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April 7, 2020 - Adventures in HellwQrld
37:00
Politics: It sucks being a liberal

I complain about how Jemmy Madison screwed this country up and what steps I think we can take to fix it. Also Ranked Choice Voting is awesome and we need to use it. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello everyone, Program Politics here, here to talk about politics.
Which is something all the QAnon people who yell at me about my screen name like to say I don't do.
Now the thing is about me personally is I'm incredibly liberal.
I have gotten into more than my fair share of arguments where I tell people, I want every drug legalized.
Just legalize them all.
There should be no black market.
If you want to do heroin or cocaine or Anything ridiculously bad, you should go see a doctor.
The doctor should give you some reading materials and probably make you watch a half hour long video that's like, this is a really bad idea, you stupid prick.
Don't do it!
And then after the doctor's done having aggressively warned you not to do this, you could say, no, I still want to do it.
Give me some heroin.
And then they prescribe you heroin.
You go to the store, you buy your heroin.
We don't need black markets for these things.
It's stupid.
It's bad.
And I'm sure if anyone who's here is like, no, you can't give people heroin!
You're a terrible person!
Whatever.
I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
I've always told anyone who will listen to me that sex work should be legal, drugs should be legal, gambling should be legal.
Just legalize everything.
That's kind of my mindset.
I'm very libertarian in that way.
On those issues.
The rest of the libertarian economic policy is stupid and terrible, and I hate it.
So all those libertarians who I just picked up five seconds ago, terribly sorry, but I'm not on your team.
But anyhow, I mean, again, personally, I'm incredibly liberal in that sense.
But I'm a Democrat, and that's just my identity, is that I believe in voting for the Democratic candidate for president.
And when you're on Twitter, with the extremism and the polarization and the passion, and just you just see everybody's just just so in it to win it.
And when people are really invested, it tends to pull them to extremes.
And that's why Rose Twitter is such a powerful thing.
And it's why you deal with so many people that are very Very angry at the idea of having to vote for Joe Biden in the upcoming election.
And I get it.
I completely understand that wanting to have this powerful, dynamic change is something that we all really want in America.
We see the status quo and it needs to be shaken up and we need to, we want to adjust it.
But the thing about America is we have a very, very poorly designed government.
The Senate is an abomination.
There's really no two ways about that.
And unless we destroy the Constitution, which a lot of people would be very unhappy about, abolishing the Senate is not going to happen.
So we're stuck with this very undemocratic, lowercase d, institution that allows for very tiny rural states to block the will of the vast majority of Americans.
And on top of that, then you compound the incredibly terrible Senate with the incredibly terrible Electoral College, which again prioritizes certain mid-sized states that are competitive in elections versus other states that are uncompetitive and larger in elections.
And now you have this very ridiculous setup Where Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, they decide who our president is.
And you will have these QAnon lunatics screaming, I don't want California and New York to decide who my president is.
And it's like, well, why do you want Wisconsin doing that?
Why do you want Florida doing that?
Why do you pick one state instead of another to declare who the president will be?
How about you just make a candidate that would actually like, effectively run and get votes anywhere.
How about that?
Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?
So you have these two roadblocks.
You have these two horrible roadblocks preventing us from getting where we want to get to.
Now, if the Democrats were to take power, what should they do?
What should we yell at them to do?
The thing is, you've got to maximize power.
So the whole point of winning an election is to wield power through that election.
And now step number one in the Senate is obviously abolishing the filibuster.
And I know that's going to be a really heavy lift.
I know Joe Manchin and all the other dirtbags and red state Democrats are going to be really tough to get there.
But again, you've got to win enough in the Senate.
And this could be a year where you could win a solid number of seats, given the hell that we're living in right now.
A lot of people that were not vulnerable before may be very vulnerable right now.
If you can win enough seats to get 50 votes to abolish the filibuster, that opens the door to a lot of possibilities.
The first primary goal, once you abolish the filibuster, is immediately make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states.
Even if they don't want it, although the District of Columbia has been fighting for statehood for forever, And Puerto Rico is probably leaning towards it right now.
Boom!
State them up, both.
That is four more Democratic Senators guaranteed.
Lock it in.
Bam!
Nailed it.
So now you've just put your thumb on the scale to give yourself an advantage to compensate for the North Dakotas and South Dakotas and Nebraska's and other tiny Wyoming's of the world that are just going to be Republican strongholds unless you can find somebody That is really capable of doing the job there, which is really tough because rural states are Republican by nature.
So immediate statehood for those two territories.
Get them into the Union and get yourself some Senators.
