2020: On Pandemics, Genocide, and the Election

How does one even begin a blogpost during the cursed year of 2020 after a four month absence in which we are still in the midst of a pandemic and are mere days away from a presidential election wherein the incumbent has simply, genocidally given up on that pandemic? 

Do people even blog anymore? How does a person even dip the ol' toe back into it when so much has occurred between June 2020 and now?

Let me start how I've been trying to stay centered during everything:

• Reading - I've been reading about one book per week, almost entirely in the genres of science fiction, memoir, and fiction (no non-fiction or political tomes for me, right now). I log my books on Goodreads, mostly so I have a record of what I've read from year to year, and because I log a lot of notes and quotes from almost everything I read, on my e-reading device.
• Exercise - I make time every day for 40-60 minutes of exercise, usually at home (via some sort of online instruction) plus at least one walk per day. I wear a mask on my daily walks, even though it's outside and less risky, primarily because I want to be part of a culture that normalizes mask-wearing during a pandemic.
• Pop Culture - I have watched a few TV series that unexpectedly had same-sex relationships in them as major plot points, including Ratched, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Away, and I'm just going to be upfront about it, shows that include LBT women are about 200% more watchable and interesting to me than shows that only feature cishets. Sorry not sorry.
• Cooking -  The vast majority of our meals have been homemade, although from time to time we do get take-out/delivery. I have always enjoyed cooking, and I find it satisfying to know how to provide basic sustenance for myself and others. Favorites: homemade biscuits, pizza, chili, veggie/tofu stir fry, Shepard's pie.
  
• Political Engagement - A certain segment of extremely online folks think that political activism means "people dunking on people on Twitter" or whatever, but there is a lot, actually, that can be done with and targeting people not in the insular worlds of political Twitter, including contacting voters, helping people register to vote, donating to candidates, and more.

Like many, Joe Biden was not my first choice as a the Democratic nominee, but he ended up being the nominee and is now standing between us and the COVID pandemic - among other things - getting much, much worse. As such, I think every registered voter has a moral obligation to support the Biden/Harris ticket, if only as a matter of harm reduction.

In 2004, after watching in stunned depression as the hated George W. Bush won re-election, I take nothing - no poll, no prediction, no level of assume hatred - for granted in 2020. For, 16 years later, we are working against a Republican party that has only grown more brazenly empowered to cheat and win by any means possible by the vile, hypocritical Mitch McConnell who is ramming through an arch-conservative SCOTUS pick who will possibly serve on the nation's highest court for decades to come, even as he blocked President Obama's "election year" replacement pick for almost all of 2016.

But to take a step back and look more broadly, I think that the COVID pandemic, and more specifically Trump and the Republican Party's genocidal mismanagement of it, should be the defining issue of the 2020 election. 

We now know that a national mask mandate in April would have saved roughly 40% of the lives lost to COVID, but Trump and Republicans have largely ridiculed masks and treated the issue as one of "personal choice" rather than as a public health necessity for the common good. Further, Trump largely won the public "debate," such as it was, to reopen businesses before COVID in the US was anywhere near under control and the US, for many months now, has had the highest COVID death toll in the entire world.

At almost 225,000 dead as of today, we see hundreds of COVID-related deaths per day and it barely makes a ripple anymore in the news.

We, as a nation, should be mourning and grieving, and our political leaders should - at the very least - be acknowledging that.

And, while I believe probably most people in the US have become accustomed to a baseline level of cruel, sociopathic abnormality over the past four years, I don't know what to make of the reality that so many people have apparently become inured to this genocide and death toll other than, perhaps, it is overwhelming for most people to think about, some people are in idiotic denial, and/or our checks and balances in the US - both formal and informal - have profoundly failed.

No institution in the US should be treating what is happening as normal. Not newscasters, not debate moderators, not comedians, not Saturday Night Live and their both-sides fucking bullshit, not schools, not professional sports, not your workplaces and their "HOW was your weekend?" gaslighting questions, not too-cool-to-care personalities and entertained-by-it-all asshat pundits on Twitter, and certainly - certainly - not any person nominated to the US Supreme Court under the circumstances of national emergency while a presidential election is ongoing.

