It’s no secret that I often express admiration for the multiparty system found in many European countries. Many people see this as chaos, and it does seem to make democracy more chaotic as it provides homes for a wide spectrum of opinions but also forces politicos to seek compromise in order to find a majority. But could such a system work in the U.S.? In my last op-ed post I lamented that the progressive movement was dying. Could we at least progress to the point of having a true progressive alternative?

First, let’s end a myth: In the U.S., neither major parties’ voters are speaking with one voice! Each party contains a wide spectrum of voters. Historically one can say that the center of those spectra is slightly left of center for the Dems and slightly right for the GOP (the fringes of both are outliers). Also both parties tend to move toward the extreme ends of those spectra for primary season and back toward the center to govern. But the Dems have their conservatives and the GOP has its progressives, although these might be issue-dependent (Catholic Dems who are pro-life and anti-LGBT, and born-again Republicans who are environmentally conscious, for example). Let’s call this our unique American brand of political chaos, and the first nail in the coffin for the two-party system.

Our system is chaotic precisely because the two parties can’t possibly make all those registered Dems and Republicans happy. Keeping them all bottled up in a group in which they’re often uncomfortable can only lead to stress and not participating in political discourse, so they participate only on election days, if at all. Many Dems didn’t bother to vote for HRC for a variety of reasons, even in those “battleground states” (a recent NY Times analysis of voting in Milwaukee was telling—are you listening, Dems, or still just blaming others for dropping the ball?), or voted for her opponent, because they felt their party’s establishment had betrayed and abandoned them. The GOP fielded a non-establishment candidate, so many more “traditional Republicans” (also feeling betrayed and abandoned!) voted for HRC (Bush senior and junior the two most notable examples). In the end, the chaos all settled and out of the ashes rose Mr. Trump, the victor and unlikely phoenix.

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First, let’s end a misconception: not all progressives are liberal, and not all liberals are progressive. The last election offers evidence for the latter: HRC’s “liberal message” was “more of the same” and was directed more to certain sectors of our society instead of to all. Too many voters didn’t like this “liberal message,” most of them coming from the sectors HRC neglected. More women voted for Trump than HRC too, so that “first woman president” pseudo-progressive message didn’t resonate that much either. (That first woman president will come when a woman lacking Clinton’s obvious flaws and baggage is nominated.) But fundamentally Clinton’s message wasn’t progressive.

A progressive message has to be one that’s inclusive and works to improve the lives of the majority of Americans, not just the few sectors HRC appealed to. Despite Harry Reid’s shenanigans in the Nevada primary, HRC appealed to a lot fewer union members than her husband, Al Gore, and Barack Obama did.  Those so-called liberals, fanatic HRC supporters, ignored the warning signs on the roads through the primaries and the months preceding the general election. HRC found many of her convention delegates in the South where they didn’t matter in the general election (even unpredictable Florida went for Trump, and the starry-eyed attempt to win Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, perhaps spurred on by liberal media giants like the New York Times, was a complete failure), while Bernie Sanders, with a long history of supporting unions (again making Nevada in the primaries an anomaly created by the nefarious Reid) showed that HRC’s assumptions about the rust belt were foolish.

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Now that Trump has won, the GOP-controlled Congress will probably receive a new nominee for the court to replace Obama’s. When it looked like HRC would win in a landslide in the Electoral College (what a difference a day makes!), there were major threats from Congress to the effect that they wouldn’t approve any nominee during her presidency. That would have been yet another blow to an important but sick democratic institution and would have continued its crippled state we saw in many important decisions during the last months with the constant threat that lower courts’ rulings are left standing when there’s a tie 4-4 vote. Now, with the tables turned, it’s possible that the Dems will do the same thing to Trump unless he nominates someone the Dems can live with (the rejection of Bork offers a precedent of what the Dems can do).

With hindsight, Trump would want to guarantee his nominee would ensure a conservative agenda, probably a Scalia-clone (isn’t Thomas enough?). Ensuring any agenda from your nominee is hard to do, though. Earl Warren was the conservatives’ worst traitor and the progressives’ delight—that justice nominated by Eisenhower shed his wolf clothing and became a liberal lamb, presiding over many important decisions that upset conservative apple carts. The situation was exacerbated for Ike and the GOP because Warren was even Chief Justice! CJ Roberts has shown a wee bit of that irascibility and independence too, earning the wrath of conservatives in many cases. Kennedy and Souter also have offered many surprises. No one knows whether the conservative side of the court will be emboldened by Trump’s win and Sessions nomination to the AG post (that will probably be filibustered by the Dems in the Senate unless it eliminates the filibustering tradition—I can see some sleepless days and nights in old Dems’ futures).

