Why I Think The Left Is Doing It Wrong

Recently I made fun of an Emmett Rensin piece on his disappointment with the DNC that was published in The New Republic, and Rensin called me out on Twitter saying I should write an actual response.

Considering the normal bounds of political Twitter I was a bit impressed by his maturity and challenge, and while I think Rensin is a very skilled writer as he is in terms of crafting prose (I’ll certainly never be as good as he is already), I still think he’s dead wrong.

Read his whole piece, as a student of the craft of political writing it is pretty good, but I basically think that he’s resting his argument on a major category error about what the Democratic Party is.

Rensin's argument could be (I think fairly) summed up as he put it to me on Twitter that “The Left should have a big coalition, but should know where it’s going.” He illustrates this argument by citing anecdotes of delegates who couldn’t come up with good talking points when he asked theme face to face in Philadelphia about what the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for. His theme is that the Democratic coalition is too big to stand for much of anything, a sort of colossus with feet made of clay.

Or he puts it:

What program, what vision of the United States, can possibly contain all of that? What do the Democrats stand for?

“Nothing,” said one Sanders convention-floor staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, when I asked what such a large tent stands for. “Whatever you want it to. Whatever you want to hear.

Rensin is trying to use this quote as a sort of hammer blow about the failures of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party: they don’t even stand for anything, what a bunch of washed up shills, she sold us out on welfare reform etc. But I’m not that impressed. The fact that exhausted staffers (who probably haven’t been paid in a while) are suffering from existential political dread sounds about par for the course in my personal political experience.

I don’t know why everyone is obsessed with using terminology from the French Revolution to describe American politics in the second decade of the Twenty First Century, but the key thing to remember is the Democratic Party is not, and has never been, an organization of “the Left”. Rather it is essentially a coalition of disparate groups that come together to form a winning electoral coalition. That’s why the party of Southern white farmers and slaveholders (Andrew Jackson! The Donkey! Woodrow Wilson making the Federal work force as white as possible!) has become over the last century the party of Cory Booker, Keith Ellison, and Barack Obama.

In other words as the coalition changes, so does the party's aims.

Once you understand this, Resin’s whole argument just comes apart. Sure the Democratic Party has trouble expressing “what it stands for” at times. That’s because any gigantic political coalition that has more elected officials in national, state, and local government offices than live in many South Pacific nations will always have trouble figuring things out at any given time.

Hence the whole story of the 2016 campaign. There were also-rans like Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and maybe Joe Biden (although he never declared). But none of them were able to lock up significant support from coalition members of the Democratic Party early on, hence they dropped out quickly. Meanwhile Bernie Sanders ran a very impressive campaign that mobilized a huge amount of support from the very liberal (white), goo-goo-reform, and people-annoyed-with-Hillary-Clinton chunks of the Democratic Party.

Combine this with some impressive support from unions, 200 million dollars, and a lot of Republican voters in states with open primaries who hate Hillary and you get yourself his wins in his home region of New England, states hammered by the recession (Michigan and West Virginia come to mind), and western caucus states (like Minnesota!) where white liberals dominate the caucus process.

Unfortunately for folks like Rensin the entire rest of what political scientists like to call “the expanded party network" was against Sanders and/or for Hillary for any multitude of reasons. And no “corruption” doesn’t explain this.

Thus a competition inside this enormous coalition which occurred both before, and during the time people where casting ballots led to one side winning, and one side losing. This hasn’t been fun for the losing side of course (I know professionally how much losing elections suck) but the fact that Rensin found people willing to point this out doesn’t really prove much of anything new.

