I see a lot of sentiment from American liberals and lefties that the United States needs single-payer healthcare, e.g.:

Now, I understand being frustrated with the American healthcare system. But I think – as a person who considers themselves to generally be a member of the left side of the aisle – that one of the reasons I am left-wing is because I think facts are important and it is likewise important that my political opinions be based on factual output. And a lot of liberals – like this guy here – use the phrase “single-payer” like it means “a solved healthcare system” or “what most of the modern world uses” and neither of these things are true. And I say that as someone who lives in a country with an actual single-payer system!

So, let’s go question-and-answer for a while.

What is single-payer healthcare?

It is a healthcare system where either the sole or primary provider of health insurance and/or healthcare is the state. If you get sick, you go to the doctor, you flash your health card (a card that confirms your enrollment in the single-payer healthcare system) and you get treatment. Some systems may require you to purchase supplemental healthcare insurance for certain elements of healthcare provision.

And this is basically what everybody but the United States uses, right?

Oh, heavens no. Canada, the UK, Norway, Sweden and Finland are about the only countries that use anything close to the mental conception most Americans have of “single-payer,” and even all of these countries have some digressions from how single-payer traditionally works. Speaking as a Canadian, here is a short list of things our “single-payer” system doesn’t cover: prescriptions, dental care, vision/optical care, home care, ambulance use, and doctor’s notes. You will note that those are some pretty big gaps there.

Most first-world countries have a sort of mix of private and public care to achieve universal healthcare:

• Japan pays for 70% of everybody’s healthcare expenses up to an individual limit, but it’s on individuals to pay the other 30%. (Japan historically manages this by strictly limiting user fees, but Shinzo Abe seems determined to rework their system entirely so this summary may be out of date within six months of its writing.) It also requires citizens to have personal health insurance, although it maintains an insurance fund for those who cannot afford their own.
• Italy has a system of public hospitals which everybody can use, but also a system of private hospitals which require insurance. Spain does much the same thing.
• France achieves universal care by requiring all citizens to enroll in health insurance plans, which are provided by a small number of national-level non-profit private insurers who deduct their fees from your paycheque and a national fund for the poor/elderly/indigent/etc.
• Germany has about 130 government operated “sickness funds” – government-regulated insurers – which cover about 90% of the population, including everybody who makes less than 50K euro per year, and a system of private insurers who cover the other 10%, who are mostly the upper-class.
• Australia and New Zealand have fairly explicit two-tier systems: medicare-for-all, but better-medicare-if-you-pay-for-it systems.
• The Netherlands requires everybody to get private insurance, which is highly regulated so as to avoid insurer abuse.

…some of those sound sort of like Obamacare. But Obamacare seems sort of bad. What’s the difference?

Well, a few things. (And we’ll continue to call it “Obamacare” rather than “the ACA” because, despite the inaccuracies, why not.)

Firstly, Obamacare was designed to have a Medicaid expansion for poorer people who couldn’t afford insurance on their own. Many states, however – mostly controlled by Republicans – decided that they didn’t want to expand Medicaid but that they still wanted the for-profit insurance subsidies, and sued over this. The Supreme Court sided with the states, because it had a majority of partisan conservatives on it. This created an insurance gap in a lot of states where it was least helpful to have one.

Secondly, Obamacare’s general principle was “for people who make too much to be eligible for Medicaid, even post-expansion, we will subsidize people who cannot afford insurance so they can buy insurance that is decent.” The subsidies were, bluntly, not quite high enough, and as a result some people (although far less than the media might have you believe) have resorted to buying near-worthless high-deductible plans.

Third, Obamacare does nothing to create true cost controls on healthcare expenses. A lot of healthcare in America costs more for no reason other than it costs more. Obamacare did not attack cost controls for a lot of reasons, most notably because Republicans weren’t willing to agree to any such thing, and because Obama couldn’t get some Democratic Senators on board for even minor cost controls – most notably Joe Lieberman, a strong contender for being one of the worst people alive, who utterly refused any “public option” (i.e. a government-run insurer who would force private insurers’s costs downward by offering lower prices) up to and including the idea of expanding Medicare to become a buy-in option for anybody who wished to do so (a position he had previously endorsed, because Joe Lieberman is a terrible person) and as a result Obamacare was forced to pass without a public option.

It should also be noted that any push for cost controls would provoke holy war with both the insurance lobby and doctors (whose salaries are part of the reason prices are high). And people generally like their doctors.

But why didn’t he just go with single-payer –

Because it was not feasible. There’s been this meme created among the left that Obama didn’t try hard enough to pass single-payer, but he didn’t try hard enough to pass single-payer because he had exactly 60 votes in the Senate for approximately nine months, exactly the number necessary to pass a filibuster, which meant that he needed every single Democratic vote to pass anything since the GOP were not going to vote for anything he proposed (up to and including proposals they helped draft, which was the entire point of the “Gang of Six” negotiations in 2009 – getting the GOP to help draft a new healthcare law so it would pass, except they then admitted they wouldn’t vote for it even under those circumstances). Which meant, in turn, that conservative Democrats like Lieberman could hold the entire process hostage. Which they were more than happy to do.

But we should go with single-payer now, right?

Speaking as someone in a single-payer system, it is not all bread-and-roses. Single-payer systems mean that every medical concern can become political drama because the government ultimately decides which treatments it is willing to pay for. This means that anybody dying of, say, some horrible cancer can suggest that the government refusing to pay for a given treatment which might still be considered experimental can turn it into a wedge issue. It doesn’t have to be life-or-death stuff either; last year in Ontario parents of kids with autism successfully lobbied for extended treatment schedules for their kids.

Single-payer also means that the government has to guarantee a given standard of coverage geographically speaking. That means patients in rural areas need service guarantees. That gets expensive too. And, of course, because single-payer usually means stretching care dollars as much as possible, it does generally correlate with increased wait times for services. Not perfectly and not so dramatically as a lot of American conservatives pretend – but it is a pressure more or less inherent to the system.

What Americans should do is recognize that Obamacare mostly does what it set out to do: vastly expand healthcare coverage, most of which is reasonably good coverage. Most of what it does is politically popular. The problems with it are relatively straightforward: the subsidies aren’t large enough, the system is still somewhat byzantine and some states are interfering with the Medicaid expansion. Neither of these problems are unsolvable in and of themselves: increase the subsidy level, for example (and offset it with a new tax of some kind) and you’ve fixed 90% of the problems with coverage, and then can turn your attention to cost controls as the next issue to resolve once everybody has their insurance and is all “this is pretty great.” (Well, except for the bit where most of the anti-Obamacare animus is actually racially driven. Good luck with that.)

But for crissake, The Left, stop insisting that single-payer is the only way to go. It isn’t. Most of the countries with the best for-dollar health outcomes don’t even use single-payer. “Single-payer” has become a sort of meme rather than anything meaningful, a way for progressives to show their lefty bona fides by being Against The System, Man, and isn’t Obamacare just a sop to insurance companies by making us pay for insurance? Well, yes, but insurance mandates aren’t a new thing: most non-single-payer countries have them, and even most single-payer countries which just take the money out of your taxes directly are usually paying private healthcare providers anyway so it’s almost always a transfer of public money to private concerns. What matters is how well that transfer is regulated and the quality of service received. “Single payer” doesn’t really move that needle at all.

Let me just explain why this is bad, because it is bad on multiple levels and thus frustrating to watch. (I checked out around, oh, Moby or thereabouts.)

1.) It is essentially impossible to do. First off, the members of the Electoral College – and particularly the Republican members of the Electoral College – are, to a one, party loyalists. That’s why they became electors in the first place. These are not people you are going to easily peel off from the Republican party, regardless of how corrupt, incompetent or awful Donald Trump is. Saying “just thirty-seven of you need to not vote for Donald Trump” is like saying “you only need to climb thirty-seven mountains.” It is not technically impossible, but for practical intents and purposes given the time frame you are working with, it might as well be. These aren’t Democrats, who consider themselves all to be precious flowers and therefore will generate electors who are oh-so-special that they can’t in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton. When Republican electors felt they couldn’t in good conscience vote for Trump, they resigned.

2.) It is mostly pointless because there is no superior option available. At this point it seems worth reminding that the grand plan of the “Hamilton electors” (and I love Hamilton, but god, I hate the effect it’s had on political discourse sometimes) is to create a situation where the House of Representatives gets to determine who will be the next President. Firstly, it is worth remembering that the House is Republican anyway, and the most likely thing they will do is vote for Donald Trump anyway, because the GOP base loves Trump and the GOP likely understands that if they were to vote for anybody else to be President they would get slaughtered in 2018 and 2020, because they’d be under attack both from the Democrats on the left1 and from Trump and his loyalists on the right.

But let’s say the House decides to vote for somebody else other than Donald Trump. You’re not going to get anybody reasonable. You’re not even going to get Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, who would be a right-wing conservative President but maybe not totally wreck everything. You’re going to get Mike Pence, who is a Christian dominionist in all but name and will pass laws to make it legal to discriminate against gays whenever and wherever, or you will get Paul Ryan, who will work overtime to completely destroy the social safety nets of America in favour of tax cuts for the rich, or you will get Marco Rubio, who actively advocated for a Muslim registry harder than Donald Trump did, or you will get John Kasich, who will pass anti-abortion laws throughout the country. And really, any one of these people will give you all of those things, plus destroying civil rights, environmental protections, labor laws and giving you as many far-right Supreme Court justices as they can possibly manage while gerrymandering districts and killing voter protections as much as possible to ensure that their system of minority rule can remain intact.

