One thing that has shown up a lot on the Bernie Sanders side of the Democratic primary is the idea that independents should be able to vote in party primaries. Indeed, this is already the case in 20 states. I think this is totally wrong. What’s more, I think those in favor of it have forgotten what political parties have traditionally been. In the not so distant past, political party elites pretty much decided who was going to be their candidates. Since then, things have gotten much more democratic. And that’s a good thing. But open primaries? I think it would be better to go back to the elites deciding.

I don’t like our two party system. If we had a parliamentary system with multiple parties, I most definitely wouldn’t be a Democrat. But we do have the system that we have. Let’s change the system! I’m all for that. But I’m not for people who can’t even be willing to take a stand as to their party preference deciding which candidate either party decides to nominate. Democrats should get to nominate the Democratic nominee and Republicans should get to nominate the Republican nominee. Otherwise, what is the primary even for?! Why not just go straight to the general election?

There are lots of things we could change about the primary system. I’d personally like to see fewer super delegates in the Democratic Party. But it doesn’t much matter. I fully believe that if Bernie Sanders had three million more votes than Hillary Clinton, there would be a mad rush of super delegates to Sanders. And look at the Republican Party! It seems that every four years they change their rules to stop what happened last time from happening again. And they succeed! Something even worse happens, instead!

Open Primaries Are Like Non-Primaries

I’ll be honest: I don’t understand this issue at all. Being a member of a political party is no more difficult than registering to vote. (I think having to register to vote in general elections is a big problem, but few people are complaining about it.) Allowing independents to vote in partisan primaries is like letting Canadians vote in US elections. It really isn’t any business of independents who the Democrats and Republicans nominate.

Now I’ll admit: I’m not keep on independents. To me, they are just a bunch of people with a clear partisan ax to grind who want the world to applaud them for their “independence” and lack of partisanship. Well, if that’s what they want, there ought to be some price to pay. And the bare minimum that the price should be is that they don’t get a say in how the political parties run their business. They are, after all, “independent.” Why do they even care who the parties nominate? They are above all that! And in the end, there will be a full slate of candidates to vote from parties more explicitly fascist than the Republicans to actual socialists.

What’s more, I’m not sure what the Sanders campaign is complaining about. According to Ballotpedia, Clinton has won 58% of the open primaries and 61% of the closed primaries. Are we really supposed to believe that this election would be different if there had been nothing but open primaries? I’m a very disgruntled Democrat. But I am a Democrat. And I don’t see why people who can’t even be bothered to pick a party should get a say in who my party nominates.

Afterword

Note that this does not apply to candidates. The fact that Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat doesn’t matter in the least as long as members of the Democratic Party want to nominate him.

I’ve already cut a number of people out of my RSS feed because they are annoying me. But Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog has thus far avoided this treatment because in general he’s insightful. But he wrote an article yesterday that was so stunningly brain dead that I may have to change my mind. The article is, Why Democrats Could Tolerate a Lot More Division in 2008. The end of the title was cut off in my feed, so I thought that it was a call for continued democracy. But no.

Steve M is making the lamest of counterarguments against those who note that Hillary Clinton fought Obama to the end in 2008. And the argument is: it was different in 2008! He even claims that he hated Clinton for doing it then. Now in one sense, this is very consistent: when his candidate is winning, he thinks the other candidate should drop out. It’s a vile position to hold, but since that’s all that is going on, he should own it. He shouldn’t be making arguments that it was okay for Clinton to do it then but it is not okay for Sanders to do it now.

Steve M’s Retrospective Argument

And really: all his argument comes down to is that in retrospect, we know that Obama won therefore Clinton did no damage. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from pulling out statistics about how unpopular Bush was. The truth is that the reason Obama won big in 2008 was the economy. And it was only in May that we started to see the economy fall apart. So the truth is that when Clinton was fighting most she and the nation did not know the election was a slam dunk. The idea that the Democrats “had the wind at their backs” is silly if not stupid.

