Nona • '91 • Asexual •
I reblog Steven Universe, animation, Splatoon, art, Japanese, languages in general, cute animals, and whatever else grabs my eye.
It’s been a couple of weeks in the making, but here’s my long-form essay on why Bernie can win. I talk about why the political science behind why the median voter theorem is dead, my diagnosis of and reflections on 2016, who the Democratic party needs to focus on in order to win in 2020, and why Bernie is the best candidate to do it. Here’s the introduction:
The Iowa Caucus which marks the true beginning of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary is in less than two weeks. An excessive 29 candidates ran for the nomination at some point or another, but we are now mercifully down to a final 12. I’ve liked a few of the candidates who have run so far, but after roughly a year of watching the field make their cases, I keep coming back to Bernie Sanders. When I first sat down to write this article, it was going to be an explanation of why I’m choosing Sanders over my second place choice of Elizabeth Warren. But I realized that many Sanders supporters have already argued the case for why he has the best views and record in this race. Independent of that argument, there’s a related but less commonly-stated case which seems just as important to point out the truth of: Bernie Sanders is the most likely candidate to defeat Donald Trump in a general election.
Polling tells us that Sanders is well liked among Democratic primary voters, but many of those who like him are concerned that he cannot realistically win the Presidency. The urgency of removing Donald Trump from office has placed a major emphasis on the trait of “electability” in this primary, and much of the electorate has made what they view as the risk-adverse choice to support candidates that have the strongest chances of beating Donald Trump, regardless of their views. When polls pose the two options against one another, the majority of Democratic voters would prefer a candidate better able to beat Trump that doesn’t share their views than a candidate less able to beat Trump who does share their views.
This likely explains the consistency of Joe Biden’s first place lead in the primary. The Biden campaign’s primary argument is that he’s the pragmatic choice for defeating Donald Trump- after all, he is a widely-known figure with inoffensive views and has eight years of executive experience under his belt. All conventional wisdom points towards the idea that Biden is as “electable” as it gets. The only problem is that conventional wisdom is dead.
2016 was the perfect natural experiment to test whether the rulebook for American campaign politics still holds up. On the Democratic side stood a woman with lots of legislative and executive experience, a massive fundraising network, the institutional support of her party, and a set of focus-group-tested positions that fell very comfortably within regular American politics. On the Republican side stood one of the most unorthodox and unexperienced candidates in history; a wealthy elitist known for his reality TV show, shady business practices, disgusting treatment of women, and colossal ego; a man who was hated by much of the establishment of his own party; and a man who spewed a noxious combination of nationalism, racism, and right-wing populism in the most brash and vitriolic fashion possible. And when November came, the latter won.
Donald Trump’s victory shocked the American political class. Politicians, consultants, campaigners, pundits, and academics with a wide assortment of views had to face what could only be described as a direct assault on how a Presidential election was supposed to work. How one diagnosed “what went wrong” in 2016 is a major factor in what one decided needed to be done about it. Many rightly observed the role that anti-democratic institutions and practices like the Electoral College and voter suppression played in this outcome, and they turned their focus towards democratic reform. Others believed the result could be attributed directly to Russian interference, and they turned their focus towards election security. Those who viewed misogyny as the issue turned to feminist activism and education. And on, and on, and on.
I think many of these ideas hold explanatory weight to varying degrees, and the work being done in the above examples is all important and worthwhile. After all, it was only 78,000 votes in three Midwestern states which earned Donald Trump his victory, and with a margin that slim many different factors could have been enough to change the outcome.
What is worrying is that all of these explanations also seem to miss something important. Not only does each explanation ignore the deep problems with the Clinton’s campaign strategy, but even more importantly each seems to start with the assumption that Trump’s victory was in some sense a fluke, the result of a bug in a predominantly functional democratic system which can be fixed in order to return to “normal.” In my view, to hold this opinion is to have learned nothing at all from 2016. Donald Trump’s victory wasn’t a random error, but was instead enabled by long-coming shifts in the American political landscape and the tone deaf failure of the entire political establishment to recognize and adapt to these changes. It’s different this time, and even any successful attempt to go back to “normal” will still fail in the long-term, as it was the very state of pre-Trump “normalcy” which made his rise possible.
Entire chapters of the rulebook for political campaign professionals are now obsolete, and the willingness of said professionals to acknowledge this appears minimal. For this reason, I am unconvinced by the story of Joe Biden’s “electability.”
When I excitedly voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, I did so quite sure he would lose to Hillary Clinton (even I was surprised how well he ultimately did). Regardless, I was never settled at the time on the issue of whether he had a better chance at beating Trump than she did, and despite my complaints I voted for her in the general election. In the years since then, I have realized that I was wrong about a lot of things. But the more I have read, discussed, thought, and worked, the more I have realized that the thing I’d been wrong about was Bernie Sanders. He isn’t just the best candidate for the job, a pie-in-the-sky candidate for progressives. A hard-headed look at the facts tells us that he is the single most realistic and pragmatic candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary.
