Do you guys remember that when President Obama took office in 2009, the US was in terrible shape financially? I do. I remember listening to NPR while driving home from work, feeling my gut turn into a rock of despair inside a ball of anxiety worms until I couldn’t stand it and switched to something else, only to obsessively tune it back to NPR five minutes later. It was so bad that economists worried that we might be entering, not just a recession, but a depression. You know, like the Great Depression, which at this point seems all old-timey and quaint, like everything else Long Ago and Far Away, but in terms of history is actually very goddamn recent. During the Great Depression, just in the US—not even counting the rest of the world, which was also in turmoil—millions of people lost their homes and lived in shanty towns, because a quarter of the people who were able to work could not find jobs. Many people ate from volunteer soup kitchens when they ate at all. Times were bad, and the poison affected everyone. It was, to cut the description short, a complete disaster.
I’m not going to lay out a whole history lesson, but this next bit is important and, TRUST ME, relevant to your interests. Two factors that contributed strongly to the Great Depression were income inequality and a basically unregulated financial system. The rich were getting very, very rich, and everyone else was by comparison much poorer. And banks were pretty much doing what they wanted. (Sound familiar? It should.) That couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t. In October, 1929, a four-day panic caused the stock market to plummet 25 percent. People lost their life savings in just a few days because their banks had, unbeknownst to them, been using their customers’ uninsured deposits to buy stocks. Regular people, just like you and I, tried to withdraw their money from the banks—only to find they didn’t have any, because the FDIC wouldn’t be created until four years later. Over the next decade, unemployment hovered around 25 percent. Wages plummeted 42 percent. In July of 1933, the entire value of the stock market was 90 percent LOWER than its previous high, near the beginning of September, 1929. (That’s right: the historical high up to that point was about six weeks before the entire goddamn thing crashed. Sound familiar? It should.) Nobody trusted our financial system, and for good reason.
Say what you want about FDR, but after he took office in 1933, he immediately began working on trying to fix the whole mess, and to a large extent, he did. By the time the 40s were approaching and we were about to enter WWII, things were a hell of a lot better, and the GIs who returned from war in the mid-40s came back to a prosperous nation. But we didn’t learn a goddamn thing. Do we ever? Fast-forward to a bunch of hot messy mess, and eventually we get to subprime mortgages and deregulation and banks that were “too big to fail” and, well, the Great Recession of 2008. And if you weren’t worried at that time, you just weren’t paying attention. Those of us who were were afraid and anxious, and we were right to feel that way.
Luckily, once again, a strong leader stepped up. A stimulus package was introduced. Car manufacturers were rescued. Banks were prevented from failing. New financial regulations were put into place. Things slowly but steadily got better. Not for everyone—the US has had some underlying financial problems for a long time now. But for a lot of us. So when I say “Thanks, Obama,” I mean that with all sincerity.
Yet, here we are, just barely having climbed out of this mess, and what has Congress done? Two days ago, the House voted to repeal significant portions of the Dodd-Frank regulations that were designed to keep this shit from happening. (The Senate voted to repeal back in March.) Dodd-Frank has only been in effect since 2010! We haven’t even had a decade of partial financial sanity, FFS! Now, Congressional Republicans and Trump, I get. This isn’t even about them, not really. They’re all complete fucking garbage and we know it. <insert my usual ragey anti-Republican, anti-Trump ranty rant here>
MOVING ON.
No, what really pisses me off is that several Democrats, including my own Senator McCaskill, voted for this abdication of sanity. And I am very fucking angry about it. I have written her office, and I have made it clear that I strongly disagree with this decision. I’m afraid that if it is not undone soon, it will doom us to yet another recession, one we might not make it out of so easily this time. The members of Congress who voted for this deserve every screamy phone call, text, and email they get.
And yet. AND YET. HERE IS THE POINT I HAVE BEEN BUILDING UP TO: As strongly as I feel about the bad thing some Congressional Democrats just did, if Claire McCaskill’s name is on my ballot this November, I will vote for her. And so should you. I would love to parrot that old saw that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, only that you vote, but that simply isn’t true. The worst president AND Congress in the history of our country control everything right now, and there is only one way to stop that. VOTE DEMOCRAT.