And then the second and I think even kind of more important thing to do is you abolish, you repeal the Permanent Apportment Act of 1929 and you re-institute, you create a new law That sets the number of representatives in the U.S.
House of Representatives to one per the number of the lowest populated state in the Union, which right now is Wyoming.
And I think Wyoming has like a half million or so people in it.
I'm sure someone will correct me, but I did this math a week or so ago.
If you do that, California ends up having somewhere around 100 representatives.
It almost doubles the number of representatives California has.
And that just goes to show you how ridiculous that is, in the sense that Wyoming, they get to have a representative who has this much smaller population pool of people that they represent, whereas the California representatives Basically represent double.
Basically double the size of that.
Which is silly.
And if you do that, you're going to damage gerrymandering across the board because you're going to have to drop new districts.
That'll be tougher to gerrymander.
And you also reform the Electoral College in one fell swoop because now The Electoral College becomes actually representative of what each state's size and population really is.
You don't have to try to do an end run around the Electoral College by making it just ratify the popular vote winner, which it should do anyways.
And you would probably do that as a stand-alone bill, but if you didn't want to, now you're going to have the big states actually carry their actual real true value in the Electoral College And it's going to be very tough for you to have a popular vote winner be the electoral college loser.
And that's one of the funny things about the Democratic Party is everyone hates it, but the Democrats have won the popular vote in six out of seven elections, going back to Bill Clinton.
And you think about that and it's just like, man, it's really ridiculous how stupid the system we have is where The party that has won the vast majority of the time and the only time they lost the popular vote was the other side was incumbent during 9-11 and had war footing and whatnot, will you?
It's really incredible that so many people can hate the party that the American people actually, very obviously, prefer over and over again.
And you can tell me, well, the system is such that you've got to win the Electoral College and this is what really matters.
Yeah, I get it.
Winning the system is what really matters.
Rick Wilson just drove into my house and punched me in the throat for whining about the popular vote.
And then he screamed, Electoral College, motherfucker!
And drove away.
Yeah, I get it.
I understand that.
We are playing under Electoral College rules.
But in a world where reality matters, and in a supposed democracy you're supposed to be the side that gets the most vote wins, it's a pretty fair metric for using which side is more popular, which side appeals more to more people, and which side matters.
Which side actually has the ear of the American public?
And it's the Democrats, not the Republicans.
And I get it.
I get that the Democrats are frustrating, and awful, and terrible, and all these things.
But it's mostly because of the fact that we have a system that is entirely designed to screw them.
And it wasn't put in place to screw them.
It never was.
The Senate and the House and all of this stuff was just...
The Senate was just an attempt to compromise to make small states happy, so they would join the great experiment that was the United States of America in the Constitution.
When that was being ratified, they were just like, well, how do we make Rhode Island and Connecticut feel good about joining a collection of states?
Along with New York and Virginia.
And remember at that time Virginia was Virginia and West Virginia all in one.
So it was a very massive state.
So there was the terrible corrupt bargain that was made between the small states and the big states gave us the Senate which was a huge mistake.
And the Electoral College was a compromise made on behalf of slavery because Direct democracy would have meant the North would have voted for who the President was, and the South really wouldn't have had a lot of say in the decision.
Because it would have been really outnumbered.
So they came up with the Detroit College, and they came up with the Three-Fifths Compromise as ways to give the South weight in presidential elections.
And in 1800, the ultra-controversial election of Thomas Jefferson beating John Adams.
And maybe I'll do a podcast on the election of 1800, because it is hilarious.
Jefferson only wins because of the inflation of electoral votes that the South caught from the Three-Fifths Compromise.
If we did the true populations of all the states, Adams would have had the majority.
He would have been the winner.
But because we were appealing to slavers, Jefferson won.
And so you have all these bad compromises that just led to the current state of affairs that we're living in right now.
And the most ridiculous part of all of this was, is that the Three-Fifths Compromise in Electoral College was only a Band-Aid that lasted 80 years.
Four score and seven years ago.
The Gettysburg Address.
The Civil War came about because Abraham Lincoln was elected president without submarine votes.
The South would not vote for him because they were afraid he would take away their slaves.
And then when he won election, they left.
So the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College being crutches to try to give the South some voice in who the president of the whole nation was going to be Didn't work.
It lasted less than a century, and then we had to brutally murder each other over four long years before we decided that the South was no longer allowed to have slaves, because slavery is terrible and bad, and we had to put a stop to that.
And then revisionists started to lie about states' rights, because that's what revisionist scum do in these situations.
So, the Electoral College is a bad idea that is anachronistic because the whole point of its existence came and went with the passing of the Civil War and the Three-Fifths Compromise was obviously destroyed because we don't have slaves anymore in this country.
