The Democrats vs. Democracy

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind about the Democratic Party. The first is that the Democrats were the party of the Confederacy and the party of segregation, the party of Vietnam and the party of spying on Martin Luther King. The second is that, given this background, it should not shock us that the Democratic Party has total contempt for democracy.

Here's the operative term: superdelegates. The superdelegates are the smoke-filled room elites' last line of defense against the passions of the masses, or against "democracy", if you want to be uptight about it. While both parties nominally democratized the nominating process through the last half-century, the Democrats always jealously guarded their veto power over the people. Just in case.

Superdelegates must be distinguished from regular delegates, which are akin to the electors of the electoral college. Electors and delegates are an elitist and antidemocratic check on the expressed will of the people, and either institution can occasionally exercise an outright veto over the wishes of the people, as most recently evidence in the coup d'etat of 2000, when nobody even attempted to assert that more Americans had voted for George W. Bush than Al Gore.

As corrupting as delegates and electors may be, they still roughly reflect the will of the people except in rare cases such as 2000, which proved that one exception to the rule is one exception too many and that a universal popular vote is the only way to hold any election. Superdelegates have even more of a stranglehold over the will of the people than electors.

Electors are essentially bound to vote for whichever candidate won their state's popular vote, however thin the margin. Delegates have even more discretion, often giving candidates proportional benefits, therefore wisely averting the winner-take-all flaw. Superdelegates, however, neither owe nor excercise any such discretion.

Superdelegates account for 20% of the total delegates. So, 80% of the Democratic party's electorate is nominally bound to vote in a way that in general reflects the will of the people. The remaining one-fifth can vote for whomever they want, regardless of the will of the people. This means that if there is a race with a margin of less than 20%, the superdelegates decide the winner. That race is now.

Clinton and Obama will be much closer than 20% after all the primaries are over. What then? Do we look at who has more delegates? Do we look at, God forbid, who has more votes? You know, like they do in France and South Korea and fucking Afghanistan? No, we look to the superdelegates. In the blink of an eye, millions of voters are cast aside, including the first generation of young people to be passionate about anything in 40 years. Why? Because the Democrats hate democracy.

The superdelegates are the elitists' defense against the peoples' nomination of a candidate that is deemed too flawed or radical by the elite. Looking past this contempt for the people, Barack Obama is not that candidate. He's not a bombthrower, he's not a pacifist, he's not an atheist. He can win.

The Democratic elite, however, seems to have decided that he can not win. While people of my generation find Obama's ethnicity interesting but ultimately irrelevant, it is clear that many of the party elite doubt that he can win the general election. Certainly the Clinton's have gone to great pains to remind us of this. But since half the country despises Hillary Clinton and the other half despises aristocracy and most of the planet despises the war Hillary voted for, how is she a better candidate? Well, Obama's......black.

What is it called when you define someone by their race? Oh yeah, racist. The Clintonistas assure us they're not racist, then insist that they must destroy the black candidate because Americans are too racist to vote for him. And Hitler killed the Jews to save them from the French, who eventually would have killed them all, as everyone knows. He didn't have anything against the Jews himself, mind you.

Who are these superdelegates? These few, these proud, these shameless who exercise veto power over democracy itself? Well, every Democratic member of Congress is a superdelegate. You know the Congress that has gotten tough on the Bush administration by only allowing him to suspend the Constitution for 6 months at a time rather than indefinately? Yes, those moral giants, those steel-spined statesmen, these 3-day workweek shit heads are going to tell us who our candidate will be.

We also have Democratic National Committee officials, various formerly elected Democratic officials, in short, the party elite. The pathetic, venal, perpetually petrified, perpetually bitching, perpetually powerless, even when they hold the majority, those chumps. They decide. This is unacceptable, and its made even more unacceptable when you realize that superdelegate is a synonym for Clintonista.

The superdelegates have overwhelmingly pledged to support Hillary Clinton, regardless of what "the people" decide. The people, unfortunately did not get the message, and when the convention rolls around, more of "the people", that uncouth rabble, will have voted for Obama. What's a Clinton to do? Well, they burdern is assuaged by the fact that, in addition to scores of people who owe Bill Clinton their careers, Bill and Hillary themselves are superdelegates.

Yes, this deserves its own paragraph: Bill and Hillary Clinton are going to vote for whether Hillary Clinton will be the party's nominee. Not me. Not you. The candidate and her husband and a bunch of people who used to work for her husband and are hoping to work for her. Pakistani much?

The Democratic Party, to put it simply, is poised to inflict a Bush v. Gore on itself. They could have a candidate with the popular mandate, with more votes, standing against a candidate with nothing but the arcane machination of an entrenched elite which, regardless of how you spin it, has contempt for democracy, as understood by the rest of the planet.

One of the most frequent criticisms of the Democratic Party is that they don't trust the people with their own money. Should we really be surprised, then, that they don't trust us with our own votes, either?