Spectre Collie

On the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, there’s kind of a running bit that illustrates how people have a hard time comprehending complex systems such as evolution, without wanting to assign motivation or direction to it. Often when they’re talking about interesting physiological behaviors or adaptations, they’ll word it in terms that suggest intentionality: like “the plant wants to reach the most sunlight,” or “the female spider wants to find the healthiest males to mate with.” Usually Dan Schreiber will ask something like “does the spider know this is the healthiest male?” to which John Harkin usually responds, “does she even know she’s a spider?”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, as I’ve been barraged with media that seems to want me to be perpetually panicked, angry, and frightened. Obviously, I’ve brought some of it on myself by diving back into the Performative Awareness Platform known as Twitter — even in read-only mode, it works perfectly as designed, taking me from resting anxiety to blood-boiling, panicked rage in about 60 seconds. But even when I’ve got that shit turned off, I’ve seen the people who I usually trust to be rational become obsessed with Trump’s bullshit rambling quotes about not accepting the outcome of the election. It’s a coup! He’s going to throw out the ballots and the Republicans are just going to appoint him President!

One of the only voices of calm and reason I’ve been able to find is from Teri Kanefield, who wrote a great op-ed for The Washington Post (and has been talking about it in Twitter threads). I’d encourage anyone who can get around the paywall to read it, but essentially, she reminds us all that he can’t do that. He can’t control state elections, he doesn’t have control over state legislators, and he doesn’t control the judiciary. He just wants you to believe that he can, because he’s losing in just about every legitimate poll available.

Of course, it is unequivocally, undeniably, unacceptable for the President of the United States to be casually speculating about a treasonous coup during a press conference. But, I mean, welcome to 2020.

People should understand now that it’s possible for something to be an unacceptable perversion of American Democracy and basic human decency; but also at the same time, meaningless nonsense trolling bullshit. I’m not saying ignore it. I’m saying don’t build a news cycle out of the headline “Trump is forming a coup to stay in office despite the election results.” The message should be that it’s unacceptable for him — or anyone anywhere near the presidency, for that matter — to be saying shit like this, not that it’s something that we need to be worried about and prepared for. If a child is throwing a tantrum and threatening to hold his breath until he passes out, you tell him to stop it; you don’t immediately call 911.

I think Kanefield’s key point — at least, it’s the one I most strongly agree with — is that all of this panic helps no one but Trump. It helps cement this baffling idea that he’s somehow powerful enough to overthrow the American government, control the minds of 50% of the population, bend the legislative branch to his will, and display a preternaturally savvy understanding of the media and how to manipulate it. All this about a barely-functioning moron who is clearly in way over his head. Who not only lost the popular vote, but lost it by the largest margin since 1876. Who is hated by the military — who I’m assuming would be at least nice to have on your side for a proper coup — because he’s a draft-dodger who routinely, casually, and openly insults and denigrates them. Who has the “support” of the Republican party, but only by means of a relationship that’s less like the houses in Game of Thrones and more like sharks and remoras, in that they’re spineless opportunists who don’t really give a shit about most human beings.

You can tell how widely Trump is disliked when even the conservative jackasses speak out against him. One such jackass has accurately pointed out that Trump’s interactions with professional media are more like professional wrestling than genuine governmental communication. And I can’t think of a better analogy than comparing Trump to kayfabe: He saunters into the ring and blathers off some racist, misogynist, blatantly anti-American bullshit. The people who we look to as referees or announcers all lose control and scream about this unprecedented display. No one can imagine what a decent American adult could possibly do when a competitor dares to break every norm of the sport and bring a folding chair into the ring oh my God I’ve never seen anything like this before, is this the end of America as we know it?!

If you’re in the media, or if you’re a politician hoping to stop this nonsense, then you have a responsibility when it comes to responding to Trump’s bullshit posturing, if you respond at all. What you don’t do is keep asking him if he’s going to do it, cementing the idea that it’s up to him to decide. Instead, you point out that he can’t do it, and that’s the end of the story. Or, if you believe that he can, you explain how, and you tell us all what the American public can do to circumvent it. It’s irresponsible to keep treating this asshole like he’s Billy Mumy in The Twilight Zone, magically gifted to enact whatever cruel whim he comes up with.

