Horrors! Only 53%!
In 2020, America is rather like that couple who fights all the time in your 70s-era apartment building with the paper-thin walls — the rest of us get to hear you freak out over and over and over again.
And don’t get me wrong — a lot of these things that are happening in America are terrible and worth freaking out about. But a lot of them aren’t.
Case in point is this article: “Only 53% of Bernie Sanders voters will definitely support 2020 Democratic nominee if he doesn’t win: poll”.
My Facebook page is lighting up with this as though it’s the most terrible thing ever, and yet it’s powerfully meaningless, a completely expectable thing.
Note the word “definitely”! Here’s another way of expressing it: “47% of Bernie Sanders are unwilling to completely commit to voting for some unnamed Democratic candidate almost a year from now.”
Why would anyone “definitely” commit to that? I’m honestly surprised that as many as 53% were definite about Unknown Democrat!
More, there’s this weird idea my Facebook friends have, that polls accurately represent not just people’s opinions today, but their actual intentions in the future.
I worry considerably about honesty and moral questions, but I would feel few if any compunctions (and not a single qualm) about misleading a poll about my future intentions if I felt it served the Body Politic to do so.
Were I an American and a Bernie supporter, I would rationally represent myself to a pollster as “would vote for Trump if Bernie didn’t get the nomination” even though I would never in a million years actually do that.
The reason is simple — it’s for negotiation. When you are negotiating with someone, whether it’s your boss or the DNC, you can’t just give up the game right away by admitting you will take any deal they offer. This destroys any possible leverage you have — it shows weakness.
On the other hand, if you are a Bernie supporter, saying today, “It’s Bernie or Bust for me. Give me Bernie now”: this shows strength. It increases the chances that other teams will quail and lose hope and Bernie will win. Even if Bernie does not win, it gives you leverage to ask for more: “Maybe I’d vote for you if you promised to decrease the military budget…?”
Again — saying now you might not vote for another candidate coughBidencough — does not prevent you from finally holding your nose and voting for whatever useless neoliberal turd the DNC finally deigns to drop in your mouth. Of course, if it’s Biden then Trump will win but you can at least feel good about having voted against him.
I can just imagine asking for a raise like this!
“Hey, boss, I wanted to [gulp] ask for a raise, but if you didn’t give it to me, I’d be fine! I love working here, and I’d never leave, it’s the best place ever. In fact, I’m sorry I bothered you, I know you’re busy, I’ll go back and work now.”
—
Indeed, if there’s one reason that the United States has moved so very far to the right so very fast, it’s that progressives have an “always blue” strategy., where they never even pretend to hold out their vote. Because the DNC knows that the progressives are in the bag for them and will never switch to another party, the DNC also knows that logically, they have to offer them nothing except the appearance of opposition to the Republicans.
Look at the big two — gun control and reproductive rights. There has been essentially no change in these issues at a Federal level in generations, and yet this is still what the Democrats have continued to offer — along with a steady diet of warfare and capitalist adoration of Wall Street’s verge. It took the Squad to finally address the anti-war, pro-income-equality issues that should have been in the very blood of American progressives.
Republican voters don’t do that. If their “Republican” candidate defects on any of their central tenets, they don’t vote for the RINO.
So Republican policy is on a ratchet — it can move towards the right, but never to the left. On the other hand, as Obama astutely pointed out, most of his policies would have made him a moderate Republican during the Reagan era.
Progressive are completely rational in pushing back after literally generations of hippy punching by right-wing Democrats. When Sanders supporters aren’t willing to “definitely” commit to some spineless empty suit sight-unseen, perhaps take a chill pill instead of going all Chicken Little.