No matter what happens with the Electoral College, the next President will be a disaster for anybody who cares about the rule of law, because the GOP as a whole actively does not consider anybody to the left of Lindsay Graham to be allowed to govern. You’re already seeing this in North Carolina, where the GOP lost the governorship and the Supreme Court and reacted by introducing reams of emergency legislation to take away the governor’s traditional powers and give them to the gerrymandered legislature they still control. You saw it for six years of the GOP Congress under Obama, ending with their refusal to even vote on (much less confirm) his Supreme Court nominee. Now that they have power, they’re going to actively work to cement their stranglehold on political control, regardless of the fact that they’re less popular than the actual majority vote by far.

Yes, Trump will be worse than any of the other options, because he will be personally and systematically corrupt, and because he will be much more disastrous on foreign policy as tyrants seek to buy him off (and that will happen). But in the end, Trump’s move to fascism will simply be overt, as opposed to the stealthy fascism the GOP will institute, and frankly, it’s probably going to be easier to oppose if it is overt.

Finally, 3.) It is antidemocratic and democratic principles matter. Let’s be honest: if the tables were switched and Clinton had won the EC but lost the popular vote, and Trump was personally campaigning to have electors switch the vote because he won the popular vote, we would rightly call that deplorable. The election of 2016 was conducted under a set of rules to which all parties agreed2 and Trump won under those rules.3 The fact that the Electoral College has an escape switch that is archaic and has not been used in literally centuries does not mean anybody should seek to use it, regardless of whatever the fuck Alexander Hamilton wrote about it. Remember: Alexander Hamilton also helped design the Electoral College working under the impression that political parties wouldn’t exist, which was one of the stupider things he believed, so maybe let’s not be those people who fetishize what the Founding Fathers wrote because they got a lot of shit just wrong.

There’s no easy way to say this: you either care about the rule of law or you don’t. As a liberal, I care about the rule of law because I think it is important for people to have the opportunity to self-determine how they are governed. That’s literally the entire point of democracy. When I see my fellow libs and lefties growing despondent because Donald Trump won a minority of the popular vote and effectively only won on technicalities and now will move to seize power, I can understand that because it’s saddening. It actively hurts to recognize that the other side of the political spectrum has finally abandoned all pretense of comity or political principle and become motivated solely by the opportunity to exercise power.

But that doesn’t make me want to abandon rule of law. It doesn’t make me want to abandon my principles. I believe in democracy and no feeble MAGA-hat wearing motherfucker is going to make me think differently about that.4 And if you’ve given up on democracy, I don’t know why you’re wasting time supporting this fucked up “Hamilton electors” plan; you might as well just go get a rifle and start picking your targets, because if you’ve decided that all that matters is the exercise of power, you’re effectively just Che Guevara in nicer clothes.

Important: Do not go get a rifle and start picking targets, for crissake. That was hyperbole.

Instead of that, and instead of the stupid electoral college plan, what you and all other lib/left Americans should be doing is, well, all of this. Use your voice proactively to build towards 2018 (not 2020, 2018 – the governorships and Congress matter tremendously right away for protecting voter rights and preventing gerrymandering), and start right now. You know this can work, because the Tea Party used exactly these same tactics to overwhelm the GOP and turn it into a permanent clown college. There is no reason not to do the same, except for much better and more productive and fairer ends. Go on. Do the work.

1. Well, hopefully; it’s the Democratic party and we should never underestimate their capacity to try to Be Reasonable And Work With The Other Side no matter how terrible the other side is. [↩]
2. Granted, there was not a lot of choice about the agreement, but consenting to work within a system is de facto consent to it. [↩]
3. Do not even start with the recount thing. If there was any chance the recounts could actually have turned things around, the Clinton campaign would have been on them like white on rice. [↩]
4. As a Canadian I of course extend this disgust towards Kellie Leitch wholeheartedly. Fuck you, Kellie. You’re the goddamn worst. [↩]

Last night, I took my son out to a revival of the…classic? Yes, let’s say classic, for a given value of the word…1980 ‘Flash Gordon’ movie. I was enjoying the heck out of it, as I do every time I watch it; the movie hits that exact sweet spot of camp and sincerity, where everyone knows what they’re doing is silly and they exaggerate all their performances but at the same time they’re treating the silliness of the material with respect. (My kid loved it too, although I was surprised to remember just how scary some of those scenes can be to a ten-year old.)

But as I was watching it, I started to notice that…well, look. There’s no way to be watching a film right now about a tyrannical, capricious madman who has grown decadent with a lifetime of power, treats women as playthings and concubines, and has an equally jaded and debauched daughter that he has a…complicated…relationship with, and not think of the current political climate. I found myself picturing Donald and Ivanka at the inauguration, watching the protesters, and Ivanka asking, “Why is water coming out of their eyes?” With Donald, of course, responding, “It’s what they call tears. It’s a sign of their weakness.”

Likewise, I’m pretty sure that Donald and Melania’s wedding vows actually included the line, “Do you, Donald the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this woman Melania to be your Trumpess of the hour?” “Of the hour, yes.”

I’m not quite sure where everyone else fits into this prophetic scenario, though. Klytus seems to be pretty obviously Pence. It’s just possible he could be Bannon, but I don’t think Bannon’s that calculating. Kala is obviously Kellyanne Conway. Which would make Prince Barin…Jared Kushner? Definitely all the rulers of the kingdoms of Mongo are prominent Republicans who are being played against one another to keep them from uniting against Trump, but I’m not sure you can assign any particular role to any particular Prince. If nothing else, I just cannot fucking picture Paul Ryan shouting, “Representatives…DIIIIIIIIVE!” (But I can picture them responding to a request to team up against Trump with, “‘Team up’? What does that mean?”)

Of course, this is tremendously illuminating in terms of what it means for Trump’s plans for America. “…they won’t be the same human beings. They’ll be more docile. Tractable. […] Let’s just say they’ll be satisfied with less.” (I don’t know if the earthquakes and tidal waves will be literal, but given Trump’s stance on climate change I’m not yet willing to rule it out.)

On the other hand, it looks like there’s a distinct possibility that Mike Pence will be impaled on a bed of spikes sometime in the next four years, and Conway will literally melt. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

What does all this mean? I’m not sure. But if the quarterback for the New York Jets decides to run for President in four years, I’m voting for them even if it seems like political suicide. Because it’s not suicide, it’s a rational transaction.

(Also, if Trump does get re-elected, he probably shouldn’t do any appearances right in front of a big picture window. Just sayin’.)

I’ve thankfully never been in a position where someone in my family withdrew all my life savings and entrusted it to a sweaty guy in a cheap suit who promised to triple our money but whose name autocompletes to “con artist” in a Google search, all because of a number of vague and shifting rationales that mostly seem to carefully tiptoe around the number of black and Latino people working at the bank because they’re totally not racist…but if I had, I imagine it would hit like this election is hitting now.

It’s hard to look at my fellow Americans the same way. Even knowing that Hillary won the popular vote, even knowing that voter apathy and voter suppression means that Trump garnered no more than 25% of the population’s support, it still just makes me wonder what else I assumed about the fundamental intelligence and decency of the people around me that is wrong. Because in the end, that is what everyone got so wrong about Trump–we assumed that because he’s such an obvious, piss-poor liar and because he’s left behind such a clear and unmistakable trail of financial ruination of anyone who ever trusted him in his wake, that there’s no way the American people would fall for his lies just because he pandered to their worst instincts. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, but I don’t think anything has ever hurt this much to be wrong about. I wanted to believe that America was better than this. And we’re not.

And now…every day brings worse news. The Cabinet that Trump is assembling can best be described as “kakistocracy”, the rule of the worst. We have a new Secretary of Education who wants a repeal of the child labor laws, a Secretary of Defense with the charming nickname of “Mad Dog”, a National Security Adviser who was kicked out of the military for assaulting his staffers, and an Attorney General who was deemed too racist to become a judge. By Reagan. And let’s not forget Steve Bannon, the closest we have gotten to a literal Nazi in the White House. We can all try to be optimistic, and hope that somehow this assemblage of the least competent human beings ever will somehow cobble together a functional government, but the potential damage here is virtually unlimited.

And of course, we have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a conservative Supreme Court. This is the closest we’ve come in a good fourteen years to a rubber stamp for every dumbass idea the Republicans have ever come up with, and they’ve gotten a lot dumber over the last fourteen years. Well, at least the House and the White House has. The faint hope remaining for sane Americans is that the Republican majority in the Senate is tiny, and many of the more moderate members won’t have to face re-election until 2020 or later and can kick Trump’s crazier ideas to the curb. It’s going to be hard to get sixty votes for a lot of Trump’s proposals. And John Roberts, at least, has no interest in telling stare decisis to get fucked just because the Republicans want to overturn settled constitutional law. He doesn’t want to be remembered by history as the 21st century Roger Taney.

But that means that best case scenario, we’re looking at eight years of Republican obstruction of good ideas followed by four years of Democratic obstruction of bad ideas. Which amounts to twelve years of inaction on pressing crises. There’s no way to see this as anything other than a disaster. I’m tired of casting blame over whose fault it was, because in an election this close virtually any factor could have been the deciding factor, but I think that Democrats and progressives need to work pretty damn hard over the next four years. We need to make sure that Republicans do at least pay lip service to their oaths of office–this will probably at some point involve impeaching Trump, who looks to be approaching the Presidency with the same mindset that he approaches charity, namely “How can I shovel as much money into my pockets as I can while giving as few fucks as possible about anyone who isn’t me?” I guarantee you, we are less than a year out from a scandal that would have gotten Obama thrown out of office so fast his head would spin were the parties reversed.

