In 2016, Democrats can’t afford to stay home and pout

This is my friend Erika. At her family’s annual Christmas party (while savoring her delicious bacon-wrapped dates) we broached a potentially-awkward topic. I’m supporting Bernie, I said. I’m for Hillary, Erika told me. But we both agreed, we needed a Democratic president.

It’s true that at this moment, Hillary has the polling and financial advantage. It’s also true that Bernie is enjoying an almost identical level of support that then-Senator Obama had in late 2007. As much as she would like to project an image of inevitability, Clinton is defeatable. It’s happened before and history was made.

As lucky as we are to have a variety of Democratic candidates who are all not insane, we have a different problem larger than the selection. The danger we on the left face is right now in the early stages. You can see the late stage of this disease ripping apart the Republican Party at this moment. It’s a disease of orthodoxy. The symptoms include a rigid adherence to ideological purity, a denigration of compromise, and a childish insistence on getting one’s way in every way all the time without exception.

According to one poll, 14% of Democrats will not support Hillary Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee. Any Democrats laughing at the shambles the Republican Party is in, don’t laugh too loud; the seeds of the same dysfunction are being planted here on the left, and those 14% are the farmers.

If Hillary becomes the nominee, it will be tough to get Democrats to show up and vote for her. The prospect of a Bernie Sanders presidency is exciting in the same way an Obama presidency was exciting eight years ago. When Democrats are excited, they show up and they win. When Democrats are not excited, Republicans often win. In an electorate as evenly divided as this one, eliminating 14% of our votes combined with the boredom of the remaining voters means a lot of risk. Dems should remember Republicans control the House, the Senate, and most of the governorships and state legislatures around the country. If the GOP wins the presidency, they will end abortion-rights, turn the Supreme Court conservative for the next 25 years, destroy Obamacare, and allow climate change to accelerate until the effects become catastrophic. That prospect should get everyone mobilized to help the nominee win, whoever he or she is.

I’m a big fan of Bernie Sanders. And I’m not wild about Hillary. But if she becomes a nominee, me and every other Sanders supporter must choose to support her, and work twice as hard to make sure she wins the presidency. And that goes for all Hillary’s supporters if Bernie wins the nomination.

There is simply no universe in which a Republican presidency is worth the protest vote of a few butthurt progressives.

It’s a bad idea to say, “We’re at war with Islam”

It’s been less than a week since the massacre in San Bernardino, and many conservative pundits have been demanding the president declare we are at war with Islamic radicals. They want everyone to hear that we are at war with Islam. But we shouldn’t say that, because our enemies very much want us to say it.

Islamic radicals want the rest of the Islamic world to join them in their war against the West. If the president says that Islam is the problem, Islam is incompatible with American values, Islam is the reason for these murders… these statements make it *much* easier for ISIS to radicalize vast parts of the Muslim world. Why? Because now everything they have been trying to convince their own people of (i.e. “We are at war with the West”) is really coming true. If we deny radical Islam a legitimate story about the West hating and fearing Muslims, it helps *us*. When a country like France suffers a terrifying and brutal attack by Islamic radicals, then *opens her borders* to welcome Muslim refugees, it completely undercuts the ISIS narrative of “the West hates Muslims.”

Conversely, when there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims fleeing Syria, doing everything they can to move away from ISIS, that also destroys the narrative that ISIS is good for Muslims and good for Islam. President Obama is willing to be pilloried in the press because he understands both of these dimensions. He understands that the moral victory of speaking the “unvarnished truth” to hundreds of millions of religious Muslims will be more than offset by the growth in enemy recruitment and morale. Even President Bush understood this (well, not at first, but someone smart explained it to him) which is why he, as a true Bible-thumping evangelical Christian, never once said “we are at war with Islam.” Because to say that is to make our enemies much, much more powerful. Once those words are spoken, they can never be unsaid.

So what’s the answer? If we are at war, shouldn’t we be able to say what war we’re fighting? Shouldn’t we be able to say who the enemy is, like a normal war? In my opinion, this war is not like our other wars. I doubt there was any previous conflict in American history where there were as many potential enemy fighters as this one. Islam is such a large and popular religion that even if a small percentage become radicalized, that would create a very large number of people willing to kill with no regard for their own death. Our society is not currently configured to handle a problem of that scale.

The best we can do, and what I think the administration is trying to do, is to drain energy away from the radical Islamic idea that the West wants to fight Islam. At the same time, they are altering military and diplomatic strategies to try and contain radical Islamic influence while maintaining plausible deniability about the nature of the interventions. Could I be wrong? Sure. I’m not a general nor a diplomat. But I know how to think beyond a single level of cause and effect, and I believe the president and his advisers are smarter and better informed than me.

It does not feel satisfying to prosecute a war like this It also doesn’t matter how it feels if the result protects American lives. Pundits should knock it off with the constant exasperated impatience, complaining about what the president should say. If he listened to the critics’ demands, it would be a tremendous gift to our enemies.

Posting on Facebook doesn’t make a difference

I’m walking Cassie on a beautiful Sunday morning here in Los Angeles and I had a thought.

  

In the last Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders said that a college education today is like a high school education 50 years ago.  I think that’s true.  It’s like inflation. 50 years ago a loaf of bread was thirty-five cents; if you want a loaf of bread in 2015,  it’s four bucks.

The same thing is true when it comes to  our responsibilities as citizens.  It used to be that registering to vote, watching the news, and going to the polls on election day was considered all you had to do to participate in civic life.  Today, that’s just not enough. Today effective participation in the political life of this country demands more of all of us.

I see that itch to participate all the time. People post an article on Facebook with a sentence or two about what they think. And then the itch feels scratched, and we move on. 

However, the reality is that we are wasting our time. We’ve got problems that will only be solved if more people get involved and really advocate for the changes they want. I’m just as guilty as anyone else of posting political screeds on Facebook, but not donating my time or money to the problem I’m complaining about. I’m waking up to the fact that posting on social media and other things that “raise awareness” aren’t enough for things to get better. It’s scratches that itch we have to do something, but it simply doesn’t make a difference.

I’m going to reroute my energy from posting on Facebook to actually doing something real to work on these problems that are getting bigger while we play with our phones.

I’ve just started volunteering for Sanders’ campaign and will be making calls into primary states for him on December 5. If you want to make a difference too, join me. And post less about your passions and act on them more.