Monday, November 23, 2015

Hello President Hillary

Because these blog archives are stored on-line permanently (and of course by "permanently", I mean "as long as it fits Google's business model to continue to host this blog for free"), I thought it might be fun to engage in a little game of prognostication, and then check back in a year's time to see how I did.

Although right now, dear reader, I imagine you're rolling your eyes and saying, "Oh, way to try to take credit for the obvious ones!  I suppose you're also going to predict that the snow will melt in spring."

That is what you're thinking, right?  This is pretty much a foregone conclusion, right?

I mean, we're going to have to put up with the media circus for another 11 months, but this is pretty much inevitable.

There's no way that the Democratic Party Establishment is ever going to let Bernie Sanders get the nomination, and so Hillary's nomination is inevitable.

And what in the world is happening over at the Republican Party?  They're self-destructing right before our eyes.
There's no way any of these guys could possibly win in a general election.

I mean, seriously, what is happening?  Has there ever been a point in history where one of the two major political parties has been in such disarray?  (I guess maybe if you go back to the dissolution of the Whig party, or something like that.  But certainly nothing within living memory, right?)  I can't imagine what future historians are going to write about this whole debacle in 50 years' time.

However, before I as a liberal get too smug about this whole thing, I need to concede three obvious points:
1). The fact that half of the political power in America has gone this crazy is nothing to feel smug about--it should be something that scares us.
2). Although the Republicans are paralyzed in their presidential election bid, they have been doing quite well in congressional and state elections.
3). This is as much about the failure of the Left as it is about the failure of the Right.  With the American Right disintegrating into craziness, the American Left should have been an attractive alternative to people.  But it's been failing to make any ground.

As for Hillary...
As someone who has been - critical of Hillary in the past, I of course have mixed feelings about her election.  But let's face it....it could have been much, much, much worse.  As someone once said, there are two political parties in America, the sane business party, and the insane business party.  If we do have to be ruled by the business interests, we might as well have the sane party doing it.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Power and Ideology

2 comments:

dpreimer said...

A thought that's occurred to me: would Trump and his antics have got nearly this sort of traction if Clinton and yet another Bush weren't in the picture? I mean, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Obama, Obama ... Clinton/Bush? If American voters are anxious and despairing at this point, I can't say I blame them.

Joel Swagman said...

I think you've put your finger on something. That's definitely part of it.

The success of Donald Trump has been surprising, hasn't it? Crazy thing is, I even know people who support Trump. Some people I went to school with, very intelligent people, are big Trump supporters. (One girl who was valedictorian at our junior high school.) I had trouble making sense of how intelligent people could believe in such a dumb candidate, but I just took it as more proof that intelligence and rationality are not necessarily linked.

Your explanation helps to make a bit more sense of it.

I should clarify, however, that from my perspective, Trump's runaway success isn't the worst of the Republican Party's problems. I can't imagine Trump would ever get the nomination. Nor can I imagine Ben Carson would ever get the nomination. The problem is, to my mind, absolutely NONE of these guys running on the Republican side are remotely electable.

Maybe Jeb Bush is the closest thing they've got to an electable candidate. But he's been saying such stupid things on TV lately I can't imagine that he'd ever win in a general election.

.....Oh wait, what am I saying? His brother said stupid things all the time in 2000, and still won...