Blinkered and Selfish

More truth from Charles Blow on the blinkered and selfish idiocy of people who care about racial justice voting third party or not voting at all. I wish he had also made the affirmative case for Clinton on issues of racial justice, rather than just cataloguing the myriad ways in which Trump will affirmatively harm people of color and stymie the cause of racial equality for generations. Blow's argument is applicable to any issue at all in this election, however; you could write the same argument whether it's on reproductive choice, or health care, or the environment -- you name it. It's amazing this has to be spelled out, and how many people can't or refuse to see it.

In fact, it's both maddening and terrifying the way "progressives" wrap themselves in Hillaryhate like a warm cloak of false moral superiority, immune to fact or reason, gleefully vomiting out rightwing smears, wilfully ignorant of historical context, and then calling anyone who points out the underlying practical realities and the context a tool and a stooge. Blow and umpteen others have demonstrated that the practical consequence of voting for a third party will either put Trump in office, or substantially weaken Clinton and downstate Democrats, making it much harder for her and them to enact the progressive agenda of the Democratic platform if she is in fact elected, and that neither of these results can be squared with a "conscience" that cares about end-results for actual people. This is so blindingly obvious, I can't believe it needs to be said, much less over and over, and why it does not make a dent.

I don't know where we go from here, because, as I said back in April, this cancerous line of thought goes deeper than any election -- it's about bias confirmation and rejection of reason, fact, analysis and science, and it's no longer just the right that is infected with it. You see it in the vitriolic and hate-filled language that the Hillaryhaters on the left deploy; in the binary reasoning; in the willful misreading of information to serve a pre-existing agenda; in the intransigent disgust of compromise; in the refusal to acknowledge that issues are complex and that addressing them requires dealing with and trying to satisfy multiple competing constituencies; in the use of personal attacks, labeling and trolling to shut down discourse and even dissent; in the total disregard of and disrespect for other viewpoints. It occurs on both the left and the right, and it's goddamned scary.