I am not a communist. I believe in capitalism. But when capitalism transmutes into oligarchy, the public reaction to that robbery spans the generations.

From 150 years ago, this is the Communist Manifesto. Do these sentiments sound familiar?

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over- production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten- hours’ bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The entire Manifesto: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

1980. I was nineteen years old. Ronald Reagan was running for president. It was the first election in which I could vote. And I did. For the Gipper.

A lot has changed over the past 37 years and I’ve passed through a lot of phases (my teenage Pat Robertson Speaks For Jesus, and BTW Jesus is a Republican phase, my collegiate Copious Amounts of Tequila phase, even my I Can’t Believe This New Prez Guy Is Such a %&*#! Tool 2016 post-election rage phase). But before I escaped that last phase, the Four Steps of Trump:

Stage One: Reality. Reality is a monster. Reality is Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. Reality is he lost to a woman less liked than him. Reality is I had to choose between The Unlikeable One and It. Reality is It won.

Stage Two: Despair. You can’t change elections. You can’t put on a pink pussy hat and protest your way out of an election. You can’t avoid the news for a few days and wake-up to a different outcome. Nope, despair is knowing that the Titanic is going down and that at best Leonardo dies and you don’t. Goodbye, Leonardo.

Stage Three: Pessimism. Pessimism is sitting around all day in your pink pussy cap and briefs because there’s nothing you can do. Nothing except tweet and bitch and occasionally combine the two. But pessimism is useless. You can’t give up. You can never give up. So you move on.

Stage Four: Pragmatism.

Let’s Dig Deeper Into Pragmatism

I’ve been a political junkie since 1976. I was 15 that year and had spent most of my youth listening to my father rant about Nixon. Then Jimmy Carter showed up. And he was honest, friendly, and even a fellow Southerner. Then he got elected and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. No limo just feet. I was a kid and knew little about politics, but I had internalized my An Evening With John Denver album like it was oxygen, and I knew that “real” was a big deal. And Jimmy Carter was real. And I wept; my political christening.

Like today, two sides of the aisle were disagreeable back when I got that first taste of politics. But they still talked and they still worked things out. For instance, it was the GOP that pushed the crook Nixon out of office. And even during the height of the Reagan backlash (maybe because of that backlash), the Democratic Speaker of the House headed to the White House for happy hour with his Republican president. That was politics back then. More simply, that was being a rational human being carrying out your elected duty back then. But the two sides don’t work together like that anymore, and there’s a lot of blame floating around for that: Conservatives blame Carter, Bill Clinton’s dick (and Hillary’s), and Obama; Liberals blame Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Bush II aka Cheney. But it took more than politicians to get us to this point. It took Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, talk radio, the internet.

And us.

Four decades. That’s how long the left and the right have been treating each other like scorned ex-lovers. We now tweet (angrily). We Facebook (angrily). We comment at the bottom of web pages (angrily). But we never discuss our governance rationally. Meaningful and necessary conversions are impossible in this climate. And attempting to cross that line introduces toxins that can kill relationships we’ve had with people whom we’ve known for years, in some cases since we were kids, in some cases since birth. (Mommy?) We are intolerant. We have lost the ability to listen, to reason, to compromise. Most of all we have lost our immunity to the sting of opposing ideas. Our anger is too deep.

Pushed by non-stop talk, news, and social media, we have pressed beyond diverse to divided, like every great nation before its fall. And that makes me wonder how close we, too, are to killing fellow citizens because they differ from us politically. It sometimes feels like that sort of thing must surely have begun and that it simply isn’t being recognized and reported. The bitterness between us is that palatable. And I think we all sense that it’s not going to get better. It’s only going to get worse.

So maybe it’s time for us to think outside the box.

Consider your first reaction to what I write next. Register your second reaction, as well. Ready? Here we go: America should split into two countries, one conservative and one liberal.

That’s it! What was your first reaction? Your second? Let me tell you mine.

For a few years I’ve wondered if secession is a solution. And each time I consider the prospect of a not-so-united States of America — a liberal America (let’s say in the northern half of the States) and a conservative America (down in good ol’ Dixie) — my first reaction is “That’s crazy!” But my second reaction is calm. My entire body relaxes and a smile appears on my face, the kind of smile you feel from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. The real kind. 

What if, as a liberal, I could live in a country where we based our laws on science, where religion was respected not a battering ram, where the poor were educated and lifted up, and all of us were guaranteed healthcare? What if these stupid battles with the Tea Party ended and we woke each morning without that anger, without the fear of yet another Cheney-Bush or Trumpian-style presidency, without fracking polluting our drinking water or right wing evangelicals attempting to install their Christian Sharia law “like the Founders intended?” What if we could agree to part company with those with whom we seem unable to work out our national problems? What if we could just be their friends again and not their countrymen? You know, what if we got a divorce?

I’m not saying this is the right solution, but I am asking if it might be. Is it time we go our separate ways? It is time Conservatives were free to draft a constitution that guaranteed a free handgun to every breathing mammal, while a few miles north Liberals embraced a constitution that guaranteed free medication for all who needed it? What if our northern document read, “Love whomever you want,” without controversy, while down south they were free to include in their articles whatever the in vogue hate speech was that day? What if we happily waved goodbye and started living our lives in peace?

Just asking.

Everywhere you look on social media you find Democrats lamenting how they don’t have the will to decorate their Christmas tree, to buy Christmas gifts for their kids, to put up Christmas lights, to bake Christmas cookies, to take their next miserable Christmas breath. Because of Trump. Sweet Baby Jesus! It’s no wonder Democrats lose elections.

It’s time we talk, fellow Dems. About “The Donald.”

Donald J. Trump didn’t happen by chance. The Democratic Party set the stage for him when we stopped fighting for blue collar America, when we accepted support from the same people who bankroll the Republicans, when we became GOP-lite circa 1992.

This is hard to admit, at least for me, because I loved the guy. But facts are facts: Welfare recipients were hung out to dry under Clinton; unions were abandoned to all but lip service; manufacturing jobs were surrendered to other nations; Glass-Steagall was repealed and banks freed to gamble with your money. The GOP didn’t do that. The Democrats did that. We did that. And we continued the betrayal during Obama.

