I The Democratic Party And Integrity
I don't have the same faith in the Democratic party and what it does—on the world stage or domestically—that many others do. I feel utterly let down by every Democratic presidential candidate I have voted for in these past decades (except Carter, who didn't win—my first presidential election).
A lot of American voters in this election see this as a choice between rotten vegetables and poison; or maybe even between steamed broccoli and poison. I don't see it that way; I don't see the profound distinction. I see two parties that both entrench us in hideous wars that churn out Americans with PTSD, kill innocent civilians, destroy and cripple other cultures, and enrich defense contractors. I see two parties that are both in bed with Wall Street, which means I hear any invocation of the Democrats or Republicans as being on the side of the poor or even giving a shit about poor people as utterly disingenuous. Clinton de-regulated banking and murdered Glass-Steagall, setting the stage for the Great Recession, which harmed and continues to harm many people. Obama had an opportunity to help Americans who were losing their homes in the 2008 crash; he chose to bail out banks instead with taxpayer $$. We have made no progress on important environmental fronts in decades. Under Democratic or Republican presidents, there has been increased offshore drilling; increased fracking; more capitalization of public lands; carbon offset programs that allow industry to continue contributing to climate change; and no efforts that I'm aware of to really protect or repair.
Biden's run for the presidential nomination in 1988 ended when the press outed him as a liar—about his ranking in law school, about his involvement in the Civil Rights movement (he was not at all involved), about the fact that more than one of his speeches were plagiarized from others and completely uncredited.
I consider it reasonable to expect that candidates for the highest office in the country have not been credibly accused of rape or other sexual assault. The idea that we would choose the candidate who has been credibly accused of fewer rapes feels obscene to me.
This isn't me splitting hairs or insisting on moral purity. I do want a candidate—and this can certainly be a person who has made mistakes but OWNS them—that appears to have integrity. The field of two options we are presented with in 2020 makes this desire seem frivolous, I guess. But I consider it absolutely foundational. And I believe we all need to be talking about this.
II Our Electoral College System
Forty-eight of our fifty states in the US are winner-take-all states with respect to electoral college electors. So whoever gets the most votes in a state wins all the electoral college electors for that state, regardless of how narrow or wide the win is. My state, California, has reliably voted for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election since 1992. California's demographics today, in 2020, suggest that this outcome is more airtight than ever. Barring something utterly bizarre and unforeseen, like Biden sprouts horns and a tail and eats a baby on the debate stage with Trump, the vast majority of California voters will vote Biden/Harris in November and all those electoral college electors will be theirs.
Because of our Electoral College, we don't have a system of direct democracy (or, I would add, representative democracy, but that's a rant for another day), in which every vote counts. In every election, many, many votes don't matter at all. The Arkansans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016—their votes didn't count because a majority of Arkansan voters chose Trump, so he took all those state's electors. The Californians who voted for Trump in 2016—their votes didn't count.
This winner-take-all-business is not mandated by the Constitution, as the Electoral College is. It would not take a Constitutional amendment to make individuals' votes count. Winner-take-all is state law. Every state could decide to award electors proportionally, moving us closer to a more democratic system.
Getting a small piece of the pie means nothing in our political system. I remember being so excited in 1983 when the German Green Party won more than 5% of the national vote and thus earned representation in the Bundestag, the German Parliament. Then, as now, in Germany, a given party only needed to win 5%!! I remember thinking at the time that our own country might develop a Green Party. We did, of course, but our Green Party remains feeble. (This kind of proportional representation among different parties would require a whole different political system; we couldn't just plug it in to what we have. I still think it's interesting to note how different countries address the possibility of representing more diverse opinions in government.)
Because I'm confident that my state will vote blue, and that the Biden/Harris ticket will sweep all of California's electors, I believe I have margins in which to think about my vote differently. I can certainly understand how those who live in swing states would arrive at the decision to vote Biden/Harris.
III Change
If we believe reform—or radical change—is overdue, I believe we need to acknowledge that our current system can't/won't reform itself because it is funded, supported, and given legitimacy by its entanglement with the very institutions from which it should demand better behavior. Wall Street writes the campaign checks; we all know how that story goes. Those populations unable to make donations to political campaigns are forgotten, invisible, ignored, unimportant in our current system. Either professionally or personally, I have ties to low- and no-income people; people with disabilities; and people with mental illness. Their opportunities—access to relevant services; the possibility of avenues to meaning and improved circumstances; and the prospect of actually becoming visible and voiced in a world that communicates constantly and in myriad ways that it doesn't give a ding-dong-dell about them—have been, in certain very important ways, shrinking, not expanding, whether under Republican or Democratic leadership, at the state or national level.
Does Unity 2020 have a viable path to the White House? Very unlikely! Probably 100% unlikely. Unity 2020 doesn't even have candidates yet.
So then why would I consider voting for Unity 2020? Without even knowing who the candidates are, for crying out loud? Because I believe that doing so might have the potential to communicate some important ideas. One thing it has the potential to communicate: there is some small fraction of people out there who believe in the possibility of finding common ground, of working in good faith with other people with different ideas and backgrounds for the betterment of all. Because the proposal also includes an idea about how to modify the system—with the co-governing of the two candidates—it has the potential to communicate that some people believe not only that the system we now tolerate should be modified, but that it can be modified. It has the potential to communicate that these human options we are presented with every four years as part of the presidential election process are limboing under a bar so low that we are way overdue to raise our standards.
There's never a good time for change. We're always in crisis mode in our country around elections, having to choose between two options that are deeply imperfect, and I'm being generous and charitable with that description. We're always in crisis mode, which means nothing can ever change. Taking the long view here: Who benefits from this? I don't think it's the American people.