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I read that comment to imply that this is what many Democrats are bringing to this campaign. Last night on H&C they had KellyAnne and a Dem pollster named Doug. The discussion started out trying to figure where the Hillary/Barry fight is going but ended up in basically the same place: the Democrats are determined to prove their internal fire in the belly, no matter the cost, and the contest with the Republicans is just a phantom on an invisible horizon to them. Just as this writer only vaguely seems to have heard of conservatives and only knows the most disrespectful stereotype of Republicans, the Democrats at large have really bought into the fantasy that there really aren’t any opponents, except those within the Democratic universe (there is no other) who seem to have chosen an unwise set of priorities among the verities all good humans (only Democrats are good humans) must hold to be considered fully real. So they battle among themselves. Their issues were originally about the long march through the institutions (something begun by FDR as is noted above) but that march has been uncomfortably visible to ordinary humans, who have not approved in the usual case. Allowing the one exception (Clinton), one sees that the Democratic project to forcibly evolve American humanity into the sci-fi perfection imagined in the 1930’s has never been really accepted by mainstream peoples of any color, origin or belief set. Yet the dream lives on and the ideal remains the chimera Democrats relentlessly pursue. They will remake us, for our own good, whether we recognize our inadequacy or not.

And the fight now isn’t about whether the Dems really want to establish their feminist cred or their ethnic bones but which of these ideologues the Democrats finally can’t stop from being the latest one to assail the trenchworks of Amrican life and work. The fragility of the spoils system they tried to erect is now showing its creaks and its dangers: when you promise something to somebody, the main thing is to deliver. It better be something that you really can provide, yes? Well, Democrats can’t deliver what they promise, not in any large measure. They can only loot the system in small portions, enough to enrich those they enshrine in power, but not enough to actually deal with anything they have decried as systemic crises. We know what happens to poverty when Democrats decide to ‘fix’ it: some Democrats become extremely rich, a lot of lawyers buy lots of offshore property and slums turn to war zones. A lot of people who don’t normally have anything to say politically know this just as well as anyone and are usually smart enough not to even need to mention it. They know that’s what’s in store if either Hillary or Barry is elected. A few kids might think ‘no, really, it’ll be really really different this time’ but no person who actually paid attention in any of the last few decades is going to be deluded by the candidature on the left we now are forced to experience.

We know what the real problem is: John McCain may once have been a hero and a great American but his thinking has apparently blurred under the constant pressure of the Washington DC advocacy crowd. It’s not something personal but something truly systemic about our federal system of governance. That much power that densely concentrated in that small a group attracts those who would manipulate that power in mass numbers. And they’re really good at manipulating, in every conceivable direction. For myself, I’m just not sure which way John would strike out for, if he were elected. I don’t think my hesitation is unusual, either.

But that’s perhaps the good side: I KNOW which direction Hillary or Barry will make me march and I am determined never to go that way. So I probably will vote for McCain, not out of conviction, but as a profound negative. There is little prospect that any of the proposed power structures will do anything but work to magnify the degree to which day-to-day life is managed from Washington. Most people will have to make a hard calculation about exactly what level of resistance can be afforded. It could be characterized as sheeple-izing but that’s unfair. We all have lives we’re trying to get on with and the politicians seem to have nothing better to do that to try to teach us all how to do that. Thing is, they also command the enforcement structures. Unless someone is prepared to execute a coup d’etat, a la ‘Five Days in May’, then most are just going to recognize a bully state and do everything they can to quietly invalidate what they cannot avoid and cope with what they cannot invalidate.

The fix is in this year. Don’t let that get you down.