This whole incident is a perfect example of how the media — both legitimate and social — just stumbles over itself trying to give him more attention and more unearned significance. I suppose having someone in the office of the President who will just randomly spout out racist, fascist bullshit is like a negative zone version of the Puppy Bowl: it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it gets a strong, immediate reaction from the audience. And the state of mass media in the 21st century is a complex system that happens to feed off of knee-jerk reactions to blatantly provocative trash. Our insistency on immediacy, and on the distrust of gate-keepers, has created an environment where even the cheapest and laziest disturbance can ripple out into a gigantic, self-perpetuating feedback loop, more quickly than actual news has ever been able to spread.

But giving Trump credit for “manipulating” that environment would be as misguided as assuming butterflies have insidious powers of weather control when they flap their wings and cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet. (Now I’m going to be embarrassed when we discover the butterflies have been the supervillainous architects of 2020 this whole time).

If this is a chaotic system, like I’m suggesting, then it’s probably a mistake to assume malicious intent on the people warning us about every incident of Trump’s incompetently authoritarian, clown-fascist posturing. In fact, I’d assume that most have the best of intentions. After all, if the president is even casually threatening to refuse to leave office, it is news, even if it’s not an imminent threat. I think the issue is that people are ignoring the notion that journalism and politics are both supposed to be a public service. It’s not enough to tell us what’s happening; you have to either put it into a useful context if you’re a journalist, or tell us what you’re going to do about it if you’re a politician. But one of the few things that both the “left” and the “right” can still agree on is that our politicians don’t feel obligated to represent us. For over a decade, most of the people representing me in the federal government have been less interested in impactful legislation and more interested in crafting the most impactful, buzz-generating statements on Twitter. Let that sink in.

Calling Trump “the heel” — in the perpetual Wrestlemania that national politics in 2020 has become — can be interpreted as an attempt to diminish his awfulness, but that’s not the case at all. It’s not hyperbole at all to say that four more years of Trump would be catastrophic for this country. But it wouldn’t be a “master manipulator,” or some shadowy dark state puppet-masters taking over the country in a violent or non-violent coup. It would be more a case of Americans just giving into apathy, selfishness, and hatred, letting the cancerous decay take over everything. It’d become a nation of Tucker Carlsons and Kellyanne Conways. But calling him “the heel” is a good analogy because it’s a reminder he’s not just a tool for the Republicans to root for or hide behind. He’s there to give the Democrats somebody to boo at.

In 2016, the Democrats spent an entire convention reminding us that Trump was a demagogue. I’m guessing that they didn’t ask Michelle Obama what that word means, exactly, because they sure as hell seem to be trying to make us as fearful and suspicious of each other as they can. It should go without saying that I’m voting for Biden. And more than that, I like Biden, and I trust him, because he’s one of the few politicians at the national level who seems incentivized to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. But I don’t know what the hell Biden’s campaign is doing.

There are all the annoyances with overwhelmingly frequent donation requests, and tone-deaf and robotic messaging, which are all probably inevitable in a national election campaign these days. But what I find disconcerting are the messages that seem to be intended to make us afraid or worried. I’ve seen donation requests that claim “the polls” put Biden at Trump within 2 points of each other, so it’s crucial that I send a grassroots donation of $100 or more, even though I’d already read on the same day that Biden is winning significantly in polls all over the country. I’ve seen claims that the Trump is raising hundreds of millions of dollars and Biden is the underdog, right after seeing reports that Trump’s campaign is as bankrupt as his casinos and Biden is out-funding him significantly.