“I used to seek out vulnerable people. It takes one to know one. I’d harp on them for minuscule things. Just to make them feel more ostracized. I bullied them in the same way I was being bullied. I guess that’s why I want to be a filmmaker. As an atonement of sorts. To sort of explore the fear and bad feelings that I had as a kid. But if I’m ever going to make the art I want to make, I need to be less scared of people. I still have insane social anxiety. If anyone looks at me, I’m convinced that they hate me. I was just sitting on this bench, having a panic attack, because I thought everyone was judging my shirt. The whole reason I came into the city was to attend a protest meeting. If I’m ever going to write a screenplay, I need to talk to people, and learn from them, and understand what they’re about. But I’m afraid I’ll just go to IFC Center instead, and watch Parasite for the fifth time, then go back to Jersey and lie to everyone about it. So I’m trying to talk myself out of that. I need to get to a place where I can trust that people are kind and loving. And that the whole world isn’t judging me for minuscule things. And that nobody hates me because of my shirt.”
I think a huge part of the ignorance about aromanticism is that people fundamentally misunderstand aro relationships because they simply do not have any frame of reference for what it would be like to live without romantic feelings. Non-aro people completely miss the point when they imagine their life as exactly the same, but with the romantic feelings and relationships removed, and extrapolate that that’s what aro people’s lives are like, because for a lot of people… it’s not.
It’s the same misunderstanding when cis people try to imagine what it would be like to be trans by thinking “what if I wanted to be a boy?” and straight people imagine their partner and their relationship as exactly the same, just another gender.
That’s why we get all this bullshit where allo people act as though all relationships must fit neatly and obviously into either ‘romantic’ or ‘platonic’ categories, because… their relationships do. That’s why we hear stuff like “lol what you are describing is a friendship!” when aro people talk about QPRs, because for them, any relationship that lacks romantic affection is a friendship. Because they are not imagining their life without a relationship that is committed, incredibly intimate, exclusive, and prioritised above all others.
Aro people can still desire a level of intimacy and commitment with somebody that everybody else gets from romantic relationships, without wanting a romance: sharing everything - space, money, belongings, time - having a level of emotional and even physical intimacy that is not common in friendships, being committed to one another, making that relationship a priority above other things in your life, basing major life decisions around that relationship… these are all things that most people fulfil through romantic relationships, and aro people can desire that kind of intimacy without feeling or wanting romance.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand QPRs or the aro experience. You don’t have to understand it to respect it. At some point you have to acknowledge that you don’t understand because you have not experienced it, you have no frame of reference for it, and you will never really know what it’s like because those are not one of those people. The validity of aro people’s experiences does not hinge on whether or not non-aro people understand or accept them.
I’d be laughing at this if I wasn’t busy reeling from the fact that this guy is a real person and I’ve just seen his true face
I actually got the chance to see him speak at a Children’s Authors panel at BookCon one year, and seeing his face I could handle. It was surreal, but I could deal. What was really a trip was that his voice is much higher than i’d always heard it in my head.
I went to one of his book signings when I was in middle school and it was really was surreal. Throughout the whole reading he insisted that he was not Lemony Snicket and proceeded to perform a song on the accordion about how if he were Lemony Snicket, he would play us a song on the accordion but was not. And he signed the books like this, with a stamp calling himself an “official representative” and not the author:
He threw a penny at me during the reading. It was wild
Sorry for the shitty screenshots but I did also want to include some of Warren’s plans that specifically highlight healthcare for LGBTQ folks!!! She and Bernie are both great candidates that stand by the community & it’s important to remember that
Remember not to let the conservatives or russian spambots or whoever else is coming for us 2020… remember not to let them drive a wedge between us. Especially not between two strongly progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren.
(Note: not saying OP is working for the russians or anything. Just that this kind of divisive bullshit is exactly what the GOP, russians, and anyone else working to keep american a capitalist hellhole wants)
I love this duality that SU presents with Pearl. She’s a rule-loving nerd and a literal rebel. A loving committed mother and someone who, at times, has shown conflicting feelings on being a parent (both in what it cost her to become one and in what it prevents her from doing).
A lot of television shows have multi-faceted characters but I think the stark differences we see in Pearl are somewhat unusual In any fictional character.
Things about journalism that tumblr never seems to grasp
Headlines have to be as streamline as possible. Aka, they can’t include names unless the article is about a well-known public figure.
Those “water is wet” articles do more then explain what you already know, they’re providing evidence and sources that support/explain what you already know.
Oh my god, there’s information after the headline.
