An Ode to the Newest Unaffiliated Voter
That's me.
Trigger warning.
During the Bush administration, I once said that I hate the democrats and the republicans the way one hates one’s mother and stepfather when one is molested by their stepfather. You hate your stepfather for molesting you and you hate your mother for not stopping it. And in a way you hate your mother more because you expect her to be better.
Yesterday I realized that the three politicians who I felt excited during my adult life about were Howard Dean, Joe Biden, and David Hogg. The Democratic Party treated each one abominably, albeit in very different ways. Barack Obama fired Howard Dean and replaced him with a part-time DNC chair. The democratic party pushed Joe Biden out of the 2024 race. And now the party is trying to push out David Hogg.
The thing that has kept me a democrat lately has not been that I agree with them on anything lately. The republican party is fast walking the the US to fascism, or at a minimum authoritarianism. Yet, what are the democrats doing? Well, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the senate, voted to advance the republican continuing resolution that gave Trump the power to decide what to spend allocated money on.
The chair of the DNC is now fully committed to removing the one Vice Chair who is actually trying to generate excitement for the party. First the DNC tried to remove him in the name of neutrality in primaries. Neutrality at the DNC doesn’t exist. I am old enough to remember when Debbie Wasserman Schultz handed over the DNC to the Clinton campaign before a primary vote was cast. But then realizing that neutrality meant he probably couldn’t start mucking about in the presidential primary in 2024 the DNC abandoned neutrality and decided to just hold a do-over election for the Vice Chairs.
The thing that has kept me a democrat lately has been the ability to vote in a primary. But I learned last night that in Colorado Unaffiliated voters can vote in primaries. So, I contacted my local elections official to make sure that changing party affiliation didn’t have special consequences for me as an overseas voter. And having heard that it did not I went on the Colorado Secretary of State website and changed my registration to Unaffiliated.
I have said many times that the world faces three great problems, climate change, income inequality, and fascism. Democrats believe the answer is to tinker at the margins of these problems. Republicans believe these are not bugs, they are features and are actively working to make them worse. As such my view that the democratic party is the lesser of two evils has not changed. And I will likely continue to vote for democratic candidates in general elections. Third parties don’t generally do well in the United States. I have not been happy with my senators for a long time. I am fortunate that I generally agree with my House Representative.
The world is fucked. Me changing my party affiliation is not going to unfuck it. But since Bill Clinton the democratic party has not done enough for the masses of the US. Are they better than republicans. Certainly. That’s like asking if chicken salad is better than chicken shit. But the chicken salad is rancid and I am no longer going to keep eating it and pretending it isn’t because the only other option is chicken shit.