I understand the desire to keep people involved and keep voters from becoming complacent, but if you can’t do it honestly, then that sets a horrible precedent. When apathy is largely responsible for putting one of the most obviously shitty and dishonest people in the United States into the office of president, we can’t just shrug and say, “eh, politicians and political campaigns lie all the time. That’s just the way it works.” There’s something very dishonest about whipping people into a panic about the president stealing the election in an unprecedentedly underhanded coup attempt, and then telling us that the only way we can stop it is by voting. Doing otherwise just undermines the entire system of democracy that we have in place. You can’t warn people that they’re in imminent danger and then not give them any tools to actually do something about it.

There is no real choice in this election — it’s either Biden or disaster. But that was also true in 2016. I think a lot of liberals like myself assumed that since nobody in their right mind would vote for Trump, there was no chance he’d make it into office. And I think the Clinton campaign made the mistake of assuming that the race was between Clinton and Trump, when in fact the race was between Clinton and apathy. That’s exactly why I want the Biden campaign to focus on the whole “build back better” message (which I happen to think is perfect) and less on the “Trump is a lying piece of shit and he sucks” message. The reason is because the goal of the Democrats in this campaign shouldn’t be just to win, but to get people engaged again, helping build up our communities, restoring faith in our democracy and our ability to do better. Stop letting some shithead dominate the conversation and make everything about him. Instead, remind people how the government — and law enforcement — are supposed to work for us, instead of being in control over us.

In other words: back off the hyperbolic “coup” bullshit until you’re trying to get us to actually mobilize to overthrow the government. Until then, just try being honest with people about the severity of what’s happening in the government, and our role in it. If you want to encourage voting, encourage voting; don’t just gin up meaningless social media engagement and call it “activism.” If you want people to volunteer, give them opportunities to volunteer, and do what you can to make them productive. Give people opportunities to combat and counteract voter suppression attempts, instead of just being angry about them. As it is, yelling “Trump is going to throw out your ballots and steal the election!” seems only a step removed from “Obama is coming to steal your guns!”

Trump is obviously unfit for office, and he’d already done 10,000 disqualifying things before he even started lying about a disease that’s killed over 200,000 Americans so far. This is serious. But our role in it at the federal level is pretty simple and straightforward: research the candidates for local and state races as much as possible, make informed choices in those races, vote Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into office, and encourage friends and family to do the same. If we want to be more involved, we can volunteer for campaigns or volunteer to work at the polls. Or we can get back to focusing on local issues, where we can probably make better use of our talents and have a larger impact.

But part of the beauty of having a representative government is that the vast majority of us don’t have to spend every waking moment of the day in a panic about what’s happening in the federal government, because people have been screaming at us that not being anxious 24/7 is the same as being complicit. Hell, if you want to convince more people to vote for Biden and Harris, just remind them what it was like to wake up not worried whether the federal government had collapsed while you were asleep. Remind them what it was like to be able to travel and not be embarrassed to be American. Or to travel at all, for that matter. Maybe campaigns want each of us to feel like we’re super-important, but our actual role at the federal level is pretty simple and straightforward. But over 300 million people taking the responsibility to do something simple and straightforward can make for a complex system that wants to do the right thing.

Image of the “100,000 square foot” Tate Center, its “95,000 square foot addition,” and the tiny stadium you can just barely make out sitting across the street, from the architecture firm Cooper Carry’s website

For a while I’ve been reading Stacey Abrams’s book Our Time Is Now, but I had to put it on hold. I was trying to read it before bed, and it would make me too angry to get to sleep. I knew that my home state of Georgia had had a contentious election for governor, and that the presumptive “winner” of the election, Brian Kemp, was known nation-wide for pulling some extraordinarily shady and undeniably unethical maneuvers to push the vote in his favor. Unethical as in the secretary of state refusing to recuse himself from overseeing an election in which he was a candidate.

What I hadn’t known was that “unethical” was the charitable interpretation. Kemp and the Georgia Republicans were guilty of blatant voter suppression. Abrams pulls no punches in the book, calling it like it is. And knowing that they would so casually and blatantly subvert democracy like that, and assume that it didn’t matter if anyone found out, is absolutely infuriating. Even more infuriating that they kept up their voter suppression for the 2018 election, forcing people in some districts to sacrifice an entire day trying to get into their understaffed and under-equipped polling station. One of the most egregious offenses was purging hundreds of thousands of registered voters, disproportionately in Democratic-leaning areas.