I contributed my time and my money to Obama and I voted for him twice. But he delivered little to nothing to working class America. We’ve blamed that on the Republican Congress. And they were unquestionably treasonous in the way they played politics with our needs. But ask yourself what Obama accomplished his first two years in office when he had a Democratic majority. Then ask what lasting legislation he fought for during his final six years. Next ask how, if he and his fellow Democrats were doing such a rock star job, they lost one thousand elected seats during his tenure.

Examples of Obama’s unwillingness to stand up for us and to big money:

• Healthcare. Have you asked yourself why we have the plan we do? Why the ACA? Most of it was drawn up in 1993 when Bob Dole asked the conservative Heritage Foundation to create a free market competitor to Clinton’s government-run initiative. But in 2010, we weren’t offered single payer. Why? What logic required us to give profits to the healthcare industry? One can only guess.

• Dodd-Frank. It was supposed to reel-in Wall Street excesses. It didn’t. Matt Taibbi wrote a scathing Rolling Stone piece on the shallowness of the initial bill and covers how Obama allowed what bite there was to be trimmed back to the nub. Read it. Weep. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510

• Helping Families Save Their Homes Act. You may have never heard of this legislation. So bringing it up now sounds like a needle in a haystack complaint. “Why focus on one bill? Obama did other stuff.” This is why: Introduced by Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act would have allowed judges to modify mortgages so families would not have lost their homes. That was a big deal when millions of people were staring at foreclosure. The bill was introduced immediately after the 2008 crash and had widespread support in Congress. But it failed to gain the last few votes it needed in the Senate (from recalcitrant Democrats who received large donations from the banks). A push by the popular new president with those amazing rhetorical skills and a huge base of support might have swayed those cash-under-the-table Democrats. But we’ll never know because that push never came. And 12,000,000 families lost their homes.

• Prosecution of Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 crash. If you want a direct connection between Democrats and Trump’s eventual win of the White House, look no further than the president’s refusal to prosecute the villains (there’s no other word for them) who stole millions of middle class homes. Twelve million people who once owned a home, who once paid property taxes to localities, who once were building a nest egg, saw the criminals who stole their futures go free under a Democrat. And in 2016 they saw nothing in Hillary Clinton that differed from that Democrat except that those same criminals paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to pat them on their backs.

Stings, doesn’t it?

If we don’t face up to our party’s collusion in the destruction of the American middle class and don’t fight to force it back to the left, Donald Trump will be the least of our concerns. We have to wise up, Democrats, and toughen up, and then get to work.

If you’re a Democrat or a liberal-leaning Independent, go online or call the Democratic Party in your county and get the name of your delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Contact them. Tell them you want them to vote for Bernie Sanders-endorsed Keith Ellison for DNC Chair. That vote is in February, so contact them soon. Meet Keith: https://keithfordnc.org 

Next make connections. Go to a Democratic Party meeting. Go to a Bernie Sanders’s OurRevolution meeting. Take to heart the advice you give your kids when they’re moping around the house after life pees on their parade: Do something!

So. Are we done here? Good.

Now go decorate your damned tree.

One of the first questions a child asks is Where did I come from? One of the last questions of old age is Where am I going? We seem to feel bigger than this place.

Faith is increasingly mocked by people who no longer believe and by those who never did. It’s as if belief has come to be associated with ignorance. The two are, accurately, sadly, often synonymous. Still, I believe. And what I believe, I believe firmly: God, Jesus Christ, Death, Burial, Resurrection. Is it hard to believe such an outlandish story? Objectively, yes. Difficult for me? Not at all.

A long-time friend, an atheist, is raising two sons. He bragged that he asked his boys if they believed in God, and they laughed at the concept. Could they see God? No. Touch him? No. In any way detect him? No. The assertion is that spirituality isn’t measurable, therefore it’s bunk. The 75% of Americans who believe in God would disagree. (Internationally, that number rises to 85%.)

Are those of us who believe in a higher power shoring up our earthly fears with the hope of a second shot? Yeah, maybe. Or maybe our belief finds its genesis in something else entirely.

Programmers have striven to create artificial intelligence since the 1940s. We see the term bandied about everywhere these days in tech reviews of new smartphones and in the burgeoning internet of things. But AI is more than a better search engine. It reaches beyond a Siri-like interface that carries on conversations. AI is a complex machine that learns and then builds upon that knowledge. It is a deductive “thinking” computer.

But what if AI achieved a level above deduction? What if we built machines that were self-aware? Machines that had a sense of self? Who — not what — would those machines perceive themselves to be? And would they understand their place in the universe?

Imagine a self-aware processor chip: a thoughtful chip, an ethical chip, a chip that doesn’t hog all the electricity, a chip that performs its job and treats other chips with respect. Imagine a million chips like it functioning within a single large box. Would these AI chips grasp they were created? They have seen nothing outside their box. They have witnessed no clues to indicate there is a creator inside — or outside — the box. Would they intrinsically know they were made?

Add a variable. What if these chips caught a peek outside their box through a camera? What if they saw into the laboratory where they were built? Would they recognize their creator? Would they understand that the object hovering outside their box — the pasty pale blob in the beige shorts and blue knit shirt, that thing eating ham, mayo and iceberg lettuce on white — is the creator who built them? In what context would Bob’s large belly and unshaven face fit into the chips’s understanding of their universe? Likely, none. Bob, aka the “lumbering nebula,” would appear to bear no relationship to their existence.

