Friday, November 11, 2016

If you didn't vote for Clinton: A step-by-step guide

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I imagine there are some people who are already trying to come to grips with the fact that by failing to vote for Hillary Clinton they helped make Donald Trump our president-elect. As it becomes brutally clear what a mistake this was, their numbers will grow. In a spirit of kindness and friendship, I would like to offer some practical suggestions to those nonvoters/third party voters/supporters of write-in candidates who, unlike Trump voters proper, may have some residual capacity for shame, and might even nurse the secret desire of someday doing something for the good of the world that might begin to make up for the death, madness and horror they helped unleash.

1. Lie. No one needs to know the truth about who you voted for. People who know will never look at you the same way again. Every time a journalist is assassinated, every time another hundred thousand jobs are lost, every time the coffins land at Andrews from a war that started due to a Twitter beef, people will remember you helped make it happen.

So lie. As of today, you supported Clinton, you voting for her, despite whatever misgivings you may have had. Learn that story and stick to it. This is not dishonesty but a necessary social fib. Telling people you voted for Jill Stein is the political equivalent of telling your spouse that their ass looks fat. If you want to do something good in this world and maybe start to dab at the dogshit that is smeared across your soul (never to be expunged completely), you will have to cooperate with decent people to achieve anything. Decent people will never trust you if they know what you are. Take the secret to your grave.


2. Don’t try to explain yourself. So maybe you’ve already spilled the beans, and lying is no longer an option. People know what you did. You’ve started to see the little stiffness that comes into your friends’ manner when politics comes up when you’re around. You’ve crossed the point of no return, but there are still things you can do to limit the damage. Chief among them is to keep your rationalizations and excuses to yourself.

3. Seriously, whatever you do, don’t try to explain yourself. Don’t whine about Bernie, don’t complain about Clinton’s e-mails or whatever other non-scandal you used to justify infecting our democracy with the human equivalent of tertiary syphilis. (Hey, remember when he ran a fake charity and used it to buy a $25,000 portrait of himself? That man will be the president. You built that!)

Newsflash: No one cares. No one cares why you enabled a man who talks about American Muslims in 2016 with the same language Nazis used about Jews in 1936.

Remember Star Wars? Remember Darth Vader? What a great character! Remember when George Lucas thought we wanted three movies about how this guy went from an annoying child to a whiny emo bitch to a child-killer? Yeah, how he got that way was never the point. Normal people don’t give a shit why you sided with evil. You did, and nothing you can say will make that better. Just. Stop. Talking.

4. Do not try and play both sides of the street. I would not believed it had I not seen it myself, but there are some people so deranged that they will brag about how terrible Trump will be and the part they played in bringing him to power, and then complain that the democrats did, or didn’t do something or nothing to lose his support and that of others like him (him because let’s be real here, it’s a him.)

Pick a lane. If electing Trump is a bad thing, it is a bad thing you helped bring to pass, and you with direct responsibility for the outcome have no business lecturing the people who voted the right way about what they might have done to gain your support. This is the moral equivalent of a pedophile publishing a guide for six-year-old girls on what not to wear.

5. Do not try to create a moral distinction between you and the people who voted for Trump, based on the fact that you merely did not vote against him. No one cares about the difference between the bank robber who shoots the teller and the one driving the getaway car. If you want to open up a space between you and the people cursing Muslims in the street and assaulting Jews, there is one and only one way to do so;

5. Say you’re sorry. Just that. Say you’re sorry. You were a fool; you made a terrible mistake; now you want to work, humbly, alongside the people who made the right choice, to fight Trump, the GOP, and inbred bigots in general.

I know that some of you are still deep into the process of rationalizing what you’ve done and you may still think you can justify yourselves somehow. Time will ultimately bring many of you to a realization that no justification is possible, only a frank unqualified apology and humble hard work. If that seems unappealing to you, remember #1 and lie for all you're worth. Good luck.


7 comments:

  1. I am from Germany and I am a mostly rational person and would have voted Clinton in a swing state, thus I did not load myself with your blame. That being said, your post is too one-sided.

    The DNC should have made a better offer. People are not only rational. Do you know the ultimatum game? People are willing to punish unfair behavior at a cost to themselves.

    A complete analysis of what produced Trump includes the establishment Democrats. They are already pushing Tim Kaine as their next leaders. He would quite likely lose again. The corporate donor of the Democrats would be fine with that, they all bribe the Republicans as well.

    The people now in power of the DNC benefited from the corrupt system, that got them were they are. They will not fight to end the corruption. If the corruption continues, Trump may very well continue, if the donors give enough to the Trump organization to keep his policies somewhat economically sane.

