About Hillary...

I'll start off this post the way almost all pro-Hillary pieces begin, and yet no pro-Bernie piece that I've seen does, which is by saying that I like the other candidate too. I like Bernie a lot. And this post isn't about me saying unequivocally that I'm voting for Hillary. I'm split. It's about addressing the vitriol.

But let's start with why I'm split. It's not a matter of conscience versus practicality, because my conscience is FUCKING FINE with a vote for Hillary. It's more a matter of idealism versus realism. A lot has been said about Bernie's plans being unrealistic, but I don't think a lot of people have gone into depth as to why. It's not that universal healthcare is unrealistic, because it works the world over. It's not that I don't think he can pay for it. He can. Again, it works all over the world. It's that passing universal healthcare through a congress that has tried time and again to defund and dismantle the half-measure that is Obamacare is unrealistic. And the most important distinction between Hillary and Bernie to me, namely the issue of campaign finance reform, is the least realistic in this regard. He can't executive order that shit. He can't. So tell me how he gets it through Congress.

Because I know he's reached across the aisle to get things done without compromising his values in the past. I. Fucking. Know. But there is a big difference between doing that as a senator and doing it as President, especially as a president against whom the right will double down for the simple reason that he is an avowed (democratic) socialist (the parentheses are there because, while I recognize and understand the distinction, his opponents do not and will not). The Killer Mike response to the question of "how" Bernie will accomplish his platform is that we stay the course and get out the vote in the midterms. It's true, of course, that midterm elections are vitally important if you want your president to accomplish anything, and I'm not so jaded to think that we couldn't mobilize people to get out and vote, especially if Sanders declares Election Day a national holiday, as it fucking should be (even though the working poor are the ones least likely to benefit from that holiday, and even though the President only has the authority to declare a one-time holiday, otherwise it has to go through--you guessed it--Congress). The problem is this:

That map is already drawn. The time to get out the vote for midterms was in 2010, and the Democrats blew it. Big time. Dismantling and rewriting laws to protect against gerrymandering is a massive undertaking. It is also, currently, within the power of the state governments, though there is constitutional language enabling Congress to intervene. Those battles always go smoothly, right? Easy to get a Republican Congress to take away jurisdiction from the states in order to dismantle the redistricting that ensures their reelection, right? And as for grassroots campaigns to bring out voters for local elections: again, I'm all for it, but if you think midterm elections are a tall task, local elections are a truly depressing obstacle. And I don't see how Bernie gets us riled up for every local election when he's running the fucking country. To be clear, this is not a surrender: voting in midterms is still vital and important; voting in local elections is vital and important, and I would gladly join in a groundswell of grassroots campaigning to bring election turnout up.

But before you condescendingly tell me what a revolution is, as though I don't know, and before you call my realism cynicism, explain to me in detail how a grassroots campaign is going to cut through this shitshow. Because until Bernie starts stumping to propose a national call for a Second Constitutional Congress, his revolution is just impressive campaigning within a broken system. And if that's what passes for a revolution in the imagination of the radical left of this country, maybe I'm not the one who's fucking cynical.

If I am swearing more than usual, it's because the tone of the Bernie defenders on the Internet has become noxious and smug. It's a tone every woman knows incredibly well: the tone that says "the only reason you don't agree with me is you don't know what you're talking about, so let me explain it to you." It is a tone that sends me into an apoplectic motherfucking rage. But I, like Hillary, like every goddamn woman I have ever met, know that we have to swallow that rage and speak evenly and respectfully, demonstrating that we did, in fact, understand what you said, and we can see your point, but...

But I want to spew the bile I just swallowed all over your fucking face.

So that's why I'm writing this.

I have no desire to touch on the Berniebro controversy, because while it is entirely believable to me that some assholes may say explicitly what a lot of my friends (yes, my friends) have said implicitly, I recognize that there are journalistic failures that have emerged in regard to the articles on the subject that make it messier than I have time or energy to deal with here. What I will address, however, is the attitude of those writing in response to the initial articles. First, for your instinctual response to be to disprove and discredit instead of to simply condemn is telling (yes, even if the thing you're condemning turns out to be exaggerated). Seriously, how fucking hard is it?! Secondly, there is an assumption that the only people who could possibly support Hillary Clinton are dupes or shills (or my personal favorite, voting with our vaginas).

