Seven Eighths

An exercise in nonfiction as something semi-poetic....

One

One eighth in music is a semiquaver.  I always thought that was a fun word; as your intervals get smaller, the words get longer: demisemiquaver is half an eighth, and a hemidemisemiquaver is half that again.

Two

Two eighths is a quarter. Asking random strangers for one on the subway has at times not ended well.

Three

Three eighths is a number you're most likely to hear in the context of hat size... though some of us are a couple of eighths larger.

Four

Four eighths is a half.  This post marks halfway to my WNFiN goal for the month.

Five

Five is about how old I was when I first noticed that stock quotes used to come in numbers like 43 5/8 dollars per share; it was an artifact of manual floor-trading via hand signals.

Six

Six eighths, or three-fourths, is roughly the fraction of Americans whose lives don't really require major economic upheaval.

Seven

As in, seven-eighths.  This miserable year is seven-eighths over.

Fourteen, Fourteen

As in...

What the Texas State game was tied at before Idaho scored 33 unanswered points to win, and thus become bowl eligible in their second-to-last season in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Most of the predictions I've seen have Idaho going to the Arizona Bowl in Tucson.  I'm keeping my eyes peeled. 

We're Better Than This...?

Seriously?

In the five days since the election, we've had protest marches in cities all over the country, rioters (possibly anarchist infiltrators) doing property damage in Portland, calls for changes in rules after-the-fact (as a veteran of Democratic Party rules committees in more than one state, this really doesn't surprise me), and a petition with over three million signatories calling for dozens of people to compromise their own integrity and stated preferences... all because we didn't get our way.  This is sore-loser-ism in the WORST way possible, and I want NO part of it.  We were aghast when the other side threatened protests and a refusal to accept the results when it looked like our side was going to win, and yet here we are drowning in a sea of our own hypocrisy four days after our candidate conceded.  What happened to Michelle Obama's admonition a few short months ago that, "We go high," in this instance?

A Profound Inability to Behave

In the last half-century, the left has been plagued by ill-behaved protests, from the SDS sit-ins in Berkeley and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, to the WTO riots here in Seattle (while a Clinton was President; see yesterday's post about how the inseparability of globalism from the Clinton brand probably did us in) and the Occupy tempests a few years ago.  Not that we have a monopoly on it, mind you, but rather it's the whole holier-than-thou mindset about that's troubling: I've been to both Sproul Hall and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and if you're looking for moral authority about which sit-in disrupted far fewer people, you probably aren't going to like the results.

Concentrate Energies Where They're Effective

Honestly, I've been to exactly one protest march, back in 2003 in Texas, and I found it a considerable waste of time.  There were plenty of people there trying to co-opt it for other causes -- the event was about gerrymandering, yet people were displaying peace stuff, and anti-nuclear-power stuff, and reproductive stuff, and just about everything else except having the backs of the state senators who'd fled Austin for Albuquerque.  The number of man-hours wasted in these protests is staggering; you'd get a lot more mileage out of having these people fund-raise to make media buys.  And that's part of the big takeaway: In a century where it's rare to see kids outside on tricycles, protest marches are more unnerving than persuasive anyway. 

Bernie Sanders and Broken-Clock Syndrome

I've Not Come Here to Praise Bernie

That should come as no surprise, given how outspoken my opposition was to his candidacy.  I'm even more opposed to the idea his faction -- led by surrogate and really poor choice for Chair Keith Ellison -- should be trying to take over the Democratic Party and drive it even further left.  Frankly, the Sanders-inspired platform was an overreach, and that itself might have made the difference in key narrow-margin states; as this last election painfully demonstrated, we are still overwhelmingly a center-right nation at the core, which doesn't exactly jib with peaceful isolationism and democratic socialism.

To quote Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, "Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.... In their view the government was broken, the economic system was broken, and, we heard so often, the news media was broken, too. Well, something surely is broken."

He Was Right Twice

First and foremost, Sanders was able to capture the tide sweeping the working class throughout the historically "first world" countries: A backlash against globalism, neoliberalism, Clintonism (it's in the brand), or whatever else you'd like to call the Davos-friendly center-left policies behind free trade and transnational mergers that characterize the "New Left" worldwide.  Sanders turned Rust Belt primaries into a referenda on these ideals in general, and specifically their manifestation through NAFTA; it should come as no surprise, then, that Trump was able to capitalize on these same sentiments late in the game and duplicate his efforts.

Second, Sanders was quick to realize his brand of egalitarian socialism would resonate well with  Millennial generation whites who largely grew up in a culture of participation trophies.  This explains the massive age and race gaps back in Democratic primary season: That same message was tone-deaf both to older generations brought up in a culture where awards come for hard work and merit, and among non-white populations often deprived of the largess required to afford a participation-trophy culture.  Nevertheless, this same schism - perhaps reflected in the Sanders-driven left-shift overreach of the Democratic/Clinton platform - played out among the sizable fraction of potential voters who ultimately stayed home rather than holding their noses to participate.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

First things first, we need to find a Democratic leader who can reconnect the party to working-class white people; I've heard Martin O'Malley, former Maryland Governor, is looking at a run, and I think he'd be an extraordinary choice.  Those of you who know me probably know O'Malley was my first choice over either Clinton or Sanders in the primaries, and I think he bowed-out way too early.

