The Blackmail Dilemma

For actual progressives, dealing with Democratic Party blackmail has produced a generation-long dilemma without an apparent solution.

Other than the likely inevitability of a global climate crisis in this generation — because no one with power is doing anything close to enough to prevent it — the one issue that's kept me up at night for more than a decade now is the success of the Democratic Party's blackmail of its voting base, and the impossible situation it leaves us with. For actual and thoughtful progressives, dealing with this blackmail has produced a generation-long dilemma without an apparent solution.

I know that the term "Democratic Party" doesn't include all Democrats. For example, I would still eagerly vote for Alan Grayson for President, or anything else he decided to run for, and there are others like him, Democrats with the right values and more integrity than they need to offset the moneyed temptations.

But even though the Party is a mix of its parts, it's also an aggregate of its parts, and in the aggregate, the Democratic Party is indeed the lesser evil, not the greater good. In the broad strokes, almost nothing good comes from the Democratic Party — simply less evil than what comes when their Republican colleagues are in the driver's seat. And even then, Democrats are often collaborators and enablers. As just one example, Obama ran on repealing the Bush tax cuts, then, when he had the chance, repealed just half of them.

It's the firmness of the grip of the trap that's so troubling. If you vote for a Republican, you get a Republican. If you don't vote, you often get a Republican. If you vote third party, you very often get a Republican. Most people who are the least inclined to vote Democratic hate or fear the Republicans — and the Democrats know this.

Thus, there's no incentive, zero, that inclines the corrupt, corporate wing of the Democratic Party to change anything at all — and that's the wing that's in charge.

All available avenues of change seem to have been closed off. The Sanders Solution (if indeed it existed) was rejected by those who control primary elections in both 2016 and 2020.

Is there a third-party solution? The bipartisan consensus (the two-winged monoparty) has made it literally impossible for a national third-party challenge to succeed — for starters, post-Ross Perot, the two parties have made sure that no third party candidate will ever make it to the debate stage.

And the last of my solutions — the "party within the Party" or "virtual third party" solution — seemed to die before our eyes when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejected her earlier idea of a muscular and oppositional sub-caucus of House Democratic progressives that would fight like the Tea Party fought, vigorously and at every turn. That ship has apparently sailed without any of the current "squad" members on board.

Will Biden become the solution? He's being praised to the skies as the newest of new FDRs, but as Matt Taibbi points out (paywall link), that media pump had been actively primed by Biden operatives behind the scenes to get that praise — "high-flown language" that came "on the heels of Biden’s people whispering F.D.R. comparisons in the ears of reporters for weeks," as Taibbi put it.

And Taibbi offers a great number of ways that Biden is keeping his old promise — that nothing will fundamentally change — while his agents give lip service to his new and opposite one — that yes, you should hope for it anyway.

Haven't we heard that song before, that there's hope for change? Didn't work out the last time, as I recall, and it's doubtful the same people will give us a different outcome this time.

So what's a voter to do? Vote your conscience and go passive about the result? Going passive is exactly what the blackmail dilemma is designed to make you do.

And yet what action can create the opposite result? Apparently none, until God Noah's-floods us all with a climate wipe-out that indeed changes the system, but by killing most of the people dependent on it.

Given the starkness of this sky-level view of things, the word "dilemma" barely scratches the surface of the problem we have. Yet humans weren't built to be passive in the face of disaster and stay mentally healthy as well.

Action is clearly the antidote — but which one?