I don't know what to say, really. The events of the my political life as an adult, over the past 20 years, have impressed upon me that while we must not ever give up doing, saying, and fighting for what we believe is right, it's also unfair to pass the buck to the next generation by simply saying, "the young people will save us." 

Not only are there a lot of young misogynists and racists and homophobes, I'm deeply uncomfortable with, for instance, the way that so many adults are entertained by teen victims of gun violence having to regularly re-traumatize themselves on Twitter, by subjecting themselves to rightwing harassment, as part of their work of "saving the rest of us."

I've said this before, but every generation will have to fight its own battles, eventually, when we're gone. And likely, at least some of these battles will be those that have already been fought and won and lost before. Perhaps it is part of our work to leave them tools they can use, or re-purpose, for that task. But, I also refuse to cynically withdraw while I'm still here. My activism won't look like yours, and vice versa, but I think we can all find ways to contribute, and however we contribute I don't know that any of us can predict the end result(s) of our contributions.

Thoughts on Social Isolation and 2020

Whew!

The past month or so has been a lot, yeah?  It appears that Joe Biden is on track to the Democratic nominee for president. And, fine. Whatever. He wasn't my top choice at all, but the COVID-19 pandemic, and Trump's massive failures around managing it, is one of many issues that highlights the urgency of defeating Trump in 2020.

It's a low bar, but Biden would be exponentially better than Trump. And, if Bernie Sanders were to pull off a surprise win, he would be as well. Whoever the nominee is just needs to be smart enough to name a progressive woman as vice president.

Anyway, it appears many of us will be stuck indoors, at home, isolating ourselves from others during this pandemic. Also, shoutout to those providing essential services right now who cannot do so, including health workers, firefighters, caregivers, law enforcement, delivery people, and more.

During this time, I've been thinking of doing a Xena rewatch (and possibly recaps, but not sure what I will have time for, given my other responsibilities).

Anyway, I mostly just wanted to check in. Please stay safe and healthy (and at home, if you are able!). How are others occupying themselves during this time?

On White Daddy and Electability, Again

When you think about it, a white male Democrat hasn't won a US presidential election since Bill Clinton did in 1996, a quarter century ago.

At the same time, polling data from the past year or so consistently have white men - specifically Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders - as performing better against Trump in 2020 general election matchups than do the candidates who are women and/or people of color. Here's one sample poll from early February 2020, for instance, from Real Clear Politics:

General Election Poll vs. Trump, 2/2/20: Biden +6, Sanders +4, Warren +3, Buttigieg +1

Interestingly, the numbers for Trump tend to stay about the same no matter who he's matched up against. It's voters for the Democratic candidate who tend to peel away the further away from "cishet white man" the Democratic candidate is. Some polls, for instance, even show billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race relatively recently, doing about the same as Joe Biden.

Another data point is that historical polling data from February 2016 shows that Hillary Clinton was polling at about where Joe Biden currently is polling versus Trump. In fact - unlike Biden or any other 2020 candidate - she regularly had a double-digit advantage on Trump at around this point in the campaign. Current numbers, of course, are also before Trump and the Republicans really start going after the nominee. Although I'm sure their efforts to cause chaos and in-fighting are already well underway, we can expect such things to amp up after the Democratic National Convention when they can really solidify around different narratives and attacks on the nominee.

All of these factoids together concern me for our 2020 prospects.

Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the 2016 popular vote by literal millions of votes, of course, and Trump squeaked out an electoral college win in swing states after a, to put it mildly, clusterfucked cascade of colliding factors worked against her. The thinking this time around is that Bernie or Biden or, I guess, Bloomberg would be able to win at least some of the swing states that Clinton lost, a premise that seems to rest largely on the usually-unstated assumption that these men would win because they are white men.