And here’s the rub: the sad reality for all of us in this vale of tears is that of coalition politics is pain. The pain of the disappointing compromise, the pain of learning the people you identify with don’t actually see you as one of them, the pain of realizing a group in your coalition can be a bigger obstacle to the change you want than the enemy you thought you were fighting against. Jonathan Bernstein summed it up pretty well back in 2009 when Barack Obama was ruining everything by being the moderately liberal Democrat he’d always been (sorry Lefty writers) and slogging through the agonizing work of passing the ACA:

In response, I'll trot out one of my favorite quotations about politics -- in this case, coalition politics. It's from Bonnie Honig, and she is working from an essay by Bernice Johnson Reagon:

Coalition politics is not easy. When you feel like you might "keel over at any minute and die," when "you feel threatened to the core," then "you're really doing coalition work."

Hence the Bernie staffer’s existential dread. Learning in a very real and visceral way that most black and brown voters, most unions, and most elected Democrats don’t think your “Revolution” will add up to much is going to hurt.

Other forms of politics have joy of course. The joy of winning on election night (I’ve been there, it can really be amazing) or the joy of direct action that really works. Just try to imagine how Reverend William Barber felt last Friday morning when they told him the Federal Courts just struck down North Carolina’s voter id law.

But not coalition politics; coalition politics just goes on and on and on and every day there’s a new thing to be frustrated with.

The upshot is that coalition politics can do really powerful things, like stop a postmodern fascist ogre from becoming President of the United States. And it can also do things like elect a woman to be the most powerful person in the world, who can then establish a liberal Supreme Court for the first time in two generations.

This pain and difficulty, something inherent in coalition politics, was of course put on national television last week. There were the Bernie delegates who love their guy, but got on board with Hillary over the last few days and months for whatever reason. There are also the depressed staffers and other delegates (that Rensin quotes) that are still mad but accept that Hillary’s the only person who can now stop Trump. Finally we saw the Bernie dead-enders who decided to burn every bridge with the coalition by doing things like screaming during moments of silence and booing decorated generals on national television under some sort of “heighten the contradictions” theory of politics.

In other words this giant coalition is already remaking and shaping itself to do with its new members. Some of the Bernie’s non-dead ender groups will focus on electing more liberal officials at the state and local level; others will demand more liberal policies from Hillary if she wins, meanwhile other groups will demand a bigger share of the pie because they were stalwarts for Hillary from the beginning. It’s all moving and changing in the great kaleidoscope of politics in a nation of 320 million people dependent on future events like who will win this fall.

So yeah, it can be hard to figure out what’s going on at any one given time.

I can imagine Hillary taking down The Terror and winning this fall in a squeaker. In this case you’d see today’s liberal Democratic Party with a much smaller focus on things it could work on. I can also imagine the unlikely but very possible reality of Trump winning as well, and a resulting Democratic Party that would care a lot more about winning in 2020 than morality of drone warfare.

Personally I hope Hillary will just blow the doors off and win in a landslide leading to big wins in Congress and state legislatures. This would make all sorts of change possible (Immigration reform! Giant infrastructure bill! John Lewis’ Voting Rights Act fix!) both at the national and state level. But this in turn would probably give us a different Democratic Party than the one we have now. It would probably be a party where the concerns of white suburban and rural groups are more salient than now, as that's where Democratic pick-ups in Congress and state legislatures would happen. In other words this hypothetical Democratic Party would care more about things like public lands and water rights and somewhat less the issues of single payer health care and drones the Left values right now.

This is why it's hard for a writer to figure out “what it all means” on some ideological scale that doesn’t explain American politics very well by talking to some twenty something DNC delegate who hasn’t had good media training yet.

Rensin closes with several big paragraphs which summarize his frustrations with the Democratic Party. I’ll just quote the important one:

When a single party absorbs the whole of “reasonable” political opinion, the consequence is rarely a single-party state. The adversarial logic that dictates the terms of American political life will only drive the opposition to the fringes, where there’s oxygen to be found, until the bounds of the “reasonable” are so expanded—eventually, the unreasonable win an election. Defeating Trump is a viable strategy. Praying that no Trump ever wins is not.

