#because all the republican candidates are very anti trans

[im-a-freaking-joy]

Okay so. I'm doing some reading on the 2024 presidential candidates because this is the first year that I'm able to vote and I want to know as much as possible. So im on this website, ballotpedia, and tell me why LITERALLY ALL OF THE CANDIDATES SUPPORT ISRAEL?? literally all of them are like "well israel is all good and dandy and has the right to protect thenselves (:" and like??? HELLO?? THEYRE COMITTING GENOCIDE??! I'm so tired of this fucking country good god, we cant even get one cadidate that opposes genocide and war crimes?? What the fuck.

[batboyblog]

hey thanks for not being super doomer over these anti-trans bills. i kept on seeing so many people being defeated over them and it messed up my mental health for a while, like nothing could be done. but you did bring up some good points and shed some light onto people who are actively fighting for us so i thank you again

The queer movement, in the US any ways, has always been cyclical, we make big gains and push forward, then there's a super scary backlash. We're right now at the hight of a really scary backlash thats focused on trans people in particular but is anti-queer more generally. It's intense but its important to remember these backlashes don't generally last very long, they are scary, but each time they've happened, the mid to late 1970s, the 1980s, the early 2000s, the tide has gone out and gay rights, LGBT rights, and society's acceptance of LGBT people has been farther along than before they have never ever managed to turn us back in the years since Stonewall.

And as intense and scary as this is in some ways it's better than last time, when I was a gay teenager. in those days... in 2004 and 2008 the Democrats running for President were uniformly against gay marriage (the big issue of that time) they were trying to get us to settle for the not marriage alternative of civil unions. Only a handful of Congresspeople (some of them gay themselves) in DEEP! blue districts dared to support gay marriage outright. Today the Democratic Party is the most pro-LGBT major political party in the world, you had the President and every Democrat of any note making statements for TDOV a few days ago and you're not seeing even red state Democrats back down and agree to be "a little transphobic" for votes. It felt a lot more lonely last time when it was us and a handful of allies fighting the backlash with most of the Democratic Party on the side lines handwringing and saying "well can't you wait?"

any ways this movement is and will always be a struggle, the rights we've won, the acceptance we've received has never just been given, it's been won, through hard work. Everyone has to dedicate themselves to work in their corner of the earth to the best of their abilities and to push themselves past what they think they can do. That means hooking up with LGBT rights groups on the ground to protest, to rally, to try to support and comfort those queer people who are down and out in whatever way right now, it means digging deep and having hard and awkward conversations with the people in your life, if you're gay or trans or whatever and you got that one aunt/uncle/cousin/whoever in your life that loves you to bits but you know still votes Republican and you just don't bring it up because you don't want to hurt the relationship... have the talk keep having the talk as many times as you need to. Tell your grandparents if they don't know, tell your parents (if its safe or if you don't need their money any more) tell co-workers who don't know etc, they vote for us 2 to 1 if they know they know one of us. Finally register to vote, make sure all your friends particularly if you're young are registered and vote, vote in every election. Trust me it's AMAZINGLY easy to find the email of candidates for school board or city council and it's amazingly easy to ask questions. Last election I emailed every school board candidate about Holocaust education, and the state rep candidate about trans rights, she wrote me back a lovely note and mailed be a sticker she'd picked up from a trans rights group. It's amazingly easy to get involved, I volunteered with my local democrats for one election and they offered me the #3 spot in their local party, I have the phone numbers of my state rep and state senator without trying really, you can get in the room with these people, with candidates for governor, congress, I have my picture with 3 US Presidents? its not hard to do, and you can use chances like that to talk to them and show them your humanity and leave an impression that really matters in the long run.

sorry to RAMBLE but it's important that everyone do their part, pick a little something, a project to push this thing forward, people doom scrolling, particularly posting about how its hopeless does not help, posting in general doesn't help much even if its not doomerism, I think in the years after the anti-gay marriage Bush backlash we got very online and we got very "progress just happens" and a lot of people fell out of the habit or came of age without the habit of protest and without a local queer community or local progressive community and its very important in the face of this to find or build those and also understand in some places its gonna be years of work to get where we want to go, but we will and it'll be worth all the work.

[wathanism]

Your ideals are going to kill people. The only thing refusing to vote is going to do is ensure that the republicans win and their project 2025 gets enacted. This is not a conspiracy theory. They want a theocracy. They want authoritarianism. They want fascism. You and everyone you convince to not vote is letting that happen.

I don't know who convinced you that its impossible to care about two things at once, but abandoning the vulnerable here in the states because you care so deeply about the vulnerable on the other side of the world doesn't make you more righteous.

Refusing to vote for him is a foolish act that will do nothing to stop what is happening. Even if he finally pulls back all aid for Israel at the eleventh hour, no one will vote for him now, which means the vulnerable right here at home are fucked. Thanks.

i was really close to not answering you at all because i have a hard rule about not talking with selfish cunts who are commited to misunderstanding everything a non-white person says to them. but since you had the good sense to realize that you were being an ass right then, i'm going to assume that you're worth engaging with, and i'm going to hope you'll talk with me in good faith and read everything i have to say rather than blow up at me again. if nothing else, i'm going to use this as an opportunity to say all the things i've been wanting to say since i made that post. that said, i'm real pissed and i'm not gonna be all nice and palatable in my answer.

first of all, no i'm not a US citizen. i live in west asia. y'know, where all the wars are? gaza is five hours away from my hometown of damascus, which is also being bombed with your tax dollars, by the way! in fact, i grew up living under a textbook authoritarian theocracy. so don't sit there and talk to me like i don't know what it's like to be afraid of your own government. we're in this shithole world together, and you and i are a hell of a lot more like each other than the politicians putting our lives on the line.

second of all, i should have been more clear about what i actually would like for US voters to do. contrary to small-minded liberals' assumptions, i'm not republican nor am i anti-voting. i'm saying people should vote third party. i even have a preferred candidate in mind, jasmine sherman. they even have strict and well-defined policies to protect trans rights and provide universal healthcare that includes gender affirming care and reproductive care.

this is usually the point when usamericans talk down to me like it's my first day on earth, so let me be clear. i know about the electoral college. i know about the flaws of the first-past-the-post voting system. i know about ranked-choice voting and why that's a better system in almost every way. i know that until there's drastic changes to the US voting system, there is no chance a third party candidate could even win. i'm not delusional about that. and i'm asking you to protest-vote anyway. which, yes, i realize is a big ask, but consider that this is a big fucking problem that requires pretty drastic actions.

several absolute dumbasses who i refuse to engage with said some very interesting stuff that made me realize why so many people are quick to dismiss the idea of refusing to vote for either major party. some examples:

they describe the push to vote third party as us lashing out at biden. in their eyes, we're not politically aware adults with a righteous passion for justice. no, we're petulant children causing problems for everyone whose rights actually matter. maybe a nicer person than me can give them the benefit of the doubt, but i find it extremely suspect that they truly seem to believe that non-white people are irrational, easily-angered, thoughtless creatures with no understanding of the complexities of the situation. there's a complete refusal to consider that there might be an actual coherent strategy behind the activism of indigenous and black people.

and again, because this is not my first day on earth, i know about the "but trump!!" argument. i honestly am BAFFLED that liberals seem to genuinely believe they're offering anything novel or valuable to the discussion at hand when they parrot talking points that we've been hearing since 2016 with quite literally nothing to show for it.

but i digress. the important thing is: yes, i fucking know. i know trump would have a near identical policy on gaza. he'd also have an identical policy on the police, on covid, on immigration, and on most other issues. you worry about project 2025, and you're right to! but the thing is, and you'll forgive me for quoting imani here but she is the most correct person ever always, "everything in project 2025 relies on biden doing exactly what he's fucking doing right now. the more successful this genocide is, the more likely project 2025 is to happen." because at the end of the day, it doesn't require a republican president. it requires a CONSERVATIVE president. and that's what biden is.

i don't know if you're missing it or if you don't care, but democrats benefit from you being terrified, and that's exactly why they'll never keep you safe. you will always be one election away from being killed by the system because that's what keeps you complicit. democrats won't shoot the gun, but they will ALWAYS make sure it's loaded and that you're trapped in a room with the person who'll shoot you. don't forget that roe v. wade was overturned on biden's watch. trans rights were rolled back on biden's watch. covid deaths skyrocketed and protections were dismantled on biden's watch. he'll find every loophole in the book to funnel weapons to israel's military but he'll never lift a finger to fix the problems ruining your life, because he needs you to be as scared as you are. that's exactly what's keeping you from showing an ounce of compassion or solidarity to palestinians right now. and no, your fucking lip service and crocodile tears don't count as solidarity.

liberals have managed to completely forget the most important lesson about social justice: none of us are free until all of us are free. you've been so busy yelling at arabs to even realize that this moment in time is one of the greatest pushes against the two-party system. do you not get how important that is? right now, when damn near everyone who's even mildly left leaning (and many who are right leaning) is so deeply unsatisfied with both major candidates, is the perfect time to be thinking of ways to break out of this system. to organize, to advocate for your mystical fucking ranked choice voting!

palestinians aren't asking you to lay down your life and throw away your human rights so they can mildly spite joe biden. they're asking you to grow a fucking spine and stand on principle and god damn DO SOMETHING to tear apart the two-party system. make people realize that a third party candidate IS a viable one, so that one day they can be.

you're framing this as a matter of pitting palestinians versus americans, which couldn't be further from the truth. maybe instead of directing your hate towards palestinians and their allies, show some gratitude. palestinians are uncovering the veil of all the atrocities and all the corruption in the world, and they're giving the people of the earth a banner to unite under. there have never been so many people (afaik, at least) pushing against the systems of corruption in america. that kind of thing ripples out. standing with palestine isn't easy, but all of our lives will be better for it, including and especially the lives of minorities living in the US.

there is so, SO much more i can say about palestine, and it will inevitably turn into a very spiritual rant about the uniting force of the holy land. but i'm instead just gonna leave you with this tweet that i think sums up everything about this.

[cbk1000]

Not to keep belabouring this point, but as we are now in Election Year, this is your friendly reminder that I don't give a fuck what you think about Biden. I don't care how you feel about his administration's response to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I don't care if you think he's too old, not progressive enough, etc. etc. etc.

