Ralph Waldo Porcupine

The den of a prickly transcendentalist philosopher

Tag: 2020 Presidential election

The Porcupine Fantasy

Ralph Waldo Porcupine

I was just reading a piece on The Reformed Broker titled “The Biden Fantasy” and took it into my head to record my own.

My fantasy more or less boils down to this: the Cold Civil War ends in a draw.

But eight words wouldn’t be much of a blog post, so if you’ll indulge me, I’ll detail it.  Biden wins, but not by so much that the Democrats can wallow in their own fantasy and self-indulgence.  (I admit that this is quite an ask.  They’re Democrats, after all.)

More importantly, the Republicans keep the Senate, so that Biden’s ability to work with his former colleagues forms a power base that allows Biden to ignore, or, better, slap down the Woke, whose ambitions are the true drivers of American misery right now.  If that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter that much to me what happens in the House.  If the Democrats take the Senate, though, my fantasy is that the Republicans take the House.  I admit that that’s not realistic, but viz. the last word in the title of this piece.  (Divided government gets a bad rap.)  In the light of this, Leftist plots to strike structurally by expanding the Supreme Court and waving in two more Democratic-dominated states fade away.  Biden, with bipartisan support, continues holding the hard line against Chinese foreign and economic policy aggressiveness that is Trump’s least controversial policy, while American supply chains diversify to other countries.  Two or three vaccines for COVID get approved, one is generally agreed to be best, and everyone cooperates to make it widespread.

College administrators and professors realize their role in the promotion of this atmosphere and that Progress has a hard limit in a wall of Liberty– in this case the freedom of Trump’s voters to think what they want and to vote– that can’t be taken away without terrible, un-American methods.  At some national convention that I just invented for reverie purposes they renew their ideals about justice, etc., but call for new methods based mainly on outreach and persuasion.  Hollywood tells the story of Trump supporters sympathetically.  Wall Street starts getting serious about offering real financial education, allowing the government to require a year of service as a financial educator in order to become licensed as a stockbroker, or something.  Executive officers in blue areas discover a spine and start arresting and prosecuting the likes of Antifa.  Both sides agree to slap down police unions and limit their power to shield terrible cops from firing and other results of prosecution.

There’s a fine line between the cross-section of an individual’s mind and values, expressed by an appropriately fleshed-out fantasy, and an inane and interminable narcissistic disquisition, full of grandiloquence and fifty-cent words but unballasted by realistic plans for getting any of this done (which, sadly, I lack).  I’ll end this here, then, and hope that you’ll agree I’ve mostly avoided the latter.

The Democratic field in 2020

Ralph Waldo Porcupine

Who will the Democratic nominee be in 2020?  That was the chatter at Nate Silver’s 538, in a sort of Round Table discussion that they call a snake draft.  As a libertarian-ish Independent in a swing state, I just wanted to mention my thoughts about some of their top possibilities.

  1. Elizabeth Warren.  Ugh.  About the only things she really has going for her (not with me, with the electorate) are that she’s fairly well-known nationally, she’s a woman and she has a portfolio, as it were, akin to Bernie Sanders’s– superficial egalitarianism.  She could probably win the Democratic primary, but not the general election.  The policy superficiality aside, her flaws are the long, public history of her whoring after minority status as a Leftist status symbol, and the fact that she’s condescending and schoolmarmish in an intensely irritating way.
  2. Kamala Harris.  Who?  Yeah, I know, a senator from California.  As though that were a swing state.  Yes, she’d get lotsa donations from the Golden State, but 2016 proved yet again that money has a limited impact on political victories.  Apart from that, she’s just another generic Democrat chasing after “historic!”
  3. Kirsten Gillbrand.  Known to me chiefly for having been handed Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in deep-blue New York.  This was after Hillary was handed it, served without much distinction, lost her one competitive race before 2016, and was handed the Secretaryship of State.  That particular office is not exactly one that tempers a politician in the white-hot flame of competitiveness.  (True, fewer are these days.)  Basically a nobody, as far as I’m concerned.
  4. Joe Biden.  A long-experienced politician, originally from purple Pennsylvania, nationally known with Executive branch experience.  That he’s not at the top of everyone’s list speaks volumes about the Democratic Party’s poisonous addiction to identity politics and party identity narrative.  He’d be the one candidate who could actually get the Presidency by winning it, rather than by the Republican candidate losing it.
  5. Eric Holder.  In baseball terms, near as I can tell, Holder would be the equivalent of a .240 hitter in AA ball.  What does he have apart from being black and anyone at all having heard his name?  (Another generic Democrat chasing after “historic!”– but Obama has picked most of the low-hanging fruit.)
  6. Beto O’Rourke.  Why on earth are so many candidates with tiny resumes at the top of the Democratic list?  On the list at all, sure, but he’s like the 50-1 shot at the Kentucky Derby, and should be way down the list.  His inclusion here is likely an example of recency bias.  Unless he wins, which isn’t likely, a year or two from now people will barely remember him.
  7. Cory Booker.  Probably one of the stronger candidates, not because he’s black (see above about the low-hanging fruit) but because he actually has something resembling a struggle, as mayor of Newark, and executive experience, and some history of bipartisanship.
  8. Bernie Sanders.  Not a likely event, due to his age.  Yes, Trump’s almost as old, but seems one hell of a lot more vigorous.
  9. Michael Avenatti.  He brings to mind O Brother, Where Art Thou?  In that movie, the challenger in the Mississippi gubernatorial election is winning in the polls with a shtick about being for the “little man”, with a midget on the platform to agree with him, and the governor’s son says, “We could hire our own midget, even shorter than his.”  Avenatti would be the Democrats hiring their own midget.
  10. Oprah Winfrey.  She might actually be formidable against Trump– nationally known and admired, being at least somewhat self-made through fighting her way upward, having been successful in business.  But on the other hand, maybe not; being on a TV show where she gets to pick the guests and topics probably doesn’t prepare you that well for politics.  And in any case, she’s not running, which is probably why she’s at the bottom of the 538 discussion.

There were other candidates on the list, but the 538 people were really scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point, and my remark about most of them would amount to “who?”.