The magic folks who can save us, though few are still alive. Plus sending the Electors to "College."

I'll get to this week's fetish -- the Electoral College -- in a bit, with some thoughts that never entered your awareness, before. But first, something you've seen me rant about time and again. How every single democrat and journalist has missed the blatantly obvious.

== Again, go to the Greatest Generation ==

I don't get it. There is a polemical judo move that could be startlingly effective in this civil war: rubbing the noses of Deep-Red America in their hypocritical betrayal of the heroic Greatest Generation (GG). 

 The Boomers' parents are now lionized, but only in abstract, without ever mentioning their politics! Or the name of their favorite living human - Franklin Roosevelt. When Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez talks about a 70% marginal tax rate, she says "it was higher under Eisenhower... clever! But how much more effective to cite those who defeated Hitler, contained Stalin, went to the Moon and built the fantastic-confident American middle class, using exactly the measures she now recommends. 

Screw "democratic socialism!" It's a buzz word to drive confederates back into Hannity's arms. But "Rooseveltean" would let you keep focus on the GGs! 

Hammer home that they were union members. They hated nazis. And every single "supply side" (voodoo) so-called "reform" that rescinded the Rooseveltean social contract led directly to slower growth! To declining investment and R&D. To slackening entrepreneurship and lazier styles of business. To wider disparities and a sickening middle class. Again, not a single Supply Side prediction came true, ever! No wonder they hate science.

Crow that enterprise and ingenuity flourish under democratic policies and wither under republican ones. *You already own the left, dear charismatic-one. Now steal the part of the Fox base that can remember hearing stories from their GG parents, about how FDR helped them save America and the world.* Those hero-parents found a successful balance-point and would be ashamed of Boomers who became tools of oligarchy.

Want redoubled irony? The book that the American right – especially Steve Bannon – fetishes is The Fourth Turning, by Howe and Strauss, claiming that every fourth generation is a “hero” generation that overcomes the crisis caused by the decadent second generation, restoring America to vitality and vigor and wisdom. We boomers are the decadent ones in this scenario, while Millennials will be the heroes, just like the “heroes” of WWII.  Elsewhere, I dissect the right’s fetish with “cyclical history,” a bona fide insanity that’s been disproved again and again. But sure, there are some blurry patterns. And yes, the millennials I know are better people, and we Boomers have made a mess.

Still note the irony: Bannon is flitting around the world, helping Putin to provoke the crisis when there was zero evidence one would have come, without them.  He and his fellow Kremlin-commie-nazi-oligarch-mafia cabal members are pushing boomer buttons hard, to send the West tipping into hot civil war. He rationalizes that Millennials will then rise to the occasion, overcoming even a myriad mushroom clouds and a broiling Earth to restore virility.  

Only… um… Steve? Won’t that entail the young folks rejecting… you? The quintessential sanctimonious-manipulative right-wing oligarch-racist boomer-thug?  Already, polls show youths – even republican ones – turning hard left, while the works of Karl Marx are again flowing across campuses.

Was this the plan, Steve?

  
Now to two nations that really need a better voting system.

== Sending Electors to "College" ==

Elizabeth Warren is growing on me. She’s smart, utterly fearless and targets proto-feudal power in all of its incarnations. Alas, her latest - demanding an end to the Electoral College or EC - is Quixotic without a chance of coming true till this phase of civil war is ended by many dozen other means.  And even if it were possible, we must get past the loony “first past the post” rules that let someone awful, who gets 40% of the vote in a state - or in some national popular vote - defeat two far better candidates with 30% each … or one with 39% plus a spoiler. We’ve long needed Preferential Balloting… and maybe the dems - having to sort through 20 primary candidates - will lead the way.

One workaround popular among liberals is the “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact”… an absolutely stupid idea that cannot possibly work, at any level, at any stage in any realistic process.  

Anyway, the EC was written into the Constitution in order to offer a way to avoid exactly the sort of the insane result we saw in 2016, a blatant madman and likely traitor given the presidency because the EC is made of party hacks who mail in a form-“ballot” and do not act like a “college,” at all.  