Yes, I know other reasons are put forth as to why these men would win, and they usually involve some variation on the narrative that, unlike the fine specimens of politicians that these white men are, Hillary Clinton was History's Worst Candidate Ever.  As white male politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and even Martin O'Malley (yes really) looked around the post-2016-election aftermath and thought the world needed their gloat-bragging that they could have done what "the woman" didn't do, they helped write into existence the pervasive narrative that the USA was in dire need of White Daddy to come to the rescue.

Now, I don't think it's even necessarily sexist to point out that much of the electorate has bought into the sexist hype around the dire need for a white male candidate "because of everyone else's bigotry." What was largely lost in the national discourse, if one can call it that, around whether Bernie Sanders actually told Elizabeth Warren that he thought a woman couldn't win the presidency, is that a presidential contest is not like a one-on-one chess game. It's a popularity context, the results of which are an expression of millions of voters' prejudices, hopes, dreams, fears, and countless factors outside of the control of the candidates themselves.

That supposed frontrunner Joe Biden, who would perform catastrophically in a debate against Trump anyway, is treating the match-up like a boxing match and, like most 2020 candidates, has yet to acknowledge everything Clinton was up against, demonstrates primarily that he is not anywhere near equipped to face the challenges of the general election that are yet to come.

Trump is unquestionably so terrible that I think many people and institutional powers are circularly settling for mediocre candidates who don't, actually, have a great chance at beating Trump because they "reason" that "everyone else" is settling for these candidates because these are the only candidates who can win.

Or, they felt deeply threatened by Clinton's near-win in 2016 and so are implicitly or explicitly demanding consolidation around certain white male candidates. We are, I believe, still experiencing the fallout of a 2016 election cycle that was deeply misogynistic across the political spectrum and in which, in true American form, many people demanded everyone immediately stop "relitigating" (ie, processing, analyzing, writing about).

And so, here we are, with many of the same issues cropping up. That one of the major players in the 2016 Democratic Primary decided to run again while the other was largely told to go knit in the woods for the rest of her days hasn't helped the situation.

But, such is life, here in the backlash.

On the Bernie front, I think hardcore Bernie supporters, many of whom operate in a rhetorical environment as though Republicans simply don't exist, are in serious denial about how he would fare against Trump/Republican attacks against him and "radical socialism." In the recent Iowa Caucus, Bernie halved his support in the state after 5+ years of campaigning for president and ended up essentially tied with the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana that no one had heard of a year ago.

My strategy for 2020 is therefore to vote for the candidate whose policies I most agree with and who I think would be most effective as president. For me, that person is Elizabeth Warren. If that person, for you, is Biden or Bernie, more power to you. But, if you're only supporting certain candidates because you think a white man is the "safer" candidate against Trump, I think that's questionable logic.

No candidate is a safe one in this age of propaganda, disinformation, and foreign collusion. Certain candidates have been granted a huge assist from the hype about white male electability, but none of that has accounted for all of the additional noise that exists in our current political landscape.

On "Resistance Moms" and 2020

Today on Twitter, I made some observations about some 2020 polling data from Indivisible:

This is interesting on several levels.

One, if it's true that Indivisible disproportionately includes "resistance mom," I think there are many reasons this group doesn't support Bernie. For one, he dredges up a lot of history from 2016 and can't seem to admit he lost to a woman. https://t.co/4GxCGPEdTZ

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) July 3, 2019

The data shows that this group of voters - said to be disproportionately white, female, and suburban - disproportionately support Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. The numbers also show that more within this group do not support Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, than do.

As I tweeted, these findings are interesting on several levels. Regarding Bernie, I think he dredges up a lot of history from 2016, most notably that he can't seem to admit that he lost to a woman. But in addition to that, I think he has earned the distrust many women probably have of him due to his consistent 1960s socialist rhetoric that dog-whistles the mantra that white working class men are to be prioritized with respect to the political solutions he's proposing.