I do wish this whole thing were over. Bernie Sanders is not going to be the Democratic nominee. Even the marginal notion that he would get the super delegates to switch to him is now ridiculous with everything he’s done to alienate the Democratic establishment. But the man has every right to stay in the race. And Clinton supporters should accept this. Steve M concluded his article, “No, the Democrats can’t afford the luxury of a sustained fight. Not this year.” That’s a nice way of saying that Sanders should have dropped out of the race in February.

Steve M Has “Reasons”

I believe in democracy. I believe in it in the Democratic primary and I believe in it in the general election. Barring an economic catastrophe, I don’t see Trump winning. And the truth is that I don’t think that Steve M would be making the argument that this election is going to be really close under normal circumstances. But that’s what he has to say to make the argument that everyone must rush to get in line behind Clinton. Authoritarianism isn’t just something for Republicans. And it doesn’t matter if the authoritarian has “reasons”; authoritarians always have “reasons.” And in the case of Steve M, we’ve heard the exact same “reasons” before.

Let me leave you with a thought: in 2008, the Clinton and Obama camps were probably more angry at his other than the Clinton and Sanders camps are today. I didn’t even follow politics that closely then I heard lots of Clinton supporters claim that they wouldn’t vote for Obama. It didn’t go like that in the end, of course. The time for unity is the general election. The only people who call for unity in the primary are the people who are winning. If Hillary Clinton loses in November, it won’t be because of Bernie Sanders.

I’m not much of a fan of Facebook. It is, after all, just a photo sharing website that took off. What it had that other photo sharing websites didn’t have was founders with friends who had rich daddies. But at least it does work as advertised. There are other issues with it that I will come back to, but it is generally useful to people. This is not always the case. Take the case of Theranos.

Theranos is one of the big new purveyors of Silicon Valley disruption. It created a device called Edison that could test for disease using just a couple of drops of blood instead of a whole vile. Thus, instead of going to a phlebotomists to get blood draw, you would “just” get your finger poked and be done with it. There was just a small problem: it didn’t work that well. The Wall Street Journal reported last week, Theranos Voids Two Years of Edison Blood-Test Results.

But what’s the big deal? People make mistakes. Well, it’s a little worse than that. Theranos is voiding all results from a two year period. Geoffrey Baird of the University of Washington Department of Laboratory Medicine said that this was “unprecedented.” But what’s worse is that this move was really just an attempt by the company to mitigate damage. Back in October, The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report, Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology. And since then, the heat has been on.

In April, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services threatened Theranos with banning founder Elizabeth Holmes and her second in command, Sunny Balwani, with a two year ban from working anywhere in the blood-testing industry. Balwani later resigned. But the whole thing is a mess. And this is at a company that is supposedly worth $9 billion. But as they were showering the company with money, no one seemed to care that their product could do what it claimed.

More Fundamental Problems With Theranos

But even if the product worked, there are other problems. Like so much Silicon Valley “innovation,” I wonder why we should care. To me, the ultimate example of this is this app that allows you to deposit a check to your bank account remotely. I first saw it with a commercial of a couple who were laying in bed on a Sunday morning and didn’t want to go out to the bank. Well, okay. But there’s no mail delivery on Sunday, so you probably got the check on Saturday. And depositing it on Sunday will be no better than waiting until Monday. So who cares?

One of the selling points of this procedure was that it was less painful. I find this a farcical statement. I have really bad veins and have gotten lots of blood tests. There is basically no pain associated with giving blood unless it has to be drawn from an unusual place like a knuckle. On the other hand, the idea of having my finger stabbed gives me chills. And it isn’t like I don’t have a lot of experience with that too. It’s a minor thing, but typical that Theranos would use a thoughtless lie to sell its product.