Which suggests a possible way to make things better without having to amend the Constitution! And it could possibly be set in motion by just one rich philanthropist.

In November 2016 I wrote to a few millionaires suggesting they do something historic.  Simply rent a luxury resort hotel somewhere and announce "For one week only Electors will be allowed to enter (other than staff). They will get all meals and amenities on the house. There are no conditions. They are not required to deliberate or talk to each other. But if a quorum shows up, it is within their power to call it a "college" and discuss whatever they like." 

No coercions suasion or influence. Just a place to spend one week in luxury, and experience being - briefly - the 538 most important people on Earth.

Oh, the howls it would have raised! Would a quorum have shown up? I bet it would, but we'll never know. Well, well. Think about it for next time.

Let me conclude this Electoral College musing by quoting from one of the members of my blog community at CONTRARY BRIN:

“There have been 58 presidential elections in the United States. In just five of them did the Electoral College pick a winner who got fewer popular votes. When the EC ratifies the same choice the popular vote did, it is as if the EC had done nothing at all. It may as well be a rubber stamp. It is in those rarer cases, only five in our nation's history, where the greater number of voters choose one candidate, and the EC the other, where the rubber hits the road. In these, the EC has done something! But what has it done?

“Of those five cases, two (the 1824 decision for John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson and the 1888 decision for Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland) do not seem, to me, very important in their effects. In both, the loser would go on to win the office later, and the nation's course not be critically affected for better or worse.

“In 1876, the EC would choose Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden, as a compromise which included the end of Military Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. This stands as an historic disaster America is still paying for.

“The EC didn't overturn another popular vote until recent times, the 2000 and 2016 elections. The 2000 result gave us George W. Bush over Al Gore, plus 9/11 and an ongoing Middle East quagmire plus no action on climate change, the USA Patriot Act, waterboarding, far-right Supreme Court judges, the 2008 economic debacle, and whatever else Pandora's Box had to offer at that moment. The 2016 result, as we know, gave us Donald Trump, a sogheaded, parasitic ponzi charlatan and racist psychopath in the pocket of a hostile foreign spy agency.

“In the 2016 case especially, the winner was precisely the sort of obviously unfit president the 'wiser heads' of the EC were supposed to spit out like a mouthful of gristle. The EC delegates had the power to vote 'faithlessly' if they chose. Instead, (with the exception of a tiny handful of faithless Clinton electors) they dutifully followed party over country and voted Trump into the White House.

“So, to recap: of the five occasions when the Electoral College chose differently than the popular vote, two were (as far as I can tell) a wash, and three were unmitigated disasters for the nation. The Electoral College has a demonstrably worse track record for choosing presidents than the popular vote. It is as useful as a goiter.”

And yet, see my riff above about possibly (at last) listening to the Founders and making the Electors go to College.


== The second nation? ==

Again, Brexit. Let the people vote again. They did not know about Vladimir Putin, first round.

Only do it using a preferential ballot  with four or more ranked choices.  We all know what they'd choose, by a huge margin.

Now let's close with perspective on why the left should accept incrementalism... and why sane conservatism should accept the well-deserved end of the Republican Party.

== Protect the big tent ==

When self-righteousness reigns.... Greenpeace co-founder tears into Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal: ‘Pompous little twit.’  And hence a lesson to the Left: stop doing what Putin and Fox clearly want: splitting and breaking up the Big Tent coalition that’s the only thing that can win this wretched phase of the American Civil War. Stop pissing on your allies!  Think. If the Democrats can win over just ONE million more RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) 2020 will be a rout and we can burn Foxism to the ground. 

Squint at that delicious fantasy. But then, what happens next?

The Dems will get a lot of incremental stuff done. Restoring science, freeing the civil service, ending the Drug War, ending gerrymandering and other cheats, providing Medicare at least for all children till age 26, achieving reform of college debt, major action on Climate, restoration of the CFPB and breakup of some monopolies… 

...and none of it will satisfy the Left, which is fine!  The center of argument will be hugely shifted and you can push again from there. 

