Embrace being politically homeless
I remember standing in the Atlanta airport the day after Election Day in 2004, watching John Kerry and John Edwards give concession speeches. I was dumbfounded that America could vote for a second George W. Bush administration. How could any thinking person cast their ballot for such a vacuous disaster as that?
George W. Bush had neither the intelligence nor the dignified manner to hold the office of president. He was tested in his first term by the enormous events of September 11, 2001 and failed miserably by falling prey to his coterie of ambitious and careless advisors. His invasion of Iraq got thousands of Americans killed needlessly; it further destabilized the Middle East and made the mullahs of Iran more powerful.
Four years later, John Kerry was not a perfect candidate, but he wasn’t George W. Bush, and that was all that mattered. The infuriating absurdity of the George W. Bush presidency was compounded tenfold by a public that took this empty suit seriously; many even thought it was some kind of patriot duty to vote for him.
So when Donald Trump won re-election earlier this month, I felt like I understood people who were morally outraged and angry at their fellow Americans. When your opposition candidate is an unqualified absurdity, a high level of moral outrage is natural. I’ve been there.
But I no longer rank among people emotionally swayed by election results. I’ve embraced political homelessness, and with that comes great freedom.
Maybe it’s a certain level of age and experience, or a knowing cynicism that has crept into my worldview, but I don’t see the world in the same black-and-white landscape of good and evil that I did in 2004.
Maybe it is my background working as a financial journalist that allows me to look at issues and policies more clinically and with a sense of emotional detachment. I’ve learned to look at what people actually do and what facts on the ground are, and pay little attention to rhetoric.
I’ve come to expect the worst from everyone and so I’m rarely surprised or disappointed. Of course, the government is going to abuse its power, it wouldn’t have attained power if they hadn’t planned on using it. I’m often saying to my friends, regardless of their political affiliation, “Your side did this too.”
So I went into the presidential election predicting that Donald Trump would win and confident that I wouldn’t be happy with either outcome. I’ve seen Democrats and Republicans sacrifice principles for political advantage repeatedly, over multiple election cycles, to the point that I know neither is capable of keeping its word or staying grounded.
But while I have lost whatever faith I had in the American political system, I have not lost faith in America. If anything, our country shows us over and over again that it is resilient and capable. America exists in a superior plane far above our wretched politics. George W. Bush and his cabinet of incompetents deserve to smolder in the ash heap of history, but the people who voted for him were mostly decent people who loved their country and felt wounded by being attacked. The Trump supporters who put him back into office have seen their grocery bills triple.
There is so much more consensus on vital issues than we’re led to believe, and in the real world, if people are able to meet on their own terms, they can build meaningful bridges with neighbors and political opponents. It’s being done on the local level around the country every day.
So, if you’ve become frustrated and disillusioned, political homelessness may be for you. It won’t cure all frustration and aggravation with American politics, but you won’t blow a head gasket when the next unqualified hot mess takes the Oval Office.
Democracy is in the details
Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill is famously quoted as saying, “All politics are local.” He was right. What’s more, so much of what gets decided in our republic doesn’t happen on the televised stage but in the mind-numbing minutia of committees and boards you’ve never heard of unless you are willing to delve into the morass of local politics. But I’m telling you: delve into that morass.
This universe of local community boards and party committees have more sway and control over our politics than one might think, and they are a way to have an outsized influence on your community without having to run for public office. Depending on what you do, you might only need a few hours a month.
And no matter what your politics, you likely agree that the political establishment is decrepit and in need of new blood. Case in point: here in New York, the Democratic Party bosses were nominating candidates for party positions who were not even aware they were running. There were actually people interested in some of these party positions, but the people in charge filed the names of candidates they drew from old lists, thinking they could fudge the paperwork and appoint their own candidates later. The bosses had become accustomed to few showing interest in these party positions. With more people engaged in the political process on the local party level, this kind of rusty machine can’t continue run like that. Why shouldn’t there be a contest for these positions every step of the way—picking candidates who are actually running would be a good first step.
