Burning Man

Politicians at the national level need a robust-yet-flexible "ground game" because election requirements and the political topography differs not only state to state, but county to county, perhaps city to city, whatever the polity is that local governments choose to organize themselves around. Like everything else we decline to organize at the federal level--marriage, education, traffic laws, sodomy--the well-intentioned benign neglect can lead to an oozy, spreading feeling of chaos. Throw in the fact that most elections are run at the retail, transactional level by interested volunteers and you've just devised the perfect system--slow, inefficient, inconsistent and, if you've decided to go with a caucus system, a bit shouty--in which the disgruntled might start to grow a conspiracy theory or four when things consistently refuse to go the way they'd like. This year, it's an odd situation where the messier things get, where the obvious hand of institutional control is most clearly absent, is exactly what the conspiracy theorists have decided constitutes evidence of conspiracy. If there's no structural edifice looming over you, they're very happy to fantasize one for themselves to fill the void.

Or if you're a special kind of entitled douchebag, you could even proclaim from what should be recognized as a privileged position (requiring, one would think, some care as to not inflame the basest, least-informed passions among the voter class) that you see conspiracies everywhere even when you're fairly comfortably winning.

Bernie Sanders voters are mad. I get it. Sure, there's been change and progress over the last eight years of Democratic presidential rule, but they see that change as a) frustratingly incremental and b) tainted by the corruption and inefficiency of the rotting system it was birthed from. They're looking for something more along the lines of Susan Sarandon's revolution, holding on to the Fitzgeraldian idea that a great leap of productive social progress can be made even if the ideas propelling it forward are monumentally stupid.

Sure, lots of the last eight years have been frustrating. There's been obstruction and disrespect from Republican hypocrites in Congress. Guantanamo Bay hasn't been closed down quite yet. The Yankees were able to win a World Series in there. All of this is objectively upsetting, I get it.

But we've also cut the deficit by something like a trillion dollars. The wars have ended in Afghanistan and Iraq... you know, mostly. The national percentage rate of people without health insurance is down to single digits. And still the most vociferous of the Bernie voters' plan is: let's elect Trump and burn this whole fucker down. So we can then... what? Let the Republicans self-immolate so it will be easier to elect a Democrat in the future, I guess. OR, just as a counterpoint: let's NOT elect Trump at all and just elect a Democrat now instead?

Will the Berniacs come back to Hillary in the fall? Consider this quote from Salon:

These angry people have nowhere else to go. So the safe expectation is that they will fall in line without much kicking and screaming. And that, ultimately, is why many of them are kicking and screaming. Yes, they’re going to vote for [the Democratic nominee]... The truth is, they’ll probably love voting for [the nominee]. But after what they feel has been done to them — the way in which they were written off, marginalized and resented, their hopes mocked and their history-making ambitions dismissed as retrograde identity politicking — damned if they’re going to be nice girls about it.

I forgot to mention, this was from a Salon article about pro-Hillary PUMAs. In 2008.

Hillary won almost 18 million votes in the primaries that year. And Obama earned around 69 million votes in the general, beating John McCain by about 10 million. So not all of the Hillary voters could have stayed out, no matter how mad they were. As frustrated as some of us get with the Democratic infighting, the truth is we can't afford to have them all stay home in November. They're boringly earnest and crazy fuckers, but they're our boringly earnest and crazy fuckers. We need them to be friends again. But I think it will be easier than it currently looks. Come November it will be down to a choice between a former senator/secretary of state and a builder who is so shitty at building, even the imaginary things he builds fall apart.