A more important issue is whether this is a good idea to allow people to get tested all the time. I know far too many people (I might be one) who would become addicted to this. And having medical treatments are often more dangerous than the disease (or in many cases, non-disease). In my father’s recent problems, we now think that it was just a kidney stone. But in putting a catheter in, they managed to cause a bladder infection. So basically 90% of the pain was due to the doctors.

New Ways to Do Old Things

But what more bothers me about Theranos is that there is nothing truly disruptive about it. It would be innovative in the sense of making blood tests easier. But it is disruptive only in an economic sense. It is a way of putting a bunch of phlebotomists out of work and then keeping all the savings. This seems to be the point of “disruption.” In the past, technologies that put people out of work were worth it because the savings were shared. That’s just not true anymore.

So whether it is Theranos or Facebook, what they really do is provide investors with a better way to make money. They don’t offer customers anything distinctly better. For all the talk of Uber, people aren’t getting anything better. Uber is just a way to skirt existing regulations and make drivers pay more of their own expenses. And it’s still hard to get a ride where it was hard before.

Afterword

As you may know, I used to work with my brilliant young friend Mikhail on a start-up. And it amazed me that we couldn’t get investors. But now it seems all too clear. We were doing cutting edge technology. It had a clear path to profitability, but it wasn’t a way of siphoning off money from an existing money-making system. And that’s why no one was interested. It reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with Jim Hogshire. I mentioned that I wanted to write a book about a particular subject, but that there were already books on the subject. He told me that it was easier to get a book published if there were already books on the subject. The hardest thing to sell to publishers was something brand new.

That’s the same thing in “innovative” Silicon Valley. They aren’t interested in anything new. That’s why Facebook was so big: it wasn’t new. It a distinct example of something that was well worn. So it isn’t at all surprising that investors in Theranos didn’t care if the company could actually do what it claimed.

I’m not big on honoring the dead when I wasn’t inclined to honor them when they were alive. I mean, I would never go to the door of a grieving family and say, “You know, your father was an awful man who made the world worse when he had the power to make it better.” But that doesn’t mean that I will join in on the “What a good man!” chorus that’s going on. It’s all about Bob Bennett’s death bed wish to apologize to Muslims for the fact that Donald Trump will be the head of the Republican Party — Bob Bennett’s party.

Tim Mak reported on the story for The Daily Beast, Dying GOP Senator Apologizes to Muslims for Donald Trump. And it ends almost as poignantly as The Grapes of Wrath, “But even as he was passing away, Bennett struggled to press the issues — to ensure that though his life was ending, the ideas he held dear would not go with it.” But instead of a starving man being breast fed by a woman who just gave birth to a dead baby, it is the story of a multi-millionaire bigot who wants to be remembered as a Good Guy™.

Bob Bennett: Bigot

Bigot?! Was Bob Bennett a bigot? Well, when it came to the LGBT community, he sure was. When it came to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, the Human Rights Campaign gave him a 0% rating. That was when 103 of 535 members of Congress got a 100% rating. And another 69 got a 90% or greater rating. So one-third of Congress got 90% or better, and Bob Bennett got 0%. He voted against legislation that would make it illegal to fire someone because of their sexual orientation. What a kind and accepting man!

But none of that matters because, “He would go to people with the hijab and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here.” Now just to be clear, this kind of ostentatious personal outreach is actually creepy. And it puts the person approached in an uncomfortable position of being simply a member of a group. The act isn’t about them feeling welcome but about Bob Bennett feeling good about being welcoming. Imagine if I stopped Native Americans on the street to express my regret for the Trail of Tears. That’s what he’s been doing but Muslims are so actively discriminated against in the US today that his act is seen by many to be noble. It isn’t; it is just a different kind of racism.

Bob Bennett: Typical Republican

Meanwhile, Bob Bennett did so much for corporation and so much to individuals. He voted against getting rid of the tax subsidy for companies that offshore jobs at the same time that he voted to make it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy. He also voted multiple times to make it harder to sue corporations. He voted to further limit appeals on death penalty cases. He voted against taking racial statistics into account in death penalty appeals. And he was, of course, a big drug warrior. And he was against doing any rehabilitation in our prison system. He was, in other words, an entirely typical Republican.