And in addition to the usual local and state races on the ballot Tuesday, there are three ballot initiatives specific to New York City that can shape the future of local politics and open the door for more involvement. The first would mean stricter limits on individual campaign contributions candidates could collect but increase public funding for candidates. The second would create a Civic Engagement Commission under control of the mayor (please vote against this if you live in New York City). And the third would put term limits of a sort on people serving on community boards (they could serve for eight years but then must step down for two years with the ability to reapply). I think a better solution to create more responsive community boards would to make them elected positions—members are currently appointed by borough presidents.
Whatever your position on these or other issues, you won’t change a thing by throwing rocks at someone you hate, marching on Trump Tower, or trolling normies with dank memes. Go vote.
Clearly there is a populist political wave that is cresting with Democrats now after Donald Trump surfed it to victory two years ago. There’s no reason it should stop for either party. In both cases it has widened the debate.
Five years ago, Democrats were scared to call for socialized medicine and Republicans would not have dared question birthright citizenship. Both these topics are rightfully in the mainstream now. There is no reason that ideas should be kept out of the public sphere by old and uninspired machine politics.
Don’t like it? Get out there and do something about it.
Labor’s Love Lost
This past Easter Sunday, my family ate heartily and discussed some of the current political and economic issues of the day. There may be better ways to wash down a tasty Easter ham than a lamentation on the state of the republic, but we haven’t found it yet. Our conversation settled on how many pension holders have been screwed by their municipal or corporate overlords.
The unofficial conclusion we reached over our Easter meal was that the United States is long overdue for a resurrected organized labor movement.
Labor unions represent only about 11% of the American workforce, and a majority of union members today are government workers who can’t strike. The upside to this is that a lot of government workers have very good, stable jobs that are safer and more lucrative than their non-government worker counterparts. But most workers are continually getting screwed.
The labor movement was spurred on by the large impact of industrialization and it was designed to protect industrial laborers and tradesmen. It has not adapted to the changing economy. The majority of American workers today are not industrial tradesmen.
If there was a viable labor movement in the U.S., I would have a real union to join. I work as a financial journalist. The company I work for actually cut our salaries years ago during the financial crisis. They technically restored the salary cuts years later, but haven’t given raises since and continued to cut our pay in other ways, such as stopping all matching 401k contributions, gutting healthcare benefits, and the like. They’ve also done a lot of outsourcing. Employees with many years of service to the company under their belts were shown the door, their jobs shipped off to India.
A labor union would have fought all of those things, but there is no labor union representing us. We are considered too “professional” to join a union, though not professional enough to be tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage if someone outsourcing shyster can save the company a few dollars. But we don’t have much recourse since there is no collective bargaining going on. People vote with their feet and while people are leaving the company in droves, the rest of us are there are spending our energies looking for other work rather than fighting a good fight (and since I need my job and have four mouths to feed, I’ll kindly not mention the name of the company I work for here).
I dream of the day when the outsourcing C.E.O. gets a brick through his living room window and four flat tires on his way to work. There should be real unions to contend with when companies want to cut pay, cut benefits or cut jobs. This isn’t because I think the answer is some kind of socialist worker’s paradise. To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about democracy: Capitalism is the worst economic system there is except for all of the others.
There seems to be a great illness of myopathy among our current class of capitalists. They think only in the short term and only in terms of the bottom line. I have no problem with businesses making hard decisions and scoring a healthy profit, but a lot of executives are not thinking ahead much farther than the next quarterly report. Sure, the slash-and-burn fiscal ass-fucking they’ve been giving American workers has increased profits now, but what kind of company are they going to have in five years?
But our companies have pursued these policies and the results are predictable. American capitalism no longer means industriousness and hard work, but rather golden parachutes and amorality.
Just as democracy doesn’t work without real political opposition, real capitalism doesn’t work without American workers having some kind of say over their working lives. Labor unions were once the source of that power. They can be again.
Matthew Sheahan 
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