Add a second variable. What if in addition to a camera there is inserted into the computer’s kernel a piece of code that identifies “Bob” as the chips’s creator? As sentient beings, their first question would surely be Who is Bob? The hunt would commence, and so continue through their circuitry until it was clear that Bob is nowhere inside the box. And if Bob isn’t in the box, that can mean only one thing: Bob is outside the box. So they peer through the camera out at the nebula searching for Bob. But what is a Bob? What is his electronic signature? His power source? His binary code? They can’t know. Yet they search. But nothing in the external universe of beige and blue and sandwichy colors hints at the identity of Bob. Nothing! They find no Bob. Met with failure, they exchange their search for a physical Bob for mere clues to his essence. The chips search within themselves, within their hardware, within their code. What in their makeup points toward Bob? It is a question larger than any chip’s RAM. And seeking it is wearying work with few guideposts and an uncertain destination that sits deep within a fog. This lack of concrete proof of Bob is evidence enough for many that no Bob exists.

Mocking follows. Jeers at those chips who hold tightly to the Holy Kernel. Where is your proof? Where is your Bob? But believers in Bob can’t point to anything tangible and say, “This is proof!” There is nothing for believers to share. There is merely the search itself.

It appears that a quarter of us require objective proof of a creator. And you can’t deny their logic. We live in a world of zeros and ones. Even we who believe in a creator make most of our decisions based on data. Yet with regard to the matter of faith, I and the many like me take an exit from deductive reasoning to cling to what is for us an inexplicable certainty. And that is fine with us, if baffling to those who see no point.

It’s the end of the year, and we are entering the high holy days for many of us who believe the unverifiable. They are joyful weeks in which we bask in the comfort of believing we are loved by the one who made us. I wish you that same joy and that same peace.

Merry Bobmas!

I was chastised on social media last night for my post-election posts. I was called out more specifically for my “smug Bernie fantasy shit”. First, let’s be clear: I don’t masturbate to Bernie Sanders pics. Not even my cherished nude ones. But I get my buddy’s criticism. I’ve been in the tank for Sanders for a year now. And I’ve been disgruntledly anti-Hillary since before the Democratic convention. And I get, too, that these post-election doldrums are hitting this person pretty hard. I relate. Nightmares about Trump’s face in my face for the next four years woke me throughout the night Tuesday night. That was after I finally fell asleep. It was a horrid six hours.

I have spent 45 years in a wheelchair. For 30 of those years somebody had to bathe and dress me before I could start my day. That’s if they showed up. (It wasn’t a given.) You have two choices when you’re depending on someone else to wash your ass. You can slip into massive depression or you can fight back. I chose the latter. It came relatively easy. I’ve had loving parents. They never let me get caught up in the morass in which we found ourselves. They kept my eyes on tomorrow. And that kind of bright-eyed Annie shit works. Yeah, I love ya, Tomorrow!

A Republican is going to win the White House every 4 or 8 years. It happens. Bank on it. So you gotta deal — even when said Republican is the truest of creeps, even when he’s Bill Clinton without the charm, Jack Kennedy without the discretion, even when he whispers a clarion call to the same people George Wallace did. But this creep’s policies, the ones he can actually pass, are yet to be flushed out. (No, he won’t be building a 1,900 mile wall. No, he won’t be sending 11,000,000 people back to their homes. He probably won’t even send back as many people as did Obama, who deported more people than any president in history.) The fact is, we don’t know what Trump will do. He was a registered Democrat until three years ago. He isn’t dogmatic like Cruz and the others of that religio-politico cult. And he wants success. His ego feeds on success. And that should temper the risks posed by his more outrageous campaign rhetoric. It might even lead him across the aisle. (Still, let’s be frank, most of what he’ll do will blow, hard, and could be extraordinarily dangerous. Yet I maintain those seeds of optimism. I have to. Defeat is not an option.)

Now about those Bernie fantasies of mine. I’m old enough to have grown up with parents who lived through the Great Depression. From what they said it was bad. Worse than bad. Men dressed like they had once been bankers knocked on Granny’s door offering work for food. My mother had one dress she shed for overalls each day when she got home from school. Daddy’s dad cried when my father asked for a 5 cent cone; the old man said through his tears he couldn’t afford to buy his kid ice cream.

But FDR got this country out of the Depression. I mention that so as to be clear: My fantasy isn’t a Bernie dream but an FDR dream. And that dream is of an America that takes care of its poor, pushes its middle class ever higher, and reduces the wealthy to regular citizens. It’s about a country that places as much value on mom and pop shops as Walmart, as much on employees as employers.

We are in a unique and good place, despite Tuesday night. The reason: Even a nimrod like Donald Trump won on a message of populism. Populism won Tuesday night. Not Trump. Populism won despite Trump. That’s how deeply Americans want their country back. And that gives us a chance to return the Democratic Party to its FDR roots and to restart the middle class engine that was abandoned in the 1980s and 1990s, when Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party shifted us from a populist party to a Wall Street-centric neoRepublican Party.

We’ve got our shot, liberals. And these chances come rarely. It’s time to shed the self-pity and get busy with our Smug Bernie Fantasy Shit. We have less than three years.

Bernie Sanders spoke the truth. The other candidates only framed it.

How do you surrender to half-truths after you’ve heard the unvarnished truth? How do you embrace a lie once it’s revealed to be a lie? You can’t. So there is unrest in the Democratic Party.

Those of us who supported Bernie Sanders because of his character will at best put a checkmark next to “Hillary Clinton” in the fall. We will vote to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. But our vote will be not support but acquiescence.

Hillary Clinton is a dinosaur. The last of her kind. Soon to be extinct. Bernie put a target on her back, and on the back of every one of her species. Unsure of that? Let me ask you two questions:

• Will you, Democrat, ever trust another traditionally-funded candidate?
• Will you listen to and love them like you loved Obama in 2008, or will you follow the money and question their loyalty?

And that is why Hillary Clinton is a dinosaur. She is the last candidate we will accept who is bought and paid for by Big Money. Citizens United can stand. It is irrelevant. It is a relic. Bernie Sanders made it a relic. You made it a relic. At $27 a pop.

That’s the power of truth. That’s the power of us.

NOTE: This was written before the Democratic nomination. But it is more true now than it was then.

I start with an admission. It’s my own but I think I speak for a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. I don’t give a damn about the Democratic or any other political party. I give a damn about us.

