I am tired. I am old. I've seen this movie over and over again. It's like the Midsummers' Night's Nightmare of lefty drama festivals, the drama queens of the play-left poised to blow another election because their guy isn't the nominee of the party. They want us to bend over backward and kiss their collective asses or they're going to vote for Jill Stein or Donald Trump or stay home and preen in their lefty purity as the country and the world goes to hell because their dream candidate didn't win the nomination or, as I'm beginning hearing that Naderite excuse for gargantuan irresponsibility echo over and over again, "the debates".
I don't include all of Bernie Sanders supporters in that, some of them aren't idiots, many of them appreciate and care about reality. But I think anyone who is talking that way at this point in the middle of June is never going to vote for Hillary Clinton and it's best to tell them to go to hell and we should stop wasting our time trying to placate them. Their reaction to a real and accomplished heroine of the left, Elizabeth Warren. this week was the last straw for me.
The Democratic left, the left that actually has sitting members of congress and a few Senators and even the odd governor have to get rid of the dead weight of the play lefties because they are not someone we will ever be able to work with or depend on. They are a dead weight on us.
How would I define a play lefty? Someone who, as we have the all too real prospect of having Donald Trump as president, is now talking about voting for someone other than the one and only woman who stands in the way of that effort, Hillary Clinton. Those people and the organizations and media sources of the left who encourage them are the play left. At this point I would also include anyone who is giving any platform for the Greens to promote their bull shit con game and that includes just about all of them from Democracy Now to the more obscure magazines such as In These Times. If they didn't learn anything from 2000 and 2004, they are invincibly ignorant. I'm at the point where I don't even want to read them anymore.
I am also rather tired of the perennial and condescending insistence that we have to court "the young" as if "the young" are a monolithic pro-Sanders mass instead of a mix containing everything from those who are rabid Trump supporters to their most accommodating allies, the la-la lefties who this post is about. And I would guess their fair share of young rational left and voters who will not fail to vote for the only other candidate who will be president in January, Hillary Clinton. I know of young people who are quite enthusiastic about the prospect of her being president. To pretend that all of youth fell lock step into the Bernie or Busters or even those people who supported him on a reasonable basis is to lie about "the youth vote". It is one of the most cherished lies of the let's pretend left that "youth" is going to support it. It's just like they're always so confident that the blue collar vote - much of it solidly Republican for decades- is going to magically join their revolution.
Today, I'm totally uninterested in the goofy guys and gals of the play left, no matter what age they are. The young among them may. may, possibly, theoretically, may be able to do what their elders who, even after the Bush II regime, are still fans of fantasy revolution gaming haven't done, grow up and out of it. But they are going to have to do that through the hard school of experience. I know, that's how I grew out of it. I stupidly and shamefully voted for Barry Commoner in 1980 and Ralph Nader in 1996, though I'd grown up enough to not repeat that shameful folly in 2000. Coming to realize that much of what I was reading in the lefty magazines who continued to support Nader - I subscribed to four in those years - was dishonest bull shit and a con job was a big part of that shift.
It's my experience that most of the play-left will never grow up, look at the geezers who scribble for that media mentioned above if you want an example. Some of them will evolve, but only into the not so distant ideology of neo-conservatism. Quite often when they figure they can make more money from it. For most of them politics has as much reality as an appropriately themed video game that they play at when they're not spending their lives being entertained by something else.
We have got to stop considering them as any kind of potential allies, they aren't anyone we can depend on and the cost of stroking their egos has come with too high a price. We have to face the harder reality that if we are to ever really gain power and keep it for the minimum of two election cycles needed to make change, those guys are totally unreliable. Dump them now.
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