We need to stop being the party of political correctness as a suicide pact.  Allowing ourselves to become the vessel for an Academic Left led by the Black Panthers' own Metternich, Angela Davis, to steer us into sociological no-man's-land, often literally, has been one of the greatest failings of the modern Democratic Party.  We can talk about tolerating Islam without embracing it, and that may make all the difference: The President-elect is, admittedly, right that failing to confront "radical Islamic terror" verbally head-on demonstrates weakness.

But most importantly, we need to find, as Robert Reich has correctly pointed out, an economic agenda which stops prioritizing investors over voters.  That heavily-tarnished shareholder-lawsuit firm Milberg Weiss' partners have been massive donors to the neoliberal-flavored Democratic Party should come as a shock to no one, but theirs is exactly the sort of cancer we need to cut out and then take strong chemotherapy to keep from recurring.

Hip-Hop Isn't Usually My Thing...

This Post Wasn't Supposed to Be THIS Post

I went on Spotify looking for covers of "Darling Nikki," thinking it would be fun to do a sort-of countdown. THEN I heard the one by Saint and realized I'd found some special new music worth sharing by itself.

This kid is 19, from Gambia, and currently lives in Sweden, where he moved as a refugee.    And he seriously has talent; as everyone who has spent little more than an hour or two with me knows, I'm really, REALLY not into hip-hop.  But Saint has made his work just melodic enough to transcend the genre.  It's a new thing, and it's really, really good.

Obviously, young and fresh as his talent is, his catalog isn't particularly deep... but worth every minute spent listening!

Civic Unicorn Math

The Myth of the "National Popular Vote"

One unfortunate casualty of the decline in civics education in this country is a misunderstanding of how it was actually designed; "Hamilton" the musical aside, I fear much of the country has never touched the Federalist Papers.  So it comes as no surprise to hear people talking about the United States as a "democracy," when that is precisely the form of government it was designed to avoid.  The Founding Fathers knew the work of the Roman political philosopher Polybius backwards and forwards, especially the inevitable descent of democracies into mob rule.  From this was born a vision: A constitutional republic, governed by policymakers who themselves are elected by the people, but which has no national election.

In that mix then were forged compromises to create what has scaled upward to the system we have now: 51 separate elections, and a weighting scheme designed to aggregated their results in a meaningful way the preserves the integrity and rights of smaller states.  There's no shortage of advocacy, especially this week, for attempting to subvert that model with an amendment to dignify the unicorn of arithmetic called the "National Popular Vote" -- a mythical creature with about as much real value as the average temperature of the whole United States at any given time -- despite the obvious realpolitik that there's no way 38 states could be persuaded to surrender their sovereignty so fundamentally as to ratify such an amendment.

Properly Contextualizing Each State's Results

Nuance and context are -- as is the case in most situations -- key to understanding how deeply flawed the brazen act of simply totaling the individual outcomes of 51 separate elections and attempting to infer meaning can be.  For example, in some states, there were four choices on the ballot, whereas in others, there were dozens.  This year, Evan McMullin was on the ballot in eight states; absent single-transferable-vote, how do you interpret his net impact on an overall total in the context of attempting to infer the absence or presence of a "mandate" for another particular candidate?  In such a scenario, does the absence of any candidate winning an actual "majority" really allow for any kind of legitimacy inferences between a pair of narrowly-competitive pluralities? A majority of the voters voted *against* each.

Worse are the opportunities to rig an election two orders of magnitude worse than the compartmentalized results we have today; someone puts their finger on the scale in Florida, they flip Florida.  Imagine dozens of independent opportunities for election officials across the country to find ways to puff-up vote totals incrementally in favor of one candidate or another.

The Electoral College Then and Now

One thing to keep in mind: The impact of Senatorial Electors (the two each state gets just for playing) was substantially higher in the 18th Century than it is today. In the original design of the republic, there were 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators, so 26 of the 91 electors (28.57%) were part of that not-population-apportioned skew.  By way of comparison, and with DC treated by Constitutional amendment as if it were Wyoming, today 102 of the 538 electors (18.96%) are "Senatorial" in origin.

An alternative way forward then: Rather than trying to undo 228 years of a system designed for scalability and durability in the face of challenges, why not challenge some of the larger states to break themselves up and claim their missing Senators (and their respective electors) in the process. Again, using 1788-era ratios, the size of the House would suggest we should have 87 states, not 50.

Short Form

In which I've had a long, exhausting, grueling day, but I didn't want to miss my WNFiN target by not writing anything for Wednesday.  So, this is it: 30% through the month and I've managed to keep to generating a new post each day, even if this is kind of a punt....