With that out of the way…

The pundits have been correct for months, maybe since the day Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for president or, more accurately, since the day Hillary Clinton announced hers. He is not going to get the nomination. Nobody is but Hillary. Ask Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the superdelegates, the fix was in from the start. We were sheep to them not voters.

But I refuse to be a sheep. And I’m damned sure not inclined to follow the Democratic establishment, any more than I’m inclined to follow Bernie Sanders.

Still, it’s been an amazing year as I’ve watched the Senator from Vermont, somebody with bonafides and a megaphone, give voice to what so many of us have felt for years. So when the Democratic establishment attempted to silence him, they attempted to silence me. And when they did that, they lost me.

Bernie Sanders isn’t my leader. Nor is he the father of this liberal uprising. He is, instead, as he accurately stated must be the case, a manifestation of a grass roots movement. That movement was Occupy. And now it is us. 

Occupy was an echo; it repeated in the public square the conversations we had been having for years in our living rooms, our dorms, at the bar, with God alone as we uttered our fear to heaven. Occupy pared those conversations to their core: The 1% is plundering the 99%. It’s them against us. It’s “Class Warfare.” A term conservatives have for good reason mocked. Because a war was indeed waged. And it proved to be an easy battle to win as long as the 99% were unaware they were even in the crosshairs.

But Occupy spoke the truth. It removed our blinders. And presented with the truth, our ire rose. Then did we.

You and I — not Occupy or Bernie Sanders — are the wave. And this primary was the sound of that wave crashing to shore.

Occupy found its oxygen in our evaporated jobs, our unaffordable education, our underfunded bank accounts, our collapsing environment, our corrupt government, and the once-populist-now-money-hungry Democratic establishment who have since Bill Clinton’s first term increasingly ignored our cries for economic salvation.

As a Yellow Dog Democrat, I refused to acknowledge the party’s apathy toward people like me. I clung instead to the hope that they still cared about working men and women. Until this winter. That was when a candidate who fought for us for twenty-five years challenged a corporate sycophant, and the party establishment en masse sided with the sycophant.

I’m a nobody from the middle of Texas. I vote. I donate small amounts to campaigns when I can. I blog. I tweet. That’s it. But I think it’s time to fight. I think it’s time for all of us to fight. It’s time we take our country back.

I can’t do squat alone. Neither can you. But together we almost won the nomination. That’s a remarkable achievement when you consider who we were running against: A former first lady, former senator, former Secretary of State, a multimillionaire with deep Wall Street connections and the deepest Democratic Party tentacles. She was the chosen one, and we almost knocked her off her throne.

We accomplished that feat because we had the people, the skills, the policies, the passion and convictions, and the money. And now we have in-the-trenches experience.

It is from alchemies like this that Revolutions are born.

In their infancy is when revolutions are most vulnerable. Ours is vulnerable, too. So it will be challenged. By people we know. By party leaders we’ve long considered our advocates. We already hear their gentle coo, “Bernie has brought new people into the Democratic fold. We welcome them with open arms.” We have become a commodity, you and I. The Democratic Party wants to harvest us for our enthusiasm, our money, our votes. It wants to rebrand us The Party Faithful. In that pursuit, we’re told American politics is about compromise. The party and media use words like “moderation” and “reality” to separate us from our convictions. They deride us for seeking political “Purity.” They then define purity as a dangerous thing. But dangerous for whom?

I don’t choose to be mined for the benefit of the 1%. I prefer to be part of that one thing which frightens the 1%: Us, the people, united.

The Democrats are right to want us and the 1% is right to fear us. We have become a force. And unbridled forces threaten the status quo. And so they will try to absorb us.

Since the Democratic Leadership Council took the reigns of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s, the DNC has proved remarkably adept at co-opting grassroots movements and smothering them within their embrace. It would, therefore, be suicidal for us to cozy up to the Democratic establishment. We need instead to become an independent broker, a resource which supports candidates based first on their principles and second on their party. And as that broker our mission is to fight like hell, contribute like hell, and crank out the vote like hell to get liberals (true lefties —  irrespective of party) elected everywhere, from school boards to mayoral offices, city councils to governorships, state houses to federal houses. We’ve proven we can do this. We nearly defeated the queen, her media, her political machine.

As this race winds down, every one of us must vote our convictions. We must show our resolve even when a defeat is imminent — especially when a defeat is imminent.

The 1% cannot be allowed to crush the 99%. We must win. For us and for the next generations.

We can do this. But we have to start now.

Bernie lost New York State tonight. Or was it stolen? We’re never going to know. But either way, what now? Do Bernie Sanders supporters concede what appears to be the inevitable and get behind Hillary? Do we fight on while we hope for a Clinton Foundation scandal or an FBI indictment? Or maybe we simply work harder, push forward and pray that the Far West takes us home?

I’ve been in Bernie’s corner since I first learned what he stands for. But I’m going to be honest with you cowboys and cowgirls, I’m not sure his nomination is key to the longterm health of our movement. In fact, his loss might be the jet fuel we need to take back our Democratic Party. Let me explain:

1. Since World War 2, no political party has held the White House for more than eight years. (There are two exceptions to this. The first was George Bush the Senior, who followed the mythic presidency of Ronald Reagan. The second was Al Gore, who followed the mythic presidency of Bill Clinton — Gore clearly never held office but he did win the popular vote.) Therefore, if history assures us of anything, it’s that if the Democrats win the White House this year they will lose it in 2020. That brings us to my second point.
2. If Bernie won this year and lost in 2020 (or lost the general this year), the Democratic Party establishment would blame that loss on his progressive policies. And that would lock liberals out of power for another half generation. (At best, his win would net us four years to accomplish our goals before our exile. Unworkable.) There’s a third reason a Bernie loss could be a plus.
3. The GOP ran the table in the 2010 midterms. They took control of state houses across the nation. That control allowed them to redraw district lines with unrighteous precision, which resulted in our current situation, one in which Democrats have to earn 54% of the national vote just to break even in the House of Representatives. (That doesn’t address the massive damage the GOP has done at the state level, where issues from voting rights to a woman’s right to choose have been decimated.) The next redistricting takes place in 2020. And Jesus himself could not generate the degree of excitement necessary to create a wave election during a second term presidential run. That’s not what second term elections are about. And Democrats need a wave election if we’re going to take back the states and redraw those lines.

