So Long, and Thanks for All the Ish
Finally! I can stop pretending to like Democrats.
Well, you gotta admit, the Democrats tried(-ish). They had a lot going against them, but they gave it their best(-ish) shot. But now that Donald Trump has been inaugurated, and the fascist roaches have successfully and inextricably infested the nation, we can count(-ish) on Democrats putting in the hard(-ish) work to keep us all safe(-ish). We should all feel very confident(-ish) and positive(-ish) about the future.
That’s a lot of -ish, I know. More -ish than I’m comfortable with, if I’m being honest. I’ve never been super thrilled with the amount of -ish that Democrats have asked me to swallow, but I always chalked it up to a necessary sacrifice because they’ve been our sole bulwark against fascist creep. At least in my lifetime. And though that was always their main selling point, it was their biggest problem. In a two party system (which is effectively what we’ve always had to work with), if one side’s stated goal is to tear everything down and drown the constitution in a bathtub, the other side will, by necessity, be a coalition of people who don’t fucking want that! And that’s gonna be a messy coalition, because it’s going to be practically everybody else. (Or at least everybody else who understands math.) So, I ignored what I could stand to ignore and bitched about anything I thought was worth bitching about, but I remained a member of the Democratic Party, both legally and culturally. But I’ve hit my -ish limit.
I wasn’t always a Democrat. To my great shame, I voted third party for the first three presidential elections of my adult life. (Yes, even in 2000. I know. You can’t possibly be more disappointed in me than I am.) I remember the day, pretty much the exact moment, I became a Democrat. It was November 2, 2004. I was drunk as fuck, sitting on the floor of my friends Jack & Jen’s Bainbridge Street apartment in Philadelphia, watching my all hopes getting dashed against the rocks of reality like so many Babylonian infant skulls. At one point, I declared out loud, “That’s it! I’m a Democrat from now on.” Nobody in the room cared, beyond some mild bemusement. But it was after that that I officially registered as a Democrat, and 2008 was the first Democratic primary in which I voted. It was a good year to start being a Democrat. I cried when Barack Obama won (still mocked for that on the regular by leftier friends), not because of Barack Obama. But because I understood the momentousness of that moment for a country founded on the backs of Black labor.
The goodwill generated by that moment for the Democratic Party has long since been exhausted. I watched them fight(-ish) against the overtly racist Tea Party movement to practically no avail. I watched them push back(-ish) against ugly illiberal reporting on our first Black president from the national media. I watched them rally(-ish) around our first woman candidate as she was assailed with sexist attacks from both the right and the left, but ultimately sit on their hands while a confidence man walked into the Oval Office. I watched them defend(-ish) absurd ageist attacks on our standard bearer from a supposedly objective media, while also kind of contributing to it. And I saw them rally(-ish) around our first Black woman candidate in, like, the eleventh and a half hour. Fecklessly.
I’m done. I am fucking done with the party. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop voting strategically. (I’m not some braindead Jill Stein dipshit.) But it does mean I’ve given up on them as a hope. I no longer believe that they hold any power to save us from our the electorate’s worst impulses. Nor much interest, really.
To be fair, I also don’t believe that there’s an electoral solution to the problem anymore. The goal was to keep the cockroaches out as much as possible, but the country just voted to import a dump truck full of them and shovel them into every cranny of government. The new administration is (obviously to anyone with eyes to see) a bunch of lawless thugs who have told us in plain English that they have no intention of ever handing power back to the Constitutionally mandated democratic process. They’re in! There’s no getting them out. At least not at the ballot box. (I have a lot more to say about this...)
So, quitting the party is, admittedly, a bit of an empty gesture. But, at the moment, all the gestures available to me are empty. So, my plan is to just start throwing out empty gestures until I find one that still has a little juice left in it. Hope you like empty gestures, because this newsletter is going to be full(-ish) of them.