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[If you haven’t already voted, what are you waiting for? Don’t like any presidential candidate? Then vote for Buddha. But vote–local down-ballot races and ballot questions might be more important to you than whatever “psychopathic personality” resides in the White House (there might be two–the quote is from Kurt Vonnegut.]

Even in junior high (middle school for those in the Midwest and East), I recognized the truth of the adjectives in the title. In California, at least back then, we had to pass a “Constitution Test” at the end of the eighth grade—probably nowadays only immigrants seeking citizenship have to show they have this general knowledge. (The Constitutuion is like the Bible–people claim to know it, few do, and many misunderstand it and misquote it.) Every election I confirm that original, youthful analysis. Diehards who hold up the Constitution as a holy relic to be worshipped and never changed are blind to the flaws in that grand old document that seems to show its age and irrelevance with every election cycle. The Electoral College represents the worst lack of vision the Founding Fathers had.

There are many—they often wrote an erudite, flowery, but anachronistic English that was ingenuous in many cases and aristocratic in others (the Electoral College falls into both classes).  They did throw the “all men are created equal” in the Declaration under the bus—Jefferson’s flowery idiocy is just plain wrong, and the Constitution basically corrected it by considering that all citizens should have equal opportunity and rights if we add in the amendments (it took a while to correct that women weren’t allowed to vote and slaves were fractional men).

They also left too many things open to interpretation. The Second Amendment means, for example, that our National Guards, the successors to those old militias, can exist and carry arms, nothing more, but the NRA and many other extreme gun aficionados think that it means you have the right to carry an automatic and own a military-style weapon like an AR-15. The Electoral College, however, prevents a true democracy, clearly not what the Founding Fathers intended. Here are some negatives to prove that point:

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Britain has the Conservative and Labour parties. We have the GOP and Dems. France’s two main parties are the Socialist Party and Republican Party, while Germany’s are the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties. Western democracies tend to have two major parties, whether their system of government is parliamentary or like ours.  In parliamentary systems, more sharing of power is done, because a multitude of minor parties often guarantees that two or more parties have to join forces to govern—no party has a simple majority. In any case, these are all representative democracies.

Conservative voters should be happy, though. For the most part, representative democracy is more conservative than progressive, because majority opinion often puts brakes on any radical ideas. In this sense, conservative parties are superfluous. It often takes the domination of one party, often despotic, like in Venezuela, or in faux democracies (the German Democratic Republic AKA East Germany was a prime example), for the majority to wake upa an spur on radical, progressive change. For the most part, people just try to get on with their own lives and hope THEIR representatives don’t screw things up too much.

When I first arrived in Colombia, Conservatives and Liberals took turns. That was an agreement reached after toppling the dictator Rojas Pinilla, who had forcibly ended La Violencia, that terrible civil war between—you guessed it—Conservatives and Liberals. For years, government in Colombia was a shadow representative democracy, although elections for lower legislative positions were “representative.” Democracy is messy, so people often turn to strong men (or women) who will clean things up. There are still people in Spain who yearn for Franco, for example. “You could walk safely in the streets of Madrid late at night,” one guest at a dinner party there once told me. Fascism appeals to people who see chaos all around them.

Franco’s appeal is Trump’s appeal in the U.S. now. People want to walk safely in the streets late at night. They don’t want to be terrorized by criminals of any stripe. They want to feel safe, have good jobs, educate their children, and forget about government. Now they feel that the old way of doing things isn’t working. Sanders’s appeal is often said to serve that same purpose. But it was the other pole of the magnet. Yes, people wanted change, but they didn’t want to turn to fascism either. Sanders’s revolution also was attractive to many not satisfied with the old way of doing things, but his supporters looked toward a brighter future, not a return to the dark past of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese Empire, or the faux democracies Russia has often suffered from and promoted, or Donald Trump.

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Most dust from the fallout of the hacked DNC emails has settled by now (Hillary and friends seem to have problems with that antiquated communications medium–maybe she should have used Twitter, but what’s the hashtag for TOP SECRET). I’m still writing this post, though, because I’m still pissed. Not surprised, mind you—I never was—but still pissed. (OK, maybe I was surprised that we saw a wee bit of the tip of that iceberg made from the toxic waters of dirty politics.) I can now refine last Tuesday’s post that spoke about general corruption in the democratic process in both parties by analyzing how the DNC committed election fraud in their rush to get Hillary nominated and Bernie thwarted, probably all under the auspices of Clinton Inc.