We’ve also got a duty of care to the people around us. There are a lot of vulnerable people right now, in a position where the emboldened racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic/xenophobic bigots of America feel emboldened to take out their worst impulses on the defenseless. I’m not saying “Go out and buy a gun,” here, but be prepared to do things like give to the food shelf at your local Muslim community center. Make sure your LGBTQ friends and family have emotional support, including suicide prevention lines. Call your local Congressperson every time the Republicans try something stupid and don’t be afraid to yell. We can all be an active and present force for kindness and decency in our everyday lives, and there’s never been a time when it’s more needed.

But more than that, we have to mount legal challenges to gerrymandering and voter obstruction laws, and we have to make them stick. We have to find candidates that inspire people, not just ones that are capable–and frankly, they need to be candidates who reflect the diversity of the coalition that brought Democrats to power. Bernie Sanders is a great guy with wonderful ideas, but he’s yet another elderly white person who assumes that their progressive credentials authorize them to speak in lieu of actual minorities. (And bluntly, he does so cluelessly–telling black people that their issues are class issues does not fly after Tamir Rice.) That kind of candidate is not going to cut it in a post-Obama Democratic Party. And we have to say that while reaching out to white Trump supporters is all well and good, we are not going to compromise with them on human rights issues under any circumstances. The humanity of women and minorities is not negotiable.

Of course, just thinking about all that work, all that hate that we have to counter all over again like the last sixty years never happened, all the exhausting effort of once again cleaning up after a Republican shitshow only this time on steroids…it’s enough to make you curl up into a little ball and whimper. It’s dispiriting and demoralizing. So one other thing we have to do is give ourselves permission to think about other things sometimes. To let ourselves laugh at the absurdity of it all, even as we rail against the injustice. To every once in a while just not be fair or nice to the opposition even though we stand for fairness and niceness, because sometimes you just gotta call a dumbfuck a dumbfuck to their face. Molly Ivins said it better than I ever will:

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

So that’s what. We’ve got a screaming dipshit for a President. Whatever else we do, let’s at least have a little fun at his expense for the next four years.

Okay. It is, officially, the last fucking Friday I will have to think about this fucking election one way or the other, and my blood pressure is through the charts and I’m jittery and I can’t even fucking look at FiveThirtyEight anymore without having a panic attack. So let’s take a moment to make the last case you will ever need to hear for going out on November 8th and voting for Hillary Clinton. And because it is the last case, it’s going to be a doozy. Ready?

1) Trump is the worst major-party candidate ever to run for President. It is, at this point, not an argument. He is a pathological liar, a grifter, a con artist, a crook. He has aligned himself with foreign governments whose outlook is antithetical to the American way of life. He has actual fucking MOB TIES. He is a serial sexual predator. He has repeatedly and openly advocated for American troops to commit war crimes. He is so thoroughly incompetent and disinterested in becoming competent that the keystone of his foreign policy is an unworkable boondoggle that everyone understands will achieve no realistic or meaningful goal. His tax policy, such as it is, will blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in the national debt. He has forcefully and continuously expressed his admiration of autocratic dictators, and suggested on multiple occasions that he will use the power of the Presidency to punish people who he dislikes. He courts white supremacists and racists while parroting their opinions literally verbatim on multiple occasions. He traffics in the most deranged conspiracy theories to the point of inviting their promulgators to his inner circle. He is actively managing a campaign to suppress the votes of people he feels are inclined to support his opponent. He is not simply manifestly unqualified to be President, he is actively and dangerously inclined to treat the Presidency as a means to aggrandize his personal wealth and power at the expense of democracy itself.

Four years ago, I said that while I didn’t think that Romney would be a bad President if elected, I thought that he could not be allowed to succeed through a campaign of sheer and unmitigated mendacity. This is incalculably worse. Giving the Presidency to Donald Trump would be like letting Bernie Madoff run our country. It is imperative that he lose the election, by as large a margin as possible so as to remove his potential excuses of “voter fraud”.

2) Hillary Clinton is actually a very good candidate. At this point, Hillary Clinton has endured more petty bullshit than any candidate in recent memory, and I say this knowing that we have a man in the Oval Office who many people still think is a secret Muslim who’s planning to take away our guns. (Better get on that, Barry!) The Republicans have been salting the ground against a potential Hillary candidacy for a solid twenty-five years now, beginning with her inability to properly bake cookies like a good Presidential wife and continuing on to criticize every decision she ever made while holding political office and quite a few that she didn’t, and they’re currently laying the groundwork for impeaching her before she’s even taken office on the grounds that she probably did something bad. (If you enjoyed the 60+ attempts to repeal Obamacare, just wait until the monthly impeachment trials!) If you think that the fact that the Republicans have been solidly and unrelentingly committing character assassination against her for a quarter-century and your mild dislike of the woman is mere coincidence, you are deluding yourself. Hillary is the victim of a smear campaign, and her approval rating only shows that it’s working.

Is she a little secretive? Yes, but no more than could be expected from a woman who’s had her Secret Service agents write tell-all biographies about her, her husband testify about his sex life in court, and Russian spies hacking her assistant’s emails. Is she hawkish? No more or less so than any other serious political candidate we’ve ever had in the last century or so because the US has been intertwined with global politics in complicated ways that make it difficult if not impossible to avoid the use of force at times, and neither isolationism nor pacifism is particularly practical as a stance right now. Is she corrupt? Oferfucksake. No. She’s not corrupt. She is literally being accused of corruption by a man who has made a career out of sticking other people with the losses for his business failures and runs a charity as his personal piggy bank, as part of an elaborate “I’m rubber you’re glue” distraction from multiple pending civil suits against him for fraudulent business practices. Don’t fall for it.

Hillary Clinton is an intelligent, dedicated civil servant who is going to do her damnedest to make the world a better place. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or has been suckered by lies.

3) Voting for a third-party candidate helps Trump. There are two third-party candidates running this year, Gary Johnson of the Libertarians and Jill Stein of the Greens, about which more later. Neither one stands even the tiniest snowball’s chance in hell of voting. If your vote is going from Hillary Clinton to either one of these candidates, you are reducing the margin of victory for Hillary because she loses a vote and Trump doesn’t. If enough people do this extraordinarily stupid thing then the margin of victory will go below zero and Trump will win, and there is a non-zero chance the human race will perish in a nuclear holocaust. (Oh, right. I forgot to mention that under Item #1, he has no understanding of military strategy or tactics and apparently thinks that nuclear weapons are an acceptable first-strike option. This is how bad Trump is. “Nuclear holocaust” is something that gets lost in the motherfucking shuffle.)

Even if you’re not convinced on a personal level by Items 1 and 2, saying “But I want to vote with my conscience” or “I want to vote for the candidate that best aligns with my personal beliefs” is essentially admitting that you don’t understand how math works as a practical option. If the gas company tells you, “You have to pay the gas bill or we will shut your heat off and you will freeze to death,” it is not a practical solution to say, “Oh yeah? Well I don’t like the gas company, so I’m going to buy a pack of matches as a protest vote!” If your doctor tells you, “You have gangrene in your leg and you must amputate your leg or you will die,” you do not get to say, “It’s so unjust that I only have two options! I think I’m going to get a shot of penicillin instead because I want to send a message!” Whether you like it or not, this election is Clinton vs. Trump. That choice is clear and inarguable unless you are a dumb and/or crazy person.

4) Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are terrible candidates. They’re not as bad as Trump, because it is literally not possible to be as bad as Trump unless a man with quirkily mismatched glasses has nicknamed you “The Smiler” and maybe not even then, but they are manifestly incompetent, unqualified, and ideologically fringe on a level that they can only get away with because they’re so obviously not going to win that media coverage of their campaigns has been reduced to, “Aww, look! They’re giving a speech just like a real candidate!” Anyone who tells you they are voting for either one of these two because they want someone better than Hillary either hasn’t done their homework or is a fucking lunatic.

Gary Johnson is backing a tax plan that he quite clearly doesn’t understand and which all credible economists agree is regressive and hopelessly inadequate. He wanted to eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, then backed down from that statement on live television while admitting he doesn’t actually know what those departments do. He justified his ignorance of global politics by saying that you’re more likely to go to war in other countries if you know where they are. His own Vice-Presidential candidate isn’t willing to say on the record that he’s qualified to run the country.

Jill Stein, despite being a motherfucking medical doctor, is spouting bullshit about “toxic mercury” being found in vaccines because she doesn’t want to antagonize her base. She has publicly said that she’s not willing to rule out wifi causing brain damage. Her central fiscal policy depends on what she has literally called “a magic trick” to make money suddenly exist, one which absolutely everyone who has ever looked at it has called actual fucking gibberish. Oh and her VP appears to be an anti-Semite.

And even if some miracle happened and these two were elected and proved to be more competent than their stated political stances would indicate, they have fuck-all hope of getting anything done because they have no base in Congress. Their respective terms of office would be disasters, and no responsible person should vote for them. If you don’t think the Democratic Party is representing your views, get involved in local politics. If you want a viable third party, work at the local level to stand sensible candidates. But for this election, vote Hillary.

5) A write-in is an abstention, an abstention is a vote for Trump. Again, the Trump supporters are going to turn out in force to support their candidate, because they’re all aware this is probably their best chance to get an open white supremacist and misogynist into power who’s willing to use the office to punish women and minorities. There are also people who are going to turn out for him out of a blind obligation to the Republican Party, who has been derelict in their duty on an unprecedented scale here. But these people are a tiny sliver of this country’s eligible voters. Trump cannot win if turnout is high, because he is thoroughly despised. His only hope is if most of the people who despise him are too apathetic to do anything about it. If he can keep his base energized and nobody else shows up, he wins. In case I wasn’t yet clear enough, THIS IS BAD.

