Friday, August 19, 2016

Listen, listen

I'm mostly a pro-Bernie guy. But I'm afeared that the actual socialist (Bernie) in our Presidential race has lost the progressive part of the race to the moderate (Hillary Clinton.)
And this is why.
We've learned some things over here on the left in the last 40 or so years. The anti-nuke movements, the anti-racism movements, the pro-clean-Earth movements, women's rights, LGBT rights, we've learned quite a lot about organizing these movements. Since Angela Davis published Women, Race, and Class we've learned (albeit slowly and with stops and starts along the way) that we need to be inclusive of what the kids today call "intersectionality" (which is a word I don't particularly like but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.)
And how do you do that?
The rule is you have to listen.
Bernie. O! Bernie my brother. You have some good ideas. And you can change the political discourse from where it's been since Regan (no less than Barack Obama told me that). But man, you need to listen.
You have to not be surprised when the Black Congressional Caucus tells you things -- like that they don't want Superdelegates to go away. I mean it surprised me when I heard it, but I don't work with those folks every day. You do! Why didn't you ask them? The BCC has what we might euphemistically call a "history" of not being allowed on the floor of the DNC convention. They like to know they're invited.
And you know what? That makes a lot of sense. It's still anti-democratic, but yeah, it gives establishment Black Democrats a bit more power which is maybe an okay thing. But you need to listen, to find out, what other people (non-white people, for instance) are thinking.
This is way overdue. I'm beginning to think they were wrong about him coming for our guns.

The big deal is we need to listen. Hillary Clinton is the very model of the modern major general of listening. Sometimes she listens too much -- like to Bush II when he told her he wasn't going into a senseless and nonsense war with her vote for authorization of force in Iraq.
But you can't imagine she'd be blindsided by the BCC on Superdelegates.
Sigh. I wish this were a clean election between Sanders and Clinton. One does get the impression that either the RNC or the DNC's gonna split in half here. The problem is there are too few leftists to maintain a Green party in the US and the Libertarians offend the Christian Right. So who knows what they'll do?