Every Bernie supporter knows the Dem establishment rigged the game. (Warren spoke of a “rigged system” at the Convention, but that was a poor choice of words and flew in the faces of Bernie supporters—the email leaks only added to the narrower meaning.) The more he surged, the more desperate they got, and the more they strived to thwart his efforts. While you can bet Clinton Inc was behind all this, although her cohorts ensured deniability, the DNC, led by Wasserman Schultz, represent the gang of hitmen the Clinton mafia used. Clinton is the capo; Wasserman Schultz the stooge-assassin. Yeah, it’s character assassination of Bernie, but it was still an assassination.

Forget for the moment the super delegates and arcane primary events like flipping a coin in caucuses (although both are still open wounds for me). Forget for the moment scurrilous Bill standing outside polls, cajoling voters to vote for his wife (he also courted those super delegates—promises of rewards and special favors if she wins?). Forget for the moment all the evidence indicating that the Clintons are kissing the butts of one-percenters so their entire family can join that crowd (Chelsea’s already married to one, of course, so we know where her loyalty lies). The emails are an indictment: Released by Wikileaks, they show a concerted effort to attack Bernie and tilt the scales in Hillary’s favor by the DNC. The Russian connection (even if it’s true, it’s a distraction engineered by the Clinton camp to diminish outrage at the real problem) doesn’t change the damning content of those emails—Wasserman Schultz and her cohorts in the DNC were out to get Bernie. That’s election fraud.

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I’ve always said true conservatism has its place. In our haste to polarize the country’s political discourse, progressives give conservatives a bad name and vice versa. But putting the brakes on really radical ideas in order to study their consequences, so often lacking in wild-eyed progressives, especially one-issue voters, is a sane course. The law of unintended consequences applies to both conservative and progressive thinkers, of course, because not changing something might have worse consequences than changing it. “Making progress” implies striving to make things better, not worse. Logic and reason, also so often missing in today’s political discourse, seemed to be more prevalent in our nation’s history, probably because the media didn’t have as much reach and was less into sensationalism.

All that said, Daily KOS, who has become my least favorite progressive newsletter (being blindly for Hillary Clinton is hardly being progressive—the Clinton machine is a throwback to Tammany Hall and the Daley machine in Chicago), came out with an interesting list of items current conservatives would rather have people ignore in “Independence Day Special: A Dozen Facts About America Conservatives Would Like You to Forget” by Richard Riis. The 4^th is already past but the conventions are upon us, police brutality issues and the Dallas murderer are now part of our bloody history, so these points might still be interesting. Here they are with my comments:

Conservatives opposed the Founding Fathers, the American Revolution and a lot of other righteous stuff as well. The nation’s Fathers were radicals, pure and simple, and stealthily planned the whole thing. Their lofty ideals, while noble, sprung from the onerous financial situation of the colonies. The militias (the only ones the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee arms to—they’re now our National Guards) were terrorists as far as the Brits were concerned. They hid behind trees and took potshots at the Redcoats in Lexington and Concord. The true conservatives in the colonies were called Tories and swore allegiance to King George.

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Bernie’s grassroots campaign shook up the Dem establishment. While the old guard, especially older establishment blacks, don’t want any changes in the organization of Dem primaries, younger voters—and by that I mean many people forty-years-old or less—are demanding a change to a more democratic selection of the Dem nominee. But that’s not all! Those same people want nothing to do with the Clinton dynasty.

Even Wall Street is thinking twice about Mrs. Bill Clinton because “Pocahontas” Warren is making noise as a potential veep. (Probably won’t happen, though. Warren labeled Clinton as a Wall Street sycophant in a recent book.) Sanders’s supporters should remember that Warren is a traitor to their cause—she didn’t endorse Bernie in Massachusetts—but Wall Street is still nervous because she pretends to be anti-corporate largesse and anti-Wall Street excess at least, and Clinton is mouthing some of Bernie’s words to mollify Bernie’s supporters. Wall Street just might end up backing Trump over Clinton for these reasons. That would waste all those nice efforts by Hillary to court Wall Street execs with her soothing “I’m on your side” speeches—what a hypocrite!