Go vote. If you can, do it right now. Early voting has already started in most states, and you can go here to find out more:

https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/

If you can’t vote now, vote on election day. You will spend four years or the rest of your life, whichever is shorter, regretting it if Trump wins. Don’t do that. Vote, and vote for Hillary.

Thus endeth the passionate advocacy.

There’s been (and I know this will kind of surprise you, but it’s true) a lot of analysis of the ways that the historical arc of the Republican Party has finally led us to a living elevator fart loudly arguing that we just shouldn’t bother holding the election because he wants to be President. People have talked about economic insecurity, racial animus, anti-Washington sentiment, sexism, misogyny, and a party apparatus that seemed bizarrely happy to bend to a knife at their own throats. But one of the things that I think hasn’t received enough attention is the way that the Republican victories of 2000 and 2002 paved the way for their eventual disarray and internal strife.

If you go back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you’ll no doubt remember a country that was pretty solidly united behind President George W. Bush. The 2002 elections gave the Republicans control of the House and Senate, as well as many state legislatures and governorships. Karl Rove, who was at that time tremendously influential in the party apparatus, decided to use this control as part of an ambitious scheme to give the Republicans a “permanent majority”, using detailed demographic information to redraw the political map in a way that made many districts so safe that any Republican could win them. (This scheme was furthered in 2010, by an additional round of redistricting, but it began in 2002.) At the time, this seemed like a plan to consolidate Republican control for generations to come…but I’d argue that it was, in outcome, a plan to permanently destroy the Republican Party. And we’re only now beginning to see how devastating it was.

Because the Republicans of the 90s, for all that they were already beginning to stoke the politics of racial resentment and mindless opposition to the Democrats on any issue, were also ferociously disciplined in getting their members to fall in line for a unified party agenda. Newt Gingrich…look, I can’t stand the man. I’m not saying I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, but I will say that I probably would if he weren’t. But he was a very effective Speaker of the House, and he even managed to work with Democrats from time to time on genuinely bipartisan bills. The Republicans were not, as they are now, in constant danger of throwing coups against their own leadership for being insufficiently batshit fucking crazy.

What changed? Simple. Back in those days, the Republican Party had leverage over its own members. Republican representatives had to go back to their home districts every two years and campaign, and those campaigns required them both to be reasonably responsive to the needs of their constituents and to stay in the good graces of their party. Competitive campaigns cost money, usually more than a representative could raise on their own, and the Republican Party tended to remember at election time when someone was off on their own criticizing their party leaders and who was a good soldier. That party discipline was frustrating at times, because it meant that Democrats couldn’t appeal to the conscience of individual members to peel away their votes on key issues, but it also meant that the party couldn’t be hijacked by rogue factions.

Rove changed all that. By making safe districts in which Republicans no longer needed to worry about re-election, he ensured that the party apparatus had no control over its members. Republicans no longer had to care about whether the RNC would support them through a tough campaign, because there were no tough campaigns anymore. Instead, Republicans now had to deal with competitive primaries, where they faced challengers not from the left but from the right. This was a huge problem, because they’d spent the best part of two decades motivating the base to vote with increasingly paranoid and racist rhetoric in the sure and certain knowledge that they would be selecting the candidates that the base voted for.

Instead, the base is selecting their own candidates. Those candidates are now running in non-competitive seats, and frequently campaigning and voting against the very idea of the party establishment. They believe the rhetoric that was once cynically deployed in service of keeping the legislature in safe hands, and the Republicans are increasingly finding that they have no levers to pull to keep them in line. And now that Republican extremists are in power, they have more authority and a bigger spotlight from which to promote their positions. This leads to more extremist candidates standing for election, all the way up the ladder to the national Presidential race. Trump’s defeat of the GOP establishment can be directly traced back to this decision to make a “safe space” for right-wingers. The moderates, in the hopes of removing their obstacles to power, may have removed themselves as an obstacle to others instead.

Ironically, it may be Obama who winds up saving the Republican Party from their own worst elements. He’s already announced that his post-Presidential goals are to challenge the Republican drawn maps as gerrymandering and force them to create more representative districts once more. Perhaps when the ultra-right wingers are forced to contend with actual voters, we’ll see at least a moderate amount of sanity return to the Republican Party. Until then, the redistricting plan seems to be going down in history as a classic example of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for…because you just might get it.”

After a long stretch of being wrong about how far naked and unashamed xenophobia could take someone in the current iteration of the Republican Party, it seems like I’m on much firmer ground in predicting Donald Trump’s path through the general election. I was right in saying that the media have no real interest in promoting Trump’s counter-narratives about Clinton, because watching the first-ever total implosion of a major party candidate in real time is great television. (Notably, his only strong stretch in the polls this entire season was between Conway’s hiring and the first debate, when she kept him relentlessly on-script and took away his opportunities to freelance.)

More germane to the last week or so, I was also right in thinking that once Trump started getting serious media scrutiny, he wouldn’t be able to take the heat. He held off scrutiny on his tax returns, but only because he’s now far too busy defending himself from upwards of a dozen allegations of sexual assault that he essentially confessed to into a hot mike. He’s a hot mess of a disaster of a candidate, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer by the day as his response to virtually every challenge is to flail in an incoherent baby temper tantrum, call his opponents playground slurs, and try to find someone else to blame for his failures.

And that brings me to the third thing I was right about. I have been saying ever since Trump’s first polling meltdown, shortly after the convention, that if Trump got behind in October he would spend the last month of his campaign trying to find someone to pin the blame on rather than trying to win, because Trump is a narcissist as well as a misogynist and the preservation of his ego holds a higher priority for him than anything else. He can’t handle losing, he especially can’t handle losing to a woman, and so if he isn’t going to be President then he knows that it must be somebody’s fault. So I knew that October would be a month of Donald Trump blaming the GOP for his failure, simply because they’re the only possible suspects once you eliminate Hillary (who, as a woman, simply isn’t capable of beating TRUMP!)

I don’t mention this to boast, though. I mention this because I want to make it clear that I really thought I was braced for this. I really did think that I understood what it meant to have a solid month of Donald Trump running smack into the brick wall of his own incompetence and throwing a month-long pity party for himself with the cameras all pointed at him to catch his miserable, mean-spirited, petty spite in all its magnificent glory. I thought I might even enjoy some of it.

OH GOD WAS I WRONG. This is…this is seriously the most chilling, creepy, horrifying and horrible week of politics we’ve ever had in American history. This is Donald Trump being revealed as a serial sexual predator, and finding a posse of sleazy apologists who will go out and say, as a Hail Mary strategy for getting their pal an office that they manifestly have not even considered whether or not he deserves, that the accusations against Trump are all lies, slander and misconstruals of innocent comments from over a decade ago and should be ignored…but that Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults are all the gospel truth from wronged women who have been silenced for over thirty years and disqualify his wife from office.

In other words, they’re out there saying, “We can’t afford to have a sleazy, perverted, gross dirty old man getting into the White House. VOTE TRUMP!”

I anticipated that Trump would go after his own party. I did not anticipate the sheer, pathetic, unmitigated moral cowardice with which the GOP would greet these attacks. I did not expect that after a tape surfaced of the candidate openly boasting about his ability to commit sexual assault and get away with it, followed by a dozen corroborating stories from women in his past, that the response from the Republican Party would be, “Um, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but, um… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

And while I expected Trump would descend into paranoid fantasies to preserve his ego, I really didn’t think we’d get a rally where he flat-out said that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with “the international bankers” (I’m actually kind of amazed he avoided saying “Zionist”) to destroy the United States of America by rigging the election with the help of a complicit GOP. I did not think we would get to the point where he literally accused his political opponent of being the Devil. I did not think that Trump would preserve his fantasies of being a political messiah by literally inciting crowds to revolt in the event that he was not elected. I thought I was braced for a crazy October, but the crazy is now coming thicker and faster than I was emotionally prepared for.

And I don’t know when it will stop. At this point, I would be entirely unsurprised if another thirty or forty women come forward before Election Day; Trump has had decades of unrestrained and unpunished privilege in which to assault women, and I’m sure the only question is how many of them are willing to talk about it. And I think that Trump will get more and more unhinged as his accounts finally come due. But I no longer feel like I know what it means for a major-party candidate to be unveiled as a grifter and sexual predator with the whole world watching, less than a month before we elect our first woman to the Oval Office. It’s just too damn motherfucking nuts right now to get a grip on.

I guessed some of this stuff in principle, but…in practice, being right about it doesn’t fucking help.

Recently got an email, the hey portion of which was (I am editing a bit for clarity):

“I’m not going to vote for Trump, obviously. But I have to admit I am leery of voting for Hillary. I mean – I understand that she’s been targeted by the right wing, I get it, but the Clinton Foundation stuff seems uncomfortably close to pay-for-play to me. Can you make me feel better about it?”

Sure. It’s actually remarkably easy.1

First off, a caveat: all of the following makes one assumption, which is “Hillary Clinton is extremely intelligent.” I’m not worried about her morality or lack thereof here, you can have your own beliefs about that. I personally think she’s a person who has a moral code she takes seriously, and has political positions – particularly with her views on the use of American military power – with which I disagree. But that’s me, you can think different about that. However, if you think Hillary Clinton is stupid – not “disagrees with me politically,” not “is crooked and amoral,” but stupid – then honestly, I don’t know what the point of this even is, you’re just a dipshit living in a mirror universe. But anyway.

