Saved by the Bell Curve

When I complained about the American news media’s gross journalistic malpractice, I also talked about my disappointment with the Harris-Walz campaign falling back into the worst Democratic election habits. But it would be foolish, and just plain unrealistic, to ignore everything that the campaign has done remarkably well. If nothing else, simply bringing back a sense of hope to all of us trained by the Democratic Party to be perpetually anxious and on the precipice of the downfall of democracy itself.

But the aspect of the Harris campaign that’s been impressing me the most lately is how they’re fighting multiple opponents on multiple fronts — at times, it’s seemed like a dogpile — without going too far on the defensive.

After all, the thing that first got me enthusiastic about the campaign wasn’t that they surpassing the GOP by every measure of success — the Biden Administration has been doing that for four years — but that they were beating the “Democratic elite.” Since Biden’s withdrawal, the campaign has been holding its own against the right, the left, and the media establishment, staying on message about doing what’s best for the middle class.

They’ve also done a remarkably good job of emphasizing that multiple contradictory things can be true at the same time. For instance:

Donald Trump is shockingly stupid, incompetent, childish, narcissistic, and completely unfit for office.

Donald Trump is a serious threat to the future of American democracy.

Those two things have always been true, but seeing them both in action at the same time creates a cognitive dissonance that people just aren’t good at processing. We’re used to our villains being devious masterminds, always thinking two steps ahead of their opponent, always having a contingency at the ready to thwart our heroes.

When you see this worthless shitstain staring at a solar eclipse, it’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that his self-serving incompetence resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. We can’t understand how somebody so incompetent could be given so much responsibility.

During this election season, the thing that keeps pushing me from anxiety to incandescent anger is being reminded of how undeserving everyone in the Trump campaign is. This has been the most brazenly incompetent, voter-hostile, off-message, poorly run campaign I’ve ever seen. Just a non-stop clown show. Even more than with Hilary Clinton’s campaign, it’s felt insulting to the Democratic candidate that she has to prove herself competent without fault, while the Republican candidate is praising Hitler and rambling about the magnificence of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and everybody just shrugs and says “oh well, that’s Trump for ya!” It’s made me long for the good, old-fashioned sinister evil of the past. Devious masterminds working from the shadows, instead of billionaire dipshits just blatantly buying a campaign without even trying to hide it.

So that’s another thing to like about the Harris campaign: she’s brought war criminal Dick Cheney back into the spotlight. I have to admit it’s been entertaining to see people throwing tantrums every time the DNC brought a Republican onto the stage, and especially as Harris has done multiple appearances being chummy with Liz Cheney under a banner reading “Country Over Party.” Not because there’ve been signs that Harris is going back on her progressive policy proposals, which would absolutely be a valid concern, but simply for acknowledging that moderate Republicans and never-Trumpers have more in common with Democrats than MAGA types do. And that the President of the United States has to represent everybody in America, regardless of political party.

It is most likely my pro-Harris bias talking, but I’m a lot more comfortable hearing her talk about working alongside Republicans than when Nancy Pelosi says it. Pelosi comes across as having genuine nostalgia for the Reagan and Clinton administrations, as if they were the golden age of reasonable American politics, instead of the breeding ground for everything that’s wrong with both parties today. With Harris, though, I get a sense of practicality and authenticity. Part of that is simply because she often says stuff I don’t agree with entirely; nothing she says sounds too good to be true, but just common sense good ideas that if enacted, would be more progressive than what we’ve seen in years.

She repeats her talking points relentlessly, to a fault even, but that doesn’t seem to me like a lack of sincerity but instead an insistence that this is the platform, we’re not changing it without a lot of deliberation, because it’s what we believe in, instead of just what people want to hear.

Again: we’ve been stalled for so long that ideas that used to be thought of as wildly progressive are now just plain common sense. Nobody in the Harris administration is going to be pushing hard for universal basic income, but then if the left got everything they wanted, they’d have nothing to complain about.