When it comes to Donald Trump, it is hard to see how he’s all that much different. In 2006, he voted to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. He’s been against any kind of pathway to citizenship. So what we really see from Bob Bennett is your typical intolerant Republican who is upset that Donald Trump is so explicit about this stuff. It isn’t that he disagreed with Trump’s bigotry; it’s just that he doesn’t want to be associated with it.

There is another issue, however. Bob Bennett in general wanted to do whatever it was that big business wanted. So in general, he was pro-immigration — not for the sake of the individuals, but for the sake of the corporations that wanted to get low-cost workers. So even in his substantive disagreement with Donald Trump, Bob Bennett was still on the wrong side — for corporations and against humans.

So Bob Bennett is dead. He was 82 years old, so it isn’t that big a deal. And the man was very pro-war. He supported the Iraq War. And had he been in office, I’m sure he would have been against the Iran nuclear deal. He was one of many war enablers who allowed lots of Muslim children to never get the chance to live to 82 years. I appreciate that he didn’t want to be remembered as a bigoted war monger who really only cared about the rich. But that doesn’t mean we should change history and remember him as something he never was.

Update

Martin Longman wrote a great article that is similarly unmoved, On Bob Bennett and Donald Trump. It goes into Bob Bennett’s association with Nixon’s Plumbers. Longman sums up, “But it’s a sad testimony that the party is now too awful for a guy with Bob Bennett’s moral compass.” That is to say: Bob Bennett doesn’t have much of a moral compass.

A lot of the liberal blogosphere is dumping all over Sanders — and this has largely been true since the beginning. This is partly because, as an older guy, I read a lot of older bloggers. And being older, they tend to be Hillary Clinton supporters. And that’s great! Bravo! I have no problem with people supporting Clinton. But let’s be honest about the reasons.

My prime example is PM Carpenter, who has spent the last decade telling the world that he’s a democratic socialist. But the moment Sanders became an actual threat, Carpenter posted, Why This Democratic Socialist Opposes Bernie Sanders. The short answer: because America is not ready for a socialist. Well, maybe one particular American whose initials are PMC. But he isn’t alone and it’s gotten to annoy me.

I’ve decided their slogan should be, “We love Sanders — as long as it doesn’t matter!” Because that’s the thing. As long as no choice had to be made, he was great. But the moment it was a decision between actually standing against our unjust economic system and just going along and treating it as a problem no more pressing than same sex marriage, their decision was clear.

As Matt Bruenig has pus it: the Baby Boomers just don’t like the idea that they are the conservative ones now. Here’s my usual caveat: I like Clinton. I don’t have a problem with people supporting her over Sanders. But I think it’s about time that these Clinton supporters admit that they prefer her because her policies are more to their liking — not because he is unrealistic or some of his supporters are jerks. Or because America isn’t “ready.”

When Clinton Was Sanders

It is, of course, ironic that when Clinton was in Sanders’ position in 2008, she acted very much like he is now. Of course, things are different between then and now: things were closer then. But they certainly weren’t categorically different. And just as Clinton claimed it was a good idea to stay in the race in 2008 because Obama might be assassinated, Sanders could certainly argue that he should stay in because she might be indicted. As far as I know, he hasn’t said anything that vile.

I’m not thrilled with some of the things Sanders is doing right now — just as I wasn’t thrilled with Clinton in 2008. But the main thing is I feel that yet again, the liberals in the Democratic Party are being told they must get in line or else the boogeyman (insert whatever Republican is running) will be elected and the world will end. And I’m tired of hearing it.