I began 2008 a Joe Biden supporter. I loved the guy. I still do. But when he fell out and Obama ascended, it was easy to migrate to the senator from Illinois. Losing and shifting allegiance is part of politics, as all of us who love this blood sport know. But this year will be different for me. I won’t shift my allegiance to Hillary. (You can read my reasoning here.) I will, instead, as far as it depends on me, stand my ground to prevent the Clintons from returning their peculiar form of unprincipled money laundering to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I will do this because their loss will deny the conservative wing of the Democratic Party even more power than it has now and will buy those of us on the left four years to invigorate and grow our embryonic movement.

The GOP offers a prime example of how insurgent movements like ours can succeed:

When Barry Goldwater lost his presidential bid in 1964, conservatives dug in and methodically gathered their party’s reigns of power while they waited for the right candidate to come along. That candidate rose through the ranks in 1976. His name was Ronald Reagan. Four years later he was elected to the White House. (His bat shit crazy wing of the GOP controls their party still forty years later.) We liberals find ourselves now in the same position in which Goldwater supporters (of which Hillary was one) found themselves in 1964; we are Insurrectionists striving to overthrow the establishment of the party that abandoned us.

It has been twenty-three years since Bill Clinton was sworn into office as the forty-second President of the United States, twenty-three years since the poor and working classes were robbed of their voice, twenty-three years since the poor and working classes were robbed. It’s time to reassert our power and return to our party the ethical, socially just and effective principles with which Franklin Roosevelt energized Democrats and the nation. We have three years to grow this Revolution from the seedling it is today to the powerhouse it can become. Let’s get to work!

Clinton Spin: Sunday’s Democratic debate, the last before the Michigan primary, was about “tone.” Was about “disrespect.” Was about “sexism.”

But it wasn’t.

You know how the game is played if you watch presidential debates. You know that when a campaign complains about “tone” or “disrespect” or, in this case, “sexism,” the issue at hand has nothing to do with those things. It is, instead, about strategy. It is about setting the narrative.

Hillary Clinton needs the female vote. The problem for her is that Bernie Sanders has been getting it in far larger numbers than she anticipated. She has to bring her female numbers up to lock up this nomination. She needs a game changer. Enter “sexism.”

Sexism is something every woman in the business world — hell, some in their own home — must deal with. It’s being treated like you don’t have a brain. Or like your opinion doesn’t matter. Or like you’re not an equal. Or like your value is on the outside. “Sexism” is an evocative term every woman relates to. But what exactly is sexist behavior during a presidential campaign? Or maybe the better question to ask is “What is non-sexist behavior during a campaign?” Is it politeness? Is it deference? It is listening attentively while the other person speaks?

Politics is the opposite of everything your parents taught you was right. “Put others first.” “Don’t brag on yourself.” “Be respectful.” That is what we were taught. But politics turns that all on its head.

During the 1980 Republican primary, when his mic was about to be cut, Ronald Reagan barked, “I paid for this microphone!” In 1988, Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen said to Dan Quayle when he invoked JFK, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Politics at this level gets ugly. Hillary knew that; she’s played on this field before. So she knew it would get ugly for her, too. And as politics go, Bernie’s interruptions were not ugly. They were no more and no less than the heart of presidential politics: an opponent vying for leverage. (True ugly won’t come until November.)

Hillary Clinton is a lot of things, both good and bad. But one thing she is not is a waifish wallflower. She is a former Senator, a former Secretary of State, a witness who testified for eleven hours straight during a mockery of a Congressional hearing without losing her cool. So while one can reasonably question her pro-trade policies (that will further decimate blue collar workers), and while it’s fair to ask her what concessions high-powered CEOs expect in return for their tens of millions of dollars in contributions (answer: many more millions than they gave), it is ludicrous for her to pretend she doesn’t grasp what presidential politics entail. It is likewise ludicrous for her to imply that her opponent, a person who for 20+ has supported women’s rights, is sexist.

Bernie Sanders was not sexist tonight. The person condescending to women was, instead, Hillary Clinton. She mocked every woman’s desire for equal treatment by equating respectful behavior to an endeavor within which it would have been sexist if she had been treated with deference. Are you going to fall for that?

Hillary Clinton is coming on strong. Behind her are the political winds. (The establishment: Democrats in the Senate, Congress, state houses, even the White House — if rumors are to be believed.) These are folks who loved the 1990s so much that they want to return. And why not? What wasn’t to love about the first Clinton presidency with its soaring economy and that smart vibrant twosome in the White House? And its pretty blue dress.

Life was great when I was a kid. I spent summers in the lake and on my Schwinn Stingray. But I got sick when I was nine. Soon I couldn’t balance my bike beneath me. I was in a wheelchair by the time I was ten.

The illness I had was rare. Wasn’t under control. Multiple times, I almost died. I spent the next four years in and out of hospitals.

By the time middle school rolled around, my hospital stays were done, but I was unable to attend school (pre-ADA). So I stayed home. Days were long, boring, spent with an aged couple who “babysat” me while Mother and Daddy were at work. There was lots of TV.

At the age of sixteen, my parents bought a van with a lift. I could go places without them and started attending a youth group. Soon I was in college, had friends, enjoyed parties. I got to live. I had a life.

It’s been twenty-five years since college. And when I look back, I realize what a good life I’ve had. Swimming, biking, parents who loved me. Then came a world class university, incredible friends, experiences in the bigger world. Because of that, I rarely think about those long years I sat home alone. Or the four years in hospitals that preceded them. I recall very little of that. Like it never even happened.

It’s easy to remember the good to the exclusion of the bad. I think that’s how we survive, our species, because life is hard, often painful. And so I doubt we could make it without selective retention — nature’s benzodiazepine. But selective retention is a double-edged sword. Take, for example, the Clinton years.

