They Call It Democracy

I had been thinking that maybe "The Ballad of Donald and Kamala" was all I was going to have to say about this election cycle, but apparently there's more.

Given the extremely repetitive nature of the public and private discourse in the USA during election season, I thought maybe about eight years ago I had said all I could ever possibly want to say on the subject.  But I guess the problem there is although the dynamic is deeply familiar, the facts on the ground are new.  

It's not 2016.  Her name is Kamala, not Hillary, and certainly not Bernie.  It's not 2004, or 1968, it's 2024.  The backdrop of a genocidal US-sponsored war on an entire people is not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, it's in Palestine and Lebanon.

In all the years I've been alive, and certainly in all the years I've lived in Portland, Oregon, I've never seen so little evidence of any kind of political activity.  There are occasional houses with American flags on them, which is the closest thing in the actual city of Portland where you're likely to see signs of any proud Trump supporters.  That's been true around here for quite a while.  What's new is the almost complete absence of yard signs supporting the Democratic ticket.

On my walks around our inner southeast Portland neighborhood, one of the fancy new houses, among the row of them on that block, has a Harris-Walz yard sign.  If I take a longer walk, I'll eventually come to a house that displays one yard sign calling for an end to Israel's war on Palestine.  We live near an infamously liberal liberal arts school, Reed College.  In my regular walks around the neighborhood, I'm the only person wearing an overtly political t-shirt that I ever come across.

Not only that, but I get a lot of mildly dirty looks from people, in reaction to the faded Palestinian flag t-shirt I'm often wearing around town.

My interpretation of the dirty looks isn't necessarily that they buy the Israeli narrative or they're not sympathetic to the Palestinians and Lebanese being killed en masse.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, I don't know.  But I suspect the dirty looks are more coming from a rejection of the whole concept of wearing a political t-shirt in the first place, which is seen as a fairly pointless form of virtue-signaling.  I find myself largely agreeing with the sentiment that it is basically a pointless act of virtue-signaling, but I do it anyway.  I've been doing it for a very long time.

Maybe the lack of Harris-Walz yard signs is because people are horrified by the bipartisan Democratic and Republican support for massive amounts of bombs being sent to Israel.  Hard to know what explains the absence of something.

I guess we'll find out if the absence of the yard signs indicates disinterest in voting at all this time around.  I suspect people will still vote.  And around here, they'll mainly vote for the Democrats, for whatever office.  The primaries are all that matter in places like this, and the Israel lobby has been buying up one seat after another, as they do.

Oregon isn't considered a swing state, but I'm getting the impression over time of what it's like to live in one lately.  My Instagram feed in recent weeks is completely dominated by Jill Stein ads.  I love all of them, but that fact notwithstanding, it's easy to see how other people are noticing that something's up here, not just me.  What kind of advertising budget and what algorithms are at play here?

Otherwise, the discourse from the "radicals should hold their noses and vote for Kamala" camp is the usual discourse -- the Republican candidate is obviously worse on most every conceivable policy, so although things will also continue to get worse under the Democratic candidate as well, vote for them, because the inevitable decline will happen more slowly that way.

The problem with convincing people to vote for the lesser evil in this instance is that the one who represents the greater evil is also the only one talking about how much everything sucks, aside from the third party candidates like Jill Stein.

Even if it's obvious that Trump will be a disaster, like he was before, he's talking about how much worse things are for people than they were several years ago, and Harris is trying to pretend things have been improving and will continue to improve under her administration.

Of course, Trump is blaming "illegal immigrants" for the rise in the cost of everything, which is the far right's explanation for all problems, traditionally.

On the other hand, if you take received wisdom across the acceptable political spectrum for granted that the housing market somehow cannot be regulated, rent cannot be controlled through laws, but only by producing more supply, or by limiting demand, then Trump's arguments about limiting demand by deporting millions of people start to make some kind of warped sense.  No one from the Democrats are offering any solutions aside from increasing supply, which no one trusts the Democrats to actually do.  On the other hand, deporting millions of people in order to suppress demand does seem like something Trump might actually do.