Well of course praying that no Trump ever wins is not a good strategy. No more that praying for the end of human failure, death, or postponing the eventual heat death of the Universe is a good strategy. Meanwhile back in Philadelphia we can use our human agency to make the world a marginally better place. Whether that’s showing on television to millions of people the profound leadership capabilities of women or color (no small theme in the 2016 Democratic National Convention!) or pointing out that many Muslim immigrants have given more to their country than Donald Trump ever has or will.

This might be profoundly annoying to people on the Left who seem to want the entire Democratic coalition to organize around their priorities because of their self-ascribed superior moral position, but this frustration is not something that will make real social and political change in the long term. And it’s pretty clearly not something the gigantic coalition they chose to join with their push for Sanders necessary agrees with. For all sorts of reasons many members of the Donkey Party coalition don’t necessary think campaign finance laws, or drones, of staffers in the DNC making offensive jokes on email are the world’s most pressing business compared to other things we could work on. None the less this is the world we live in, and this is party the Left may want to be a part of.

What exactly is your alternative?

Some Thoughts On #VANgate

There’s a lot being said about how Bernie Sander’s campaign maybe, sort of, ummm tried to steal a bunch of the Clinton campaign’s data after a computer glitch in the Democrats VAN voter file system let them briefly on Thursday night. Suffice it to say much of the reporting about this issue (so far at least) has been pretty bad. Political reporters simply don’t know a whole lot about VAN (and haven’t really cared to learn anything until last night) and so much of the more specific write ups about what-this-all-means isn’t very helpful. Still if you are interested in learning about what was pretty bad about what the Bernie campaign did (and how the VAN works in general) check out this Twitter essay by Pat Raynard from the independent Iowa site “Iowa Starting Line.” 

As a Party Decides person and recent Hillary convert I’ll just say that this whole brouhaha doesn’t mean that much to me. The Democratic Party clearly coalesced around Hillary some time ago and so baring indictment or a meteor strike she’s going to be the nominee. Meanwhile the political media is having a field day with this because since Hillary consolidated her support sometime back in 2014 or early 2015 the Dem side of the race has been boring as hell, hence the media firestorm over #VANgate. Finally there’s something to write about other than Donald Trump!

Having said that I do think that this whole episode does highlight two big points about left-wing/progressive politics that a lot of lefty/progressive types miss. I’ll call them “the ethic of purity” and “the ethic of fairness.”

The ethic of purity holds that the key to winning political battles is to campaign as a new sort of politician that is pure as the driven snow and will use this purity to great political effect. Bernie does this a lot, hence his focus on “revolution” or his idea that by banning super PACs and such somehow American politics will become supper left-wing.  

The problem with the ethic of purity is that if you are going to campaign as a “new kind of politician” who is pure as the driven snow, you better be as pure as the driven snow or the whole narrative collapses. In other words once it appears that Bernie Sanders (or his campaign which in the political media’s eyes are the same thing) engages in underhanded political tactics too, he becomes just another regular old hypocritical pol. It’s like taking money from lobbyists, once you do it, even once, you can’t really criticize any opponent for taking that sort of money either. Or it becomes yet another case of “both sides do it.”

Bernie Sanders was clearly running an “ethic of purity” style campaign: and it seems to have blown up in his face (as it has for so many other progressive types over the years).

The second idea that comes up is Bernie’s claim that he’s being treated “unfairly” by the DNC. Again as a Party Decides person I think this is ridiculous. Of course party actors have favored candidates and try to help them out, deciding on a nominee every four years is one of the biggest things our political parties collectively do! Sorry, but claiming that Bernie should automatically get to keep his VAN access even after he broke a host of rules is favoritism and trying to help out your candidate too. There’s no way to “fairly” settle a contest where the rules are created and enforced by the party actors playing the game. Is this perfect? No, but letting parties fight it out themselves is a core part of what democracy is. And in my opinion the alternatives to this are worse, and fundamentally less democratic.