There's also the reality that a good portion of the online left has spent far too much time and energy mocking "wine moms" and the "hashtag resistance" for not sufficiently feeling the Bern. Back in January 2019, I wrote about this. The refusal of the online left to take "the hashtag resistance" seriously as a political movement is, I believe, in no small part due largely to the fact that white, cisgender, straight men are not at the center of it.

We've seen some of these dynamics play out over the past three years, a notable example of which is the way many women have bristled at times when The Women's March has appeared to be a vehicle for channeling women's support toward a Bernie 2020 run, such as his invite to give what some were presented as a keynote speech at the organization's Women's Convention in 2017. (He accepted the invite, which caused a huge backlash, and then later backed out without acknowledging that invite/acceptance were controversial.)

The Biden numbers on the Indivisible poll are interesting, as well, not the least of which is because I think there is some "conventional wisdom" on Twitter that "resistance moms" are "neoliberal centrists" who probably disproportionately support him (or course, you have to factor in that "neoliberal centrist" has some bizarre definitions these days, most of which center around the degree to which one does/doesn't like Bernie Sanders).

I'm not sure what to make of Gillibrand's numbers, other than that she most likely has taken huge hits because she called on Al Franken to resign. So, perhaps these voters are resentful of her for that and/or they think other people would remain too resentful of that (ie, misogynistic) to vote for her.

Remember: a lot of women have internalized misogyny, and it's also pervasive among the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum. It's fully possible to support some female candidates, while not supporting others for misogynistic reasons.

All in all, it's still early. Biden and Bernie have near-universal name recognition, however, and I suspect that the more people see of the other candidates, the more people will realize that neither man is particularly well-equipped for this political moment.

I know Bernie's team is pushing the narrative that everyone is stealing his ideas*, but demeanor - among other things matters - and he simply doesn't have it. (*If everyone is stealing Bernie's ideas and supporting "his" agenda, are they also still neoliberals centrist sellouts? Hmmm, ponder the paradox).

The Iowa Polls: "I guess he'll do" 2020

It's 2019.  Grab your barf bags because we're off to the 2020 races and three white men are leading in the polls of likely Democratic voters.

Here's from a recent CNN poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa (cite: PDF):

That's right, Joe Biden (32%), Bernie Sanders (19%), and Beto O'Rourke (11%). These are three men who have each lost the biggest political races in which they've competed. I'll just say for that reason alone, although there are many others, I am very concerned about 2020 and our chances of defeating Trump and the Republicans.

What could it possibly mean that Democrats and major media voices are not widely shouting at these men to retire into the woods and knit for the rest of their days?

Here are some theories, any combination of which might be playing out.

(1) It's Iowa, which is about 91% white.

Yet, in national polls, Biden has tended to lead, with Bernie Sanders coming in second, and someone else coming in third - often Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

(2) Biden, Bernie, and Beto all have a lot of name recognition right now. Biden, who lost his previous bid badly, can ride on President Obama's coattails. Bernie has essentially never stopped running for president, even when he lost badly to Hillary Clinton. And, Beto just lost a high-profile race with the extremely unlikeable Ted Cruz.

(3) Hillary Clinton's electoral college loss to Donald Trump was deeply humiliating for American women and many women have lose their appetite to endure both the misogyny she (and her supporters) faced and another loss.

(4) The center to left has been in a moral panic about "white women" since approximately 47% of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump.  It's as if some people have discovered, and just started thinking about, for the first time the very existence of conservative white women. Yet, rather than this 47% statistic being an indictment of conservatism, Christianity, misogyny, racism, or bigotry, in the framework of Clinton's loss, the 47% statistic is widely perceived as an indictment of "white feminism," a category that no longer means "non-intersectional feminism" but has come to mean, on the Internet, "words said by any feminist who is white."

I'm still teasing out the 2020 implications of this, but I've seen many men take advantage of this collapsing of many progressive feminists into the category of "irredeemably bad feminist who needs to shut up forever" in ways that are profoundly misogynistic. I see a lot of cynical mocking of the hashtag resistance because it's perceived as being comprised of dorky, white suburban moms who wear pussy hats. I see a lot of progressive white women internalizing this misogyny. Ironically, I see a lot of progressives who have just given up on intersectionality beyond the prism of one or maybe two intersections of identity, when there are so many more.

