Cult of Personality Crisis

Imagine voting for, or supporting, a US presidential candidate because you identify with them, or even worse, because you like them. These are people who you're never going to meet, who don't give a shit about you in any concrete way beyond whether or not you might (or might not) vote for them--I am willing to grant that some candidates might, and this is a big might, care about you in the abstract, i.e. wanting to make the country you live in a better place.

This blog will be most likely be voting for Bernie Sanders in next year's primary because his policies are most in line with what we think is best for the country. This blog doesn't give a shit about Bernie Sanders, the person. Or any other candidate for that matter. If Sanders steps on a homeless person next week, or if someone in his campaign is caught on video slamming a kitten forcefully against a wall, this wouldn't change our vote--because an election is about voting for a person to do a very specific job. And we feel Sanders not only has positions we can get behind, but has held these positions for a very long time, and worked hard as a mayor, and then as a senator, to advance these causes. It is, for us at least, a remarkably easy decision.

He has also shown an ability to listen to criticism, reflect on it, and get better. This is a rarity in contemporary politics.

And if someone else wins the Democratic nomination, whether by means that we consider fair or unfair, this blog will still vote for the Democratic nominee, because the Republican Party is nothing more than a bad faith virus of cruelty.

I write all this in the futile hope that we can avoid a repeat of the tedious screamfest of the 2016 primary--which is still going on, still tedious, still screaming. But then so much of contemporary politics is sports fans screaming about irrelevant nonsense into the void. It's our way of participating, and signals a lack of faith in the actual mechanisms of the election process, a lack of faith that is incredibly well-founded. Nobody is listening, and so everyone is screaming.

But voting for someone because you like them, or not voting for someone because you don't like them, may be the emptiest reason to vote for someone, and seems like a strange thing to be smugly announcing to your followers (what a term--on Twitter we all get to be cult leaders) across your various social media platforms.