That's a bullying tactic, used by every bully from high school to Donald Trump as a means to isolate and silence--by preemptive shaming--anyone who disagrees. By employing that tactic, you are delineating exactly the type of reception a rebuttal will receive, and by so doing, threatening the dissenter before they ever engage in discourse. And so any time I see this tactic used, I am immediately suspicious as to the validity of the claims being made. If your argument is sound, or if you are honestly seeking truth through discourse, then you should have no need to bully.

So in response to that, let me spell out why Hillary Clinton is actually an inspiring candidate (spoilers: it has nothing to do with her genitalia). It starts for me in 2008. I voted for Obama. I was for Obama in the primaries as well as the general. My reasoning, which I think was rare for the average Obama supporter at the time, was that he was the more moderate candidate. He was the candidate of bipartisanship. The candidate of reaching across the aisle and healing wounds. He was the candidate who proposed a more tempered form of healthcare reform, which I didn't agree with, but I thought had a chance of passing. But what I didn't predict, due to the massive groundswell of support in that election, was the extent of the backlash. And I don't think Obama was prepared for it either. As a junior senator, he certainly got his unfair share of dog-whistle and overtly racist hate speech thrown his way, but as President, the speech turned into elected officials whose sole platform proposal was a determination to undermine him every chance they got. And he was unprepared.

So if we take that lesson: that as much as this election cycle may bring out a groundswell of support for a socialist, or a female candidate, and riding that support may be inspiring and wonderful, what will undoubtably come will be a massive backlash to either candidate for those very reasons. Then consider who is more likely to be prepared to deal with that shit. The Bernie campaign seems to be operating on the same assumption that Obama's did: that the average American is with them, we only need the courage to speak up, and once we do, together we will be unstoppable. As much as we can blame Obama for trying to compromise as soon as he entered office, that's kind of exactly what he said he would do. But Bernie doesn't say that. And Bernie will be heading into a much more hostile Congress if he takes office. And for that reason, I think Bernie is less prepared than Obama was.

But Clinton? If there is anyone prepared for that battle, it is Hillary Rodham Clinton. All the reasons people hate her are reasons she stands a goddamn chance at winning battles against this bullshit Congress. Her willingness to compromise. Her tenacity. Her ruthlessness. Her political savvy. These are the things that get her labeled a liar, a bitch, hawkish, and robotic. And these qualities are precisely what will poke holes in the armor of Congress, if anything can. And I think that is fucking admirable.

Here is a secret: I don't believe in conspiracies--right wing, left-wing, doesn't matter. I believe in the banality of evil. Which means that I think the overwhelmingly vast majority of people are driven by a desire to do good, but that circumstances and backgrounds can prejudice people to form some truly vile concepts of what "doing good" means. This is what actors who play villains mean when they say that their character is not a villain.

Translated to politics, this means that the majority of politicians are in it because they want to serve the public good. Yes. Even Ted Cruz. His version of "good" is fucking reprehensible. But he doesn't see it that way. And that is key.

Something funny happens when I extend this simple courtesy to Hillary Clinton, though. Liberals everywhere come out of the woodwork to tell me how she only wants wealth, power, notoriety, or that she only wants those things for her fundraisers. Suddenly "bipartisanship" and "negotiating" become "political expediency" and "cutting deals," linguistically ascribing to those same actions nefarious motivations. And when you start talking about people as though they are motivated by doing ill, you are entering the world of conspiracy, and leaving the foundations of reality.

Let's be clear. Hillary has caved to the rules of a broken system in the same way Obama did in 2012, but while we may have been dismayed by Obama's fall from the poster boy of grassroots campaigning, not once did I hear anyone on the left question his motivations. Part of it is that Hillary caved a long time ago. Most people my age can't remember when they first started hating Hillary. That's because she's endured that shit for decades. We've been spoon-fed right-wing conspiracy theories about Hillary for so long we've adopted them as liberal ideas. And not only is she still standing, not only has she not shriveled into a self-hating hollowed-out shell of a person, she still wants to serve. She still voluntarily puts herself in the brightest fucking spotlight possible because she thinks she can do some good. And goddamn it, that is beautiful.

There are some pretty important points on which I disagree with Clinton. Her ready willingness to use military force is one. But again, when Obama ran in 2012, and we were all well aware of his condemnable use of drone strikes, liberals en masse did not call him hawkish, or ascribe to him any motivation other than making an unfortunate calculation of risk assessment that we disapproved of.

