Good Friends We Had, Good Friends We Lost Along the Way

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Sometimes Farce, Sometimes Tragedy

I've been researching, studying and writing about politics and economics (you can't separate 'em) since the 'soft coup' in 2000 that put the Odious GW Bush in power. There are a lot of people I've come to like and respect in the process, but every now and then one of them gets lost, reaches the worst, most inaccurate conclusions and just stops thinking, learning and listening. It always saddens me when it happens - it's not like I have an infinite supply of friends, especially not thoughtful, well-read and insightful ones who I can learn from. But I bring with me a set of rules, and I can't imagine trying to understand the chaotic and maddening political landscape without sticking to them no matter what.

1.) No false equivalences. Things can be in a category - there can also be category errors - but each thing brings its own set of context, and offers a different set of conclusions. When you advocate 'one-size-fits-all' solutions, you don't end up solving anything.

2.) No fantasies. There are things that are possible constitutionally, and there are things that are possible politically. The conversation HAS TO be held within those parameters. If you want to shriek SOCIALISM, if you want to destroy capitalism, if you demand a massive government program like publicly-funded single payer universal health care without at least learning enough to know what you'll have to overcome to deliver it, if you expect the very people who benefit from greed and corruption to eliminate greed and corruption from the political process - if these are the kinds of political goals you espouse, we're having two different conversations.

4.) The rules matter. If you don't like your party's candidate selection/nomination process, you can try to change it. But bear in mind that there are longstanding vested interests in that process, and until you can change it those are the rules of the game we're playing. We should continue to point out the rules that make no sense - disproportionate representation of rural states in the Senate, the Electoral College, etc - but we can't pretend we can ignore them or eliminate them in the short term.

5.) Politicians are dishonest. Pundits and scholars CANNOT be. If you can't come up with an actual viable argument for the policies you like, lying is not an acceptable option. Neither is pretending I said something I didn't say so you can argue against THAT. If an honest analysis demonstrates that your policy doesn't do what you claim, you don't get to invoke magic. You either have to accept the analysis and try to argue around it, or you have to change your policy.

Ultimately, the point of public policy as it plays out as politics is not to win so much as to make the lives of people in the community - constituents - better than they were. But every now and then, people on either side can 'lose their mind' and they often become obsessively focused on one arbitrary issue, typically attacking those on their own side of the center for a perceived lack of ideological purity or less than fanatical support for a particular extreme set of actions.

I've seen liberals I liked become so deeply enmeshed in anger over decisions made in Washington that they develop a burning hatred for their own country. Does the US do some bad things? Absolutely. Is the US (or banks, or pharma, or insurance companies, or {fill in the blank} the root of all evil in the world? Nope. Not even close. When you lose sight of global realities, you become a sad caricature, a laughable dancing bear. Look at Glenn Greenwald. Don't be like Glenn.

I wanted to talk about this a little bit, because this week I walked away from a friend I've liked and admired for a long time. But he's become so focused on tearing down the Democratic party, its institutions and the establishment left in general that you can no longer have an interesting or even rational conversation with him. There's a large contingent of the post-Bernie left that never got over the Democratic Primary, but with the government our system has allowed to form after the 2016 election, if we can't unite against the hatred, greed and corruption of the Republican party at this point, we're doomed.
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