Okay, caveat finished. Here are some important facts. Not theories about Hillary Clinton: just facts.

One: Hillary Clinton (and Bill) at this point have publicly released their tax returns for every year since 1977.2 Obviously their post-Presidential incomes are the most important. The thing about their returns is this: they are mostly very straightforward and kind of boring. The Clintons earn employment income from Bill and Hillary making speeches, and Hillary’s various government salaries as a Senator and then Secretary of State, and also there’s Bill’s presidential pension. Their investment strategies are as straightforward as their income: they have a large cash interest-bearing cash account and a large investment in a dividend-bearing mutual fund, and that’s it. They co-ordinate their charitable donations through a nonprofit charitable foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation (which is distinct from the Clinton Foundation that is the cause of all the concern and hubbub – that’s the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation): you can look at the CFF’s 2014 tax return here and there’s a list of charities they donate to at the end. A lot of Arkansas-based charities, unsurprisingly, but the charitable foundations of their alma maters are there too, their church in Chappaqua, New York, and the American Heart Association, and a few other things (and, yes, the WJ Clinton Foundation gets a lot from them as well). Basically the CFF is a bank account that serves as a hub for the Clintons’ charitable spending.

Two: For those concerned, a list of organizations that have paid Hillary to speak can be found here, albeit with some right-wing demonizing. But the list itself is correct.3

Three: Hillary mostly charges $225,000 per speech. This seems excessive to us proles, who don’t make that much in a year or even multiple years. However, it is certainly not excessive considering how much your average famous person charges for a speech. Here is one speaking organizer agency’s list of speaker fees of famous people who command over $200,000 per speech. You will note the list includes Dr. Oz, Chris Colfer, Nate Berkus, Kate Bosworth, Larry the Cable Guy, Steffi Graf, and a Dutch DJ named “Tiesto.” Hillary Clinton is much, much more famous than all of those people and is far more important/has done far more important things than all of them. It is entirely accurate to say that while speaking fees generally may be ridiculously high, Hillary Clinton’s are not particularly exceptional. (Bill, incidentally, apparently charges about $400,000-500,000 per speech. Of course, there are only four living ex-Presidents right now so it’s not unreasonable for them to have a higher rate.)

Four: The Clinton Foundation’s annual financial reports and tax forms are all public (they are here). They used to have a bad rating from CharityWatch because they had not publicly released all their records, but once they did release their records, CharityWatch gave them a very high rating. The Foundation’s overhead expenses constitute 12% of its spending; the average charity in the United States has overhead expenses of approximately 25%. The Clinton Foundation spends most of its money on, well, good works – their programs have been widely praised for their effectiveness – the Clinton Health Access Intiative, a subsidiary charity run by the Foundation which helps poor countries combat medical plagues such as HIV and malaria, gets the bulk of the operations money. There’s very little opportunity for the Foundation to enrich the Clintons (who haven’t been board members of it for years and do not draw a salary from the Foundation) or for that matter anybody else.

Five: There’s been some hubbub recently re: Clinton Foundation donors getting access to Hillary while she was Secretary of State, but the hubbub is mostly baseless. John Aravoisis pointed out yetserday that the AP’s reporting on this was actively getting numbers wrong to inflate the number of donors who actually met with Hillary. Others have pointed out that many of the donors who did meet with Hillary while she was SoS were people she would probably meet with anyway: the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who runs an OPEC member nation which sells oil to the United States, doesn’t really need to donate money to the Foundation to warrant a meeting with Hillary Clinton. Neither does Muhammad Yunis, Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank. There’s evidence that a lot of Foundation donors wanted or hoped to meet with Hillary, but not a lot that most of them actually got to do so. As Kevin Drum summed up well enough:

So here are several possible takes on Hillary:

1. Powerful people all run in the same circles. They all know each other. They all ask favors from one another. Hillary is part of this circle.

2. People who are big party donors and big policy influencers have more access to politicians than, say, you or me. On this score, Hillary is a garden variety politician.

3. Donating to the Clinton Foundation was a well-known requirement for getting a meeting with Hillary.

I’ve simply seen no evidence of #3, and that includes the AP’s strained effort yesterday. Besides, if this were truly well known, by now someone would have come forward to spill the beans. As for #1 and #2, I don’t doubt that they’re as true of Hillary as they are of every other politician in the country. This might be an unfortunate state of affairs, but it’s certainly no scandal.

So, all of that having been said: why am I not concerned about Hillary Clinton’s corruption? I am not concerned about it because, for the most part, there’s no there there.

Look. The Clintons’ income is, as I said, straightforward. It’s boring in a very telling way, because the Clintons could be earning much more money than they do. Neither of them sits on any corporate boards, and there are any number of boards that would be willing to pay them millions of dollars a year to attend a few meetings. They have a very large amount of money, to be sure – those speaking fees add up (the large majority of their money, by the way, is Bill’s). But there are so many tax accounting tricks they could use to pay lower tax rates, to invest more actively for higher returns, and they don’t do any of it. Go look at their effective income tax rates on their disclosure page: they pretty much always pay regular combined federal and state tax. They live by choice in a relatively high-tax state (New York), but there are plenty of tricks to pretend that one lives in, say, Texas to pay no income tax. They haven’t bothered. And this isn’t something they did just recently – you can go look at their entire tax history. They’ve pretty much always invested conservatively, paid their fair share of income tax on their income, and donated about ten percent of their income to charity.

Similarly: the Clinton Foundation’s financial records are public, and they too are very straightforward. The Clintons get a lot of donations from people who want the Clintons to think kindly of them: that is politics, like it or not. But there is no real evidence to show that the Clintons have done anything with that money other than a remarkable amount of good for people who desperately need it, and no real evidence that Clinton Foundation donors were unfairly favoured as a result of their donations.

Bluntly: these are not the actions of people who are overly interested in money. These are the actions of people who got to a certain level of material comfort (and are happy to keep earning at that same rate) and said “this is fine.” There is simply nothing in their financial history to suggest that the Clintons are particularly avaricious.

This is generally the point where someone might say “but what about the speeches to Wall Street” and my response is “the Clintons were paid for a service, and provided that service.” (Most of their speeches, it should be noted, aren’t to financial institutions anyway.) Nobody asks Larry the Cable Guy if he’s beholden to Wall Street. Nobody says “Hillary got paid $225,000 to give a speech to the American Camping Association, is she in the pocket of Big Camping.” In order for Hillary to make money the rest of her life, she is simply not beholden to Wall Street. She can go make speeches to campers and other people at $200K a pop for the rest of her life and she’ll be fine. There’s simply no evidence that she needs Wall Street.

(Granted: one can argue that Hillary is too cozy with Wall Street, in the sense that many of the monied finance elite are her contemporaries. That is fair. But she is hardly unique in this, and indeed the same can be said of practically all American politicians who actually have to work within the system, as opposed to the Gary Johnsons and Jill Steins of the world who like to consider their political irrelevance proof of a higher moral standard, which it is not.)

Now, the final argument at this point is that Hillary is hungry not for money, but power – this is something both sides like to accuse her of, and of politicians generally. It is mostly crap. Most politicians are not, in fact, power-hungry, because power is an abstract concept. Politicians who want power want it for specific reasons, and the two reasons are to get money and to advance their own ideological beliefs. (Political power is actually really kind of bad at creating longterm security for yourself. Most people who go into politics can say, accurately, they would have made more money simply working in their chosen fields.) And all the evidence is that Hillary’s interest in power is that she wants to do things with it to make the world a better place – granted, for her own personal definition of “better place,” and you might take issue with that definition. But her desires are purely political, in the most morally neutral sense.

In short: there is no real evidence of Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” beyond the sort of penny-ante everyday elbow-rubbing with elites that are the natural byproduct of the American system. Which is shitty in its own way, to be sure, but Hillary is not exceptional in this regard. Frankly, the evidence as to her character trends in the other direction: the sheer boringness of her personal finances and the effectiveness of the Clinton Foundation at what it does shows that Hillary’s personal priority (and Bill’s) is to work for her general concept of the public good. And that’s why I don’t worry about Hillary Clinton.

1. As a Canadian obviously I do not technically have skin in this game, but as a Canadian I follow American politics as a rule because it’s more interesting, and also our economy depends largely on yours so I kind of do have skin in the game, just not a vote. Much of the rest of the world probably feels the same way. [↩]
2. The link only includes the last decade. [↩]
3. I leave it to the reader to consider what type of supposedly liberty-loving American patriot uses the word “blitzkrieg” to name their site. Ahem. [↩]

As we get closer to the election, I will probably be doing more political posts, especially because this is an absolutely unprecedented election. My speculation on 2008 and 2012 was things like, “What if McCain has a health issue on the campaign trail?”, or “What if Romney’s tax returns reveal a historically low tax rate?”; my speculations on this election are, “If the GOP invokes Article 9 to try to kick Trump off the ticket and he sues them, would a judge have to try to figure out the monetary value of the Presidency to estimate damages?” and “Is it possible that Trump is actually hooked up to some sort of ‘Twitch Runs for President’ livestream somewhere, and 4Chan is really running his entire campaign?”

Today, I’ll be addressing one of the things I hear sometimes from my fellow liberals, which is that they don’t think the polls will stay this lopsided because the media has a vested interest in keeping people tuned in to the “horse race”, and so they’ll start diverting some media attention to Clinton’s scandals to drive things closer as we go into November. This is, according to some, what happened in 2012 when the post-debate coverage was slanted heavily toward praising Romney’s performance. It didn’t make a material difference, but it allowed pundits to pretend that Romney still had a shot, and some are thinking the same will happen with Trump.