The reality is that, unless something major changes, either Trump or Biden will be elected to the presidency in November. Our voting system is deeply flawed and deserving of criticism. But nothing magical is going to happen between now and November. There will absolutely, categorically, be no other viable choice, no third-party candidate, no perfect leftist wet dream that swoops in at the last minute to make you feel tingly in your moral purity. Unless one of them dies between now and then (and even if Biden does, guess what: the Dems aren't going to put up the Ideal Progressive as their candidate), you will get Biden, or you will get Trump. If you think you are Doing Something for the Palestinian cause by helping Trump to get elected--and that is what you are doing if you throw a tantrum and abstain from voting in a race that current polling indicates is going to be sphincter-clenching tight--I have a bridge to sell you very cheap.

However poorly you think Biden is doing, what do you think a second Trump term is going to do, domestically and abroad? Trump has consistently and regularly praised various dictators and authoritarian strongmen around the world. He admires them. He wants to be one of them. That is who we will have if Biden is not elected. You will actively harm not only vulnerable people in the U.S., but those outside this country who will be affected by the policies of Putin's biggest stan.

You need to hold your nose and vote. I am genuinely sorry that is the reality of our broken election system, but it IS the reality, and ignoring that will do far more harm than voting for Biden. Everywhere the Republicans hold power they are pushing anti-abortion legislation, they are banning books, they are trying to prevent teachers from talking about racism, they are denying trans people access to medical care. If you want to see that at the federal level, then go ahead, don't vote. And then shut your fucking whiny mouths about the Progressive Cause, because you don't even care enough about it to make the most basic effort to try and stop the people who are actively harming all those minority groups you only advocate for in online echo chambers where you think you can get a rimjob for being a good little progressive who uses all the right buzzwords.

[chewwytwee]

Something important to understand about the political landscape in America rn is that we’re going through a fight to get transgender protections to be codified into law, overall the social climate of the American population is at least not actively against queer people existing. Conservative lawmakers are taking advantage of the fact that the government guarantees for basic human rights don’t have language describing trans people or gender affirming healthcare, so it’s a mad dash to get *their* bills written down faster than the other side can and win approval from their voter base(s). However, There’s a very large gap between the opinions and attitudes of most conservatives and what republican lawmakers are pushing imo, like if you look at this last year the red wave that felt super inevitable never appeared. Republicans were spending *millions* of dollars on anti trans ads, some areas only had republican candidates *all of which were running on mostly anti trans platforms*. But the actual voter base for those republicans didn’t turn out, and the aggressive voters rights expansions and awareness campaigns by a lot of leftist politicians meant that, even though there was a general shift to the right, overall all of those anti trans campaigns didn’t turn into widespread wins for republicans. Obviously these campaigns worked in a lot of areas, and there was a shift towards the right, so it’s not like conservatives are actually cool w trans people but I think it’s really important to think about the context of anti trans legislation when there are so many people hypothesizing and doomposting about the fast approaching ‘Transgender Genocide’ (I’ve seen multiple people use that exact term, I’m not joking) because it’s bad, but it’s not like we’re actually going to backslide into a position where trans people are going to be rounded up and murdered with impunity and no social outcry whatsoever

[mariacallous]

Amid a rise in anti-LGBTQ+ hate across the US, California reached a milestone in this year’s midterm elections: at least 10% of its lawmakers identify publicly as LGBTQ+, a figure believed to be a first for any legislature in the country.

With 12 current or soon-to-be members of the legislature identifying as LGBTQ+, the statehouse has roughly reached parity in sexual orientation and gender identity – 9.1% of Californians are LGBT, according to the US census.

The legislators, all Democrats, say that despite the wins, much work remains in California and the US, including the fallout from measures such as Florida’s “don’t say gay” law and laws blocking gender-affirming medical care for youths and limiting transgender students’ participation in sports.

The news came as the US mourns a shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado that left five people dead. The suspect faces charges of murder and hate crimes. Democrats and advocates have pointed to rhetoric from Republicans that has demonized LGBTQ+ people, particularly drag queens, who have become a target for rightwing disinformation campaigns.

"When it comes to LGBTQ people, we’re on two tracks: one track is that societally we’re winning. People by and large are totally fine with LGBTQ people, they support us, they are accepting and willing to vote for LGBTQ candidates,” Scott Wiener, a California state senator and member of the LGBTQ caucus, said on Monday.

Yet, he said, “despite the fact that we are winning the battle in society at large, you have a very vocal, dangerous minority of extremists who are consistently attacking and demonizing our community”.

A record-setting year for LGBTQ+ victories

At least 519 out LGBTQ+ candidates won elected office in the US this year, in positions ranging from school board up to Congress and governor, said Albert Fujii, press secretary for the LGBTQ Victory Fund. In Colorado, Jared Polis, the first openly gay man elected as a state’s governor when he won in 2018, was re-elected.

That’s a record, well up from 2020, when 336 LGBTQ+ candidates won, according to the group, which along with Equality California calculated that California is the first state to pass the 10% threshold.

Of the 12 current or soon-to-be members of the California legislature, eight were already part of its LGBTQ caucus, including the leader of the senate and three other senators whose terms run until 2024. Four current assembly members won re-election, with two new assembly members and two new senators joining them, increasing the caucus’s ranks by 50%. The AP has not yet called one remaining race that could add an additional LGBTQ+ lawmaker.

New Hampshire and Vermont have each had more LGBTQ+ legislators, according to the institute, but have not reached the 10% threshold because their legislatures are bigger than California’s.

The 2022 midterms brought a number of firsts for LGBTQ+ people, including the election of Corey Jackson, the California legislature’s first gay Black man, who noted that African Americans, particularly Black trans people, are especially marginalized.

“I think this is an opportunity just to say that number one, we are here, we do have something to contribute and we can lead and represent with the best of them,” said Jackson, a school board member from Riverside county.

Meanwhile, in Alaska and South Dakota, residents elected their first out LGBTQ+ legislators, and Montana and Minnesota elected their first trans legislators, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In New Hampshire, the Democrat James Roesener, 26, became the first trans man elected to any US state legislature.

Roesener said he had opted to run in response to a state bill, which only narrowly failed, that would have required schools to notify parents of developments in their children’s gender identity and expression. Such requirements invade children’s privacy and can put them at risk of abuse at home, opponents say.

Leigh Finke, who was elected in Minnesota, also was driven by growing anti-transgender rhetoric. Finke hopes to ban so-called “conversion therapy” in Minnesota and, like California, make the state a sanctuary for children, and their parents, who can’t access gender-affirming healthcare elsewhere.

“I just thought, ‘This can’t stand.’ We have to have trans people in these rooms. If we are going to lose our rights, at least they have to look us in the eye when they do it,” she said.

Massachusetts and Oregon elected the nation’s first out lesbian governors. The newly elected LGBTQ+ officials are overwhelmingly Democrats, but in New York, the Republican George Santos, a gay man and supporter of Donald Trump, won a US House seat, defeating the Democrat Robert Zimmerman, who is gay.

Breakthroughs amid hostile rhetoric

The increase in LGBTQ+ lawmakers comes as some Republican-led states attempt to limit the influence, visibility and rights of LGBTQ+ people.

The Human Rights Campaign tracked what it identified as anti-LGTBQ+ bills introduced in 23 states this year and said they had become law in 13: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Louisiana.

In Tennessee, a state with one LGTBQ+ lawmaker, leaders of the state’s Republican legislative supermajority said the first bill of the 2023 session would seek to ban gender-affirming care for minors. The state has already banned trans athletes from girls’ middle and high school sports and restricted which bathrooms trans students and employees can use.

By contrast, “as California’s Legislative LGBTQ Caucus has grown, the state has led the nation in passing groundbreaking legislation protecting LGBTQ+ civil rights”, said Samuel Garrett-Pate, an Equality California spokesperson.

Those include California’s sanctuary bill for transgender youths, which has been copied by Democratic lawmakers in other states, a 2019 expansion of access to HIV prevention medication, and laws granting foster children rights to gender-affirming care and allowing nonbinary gender markers on state identification.

Jackson said he found hope in the election returns not only in California, but also nationwide.

“We have US senators now, we have governors now, we actually have trans legislators now in this country,“ Jackson said. “So in the midst of stories of hatred and stories of demonization, you still see rainbows of hope throughout our nation.”

[thebreakfastgenie]

I haven't been saying much because my brain isn't at full capacity so being smart is difficult but looking at this proposed Title IX rule (which all the big organizations like HRC support) and how the reporting on it has ranged from misleading to straight up lying... from what I can tell the "compromise" isn't a political one but a legal one because executive power is limited and they need it to hold up in court. It doesn't seem to indicate a reversal. And I'm just... kind of suspicious, honestly, about the coverage being the way it is. When Republicans are trying so hard to make this a culture war issue and so many people seem to be waiting for Democrats to cave and they're not just saying they did anyway..... the year before an election year which might as well be an election year with how our news cycles work now......

Also don't want to post about this issue without saying for better anti-discrimination protection for trans student athletes you should 1) vote in your local elections + encourage pro trans candidates to run for school board 2) vote in your state level elections so your state legislature can pass anti-discrimination laws/at the very least can't pass anti-trans laws 3) vote in 2024 so we can elect a federal Dem trifecta who can take up this issue

[lord-rosenth0rne]

There are plenty of good conservatives. WHO who you donate money to DOES directly support shitty people who want certain groups pushed down (minorities, lgbtqia+, etc). The fucking audacity if you to get so heated and then say you don’t support chik fila. Im dead laugh. Do you not see how ridiculous you are??? Id hate to be your friend because you are literally being a bitter bitch actively harming any friend you might have you are minorities and lgbtq+. fuck off. (2/2)

(Sorry about this, guys. I just couldn't resist. I'll make this quick and politics will be off the blog asap. I'll get some funny stuff rolling when I'm done. Maybe some of Roomie's artwork as well.)

If you are so sure of yourself, come off of anon. There shouldn't be any reason for you not to if this is what you really believe. Unfortunately, resorting to name-calling disqualifies you in my book for meaningful debates but you really should be more proud about your stances instead of being anon.

