analysis: ‘any democrat will do …?’

Here’s a re­sponse to this oft-heard/read opin­ion, ‘who­ev­er is the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date, vote Blue.’

First, too ear­ly to ‘ring that bell’, the joust­ing has only just be­gun.

Sec­ond­ly, to do so, ad­mits a kind of de­featism that one does­n’t be­lieve in their cho­sen can­di­da­cy, or worse, a can­di­date does­n’t have any­thing else to of­fer oth­er than they have a ‘D’ next to their name.

This ra­tio­nale needs to stop! It’ll guar­an­tee an­oth­er four years with Putin’s Agent Or­ange.

When vot­ing, who wins Gen­er­al Elec­tions and ush­ers in eras of eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty and so­cial progress for the great­est amount of ‘We the Peo­ple?’

Mod­er­ates do; FDR, HST, DDE, LBJ, Clin­ton, Oba­ma. When De­moc­rats skew too far left, Mc­Gov­ern, Carter, Dukakis, Nad­er, we’ve had the re­ces­sion­ary-caus­ing and re­gres­sive re­ac­tionary re­sults, Nixon, Rea­gan, Bush I, ‘W’ re­spec­tive­ly, and now Trump in 2016 with the dis­trac­tion of Sanders in spite of the Mod­er­ate Hillary Clin­ton trounc­ing Sanders in the Pri­maries and win­ning 3 mil­lion more pop­u­lar votes in the Gen­er­al Elec­tion; a sign that with ALL the pro­pa­gan­da con­nivances of both the Right and Left, the be­liger­ences of the ‘Bernie Bros’ opt­ing out or vot­ing for Trump, ‘the woman,’ the Mod­er­ate, STILL car­ried the ma­jor­i­ty and would be lead­ing a new era of pros­per­i­ty and so­cial progress if not for the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s ef­forts to lurch Left.

The slave-based Elec­toral Col­lege com­pound­ed the 2016 out­come; it’s al­ways been a con­vser­v­a­tive­ly skewed in­sti­tu­tion when vot­er turn out is weak as it was and will be if the choic­es are be­tween Trump and Sanders. The ol’ arch-con­ser­v­a­tive repro­bate, William F. Buck­ley, Jr. ad­mon­ished the GOP, ‘to main­tain White Su­prema­cy in Amer­i­ca, the par­ty must hold the South and rely on the Elec­toral Col­lege.’ He was in­ton­ing the plaints of the slave-own­ing Vir­gini­ans amongst the Found­ing Fa­thers who con­trived the ³⁄₅ Com­pro­mise that lead to the Elec­toral College’s es­tab­lish­ment. In these con­texts of the his­tor­i­cal facts, shall we re­peat with a mind­set that “any De­mo­c­rat will do?!”

An­oth­er con­text, Sanders IS not a true De­mo­c­rat, let alone one in long­stand­ing; an in­ef­fec­tive In­de­pen­dent with a dis­mal leg­isla­tive track record in both hous­es of Con­gress. Bloomberg? War­ren? Both are for­mer Re­pub­li­cans who switched when the po­lit­i­cal op­por­tu­ni­ties were shift­ing in their re­spec­tive lo­cal en­vi­ron­ments, not nec­es­sar­i­ly mod­er­ate or De­mo­c­ra­t­ic cre­den­tials.

Fi­nal­ly, this ‘vote Par­ty, whomev­er the can­di­date is’ ethos is the same one ex­ud­ed by the GOP that be­gat Trump as their Par­ty stan­dard-bear­er way over due to coun­try and “We the Peo­ple.” The GOP mem­bers are stuck with him and his Or­ange taint will for­ev­er stain the par­ty’s ethos and moral stance or lack of it in all its glo­ri­ous hypocrisies.

I for one, am a Mod­er­ate De­mo­c­rat be­cause, at least, I’ve be­lieved the par­ty has tak­en the high­er road, more so than the oth­er ma­jor par­ty, and cho­sen well-rea­soned, thought­ful and mod­er­ate lead­ers who had a mind­set that could em­brace the widest swath of who we are as Amer­i­cans, fis­cal­ly and so­cial­ly. The above-men­tioned Left-lean­ing choic­es have giv­en this Mod­er­ate great pause (ex­cep­tion was Mc­Gov­ern only be­cause it was clear Nixon was a dis­as­ter); Dukakis was such a Left dis­as­ter I ac­tu­al­ly vot­ed for Bush I de­spite his parts in the egre­gious dis­as­trous Rea­gan Era.

So, Par­ty over coun­try? Hm­m­mm? Elec­tions are, in great part, a call-to-duty by every el­i­gi­ble cit­i­zen to rise above the nar­row and self­ish points-of-view and opt for what is good, if not great, for the largest whole of “We the Peo­ple.”

Many have such con­ster­na­tion with­in this cur­rent era, in great part, be­cause this is an epoch of great self­ish­ness with one Par­ty putting its grasp of pow­er, and wealth, way above the greater in­ter­ests of us all as a na­tion. This only serves a few and those who have to com­pete with us on a world stage for se­cu­ri­ty and re­sources.

It is a very telling sign when the Sanders camp in­tones this “vote Blue no mat­ter the can­di­date.” It says their con­tent doesn’t mat­ter, they’re re­ly­ing on the ‘hate’ some have to­wards Trump.

How’s that hate cul­ture work­ing from the Right? Of­fer­ing more of the same will only stymie our progress as a peo­ple, a na­tion.

 

—eric ward

Flom­mist Eric Ward is a Hu­man Los An­geli­no (there are oth­er kinds), hu­man­ist, artist, in­dus­tri­al and graph­ic de­sign­er, nov­el­ist, toy in­ven­tor and en­tre­pre­neur. Life-long pur­suit is “What to do with a piece of pa­per?” Copy­right © 2020 Eric Ward. Im­age: Thomas Nast, Po­lit­i­cal Car­toon (cropped), Harper’s Week­ly, 1879, source.

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