If history is any judge, the DP will split into a Clinton-Obama wing that wants science and facts, fairness and a healthy-flat-fair-competitive capitalism, and balanced budgets, paid for by the rich...

...and that won't suffice for the a socialist wing! But what a better starting point that would be, from which to make your case for more!

Then you can have the party that you want. After the Confederacy and Putinism are routed, you will have a better chance to take halfway reforms further. Those who demand a liberal civil war are either sanctimoniously suicidal or else witting or unwitting Kremlin stooges.

AOC is smart enough to learn – rapidly! – how to do politics, can you? She’s the one teaching Democrats to do judo, instead of sumo. Try learning.

Oh, BTW, I’ve been a Greenpeace member (with some lapses) for 40 years. Sanctimonious-pushy jerks have real uses! Just don’t let them taunt you into doing stupid things.

== And the same goes for you RASRs ==

I know dozens who admit that the GOP has gone treasonous and insane, but who fear the left. To which I answer read the previous section! If the GOP gets deservedly blasted to smithereens and then the atoms broken down to quarks, what will happen?

The Democrats will break up in two.  You'll see tax-fairness, and end to drug wars and electoral cheating, some anti-trust and consumer protection and a bunch of other things, like an end to insane Supply Side... but then the DP will split and half will be pro-free-competitive-flat-fair enterprise. That half will be pro fact and science but also pro-competition. And what more could you wish for, oh you residually sane conservatives, out there?

Stop clinging to the Putin Party, run by communist and "ex" communist despots and Saudi sheiks. Join the revolution, then help forge a "conservatism" that isn't treason.

The crowning of Hillary? And the Pope Francis Effect

==  A premature coronation? ==

The pre-ordination or crowning of Hillary Clinton as the presumed Democratic Party nominee in 2016 was deeply premature.  Even if she winds up with the nomination, why would democrats forego the drama and press coverage of a contested series of primaries and debates? Hundreds of well-vamped and amped opportunities to put forward their shared -- or somewhat varying -- messages – what? Are they really so stupid they would bypass that? 

Even if Clinton were inevitable, the DP’s brightest should step up to tear some spotlight away from the GOP’s astonishing gremlin-frenzy, if only to contrast favorably against the giant rugby scrum of seventeen fanatics racing each other over right-wing cliffs of insanity.

 Hence I was interested to read this argument that the dems ought to take another look at Al Gore. Wow.

Oh, without any doubt, it would be a stronger America today, had cheating not robbed us of the legitimately-elected Gore Presidency, in 2000.  You cannot name a single metric of U.S. national health that did not plummet across the misbegotten reign of either/both Bushes -- one of them the worst president of the 20th Century and the other (I hope will turn out by 2100 to have been) the worst of the 21st. Even a tepid Gore span would have been brilliant, by comparison.  

(Please, please just accept the challenge and offer up one, even one, unambiguous statistical national health metric that attributably improved across either of the last two GOP-held presidencies. One. No? In which case, why should the Republican Party ever again be trusted with a burnt match?)

In fact, though, I do not yearn for Al.  He proved the adage that Democratic Presidents choose, as running mates, people who are qualified for the job, but uninspiring. From LBJ and Humphrey and Mondale to Gore and Lieberman and Biden, this trend is almost perfect. Of course, it is far better than the GOP's alternative fetish – wherein Republican nominees always appoint unqualified fools or horrors to be their Vice Presidential running mates. 

All right, there was one exception to that pattern – Ronald Reagan picked a VP who on-paper was eminently qualified, but who -- lest I reiterate -- ironically went on to become the worst president of the last 100 years. Even worse than his awful son. 

But no. A guy like Al Gore is not what we need right now.

What we do need is someone who can stand up next to Hillary, during debates, and rock the boat!  Alas, while Bernie Sanders sort of qualifies, the stuff he is saying is pretty standard on the left wing of the party. And no, I am not talking about Elizabeth Warren, though she might gain administrative experience for one term as Vice President or a cabinet secretary. No, neither she nor Bernie rock the boat the way I want -- by shattering the narrative.