And, I must stay it's bold of you to assume you'd even make the cut to be a friend of mine. So far, you've kinda shot yourself in the foot on that option. My friends and I don't talk to one another this way and we know where one another is coming from, even if it comes out wrong. We don't cancel each other and know when to agree to disagree. We barely even hold grudges. I'd rather not be your friend if that's the way you'd talk to yours in a disagreement. It's disgusting and abusive. My friends are well above all of that, thank you.

I'm not afraid to say my stance is the fact politics aren't black and white and no one should be treating it as such. A donation for a politician does not mean you support every little thing about them. Voting for a politician does not mean you support every little thing about them. It's naive to believe that. That's reality. You are choosing who you think is the best to run the country on their policies on various subjects. It's the same with Congress. What are their policies for protecting the country, what do they plan to do for the deficit, where do they stand on this, where do they stand on that? And you gather all of it up and figure out which is the best candidate for our country. It's very unwise to choose someone for a single policy alone and ignore the rest when it is a weighted decision. You are going to have to suck some things up when making a decision, especially when both politicians are the scum of the earth.

"Good Republicans (originally it was conservatives, the anon messaged to change it)"? According to what, exactly? Because they market themselves as LGBTQ+ friendly or minority friendly? What are their other policies like? Women's issues (including anatomy since some like to pretend a woman can't get pregnant during rape)? Abortion stance? Planned Parenting stance? Country issues? Security issues? Border issues? The deficit? The economy? Foreign affairs? Unemployment? Disaster response? What exactly ARE their stances on the LGBTQ+ and minorities and are they really allies or just trying to buy your vote only to not do anything once they get in? How do they feel about Trans people and transitioning? What do they think are basic human rights? Do they want troops overseas or to bring them home? How would they take care of our military and veterans? Police reform? What do they think of illegal immigrants? How would they help low-income families and neighborhoods? School funding? Medicaid? Social Security? Health insurance in general? How trustworthy are they? Are they sincere or is it empty promises to get where they want to be? What is their history like? Do you see why this isn't a black and white issue? There is no way you would ever have a candidate check all the boxes right. You could screw yourself over very easily if you do not pay attention. The same goes for Democrats. You thought they were off the hook? Nah, fam. Same damn thing. Rules for all, not for some.

If you're talking "Good Republicans" as in civilians, then you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot here as my original post pretty much defended the person in question. Scott IS a good person, as per his actions, but everyone wants to condemn him for doing what he thought was right.

Where do you draw the line? What is the most important out of all these issues and what issues would you allow to fall to the wayside, maybe hoping the candidate might not be so bad about it and have a change of mind? That's the issue you're facing every time you go up to the ballot box. At least, it is when you're well informed. When you're not, you're basically going the shallow route and picking a winner on what they've been most vocal about like a well-groomed dog at the annual dog show.

I don't support Chick-Fil-A for donating MILLIONS, not thousands, to anti-LGBTQ+ and discriminatory organizations, you know, places that SPECIALIZE IN THOSE ACTIVITIES. Same with the Salvation Army. Burger King knows what they did. Politicians don't specialize in that. They have much more going on than to be doing that. They have countries and states to run and nowadays, that's a career death sentence. I mean, you do support cancel culture. That's why you've messaged me, to confirm your stance on what happened to Scott, who also, mind you, sent donations to pro-LGBTQ+ charities, further proving my own point.

And yes, according to a lot of people as per your first message that I laughed at and deleted before realizing I wanted to respond, I'm supposed to be LGBTQ+ but there are a lot out there, including in the LGBTQ+, who don't believe ace/aro people belong there or exist in general. Oh, and I'm nonbinary. But that's okay. That doesn't mean I don't support them either way.

[redbeardace]

The Equality Act

What is the Equality Act? 

If you’ve paid attention to politics (in the US) over the past few weeks, the Equality Act has been name-checked quite frequently.  It was listed as a Day One priority of virtually every major Democratic presidential candidate at a recent town hall.  It was brought up in response to a recent pair of Supreme Court employment discrimination cases, one involving a gay man, the other involving a trans woman, both of whom were fired after coming out.  But what is it?

The Equality Act is an update to a number of federal anti-discrimination laws, primarily the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This act explicitly provides anti-discrimination protection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.  You can read the full text of it here, but if you don’t feel like it, the basic summary is that it’s mostly a Find-And-Replace job, substituting “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” for the word “sex” in existing anti-discrimination laws.

Why is the Equality Act important?

Right now, across the entire US, it is illegal for someone to be fired due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.  In many states, there is a specific state law prohibiting this form of discrimination.  However, in the rest of the states, where there isn’t an explicitly state law, it’s prohibited because of an interpretation of the word “sex” in existing anti-discrimination laws.

These existing laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.  For a plain, simple example, that means that you can’t reject a qualified candidate for a job, simply because she’s a woman.  Sex cannot be the deciding factor.

And that’s where the interpretation comes in.  Over the years, guidance of federal agencies and findings in court cases have held that this protection on the basis of sex extends to sexual orientation and gender identity.  Let me tell a quick pair of stories to illustrate:

1:  You have a hardworking, recently promoted employee named Alex.  One Monday morning, Alex comes into the office, sporting a shiny new ring.  Intrigued, you ask about it.  “I got married to Elizabeth on Saturday!”, comes the excited reply.  You congratulate Alex and wish him a happy life.

2. You have a hardworking, recently promoted employee named Alex.  One Monday morning, Alex comes into the office, sporting a shiny new ring.  Intrigued, you ask about it.  “I got married to Elizabeth on Saturday!”, comes the excited reply.  You fire Alex and throw the contents of her desk on the street.

In this scenario, the only difference between Alex and Alex is their sex.  Their sexual orientation is effectively irrelevant.  You fired Alexandra for doing something you would have been fine with Alexander doing, therefore you have illegally discriminated against Alexandra on the basis of sex.

Or so says the interpretation.

The thing about an interpretation of this kind is that it’s fragile.  It’s great when you have LGBTQ-friendly people at the wheel.  But all it takes is one fascist dictator wannabe to tell the federal agencies to change their mind.  All it takes is five people in black robes with a lean to the right to say “Nah, I think it means this”. 

And that’s where we are today.

The court cases heard last month will be decided next June, and there is a very real possibility that the Supreme Court will reject the interpretation that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected on the basis of sex.  If that happens, it will immediately become legal to fire people or refuse housing or kick someone off a bus for being gay or being trans in more than half of the states in this country.

So that’s bad.

The Equality Act, by explicitly including protection for sexual orientation and gender identity, will make it clear that kind of discrimination is illegal.  It won’t be open to interpretation, and will be far more resistant to the direction of the wind in DC.

What else should I know about the Equality Act?

It explicitly provides protection for intersex people.  When I did a survey of state-level anti-discrimination laws earlier this year, I found that intersex people were largely ignored.  That leaves them in legal limbo land where maybe they’re protected and maybe not.  The Equality Act includes “sex characteristics, including intersex traits” under the definition of “sex”, and would thereby unambiguously include that in all of the protections provided.  However, while the Equality Act is a step in the right direction, but it does not address specific intersex issues.

It covers the “perception or belief, even if inaccurate” case, which plugs some potential loopholes in protection.

It is worded vaguely enough to protect agender and non-binary people, but it does not explicitly mention them.

Unfortunately, sexual orientation is defined as a specific, enumerated list:  “homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality”.  Asexual and pansexual, etc., are not included.  This is a common failure of many anti-discrimination laws.  I doubt it’s born of malice.  Instead, it’s a combination of ignorance and inertia.  So many existing laws define it this way, it’s easy to copy and paste without thinking.  I prefer the language in New York City’s ordinance:  “A continuum of sexual orientation exists and includes, but is not limited to, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality and pansexuality.”

There is no mention of romantic or affectional orientation in the Equality Act.  This strikes me as a huge hole.  Not only does this mean it completely leave out protection for aromantic people, it opens a loophole for discrimination based on romantic orientation of all types.

Nothing in the Equality Act tries to fix unnecessarily gendered language that exists in the law.  That would be a far more involved undertaking.

So where does the Equality Act stand?

The Equality Act has been passed in the House of Representatives, where it was a priority of the Democratic majority there.  After passage, it was sent to the Senate, where it will die, because the Republican majority there wants nothing to do with it.  And the President wouldn’t have signed it anyway.  There is no chance in hell that it will be passed before 2021, and even that would require Democrats holding the House, taking the Senate, and getting the White House.

So, you see, that’s a bit of a problem.  The Supreme Court’s ruling on these cases will come out in June 2020...

What you can do about it!

Register to vote NOW if you’re eligible and haven’t already.  Go.  NOW.  I’ll wait.

VOTE.

And vote for the Democrat where applicable.  Republicans are actively opposed to this issue.  You have seen what happens when Republicans have control over the government and it is up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen again.  Yeah, sure, Democrats aren’t perfect, but they’re a hell of a lot better than this fascist clown show and homophobic sidekick we have now, so vote Democrat and then keep the pressure on to force them to get better.  (And while you’re at it, push them for Ranked Choice Voting so we can maybe get rid of the two party stranglehold...)

Find out about your local anti-discrimination laws.  Local anti-discrimination laws won’t be overturned by the court decision in these cases.  So, if your state or city does not already have LGBTQ protections in its anti-discrimination laws (or doesn’t even have any anti-discrimination laws at all) band together and make noise.  Get them to pass one.

Tell everyone you can about this.  Be loud.  Silence will let them get away with it.

Fight back.  If it all goes to hell in your state next June, boycott any business that fires someone for being trans, picket any apartment complex who evicts a gay couple.  Broadcast their bigotry, shame them publicly.  Make noise.

Reach out to your lawmakers and tell them that you support the Equality Act and think it needs to be improved and passed.  And “improved” is key.  Since it hasn’t passed yet, there’s still time to make it better.  So tell them they need to make it better.  (At the same time, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.  As it stands today, it’s a vast improvement over existing law, so work to get the Equality Act passed, even if they don’t fix it.)

But Wait...  There’s More!