So, great.
Good job, Jimmy Addison, you stupid prick.
So, you fix those things, and you start to grease the wheels for the party that America actually supports to actually start flexing its muscles and wielding some power.
Now, I know that Rose Twitter and everybody else on that side is going to be screaming and yelling at me that Democrats are monsters and that we're evil and all that kind of stuff.
And I get it.
And it's cool.
And let's work together.
And I mean that honestly.
Because really, truly, we're on the same side, but the vitriol and the venom and the hatred between the Democratic Socialist Rose Twitter left and the boring, gonna vote for Joe Biden and have a spring in my step while I do it left is ridiculous!
Because we're on the same side about 85% of things at least.
There's no reason for all this hatred and division.
And honestly, you see this because These are the kind of fights that make people really crazy because you're in agreement on so much and it just feels like the other person just won't give you that last little thing that's ridiculous.
They won't do it.
And I think the easiest and best way to bridge this gap is ranked choice voting.
And I'm a huge advocate for ranked choice voting.
And we need it.
Because it soothes a lot of the problems that we have.
Because the whole issue, the whole argument between the two sides is that the people that want to vote Green Party, or the people that just want to write in somebody else, the people that want to not Bend to the corporatist, DLC, third-wing, blue-dogging, triangulating scum of the Democratic Party.
They are seen as an objective force for evil by the Democrats.
Because by refusing to vote for the Democrat, they are effectively aiding the Republican.
Because when you have a first-past-the-post system, a terribly ineffective and bad system for voting, you create a situation where if everyone doesn't vote for one person, the other guy's gonna win.
And this is the huge problem with Green Party candidates and Liberal Third Party candidates, is that they split the vote and they are a spoiler.
Rick Wilson in his book even talks about funding these people.
In Montana, in the 2018 midterms, Jon Tester got a Green Party candidate struck off the ballot, and it turned out he was actually being paid for by the Republicans to run as a Green.
And this is the huge problem with being a liberal party that is a minor liberal party.
Is that you're, no matter how benevolent, no matter how pure, no matter how noble your
intentions are, no matter how righteous and honest you are, you are going to be used by
Republicans for cynical means.
They are going to work to grow and expand your power base Because they know that all you will do is hurt the Democrats.
And that's what they want.
Because you can create nightmare scenarios like what happened in Maine, where the governor, LePage, who pretty much everyone hated, won election in a multi-white race with a mid-30s percent of the vote.
It was just this ridiculous thing where there was like three liberal candidates running and LePage was the Republican.
And the three libs managed to split the vote in the most egregious manner possible on the page right end with a real, shockingly low plurality of the vote.
And guess what?
Maine has ranked choice voting now because they saw what happened and they said, no, we're not going to let that happen again.
And guess what happened in 2018?
In one district, there was an election under ranked choice voting.
And after the first round, the Republican won.
But then after they added all the second place votes in, the Democrat won.
And then the Republican sued to try to stop the result from being confirmed because he was angry and was a poor sport and a sore loser.
And the courts told him to drop dead because ranked choice voting was the system they ran the election under and that's the way it works.
And that's the way it should work.
And when you have ranked choice voting, what is the benefit for the Green Party candidate?
Well, first of all, now they are free from the taint of being a spoiler.
They can no longer be considered to be a bad person that is just trying to help the Republican win.
And all of that negative connotation is taken away first and foremost.
And also, just think of what it does to the dynamic between the Democrat and the Green now.
Because there's no longer this There's no longer this rage at the person who is pretty much very close to your ideology compared to what a Republican would be when it comes to your ideology.
And you and them can now actually have detente.
You can actually have An open and friendly communication between the Green and the Democrat without having to worry about there being any actual concern about costing each other the election.
You can actually have the Democrat and the Green campaign together under a mutual pledge that they will ask the people that vote for them as their first choice to vote for the other one as their second choice.
Now, if you want to tell me that even that is a bridge too far, that even you will not do that for the Democrat, those vile corporatists, scum, well then, okay, fine, you're completely uncompromising and, I mean, again, this is an olive branch.
This is a desperate attempt to try to reach out to the left and to ask them to just try this thing, do this thing for us, and try to make elective politics in America not this toxic cesspool that sucks.
And again, because we saw what happened in 2018, it worked.
People did vote for the Democrat as their second option.
The Democrat did get enough votes in the second ballot to beat the Republican and win.
And the other thing about this is, think about what this means for the minor party and the bar they have to clear in order to actually win an election.
Because first of all, if you're going to win an election against a Republican, you're going to need to have the progressive left liberal side of the voting pool be over 50%.
You're going to have to have more liberals than conservatives actually cast ballots.