Okay, since I started writing this missive there have been a couple more DP entries, Jim Webb from Virginia, for one, who represents the Blue Dog wing of the Party, a wing that should be nurtured! There are millions of Americans who are genuinely and sincerely somewhat-conservative by temperament, but who also know the Republican Party has gone  completely insane. They'll need reassurance that the other tent is big enough for them, and that it welcomes a diversity of (sane) views. Democrats who reject a sane Blue Dog out of hand are pure fools. Sane vs insane is vastly more important than "centrist versus slightly-left-of-centrist."

 One quirk that I might be the first to mention. A major NASA project might have to be re-named, if Jim Webb does become president.

Lincoln Chafee and Martin O'Malley have also declared in the Democratic race, and I am willing to look. And now there is renewed talk of Joe Biden. Already the five DPs are more varied than the seventeen GOP fellahs, all of whom get 90% of their talking points from Roger Ailes.  (Though yes, Trump does entertain.)

Still, I am unsatisfied.  We need stronger drink. Maybe not for the nominee, but certainly earlier, during the debates and media discussions leading up to that decision!

No, I mean someone who would take the discussion off at vertical angles to the hoary, lobotomizing so-called “left right political axis!” Someone with solid administrative credentials and popularity and sanity and purpose – but who is bored with all the standard clichés, that are so expertly manipulated by Fox News.

I am talking about Jerry Brown.  

Okay, he’s old and would likely serve just one term. (Dig it, Warren fans?) But he is a masterful politician, hugely successful and popular in the U.S. state that outproduces all but maybe seven nations on the planet and is the source of half our world’s innovative drive. 

Moreover, California is the one place where Obamacare (formerly RomneyCare and HeritageCare and the GOP plan for ten years) has been executed absolutely flawlessly, delivering on every promise and defying every doomcast.

And Jerry despises clichés! They bore him. He would take any and every Fox-Ailesheimers talking point and shred it, just for fun.  He would do what Hillary has proved incapable of ever doing –

-- he’d refuse to play Rupert Murdoch’s game. And hence, even if Hillary winds up being the nominee, she would sally forth from the convention across a landscape where every old-saw and hoary assumption has been up-ended. 

Will Jerry run? Alas, I doubt it. But oh, the fun we'd have! Heck he could even declare that he's doing it "for fun!"

... which brings up a weird hypothesis about Jon Stewart's suspicious timing. But save that for another (fun) occasion.

== Who would be the GOP’s “Jerry”? ==

Where to find one for the other side? A republican who hates clichés and gets bored by standard positions and who would laugh at attempts to discipline him to the Murdoch-Adelson-Ailes-Saudi-Koch party line? Okay, okay... I guess that sort of describes Donald Trump.  But let's also add "somewhat good person" and "sane" shall we? (Note: all I ask is "somewhat"!)

Let’s see… is there one state in the U.S. that routinely produces such characters? Did I mention those mould-breakers Reagan and Brown? Well, sure.

Arnold Schwarznegger has uttered the words that so many of you ought to be saying, by now.

”As a Republican, I’m furious.”

The “Terminator” star and former California governor on April 3 blasted Indiana’s recently passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which many believe to be a thinly veiled attempt to excuse discrimination against gays and other minorities.  But our former “guvernator” went on to blast members of his party who “choose the politics of division.”

Oh, how I would love to see him take the stage, in coming GOP presidential nomination debates, and say that “emperor” Rupert Murdoch has no clothes! That the party of Goldwater and Buckley has been hijacked down paths of sheer insanity.  And that it is time for decent conservatives to save American conservatism, by getting mad at the hijackers.  

And no, I don't care whether he's "native-born." Remember, I am talking about the next 11 months of theater before the conventions.  That is when the actual national dialogue takes place. And boy do we need to shake up that dialogue!

Oh, but then there’s this... California trounces Texas, other states in job creation. And in almost every other category. Heck even if the official nominees are (sigh) "Bush versus Clinton,"*** we could still demand a special California debate.

 Jerry Brown vs Ah-nold in 2016!  