Another interesting (and unexpected) side story related to this which came up after I’d written most of this post is that ratification of the ERA is now within reach, thanks to Virginia going fully blue.  While it’s very likely that VA will vote to ratify in one of their first actions in January, there’s some haziness about whether or not it will count.  That means it will be a fascinating backdrop for the presidential election, with one side fully supporting ratification, maybe even with a woman carrying the flag for the second time in a row, and the other side being forced to explain why they don’t think women are equal, while they run a disgusting misogynist and/or someone who refuses to even eat with women.  Popcorn time!

But...  What’s the ERA, you ask?  That’s a fair question, because it hasn’t been talked about much since it was killed by a pack of anti-feminists back in the 70s.  It’s the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment that reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The haziness surrounding ratification is twofold:  First, the original congressional language had a deadline, which has long since passed.  Second, some states which ratified it early on have since rescinded their ratification.  Proponents of ratification will note that the original deadline was extended once, and can be extended again, if needed, and beyond that, a deadline may not even be valid.  As for rescinding the ratification, it’s not clear whether or not a state can even do that.  At any rate, it’s bound to head to court and make a lot of noise along the way.

As you may have noticed, the language is very similar to the vague meaning of “sex” that the Equality Act is trying to fix.  Will the ERA protect gender identity and sexual orientation?  That’s unclear.  It’s open to the same interpretation and court opinions that come up in the Civil Rights Act.  In fact, the Supreme Court decision in those cases I mentioned above, whichever way it goes, will probably be the precedent at work, should the ERA actually get ratified and take effect.

So you know what that means, right?  

Once the ERA is ratified, we're going to need the ERA 2 to explicitly include what the original ERA leaves out.

We have a lot of work to do.  Time to get busy.

[ms-demeanor]

Simply based on the fact that Voxette has been a Libertarian for a while and the fact that Bloomberg has been a major flashpoint for a lot of the discourse I’ve encountered from libertarians in the last ten years I.

I’m sorry I kind of think she’s lying about believing that Bloomberg is the least-bad option for a libertarian to vote for in the Democratic primary.

Libertarians have been pretty clear on their stance on Bloomberg for nearly 20 years:

But Bloomberg did win, thanks in no small part to a last-minute push made possible by his $50 million campaign war chest. Following in the footsteps of a man notorious for his much-maligned quality-of-life campaigns, Bloomberg—an alleged Republican in a Democrat town—was set to run the country's biggest city, and try to turn it into a nanny state more tightly controlled than anything his predecessor, or his state's U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, could ever imagine. (2002)

....

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he'd like to see devices placed on vehicles that would light up if the automobile exceeds the speed limit. Bloomberg said he got the idea from Singapore, where all taxis and trucks have devices that warn when the speed limit is passed. (2006)

....

Bloomberg's grace period was brief but brilliant: He was un-bought and un-buyable; he snapped the spine of New York City liberalism like an arthritic crab leg. Seven months ago  George Will could say, "Bloomberg has demonstrated, in both the public and private sectors, what the electorate cried out for on Election Day: 'Competence, please.'" Now that he's a candidate (probably), Will's changed the tune in mid-hum: Bloomberg is guilty of "old and recurring utopianism" and "exquisite vacuousness."

And the message to libertarians: Suck it up. We've been Bloomberg's most consistent critics since he tromped into City Hall, after all. Our nickname for the mayor was/is "Nurse Bloomberg," inspired by his insistent meddling in the sundry self-polluting habits of New York life. And we're supposed to stop being such whiny, unrealistic churls. In his advice to the free minds/free markets set, Yglesias writes that Bloomberg is "specifically identified with a brand of trivial nanny-stating—indoor smoking ban, trans fat ban—that seems to be to aggravate libertarians in a manner that's out of proportion to the actual significance of the policy issues."

Now that Bloomberg's reputation is coming down to earth, maybe we can argue this point. There's no such thing as trivial nanny-stating. There is legislation that affects personal behavior a lot and legislation that affects it only a little. But it's part of one continuum; the pol who believes he can enhance public health by limiting public choice believes he can fix many other problems by limiting that choice. One success follows another. The critics of one minor quality-of-life law wither away, and it's easy to imagine the next round of critics meeting the same date with obscurity. 2008

....

Past Reason.tv Nannies of The Month have included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (anti-salt, smoking, trans fat, you name it), a New York state senator who wanted to ban fish pedicures, and a Phoenix pol who banned churches from feeding the hungry on their own property. (2010)

(there are literally hundreds more examples of Libertarian Magazine Reason.Com dunking on Bloomberg, I just figured I’d made my point)

The only reason I knew who Michael Bloomberg was before this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad primary season started is because I used to be the kind of libertarian who got really, really up on my high horse about the nanny state and Bloomberg is absolutely someone who has been criticized for his shitty paternalistic policies by libertarians for decades. Voxette’s claim of “the soda ban wasn’t important because it didn’t make much difference” either suggests that she doesn’t much care about her own philosophy (c’mon, isn’t there a line there about how one doesn’t argue over inches of evil? - there is. there is a line and objectivisim is very clear about compromise)  or she’s lying about thinking he’s the better candidate.

And, for all that I strenuously disagree with her interpretation of the world I don’t think that Voxette is faking her beliefs. I think she’s very sincere about being an objectivist and that’s why I don’t buy the lesser of two evils claim.

Given my own former political positions and current familiarity with lots of libertarians I that it’s probably impossible to have been a Libertarian since Bloomberg’s time as mayor of New York and think he’s anywhere close to an acceptable candidate. Bloomberg’s name has become shorthand for the exact kind of Vape/soda/trans fat-banning, police-empowering, regulation-building, tax-raising kinds of politics that Libertarians loathe.

[queernuck]

Who Is Mayor Pete?

an interesting phenomena surrounding that post that criticizes the supposed homophobia of backlash to Mayor Pete on grounds of how difficult it is to read him as gay, how much he comes across specifically as an assimilationist, as an example of what exactly many of us hate seeing in that community, is that there is a certain way that it resonated with TERFs which I think is important to consider. it taps into a great deal of rhetoric around the way that transmisogynist violence is enacted, how the creation of hostility in communities to ideas of queerness, faggy-ness, how the sanitization and creation of a fetishized notion of butch/femme culture has been a project of so many TERFs unfortunately, the way all of these converge into the yearning for the exact image that Mayor Pete fits: one of an incredibly assimilated, boring figure which refuses typical libidinal flows, who almost reads with a kind of sexlessness that dovetails quite nicely into the sort of policy goals that he most typically holds.

while discussing him as a Republican is perhaps not quite accurate, the way in which he is reminiscent of a recent letter to the editor where a gay man talked about how the transition from Obama to Trump impacted him little but a transition to Sanders (he fears) would ruin him due to his career as an investment banker, Buttigieg typefies this idea, the archetype of the successful gay man who has rejected all of these signifiers of gayness, who has divided himself cleanly from any kind of notion of “queerness”, of faggish tendencies, who almost more closely resembles an embodiment of the sterility and structural prescriptivism that “homosexual” would imply. He is not violating any sort of taboo except insofar as his violation thereof affirms the mirrored process: in becoming-gay, Mayor Pete does such in a way that affirms the mirroring of that process in the dominant subject, is part of a series of desiring-machines through which the libidinal flows of numerous Democrat voters may be actualized. For many, the idea of Mayor Pete as Their Gay Son is a kind of fantasy, a point in the questioning of why their own children cannot manage to just be “normal”, cannot have jobs in finance or join Naval Intelligence or become mayor of South Bend.

There are many men that outwardly appear like Mayor Pete out there, and I can hardly blame them. However, just as Mayor Pete is not Pete Buttigieg, is rather a kind of second-order simulacra intended to relate to other candidates and to voters in a certain fashion, they resemble him only in that they have these rather carefully constructed personae which they use in order to gain the advantages that apparent assimilation brings with it. In their real lives they may be fathers and husbands and have relatively normal, “basic” tastes but at the very least, if they are sexually active even with only a single partner, they violate at least some kind of taboo and become an unsuitable subject. The hate the sin love the sinner ideology is very much prevalent in ideas of even a married gay couple, where the idea of two men being married to one another and having a happy, fulfilling sexual relationship is itself revolting. 

When one throws in various different scenes and communities such as PNP/Chemsex, leather, even simply going out to the wrong sorts of parties or gay bars, and what is seen as a kind of salacious and enticing possibility for heterosexuality is now a condemnation, is too much for being a violation of far too many taboos at once. That some gay men have open marriages is an indication of degeneracy. This is true, as well, for many trans women: simply enjoying sex, having sexual partners, is seen as a sort of unsuitable deviance, as part of an inherently sexual identity and moreover the reduction of trans women to fetishes, the notion that we cannot exist at all except while evoking kink, that us, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals are all constantly evoking sexuality through mere existence even when heterosexual identities are allowed to imply or mimic our own while being outwardly validated, being understood as separated from these behaviors.

A comment that particularly sticks with me from this cursory (but rather unsurprising) investigation of transmisogynists getting angry about the idea that Pete isn’t Queer Enough is an insistence that one does not want to share community with “the BTQ, you are freaky and not in a good way” as one person put it. Going beyond the usual “drop the T” rhetoric, the concentration on just lesbian and gay identities is a kind of reactionary turn toward using taxonomy and ideological fetishism to create notions of what our community should be rather than looking at who it has been, who we have found solidarity with, and moreover why this solidarity is so important. The way in which Mayor Pete most openly seems a figure of heteronormativity is not in being happily married, especially given that so many happy marriages and engagements I know of consist of two people who would be marked deviant just by their identification. It lies, rather, in the same kind of turn of separation and separatism that so many transmisogynists generally and TERFs more specifically accept as part of their ideological positioning, are eager to use as part of maneuvering into a position of accomplishing the most important parts of their ideology. 