Meanwhile the whole “fairness” claim is utterly ridiculous when it comes to scope of Sanders’ ambitions. Does Sander’s think that Ted Cruz or Donald Trump is going to run a fair above board campaign? The Republicans have been pushing for years to make it harder for minorities, young people, and poor people to vote; of course they are going to fight dirty!

In other words complaining about how unfair Hillary and the DNC is being is basically just admitting you don’t have what it takes to become or be president. That’s a little harsh, but then again Bernie did just sue the party he hopes to lead, which is incredibly short sighted and irresponsible.

We Get It, You Like The Nordic Social Model

One of the things that came up during the Democratic debate on Tuesday was an exchange over the Nordic social model after Bernie Sanders praised Denmark and Hillary announced that “We are not Denmark."

This provoke yet another round of the “why-I-love-the-Nordic-social-model” from a chorus from a number of left-wing/progressive types.  See Matt Bruenig for a classic example, he has some charts (some of which are pretty dubious) for the definitive case on why Denmark is better than America. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be emulated about the high taxes/high benefits model that a handful of Scandinavian countries embrace, but it’s pretty annoying to have to listen to these sorts of takes over and over again without any reference to why American (or most of the EU) doesn’t have these model and won’t anytime soon.

The US has a complex federal system, which diffuses power through different levels. This is something Denmark doesn’t have. The US has a very different political spectrum than Denmark as well. That is to say the main struggle in domestic politics is over whether we should dismantle our smaller welfare state (that’s what Republicans want to do) or keep it (like what Hillary wants to do). Moreover larger welfare states correlate pretty strongly with more ethnically and racially homogenous developed societies, something the United States has never been. And yes the US’s socialist movement, which Bruenig is a member, is both incredibly small and hopelessly bad at politics.

In other words Hillary is right “we aren’t Denmark.” And Ireland, Italy, and Bulgaria have different models too.

I guess there should be some room for bringing in ideas with little relevance to actual American politics, but writing yet another article about why the Nordic social model is so great while ignoring the very real reasons why we don’t have it makes nonsense of the actual reasons for what’s actually going on. In other words Bill Clinton signed welfare reform (after vetoing two Republican bills first) because it was supper popular and was passed with big majorities in Congress. Not because of “neoliberalism.”

We get it, you love the Nordic social model. Now how about you move on to what could in actuality changed about American social policy to make the country better. Or run away and hide in academia and talk about how great the Nordic model is in various seminars. Just don't pretend that pining away for some Nordic prince to come and rescue you is a substitute for real political, or policy, analysis. Especially when it's what you do over, over, and over again.

Inside The Mind Of A Mass Murderer

I want to address nagging question of what's going on in the heads of the (largely) angry young men who go out and commit these mass shootings that seem to happen every few months or so. Personally I've seen a lot of hot takes from various left-wing types trying to tie these events to the author's pre-existing arguments about American society. Lots of writing about about race and gender based in critical studies using the terms like "privilege" a lot,. That sort of thing.

Is there any truth to those takes? Well there might be, but I'm deeply skeptical of explanations for individual behavior based on what Noah Smith likes to call "cultural essentialism." After all there's no way to prove arguments that "culture" causes these things to happen wrong. Does the changing racial makeup of American society "cause" young white men to go on rampages? Did Andrew Cunanan's sexuality contribute to his killing spree? These are not the sort of questions you can ever really answer.

Meanwhile things like the large scale available to high powered weaponry and the media's treatment of mass murders as anti-heroes of a sort are things that can be tested and linked to the prevalence of mass shootings. Especially when we compared the US's record on these sorts of thing with other anglo-phone countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Anyway, I don't really have anything to prove this, but I still think the best explanation of what it's like to be inside the mind of angry young man about to go on a rampage that I've ever read comes from cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti's short story "The Nightmare Network." Like most of Ligotti's work is absolutely amazing and totally bizarre. In essence it's a series of found documents and movie script note, detailing the struggle between a Kafkaesque corporation known as Oneiricon and another group call The Nightmare Network. Oneiricon's goal is to own all that ever was, is, and will ever be. They have the following mission statement:

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE PAST

BECOMES THE DREAM OF THE FUTURE.