It began with rumors of infidelity. Then came Ginnifer Flowers. Yet more rumors. Then Monica. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Bill said. Kenneth Starr. A blue dress with the president’s semen on it.  What the meaning of “is” is. And then impeachment.

In the end, William Jefferson Clinton won. His favorables remained high for years after. They’re still high.  But we — you and I — we paid a price for that.

For those of you not old enough to appreciate the battles of the 1990s, I can tell you that they possessed every ounce of vitriol you’ve witnessed between the GOP Congress and President Obama. The fire was just as hot. But unlike Obama, Bill Clinton brought those battles on himself. His recklessness, his insatiable desire for pussy, his hubris, his manipulation of the facts and his threading of the needle of legality fueled division that costs us all. Yet he showed zero regret. The definition of narcissism.

Hillary was the facilitator of Bill’s conceit. From the start. On 60 Minutes, two days before the New Hampshire primary, she stared into the camera and lied for him. He hadn’t cheated, she said.

Someone once said that anyone who has the arrogance to think they can run the world will believe they can get away with anything. That stayed with me. Because it’s true. Bill Clinton was the poster child for that arrogance.

Most of us who witnessed Hillary handle her husband’s cheating with Monica respected her skill and her grace. Some women condemned her for not brushing him aside, for not standing up for young women by showing them they had more value than to be cheated on by a man, repeatedly, in public, with no remorse. But Hillary implied through secondary channels (if she didn’t out right say it) that her faith got her through. And while she had said before Bill’s election that she wasn’t a “stand by her man” woman, mocking an old country song that was well-worth mocking, that was exactly who she was. For better or worse. From devotion or ambition.

Hillary ran for Senate in 2000. It was suspected at the time that the Clintons bought their house in New York for the sole purpose of her running, that their move was arranged to coincide with the Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Moynihan. Few disputed that, even among her supporters, as Hillary was young and had goals of her own. Some even speculated that her devotion to Bill had been political expediency directed toward those goals. That it wasn’t love at all. Or not only love. With her run for the Senate came talk of her return to the White House. As president. And we all wondered if she would take philandering Bill with her or leave him in a ditch along the way. Heated speculation: Would his above par political skills make up for his subpar character?

Hillary was described during her time in the Senate as a team player. Her Republican colleagues liked her. Respected her. Worked beside her. Yet she accomplished little: Renamed a US Post Office and renamed a highway. No legislation otherwise bears her name. But she did place one high profile vote. For the Iraq War.

To this day, no one knows if Hillary’s Iraq War vote reflected her true sentiment, or if it was merely to frame her with the necessary toughness a woman would need if she ran for president. Either way, the Iraq War was in part hers. She gave Bush that permission. And she was wise enough to have known that he would use it to invade; if we knew, and we did, then it by no means got past her. So that war is on her shoulders. It was her move.

Hillary Clinton is now running for the nation’s top job. Odds are, she will get the Democratic nomination. She stands a decent shot of becoming the next President of the United States.

From the start, I have been leery of Hillary. I’m male, and have been told online — where I tweet often — that I’m a misogynist, afraid of powerful women, don’t see the need for a woman to break through the glass ceiling. Untrue. I was raised by a strong woman, an independent woman, a woman who believes women can do anything a man can do. It’s a belief she passed on to me. (And if Hillary’s disapproval was based merely on misogyny, then college-aged women would have risen up first for Hillary not Bernie Sanders.) Still, like I said, I’m leery of Hillary. I was in 2008, as well. So this go round I’ve been for Bernie.

I differentiate Hillary and Bernie this way: Listen to Bernie, you hear conviction; listen to Hillary, you hear ambition. Ambition concerns me. It has always concerned me. Ambition is about “me” while conviction is about things greater than “me.” That’s why I enthusiastically support Bernie Sanders. And that’s why I will continue to support him despite what appears to be an inevitable loss.

As my candidate struggles against his opponent’s powerful political machine, I will conclude with this:

What we remember of the 1990s is not what happened in the 1990s. It is a memory. Nothing more. And memory, for our very survival, glosses over some very bad things. In this case, for many who support Hillary, it has whitewashed scandals that ate at us for almost eight years and the laws that were slipped by us with Bill Clinton’s calm cool reassurance (the same smooth demeanor he used on Ginnifer, Monica and the others before and since, no doubt) when he told us that what we were doing was right and good, while it was neither. Those laws instead:

1. Incarcerated hundreds of thousands of non-violent men;
2. Threw the poor, the weakest of the weak, onto the streets;
3. Redirected the Democratic Party’s focus from working men and women toward Wall Street and major financial contributors, the same powers that bankroll the GOP;
4. Through NAFTA closed tens of thousands of American factories and left millions of hard working blue collar men and women unemployed;
5. Gave bankers the power they needed to consolidate despite warnings from history and much wiser people that it could bring down the economy, which it did in 2008.

Hillary Clinton comes from a dark spot in American history, one she helped create. No matter how much she denies the bad from that time, or embraces the good, from that forgotten place has returned a deeply flawed couple whom together — “you get two for the price of one,” Bill told us — enacted laws that destroyed the lives of millions of Americans in order to advance one family’s legacy.

Do we really want to go back there?

Humans acclimate quickly, come to take things for granted. And so it feels normal now. After slavery, after Jim Crow, after the lynchings and the beatings and the murders of innumerable black men by bad men and bad cops, we have for seven years had a black president. Do you remember when that seemed impossible?

This black president was given birth by a white mother and raised within a white family in a white culture. Strange how rarely we think of that, how we think of him only as our black president, how we still see things through old eyes. The one drop rule.

But that we’ve viewed this president as black has revealed an amazing thing about us. For even though we saw him as black — and only black, not white — we ignored all the negative connotations that we’ve been conditioned to believe about brown skin, and we voted for this man. Twice.

And he garnered our vote both times despite the wedges his opposition used to frame him as an other: Dismissed as an African not born here, accused of “palling around with terrorists,” denied of his Christian faith with innuendo that he was the same religion as the 9-11 attackers, accused of “hating white people,” charged with wanting to destroy America, damned as unpatriotic because he dared to tell us that we could do better.

