As of today I no longer hold membership in the democratic party and I will not support its candidate for the presidency if that candidate is Hillary Clinton. I cannot support any organization that, particularly any American political organization that is demeaning to democracy. I am a democrat, a strong supporter of the American democracy and I feel an obligation to denounce those who interfere with its progress. As those who read my postings know, I supported Mr. Sanders endorsement of Ms. Clinton and urged others to vote for her while continuing to work to push the party and its candidate toward something resembling true liberalism and away from advocacy for neo-liberal policies that harm the many to benefit a few. I said this even after the party humiliated me and others like me who questioned the process, called for transparency and, for doing so were, by party leadership through their collaboration with the liberal media, made to look like fools, intent on destroying real democratic process.
Lying, deceitfulness undermines democracy and its promise. To lie in order to prove others liars, is a special kind of deceit and this is what notes passed between the leaders of the democratic party prove for those who will not allow themselves to be lied to again. The democratic party did interfere with the nomination process. The party’s leaders, it is evident, do not like democratic process, particularly when it seems to them that it might not produce the outcomes they wish. Throughout the nominating process, stalwarts of the party, worked to nominate a particular candidate; they interfered to insure that Ms. Clinton would be the nominee and they lied aloud over and over again with their claims of impartiality.
I argued up until today that people who care about the country and its future vote for Ms. Clinton, not because she was the better of two evils, but because I saw in her and those who supporter the better character. I put aside my resentment for lying and tried to call it something different. I said that Ms. Clinton, despite her behavior in the political arena, was still a decent person with integrity who would be smart enough to listen to the voices of those who had good reason to feel disenfranchised in society and by party if people such as those who supported Bernie Sanders continued to push her in the right direction.
Yesterday she chose Tom Cain as her running mate.
Trump will be very bad for the country and, in some ways she is most definitely better. But neither candidate is a true democrat. If either was, they would be anti-deceit and both have been deceitful and supporters of practices that deceitful. For me to vote for Hillary, to advocate for her as a proper candidate for the presidency would be deceitful on my part. I apologize for my arguments in support of her candidacy.
To those who pushed Hillary at me with such vigor, I hope that you may finally take a step back and reassess your advocacy and the means you have used to make your case and the ways in which you too have mocked those who think differently than you do. To constantly use as reason for support the improbability of a Sanders victory in the general election caused far too many to ignore what he was saying, to mock his candidacy without even attempting to evaluate what he was saying—and he has much to say that any reasonable liberal would have to like, was to undermine the goodness of reasoned debate, something, by the way, in which Mr. Sanders has been accused of trying to engage. The election of Hillary became the only concern of too many of her supporters and they would not listen to reason. When it became clear that Mr. Sanders really did have something important to say and such realization among a good many began to undermine unviability, some began to tell me and others like me that our problem was our inability to accept the possibility of a woman as president. Support of Mr. Sanders was about our sexist attitudes, attitudes we, of course would never admit to having, would never allow ourselves to get in touch with. To resent the claims, of course, served as proof that a sexist belief system was so much a part of ourselves that we were blind to it being of us.
In regard to me, say what you will, the claim is total bullshit. I know of many women I would work my ass off to support for office, of many women I have supported in their candidacy for office and I would and have supported them because they are good candidates and not because they are women. I think the Hillary candidacy has done some harm to the feminist cause that I have supported vigorously throughout my adult life.
I can no longer take it on the chin. I am burned out because I feel that have burned by the only party to which I have ever belonged, a party that left me a good many years ago when it began to make the case that it could be as conservative as the other party—tough on crime, tough on the poor, tolerant of religious bullshit, militaristic, and sold down the drain on the virtues of unbridled capitalism.
I have no party and, unless there is some kind of revolution, I will surely have no country that I can honestly say to be my own.
With this I leave Facebook too because I am discouraged terribly by a discourse limited to sound bites. I cannot stand arguments made in a sentence. These aren’t arguments at all and for those I know who teach, your use of cribbed captions is particularly disappointing. To post the quotes with no personal context to explain your agreement is to sanction the end of meaningful conversation.
This is not the end of a conversation. This is the end of misguided belief in having finally found one.
Signing off but always available through the blog page and e-mail.