== Did Heinlein exaggerate with “Nehemia Scudder? ==

Via David Ronfeldt: It's evidently from an odd book by Norman Cohn, the expert on millenarianism famed for his book "The Pursuit of the Millennium". The quote may fit a discussion about some current U. S. political trends, though it was originally written for a different audience.

"It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."   --From Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Oxford University Press, 1970, p.14). From the posting Fatal Attraction.

Radicals are starting to simmer, and the fellows who are pulling the latest oligarchic putsch need to understand where it might all lead.  Those of us pushing for a normal, rhythmic moderate-pragmatic “reset” of the flat-open-fair social contract envision something like what Americans have done in most generations, including the two Rooseveltean flattenings… preventing the routine efforts to rebuild feudal pyramids of privilege that ruined 99% of societies, and keeping our flattened-diamond experiment going for another generation.

But read here, how others have already given up. The putsch has already gone too far, they claim!  Elias Isquith interviews Chris Hedges: “We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.” 

Is this right?  No, not yet.  There are far too many positive trends, especially since 2013 was the best year for U.S. civil liberties in two decades or more. Something the far-left and the entire right – both of them allergic to optimism – will never admit.

Still, heed the sounds of pitchforks being sharpened and tumbrels being oiled. The Roosevelts were moderate–pragmatic alternatives to Trotsky, to Hitler, to Stalin, or Bakunin.  As I portray in Existence… any new feudal caste had better try lots harder to be actually smart, instead of delusional (like every other feudal caste, across all of time). Or else they should picture a Billion Bakunins, many millions of them armed not with pitchforks, but genetically engineered bugs. Then, envision them getting jobs serving drinks at high class resorts.

Negotiate with us. The enlightenment made you rich. Try showing it some loyalty.

 == The Pope Effect ==

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory real..“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said. 

Further -- in words likely to anger some of his conservative critics, the pope backs the science of climate change, saying "plenty of scientific studies point out that the last decades of global warming have been mostly caused by the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) especially generated by human action" 

Yep… one more gol-durned "elite" trying' to use reality to bully the plantation -- er oligarch -- er, Fox -- er, "job creator" (yeah, that's it) lords.  Down with every elite who's not a confederate plantation lord!  You listening, God?  

Okay, okay, this fellow seems to be on his way to becoming the most reasonable and insightful and most humane pope any of us have seen.  Still, and while the messages have mostly been positive, so far, I have my limits. For example, when Pope Francis “denounced what he calls the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians,homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.”  

While I agree with the actual statement, I find it hard to swallow coming from the Vatican, whose behavior during that same time was utterly accommodating to evil forces committing those crimes.

See this simple dissection of why certain religious dogmas are absolutely tantamount to treason.

Oh, but finally then there's this...

As we speak, Republicans are pushing hard to retract all accountability measures from their own No Child Left Behind reform of U.S. education. 

Now why would they do that? I thought the whole purpose of NCLB was to use testing and comparable metrics to find out where schools are failing so that attention can be focused on them... so that no child would be left behind! 

Remember when testing and accountability were the conservative catch words?

But oh... okay. It turns out the GOP is running as fast as they can to cancel all real measuring and accountability -- for one simple reason. The accountability testing under No Child Left Behind was blatantly showing that Red States are failing. They are falling more and more behind blue states and getting worse. 

So... shall we re-evaluate processes and try to do better? What... no? Um, did I mention these are republicans? Perception is all that matters! The solution is "don't you dare look at us! Especially if we're failing!"

Oh, boy. The next year will be "fun."  Come on Jerry and Arnold ... and Jon... take off those quotation marks.


==================

*** I am still looking for a bold urban guerrilla theater ensemble to look at my script for a very easy political video. One that would be hilarious, pointed and devastating... regarding the problem of political "dynasties." Hey, don't get me wrong. Given any choice between a Bush and a Clinton (and their respective armies of factotums), it's a no-brainer. Another Bush could kill us all. And I got no beef against Hill. Except that we would never know a moment without shrill (even if unearned) rancor. This nominee cannot sooth Phase Eight of our Civil War, no matter how hard she wants to, or tries.

Still... do I have a bit of satire that could at-minimum make you all laugh and cry? Sigh.