks as head of a party he has never hitherto been a member of and almost all the super-delegates of which are not supporting him, with little prospect of majorities let alone super-majorities in congress, and a host of enormously powerful rich stakeholders he won't even talk to arrayed against him. Be all that as it may, I wish your candidate the best of luck, and disagree though we may, I daresay you need no longer at any rate be "amazed" that an intelligent committed person of the left disagrees with you on the matter of a partisan presidential election.

Anonymous said...

Nice discussion. Unfortunately, the FBI may soon be indicting Hillary. It will be interesting to see if attorney general Lynch will proceed against her. I am not a true Sanders supporter either. I have only wished that we Demos had come up with an alternative candidate like Warren. If the Demos somehow blow this election expect the Star Was galactic Trump empire to come after us all.

Dale Carrico said...

Hillary is always and never being indicted. Warren will be a big supporter of Hillary (or Sanders) and an ally of her administration. Agree with you that beating the unabashed white-supremacist patriarchal plutocratic theocratic gun-nut GOP is more important than ever. Come the general we all have work to do.

Unknown said...

I thought this was awesome when I found it and since I think I have heard that you have read Murray Bookchin.

http://murrayhatesbernie.tumblr.com/post/127378873094/murray-bookchin-the-bernie-sanders-paradox-when

I think this still applies to most of Bernie Sanders positions today. And like you said it is a choice between the best sociopaths.