Most recently there’s been a bit of voter-suppression fuckery from my alma mater, the University of Georgia. The “UGAVotes” Twitter account announced that the Tate Student Center wouldn’t be made available for voting, giving the excuse that it was because of “concerns about social distancing.” Instead, students would be able to vote in downtown Athens, and they’d even be provided with a shuttle!

It didn’t take long for people to point out the obvious problems with that. Sending 37,000 students to the same polling places as the other 125,000 residents of Athens is likely to cause the same kinds of delays and long line-ups that plagued the majority-black-or-Democrat districts in 2018. It would also be no safer than the student center, because you’d be just causing a greater concentration of people in downtown Athens instead of a few blocks away.

Most obviously — and most infuriatingly — it’s absurdly hypocritical, since the University has decided that football games at the stadium, which is literally across the street from the student center, are safe. UGA’s Twitter responded with the smarmiest and most condescending thing I’ve seen in quite some time:

“Those comparing this matter to a football game should be able to recognize that football games will be played outdoors but we will still require social distancing by substantially reducing capacity to the stadium. We have eliminated tailgating as well due to a desire to keep the campus as safe as possible and limit visitors during the pandemic.”

Twitter is horrible and is responsible for so many bad things, but it did make me happy to see so many people calling them out for such a blatantly self-serving and hypocritical statement. After people nationwide responded to their bullshit by pointing out that if the stadium — which again, is just across the street — is so safe, they could just use it as a polling place, the University eventually responded with an unctuous bit of finger-pointing, offering the Coliseum, if approved by the Secretary of State and the local election office. Because you know, if there is any group that’s proven itself to be a bastion of integrity and honesty, it’s Georgia’s Secretary of State and local election boards.

After having spent four years at UGA, I have to say I’m kind of at a loss as to why the GOP is so devoted to keeping the students from voting. While the students are generally better educated and more ethnically diverse — which is to say, not Republican — there’s also an obsessive, overwhelming devotion to the football program and alumni donations that fund it, and to the Greek System — which is to say, extremely Republican.

I should mention that I don’t know for sure whether the members of the UGA administration making these decisions are actually Republicans, but I would be stunned speechless to discover that they weren’t. Every executive at UGA that I was aware of was a weird hybrid of the dean from Animal House and one of Paula Deen’s sons. A kind of good-ol’-dean that I can easy imagine forming a human centipede of sycophants from Athens to Kemp’s office in Atlanta and all the way up to the seat of Trump’s favorite Fox News-watching recliner.

But it is good for an embittered chuckle to see the conundrums the GOP gets into when their evil schemes clash with each other. They need COVID-19 to be just dangerous enough that it prevents liberal arts majors just finding out about class inequality from being able to vote, but not so dangerous that it keeps them from stuffing students into dorm rooms and classrooms to get their tuition, or keeps them from stuffing a bunch of drunk people into their comically overpriced seats in a football stadium. It’d be almost funny — if it weren’t politicizing a deadly and highly contagious disease for the purposes of subverting American democracy. Maybe you had to be there.

Copying the most important link from this blog post to the top, to make sure it gets noticed: if you can, donate to causes like the World Central Kitchen, an organization that’s actually helping people instead of just complaining. If you can afford it, an especially cool way to donate is to bid on the artwork that Mike Mignola has been making to support the WCK.

Three times now, I’ve started writing a post about how two reporters from The Washington Post revealed proof of a cover-up over the White House’s catastrophically failed lack-of-response to COVID-19, how remarkable it is that it’s Bob Woodward who’s the one with inside information, and how it’s inexcusable that he chose not to reveal the information until it would spur sales of his book.

