Red White & Blind

I’m delighted to announce that the audiobook of Red White & Blind is complete. Putting it together has been a long labor of love, and now it will launch in a matter of weeks—no later than the first week of September. If you prefer listening to books with your ears over reading them with your eyes, you will now get to enjoy this book in your desired format.

When I first considered how to create the audiobook, I reviewed the manuscript and realized that many segments would be best delivered in my own voice. So I set out to read the entire thing, from start to finish, forgetting for a moment how huge an effort it is to record an audiobook. And this book is longer and more complex than the narrative nonfiction of my first book, Double Happiness, so it took a bit more to get it over the finish line. The project even grew a bit as I went. I realized it needed audio breaks to indicate section breaks and new chapters, so I sat down and recorded some guitar riffs and interspersed them into the audio flow. I also employed a female voice to read the primary sources authored by women, and that female voice belongs to a human very important to me: my amazing wife Pamela.

So this audiobook turned into something approaching a radio play.

And now it’s done. I think you’ll enjoy the final product quite a bit if I do say so myself. It will be released and ready for your enjoyment in just a few weeks.

More From This Newsletter

In other news—and there’s a lot of it these days with all that’s going on in the world—I believe I can help people see the world more clearly if I engage more fully with this newsletter. I will be adding more features here and on the video channel, and I hope you’ll let me know what you find valuable and useful.

Will Assange know justice? Will Super Tuesday end the primary season?

A full, new episode of the Red White & Blind show is out. Sit back and enjoy the full episode, or choose the individual segment that interests you most.

To me, they’re all important, but the most pressing is the case of Julian Assange. A verdict in England will be handed down any day now on his extradition. For the sake of international law and press freedom, he must be set free today or he will languish and die very soon in an American prison—and this thing we call investigative journalism will become all but illegal.

FULL EPISODE

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INDIVIDUAL SEGMENTS

You’d be forgiven for feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day right now. Not only is it early February, but it probably feels as if you lived through the 2016 primary, went to sleep for several years, and then woke up right back at the beginning of 2016.

As happened so many times during that primary, this past week a small state held an election that should have been efficient, clean, and fair, with a minimum of fuss and mistakes, but instead turned into a godawful “debacle” full of “irregularities” that mostly harmed the chances of one candidate, Bernie Sanders. And just like in that 2016 primary, some watchers of this new 2020 primary see that “debacle” as the result of incompetence, others see mere coincidences, and others see outright conspiracy and fraud.

What everyone agrees on is that this was a disaster for democracy that should never happen again.

Let’s break down this very first election of 2020 so we can determine whether it is fundamentally a conspiracy, gross incompetence, or coincidences that are to blame. We’ll begin with a list of everything we know, in chronological order. If you’re in a hurry, you can scroll down to the heading “Coincidence, Incompetence, or Conspiracy?” for my conclusions.

A Timeline of the Things We Know

2019

Spring 2019. The DNC and party upper establishment indicate for months that they would strongly prefer Bernie Sanders not be the nominee. (source, source)

Summer 2019. The Pete Buttigieg campaign participates in at least one of several “Stop Bernie” private meetings in the spring and summer of 2019. The Biden, Warren, and Klobuchar campaigns do not appear to participate in these meetings. (source, source)
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When looking at the 2020 candidates for the Democratic nomination, you might already know whom you want to support, based on your ideals. If not, I created a “potentially sane” guide for progressives that meticulously compares the candidates on issues, records, promises, and ethics.

But putting aside our ideals for a minute, which candidate is best positioned to actually win a general election against Donald Trump?

To answer this important question, I researched the general elections we’ve had so far in this century. Based on my findings, I assess each candidate below with a percentage chance of beating Trump in November.

If you’re in a hurry, you can skip the research and explanation of my criteria, and go straight to the assessments of the candidates.

HOW TO DETERMINE ELECTABILITY IN 2020

If you’ve paid a nonzero amount of attention to presidential races, you know there’s this thing called the Electoral College that ensures only a handful of “swing states” determine the winner. In essence, states rather than people vote, and since we already know today how 44 or so of the 50 states will vote based on a preponderance of voters of one or the other party, we really only have to look closely at a half-dozen or so “swing states” to know who will win the whole race.