Sanders Is Jackson

Also, other than 2008 when (as I said) Clinton behaved very much as Sanders is now, we have to go all the way back to 1988 to find a Democratic primary that was anywhere near this close. In that primary, Dukakis won 1,792 delegates (42.4% of the popular vote). Jesse Jackson won 1,023 delegates (29.4% of the votes). And my recollection is that Jackson was treated very badly. And I say that as someone who worked on Dukakis’ campaign. But Jackson played nice and in the end got… nothing. There’s a history of this. The left is just supposed to remain silent and show up to vote for whatever candidate the establishment wants.

Clinton had a far better reason for (finally) playing along in 2008. I mean, hell, it got her a party elite that wanted to just give the nomination to her in 2016. But Sanders is very likely to get the Jackson treatment. Will he be offered the VP spot if he drops out after the last primary and endorses Clinton? I rather doubt it. And I wonder if this hasn’t already been made clear to Sanders.

The main thing is that it is hard to believe that Sanders will be treated well in the end given that the main complaint I’ve heard against him since at least January is that he isn’t a real Democrat and he refuses to raise money for other candidates. Because, you know, that’s what voters care about the most: the party’s fund raising problems. Actually, I think the conservative wing of the party thinks what it always thinks of us liberals: we have nowhere else to go.

Honesty About Sanders

But getting back to our liberal blogging friends, my complaint continues on because everything done by Sanders is always painted in the worst light possible. I think this is what you get when years of writing makes you someone who ought to support Sanders. You can’t make the policy argument, so you make the argument that he is unfit for the office. Josh Marshall has determined, apparently based on a polyp in his anal cavity, that all the negativity in this campaign comes straight from Sanders himself.

Personally, I’m willing to wait and see if Sanders will refuse to endorse Clinton as Steve M claims at No More Mister Nice Blog. But that’s probably because my belief about policy goes along with my support of Sanders. I don’t have to troll around looking for any excuse to not support the candidate who I always claimed I would support should they been on offer.

Afterword: It’s Personal Too

I also don’t like the fact that Sanders supporters are painted with such a broad brush. I do not think that I’m an outlier in terms of Sanders supporters. I think the people misbehaving are the outliers. And it bothers me that this is exactly the same kind of thinking that reinforces racist steteotypes. Over ten million Democrats have voted for Sanders and they are all just like those idiots in Nevada. With one or two exceptions, of course.

Update

I just saw Krugman’s newest, “Questions of Character.” He really is the king of the anti-Sanders filter. And I think he’s done great damage to his reputation. On Economist’s View, he is hounded in the comments for his knee-jerk Sanders slamming and for his stupid new claim that, “Reality has a well known center-left bias.” It just shows that Krugman now believes that he is keeper of Reality™. It’s sad, but it isn’t surprising. Great fame and wealth drives people crazy. It’s one of the under-appreciated aspects income inequality. But at least Krugman isn’t drugging and raping women — as far as we know.

Update 2

I haven’t read Krugman’s newest column. But I saw Mark Thoma’s edit of it. Apparently, in “Obama’s War on Inequality,” Krugman spends a good deal of time bashing Sanders. But as Thoma removed all the Sanders stuff. He’s done it lots before. And what you see is how easy it is to edit the Sanders slams out — because they aren’t central to what he’s writing about. Krugman just can’t help it. This is what we in the editing business call “bad writing.” I run into it with my own writers all the time where they get sidetracked about something they care about. Krugman is the new Jonathan Chait: if anything is more to the left than he is, it’s Wrong™.

Update 3

I found this article by Steven Attewell very interesting. Just as an aside, he mentioned that moderate Democrats “were happy enough to be for single-payer when it wasn’t going to pass.” This is what I’m talking about. There’s a big group in the Democratic Party that claims to be liberal for purely rhetorical purposes. If it were 1965, we’d find out suddenly that all their support for the Voting Rights Act vanished as soon as they were expected to vote on it.