The reactionary red-brown alliances one sees TERFs willing to make (that is, if they were even really all that red to start with) are hardly accidental, and do little to advance the causes they supposedly stand for except through empty signification of a progressive simulacra of the reactionary ideology they support. The aforementioned discussion of a sort of fetishization of butch/femme identity is the means by which reference to an imagined past, one which includes these roles and imagines lesbian bars, spaces, identities is so often cleansed of any meaningful history, any connection to radical politics beyond being left-wing by the liberal standards of the current Democratic party, any kind of actual look at how and why communities of LGBT commonality were formed and realized and lived and continued and developed to this day, is used as a means of recapture for transmasc identity in order to affirm the biological determinism that their ideology necessitates. This turn is used to insist on trans men as something lesser, something denatured and not to be understood as a “man” while trans women are absolutely, ontologically men in a sense that can never be changed, that persists as the kind of marker which ignores any experience of transness in order to instead whip up a false frenzy of ideological maneuvering against vulnerable women. The conservatism of clinging to particularities of past expressions of “butch” and “femme” rather than looking at how they deride current and contemporary communities which contain plenty of butches and femmes, which contain other expressions of gendered performativity, which navigate the tensions of the sexed body through these performative creations of identification and shared space within, and most of all how many of these spaces are ones where liberation is seen as shared, as including justice on grounds of fighting antiblackness, supporting antiracism, intensely personal accounts of anti-antisemitism and anti-Islamophobia and anti-Xenophobia action, a paradigmatic antifascism, opposition to colonialism, a philosophy of anticapitalism, how vital the turn against assimilation therefore is, that the idea of assimilation as a whole involves abandonment of these ideals and instead an acceptance of the very structures that Mayor Pete most ardently advocates for, is what makes him so frustrating.

His prominence is defined so much by his assimilationism not because he is a relatively boring person with a husband. That describes plenty of people who still at least passingly validate the necessity of how LGBT histories involve anticapitalist struggles, who may themselves hold these views. There have always been people like Mayor Pete: they were the landlords driving up rent in Greenwich Village during the AIDS Crisis. They were the ones saying that bills could only pass if they dropped protections for trans people. He is a representation of the way that so many politicians only turned to supporting gay marriage when a certain arbitrary threshold was crossed by public support for the idea. The way that criticism of Mayor Pete as a politician who holds incredibly reactionary views, who has presided over violent police action and brazen codification of antiblackness within police work, who willingly joined a colonial war machine and uses that as part of his sales pitch, one who will defend the interests of capital to his dying breath as part of his campaign, one who somehow manages to propose a more cumbersome healthcare plan than Obama’s ultimately ended up being, this is the kind of candidate we have at hand. 

And he is fucking awful.

[incarnateirony]

Democratic Debates, Day 1

So a few ground rules:

If you’re going to reply, be an adult about it, and don’t try to read everything in bad faith default lens. Ask questions of anyone who engages rather than accusing. And not in that presumptuous white guy bad faith questioning that isn’t a question tone.

If replying, put your comments with a lead in no longer than two (reasonable) sentences behind a cut. Because

some of us are fandom blogs first or whatever interests and our followers aren’t deeply invested

I just don’t want goddamn pillars of text on my reblog wall if I respond to discussions.

Literally if you’re a republican out to just be a shitlord and start whining or complaining or insulting or “no u”ing, see rule 4

I will not reblog or reply to any commentary that doesn’t fit these very basic guidelines, because internet trolling etc is not worth the future of our country. And that’s very much at stake now.

If you don’t want to see this, blacklist #politics and/or #democratic debates. Now, my takeaways on this, some surprising.

So, I’ll start with some disclaimers: I’m pretty much “vote for my dog over Trump” party line right now but we need to figure out a mix of “our best chance of winning” along of “award for the least tool” with hopefully a side of “I really like them and their policies”

Honestly, I entered this without being fond of Warren. She had some... establishment backing and other things that were just rubbing me wrong. I actually went in to day one looking to hear about Tulsi since I heard great buzz about her but honestly had only pulled up a few pages that sounded great on paper, but wanted to see her in action. Everyone else was littered policy ideas disembodied and, as a very visual person, I need to be able to connect to how they handle their podium beyond writing nice policy platitudes or listening to the toss back and forth online with everybody screaming at everybody else.

I’m also going to get something out of the way, and BEFORE you flame me on my marks on the image, read why I selected one that... I generally wouldn’t. First, this was my original graphic I released.

Okay so sore thumb here: De Blasio. The reason for the circling being simple: if you took every semi-valid idea of every other white guy’s platform on this lineup, gave it a little bit of meat, and showed ACTUAL LIVING PROOF OF HAVING ENACTED IT ALL IN HIS TENURE AND MAKING THE IDEAS WORK, you get De Blasio. A lot of the ideas of the other nominees is basically *hand raise* “I did that.” So like. That’s that.

Anyone with no mark whatsoever is kinda like “you’re there and not trump so good for you” but there’s some updates further down this conversation on one of those.

The internet keeps acting like Klobuchar did well and I really don’t get why. It kinda feels like our token non-canuck trying to appeal to them-there northern hunter-type and cheese folks to reach out as a middle ground without actually committing to much and honestly, she’s just not going to last.

Booker caught my eye even if I was kind of head tilting because that is quite literally the whitest black man I have ever fucking seen, but he made a point about intersectionality, marginalized groups, and held his ground. He was all but unknown to me but I at least looked at him now. On the other hand, a lot of it felt like borderline pandering. I don’t know. I’ll keep an eye on him, but he actually stood out a bit at least. Not hard with the mayo jars up there but whatever.

It’s not a rare take online that Castro took the internet by storm. I love him. Everyone loves him. I do have some concerns long-term though; it’s less having actual problems with his ideas and more knowing that ... our country is too fucked for him right now. He’s advocating some pretty heavily open borders and while in principle I enjoyed watching him stomp on Beto about that, I honestly feel like if we put him against Trump, we’d lose. 

There’s people in the red party that ARE tired of Trump, that ARE experiencing a crisis about the inhumane shit going on at the border, that WOULD be willing to crossvote to make it end -- but we can’t forget that a lot of them initially voted for Trump BECAUSE of a deep seeded Xenophobia, and the level of aggression -- again, the kind of aggression I personally agree with -- Castro had may end up being very dangerous long term in getting that vote. Pretty much everyone up there agrees we need very comprehensive immigration reform and immediate action about the travesty, but I feel like unless Castro smooths his roll a bit we’re in for a long term faceplant that gives us another four years of Trumpian hell by people pulling back into their xenophobic mindset and -- if not voting for Trump -- abstaining from voting for him, which I think several other candidates have in their court.

Castro made a bit of a gaffe about switching trans genders but the fact that he tried, I guess. And considered trans in the discussion of choice and birth control etc. It could have very easily just been a stupid fumble. He’s still trying to take it into account. I can forgive that, in the scale of it, even if it has a bit of performer aspect.

Also I’m left to wonder where Castro was when they needed help running in Texas to begin with. I also just don’t see the passion in his eyes of several candidates, it’s strangely calculating on most topics. I like his platform, in theory, but I’m very cautious. 

Jay Insley is just weird even if everyone likes him.

Dulaney is a meme and I don’t know why he’s even here.

Tim Ryan accidentally wandered in on his way to the Republican debates as best I can gather.

Tulsi was the one that I was watching. All in all, I was underwhelmed. And then... it got worse.

The better part of her time was spent repeating her time in the military. And while it was great watching her school Tim Ryan, that’s not exactly hard to do. The fact that she lit his ass on fire when he just about self combusted in front of the party without her help -- I mean, it was the highlight of her showcasing aside from the snazzy Rogue hair.

Somehow, for as woke as tumblr is, and the progressives that had me looking her way, I hadn’t heard of her anti-LGBT past which she’s mostly couched her opinions on and held as recently as 2014 or THE FACT THAT I HAVE FOUND OUT THAT SHE WAS VETTED BY THE FUCKING TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO BE ON THEIR CABINET, I’M FUCKING HORRIFIED.

BUT THEN THERE WAS THIS LITTLE GEM THAT I FOUND BEFORE ACTUALLY DISCOVERING THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH.

What the FUCK? What are you, seven? That’s literal pre-emptive “my sister stole my phone lol sorry” level tweets. YOU’RE A FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE TALKING ABOUT IMPORTANT NATIONAL MATTERS LOCK YOUR GODDAMN PHONE.

Because THAT’S just what we need, we’ll go from Trump impulse-tweeting to like “LOL fuck korea - lmao sorry my sister texted that”???? 

Neverminding how STATISTICALLY INCORRECT that is. Depending on exactly HOW you count time Warren got 2nd or 3rd most time -- yes, more than Tulsi. She did not have the most. She did not have “more than all the other candidates combined.” And Tulsi did not have the least time, but center-ground on time. She wasted a bunch of it endlessly reciting her time in the military, scoring an okay shot on Ryan, and... well, vagueblogging about her opinion on LGBT to the vein of “something something equality my bad I was raised conservative” great. Great selling point. Great couching there. Five years ago you were fighting against me having rights and now you’re basically against government deciding what people can’t do but what the fuck is your opinion on me as a human being?

Doubling back from that problem though, that’s when I dug in her LGBT history and ended up tripping over the Trump stuff. AND THIS IS THE CANDIDATE I WENT IN TO HEAR FROM TONIGHT LIKE “YES PLZ LET ME HEAR MORE” because people I knew LIKED her, but then I find out she’s a Trump frand that has Trump-like hyperbolic meltdowns on twitter? NO I DO NOT WANT FEMALE TRUMP WITH ROGUE HAIR THANKS BUT NO THANKS. 

Back to Warren, who I started with a MEH on, she came out WICKEDLY strong out of the gate. Her second half was weaker, she kinda has next to no active plan beyond talking/passing around more research on gun reform, but everything else, yes. Do I think she has the potential weight to pull it off, yes. And most of all, watching as she gets mad, upset, or emotional, do I believe she believes everything she said tonight, yes. Look, I know there’s STUFF about her claiming she had Native American heritage or whatever but I’m honestly so far past giving a fuck about the obscure shit like that if they have decent policies because our country is so FUCKED right now that I DONT CARE. She held her ground.

So in the end my spread ends up looking more like

of day 1 contenders, Warren still maintains her strong chance. Castro kind of sprouted up out of the earth and I really goddamn like him, but I do hold caution for my reasons above, because again, our country is THAT FUCKED.  

Booker really turned some heads and I liked him Booker... Booker’s very concerned about a lot of marginalized intersectional issues and it took him from “who the fuck is that” onto my radar which is a leap, but he didn’t drill in as hard as Castro did to my mind and I feel like he’s just... I dunno, I could be wrong but I feel like he’s gonna fade. Beto, IDK, still exists, isn’t an embarrassment and doesn’t just morph in with the other white guys up there. He’s not Trump. So I won’t delete him, but let’s say he barely, and I mean BARELY hedged into my consideration in this image, I almost just cropped it over to Warren.

