This started as my stock comment responding to #BernieorBust and #NeverHillary posts on Facebook, but then I posted in Crashing Vor’s thing today as a comment, and then thought about it some more.
Now it’s a another fucking open letter. Here goes:
Dear Sir/Madame:
Losing elections sucks. It sucks in the primaries and it sucks in the general. There is literally no time or place where it feels good to have put your all in for a candidate only to find out that you were in the minority (even though you KNOW you're in the right and they're just not seeing it).
That being said, we all have to make a choice when we're in that position. If it's a primary election, we can choose to mitigate the damage to what we believe is right, or we can choose to walk away, or we can choose to try and make people pay for disagreeing with us. In a general election, we can walk away or we can become an active part of the opposition.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't begrudge any pissed off Sanders (or O'Malley or even Webb) supporters their anger and pain. I’d accept that you need to take your time, lick your wounds, come around slowly.
Not this time. These aren’t normal circumstances.
Firstly, the candidate that won the primary is truly not that far off in POLICY from the candidate who lost. There are differences in matters of degree, but not in intent. Much of what I've seen in diaries about Never Clinton is about her as a person. OK. You don't like her. That's fine. I wasn't a huge fan of Bill Clnton -- as a matter of fact, I pretty much hated him as a person, but I voted for him twice because he was so much better than Bush or Dole. You think Clinton is untrustworthy. You think she's corrupt. You think she's a “$shill” or a "Hildebeast."
OK.
I'm not going to argue perceptions with you. I won't be able to convince you and you won't change my perception -- mainly because a year ago, I pretty much agreed with you, but not anymore. I’ve reevaluated my own assumptions, biases, and sources of information and found that I had room to grow. Now I like her and that's likely not going to change again.
Some people have real and valid issues with her foreign policy. Honestly, I do to and I don’t plan on giving her a pass on bullshit hawkishness once she’s elected, but I’m also not going to hold her work as SoS against her too much because as an employee, much like as a spouse, we are often not in charge of the agenda or which side we take on it.
What she did as Senator, though, is hers and hers alone — and for the most part, she did pretty damn well. And even if you think she’s an Eisenhower in disguise (she’s not), or no better than her husband (she is — by a long shot), and you have articles and votes to point to that prove it, hold your fire until you’ve read the whole way through.
There’s a second point:
the candidate that she will be facing in the general is not normal. He is a fascist in the truest sense of the word. We jokingly call him Il Douche, but it's not really a joke. Donald Trump argues for a personality-led corporatist regime that curbs civil liberties and elevates nation above the individual using violence and strength as a political virtue. That is definitional fascism.
Right now we all have an opportunity to be one of the people who piles on in the vote against fascism in this country, and choosing not to because you are upset with the way the primary went down is a choice you can make, but it isn't likely to leave you feeling good when you tell your grandchildren about it.
Finally, there's this:
I'm a middle-aged white college-educated property owner. I would likely survive a Trump presidency with minimal damage save for the destruction of my ability to retire someday if he actually tries to give American debt-holders a haircut. Some of you are women and/or people of color, but many of you are just like me and we’ll likely be ok.
But my daughter (and your children) will have to live with a president whose reversal of American policy on Climate Change could doom them and whose additions to the supreme court choices could limit or eliminate environmental, social, labor, and privacy protections for the next thirty years. My students (I have taught high school for nearly twenty years in Watts, South Pomona, and MacArthur Park here in LA) will fare even worse. They are universally black, brown, and poor. They will be devastated by the destruction of the social safety net, by the willingness of a Trump presidency to turn a blind eye to the suffering of our people, and by the stated anti-immigrant policies that are the only real policies that Trump has espoused.
In short, people like you and me? We could not vote, vote Green, vote Lib, or vote for Trump and be ok.
But if we were to do so, we would be doing it at the expense of everything we purport to care about. I'm not a selfish dick, so I won’t even consider it no matter how much I would love to see a social democracy take root in this country.
Make your own choices, of course, but do understand that petulance in the face of fascism is not something you're going to want to defend to your children, and the more you post about your willingness to destroy the system in the face of fascism rather than join in the fight against it, the more damage you do.
Thank you for your time.