The whole thing just seems like a perfect illustration of the decline and increasing selfishness and apathy of American society over the course of my lifetime. Casting Bob Woodward promoting a book release in the role of Deep Throat just feels too poignant, in the same way that so much of 2020 has seemed to be plotted by an amateur author who doesn’t yet understand why it’s bad to be too “on the nose.”

But I keep deleting it, because I keep feeling like my time would be better spent elsewhere. I’m sure that I have gifts to provide to society that will be revealed at some point, but being able to give insightful commentary about the goings-on of rich people in Washington, DC is not one of them. I don’t really give a rat’s ass one way or the other about Bob Woodward. I was still in diapers when Watergate happened, and every detail I remember about it is from the MAD Magazine parody of All the President’s Men. Until last week, I thought that Woodward was the one Heartburn was about. (Turns out it was Carl Bernstein). I have a B- history student’s grasp of the 20th century, is what I’m saying, so it’s unlikely that the definitive record of this entire incident will be revealed on a blog by an intermittent game developer with an audience of about 15 people on an active day.

Besides, nobody’s talking about how much Bob Woodward has suffered here. If he weren’t such a patient and diligent reporter, there might now be 200,000 more surviving Americans who could’ve bought a copy of his book!

That’s the problem, the thing that keeps making me pulling me back into pointless, un-constructive anger at people who don’t care and will remain completely unaffected. Obviously, waiting to reveal information isn’t as bad as willfully deceiving people about it for political gain (even the Post describes what Trump did as “downplaying” the virus, as if he were just incompetent, instead of what he actually did, which was actively engage in a disinformation campaign about it). But when the end result is the same and the motivation is the same, does it make a tangible difference?

The Trolley Problem

Woodward’s defense for waiting to reveal the information — and calling it a “defense” is inaccurate, since he talks as if he has nothing to justify — was that he wanted to give the full story, and his deadline was the election:

Again, Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture — one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming.

Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form “the best obtainable version of the truth,” not to rush individual revelations into publication.

And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb and make their judgments well before Nov. 3. “The demarcation is the election.”

from Margaret Sullivan’s article in The Washington Post

The most charitable interpretation of this is that he sees himself as something like the Watchers of the Marvel universe — spending an eternity overseeing the day-to-day activities of ordinary humans, forbidden to ever intervene. But there’s no shortage of tell-all books about the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration. Hell, Woodward has already written one. This book is coming out at around the same time as the criminal Michael Cohen’s, who’s more blatantly doing a press circuit — and starting his own podcast, because of course — to promote it. What’s the difference, apart from the obvious assumption that Woodward’s book will be better researched and infinitely better written?

Serendipitous photo of my three choices for Democratic Presidential candidate in reverse chronological order, via Rolling Stone

I watched most of the Democratic National Convention this week — they really should consider continuing the new “infinitely more watchable” format even after the pandemic — and I found myself just crying and crying. It shows how hard the last four years have been when all it takes is a bunch of people earnestly talking about hope, decency, and empathy to provoke such an emotional response.

For a while now, even before the United States collectively shit the bed and elected one of the worst people alive to be President, I’ve been feeling increasing frustration with and outright despair over the political atmosphere in America. It wasn’t just that awful people were pulling all of us down into the mire of their own awfulness, it was feeling increasingly uneasy seeing the opinions and the tactics of people who were ostensibly supposed to be on “my side.” Watching the convention last week, and seeing the reactions to it online, made the last piece fall into place. I realized that I’ve spent decades being manipulated.

Not manipulated into believing in liberal or progressive causes; I do that because I’m a decent human being. I mean manipulated into being hyper-wary of being manipulated. It goes back decades. For all I know, it started as a well-intentioned attempt to teach media literacy to a bunch of naive 80s kids. But over the years, it’s grown more and more pervasive, transforming from a healthy skepticism to a defeatist cynicism.