De Blasio is just sort of “status quo, but actually enacts it” but I wouldn’t weep to see him vanish, either. In the end out of this debate though, I see like

Everyone else go home.

ON THE OTHER HAND, MOST CANDIDATES I’M ACTIVELY INTERESTED IN ARE ON THE FLOOR TOMORROW, WHICH BY THE LINEUP IS SLATED TO BE A BLOODBATH.

I’m really, REALLY hoping everybody has the common sense to make such an ass of Biden he’s knocked out early. Like that’s part of why I’m so goddamn interested in day 2. If we end up with Trump vs Biden we might as well all just put on our goddamn clown suits but he has the fiscal backing to push through even if he shouldn’t unless he’s utterly DECIMATED early on.

I don’t like Kamala Harris’ prison industrial complex CRAP but I’d be HAPPY to watch her drag Biden around like a wet rag. Sanders is a given point of interest. Buttigieg is another one to watch. Yang... isn’t... gonna last. But is just sort of a ... fun thing to watch I guess in this mix up. Someone else may surprise me, I don’t know.

[theculturedmarxist]

The left is in crisis across the West. It is out of power in most countries and out of touch with its historical working-class base. Class politics has given way to identity politics. And noble causes like anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-discrimination have congealed into a stifling morass of political correctness and competitive victimhood.

Thankfully, there are some pockets on the left who recognise this predicament. I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left.

Frost is a co-host of the hugely successful Chapo Trap House, which offers a funny, irony-laden and often downright vulgar take on contemporary politics from the left. She also writes a column for the Baffler and is a trade unionist.

Newer on the scene is the acerbic and wickedly funny Anna Khachiyan, art critic turned cultural commentator, who co-hosts the podcast Red Scare. Red Scare saves its most biting criticism for ‘neoliberal’ feminism.

Among the most refreshing things about Frost and Khachiyan is that their politics are resolutely not woke. ‘You can tell people that I’m trans’, says Khachiyan, with characteristic irreverence, as Frost, Khachiyan and myself sit down to talk at Eastwood in the Lower East Side. ‘I’m not trans, but you can say that just for fun.’ Their reasons for rejecting wokeness are both pragmatic and political. ‘The majority of people are not woke’, explains Frost: ‘Why would we dismiss the majority of people as hopelessly reactionary?’

Not only that, for Frost, identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are ‘a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst’. ‘The biggest divide in American society is class and that’s it. I’m a class-first person’, she tells me. ‘You’re hearing in the election how much we need to elect a woman or we need to elect a woman of colour. But the most left-wing candidate is an old, white, heterosexual man [Bernie Sanders] and I want him to win… I’m a Bernie bro. I was a Bernie bro in 2016 and I am now.’

But would the first woman president not be a breakthrough for women? ‘They’re always talking about the “little girls” – how would little girls know that they can be president? It’s just so stupid. I was a little girl once, I’ve never felt limited by this stuff’, says Frost. She raises Margaret Thatcher: ‘You [Brits] had a girl boss – she showed those bro miners!’

Frost describes herself as a socialist. She says she came to socialism through feminist organising. But the current wave of media feminism turns her off. It is about ‘middle-class women trying to get spots in the boardroom’. ‘A lot of this stuff is “fight the power, put me on the throne”.’ Or it’s, ‘Men are rude to me and they explain things to me’, she jokes.

Of course, I suggest, there are many real struggles that women face, particularly working-class women – from low pay to childcare – so why do these issues barely get a look in? ‘They don’t care about working-class women’, Frost says of contemporary feminists. ‘Half the time they’re smearing them as reactionaries because they voted for Trump.’

‘I fundamentally think they are disgusted and horrified by working-class people’, says Khachiyan. ‘Real women don’t live up to the liberal-feminist pieties’, adds Frost. ‘And I think that’s very threatening for the uptight, white, overeducated, liberal women to be confronted with’, replies Khachiyan.

So why did so many people vote for Trump? ‘There are two categories of Trump voters worth discussing separately’, says Frost. ‘There was the wealthy, petit-bourgeois reactionary. But there were also working-class people who heard only one of the candidates talking about jobs.’

Trump has many faults, of course. ‘Fundamentally, he is a cruel, stupid man’, says Frost. But he has ‘a very good observational talent’. Liberals, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, have been far too moralistic about the Trump vote, she argues: ‘Most people don’t believe that presidential candidates are telling the truth the entire time.’

Worse, the left’s response to Trump has been totally counterproductive: ‘Do you want to tell people how bad they are? Do you want them to repent because they’re bad racists? Or do you want them to pursue a left-wing project?’

‘Those people are ours to win’, says Frost. The populist moment is an opportunity, she says, but one which ‘I can totally see us pissing away’. ‘The self-identified left are very sceptical of the populist stuff. Look at their takes on the yellow vests: “They’re all fascists!” They’re probably just fucking French people – and who can tell the difference?’

Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’

What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’

For Khachiyan, ‘You can say a lot of bad things about Donald Trump, but you can’t say the man is boring’.

‘Trump should be an artist, not a politician’, she adds. ‘He says, “I’ve never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”, and he loves Diet Coke, that’s his drink of choice. I don’t know if he’s self-aware or not.’

The problem with liberals, she says, is that ‘they can’t differentiate between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him… He really brings to the fore all these inarticulable taboos. But as a politician, he’s not very exceptional.’ It is not so much Trump’s policies that anger the liberals, but his brashness, his demeanour. Frost adds, by way of example, that Obama also ‘threw tear gas at the border’.

Three years on from the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still largely in denial or in despair about Trump’s victory. The now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative provided an excuse to avoid any soul-searching. ‘The whole Rachel Maddow and the NBC crowd have infected the minds of boomers with this dystopian narrative’, Khachiyan tells me. ‘Even my mom, who’s from Russia, buys the collusion narrative.’

‘The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’

But while liberals may be electorally challenged, they still dominate mainstream culture. ‘“Liberal’ is the political denomination, but “nerd” is the cultural denomination’, says Khachiyan. ‘We’re living under the triumph of the nerds… If you had an American Psycho-esque novel today, there wouldn’t be this broad-shouldered besuited guy who looked like he walked out of the pages of an advertisement. It would be about a fin-tech soy boy. He’d be hunched over, clutching his tote-bag’, she says.

‘Bret Easton Ellis said there could never be the great Millennial novel – we’ll see. I haven’t read that Sally Rooney book that everybody’s writing about’, Khachiyan says, referring to the Irish author’s breakthrough novel, Normal People, which focuses on a millennial relationship. Frost adds that she read the book ‘with the intent of savaging it’, because ‘all the Guardian feminists like her’, but found ‘there was a lot of good shit in there’. ‘I think the women who like it don’t understand why they do… women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship’, she says. Khachiyan adds: ‘Which is what most people since the dawn of time have wanted… There’s nothing reactionary about wanting a boyfriend!’

The conversation turns back to Bret Easton Ellis, a critic of what he calls snowflake culture, who is frequently accused of being a reactionary. ‘A lot of artists either don’t have any politics or their politics are retarded’, says Khachiyan. ‘His whole virtue as a writer is being a great stylist and a great narrator who retains plausible deniability. American Psycho has references to killing homeless black people, calling Asians “slant eyes”. And a lot of these woke SJW people sincerely think he’s a racist because he describes the condition… Artists are sometimes unassailable… The whole impulse to peg someone for what they are now is bizarre.’

Another recent favourite author among Guardian feminists is Kristen Roupenian, whose short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral. The story is about a young woman who realises – slightly too late in the day – that the sexual encounter she is about to embark on is not what she wants. When the man finally realises he has been rejected, he lashes out. ‘Guardian feminists liked it because it “proved” men are trash because the man called her a whore at the end’, says Khachiyan. ‘Actually what it showed is that men can be sad and pathetic’, adds Frost.

Khachiyan tells me about an event she was at with Roupenian recently. (‘Hands down one of the most inarticulate, scatter-brained speakers – but the woman can write!’) Lena Dunham was meant to speak, she says, but didn’t show up because ‘she cooked up a fake illness’. ‘It was around the time she had her uterus removed’, she says. Frost adds that lots of American women are ‘voluntary removing their reproductive organs’. ‘Nobody is talking about this. It’s a middle-class, very elite phenomenon, where they’re like, “I have menstrual problems, I’m going to remove my womb”. Lena Dunham wrote a whole fucking essay about it.’

I asked how the seeming frigidity of the #MeToo moment, let alone the alleged epidemic of uterus removals, sits alongside modern feminism’s ‘sex positive’ celebration of polyamory, pansexuality and sex workers. ‘It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility’, says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.’

Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’

We move from jealousy to hate, and to the alleged epidemic of racism or even fascism often talked up by the left. Hate speech, we’re told, must be contained. Khachiyan takes a refreshingly liberal line: ‘You should be able to hate and hatred should be protected, as long as it doesn’t spill over into physical violence.’ ‘There’s this idea that we live in a white supremacist country when we fundamentally don’t’, says Khachiyan. She mentions antifa, the self-styled anti-fascist group that, since our conversation, has hit the headlines for beating up a right-leaning journalist in Portland. ‘Antifa have manufactured a threat to have some semblance of an identity’, she says. ‘All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.’

Frost and Khachiyan have a Marxist understanding of race. ‘We invented race to justify exploitation’, says Frost. ‘Splitting people on the basis of race was used to morally justify slavery… Racial discourse was created after hyper-exploitation.’ But ever since, argues Frost, ‘When we tried to not be racist, we ended up using the same framework’, which today also lives on in identitarian form. ‘All “race” is, is that some people don’t sunburn. That’s the entirety of racial difference.’

But how much can Marxism really illuminate today’s mad world? ‘Twitter call-out culture’, Frost concedes, ‘has no Marxist explanation. It makes no sense economically or even logically.’ Marx cannot account for a ‘social phenomenon where you rat out your closest friends’ and ‘describe them as reactionary’: ‘Why would you do that? Of course it will be bad for you.’