Nothing else will do it. Why? Because Republicans do one thing right: they vote in concert. They do the one thing we won’t. Nothing will dissuade them from voting for the Republican on the ballot. Rapist? They vote for him. Complete moron? They vote for him. White-hooded KKK member? They vote for him. Sometimes they’ll even hold their noses and vote for a woman. Some do it for no better reason than they just do, but others do it because they’re pretty sure they’ll get most of what they want if a Republican wins. And they’re generally right.
Not us, though. No. OH NO. All you have to do to peel off liberal votes is to run a candidate who isn’t perfect. (SPOILER ALERT: none of them are, not even your faves. Every candidate is problematic to someone.) Plenty of Democrats choose to stay home and pout because their preferred candidate isn’t on the ballot. Or they’ll vote for the goddamn Green Party candidate or whatever. And it’s enough to skew the results in the Republican’s favor. When races are neck-and-neck, as they so often are, it takes very little to split the vote, and it’s usually the liberal vote that gets split. STOP SPLITTING THE VOTE.
And I don’t want to hear any bullshit about the two-party system, either. Just exactly how is putting Republicans in power, over and over, going to end the two-party system? I mean … how do you see that working out? Do you figure Paul Ryan or the Corruption Turtle McConnell are just going to stand up at some point and say, “Hey guys, this is working too well for us. We keep getting too much power. We need to reform our system”? No. Of course not. The only way we’ll get more viable parties is if one or both of the current viable parties split. (And hey, right now it looks like the Republican party is the best candidate for that and a 2018 blue wave is the best way to make that happen. So. Yay there.) The Green Party will never be viable because it rarely bothers to run candidates for anything but president. The Libertarian Party will never be viable because libertarianism is the most impractical, assholish political system devised by man and most of us know that.
BUT THAT’S NOT FAIR, you say. IT’S NOT FAIR THAT WE CAN’T IMPACT THE SYSTEM. Just shut the hell up. You CAN impact the system, but the majority of us choose not to. If you REALLY want to impact the system, here’s how:
- Vote in every election. They all matter. Not just because the local elections impact your personal life more directly—though they do—but because the city council members, county officials, and state officials you elect work their way up to the national level ALL THE TIME. If Obama hadn’t been a community organizer, he probably wouldn’t have been elected to the Illinois Senate. And if he hadn’t been a state senator, he surely wouldn’t have been elected US senator. And if he hadn’t been a US senator, do any of you REALLY think he’d have been elected president?
- Oh, AND. Another reason to vote in every election, no matter how small: the pool of electors—the people who actually elect the president—are generally selected from party leaders and state officials. Remember thinking that maybe, JUST MAYBE, a few electors would go against their states in 2016 and vote for Hillary Clinton? Well, that might have happened if we’d had a handful of electors with more courage and foresight.
- Finally, the primaries. The primaries decide who ends up on the general election ballot. So if you really don’t like your current Democratic senator or rep or what have you, figure out the best Democratic alternative and work like hell for that person. Volunteer. Donate. And especially, mark the day of the primary election on your calendar and MAKE SURE YOU FUCKING VOTE.
And then, once the primary results are in—whether you campaigned for someone or not—shut the hell up about the choices you WISH you had and support the best choices you DO have, the Democrats who will be running in the general election. Progressive candidates, many of them women and people of color, have been winning primaries and special elections around the country. THAT’S FANTASTIC. I want so much more of that! But we’re not going to fill Congress, state, county, and city offices with just progressives. It won’t happen—not in 2018, anyway. We cannot make that happen just yet. HOWEVER, what we can do, what is 100% within our power to do, is elect Democrats. Even if you feel like you’re choosing between the lesser of two evils—hell, especially then—vote. We’ve seen what happens when the greater evil makes it into office. Trump is in power partially because people didn’t want what they (erroneously) saw as the lesser of two evils.
So, yes, vote in the Democrats and then push them to be more progressive once they are in office. Do everything you can to get out the vote, make sure you vote yourself, and once they’re in office, HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. Will they always vote your way? No. You might get 75 percent of what you want from them. But they sure as fuck aren’t Republicans, from whom you will get exactly zero percent of what you want. And Democrats will respond to your calls and texts and emails. Those matter. Those sway them.
And guys. GUYS. Look around you. If you haven’t been following the news, just know that Trump and the GOP have been doing everything they can to dismantle our Constitutional protections, and they’ve been remarkably successful. I’m completely serious when I say that if we don’t get our shit together this November, we might not get another chance. UNIFY. For once in our lives, we have to stand together.