I don’t think it will, though (with, again, the caveat that tomorrow Trump could declare himself God-Emperor of Cleveland and it wouldn’t be significantly more surprising than anything else that’s happened this year), for one main reason. Namely, the media already have a great story, the story of a madman collapsing not just his own political fortunes but those of an entire political party that’s been a force in US politics for over 150 years, and it’s getting amazing ratings for them. They can ride this all the way to election day as long as Trump keeps giving them material to feed this narrative.

And Trump, in turn, wants to do exactly that. His overriding need for attention has driven him to continually say controversial things in order to keep the spotlight on him, despite the fact that Hillary’s high negatives and his own high negatives mean that whoever has the most media attention is invariably going to do the worst. Basically, he can’t tell the difference between good attention, say for doing well in school, or bad attention, like picking a fight with a Gold Star family and insisting the President of the United States founded ISIS. Trump is more than happy to help a media-driven narrative that he’s the most controversial candidate ever, because a) it’s about him, and b) it’s about him being the most something something.

So no, there will be no point where Trump pivots to being boring and normal, and no, there will be no point where CNN gets tired of putting up footage of the latest crazy thing he says and saying, “Wow, isn’t that crazy?” (Or putting up Trump surrogates on TV and asking them, “Can you maybe explain why your candidate apparently called for military tribunals for American civilians?”) They are feeding off each other. The Crazy Train ain’t stopping, not unless the Republicans come to their senses and kick Trump off of it.

Which comes with its own set of craziness, but we’ll deal with that if it happens.

A lot of people will, as part of the ongoing debate about how miserable and grinding the current election is, talk about how frustrating it is that in America we only have Trump and Clinton as viable options because “we live in a two-party system”. (Usually, this is right before they talk about writing in Mickey Mouse, and right before I deliver a long and boring discussion of tactical voting that I’m going to skip this time out, which is kind of a shame because I have a great analogy but I’ll save it for later.)

The problem is, this isn’t untrue. We don’t live in a two-party system. We live in a two-competent-party system. There’s no reason encoded into our nation’s laws that genuinely prevents a third party from forming, and in fact there are actually something like one hundred political parties currently operating in the United States. But most of them are content to run essentially as ego-stroking campaigns for their members, insisting that they would totally win if not for “bias” and “a rigged system” while ignoring their own clear issues that prevent them from gaining a foothold beyond the occasional Congressperson or state official. Here’s why you don’t see a national third party that competes with the Democrats and the Republicans, and why it has very little to do with media coverage or any rigging that might be going on.

1. Third parties don’t put in the work. The Green Party runs a Presidential candidate every four years, and insists each time that their momentum is growing and that they’re going to take back the mantle of “liberal” from the centrist Democrats. But a) nobody has ever explained how President Stein will get her agenda enacted when she has literally no Congressional support, and b) nobody has ever explained how a party with absolutely no track record in government will suddenly do a great job in that field.

The fact of the matter is, a third party needs to be built from the ground up, not the top down. A Presidential run is great press, but any third party that wants to have a hope in hell of enacting their agenda needs to have a full ticket–a Congressperson for every district at minimum, Senators for the 33-34 seats up each year, and probably local representation as well. But that kind of work is boring and low-profile, while running for President is exciting and fun and entails lots of interviews with people who really want to know your opinion! So the Green Party is Jill Stein every four years talking about how unfair it is that she never gets elected.

2. Third parties are fringe. Both the Libertarians and the Greens this year are presenting themselves as alternatives for those in the Republican and Democratic (respectively) Parties who want a candidate who’s more true to their beliefs. Meaning more conservative for the Libertarians, and more liberal for the Greens.

The problem is, a candidate who trends toward the far end of the political spectrum is going to have less appeal to the middle, for obvious reasons. And if you have less appeal, you get fewer votes. A third party that gets fewer votes doesn’t get elected. Once you start selecting for ideological purity and campaigning for the outliers, you’re not going to win. Hell, that’s the problem the Republicans have this year, which is why they nominated a sculpture of Mussolini made entirely out of pre-chewed Cheetos.

3. Third parties tend to be single issue parties. This isn’t so much true of the Greens and the Libertarians, who are least are making a pretense of caring about actual governance, but something like the Alaskan Independence Party is basically running on the issue of, “Hey, seceding from the United States would solve all of Alaska’s problems!” (I assume the “Rent Is Too Damn High Party” in New York state has a similar approach, but I’m not quite sure what their issue is. Probably legalization of marijuana or something.)

The problem is, this is a nonsensical approach to governance. There’s no single fix that can be pushed through that will solve the problems the United States experiences on a yearly basis, and generally these candidates tend to be delusional people who have focused their emotional energy on demanding one unworkable fix because it’s easier to believe that you can Solve All the Problems with one heroic swoop than it is to deal with the years of constant and unrewarding work needed to make the world a better place. Most people know this, which is why these parties tend to only attract a few true believers who are just as delusional as the candidate. Which brings us to…

4. Most third-party candidates tend to be delusional nutbags who build the party around their particular hobbyhorses, and they wind up more as cults of personality than viable attempts to do the work of governance. The obvious example that comes to mind is H. Ross Perot, whose stated goal was to create a pragmatic third party focused on practical solutions rather than ideology, but that wound up being held hostage to the narcissistic whims of its eccentric candidate. (Yes, I know, it does sound like the Republicans are rapidly descending into third-party status, doesn’t it?) But really, I mean something like this guy:

http://andy2016.com/

Take a look at those proposals. This is a man sincerely running on a platform of disclosing the Pentagon’s secret time travel program and admitting that we’re already on Mars. This is the kind of thing that third parties in America are doing right now. They’re not out there trying to become a viable alternative to the current two dominant parties, they’re out there trying to put Bigfoot on the Endangered Species List. This is why we live in a two-party system. It’s not because the Republicans and Democrats suppress the competition, it’s because third parties are more interested in being symbolic forms of protest against an unpleasant reality than any kind of actual group interested in promoting responsible governance. Until someone–a lot of someones, really, because a political party isn’t just something you make with your buddies in the garage–is willing to change that, a third party won’t gain traction in America.

In fact, at this rate, we could be down to a “one-party system” in a few years unless the Republicans get their act together. But that’s probably a separate post.

I was thinking the other day about how odd it is that political campaigns are treated mainly as conflicts in ideology, personality, and party affinity, when they’re basically job interviews…and before I could really get into that idea, even in the privacy of my own head, it struck me how absurd this political campaign has been in yet another way. Because I pictured Donald Trump interviewing for a job the same way he’s been running for President.

“Hi, it’s really great to be here, because I’m an amazing guy and I’m going to do a great job for you. Although I will say I’ve been treated very unfairly here–I mean, I don’t need this job. I’m very rich, I’m very successful, but all of my close personal friends have been saying how badly you’re running this business and how much you need me, so I decided to apply. And nobody here has given me the respect I deserve for that. But I’m a very big-hearted man, so I’ll let it go, but if you want me to continue this interview, you’re going to have to be more polite. That’s all I’m saying.

“Anyway, the point is, this business is gonna be yuuuge with me in charge. I’m a very smart man, I have great ideas, I’m going to build a big wall around your business to keep out all the riff-raff–you know, all the rapists and murderers that are just everywhere, and all the terrorists, I’m not gonna be afraid to say ‘radical Islam’ to your customers, your suppliers, pretty much everyone. I’m gonna be strong. Customers respect strength. If they bring in a coupon for 10% off, I might just decide to charge ’em double. Or kick ’em out of the building and kill their families. You can’t let people laugh at you. Everyone’s laughing at you right now, all of them, and you have to stop it.

“You should probably give guns to all your employees. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they were always armed, so they could defend themselves no matter where they went? I mean, in bars, while drinking, wherever. Guns are awesome. I have a gun, you know. I mean, I don’t need it, because everyone loves me, but if anyone did try anything, I could kill them. I’m very tough. Your other applicants, they don’t think I’m tough, they’ve been saying mean things about me, but that’s just because they’re all losers. Some of them, I think, should probably be in jail. But I’m not here to talk about them, because they’re all losers who should be in prison and I’m really the best candidate for this job.

“I’m the best candidate because I’m such a great businessman. I know everything about business. I ran a whole bunch of businesses, and I made money on all of them. Even the ones that went bankrupt. Some pathetic losers will make a big deal about all those bankruptcies, but they don’t know business the way I do and you don’t either. You probably need me to educate you in business. I run a few seminars, if you’ve got $45,000 to spare…but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about me. Because I’m a very smart guy, did I mention that? I’m very smart, I’m very successful, I’m very strong, and my fingers? Well, let’s just say there’s no problems there.

“I can already tell this interview is going great. I’m winning this interview. I’m winning it so much, I may just get tired of winning and quit the job before I even get it. I may decide once I have the job to hire someone to do the job while I get on with the important job of being me, which is very important because I’m such a great guy. I’m certainly going to make sure that once I get this job, everyone respects me. I’ll make it pretty damn tough on anyone who works here who doesn’t understand how great I am, believe me. That’s because I’m strong and I deserve respect.

