2024: Is it time to kick the ball?

Six weeks ago, I wrote this:

Writing here today, it’s my belief that Joe Biden is going to drop out of the presidential race, and that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee.

So, here we are now, with a Kamala Harris - Tim Walz ticket with incredible momentum, and I want to get into what I see from the Democrats and Republicans, and get into some more personal thoughts about all this.

I was in college during the Bill Clinton years. Bill Clinton was a terrible president. Even though the Republicans viciously went after him for being a “liberal”, the reality is that from a policy perspective, he drove the country sharply to the right. He signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, he ended Glass-Stegall, he engineered massive consolidation (especially in the defense space), the list goes on and on.

Bill Clinton left office 24 years ago, but in many ways, he has continued to personify the Democratic Party to me. Five different people have been the Democratic nominees since then:

• Al Gore, who was Clinton’s Vice-President

• John Kerry, who was thoroughly Clintonian in his campaign

• Barack Obama, more on him below

• Hillary Clinton, who is of course Bill’s wife

• Joe Biden, the last of the old school Democrats

Meanwhile, the other leading figures of the Democratic Party have been Chuck Schumer (a complete shill for Wall Street) and Nancy Pelosi (a complete shill for Silicon Valley). Through most of these 24 years, the Democrats have been a very defensive political organization, often articulating reasons to vote for them in sharply negative terms: Anybody But Bush! You Can’t Vote For Trump! etc.

Obama alone felt like a change agent. In practice, though, the Obama years were… tentative. They had ideas about what to do within the bureaucracy but they really did not seem to understand what the party was supposed to be about. Hipper, younger, less white… those things mean something, but they don’t define a new platform, certainly not economically. And the viciousness of the Republican reaction kept the Democrats on their heels.

It’s ironically been under Joe Biden’s leadership that the Democratic Party has actually pivoted. Maybe it’s not ironic after all though? Biden, the last of the old school Democrats, is also arguably the last of the New Deal Democrats, and maybe it took some of the embodied left populism from the New Deal to combat the entrenched neoliberal consensus that Clintonism embodied. In the end, Biden’s act of stepping aside - an act which literally nobody else could have done - may have been the greatest manifestation of change the Democrats had available to them.

I don’t want to overstate this. Harris and Walz, born in 1964, are technically Boomers. The Democrats are still uncertain how to deal with Big Tech generally, how to deal with Big Finance generally, how to deal with foreign policy, especially how to deal with Israel. But the enthusiasm at hand is accompanied by something which really does represent a manifestation of change: the Democrats do not feel constrained by the framings of the Republicans. They learned from dealing with the likes of Mitch McConnell that the old way - the Tip O’Neill way - is long gone. The Republican Party today isn’t serious about governance. The script has flipped, and it’s the Republicans who are on the defensive.

Obama may have had a mandate for change, but even if he did, he didn’t really follow through on it. He and his people constrained themselves. Harris, though, presents as someone unconstrained in the same way. This feels different. This feels like something much bigger could happen.

I expect Harris to win, and win convincingly, with a margin at least as strong as Obama’s second victory, and I expect a much more vigorous Harris presidency than what we’re used to seeing from Democrats.

I joined the Green Party in 2000. I was strongly compelled by Ralph Nader’s anti-corporatist politics. In my formative political years, the Democrats were Clintonites: pro-war, neoliberal, corporatist, opposed to gay marriage, broadly uninspiring. I hoped for more from Obama but I never really saw much.

I spent 16 years in the Green Party. I spent two years as co-chair of the Green National Committee, five years as chair of the Illinois Green Party. I was a candidate for partisan office on multiple occasions. And if I’m honest, I was one of the most sophisticated political thinkers the Green Party had. There were a lot of wonderful people in the party, and some of them are still there, and I’m not interested in being critical. What I would say is that a lot of people who came to the Green Party were very anti-political, and were not interested in “traditional” approaches to electoral organizing. There was a strong current of thought that the strength of our platform spoke for itself, but it most certainly did not. Even today when it so often feels otherwise, most politics remains very local, and the Green Party was simply never broadly interested in doing the particular kind of hard work required to build a political base through electoral action at the local level.

I left the Green Party in 2016 and have considered myself a capital-I Independent ever since: a man without a political home. I didn’t leave because of the platform. I left because the Green Party was not, and is not, a serious political party. And I didn’t go elsewhere because I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere else.

It would be repeated over and over in the Green Party how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, this argument being used to point to how believing in the Democrats was tantamount to Charlie Brown believing that Lucy would actually hold that football in place for him. At this point, though, it’s pretty obvious that making progress within the Democratic Party has proven far more effective than making progress outside of it over the last decade or so.

I’m tired of not having a political home. I’m tired of feeling irrelevant. I have a lot to offer, and I’m entering a time in my life where I think I’ll be back to having more time to offer, but I feel like I have nowhere to apply it.

The excitement coming out of the Democratic convention, my feeling that JB Pritzker has really done a very good job as Governor of Illinois, my strong support for some of the policy decisions of the Biden Administration… I want to believe that there’s a place for me and people like me.

I work for a technology company. As companies go, it’s fine. But I can tell you, broadly, Big Tech is not fine. Google and Apple and Amazon and Microsoft, these are all fucking monsters. I want to be part of fighting these monsters.

I want the genocide in Gaza to stop. I want American dollars to stop funding atrocities. I don’t want to feel afraid to voice what I feel is a sensible, nuanced position, one where I think Israel has a right to exist, but I also think Israel is broadly guilty of war crimes. I want to be part of fighting all monsters.

I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of better, but I’m absolutely not willing to have painful incrementalism presented as the best we can get. Better is not good enough.

We’re not doing enough to combat poverty, we’re not doing enough to combat homelessness, we’re not doing anywhere near enough to combat climate change. Are we going to do more? And then more yet? Are we actually moving in that direction? Is there a part I can play?

The Harris campaign needs to mobilize young voters to turn out in this election, and I maintain that what I want to see is what people younger than me want to see. We want to see a hopeful future. We want to see a commitment to tackle challenges head on. We want to know where we can fit in as citizens.

But is this at all what’s happening now? How would we be able to tell?

Social media is putrid - I can’t put stock in that as a source of telling me what’s going on.

Mass media is wretched - I trust certain limited outlets to certain limited extents, but who could possibly go beyond that?

The overall state of our democracy is really bad, because we’ve lost so many public spaces, so many public forums, so many local news sources, so much decency. Gerrymandering, corporate financing… except at the most local of levels, it rarely feels like a government of the people.

But is there nevertheless solid reason to believe things could get better?

Even if it’s dubious… is now the time to believe anyway, because the only other available alternative is cynicism and silence?

For me, these aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re painfully sincere. I’m getting close to 50. I spent years believing I was doing something important for people - and I think I was, I think that the Green Party played an important role in pushing political discourse - but I’ve spent a decade, and especially the last five years, mostly lost. And while I don’t want to embrace the gilding of hope and change out of a sense of desperation, I also don’t want to be standoffish toward it out of a sense of something dumber than desperation.

I think I speak for a whole lot of people.

I expect Kamala Harris to win in November, and win convincingly. And I expect a much more vigorous Harris presidency than what we’re used to seeing from Democrats. Is there a place for me - for us - in all of this?

Is it time to kick the ball?