Brian Beutler wrote a very good article on Monday, The Wackiest Donald Trump Conspiracy Theory Yet. But the headline (which I’m sure he didn’t write) is misleading. Rather than “wackiest” it should be “most predictable.” Republicans are now getting very excited about the idea that the media held back on Donald Trump during the primary, only to open up on him in the general election. The Liberal Media™ strikes again! Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Republicans don’t know how to do oppo research.

For those who don’t know, oppo research is what campaigns do to each other — looking for dirt. A great example of this is in Primary Colors where Libby and Henry head out to Florida to dig up dirt on Fred Picker. Also in that film is what I can only call reverse oppo research, where the campaign investigates its own candidate to know and prepare for anything that other candidates might dig up. I’m sure all modern campaigns do both of these things. I’m also sure that Trump’s campaign has not — or at least not much. That’s one of the most amazing thing about Trump: that he managed to dominate the primary without really having much of a campaign.

Silly Conspiracy Theory

This conspiracy makes no sense, because so much of the dirt that reporters find is fed to them by campaigns. As Beutler noted, campaigns “have more resources, no daily print deadlines, and no need to worry about impartiality.” So if the media didn’t dig up enough dirt during the primary, the fault lies not with the media itself, but with Trump’s pathetic opponents. Regardless, why would the media start dumping on Trump now — before he’s locked up the nomination? It would make the most sense to wait until after California.

Of course, I don’t really see that there is any greater amount of scandal now than there was before. Trump is a scandal machine. What’s going on is that Republicans are looking for something to blame. None of the pundits who are pushing this conspiracy are so naive as to not know about oppo research. They are just pretending for the ignorant conservative masses who might be slowly realizing that they are on the verge of nominating a scandal plagued fool.

Republicans Can’t Do Oppo Research!

The real question is why is it that over a dozen major Republican presidential candidates had campaigns with oppo research that couldn’t dig up any dirt about Trump? Well, in part, that’s unfair; they did dig up dirt; it’s just that none of it stuck. But the bigger problem is that much of what Donald Trump has done that’s bad is not considered bad by Republican elites.

Trump contracted with undocumented workers? So what! He’s just being a Randian Übermensch. He was a “job creator”! So he seems to have sexually harassed every woman he worked around? Since when has the Republican Party thought that women should be anything but subordinate to powerful men? “Sit quietly while I talk about pubic hair on a Coke can!” That sums up Republican outreach to women. And the fact that his tax plan was fantastical didn’t matter when the rival Republican tax plans were only less fantastical in level. It’s like saying, “Those Harry Potter books are fantasy, but Lord of the Rings is…” What?! Fantasy written for slightly older people?

Democrats Can Do Oppo Research!

There is no doubt that the Clinton campaign has a small library of dirt on Trump. But why would any Democrat let fly with their best material until after the general election starts? As Beutler put it, “It isn’t the media that’s been strategically holding fire — it’s the Democrats.” Actually, as much as we hear that we don’t want to hurt candidates in the primary, the truth is that we do: because the other party certainly will release any damaging information once the general is on.

This is where the Democratic Party has a distinct advantage. Democratic policies are generally popular. So Democratic candidates don’t have to hold back on criticisms that would be effective. Republicans have to twist themselves into knots in order to attack each other. Of course, I’m not certain that it would have mattered. There is at least a third of the Republican Party that wants nothing more (And I mean that literally!) than a charismatic authoritarian. And now they’ve got one.

Matt Bruenig wrote a very interesting article recently, Demonizing, Not Engaging. In it, he highlighted an interesting inconsistency among liberal pundits. The African American community is overall quite homophobic. The white working class is overall quite racist. Yet liberals pundits have decided the best thing is to engage and find common ground with the African American community. They mostly want to demonize the white working class as hopeless racists. Why is this?

Bruenig presents one idea from Emmett Rensin: it’s all about who is likely to vote Democratic. African Americans are part of the Democratic coalition and the white working class is not. But this strikes me as question begging. If the liberal pundit class vilified the African American community, the Democratic Party would quickly see its coalition shrink by one. We are still left with the question of why it is that the pundit class finds it so easy to vilify the white working class.