ONEIRICON: ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM

While the Nightmare Networks goals are harder to explain to outsiders. Here's their mission statement:

Our names are unknown and our faces are shadows drifting across an infite blackness. Our voices have been stifled to a soft murmur in a madman's ear. We are the proud failures with only a single joy left -- to inflict rampant damage on those who have fed themselves on our dreams and to choke ourselves on our own nightmares. In sum, we are expediters of the apocalypse. There is nothing left to save, if there ever was anything...if there ever could be. All we desire (in all our bitterness) is to go to our ruin in our own way -- with a little style and a lot of noise.

Does that make any sense to you at all? Probably not, but I think I sort of know what it means, sort of. But that's the whole point, you'll probably never really know what goes inside the head of a rampage killer. So focus instead on the policies that affect the possibility that allow things like this to happen, not on inner lives of madmen.

Or not, I just really doubt this has much to do with "privilege" or anything like that.

The Social Media Hot Takes Are A Bit Much

Okay let's just clear thing up. The modern divide in American political division between liberals and conservatives largely comes out of events of the 1930's. The major party based divisions division over race and civil rights largely emerged in  in the 60's and 70's, after all for  several decades before then both the Republicans and the Democrats had pro and anti-civil rights wings. Moreover the partisan division over same sex marriage largely emerged in the last 15 years. Remember Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church has been around for 2000 years more or less. 

So yes the views and actions of the Pope don't easily translate onto our contemporary American map particularly well.

Sorry about the polite rage, but even for a partisan hack like me the social media "hot take" response to what the Pope does or doesn't do, or does or doesn't say is getting a bit much. It's perfectly fine to say, "I agree with the Pope on this, but not on that." But trying to determine if the pope is "liberal" or "left" or "conservative" compared to other political figures is just silly.

The Pope is the Pope, and while the priorities of Catholic Church are important for our politics (yes climate change is more important than gay marriage!) trying to cram thousands of years of thinking into our current American political lexicon is just weird.

Meanwhile partisanship drives everything these days so everyone will just focus on the points where the Pope is on their "side" in our national debate and ignore everything else. So let's just focus on jokes about wearing white after Labor Day alright?

Eichmann On Twitter

Jeet Heer made some interesting points on Twitter recently about the tendency on social media these days to create the phenomenon of "minions" (his word) to join up with social media harassment campaigns at the drop of a hat. The obvious recent case was that of a young woman, named Monica Foy, at Sam Houston State University who made what could be at worst describe as a "too soon" joke on Twitter about a recently murdered Texas police officer.

Foy had less than 100 followers on Twitter, and made the joke because she was sympathetic to the whole Black Lives Matter movement and felt it was unfair how everyone in Texas goes into morning over the death of a cop while ignoring the deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement.

The reaction to Foy's joke was swift and brutal. The website Breitbart, named after Andrew Briebart who never struck me as a particular nice person, declared Holy War and basically tried to turn Foy into the most hated person in America. Read the New York article linked above if you want to know about the details, but the reality is that death and rape threats are pretty common for women who cross what Jill Filipovic calls simply "The Right-Wing Hate Machine."

Anyway Foy got both barrels when it came to online harassment, and Jeet Heer asked the interesting question of why so many people pile into these things. I think it part of it is what you might call "Trumpism", that is the phenomena of many white heterosexual men being unable to deal with a changing society that is reducing their once sacrosanct privileges. This has been going on for a while, but it's important to point out that we really are living in a period in American history where gay marriage has been legalized and a black man is president.

A significant number of Americans really don't like these trends.

But let me suggest an alternative motive for people who join in on the whole right wing Twitter hate machine phenomenon. That is the need for people in an increasingly atomized and individualized world to find meaning and purpose. Social scientists have pointed out for a while now that many of the old social organizations and groups that people belonged to to find social structure in their lives are in decline. And so many Americans, especially white heterosexual men who where once the mainstay of bowling leagues, now find themselves in a world that no longer gives them the meaning and purpose of running society or defeating communism. Indeed it's not even clear if they are suppose to run their families, or even form families.