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    1. Your response, which is a common one, is an effort to find good and rational reasons for what has happened, anchored in a desire for reform and improvement (and implicitly a more committed leftism) which you probably favored before the election and probably would still have recommended if Clinton had won the electoral college (despite purging hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls, restricting voting hours and sites, and acts of fraud like the "vote by text" scandal, Trump still lost the popular vote.)

      It won't wash. The DNC is not "corrupt," it's political. It does the normal things that political parties do. It favors insiders. It tries to push forward candidates it thinks will win. Like all institutions in America, rich white people have disproportionate influence. None of those things constitute "corruption."

      Donald Trump, in contrast, is VASTLY corrupt. He is soon to be tried for the "Trump University" fraud. Hundreds of contractors and employees have come forward to report he fraudulently contracted for their services and refused to pay. He runs a "charity" that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to still lawsuits against him and his businesses.

      Leaving aside the hypocrisy of all this, if "corruption" had really cost the democrats votes, Trump should have lost in a landslide. Obviously this didn't happen.

      There may or may not be good ideas for reform encompassed in your vague indictment of the "corrupt system." You'd have to be more specific. But please, don't try and give them a little extra weight at the cost of rationalizing election of an incompetent, narcissistic, ignorant, bigoted serial sexual assaulting, tax evading grifter. Trump was elected because hate triumphed over decency, racism and fear triumphed over diversity and optimism.

      When you evade that moral truth, you normalize the horror that has been unleashed by the world, when what we need is clarity and conviction for the fight ahead.

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  2. May main point was: voter blaming is only one side of the argument (and not one that wins elections).

    If you lash out like this against people who agree with you that it would have been better to vote for Clinton, as if I nearly support Trump, you will not have many friends left to vote for your establishment candidate next time. You will lose again and again and again. Just like the donors would like the Democrats to lose because the Republicans are more corrupt and more profitable.

    One of the big problems of selecting Clinton was that Democrats who normally see the influence of money as a bad thing, start pretending it is normal to defend their candidate who raised 3 billion $ together with Bill. It is not normal. It was not like this decades ago, before a string of bad SCOTUS decisions, it is not not like this in Europe. The US used to be a democracy, Europe is still mostly a democracy.

    The corruption is not just getting money and then doing what the donor wants. Pay for play. There are examples of that in the Clinton emails, even if any Republican would have worse examples in their emails. The main problem is that the donors decide who runs, who wins. Without their support on every step of the political ladder you do not get to the top. Thus you do not need pay to play, most politicians do what the corporations want because that is what they think is best and they got ahead because they think that is best.

    Yes, Trump was much worse and will be much worse when it comes to corruption. But he campaigned against it. Yes, Trump will increase inequality, but he campaigned pretending to be for the working man. The Clinton campaign hardly pushed back.

    Trump got the normal amount of Republican voters. It would be nice to see in the exit polls whether these are the people that also last time voted Republican, but I would think so.

    What was different is that many people who voted for Obama did not show up. They did not believe that Clinton would fight for them. She made it clear that the lefties should fall in line and shut up. That is partially bad campaigning because she did much more on offer and did shift the DNC platform, but she got mad when asked what she would offer Sanders voters. And that is partially because people are more aware this election that money in US politics is universal acid. Feel free to blame evil Sanders, but once people have recognized the pattern and understand why American politics does not work for them, but only for the billionaires, they will not become ignorant again soon.

    If you want to call most of the Democratic base and maybe even country leftists, that explains why you support the historically unpopular Democrat candidate. Read some polls on the political preferences of the American people. Especially the young people are almost European in spite of the corporate propaganda that surrounds them. Fortunately they do not watch much TV any more.

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  3. Believe me I see the Trump problem, that is why I wrote a blog post explaining why progressives better vote Clinton, that is why the Climate Etc.' comments thought my last post on Trump was "despondent".

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  4. Rather than one-side blaming lefties/voters, you can also think of the media. As a Clinton person you may see Krugman as reliable source.

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  5. It's not about blame. There's plenty of that to go around, starting with the bigoted scum who voted for Trump, very much including the media, although contra to your views, the one group I cannot find it in me to blame is Clinton and her campaign. They did a fine job, by any objective standard. They were scandal-free, if you define a scandal as something where actual wrongdoing is discovered, not fake scandals like Benghazi and "the emails."

    Clinton won 3/3 debates, decisively. She raised a large amount of money. They produced excellent commercials that clearly demonstrated, using Trump's own words and actions, that he is an ignorant, narcissistic, racist, sexist con man and serial sexual abuser.

    Their GOTV operation and Latino outreach programs were widely praised. They made aggressive use of the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, and wildly popular celebrities. They ran a fine campaign.

    You are describing things you would like to see change in the American political system, such as less big money in politics and no more access for big donors to the politicians they donate to. And those things would be lovely, but there is not one pitiful shred of a rational reason to believe that would have altered the outcome of this election. You are simply articulating things you would like to see happen and blaming Trump's election on them.

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