“See, you’re calling for the security guards right now. I could kill them in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still love me–not that I would, but I could if I wanted to. I could also punch them, I’d really like to hit them but my good friends, they told me to let them drag me out of the building, they said that I needed to be the bigger man here, not like my enemies who should all be in jail because they’re losers, you should be kicking them out and not me, I’ll be back the next time you have a job opening, I know you’ll miss me…”

I’m pretty much sickened to the point of inarticulation by the events of the last few days. I live in the Twin Cities. I’ve driven along the same road where Philando Castile was pulled over and murdered by a panicky idiot with a badge. I have African-American friends and family who drive up and down that same road. I now have to spend every day wondering if I’ll see their deaths on my Facebook feed. There aren’t really words to respond to that.

Some of the things I want to say feel too obvious. This is an unpardonable breach of the covenant we have with our government. More than that, it (along with the Alton Sterling shooting and the Tamir Rice shooting and all the other police murders caught on video in the past year) makes that covenant feel like a sick joke, a lie we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night. These videos show us that what white people think of as the law is really just the largest street gang out there as far as minorities are concerned. They’re just another group of violent thugs that have to be placated or avoided. At this point, though, it feels like the multiple police murders…and worse, the multiple policemen who have avoided any punishment for committing murder due to a system that protects them…speaks so strongly to that fact that anything I could say on the subject feels inadequate.

And other things feel too taboo to say. Like…look, I don’t condone violence. I don’t support violence. But I do understand why someone would kill those policemen in Dallas. It is very difficult to say that in our culture, where the police are portrayed by default as “good guys”, where their bending or breaking of the rules to catch “bad guys” is celebrated by popular culture, and where their lives are considered sacrosanct to the point where the mere testimony of an officer that they believed their lives to be in danger is considered to be sufficient to exonerate them from any suggestion of wrongdoing. But if the police are murdering people, targeting them by demographic for rape and murder and extortion and seemingly getting away with it, I can understand why some people would respond by killing police. I don’t want it to happen, but it is an unsurprising response.

And the response to the response…again, this is the point where we’re supposed to say, “But he was a bad guy!” We, as a culture, celebrate rough justice done to criminals. But we shouldn’t. The police murdered one of the suspects in Dallas. They had him cornered, they were out of the line of fire, and they delivered a bomb to him by remote control and set it off in his face. They decided that the courts didn’t need to be involved in this man’s trial and punishment, not when they had a little wheeled robot and a spare bomb. This is the problem. This is the heart of it. There are police out there who feel like they have the right to decide who lives and who dies based on whether they’re “bad”. That is not the rule of law. That is murder. It doesn’t matter how bad they are, it doesn’t matter if they had multiple previous convictions or just a bunch of traffic stops, the police are murdering people who pose them no immediate threat. And we are allowing it.

And in the end, I don’t want to talk about it because there’s nothing I can do. We protest and the police murder people. We catch them on camera shooting unarmed men and they walk away scot-free. An essay like this is just another drop in the bucket of words that won’t change anything. That’s why I don’t talk about this more. Because everything I’m saying? It won’t matter to the guy with the gun and the badge who knows he can get away with murder if he kills the right sort of person.

Let’s start out with the obvious: I, like many others, was woefully wrong regarding the Republican electorate and their love affair of Trump. In retrospect, I can see where I went wrong; I knew that the Tea Party crowd was going to hijack the process somewhere in the next few elections, because they’ve been pushing the party ever further right (aided by a gerrymandering process in 2010 that made it impossible to be moderate in the Republican Party without risking usurpation in the primary by someone louder and dumber) and sooner or later they were going to stage a revolution against the money people who kept insisting that they needed a moderate like McCain or Romney to win, but who lost anyway. 2016 seemed like their “If we’re going to go down, we’ll go down with a real Republican” moment.

But where I made my mistake was in thinking that a real Republican was someone like Ted Cruz, who was against taxes, against government regulation, pro-religion, pro-life, and generally embodied the talking points Republicans have been spouting since the 1990s. I didn’t think they would look at a New York businessman with ties to the Clintons and Hollywood and say, “Yeah, that’s one of us alright!” But that’s because I didn’t really understand what the true values of the Tea Party crowd were. It wasn’t about taxes. It wasn’t about small government. It wasn’t about religion. It was about bigotry. Everything that the Republicans have said since Nixon has been a long string of dog-whistles for their xenophobic base, and Trump outflanked people with far stronger political credentials by simply being nakedly, unashamedly racist. Ted Cruz might have years of experience in attempting to destroy the federal government out of thinly-veiled spite at the Democrats for electing a black man, but he wasn’t willing to get down to it and say that the federal government needed to deport all the brown people everywhere. Trump was. That’s why he’s the nominee.

(At least, theoretically the nominee. It is still June, and there’s a non-zero chance that someone could derail the Trump campaign with parliamentary maneuvering at the convention. It’s in the realms of “OMFGReally?”, because if they do it then that’ll pretty much be it for the Presidential election and it’ll also finally cause the slow-simmering feud between the four entirely incompatible factions of the Republican party to boil over, but I feel like it has to be mentioned because if I don’t say it, someone else will.)

(The four factions, by the way, are the ultra-religious theocrats, the libertarian “business is business” deregulators, the “subjugate the lesser countries” neocons, and Trump has revealed that the racists in the party are a faction all their own that can be courted.)

Anyhow, the point is, Trump appealed to the racist wing of the Republican party through a series of Nurembergian rallies, and is now…pending serious bizarreness…the nominee. And he’s down seven points to Clinton. Clinton has, if not actually seen off her one serious challenger in Bernie Sanders, at the very least reduced him to sulking somewhere in Vermont and muttering dire conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, and she has a huge war chest, a battle-tested and savvy group of campaigners on the ground and already moving in the hotly-contested swing states, and several much-loved Democrats up to and including President Obama ready to go out and stump for her. While Trump has…

Okay, look. The thing you need to understand about Trump, in order to make the last few weeks and the next several months make any sense at all, is that he has been surrounded for pretty much his entire adult life by people whose job it is to tell him everything he says, thinks and does is brilliant. If there was ever a point where he had any self-awareness, it withered and died decades ago. This is key, because everyone out there is constantly assuming that at some point, Trump is going to say, “Nah, nah, just kidding! Here’s my real plan,” and we’ll find out that this was all some sort of clever Xanatos gambit to position himself into some sort of superior position to win the election.

But the fact of the matter is, the Trump you see is the Trump you get. He really does believe that he doesn’t need to fundraise personally, because he’s rich. He really does believe that he’s going to be competitive in New York (where he’s currently twenty points down in the polls) because he’s a great guy and everybody in his home state loves him. He really thinks that he can just go around from state to state holding rallies, and appear on TV talk shows, and everyone will listen to his great ideas and vote for him. He really, honest to God, thinks that “the Mexicans” and “the gays” love him. (For that matter, he really thinks that they like being called “the Mexicans” and “the gays”.) Why not? he asks himself. People told him that wouldn’t work to get the Republican nomination, and they were wrong then. Why can’t he win the Presidency this way too?

To the rest of us, the reasons why are obvious. There are not enough bigots in this country (thank God!) to make up for the number of women and minorities who will turn out to vote against him. A Presidential candidate receives far more public scrutiny for their statements than a B-list celebrity and reality TV star, and he will have to spend the next several months defending his record of lies, inanity, unworkable plans, and general drunken uncle on Facebook-level blather. The Republicans are not going to throw good money at this moron, and while they may not actively turn on him, they certainly don’t want any part of the Trump brand. Spending time and effort campaigning in states you are going to lose no matter what, or states you are going to win no matter what, is essentially ceding ground to an opponent who targets swing states. You really should settle any pending fraud lawsuits against you before you decide to run for political office, so that you’re not desperately trying to seal evidence while the media is looking for a juicy scandal. Little things like that.

At this point, those little things are adding up to a major defeat. Nobody is willing to call it that, because we all have memories of Trump somehow rolling up victories in the primaries when it was obvious to the majority of Americans that his campaign was an unmitigated shitshow run by a bloviating fascist who raised epistemic closure to an artform, and none of us wants to be wrong again. But of course, Trump wasn’t trying to appeal to a majority of Americans in the Republican primaries, just the bigoted few who agreed with his ugly, racist screeds. The very fact that the majority of Americans have been waiting months to weigh in on the discussion should tell us something about how November will go.

There is a lot to say about the massacre in Orlando. There is my sympathy for the victims and their loved ones, all of whom must be kept close in our hearts. They were victims of a horrible crime committed solely because of who they loved, a heartbreaking tragedy that we must always remember. There is my deep and abiding concern that the Republican Party continues to stoke these fires of hate, calling trans women “sexual predators” and warning about the awful dangers they pose to children, then affecting a pious pose of bland sympathy when their hateful rhetoric becomes hateful action. There is my strong feeling that this is a test that one candidate has failed so thoroughly, so disgustingly that we cannot possibly trust him with even a Twitter account, let alone the Oval Office. There is my belief that we have to correct our course on gun control. This cannot continue.

But one of the most important things to say, I’ve already said on my own blog. I’m reposting it here because I don’t really think it can ever be said enough and in enough places. I wrote this after Paris, but it is no less true today:

Okay. I am going to try to explain this calmly and reasonably.

The most pessimistic estimates of ISIL’s membership put it at about 200,000 worldwide. That includes non-combatants, support staffers, administrators and other political actors as well as fighters, but 200,000 is going to be our baseline estimate because it’s always good to think worst-case scenario.

There are currently 1.3 million active US military service members, with a further 850,000 on reserve. This is solely the number of men and women that America can put into the field; it does not count our traditional allies such as France, Great Britain, Canada, et cetera et cetera.

There are 1.47 billion practicing Muslims worldwide.