While I was watching the speakers deliver a message of hope and equality, I was focused on looking for “tells.” Kamala Harris’s familiar and practiced suite of Generic Politician Gestures, as she was the first woman of African and Indian descent to accept the vice presidential nomination from a major party. Paying close attention to who was and wasn’t present and who was given the most speaking time, during the Cory Booker-led roundtable of Presidential candidates now united in support of Biden. Considering the strategy behind using a teenager with a speech impediment as a shield, as an impossibly brave young man went on national television to share a story about how Joe Biden helped him, knowing that Biden’s opponents are shamelessly soulless, bullying, cowardly shits who wouldn’t hesitate to disparage a child if they thought they could get a few poll points out of it. And I thought about using loss to push emotional buttons, as Biden described his own grief to show empathy with Americans who’ve suffered loss, and I found myself sobbing at his perfect description of grief as a deep black hole that opens up in your chest.

Any time something makes me cry, I’ve been indoctrinated to ask: is this real? Am I being manipulated? Is this something maudlin or insincere? Should I be embarrassed? Am I being set up?

On its own, I don’t think that’s all that unusual. But over the decades, it seems to have metastasized into the kind of paranoia that seems to be the one thing left in the United States that’s truly bipartisan. More and more of what we’re hearing from self-described progressives is echoing what we’re hearing from the members of the current kakistocracy and their enablers. Mistrust of institutions. Dismissal of the “main stream media.” Convinced of corruption that wasn’t just widespread but completely saturated every American organization. Trustworthy public figures aren’t just rare, but completely imaginary.

Much of this was obviously due to the increasing volume of troll accounts, motivated either by political gain or just a lazy nihilism. We’ve seen how the Tea Party-infused GOP and Trump administration feed on nihilism and despair, profiting from the belief that nothing is real and nothing matters. But especially this year, as more Americans are finally admitting that they can’t go on denying all of the systemic racism, institutionalized misogyny, and white supremacy, it’s become increasingly difficult to distinguish the nihilistic trolls from the more vocal and militant people on “the left.” No one is to be trusted. All our institutions are irreparably corrupt. There’s no hope for reform; everything must be torn down. We’re surrounded not by people who occasionally stumble while trying to do the right thing; everyone is a latent racist or misogynist or fascist desperately trying not to reveal their true nature.

All this time, I’ve been feeling stressed that it’s getting harder to tell the difference between the trolls and sincerely militant liberal progressives and socialists. I’ve felt like it required more and more work on my part to determine whether something was being said in good faith or not. Finally, I remembered the only useful thing from my philosophy classes: something has to make a difference to be a difference. If I can’t distinguish between trolling bullshit and sincere bullshit, then it’s just plain bullshit. No matter how earnest the person may be about dismantling the systems of oppression.

To be clear, I’m guilty of it to some degree. When Warren, my favored candidate, dropped out of the race, I threw a tantrum online. I complained that we’d squandered so much potential for change by turning the Democratic candidacy into a choice between two old white men. It didn’t take long for me to realize, however, that the person who was the most entitled to be bitter about Warren having to withdraw from the race — Elizabeth Warren — wasn’t joining me online in complaining. Instead, she was throwing her support behind the party, against Trump, drawing attention to progressive causes, and championing the campaigns of other Democratic candidates up and down the ticket.

I’ve seen a lot of people announcing that Joe Biden isn’t their first choice for President, as if that makes them special. He wasn’t my first choice either. I’d given up on the Democratic Party and political engagement in general until I heard a speech from Pete Buttigieg. He described the end of the Reagan era, for better or worse, and that was the first thing in years that sparked hope in me that things could get better. I was 9 years old when Reagan was elected, so it’s been the standard for almost my entire life. I have no other frame of reference, but I do vividly remember how Reagan-era politics was contrasted with previous administrations, from a media still trying to process what was happening. It was all about media manipulation, optics, and spin taking precedence over authenticity, government as a service, and progress. Hearing a candidate saying “it doesn’t have to be this way, change is possible,” was inspiring.

