Sunday, November 20, 2016

Burying the Hatchet. Not right now we won't.

I have noticed a prevailing trend as of late, something in the wind starting to gather some steam. Some liberals are starting to say that liberals in general need to reconcile over the events of the last several decades, well more specifically the primary and election season that just ended. Hey, this is pretty good. The same group that told Sanders supporters to get over the primary, and due their duty are now crying that we must bury the hatchet, after months of insults, and being bullied, we must get over it all in the blink of an eye and we must bury the hatchet.


Okay, before I am going to be willing to bury the hatchet, I need to get my own head around some things, I need to continue to rest, and rejuvenate my body and mind. I also need to get many things off my chest, and for most of the people who will read this, they might find themselves in agreement with a great deal of it, others might say I am a lost cause, but I am going to say it, give it some time, and then set back to work for the world I want to see for my children, because in this current climate I doubt many of us will see this dream world.

First I am having some real problems with the hypocrisy of my liberal peers. Yes, I am a farther to the left than many of you. In most circles I am called a progressive, I call myself a social democrat, or even a socialist. What I am seeing in my peers is a hypocritical streak, you were rightfully angry when we went to war on crap intelligence. We were killing people needlessly, and as liberals we were beyond pissed off over it. We were lied to, we were used, and if that didn't leave a bad taste in your mouth, I don't know what to tell you. So, Obama comes in, a freshly minted Nobel Peace Prize in hand, and we figure we can trust this man with the military, mostly because he was promising to end the bloodshed. Yeah, so when he starts doing worse things than his predecessor most liberals were cool with it. Clinton promised a more masculine foreign policy, and to continue do the path. For those liberals who support her, you are showing your hypocrisy. You were angry when the GOP was doing it, turning a blind eye when the Democrats were doing it, and my god, you have given the conservative commentators online so much ammo that its not even funny. If you are against war, against killing innocent people, you have to be against killing all innocent people. Its like the GOP being pro-life and pro-death penalty. IF you are against war, you have to be against war, outside of a few pretty bad situations.

Next up, you have to stop with the majority of people spoke, Sanders lost, so shut up and stop whining. Well, guess what, because of the breakdown of how our elections work in the US, he won the states, got the 270 Electoral Votes, and like it or not, you need to sit down, stop whining, and shut up already. Yeah, I bet if you supported Clinton that just made you angry didn't it. Unlike the primary, all indications I have seen are that, it was fair. Trump won it fair and square, he didn't cheat. So, now you want to kill the Electoral College. Now, I have no real love for the Electoral College, the system is outdated, and honestly, it needs some serious updating or some new system to update it. Here is the skinny, like it or not, if we move to a straight popular vote system, you are going to have people whose voices will be drowned out. This election, in one breakdown I read stated that this election was urban versus rural. The cities versus the country. Funny thing, if you look at the US map, and who voted for who, you'll notice that the large cities everywhere went blue, while the majority of the country went red. Really, taking an axe to the Electoral College is no better than what the Republicans did with Gerrymandering.

Oh, but it gets worse. This whole we have to compromise BS that I keep hearing. Yeah, I don't have a problem with compromising, not really. In a good compromise nobody gets exactly what they want, both parties give up ground on something they want. But what I am hearing out of many Clinton Liberals (neo-liberal third way democrats) is that she went too far to the left. I can tell you, she didn't go all that far to the left. The problem was that she went just far enough to the left to pick up the more moderate Sanders supporters, before swinging to her center right roots. The fact of the matter is, neo-liberalism, this notion of attempting to reconcile fiscal conservatism, free trade globalism, lower taxes on the wealthy, and war hawkishness, all doomed Clinton, because people are tired of it. You say that people are centrists and as a result all candidates much be centrist, and that is something you need to think about. Yes, ending at a centrist position in a discussion is fine, it means that we haven't gone too far one way or the other. But when you start out at the centrist position and move far right, people get nothing that they want, a lot they don't want, and that anger starts building.

The fact of the matter is, if so called liberals (neo-liberals or centrist democrats) want to continue to force the hand of actual liberals and progressives, elections are going to continually get progressively worse. We have had 35 years of neo-liberalism in our politics, hell most conservatives are neo-liberal and don't even realize it. You can say that we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good enough, but the fact is, good enough just won't hack it anymore. You can get angry about it, but the fact is, if you run a fair poll on most of the progressive's wish list, you'd find that even the people in deep red states like those ideas. People are tired of the Democratic Party, they are tired of the hypocrisy shown by many liberals, and honestly, until we knock it off, until we really step back and evaluate the people we are running for office, it is going to be really hard for people like me to come back into your fold, or to allow you into our fold. Sadly, most of the so called liberals in the US don't seem to understand this.

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