I think all of this contributes to the perception that it will take a white man to beat Trump.

(5) Relatedly, some people might want to vote for someone who isn't a white man, but they don't think enough other people will, so they perceive it as safer to support a white man.

(6) Many people are more tolerant of flawed white men, where women/people of color have their flaws amplified and used as dealbreakers. Every woman who runs will have her own version of "the emailz" to contend with, while her male competitors could be literal traitors to the nation and receive no comparable coverage.

(7) The beltway media portrays, and many people perceive, politics as akin to a boxing match, rather than a popularity contest that is largely framed by the media. And in a boxing match, people think it takes a man to beat a man. Hence the various male politicians and their fans with their "Bernie wouldas" and "Biden wouldas" after the 2016 election.

(8)  Decades of rightwing anti-Clinton propaganda and attacks amplified Hillary Clinton's flaws and contributed to many people on the center-left thinking she was a uniquely bad candidate, thus masking the misogyny that lingers among the voting population, even among Democrats and Independents. See, for instance, how Elizabeth Warren is already being treated, now that it's almost certain she's running.

(9) The mainstream media is still dominated by misogynistic, white supremacist people, especially white men.

(10) Our society still widely hates ambitious women.

(11) Trump is so bad that many people have completely romanticized the Obama years. They want the perceived safety of Joe Biden, the daddy/husband figure, even though Russia interfered with the 2016 election on the watch of Obama/Biden.

(12) It's very early. Other candidates may rise in the polls over time, with more exposure.

Note, none of these reasons are grounded in any of the leading men being uniquely good politicians.

They're not.

Yet, the thing about many white male candidates is that they rarely acknowledge the invisible assists they get from white male privilege, instead taking it for granted that their polling numbers and/or popularity are an authentic reflection of their qualifications for the job. 

What else?

Biden, Bernie, and Russia

In the purported feminist revival we're in, I continue to contemplate what it means that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders lead polls among Democrats of possible 2020 presidential candidates, with newcomer (to the national stage) Beto O'Rourke now coming in right behind them in third place.

Biden has done very poorly in previous presidential campaigns (1998 and 2008), but I think his recent popularity is due largely to name recognition, the effect of riding President Obama's coattails as Democrats continue to mourn the end of that presidency, and the fact that the Overton Window of what an acceptable candidate is has shifted quite far in the age of Trump.  White men who merely quietly rape people and then half-ass apologize, as opposed to brag about it, are practically thrown ticker tape parades these days.

Bernie and Beto, like Biden, have a lot of name recognition right now, with Bernie losing to Hillary in 2016 and Beto losing a high-profile Senate race in Texas to the magnificently-unlikeable Ted Cruz.

What winners!

Plus, even those on the left side of the political spectrum can be racist and sexist. For many people who are not, they will support a white man simply because they are resigned to thinking that a woman/person of color cannot ever win because "everyone else" is still too racist and sexist to vote for anyone but a white man.

But, aside from these factors, I'm troubled by Biden because, as Melissa notes in an article about Biden's cocky comments about his qualification to be president, he "was vice-president while a foreign adversary stole our fucking election."  For that reason alone, his national security credibility is, or should be, severely lacking.

With respect to Bernie, we know that Russia gave his campaign an assist against Hillary Clinton. Are they going to do so again,this time against other Democrat candidates, while getting further assists from his most hard-core, rabid online supporters?

The mainstream media should make it extremely awkward, to say the least, if Bernie and Biden in particular fail to address the integrity of our elections during their campaigns (assuming they both run).

And, given both men's relatively popularity, it seems that more Democrats need to fully understand that the Mueller investigation is less about removing Trump because he's a terrible person (which he is) and more because he and/or his campaign agents likely conspired with a foreign government to undermine our political system.