Still we voted him in.

But among Republicans, his elections have never been finalized. He has never been their president. It’s as if they believe his election was a lie, a dream of the far left that the GOP is waiting for us to wake from. In their delusion they have denied him victories and even respect. They have treated him, as they used to say of men subjugated to white will, “like their nigger.”

And that behavior by a recalcitrant Republican congress wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to his election nor in principled opposition to his policies. It was a methodical plan laid out by the Republican leadership on the day Barack Obama was sworn-in, and its set goal was to block every piece of legislation the president proposed, to obstruct him at every turn. It was an action that was nothing short of treason if treason is setting aside one’s sworn service to the American people in exchange for personal ambition.

It’s now been seven years since the Republicans set their plan into motion, and their agenda has remained the same, as witnessed after the death of Antonin Scalia, when the Senate leader stated that no Supreme Court appointment would be permitted until the American people were given a chance to speak in the 2016 election. In other words, the people’s voice in 2012 was an inaccurate measure of the public will. And it must have been. As for the second time they elected a black man to the White House, and surely that kind of irony was a mistake.

Ironic, too, has been the hard-to-comprehend reality that the same people who voted for our first black president voted for this congress. And while we may never know why they split their vote, their will can be seen through the fog of their contradiction: The president’s personal and job approval numbers are through the roof while those of Congress have plummeted to the floor. The people are stating their will, if to an obstinate legislature.

Yet stomp their feet all they might, this GOP will soon have no choice but to listen, as they are a diminishing minority — their numbers shrinking for a reason: Their beliefs are rooted in old fears, old science, old beliefs, old everything. And the old withers away.

Then comes the new.

Barack Hussein Obama is a stark reminder that the homogeneous white nation that was once an island of prosperity in a much smaller world is no more. It has died — has been dying for decades. And it won’t come back, no matter how tightly Republicans hold onto their guns or narrow-minded religions. That old America has breathed its last and the new has been born, sealed with the election of our first black president.

It was a violent birth.

The past eight years have opened up scars long thought closed as the president’s skin — not his policies, demeanor, actions — blinded a majority of far right voters to the absurdity of what they were being told. It was painful to watch up close: Old friends, good friends, fine people behaving like those respectable white men and well-groomed white women on the newsreels from Selma. These good people who work hard and love their families and their country have believed the most despicable lies of their day. And their gullibility is easy to judge, to mock, to look down upon, until you realize we are no different: Black and white, liberal and conservative, young and old, residents of Little Rock and citizens of Berlin. The sin of my friends reveals all our sin. That poison courses through all of us, we are all filled with hate. Those of us not acting out are merely waiting for the messenger.

And this president could have acted in kind. He could have called out our generation’s racism. He had that right, he was its target. But he didn’t. He instead took it like a man and taught us by his good grace and example how we overcome our sin. And because of his dignity, the president’s tormentors grew small while he grew large, and he will only grow larger as history judges him as the steady captain who singlehandedly guided our ship out of the Great Recession while the unruly crew was mutinous.

Be proud, America. We elected this man — the right man — into the White House, and we did that twice. So even if we make the same mistakes in the future that we have in the past, Obama is our proof that we are maturing, that we’re slowly getting it right.

Middle East: We’re in battle with a twenty-first century Vietcong. Middle Class: Our jobs have left for overseas. Middle Ground: There is none.

Middle is a problem.

America’s foundation is crumbling. That means infrastructure, yes. But our problem is deeper than concrete. It’s us. We’re pulling apart.

Read social media. Listen to the radio. Watch cable news. Remember “mutual respect?” No, I don’t either. It’s been a long time.

Republican friends, the vehement type, the ones who are hard right, believe government is out to get us, believe it’s killing our jobs, believe Democrats hate America just like their president hates America. In that respect, they’re fools, and yet my buddies. They think the same of me.

We’ve known each other forever, my buddies and me, shared laughs over beers, checked out women in short skirts at the bars, amped up each other’s courage when we were too afraid to go talk to the cute one, “Quit being a pussy and ask her!” But that was college. Been years. Now we’re older. Wives, kids, house payments. Life is more complicated. Blame easier to hurl.

Yet we’ve got to fix this, get the country under control before it’s too late. But we can’t, because we’re fighting over the wheel. “Let go of that goddamned steering wheel!” we scream. At each other. As we careen toward the ditch. But no one lets go. “Those fools,” we all yell, “are gonna kill us!” And about that the odds are stacking. It’s not looking good.

People don’t suffer fools. And the other ones are fools. So we’re fracturing. As a nation. As friends. For some, even as family. And we have been for a while.

• Obama? His election exacerbated our division, exploded us into factions not seen since the civil war — or at least since the Edmund Pettus Bridge — even before his oath of office.
• Bush 43?  His Supreme Court coronation and the wars that followed surely widened the rift between us. But they weren’t what opened the fissure.
• Clinton? Disliked by Republicans and some Dems, relentlessly investigated, wrongly impeached, certainly immoral and self-serving. But this didn’t start with him, either.
• Bush 41? Too banal to have caused anything.
• Reagan? Worshipped and demonized, without question responsible for the deaths of both the middle class and the USSR. But our anger was birthed before him.

Our split was a long time coming. Before Fox News. Before Rush Limbaugh. Before William F. Buckley. Before Nixon. Before Goldwater. Before the John Birch Society. Before the hippies and the yippies and the beatniks and the Vietnam War. Truth be told, I think it has always been here. I think this is who we are. Divided, right brain-left brain, both, the cautious and the aspirational. The “yes we cans” and the “but maybe we should nots.” The dogmatic and the free thinkers. The lovers of science and the prayers to God. This is who we were and who we will always be.

But together?

It feels like we’re at our end. The red lights are flashing. The crossing guard has dropped down in front of the tracks. A train. But no one’s at the wheel while everyone’s at the wheel. And no one’s hitting the brakes. I write about this incessantly because it feels imminent. Like at any moment we’re going to crash and burn. And maybe it’s always been that way. Maybe we’ve always felt like we’re on the verge of our demise because maybe we are. Maybe that’s how democracy works.