Take those three sets of numbers together, and you will see a picture of ISIL as a tiny guerrilla force unable to do anything more than inflict cruelty on the defenseless. They are out numbered more than 10 to 1 by the United States military alone, and we are far from alone in our opposition to ISIL. Even many of the countries we have historically had a troubled relationship with feel that an apocalyptic death cult doesn’t make a good neighbor. ISIL is politically isolated and counting on two things to help them in their struggle against the West.

One, they are counting on the fact that because they are small and we are large, we have more to defend and they can choose to strike us where we are not expecting it. This is in the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is utterly tragic, and it will mean that Paris is not the last place that ISIL attacks us, but the same tactics that make them effective as a guerrilla force make them ineffective as a conventional army. They are not able to destroy America. They are not able to destroy anybody. They are only able to inflict cruelty upon the helpless when nobody is watching.

Two, the only way that they can progress beyond their status as petty, vicious murderers is by reframing the issue from “ISIL against the world” to “Muslims against Christians”. As a crazy, hate-filled death cult, they are a weak military force that has drawn the attention of some of the most powerful armies in history. As defenders of the Muslim faith, they have a potential army of over a billion that they can recruit from. They are desperate, literally desperate to convince Muslims everywhere that the West hates all Muslims with the same passion that they hate ISIL and want to crush Islam entirely.

In other words, when Donald Trump says that we need to shut down all the mosques to prevent ISIL from gaining strength in America, or when Ted Cruz says that we don’t need to care about civilian casualties when fighting ISIL, they are making ISIL recruiting speeches. They are doing our enemy’s work for them, and it is a testament to the kindness and decency of the overwhelming majority of the people of the Islamic faith that they have refused to give in to the hatred that their supposed allies around the world hold for them.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t need to stop and stop now.

Warning: some spoilers for the new Captain America film follow. Oh, and the Civil War comics, but those are like a decade old now so who cares.

Ezra Klein has a column up at Vox wherein he explains that Captain America is in the wrong in Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man is the actual hero. This is in fact not the first time Klein has written about Civil War; in 2010 he expressed his agreement with Spencer Ackerman (whose column about Civil War seems to have disappeared when Firedoglake collapsed):

And, incidentally, I agree with Spencer entirely: Iron Man was unequivocally right in the argument over superhero registration. I’m not even sure what the case for the other side is, and the libertarians I’ve asked haven’t been able to come up with one. If the state has any legitimate function at all, it’s to train and regulate people who could accidentally kill everyone in a hundred-mile radius.

I’m not a libertarian; I’m your bog-standard sorta-socialist liberal. I am also rather famously on record with respect to my opinion as to Civil War being a not-entirely-competent story.1 That having been said, the case for the other side is really quite simple: these are stories set in a universe where superheroes exist, and the normal balance of security versus liberty is accordingly upended.

Political pundits like to take Iron Man’s position for two reasons: first off, Iron Man is unequivocally the villain (or at least the antagonist) of both the comic and film versions of Civil War, and there’s a certain sort of contrarian glee to be had in saying “no, the bad guy of the story is right,” which is why every new Star Wars movie generates a fresh flood of why-the-Empire-were-actually-the good-guys columns despite the fact that the Empire are Space Nazis who murder billions of people both onscreen and off. The second reason is because Iron Man’s regulatory position makes sense when you assume that some of the elements of a comic book universe apply but don’t follow through wholly with the logic.

Klein’s argument that Iron Man was “unequivocally right” about the original Civil War dispute is one that relies on the assumption that Iron Man’s concerns about unregulated superheroes are valid and that Captain America’s concerns about the tyranny of the state are overblown. Now, because I’m a sorta-socialist liberal I can understand this position, because in the real world, the closest analogue to Captain America’s position is one expressed by gun nuts and idealistic-but-stupid libertarians, whose concerns about the tyranny of the state are (usually) overblown. But Civil War is a comic in a superhero universe, and in a superhero universe Cap’s concerns are entirely valid, because in a superhero universe as the powers of individuals grow to ridiculous proportions, so does the power of the state.

The amazing thing about Cap’s argument is that I don’t really have to make it. It’s already been made for me. Christos Gage wrote a superb one-shot Civil War tie-in comic, Casualties of War, which is mostly just an extended conversation “mid-war” between Tony and Cap as they each try to convince the other of the rightness of their position. Tony’s argument is, for the most part, the one Klein makes, along with the argument that he and Cap have a responsibility to make sure that the next generation of young superheroes is properly trained; he cites Spider-Man failing to save Gwen Stacy as his primary example. Cap refutes that argument by pointing out that Gwen Stacy didn’t die because Spider-Man failed to save her – that’s an argument that places blame unfairly on Spidey – but properly assigns the blame for that death to the person who actually caused her death: Norman Osborn.

He then points out that Osborn was able to do this because he knew Spider-Man’s secret identity, and discusses other times when superheroes’ loved ones were threatened or even killed because of secret identity leaks. And then points out – entirely correctly – that any database of registered superheroes could and would be exploited by supervillains, and actually cites moments from both Tony and Cap’s individual careers where their own information was used against them to discredit/frame them for crimes they did not commit – and even if supervillains didn’t do it, there’s no guarantee that a future administration with regulatory oversight wouldn’t do it, which for Cap is particularly relevant since the government had forced him to stop being Captain America more than once.

The crucial distinction between Tony and Cap’s positions, in the comic, is that Tony’s position is grounded in our real-world experience of how regulation generally works. Cap’s position is grounded in his unreal-world experience of what actually happens when external authority is applied to superheroes: the result is inevitably a slide towards tyrannical behaviour, regardless of the intent of the regulator, or the allowance of threats to superheroes so intense that they would be forced to abandon their duties as protectors.2

And here’s the kicker: in the comics, Cap is proven completely and utterly right by the events following Civil War. Iron Man’s side “wins,” and for about two years of comics, they mostly do all right: Tony sets up government-sanctioned superteams all over the United States (why Wyoming needs its own superteam I don’t know, but they supposedly had one) and they prevent a lot of threats. But even at this time, Tony – who is supposed to be the hero, remember – has set up the Thunderbolts as a covert team of super-criminals who have been coerced into government service. (It ends up being a spectacular failure, because psychopaths don’t make good government functionaries.)

But Tony’s moral failings aren’t the worst part – the worst part is when he loses power as a result of a crisis (a Skrull invasion) and Norman Osborn is given control of the regulatory regime. Osborn then uses his new state-sanctioned power to remake SHIELD into HAMMER, which is essentially a death cult loyal to Osborn alone, and viciously and relentlessly persecutes the superheroes – including Tony! – who won’t play ball with him, which is most of them, because Osborn is an evil man not interested in the general welfare of society at all, but only really in power for its own sake, in glorifying himself and in murdering Spider-Man, with whom Osborn is obsessed.

So Tony’s belief that a less-intrusive regulatory regime can assuage Cap’s concerns about its potential for misuse is just wrong; wrong on the evidence of what had happened before, wrong on the reasoning of what is happening currently at the time, and wrong as to what happens when it is enacted. That’s the argument for Cap’s position. And Cap is completely right.

So that’s why Klein is wrong about the comics. Why is he wrong about the film? That’s easy. First, everything I wrote above still more or less applies in the movie: Cap has real-world experience of the dangers of giving organizations too much control over superheroic quantities – that was what Winter Soldier was about, remember.

Secondly, let’s go to his column:

As I understand it, the Avengers are allowed to simply stop being Avengers if they don’t want oversight — Cap can keep his shield, Widow can keep her stingers, Iron Man can keep his suit, and they can go on and live normal lives. What they can’t do is act as vigilantes. That’s more or less the equilibrium in America, too, where we let people possess mind-boggling amounts of weaponry but have pretty strict laws about who they’re able to shoot.

The problem with this understanding is that it is wrong, because it skips over the part where some of the Avengers can’t actually stop being Avengers in a way which would satisfy the concerns of the state. It is made extremely clear in the film that the Scarlet Witch is not going to be allowed to go on and live a normal life; she is going to be imprisoned. The prison might be a particularly nice prison, but it will be a prison nonetheless, and that is Cap’s sticking point. Remember, in the film, Tony almost convinces him to work within the Sokovia Accords at one point – until Cap learns that Wanda is going to be a prisoner.

And Cap knows that Wanda isn’t the only enhanced human out there – Bruce Banner is still out there, Quicksilver was one before he died, and it is safe to assume that there are others. It is fairly obvious what would happen to them as well, and the film shows us explicitly what happens when anybody resists, regardless of whether they have powers or not – they’re sent away to an extrajudicial mecha-Guantanamo in the middle of the ocean without the burden of due process. Wanda is fairly obviously doped out of her mind to prevent her from using her powers, which is by any reasonable standard cruel and unusual punishment. And it’s clear from Tony’s reaction that he obviously didn’t know this was happening, despite his assertions that with his participation such abuses would be prevented.

Bottom line: Cap is right in Civil War, both in the comics and in the film. He’s right because although our everyday reality is that governmental regulation is, by and large, a net positive, his everyday reality is different from ours in very significant ways – and that makes all the difference.

1. Years later, I still think it’s a pretty bad story, but I will say that unlike a lot of event comics, there was a coherent idea at the root of it that was worth exploring, which is more than you can say for a lot of event comics, and it at least has a lot of exciting action parts. But it’s still not a good comic. [↩]
2. Tony actually admits in Casualties of War that his push for regulation is a half-measure intended to try to prevent the government from taking more drastic measures, such as the Sentinel program in the X-Men comics, which was intended to control citizens at the genetic level. [↩]