As far as swing states go in 2020, based on current demographic trends, it’s Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Minnesota that will be the most momentous of these “undecided” states. What’s going on in these states? Well, the crux of it is this: roughly one-third of the voters in swing states are registered Democrats; one-third are registered Republicans; and the other third are independents who often don’t vote. Let me say that again, a third of voters in swing states are independents, and they often don’t vote. Basically, any candidate will get their party’s faithful third of the electorate. The question is: Who gets more independents off the couch to vote? That’s who wins.

The Electoral College isn’t quite the whole story, though. Voters outside of swing states do matter in presidential races. Several important things carry across state lines: Money, Movements, and Enthusiasm. To wit, just because in 2008 I lived in California, a “blue” state that was surely going for Obama, didn’t mean that I had no impact on that race. I donated money to the campaign, I wrote to friends and family about the movement to elect Obama, and I cared enough to travel to Nevada to knock on doors and convince voters to support Obama.

So if you combine an awareness of the Electoral College, research into independent voter statistics, and an assessment of each candidate’s ability to generate money, enthusiasm, and a political movement, you get a pretty good pragmatist’s sense of how strong a candidate will be in a presidential election.

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They’re between a rock and a hard place of their own making

While Trump is thoroughly disliked by about forty percent of the country, the Democrats, as led by centrists Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have not only done very little to build their own popularity, they’ve actually been pursuing strategies that erode their popularity.

Ever since their disastrous 2016 loss, the Democratic leadership has spent most of its energy pursuing conspiracy theories — first about Russia, and now about Ukraine. We’ll get to the specifics of each of these theories, but suffice it to say that both are unpopular, both are unproven, and both will, on balance, help Trump and Republicans in the 2020 elections.

Worse still, the Democrats are now impeaching Trump over one of them, the Ukraine dispute. Even if the charges in this conspiracy theory are true — and they haven’t been proven — here’s the thing: no one cares.

Everyday independent voters — the people who will decide the 2020 elections — don’t care about Ukraine. What they do care about are things that affect their everyday lives: healthcare, the economy, personal debt, the environment, equal rights, immigration, and income inequality.

So why are Democrats pursuing these conspiracy theories? Why are they taking the giant step to impeach? They know Trump will be acquitted in the Senate, as Bill Clinton was in 1999, and that this drive to impeach will result in nothing but a long-running, extensively-watched, widely-discussed movie that in the end will feature Donald Trump winning. This in turn will create a stronger, vindicated candidate in November who can decry a witch hunt (with some validity), ignore attacks on his real flaws and real corruption, and pretend to have integrity in ways he currently cannot.

The question is, why would the Democrats want to lose again?

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When choosing a school, a restaurant, or a licensed contractor, most of us use criteria to make our choice. But very few people actually do this when choosing the candidates they vote for. The media doesn’t help with this either by asking nonsense questions like “who would you like to have a beer with?”

I offer here a set of criteria for progressives to use when choosing a candidate to support in our partly dysfunctional 2019 American political system. Having paid attention to this wild yet somehow predictable 2020 Democratic Primary over the past year, for your reading pleasure, I also score each candidate based on those criteria, although you are invited to tweak the criteria and score them differently if you would like.

There are a lot of candidates and a lot to examine, so this is not a short piece. Grab a coffee or tea and a comfortable chair.

Let’s get two things out of the way before jumping in:

First, basic terminology. I see essentially all politics, politicians, and movements as efforts to control the distribution of wealth and power, and each channels one of three forces:

– Reactionary, seeking to concentrate wealth and power into fewer hands
– Conservative, seeking to keep the distribution of wealth and power as it is
– Progressive, seeking to spread wealth and power more broadly among people

If you consider these strands of political energy and find yourself instinctively reactionary, you might not find much of this article useful. I am a progressive at heart and believe that spreading wealth and power more broadly is beneficial to all and creates a stronger and healthier society, and I consider the grand arc of progressive politics stretching back to Magna Carta to be a good thing and something that I hope will continue. Today, with AI, nanotechnology, weather manipulation, and the rest of the next wave of technology arriving every day, we can and must distribute power (ie decision-making) more broadly throughout the population.

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