While there are plenty of woke types queuing up to ‘call out’ Frost, Khachiyan and their collaborators – even accusing them of being Nazis – let’s hope the dirtbag left can resist being ‘cancelled’ altogether. Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags.

Fraser Myers is a staff writer at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.

[oliverzafar]

CHANGE WILL COME FROM THE CHILDREN

Oliver Zafar officially announced his bid for the presidency in February of 2019, doing so as a left-leaning Independent candidate. His core values are based on progressivism and looking towards the future, ensuring a better America for both its present and future citizens.

Read more below about where he stands on the core issues facing Americans today!

CLIMATE CHANGE. Incredibly vocal about doing everything possible to stop climate change and vouches that the Green Movement can boost economic growth and create millions of new careers for those in the fossil fuel industry worried about losing their jobs. Launch a 10 to 15-year plan to transition to 100% clean energy and net-zero greenhouse gas pollution. Remove subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry and implement a Carbon Tax. Ban fracking and all fossil fuel exports. Require plastic bags in stores only be given out at a price. His own campaign is incredibly clean, offsetting all carbon emissions produced from travel activities and events by investing in renewable energy and carbon reduction projects.

GENDER AND RACE ISSUES. Mandate a universal paid parental leave policy for either or both parents. Fight the gender and race-based pay gap by requiring businesses to report salaries, promotions, and dismissals as broken down by gender and race to the public. Codify Roe v. Wade to continue ensuring safe and legal abortions. Conduct regular random, unannounced investigations into police officers to ensure no race or gender bias takes place. Work to decrease the disproportionate amount of women of color affected by infant mortality.

LGBTQ+ ISSUES. Describes the murder of black trans women in America as a “national crisis”. Include members of the LGBTQ+ community in the Equal Housing Act. Remove all legal loopholes that allow individuals to lose their jobs due to their sexuality in twenty-two states. Ban conversation therapy. Repeal the FDA’s policy that disallows gay men from donating blood.

HEALTHCARE: Work towards “Healthcare for All” by: a) sponsoring a buy-in program for Medicaid so that not only low-income individuals have the option to use public healthcare, and b) expanding Medicare by allowing people ages 50 to 64 to still buy into it. Have the government manufacture cheap generic drugs if prescription drug costs rise too high to stop excessive pharmaceutical price-gouging. Allow Americans to purchase medications from other countries as a way to lower consumer costs. Push to pass the Affordable Medications Act in the Senate to allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices with insurance companies under Medicare.

FOREIGN RELATIONS. Build a public and private international coalition against China’s intellectual property theft and compete against China in Asia with a TPP-style trade deal. Limit drone strikes, if not discontinue them completely. No military intervention in Venezuela’s current political climate.

ECONOMICS. Cut taxes on small businesses and farmers, raise them on corporations. Incorporate a VAT Tax to pay for many of his proposals, which he loves to emphasize is a tax already used by every developed country besides the US. Encourage more union-positive thinking throughout corporate America (he’s very proud of the fact that his own staff is unionized!). Stronger anti-trust regulations to break up monopolies and encourage companies to invest profits in their employees and communities.

IMMIGRATION. Repeal criminal penalties for people crossing the border. Reexamine the current immigration process and try to expedite/ease the process so that families are not forced to enter illegally. Conduct a comprehensive review of current ICE procedures and implement serious retraining based on federally approved security protocols. If this is still unsuccessful, abolish ICE and redistribute its responsibilities to other agencies. Increase foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries in crisis to thus reduce the flow of asylum seekers to the U.S.

STUDENT DEBT. Expand access to college by providing interest-free federal loans. Allow employers to make tax-free contributions to pay off their employees’ student debt and help those in work-study programs graduate without owing anything.  

EDUCATION. Introduce a free universal pre-K program to ensure all children have the same successful start. Introduce initiatives to increase the US’ advancement in science, technology, and mathematics when compared to other much more advanced developed countries. Research the amount of homework and schoolwork given at public schools and whether or not it’s the most productive to produce actual results.

DEFENSE. Lower military spending by ending regime-change wars and reducing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

GUN REFORM. Enact the Disarmament Act with some modifications. Invest into research and development of “smart gun” technology and other technological preventative measures.

PACS: Reform campaign finance laws so that representatives don’t answer to donors, they answer to voters. Force every company that wants government contracts to disclose every campaign donation. Outlaw superPACs and overturn Citizens United.

— Please specify their target voter audience [age, ethnicity, region, income, etc]

Young, young, young! Oliver’s support is distributed between 18 to 44 years old, with very few older generations outside of his home state of Massachusetts willing to even hear him out. The quintessential Oliver voter is a grad student – high in education level but low in income. He’s also attracted a lot of support from people who are fed up with the two-party system that seems to permeate American politics and would instead prefer a more Independent candidate who doesn’t need to preen to Democratic powerhouses to make a decision. He polls very favorably among members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, especially Asians, Middle-Easterners, and Indians who want to see their region represented through either him or his fiancé. Both sides of the coast are the areas that his support is most concentrated in, especially Northeastern intellectual elites, while his spouts of passionate progressivism are lost on most of Middle America.

— What do their supporters love and believe in when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What’s people’s reasoning for voting for your character?

The first thing Oliver’s supporters will cite as the reason that they vote for him is his passion. He speaks and campaigns with a kind of fire that most politicians lost before they even became elected. They love his youth after having grown up with generation of old white dirtbags ruling the country, and believe that as the first Millennial presidential candidate he understands the problems plaguing America’s most indebted, most stressed, and most socially conscious generation better than anyone else running. Progressives also appreciate how incredibly vocal he is about his experience as a gay man and a person of color who experienced an incredible amount of discrimination following 911.

— What does the opposition hate when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What points are brought up when trying to convince others your character isn’t a good choice for the seat?

Take a seat y’all, this is gonna take a while: His youth is usually the first criticism people bring up, because it’s the one that’s least controversial as opposed to his sexuality or race (but we’ll get to that too). Even though he’s got over a decade of experience in politics, people hesitate to endorse someone who’s just a few years above the legal age to even run for president. His opposition will also bring up the hypocritical nature of his marriage, since Oliver’s this stalwart progressive while his fiancé writes for Republicans. Democrats and moderate Republicans usually stop there in terms of his personal life, but of course conservatives will reference his homosexuality as something “the country isn’t ready for” or bring up his Arabic roots as “something a post-911 USA shouldn’t trust”.

Aside from just personal issues, Oliver’s also received a lot of backlash for running as an Independent. Though he’s doing it for the sake of proving that a divisive two-party system is only going to ultimately hurt America (he’s got Madison 10 like… framed twice in his office), people are harsh to point out that he’s only going to take votes away from Berkeley and essentially hinder a Democratic victory. Oliver also doesn’t know how to just give no comment when asked questions by reporters (much to the exhaustion of his staff), which while seen as “endearingly passionate” by some is seen as “an inability to keep his goddamn mouth shut” by others. He’s also incredibly uncompromising on his key issues (climate change, healthcare, gun control, and student loans most prominently), which doesn’t resonate well with moderates who aren’t 100% committed to his radicalities. And as much as Oliver claims to fight for the people, he suffers from a chronic syndrome of Northeastern Elitism as a result of being an intellectually-raised, Harvard-educated, I’ve-read-The-Republic-in-its-original-Greek kind of guy that doesn’t hold Middle America at too high of a regard.

[kmtam]

Some of my thoughts on the thing.

I’m feeling mostly good about the election. Not great, but not bad, and nothing like The Day After in 2016. Regardless of how you slice it, we’re in a better position today than we were yesterday, even if some of our preferred candidates lost, or our preferred narratives didn’t fully pan out.

I’ll start with the bad. Apparently my moving to a GOP district did not magically flip it blue, which is a bit surprising but OK, whatever. Katie Porter lost, and this is the biggest disappointment of the night for me (I think?) because this district was actually winnable. Mimi Walters, the incumbent, is an uncharismatic, do-nothing who rubber-stamps her party line without fanfare. This county, if not the district, is now majority Democrat, and this election was a chance to rebuke the past two years of Republican governance. But Katie Porter lost, and I think she lost because she ran a bad campaign. I saw very few Porter signs on the streets (and the streets here are FILLED with signs around election time); I knew nothing about what Porter actually stood for (I just found out this morning she supported repealing the gas tax!); and she cancelled on multiple in-person events during the primaries and general. Now, maybe all of her resources were spent in more conservative parts of the district, I don’t know, but I do know that I got multiple people knocking at my door over the past few days, in an ivory tower neighborhood literally filled with liberal professors, asking me to vote for Katie Porter, which seems like misspent energy to me.

Oh well, there’s always 2020.

The senate is a tough loss, especially Heitkamp and very especially McCaskill. But despite media narratives to the contrary, the senate was always an extreme long-shot for the Democrats. The map and schedule were historically difficult, and the fact that Beto actually got within a few points in a race that started out with about a 20 point difference is extraordinary. Sure, it would have been great to take the senate, and it sucks that there are now fewer Dems in the senate than before, but in terms of actual legislative power etc., there’s not really any difference from the status quo. Now the Dems will lose by a slightly higher margin. But at least there’s a check in the House.

Florida and Georgia are bad. And in both cases there’s some electoral irregularities, along with outright vote suppression. Democrats absolutely must make voting access — and gerrymandering and voting machines — a top priority in their agenda, at all levels of government.

The defeat of Prop 10 -- which would have allowed the expansion of rent control in California -- is bad. The margin by which it was defeated is baffling. Who the hell are all these people who really don’t like rent control? And who are all these people voting to force EMTs to remain on call while they take their breaks? And why does California legislate so many stupid things through ballot initiatives?! At least the greedy boomer home-owners didn’t get their tax break.

There’s more bad stuff. Like that everyone I gave money to lost, except one person, and she’s not even in my state (Jacky Rosen in NV). And my longtime nemesis Diane Feinstein took her race handily. And literal white supremacist Steve King narrowly won back his seat in Iowa.

But there’s plenty of good stuff, too.

More women, and especially more women of color, will now be serving in Congress than ever before. Two of them are Muslim American, two of them are Native American. My home state of Massachusetts elected its first Black woman to Congress (uh, why’d it take so long?), and Boston elected a Black woman as District Attorney.