I think the issue is quite simple: shared bigotry. Although I’m sure that liberal pundits are as racist as anyone else, explicit racism has been taboo long enough that there really is no liberal pundit who has to feel queasy about having made racist statements — or even have much of a memory thinking explicitly racist thoughts.

But being in favor of same sex marriage is really quite a new thing. So even if a liberal pundit has long been in favor of equal rights for members of the LGBT community, they no doubt have many friends who have only recently seen the light. For example: their friends Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Thus, it just doesn’t seem as much a sin to be anti-gay as to be anti-black.

All of this is quite understandable. The reason I find it troublesome is that it is part of a broader tendency among pundits of all stripes to be nothing more than representatives of their classes. This is why the Democratic Party managed to degenerate into what was once considered a conservative economic stance. The Democratic Party’s main claim to liberalism is on social policy.

A great example of this is on MSNBC where economic liberalism is relegated to the sidelines. There’s Chris Hayes when he can sneak it into his show in his desperate attemp to keep his job. And there is “crazy uncle” Ed who seems about six decades out of touch with MSNBC‘s sense of itself: young, urbane, and The Economist reading!

We on the left like to laugh at the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t do much to reach out to any groups but the white working class, religious conservatives, and the affluent. But the truth is that the Democratic Party has the same problem — just with different groups. And it is reflected in the liberal pundits and all those involved in what Bruenig calls The Discourse. Clearly, there are those who push back against this — most notably Thomas Frank. Although in this election cycle, people like Frank seem particularly marginalized as any criticism of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party is seen as an attack on liberalism itself.

Liberals should try to make common cause with the white working class. I try, as I have written about a lot. It’s frustrating to see weeks of conversations go to waste because of one inflammatory Fox News segment. But it is worth doing. Note, however, that liberals don’t in general reach out to the black community on same sex marriage; they just accept. When it comes to the white working class, they just reject. And this just happens to align with the upper class sensibilities of the Democratic Party and its apologists.

Kitty Genovese was the young woman who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964. She became famous in death because of reporting by The New York Times and later by Times‘ editor AM Rosenthal’s book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. The story was that as she was attacked 38 neighbors watched and did nothing. I’ve long known that the story was largely a myth, but it was only today when I listened to CounterSpin that learned just how much of a myth it was.

The show interviewed Marcia Gallo, who last year published the book, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy. The main thing I knew about the case was that when Genovese was first attacked by Winston Moseley, a man opened his window and yelled at the perpetrator — who then ran away. It’s just that she had already been stabbed; Moseley came back later and finished her off.

What I did not know was that after Moseley first ran away, she then went around the corner and collapsed inside a vestibule where the door was locked. When Moseley again attacked and attempted to rape her, she was yelling for help, but feebly (for obvious reasons) and out of sight. A friend of her’s in the building opened his door, scaring away Moseley again. As the friend called for help, another neighbor held Genovese in her arms until the ambulance arrived. It’s actually a touching scene all around with tenderness as well as the horror of it all with neighbors trying to hold themselves together enough to be helpful. Unfortunately, Genovese died of her wounds on the way to the hospital.

So where does the this notion of 38 witnesses who did nothing come from? Well, the police. In trying to find her murderer, the police were frustrated by neighbors’ lack of interest in helping them — in many cases, refusing even to open the door. But this got morphed into the idea that there were all these people who just sat by and watched Kitty Genovese be murdered. It’s certainly true that some number of people saw or heard some part of one or the other of the attacks. But as we see: at least three of them did do something.

Kitty Genovese’s Murder as Ideological Fodder

What I got from the interview with Gallo was how the case was used for other purposes. In particular, AM Rosenthal was very interested in how individuals allow bad things to happen by not speaking up. He was particularly interested in the rise of Nazism and so on. But he also seems to have been fundamentally conservative. He did not like the social movements that were rising at the time. So he used the case (probably without knowing it) as a way of putting down social movements in the name of individuals treating each other well.