Hannah Arendt saw a familiar phenomenon when it came to the life and crimes of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust. Arednt was writing about totalitarian societies and genocide but some of the phenomena she documents are helpful when it comes to understanding what's going on.

Heer was baffled by the appeal of, "The pleasure a minion gets from service -- they joy of executing someone else's plan -- that's hard for me to fathom." And as he put it that way it is kind of baffling, who wants to be some sort of evil automaton? But as Arendt pointed out there is a certain joy, a sort of fulfillment in shrugging off your individuality and losing yourself in some great project far bigger than yourself. The Nazi rallies at Nuremberg where a classic example of this. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people would shrug off the individuality and lose themselves in the sea of their volk, their nation, their "Cathedral of Light."

Which brings me to Arendt's points on Eichmann. To be sure smearing some college student (or even issuing threats of rape or death as Foy received) for making inappropriate jokes on Twitter is astronomically less worse than the crime of actual genocide. But many of the political themes of Arendt seem to run through these disparate topics. As Roger Berkowitz put it when it came to Arendt's view of Eichmann:

In his own words, Eichmann feared “to live a leaderless and difficult individual life,” in which “I would receive no directives from anybody.” Arendt insisted that Eichmann’s professed fidelity to the Nazi cause “did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he meant to show what an ‘idealist’ he had always been.” An “idealist,” as she used the word, is an ideologue, someone who will sacrifice his own moral convictions when they come in conflict with the “idea” of the movement that gives life meaning. Evil was transformed from a Satanic temptation into a test of self-sacrifice, and Eichmann justified the evil he knowingly committed as a heroic burden demanded by his idealism.

Thus the Twitter harassers who constantly threaten liberals and feminists with rape and death may very well see themselves are heroes. They do things they don't like to do in order to fulfill a higher mission and be able to be part of an online community, that while horrible, at least welcomes and values them.

You can see a similar phenomenon in interviews with people about why they join gangs. Gangs can be a family and purpose for people who have no other.

Rituals of mass hate might be morally wrong, but their not necessarily unpleasant for the participants: it's a lot of fun to throw Guy Fawkes on the bonfire. Thus these sorts of hate campaigns can be seen as a way of finding mean and purpose in a world that won't let you be in charge of everything anymore. This of course doesn't make it right or acceptable, but like Arendt's points about why millions of ordinary people supported things like Nazism, it at least makes it understandable.

Why I'm (Sort Of) On The Hillary Train

I got asked a question on Facebook the other day about why I've been rather dismissive of Bernie Sanders and basically have gotten on the Hillary bandwagon. I've done this for two big reasons. First of all I think that the whole nominations battle at this point is really a moot point, Hillary has already almost certainly won the nomination. Simply put I really subscribe to the idea about presidential nominations laid out by several political scientists in their book "The Party Decides" (which is the distillation of a whole lot of research done by a branch of the so called "Americanist" tradition of political science) which basically argues that nominations are chosen not by voters and caucus goers, but by the parties themselves and all their actors aligning around a largely consensus nominee. How does this work? Well basically a party's expanded network of interest groups, donors, elected officials, campaign and governing professionals, activists, and elder statesmen (and women) coordinate resources by doing things like raising money, endorsing candidates, and signaling to the rest of the network who to support

The end result is that voters and caucus goers only really come into play at the end stage of this process and oftentimes just winnow candidates out until one consensus nominee remains. So from contemporary news accounts the 2000 race on the Republican was this harrowing battle where Bush took Iowa, the McCain stormed back in New Hampshire, and Bush was only able to win due to Karl Roves diabolical dirty tricks. The party decides account of that race (which I follow) is totally different. Basically Bush had things sown up after all those Republican governors started endorsing him back in the summer of 99', the rest was just New Hampshire voters being ornery.