I don't like the way her campaign is financed, either. I don't like her connections to big banks, to Wall Street, or to the pharmaceutical industry. But I also know that she has spent her career fighting for universal healthcare, fighting against the gun lobby, fighting for women's rights, and, to a lesser extent, fighting for workers' rights. And I don't believe for a second that she has forgotten her fucking life's work. I think that she has learned the hard way, time and again, that accomplishing her goals requires compromising on the means by which she achieves them. I think those are valuable lessons that should not be dismissed as defeatist or cynical. In fact, her belief that she can still accomplish some good from within that system is the opposite of cynical. And on that point, Bernie believes the same thing, or he wouldn't be running for President, he'd be campaigning for change outside the system.

On the matter of hope. Sometimes I feel that fomenting hope is the left's version of the right's tactic of fomenting hate. It taps into a gut feeling of moral righteousness that feels more true than it is. Obviously, I think one is better than the other. I would rather be surrounded by people who hope than people who hate. But because they both operate on our base impulses, they both encourage a similar defensiveness against doubt. I remember when my boyfriend sheepishly told me that he had finally bought an Obama shirt late into the campaign in 2008. He said I wasn't going to like it. The shirt read, "Dare to Hope, Prepare to Be Disappointed." I told him I thought it was perfect. Even then I was suspicious of hope.

This year, I'm even more suspicious. And the longer Bernie stumps on the silver-bullet of revolution without once describing what that revolution looks like, except to reference his grassroots campaign, the more I am unconvinced. The more I think that this time, I will vote with my brain and not my heart.

And on the topic of revolution, I've heard many (cis, straight, white) men arguing that if Bernie doesn't get the nomination, we should all sit home on Election Day and let the right take it. The idea is twofold. First, that Hillary is as bad as the Republicans. And second, that if the Republicans win, things will get so bad that the people will rise up in a glorious revolution. With all due respect, fuck you very much.

That is an idea that could only be promoted by someone who has read some romantic fucking texts on revolution from the comfort of their stable goddamn society. It is an idea that easily disregards the very real price that will be paid by women, people of color, gay people, trans people, and poor people prior to your theoretical revolution ever taking place. And if you're wrong? How long do we have to pay for your shitty gamble? Fuck you.

It's funny, too, that you think a vote for Hillary is as bad as a vote for the Republicans, yet you don't envision things getting to the breaking point if she's elected. Huh. Look, if you don't want to vote for Hillary because your Marxist conscience couldn't live with it, fine. But don't encourage people who may prefer Bernie, but are willing to compromise on Hillary, to gamble with my goddamn uterus, or the actual fucking lives of people of color, or the marriages and protections against discrimination of gay people, or the tiny, incremental, hard-won advancements of trans people, or the stomachs of the poor. Seriously. Screw you.

Also, your memes are stupid. 

Please, tell me how the curmudgeonly old man who recorded an album of folk songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie is hep to Radiohead's discography, while Hillary is the type of out-of-touch grandma that thinks Coldplay is cool. Her husband won cool points back in the day by playing the sax and listening to Fleetwood Mac, but if she were to try that, man would that be pathetic! Seriously, projecting all your hipster self-righteousness onto Bernie as though, because he speaks to your economic and political interests, he would totally agree with your artistic and cultural preferences is the dumbest shit ever. But I wouldn't fucking care if you didn't simultaneously condemn Hillary for not being cool, because one side of this meme is tongue-and-cheek (I do have a sense of humor), but the other side isn't really a joke. You do think that Hillary is a robot, that she is dishonest, that she doesn't say anything that hasn't been pre-screened, and you do think that that estimation of her character is enough of an agreed-upon reality that we can all mock it with impunity. Oh, and please, invoke the image of Bernie, the man fighting for the working poor, as someone who would engage in the classist mockery of The Olive Garden. 

You're very funny.

Anyhow.

Bernie Sanders may be the politician we deserve. His platform may be the legislation we deserve. And I understand and fully appreciate the desire to stand up and demand the things you deserve. I also know how insulting and infuriating it is to be told you shouldn't aim so high. But I don't think Hillary isn't aiming that high, I just think she understands that showing her hand enables her opponents to mobilize against her. And that is really fucking smart. So though Sanders may be the politician we deserve, Hillary is the politician we need.