If Hillary is such a great candidate, why do we need to talk about Trump at all?

The thing that’s been bothering me the most about the Democrat primary and now the general election is the failure to honestly address the serious failures of governance that lead us to where we are today. People have worries, needs, and fears, and our political class has spent a generation or more ignoring them completely to pursue their own projects. That is what created the space for someone like Trump. People like Hillary Clinton are complicit in creating that culture, and emblematic of it. She didn’t make it, but she is swimming in that soup. Instead of honestly and critically addressing their failure and the problems born of their negligence, they happily paper over it all with the arm-waving panic about Trump, Romney, McCain, Palin, Bush, etc. Yet if you track backward, all the horrors we were told we must avoid occurred anyway. The act of self-defense we were told we must make, even if it seemed counter-intuitive, never defended us. We were given a shield made of the emperor’s clothing — it doesn’t exist outside of the mind.

Yes, Trump is a disaster. A cartoonish disaster, hell, he’s even got the coloring of a character on the Simpsons. We get it. If that’s all they have to offer, pointing out how comically awful a candidate Trump is, and reassuring us that Hillary is definitely not Trump, well… that isn’t any new information. Moreover, and more importantly, it does not speak to how the long-term and fundamental problems within the Democratic party will be addressed. What used to be the party of FDR’s New Deal is now the party of not being Republicans. Where are the ideals? How are they lived out? How do we prove that we believe and live out the things that we say we believe? The Democrats get the credit for being the pro-society, pro-people crusaders without actually having to crusade, simply by virtue of the fact that the Republicans definitely aren’t the crusaders. Unless and until the Democrats do some reflective self-analysis, until they acknowledge responsibility and culpability for the problems that we face today, and until they regain some sense of purpose and principles, there’s nothing in there for us. It’s all down to personality, to the false dichotomy between intentionally bad and intentionally-bad-but-says-nice-things-and-pretends-not-to-be.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe the things that Bernie Sanders stood up and said she believes. She just doesn’t. We all know she doesn’t. If it had been left at “We have to vote for Hillary to stop Trump, but Hillary needs to get on board with…” I might be less vehement. That’s not what they’re doing, though. They’re making the Trump argument, but also offering the delusional lie that Hillary is exactly the candidate we’ve always wanted. Even Bernie is playing along, and it’s a total lie. A bad lie, because there isn’t any possibility of it being taken as objectively true. Only with delusion is it possible. I can not and will not carry that water. If that were the case, no one would even need to mention Trump in the first place. Trump wouldn’t even be a candidate in the first place if the Democrats were governing well. If we can’t acknowledge there’s a problem, we can’t fix it. If we aren’t going to try to fix it, what is my role in this? Why are they asking me to help them not fix anything, and more importantly to me, why are YOU helping them? They are not interested in helping us, that’s a fact.