Now I know, this whole idea about how presidential nominations are decided is totally contrary to how the media covers races and how we liberal/progressive types are generally taught to think about politics. It's "the people" who should decide races, not those dreaded "special interests." There's some wisdom in that when it comes to other primary fights, but the nomination for the presidency is probably the most important decisions our two great political parties collectively make. And it's in every party's actor interests to get an electable candidate that will carry out the party's agenda once in office. So since the stakes are so high party actors have strong incentives to do what it takes to make sure they coalesce around a nominee that can win and will follow through with the party's wishes if they get elected.

This process basically evolved after the post 1968 nominations reforms. During the 70's it didn't really work because party actors hadn't figured out how to coordinate outside of literally being inside a smoke filled room, but by the 80's it was up and running. Does 2008 disprove it? Not really, then you basically had a party deadlocked between Hillary and Obama (no consensus nominee!) as so then things like wining delegates did matter (voters play a roll at the end of the process!) but that was a special case and unlikely to repeat itself. Remember there were a host of other qualified candidates that cycle and they were winnowed out pretty quickly.

Which brings me to Hillary. I think the it's pretty clear that the Democratic Party has already decided on Hillary as the 2016 nominee but let's run through the evidence:

• Endorsements: Check out out FiveThiryEight's fun endorsement tracker. Hillary has literally dozens of of endorsements from governors, House members, and senators. Bernie Sanders has none (he has been endorsed by the Vermont State Auditor of Accounts however). Martin O'Malley is in second place in the endorsement hunt with one House member on his side.
• Staff: Hillary has a really broad based staff composed of Hillary loyalists from 2008 and beyond; a lot of people from Team Obama; and other folks. Basically it's a party wide staff, not just a Hillary staff. Sanders does not have this at all.
• Money: Hillary has a lot of it, Bernie has raced an impressive amount via small dollar donations, but still has much less. Martin O'Malley even less so.

Put another way Hillary is father ahead in terms of "the party deciding" at this point than any other Democrat since the modern system emerged. The only comparison would be Al Gore in 2000, and he won every single primary and caucus. And don't get me started on the fact that Bernie is not actually a Democrat.

So long story short, I am a liberal and progressive (although I'm increasingly not sure what that word even means anymore) but I'm also a party hack (indeed in my own small way I guess I am sort of a party actor) and my party has decided on Hillary already. So I guess it's time for me to get on board the Hillary Train.

To be sure there is some greater than zero chance that Hillary won't be the nominee. But basically she'd have to get hit by a meteor, become terminally ill, or have some career destroying scandal emerge. I don't think any of these things will happen, but yes if there was some earth shattering scandal I suppose I would reconsider. Or I guess this whole theory could be wrong, but again the evidence for it is very strong and I don't see that happening.

As for Bernie Sanders (and my second reason) I don't really have anything against the guy. I actually kind of like his gruff but compassionate demeanor as well as his passion. The last of the Jewish socialists! Well maybe not the last...

But honestly he's not going to win and yes I think his views are so out of the mainstream of the American electorate that they would hurt him in a general elections, much like McGovern or Goldwater.

And he's not a member of my party and I'm a party hack so...feel free to finish this line with the epithets of your own choice.

I actually like Sander's focus on income inequality and his big meaty policy proposals to try and deal with it. But (and I know I sound like a heretic) I really don't agree with his "good government" reforms around money in politics (yes I know). And to be sure inside the world of liberal Democratic politics Hillary is a bit of a hawk on foreign military adventures and a bit of a dove when it comes to education reform. I'm basically the flip of that.

But even so if she's already won, well then there's really nothing left to talk about.

Now I know a lot of other liberal/progressive types really disagree with this worldview and my stances on some or all of these issues, fair enough. But this is basically where I'm at right now. So yes it makes a lot of sense for me to get on the Hillary Train. Hopefully our engineer won't crash it.