Now, if you run third party, you need, now you need some sort of miracle to happen where
you have like this massive quantity of liberals that are willing to vote.
Because now you, again, because LePage got in with about mid-30s because three other candidates split.
So you need like 60 or 70% liberals to vote and then you need to gain the lion's share of the Democrats' votes to make it so the split doesn't cost either one of you the election and you can beat the Democrat and the Republican.
It's really tough.
But with ranked choice voting, if you can get 25.1 percent or 25.2 percent of the liberal vote,
and all the Democrats make you their second option, and they got 24.9, and the Republican got 49.9,
Second ballot, all the Democrat votes go to the green.
Boom.
50.1.
Boom.
You're in Congress now.
Boom.
You're the Governor now.
Boom.
Whatever.
You win the election.
And that's the thing.
If we have that olive branch, if we have that bridge between the two sides, then you actually can have the Greens and the Liberals and the Democratic Socialists, you can actually have those people run As honest candidates pushing an honest agenda, and they can do rallies with the Democrat.
And they can do rallies with each other.
You can have the Democrat, Socialist, and the Green go out and have a party together and tell everyone, give me your one and give them your two, and so on and so forth.
And that's how you actually build consensus between people that are basically on the same page.
And that's really what it comes down to, is just trying to build a coalition.
Trying to get people to work together to achieve a common good.
Because that's what the American Dream and Democracy are all about.
Or at least it sounded good, I mean.
I don't know.
I'm just trying anyways.
Anyhow, it's question time.
Adam Stern, who used to be the NBA Commissioner, if I please, Says I'm a liberal.
I'm in a liberal industry, music, in a liberal state, Colorado.
How do I deal with rabid Bernie bros that just sound like left-wing MAGA to me?
If you don't like your candidate, you're dumb.
When their candidate doesn't win elections, it's rigged.
MSM is fake, etc, etc, etc.
I think a lot of this really has to come down to passion and And I really think that a lot of this is the fact that people see somebody as an elixir or a cure-all for what is going on in the world.
And it never works out.
One of John F. Kennedy's advisors, After the Kennedy administration was over and all, he published a book, and the title of that book was No Final Battles.
And I think that's a very apt title, because it means that you're never going to actually crush the enemy and achieve total victory.
There's always going to be another election.
There's always going to be another bill to argue and debate over and work out a compromise about.
There's always going to be something left.
There's always going to be work left undone.
I was talking to someone before I did this podcast and I told them that all we can do is push the rock up the hill.
And they laughed at me and they said, do you know of the story of Sisyphus?
And I said, that's why I said it.
I completely, I understand the doomed nature of the need to push the rock up the hill.
But that's all we can do is we can win the battle that we can win in this moment in time.
And to me, I, Never believed in what Bernie Sanders was selling because I just didn't think that the institutional problems that exist in the Senate and what not will you can be overcome by any president in any way shape or form unless you do the drastic things that I suggested you do.
And even then, It would probably, you'd have to probably wait an election cycle or two before the District of Columbia Senators and the Puerto Rican Senators could get seated and the representatives from those new states got awarded.
And then you'd have to redistrict everything for the massive expansion of the House of Representatives and all the political backlash that would come from that.
But I mean, this is the thing is that whenever I hear these people talking about Medicare for All and All of these things which I support entirely.
I want universal health care.
Be it Medicare for All or any other system.
And there's a million different kind of systems in the world, the industrialized world.
And they all have universal coverage except for America because America is terrible about this shit.
We suck and it's a national embarrassment.
But the thing is, is that any president we have is barring some sort of massive electoral landslide,
they're going to have to go to Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia who's a Democrat, they're
going to have to beg Joe Manchin to give him a health care bill.
And if it's not Joe, and if we get to 51 senators, then it's going to be Jon Tester in Montana.
well.
And if we get to 52 Senators, it's going to be Kristen Sinema in Arizona.
And if we have 52 Senators, it's probably going to be her new colleague in the Senate, Kelly.
Who just got into office.
You're going to have red state Democrats who are not going to be really comfortable with making these votes.
And it's going to be tough.
If a miracle happens and Doug Jones won re-election, I mean, that guy is not going to stick his neck out for Medicare for All in Alabama.
They will crush him.
So, I mean, this is the terrible nature of the Senate.
It's the terrible nature of our politics and how our laws are made.
And if you want to tell me that you...
If you want to tell me that Bernie Sanders can fix these things, then God bless you, but I just don't see how it's possible.
I mean, I wish I was wrong.
I would love to be wrong.
I tell people all the time when I want to be red-pilled that I would love to live in a world that's not the world I currently live in.
