(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

As it happens, I went out on a rainy, awful night last Friday, down to the old Orpheum Theater near Boston Common—where, on September 19, 1979, I saw The Clash and was not the same afterwards—and hung out at the Our Revolution event that's getting so much run among liberals of various stripes and persuasion, a reaction that has caused me to despair of ever seeing a coherent progressive politics in my lifetime. The most recent futile wankfest was touched off when Bernie Sanders said this about the people who voted for the president*:

"Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don't agree, because I've been there. Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with, it wasn't that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election."

This touched off a wild ovation in the hall, although several of the minority guests behind Sanders on stage looked at him very much as though he'd grown a second head. It also touched off the 34,998th relitigation of the 2016 Democratic primaries and, frankly, I am sick of all these people. I am sick of the useless posturing, the vain heckling, the shined-up counter-narratives that have nothing to do with the damage that is being done now, at this moment, all over the government, to every progressive accomplishment back to the turn of the last century.

I have seen bad Democratic presidential campaigns. I have seen good Democratic campaigns. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran a very average Democratic presidential campaign, and she did so on the most progressive platform a party has put forth in a half-century. At the same time, anyone who denies the progressive energy that the Sanders campaign brought to the election is a fool. The rest of it was a collection of unprecedented flukes all coming together at once: the Russian hacking, the Comey meddling, journalistic malpractice of a kind that always seems to occur when there's a Clinton on the ballot, and, yes, the latent racism and xenophobia and fear of The Other that always resides in the dwindling white majority when it does anything en masse—like voting.

That was the accelerant, as the arson squad says. That was what got people to the rallies. That's what got them on their feet when they were there. That's what got people punched in the head. (Speaking of which, somebody else is going to get to sue the president*, this time on that very issue. Thanks, Paula Jones!) And that was a big part of what got enough people to the polls to activate that creaky slaveowner's doomsday device known as the Electoral College. So, I guess I disagree with what Sanders said at the Orpheum. But I'm not going to define my politics going forward based on that disagreement.

This clamorous futility has to end. There's too much at stake. The country is going off the rails and there's a cartoon character at the wheel. Look, instead, to projects like what Al Giordano is doing with his School of Authentic Journalism. He's holding workshops to train organizers, and Al learned his political organizing in Mexico, where voicing the wrong opinion can get you far worse than a spanking on Twitter.

(Full disclosure: Al and I are both Boston Phoenix alums of the old school.)

Jon Ossoff AP

If Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp think they can't survive without throwing Gorsuch a vote, well, I think they're wrong. But engaging either one of them in a doomed primary attempt would be a diversion of energy and money and time that the Democratic minority can ill afford. Look, instead, to what Jon Ossoff is doing down in the Georgia 6th. He's got them running scared—the oppo is beginning to drop—and he's doing it without raking old intra-party wounds and settling old intra-party scores. I'm sure that, if he were to win, one day, he'll cast a vote for which the Purity Brigade will call him a neoliberal. Other people will leap to defend him. I'm also sure that I will not be able to care less about either position.

What I do know is that electing Jon Ossoff gets the country one step closer to Minority Leader Paul Ryan, and that's the game that matters.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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