The Democratic Party establishment must fear two things about all those younger voters in Bernie’s camp: (1) they’re likely to sit out the 2016 general election now or vote for another candidate—I’m voting Green; and (2) they ARE THE FUTURE for progressive action in America—well, maybe not ye olde curmudgeon (I’ll probably either be dead or the country will be if progressive thought doesn’t become reality soon)—but those young voters, especially millennials, will carry the progressive torch (maybe literally?). The Clinton machine isn’t likely to win over those young voters, so said machine and the Dem establishment have to make it an anti-Trump campaign. But idealists get tired of voting for the lesser of two evils when both evils are so flawed—I certainly am, and I’ve been doing it since the sixties.

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This question is generated by the goings-on in New York now. The leader of the corrections workers union was just indicted. Several cops in managerial positions in the NYPD were indicted. Two state legislature VIPs, one from the Assembly and the other from the Senate, are going to jail for taking bribes. Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign has been accused of illegally channeling donations to candidates for that state legislature to try to ensure a Democratic legislature that is favorable to the mayor and his policies. I won’t name names, except for the mayor, who figures prominently in the discussion, because these cases haven’t been decided, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them were partisan motivated.

The question also has a NJ motivation, Bridgegate. How much did Chris Christie, ardent Trump supporter, even of his latest racist attack on a judge born in Indiana, really know about the payback plot against a NJ mayor not supporting Christie in an re-election bid? Two Christie confidants are already indicted. Someone on the list of suspects not indicted has filed a motion not to release that list. Again, partisan motivation might be suspected, first for coming up with Bridgegate scheme, and second for going after Christie.

Tip O’Neill stated that all politics is local. I would suggest there’s a corollary: politicians train for corruption locally. Corruption can include unethical but not illegal behavior—state legislators carving out congressional districts that guarantee one party’s dominance falls into that category. Corruption can include perverse or sketchy actions by a politician in the public spotlight. Wiener and Spitzer fall into this category—again, not illegal actions, but something that makes the general public wonder about a politician’s other ethical choices. And corruption can also include numerous illegal activities, often for personal gain. The media often can’t distinguish these types of corruption and declares them all scandalous; the majority of the electorate just follows what the media says, at least that particular brand of media they read, watch, or listen to.

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Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in Mr. Obama’s trip to Hiroshima? Or, at least the irony? OK, as a guy who wordsmiths full-time now, what the president said is both ironic and hypocritical. His basic message was that everyone has to work toward a nuke-free world. No apology for dropping the bomb (more on this later), but that message was clear. It was hypocritical because the U.S. isn’t doing that, and it’s ironic if Mr. Obama really knows he’s being hypocritical.

The nuclear powers of the world—and they include Israel—don’t want others to join that exclusive club. Their nukes allow them to strut and posture instead of walking softly, and to wave a very big stick to the rest of the world. If you assume that their arrogance is accompanied by restraint, that’s OK, but that’s quite an assumption. The Cold War avoided nuclear Armageddon only because the sticks of the two parties guaranteed a no-win situation—both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would have been destroyed.

That was a precarious situation, as the Cuban Missile Crisis showed. While that balancing act still continues with a shriveled Russia taking the place of the U.S.S.R., there are other states who can shake the stick—Israel, in spite of denials, has nukes, and that psychotic despot in North Korea is starving his people so he can shake that stick too. Iran was going down that road. It’s not clear that a détente between two theocracies in the Middle East, Iran and Israel, would be a good thing—Israel has shown some restraint, but Iran is unpredictable.

The Iran/Israel case also reflects U.S. hypocrisy. Jump on Iran for the good of peace in the Middle East? What about jumping on Israel? They’re both theocracies, and the current leaders of Israel often seem just as conservative as the Ayatollahs. There’s probably a guilt trip lurking in the background here. The predominantly Christian West, sitting between Judaism and Islam historically for the most part, would just toss a coin—again from the religious point of view—if it weren’t for guilt about the Holocaust.

Of course, I’m even wrong treating the Jewish Holocaust as unique. The Armenian Holocaust occurred earlier (World War One era, not World War Two–Germany just incurred the wrath of the Turks by calling it a holocaust) and others have occurred too—Cambodia and Yugoslavia, to name a few. Even the U.S. interned presumed enemies, Japanese-Americans during World War Two. All this was terrible; none of it is unique because human beings do terrible things to other human beings en masse on a regular basis.

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