The world I currently live in sucks.
It is awful and bad and I hate it.
Uh, but I'm pretty sure that the reality I'm living in is accurate.
So knowing that, I think really honestly, again, I think when you're talking to liberals and Rose Twitter people and Bernie Sanders supporters, the main thing I would suggest to them is the work on ranked choice voting.
Really, honestly, just a number one.
Just say, look, guys, I agree with you on a lot of this stuff.
We have consensus.
We are close on so many issues, but we're getting in each other's way or stepping on each other.
And we're letting the real problem, the real bad guys win as a result of our intra Party squabbling there are inability to heal this rift
between our people who are effectively on the same side, but there's just levels of
distrust and I
really think that once you institute ranked choice voting you
Show the minor party that you want them to have a chance to flourish and be productive and have a voice in
Electoral politics and by the same token the third party Shows that they're not in this just for the sake of holding
the major party hostage page.
Because it's really ridiculous the amount of influence that a third party can have if an election is close and you're a third party candidate who literally appeals to only like 2 or 3% of the electorate.
But that 2 or 3% can determine who wins the election!
It's awful.
It's really awful that you can wield such an incredibly undue influence upon an election when you are really an unpopular figure who can't attract any real semblance of support.
You can't build a real constituency.
So that's, and beyond that, just solidarity with them on the fact that we have all these problems.
The solidarity of the fact that we have an electoral college, that we have a Senate.
All of these things explain that the liberal in America has a plight.
We have a plight.
And this is our shared suffering.
And we are in this together, as it were.
And if they're not willing to accept that, then just roll your eyes.
Because really, in the end, it's all about gettable votes.
It's all about people that can actually be convinced to go to the polls and actually cast a ballot.
And if they're not reachable, if they won't do it, then that's their prerogative.
Just tell them, look, you're sitting on the sidelines.
You're not helping.
You're hurting.
And I hope one day you come to grips with that and you understand that if you are going to care about electoral politics, you've got to back a path to victory.
You've got to back a way to get the results you want.
And if you're not doing that, then I don't know what you're doing.
It just makes no sense to me.
It's really kind of silly in a lot of ways.
So that's that.
And my other question is Barbara Leave the Toilet Paper, which is a great name.
And she says, My sister's dipshit boyfriend thinks the cell phone towers will go down for three days while government officials will be arrested.
Without hurting her feelings, what should I tell her?
And to that I would say, I would just say, look, let's see what happens.
I will be more than happy to indulge, but is it going to happen that the arrests happen on April 10th?
Because if so, we're getting very close.
We're getting down to the brass tacks now, so you better be cutting the power off at some ill-defined point in the very foreseeable future, or else I'm going to have to start asking some questions.
It's unfortunate that her boyfriend is apparently a QAnon supporter and is out of his mind.
I would just tell your sister, like, how much has he told you about this stuff?
Like, what do you know that he has said?
Because I would think that really what the question is, as we say in the communities, How much of his power level has he shown your sister?
Is it just the weird 5G stuff and the arrests?
Or has he gotten into the mole children and the adrenochrome and all that stuff?
Has he just really taken the mask off and just gone whole hog crazy?
And from there you can assess like what's going on with your sister.
And what's healthy for her and what's not healthy for her.
And what's healthy for you and what's not healthy for you.
Because if she decides to tell you that Donald Trump is going to save America from the baby eaters, then maybe you and your sister have to sit down and have a chat.
And I hope not.
That would be really bad.
But if the boyfriend's gotten on the whole baby eating thing, then well...
Maybe he needs to have a talk about her and the boyfriend and where his mind is at and if she really wants to have to spend her golden years visiting him in prison every so often if Trump loses re-election and he decides that it's time to bring the storm via his own two hands.
Because I don't know about him.
I don't know that it'll be him directly, but that's coming.
That's coming down Broadway if they don't get what they want.
They're not going to get what they want, so they're going to do something really stupid, and that's inevitable.
Because that is the hell world we live in.
So, in closing, Ranked Choice Voting, very good.
Let's do lots more of that.
I'm kind of worried about the coronavirus hurting ballot initiatives across America.
And what that's going to do for what the ballot is going to look like in November.
But RCV, very good.
I will defend it to the bitter end.
It is America's greatest hope for democracy.
The Senate is terrible.
The Electoral College sucks.
And Democrats are what we have.
And until we can fix lots of other systems, lots of other problems in a system that was designed by a bunch of white slaves, almost like voting men hundreds of years ago, We ain't gonna get anywhere else anytime soon.
So, um, it sucks, but that's the way it is.
So, uh, put your back into it, and let's keep moving the boulder up the hill.
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