Medicaid expansion passed in Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska.

Scott Walker lost in Wisconsin (which I assume is due to the presence of @tnelms and @suchasuperlady), and Kris Kobach lost in Kansas (!).

Voter turnout was massive, in comparison with previous midterm elections.

Kim Davis, whom none of us should ever have heard of in the first place, was booted from office.

Massachusetts re-affirmed trans rights.

And lots more.

Here’s the thing. The “blue wave” thing was a media construction that was designed to either work or fail spectacularly — that is, there either would be a wave or there wouldn’t. There’s no in-between, mostly because there’s no room in the metaphor for in-betweenness. Focusing on and thinking through stupid metaphors like this -- and then trying to work within those metaphors, like referring to the “blue trickle” or the “blue particles” (har har) -- distracts us from seeing what has actually happened.

And what actually happened is that the Democrats took a lot of seats in the House, despite what is, according to traditional measures (if not direct experience), a really good economy. One of the only tried-and-true metrics that has held over the decades is that the relative health of the economy dictates whether the incumbent party gains or loses seats in an election. If the economy is doing well, the incumbents tend to hold seats or gain some, but if it’s doing badly, they lose. It’s virtually unheard of for incumbents to lose seats when the economy is doing well, but that’s exactly what happened last night, at least in the House.

And look at those Medicaid expansions in very conservative states. Republicans began the campaign by running on only three issues: healthcare, tax cuts, and racism. They basically gave up talking about the tax cuts they passed, because they were very unpopular, and they ended up outright lying about their position on healthcare since, as it turns out, even in red states, people overwhelmingly want affordable healthcare. So all they’re left with is racism. Now I’m not saying this is a good thing, of course. Obviously not. But it demonstrates that the “issues” that the GOP touts are all smoke and mirrors, and the Democratic positions on those are in fact widely preferred. Plainly, all the GOP has at this point is racism. Once we all understand that, and stop pretending like the GOP is a legitimate, issues-based political party, the better equipped we are to organize around them in the future. Which is to say, anti-racism needs to be a basic building block of everything the left, including the Democratic party, puts forward from now on.

Remember, this is all about power, not just aesthetics or feelings (those matter, too, but only really in relation to power). And the medium and long games are just as important, if not more important, than the short ones. The short game played from 2016-2018 wasn’t perfect, but it was a good step forward because the unfettered power of the GOP now has a few more checks on it. There’s another short game to play starting today, and this one is even more important than the one we just finished. As I’ve said before, I have no love for the Democratic party, but for better or worse, they’re the only force we have right now for stopping a political cult from destroying our fragile democracy, so the best thing to do, from point of view, is help them win this game. I really hope they can do it.

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

The 2020 Democratic primary is really an electoral story. Nothing the candidates say about policy on the campaign trail will become law during the campaign.1 But the language of presidential primaries is not electoral — candidates tend not to say, “people of The Left, vote for me, I’m very liberal” or, “Democrats, pick me; sure, I’m progressive, but I’m not so progressive that it ruins my appeal with Republican-leaning independents in the Midwest.”

Instead, the language of presidential primaries is largely one of policy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes a tax on wealth over $50 million and defends that policy on its merits. She doesn’t say out loud the real, immediate goal of the proposal for her — wooing liberal Democratic primary voters concerned about growing income inequality.

The 2020 candidates are likely to talk a lot about policy over the next year — it’s basically how you run for president. And you should pay attention to what they say, but not for the reasons you might think. Here’s a guide to the “policy primary,” with some thoughts from academics and one-time advisers to presidential candidates.2

1. Most importantly, policy proposals matter because the winning candidate will try to implement them as president.

There is a common view that candidates just promise whatever it takes to win and then abandon all those pledges once in office. But political science research has shown over and over again that politicians, including presidents, try to implement their campaign promises, even the more outlandish ones. We just had a record-long partial government shutdown over a campaign pledge that President Trump has unsuccessfully tried to implement — the border wall.3

So, all else being equal, you can expect follow-through from whoever is elected president on many of the policies he or she put forth during the campaign.

2. Even so, pay more attention to broad goals than fine print.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both came up with proposals to vastly increase the number of Americans with health insurance. They disagreed on the how: Clinton said a comprehensive new health insurance law should require everyone to have insurance or pay a fine; Obama had no such mandate. You know how this turned out — the law now known as Obamacare included an individual mandate.4 Somewhat similarly, during the 2016 race, Trump’s campaign named 21 people that he would consider appointing to the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventual Trump nominee and now Justice Brett Kavanaugh was not among the 21.

That said, one of the 21 was Neil Gorsuch. And the overall group was full of white, male and fairly conservative legal figures — the exact kind of people Trump has appointed to the Supreme Court and lower courts as president.

“One big takeaway from my research is that the ‘policy primary’ gives us less information about the specifics of the plans that might be on the agenda than it does about what issues are likely to be at the top of the agenda,” said Philip Rocco, a political scientist professor at Marquette University who specializes in research on the policymaking process, in an e-mail message.

Looking forward, therefore, I think it’s safe to assume the Democratic candidates running on Medicare-for-all, if elected, will at the very least push for some kind of program in which uninsured Americans can enroll in a public plan along the lines of Medicare. It’s likely Warren will try to implement some kind of new tax on the very wealthy if she is elected.

3. Rank-and-file voters probably aren’t choosing candidates based on their policy plans.

Generally, “the differences on issues [among candidates] in primaries are not huge,” said Elaine Kamarck, who was a top policy adviser to Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run. So most voters probably will not be able to assess subtle differences on policy issues among the 2020 Democratic contenders. After all, political scientists have found American voters broadly know little about politics and policy.

However, Kamarck argued that voters are often well-informed and passionate about issues that particularly affect their regions or states. So a Democratic primary candidate might do poorly in the primaries in Kentucky or West Virginia if he or she has a plan that voters in those states think will severely harm the coal industry.

4. But the policy plans tell voters about a candidate’s priorities and values — and that probably does matter electorally.

“People are not voting for a package of policy preferences, they’re voting for an individual, and the policies or issues help mark out the kind of person they are,” Mark Schmitt, who was a policy adviser on Bill Bradley’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, said in an e-mail message.

So a candidate like Warren or Bernie Sanders with proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthy is communicating to voters a persona — “fighting for the little guy,” “taking on the establishment” — that might resonate with voters who are liberal or anti-establishment, even if these voters don’t really know much about, say, marginal tax rates.

Lee Drutman, a scholar at the think tank New America, concluded based on polling data that 2016 Democratic primary voters who preferred Sanders were not significantly more liberal on policy issues than those who backed Hillary Clinton. (Sanders himself certainly was to the left of Clinton.) Instead, voters’ views of the American political system and whether they thought it was fundamentally “rigged” was a strong predictor of which candidate they supported. More anti-establishment Democrats strongly preferred Sanders. That is probably, in part, because his policy proposals, like a single-payer health care system, communicated a break from the more establishment politics of Clinton.

5. Policy details matter to important groups that can offer endorsements — and those endorsements can matter electorally.

In 2016, the National Nurses Association backed Sanders over Clinton, and this wasn’t much of a surprise. The NNA has long pushed for single-payer health care, and Sanders favored that idea and Clinton did not. In making its endorsement, NAA’s leadership specifically noted Sanders’s support of single-payer and his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama-era trade agreement that Clinton did not oppose as forcefully as Sanders.

So specific issue stands do really matter to key activist groups making endorsements. And that can make an impact electorally. Unions, for example, can organize their members to back candidates. When a Democratic candidate comes out with an education policy plan, that may be an appeal to parents, but it is also likely signaling to teacher unions, a powerful, organized liberal constituency in some states.

“Activists do pay attention” to specific policy ideas and stances, said Andrew Dowdle, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas who has written extensively about the presidential nomination process.

6. Pay more attention to the “flop” than the “flip.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been criticized for supporting overly punitive approaches to criminal justice in the past, Cory Booker for promoting charter schools, Kirsten Gillibrand for backing conservative immigration legislation, Sanders for opposing some gun control measures earlier in his career. I could go on. The Democratic Party has moved decidedly to the left in recent years, so many of the 2020 presidential candidates have, in their past, violated some of the party’s new tenets.

Scrutinizing candidate’s past records is a big part of any nomination contest. But it may not be a particularly useful exercise in predicting what these candidates would do on policy if elected president. (Note the emphasis on policy — Bill Clinton’s philandering and Trump’s lying before entering office were fairly useful predictors of what came later.)

These candidates are politicians, after all. They probably were taking stands in the past that reflected a mix of conviction and political expediency. Biden likely believed that the “crime bill” he sponsored in 1994 (and is now slammed as helping lead to the over-incarceration of African-Americans) was good policy (it was endorsed by a lot of black political leaders too). I suspect he also thought the legislation was in the political mainstream, helping him to rise up the ranks of the Democratic Party.

David Karol, an expert on the presidential nomination process who teaches at the University of Maryland, told me these “flip-flops” by candidates are often explained by their changing constituencies. He referred specifically to Gillibrand, who was first elected in 2006 in a relatively moderate district in upstate New York before becoming the senator for the entire state, which is fairly liberal-leaning.

“It’s hard to know whether the politician ‘really’ believed in their position at Time 1 or Time 2,” Karol said.

Either way, Democratic elected officials have moved away from a tough-on-crime approach and the party’s voters are now very pro-immigration . I have no doubt a President Biden would govern on criminal justice policy more like how he sounds in 2019 than he did in 1994, and that a President Gillibrand would be more pro-immigration than Candidate Gillibrand in 2006.

The obvious example here is Trump, who took some fairly liberal stands in earlier phases of his life but has generally followed GOP orthodoxy as president, as he promised to do on many issues during his 2016 campaign.

President Ronald “Reagan’s promises on abortion were far better predictors of his policies than his more pro-choice past as California’s governor were. Al Gore was pro-gun and anti-abortion at one point in his career when it made sense for a white southern Democrat to be so. But his campaign promises were better predictors,” Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist who is currently writing a book about presidential primaries, said in an e-mail message.

So the bottom line: Take what the presidential candidates are saying on the campaign trail seriously and literally. But more seriously than literally.