If the Democrats were offering a real solution -- like rent control, regulating the price of houses, and other forms of regulation, like the ones that work so well in so many other countries -- I bet a lot of people would readily jump on that bandwagon.  But this idea of the government having success with organizing the building of millions of houses, with the cost of land unregulated and insanely high, and no serious talk of doing anything about that, it just sounds like a pipe dream to people, because it probably is.

So, deport the aliens, and thus decrease competition for shit jobs, and decrease demand for shit rentals.  It's horrible and cruel, but it's taking action.

I promise there are lots of actual people who think this way.  This is the historic process through which Democrats become Republicans, or socialists become fascists.

You know from the polls back in the day that there are so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders who also voted for Donald Trump.  People don't want to vote for centrists offering more of the same, when what they're experiencing is so stressful and generally bad.  They want someone offering change.

I realize we may be talking about a tiny little percentage of people who don't know which way they're voting, or a tiny percentage of people who may be vacillating between voting or not voting at all, or between voting for one of the two major party candidates, or for a third party candidate.

But to the extent that this little slice of the population may be the deciding factor between a Trump or a Harris presidency, if it's true, as I suspect, that this slice of the population wants a change from the status quo, they won't be voting for Harris.

Harris keeps on talking about helping the middle class.  I'm wondering who these people are, this middle class of which she speaks.  I think she's talking about people who inherited a house or two, or people who bought a house back when that was possible for people to do who weren't rich.

I'm sure she's not talking about the renting half of this nation, or the ones struggling to pay gigantic mortgages, who made the mistake of buying a house sometime after the global financial crisis circa 2008.  Or the people who are struggling to pay for the rising costs of all the commodities that have become so much more valuable, now that the "international community" have imposed sanctions on Russia, causing so much of the world to starve, and the west to tighten their belts, as the saying goes.

One of the two candidates speaks out against that war, at least -- even if they're both all for the other one that's emptying the US of its supply of bunker-busting missiles, and violently ending the lives of thousands of Palestinian children.

Around here, in Portland, and I know it's also true of so many other cities around the country, what most people want a solution for is the insanely rising cost of housing, for both renting and buying.  They also want a solution to the intimately related problem of growing numbers of desperately poor and addicted people living and dying on our sidewalks everywhere you go.  People aren't impressed with throwing more money and social workers at the problem.  They want a real solution, like housing everybody.

But for a lot of folks, if no one eventually houses all these people on the sidewalks, increasing numbers of those who would have voted for housing everyone would next turn around and vote for the new "law and order" DA who promises to crack down with martial solutions to fundamentally economic and social problems.  It seems crazy to me, too, but for a lot of folks, if you can't solve a problem one way, you try another.  If socialism doesn't work, try fascism.

The history of the past century, including very recent history, in many different countries that are experiencing exactly the same trends we are, show that people who don't find solutions to their problems by voting for the left will skip right past the center and vote for the right.  Like it or not, that's how it is.

Others will opt out of the two-party failed state altogether, and vote for a third party, which in the US most people call "throwing away your vote."

And then, every four years with great predictability, all kinds of people who are normally radicals of one sort or another start accusing Jill Stein of being a stooge of Putin, and supporters of her campaign of being closet Republicans.

And of course, Republican money may go into Jill Stein ad spending, just as Democratic Party money has often gone into supporting what Democratic Party leadership considers to be the most fringe Republican candidate in a given race.  And the Israel lobby gives money to both of the major parties, along with the oil lobby, the missile manufacturers, and the banks.  And anyone who complains about the electoral system being rigged is obviously a nutcase, or some kind of Nazi.

There's a lot that can happen in the space of a couple weeks, to sway public opinion one way or another.  Instagram and TikTok can change their algorithms to favor one candidate or another.  They can somewhat less directly do that by changing the algorithm to favor one type of conspiracy theory or political perspective over another.

I've been wrong lots before, and I hope I'm wrong again, but my guess is Trump won't need to steal this election.  My guess is he'll lose the popular vote, but win the electoral vote, as he did once before.  If this happens, it won't be because of Jill Stein getting the anti-genocide vote, or because Black men are sexist.  It will be because people are looking for radical solutions to radical problems, and having been repeatedly failed by what passes for the left over the past 50 years, allegiances are shifting.