Now, all of us can get behind the idea of individuals being nice to each other. But this is a traditional conservative dodge — used effectively to limit solidarity. It is very curious in the Kitty Genovese case, however, because even had he been right, the issue wouldn’t have been the lack of one-on-one care, but the lack of social cohesion — the lack of solidarity.

Interestingly, we know Rosenthal to be conservative in a couple of ways. For one, he was very keen on the Iraq War. But the other is that he was highly homophobic and this resulted in The New York Times being slow to report on the AIDS epidemic. But Kitty Genovese was a lesbian herself. And I wonder if that fact didn’t contribute to his more easily using Kitty Genovese as simply a means to his ideological ends.

Afterword

Winston Moseley was caught six days after the attack, because his neighbors turned him in for a burglary they had witnessed. This whole idea that city people lose their sense of community is just ridiculous.

I’m a big fan of Brian Beutler. And I agree with his conclusion in his recent article, The Trump Crack-Up Is Just the Beginning of the Republican Civil War. His point is that even if Trump loses the general election badly, the Republican Party won’t change. But he pushed one of the most common and ignorant claims about the Democratic Party, and more generally political science.

According to Beutler, after the three presidential losses (1980, 1984, and 1988), the Democratic Party reassessed itself and decided that it had to move to the right. Thus brought Bill Clinton and victory. That’s a nice narrative. But it’s totally wrong. Carter wasn’t a liberal. He was the beginning of the emergence of what would become the New Democrats. What’s more, he was — as were Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis after him — part of that new breed of Democrats who weren’t really ideological but just technocratic.

We look back on them now as liberal, not because of their policies, but because they lost. Remember, I was around during Bill Clinton’s term. And according to the conservative movement, he wasn’t just liberal, he was a radical — a communist, even. That’s because Democrats are always leftist radicals in the minds of conservatives. And this is why it makes no sense to try to take welfare “off the table.” Did Bill Clinton ending welfare as we know it make the Democratic Party any less prone to attacks that it was the party of welfare recipients? Of course not!

But as I’ve shown elsewhere, and as is documented with scientific precision in Lynn Vavreck’s book, The Message Matters, the economic fundamentals favored the Republicans in 1980, 1984, and 1988. It would have been very surprising if the Democrats had won any of those races, because the fundamentals were not only against them, they were against them forcefully. Carter eked out a slight victory in 1976 because the fundamentals were only against him slightly.

Neither the nation nor the Democratic Party base was begging for the Democratic Party to move to the right in 1992. Bill Clinton was not the answer to the previous three elections. He was, however, a gifted politician in a party that had mostly been taken over by conservative elites. The only thing the party was responding to was the desires of powerful people in or aligned with the DLC.

I find this stuff really annoying because it just isn’t hard. My job — what people are willing to pay me for — is technology writing. If you want me to make Fortran 77 interesting and understandable, I’m your man. I have a basic understanding of computer science and programming. But political writers generally don’t know anything about political science. And it is particularly sad in the case of Brian Beutler, because he’s both smart and insightful. But how about learning a little about the science of it? Instead, it is just fine to depend upon what everyone “knows” — which turns out to be untrue.

So yes, the Republican Party won’t change even if Trump only manages to get 30% of the vote. But the Democratic Party is no different. What’s more, why is the presidency such a big deal? Does political science teach us that the presidency is all that matters? No, of course not. And as it is, 31 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, compared to just 11 by Democrats! They also control the Senate and the House. And after the next election, they will almost certainly still control the House — and might control the Senate. It seems to me that the Republican Party is doing okay.

This all disturbs me. But we aren’t going to change it unless we can see the truth and look clearly at the political science. And believing that Bill Clinton was a response to political changes in the country is perhaps the biggest part of the problem. Because now conservatives win even when the Republican Party loses. And someone as smart as Brian Beutler should understand that.