Yeah. Okay. Fine.

Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.

Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.

The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

Lyndon Johnson, our second great emancipator, did his utmost to ship me to Vietnam. Richard J. Daley and his uniformed thugs had my friends beaten up in the streets of Chicago. Hubert Humphrey, the great defender of organized labor, spent the last years of his political career solemnly licking Lyndon Johnson’s boots.

Still, I went to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. On election day I walked a precinct in Southern California until the polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time. I didn’t have the cell phone that would certainly be in my pocket today—I didn’t even have a transistor radio—and so it was that people who opened the last few doors I knocked on in the near darkness of that California evening actually burst out laughing at me before closing the door in my face. I may have been the last person on earth to hear that the election was already over, that McGovern had won only one state and the District of Columbia.

Thirty-four years later, at a fundraiser in Arizona a liberal friend had dragged me to, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, a property developer in Phoenix and ex-chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, let me know in no uncertain terms that it was those anti-war crazies who got Nixon elected, and that we (meaning the Democratic Party) were never going to go there again if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t the only senior Democrat of consequence who’s served me up that deeply cherished nonsense over the years.

And so it’s gone since—the Clintons and their “New Democrats,” Obama’s “more than a collection of red states and blue states,” et cetera, et cetera. The members of the DNC, who, like Godechot’s Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, now reverently present us with the ghost of Joe Biden—take him or leave him—and warn us earnestly that if Trump gets elected in November it’s all going to be our fault again, just as Nixon was in 1968 and 1972, and Trump was in 2016.

To which I say, “I’m done with this. No matter how it goes this time, we’re done. Peddle your paralysis elsewhere.”

Reaping the Whirlwind

The thing vicious narcissists like Donald Trump never seem to understand is that they aren’t any more bulletproof than the people whose blood they cry out for on a daily basis. I’m sorry he was a target today, and I’m glad early reports say that he’s okay, but I have to say I’m surprised it took this long for someone to open fire on him at one of his fascist rallies. Gunfire is, after all, the politics he encourages, at least as long as all the guns are pointed away from him.

That’s not how it works. That’s not how it’s ever worked. It’s a shame Donald Trump has had to learn that the hard way, if indeed he has learned it. Personally, I doubt he’s capable of learning anything, but I’m not sure it’ll matter much either way. The final acts of this particular American tragedy were written long before Trump had any real part to play in them.