Which is their favorite thing to do. For several years now, I’ve just kind of gritted my teeth and kept mostly silent whenever the Extremely Online Left went off on yet another self-righteous tirade that had little to do with reality. I always assumed “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and we were both ultimately on the same side. But this year, it feels like I’m better able to see through the bluster and realize that all of the posturing and purity tests have never done much of anything to effect actual change. After seeing a lot of people spending years yelling “Kamala is a Cop,” it’s tough to take them seriously when they threaten to withhold their support for Harris unless she moves to the left.

The one enormous issue, of course, is the Biden administration’s poor handling of the attacks on Palestine, and the Harris campaign’s refusal to talk publicly to Palestinian Americans to reassure them that their concerns are being heard. Harris has stressed wanting to stop the genocide without abandoning the alliance with Israel, but it does seem tone deaf for a Democratic campaign to be giving more visibility to Republicans than to Palestinians.

Which is a stark reminder of the concerns of practicality vs ideology when it comes to a presidential election. I like to think that since the Obama campaign, most of us have matured a bit and can appreciate that you’re not voting for your cool new friend, but for someone who’s going to have to represent 300 million people with wildly differing opinions. It is inherently compromised, and it’s not idealism but fantasy to pretend otherwise. It’s entirely valid to consider Gaza the most important issue in this election, but that means doing everything possible to elect the only candidate who can possibly broker a solution, and it’s appalling to me to see people refusing to acknowledge that.

Considering how often people on social media point to the “Land doesn’t vote, people do” maps, you’d think that they understand how numbers are important to democracy. And you’d think they’d understand how a bell curve works. When you’re in a position of trying to get as many votes as possible, it makes more sense to aim for the big group in the middle instead of the small groups at either end who very loudly insist that they have all the answers.

The most perplexing question in American politics remains why such an ineptly run campaign, led by an idiotic and felonious election-loser, assisted by a few charisma-free trickles of lukewarm diarrhea whose only interesting feature is their absolute hatred of women, could be “so close.”

Obviously, it’s largely if not entirely driven by the outsize influence of money in American politics; the richest people in America clearly do not want Harris to win, and they’ll sacrifice the whole country to keep their hoards intact.

Some of it is simply desperation. They repeat over and over that “50% of America” supports Trump. Fox News’s Bret Beier just recently made that claim when trying to tear down Harris in an interview; he asked, “are you calling half of America stupid?” Traitor Ted Cruz has tried to use the same tactic to repeat his attempts to undermine the 2020 election, saying “a lot of Americans have doubts about the voting results.” It’s always used to defend the indefensible, when they reach the point where they can’t reasonably justify a lie, and can only claim that it’s what the people want.

I’ve already put in my vote1, I’ve donated as much money as I can afford, and I’ve sent a few letters to try and encourage others to vote, so all I can do at this point is hope that the numbers work out. I no longer believe, as I did for most of my life, that progress happens as a result of the extremes pushing the complacent middle in one direction or the other, but by boring moderates recognizing that the goal is to make as many people as satisfied as possible.

I don’t consider that compromising values, I don’t consider it abandoning my own label of “progressive Democrat,” and I don’t even consider it putting an end to my own idealism. It’s a different kind of idealism, an insistence that reasonable adults can strongly disagree on important issues and still get along and still make progress. That seems more permanent, better able to break us out of the current cycle, where the United States of America has an existential crisis every four years.

I’m tired of having to pretend that the MAGA “movement” is a genuine political party, or that it deserves a voice in my government, instead of just acknowledging that it’s the racist, lunatic fringe that it’s always been. For that matter, I’m tired of feeling like I should be doing more to appease the people who are going to end up calling me a “shitlib” anyway. Go make yourselves useful and start a viable third party or something.

When everyone is trying to tell you that we’re just a coin flip away from disaster, it’s reassuring to be reminded that I’m comfortably in the majority — at least as long as you split the graph horizontally. Unlike a politician, I can comfortably say that MAGA supporters are stupid, and I’m part of the over 50% of Americans who just want reasonable, competent adults running the government.

1
For Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in case you were wondering

1 For Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in case you were wondering