Finding out later on that he’d have been the first openly gay President was proof that change was possible. Just a decade earlier, the leading Democratic candidate for President had said that he was against marriage equality “because of [his] religion,” and resorted to the GOP’s obstinate and cowardly excuse that it was a matter of states’ rights. Gay rights had been a hot potato that no one in the Democratic Party was willing to hold onto, and by 2020, a gay front-runner for the Presidency was hounded by criticism that he was too conservative.

Call me a single-issue voter, but that’s the realization that finally snapped me out of my cynicism, and got me fired up for a Biden/Harris administration. While the Democratic Party was just perpetuating more of the same while claiming to have the moral high ground, Biden forced the administration to finally “evolve” and make a stand. Biden officiated the marriage of two White House staffers, while party insiders and pundits were still lamenting how he was prone to “gaffes” like standing up for basic human dignity that the rest of the party wasn’t ready to embrace.

As far as I can tell, Biden wasn’t his own first choice, either — it took him forever to throw himself into the running. I don’t have to wonder about any hidden motivation, because I can’t imagine what he has to gain by being President. Few of the candidates this election have sounded sincere — except for Cory Booker, of course, who always speaks with 150% conviction — not because they’re lying, but because they’re always having to deliver a set of talking points repeatedly over the course of more than a year to thousands of different people. But throughout Biden’s acceptance speech, I didn’t have a moment’s doubt that he was being sincere. I believe he’s in it to help people.

I believe Kamala Harris is in it to help people, as well, even though she absolutely talks like a politician and a lawyer. Tone and optics should be irrelevant in the post-Reagan era. Trust is more important. She’d already earned mine by virtue of seeing the course of her career; if all she wanted were power or money, there are much, much easier ways she could’ve gone about getting it.

So in other words, I’m rejecting the bullshit idea that as a liberal progressive, I’m “begrudgingly” voting for Biden and Harris. I’m rejecting the idea that the Democratic Party doesn’t represent all the people that it claims to. I’m especially rejecting the idea that American government is a pendulum that only works for one half of the country at a time. We’ve seen multiple times what happens when you have a bastard occupying the White House who only cares about placating a base instead of working for all Americans. Anyone who suggests that a moderate is irreparably compromised simply doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care, how democracy is supposed to function. It’s not about getting enough votes to win an election, it’s about electing the person who’s going to do their best to represent the needs of everyone.

The overwhelming message I got from the Democratic National Convention was one of inclusion and unity. I reject the conclusion of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said that the convention wasn’t “targeting” her because it didn’t include the prerequisite number of Muslims, or a Latino who’d run for President. I reject the complaints of atheists, who’ve insisted that mentions of religion and faith somehow exclude the nonreligious. If we want to make people realize that social justice isn’t a zero-sum game, in which improving the lives of long-marginalized people means making life worse for the people who’ve historically benefitted from inequality, then we have to commit to that. We have to reject even the notion of “marginalized” and acknowledge that everybody truly means everybody. If that’s a “moderate” message, then I guess I’m an unashamed moderate.

That’s the message I got from the convention. A party that’s finally committing itself to genuine inclusion, and making a government that serves everyone even when it’s not trying to get their votes. Are they going to fall short on that pledge? Undoubtedly! But I don’t live up to all the pledges I make for myself, even with the best of intentions. Why would I expect perfection from an inherently compromised and messy process involving thousands of people? Electing decent and honest people who believe in government as a service is the first step. Decency and honesty aren’t just a low bar set by a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent administration; they’re an essential first step to a government that works for everyone. Damn anyone who tries to dismiss hope and optimism as gullibility and complicity. Damn anyone who can’t see past winning a single election, when the election is just the first step of a never-ending process to make things better.

We all know that voting Trump out of office is the barest minimum a decent human being can do. But if we’ve learned nothing from the Obama Administration, it should be that having an honest person with integrity in the office is just the start. It’s what keeps us stable enough for actual progress, so we can disagree about important things without having to argue against immorality as if it were a valid political stand. It’s what lets us be confident that the people we disagree with are arguing in good faith. Personally, I’m looking forward to trusting people again.