I'd work to keep Democrats and otherwise left-leaning people at each other’s throats.
I’d try to reawaken and stoke as much 2016 primary dumpster fire angst and anger as I could, and keep former and current Bernie and Hillary supporters as hostile towards each other as I could. I’d reopen old wounds and do my best to cut new ones exploiting whatever opportunities I could find. Above all I’d sow division and anger wherever I could.
Government as a rule relies on cooperation and trust between peoples in order to be effective. Democrats as a rule trust and advocate for trust in government to do its job well, or at least justly. We also advocate for that same crucial cooperation and against hostility and unjust anger towards others.
So if I wanted to damage Democrats and left-leaning folken then sowing hostility and distrust between and among them would be my most important goals.
It’s crucial we keep these things in mind, and that we judge more critically each of these incoming fecal missiles on whether or not they are actually an illusion meant solely to enflame.
Tuesday’s election will be an enormous one, both for Dems and for the future of the country, just like most every election has been since forever. We have a helluva lot of work to do already, and strong headwinds both from our own stubbornass herded-cats antics and from a generally self-serving media with ofttimes loose ties to the truth.
The time to close the book for good on the 2016 primary and move on was in late July of last year, when Bernie Sanders formally and in full-throated fashion endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on the Democratic National Convention floor.
That isn’t to say there aren’t things to fix, or that there weren’t problems with the way the DNC conducted itself during last year’s primary. And that is not to say there was outright favoritism or rigging going on, just that going forward we might seek to find a lesson in that process and learn from it.
But other lessons are more important than that one.
MOVING ON is the thing, and right now. Hillary has said she will not run again, and for all the shit she’s been through I for one can’t blame her one bit, being one who proudly voted for her last November and would gladly do so again. Bernie will be 78 in 2020, and for that (admittedly Machiavellian) reason, as much as I personally love the old guy, I’m ambivalent towards him trying again for the presidency, and would salute him and not blame him if he decided not to.
And in the meantime we have a lot of work to do, the vast majority of which involves neither of those two and is just as important as any presidential race.
Ignore the trolls and flamethrowers.
Keep focus.
Keep working harder than ever for your cause or candidate.
But above all Move The Fuck On.
All of us doing our damnedest to accomplish those things is all we can do. And who knows it might actually work, and among other things elect more and better Democrats.
I hope so because we need them.