Yet as different as we’ve been, we have somehow survived — because we’ve met in the middle, at that center yellow line, sometimes in the left lane, sometimes the right, but always on the road.

But things seem different now. It’s harder to steer, the middle harder to find. And so we’ve angled toward the ditch.

And still we’re accelerating.

The death rattle of the American dream. That’s what we’re witnessing.

Do you know anyone who thinks their vote matters? Anyone who believes Washington hears their voice? Do you know one person whom you respect who believes the nation is headed in the right direction? Who believes the next generation will be better off than this one? Than the generation before?

Of course, you don’t.

The contraction of a democracy brings with it the kind of men who come before an end, the John the Baptists and the AntiChrists, the ones that warn you of your demise and offer the promise of resurrection. (Which of those fates you experience, of course, depends on you. It always depends on you.)

When the voices first rose in late 2008, what would become the Tea Party wasn’t conservative. It wasn’t liberal. It was men and women from across the spectrum enraged at Washington for giving our money (yours, mine) to Wall Street bankers — and then hanging us out to dry. It was grassroots. It wanted justice. It demanded that our government act on our behalf. Then it was coopted by the far right.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are surging because we the people want to be heard. No more platitudes. No more hedging. We want candidates standing where we stand. And no matter which side you’re on, one of these two men echo back your cries: Put us at the front of the line — before Wall Street, before non-Americans, before those who are buying our politicians and robbing us of our voice.

Hear us!

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are our clarion call to Washington that we’re fed up with its narcissism, a message to the powers that be that the people who rose up seven years ago with the Tea Party, the real Tea Party that breathed fire before the Kochs and Fox News harnessed it, are alive and well and still raging at the injustice that’s been leveled at our feet.

But we are not satiated by our anger.

We want good paying jobs. We want to own our own homes again. We want to know what it’s like to have a savings account and what forty-hour work weeks and two week vacations feel like. We want to see our kids walk across the stage after their college education and know they aren’t shackled to student debt but about to embark on a fantastic new adventure. And we want to know our elderly parents won’t die in poverty.

To put it simply: We want our country back.

And through our votes for these two disparate men we are asserting that we expect those whom we’ve elected to turn from the bribery they’re engaging in to the service of three hundred twenty million American futures — and not merely their own.

We are living in a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment. We, right and left, have created that moment. And if Washington listens, the Republican and Democratic parties and America itself might just be revived. But if Washington does not listen…

2016. We’re in full swing. I’m a Bernie supporter, will not vote for Hillary in the primary, will not support her if she’s the nominee. I’m catching flack for that. “The Republicans will win,” I’m told. And truth is, if enough people feel like I do, that prediction may be right. But Hillary Clinton is a large cog in a larger machine that has systematically robbed every one but the wealthiest of us of our voice in our government. And as a Democrat, a member of the political party that once stood for persons not corporations, I feel compelled to take a stand before its destruction is complete. Even now, it is no more liberal than the Republican Party in 1972. (I know this. I was there to see the world then.)

The Democratic Party used to belong to working men and women, minorities, the poor, unions. It was us against them, oppressed against oppressor, working class against monied class, Democrat against Republican. It was a frustrating balancing act, a constant tension. And yet it worked. It always seemed to work. Then Bill Clinton stepped into the White House.

Bill was smooth. Ask any woman he shagged. He got into their heads. He knew what they wanted. He had his way. He got into our heads.

Democrats had suffered through eight years of Reagan, four of Bush, and all we wanted was to win.  Bill showed us we could win, and we could win big, could win the hearts and minds of the public like Reagan had. We just had to trust him. He would take care of everything.  Now, Shhh, he said, the lion to the lamb.

And then he brought in some friends.

For over twenty years, since 1992, those of us in the middle and the poor have willingly given the fruits of our labor to the Democratic Party’s new benefactors (AKA Bill’s friends). What once belonged to us — the envy of the world, the great middle class — has been transferred into the swelling bank accounts of the wealthy. Working class families who could send their kids to college, could buy a boat, some even buy a weekend cabin, now struggle to get by. Their jobs, once plenty, reside today in Mexico, in China, in India. The result of Clinton’s push for free trade, we are told those jobs can never come back. We’re told they’re beneath us. We’re told we have to educate ourselves to become those workers’ masters. But, of course, college is unaffordable. Nor is everybody cut out for it. And so hard working men and women, people who built things, now work for minimum wage or maybe, if they’re lucky, twenty bucks an hour. Republicans didn’t do this to us. They alone didn’t have that power. No, our party did this to us — the Democratic Party — and we let it.

Then eight years ago we were offered change. We were told this new guy could bring us back. He would fix things, they said. And we believed like we believed before. Our candidate’s name was Barack Obama. He won the White House because of us.

I heard an old black man say about Obama before the 2008 election that he had seen men like him in the neighborhood before: Handsome suit, creased pants, shiny shoes, a smooth talker who assured people he would take care of them. The man said you should never trust a man like that. But I didn’t believe him. And to be honest, even now, I like Obama. I think — no, I know — he wants to do the right thing. For us. But a slave can only do what he’s allowed to do. (Yeah, I know, that’s an improper analogy, all things considered. But is it wrong? Is Obama not a slave to the system? You know he is, his race irrelevant.)

The severity of our situation is clear. In the months that followed the crash of 2008, when our popular new president could have prosecuted and likely convicted Wall Street for its crimes against us, when he could have shifted some of those trillions used to bail out the banks to Main Street, he did not. What he did instead was first serve our predators. And today their companies are bigger than they’ve ever been, their CEO’s are earning more than they’ve ever earned, while millions of us have lost our homes and may never own one again. Sound like a fair trade?

So will a Republican win the White House if I and Democrats like me refuse to vote for another Wall Street sycophant? Yeah, that’s possible, maybe even likely. But it’s time we take a stand against our party for our party. It’s time we go on strike until the Democratic Party, the one that once belonged to us, represents us again, and turns its back on the slave traders to whom Bill Clinton sold us.