The sooner people realize the function of electoral politics is to just get some person in office that has to listen to people who care about political issues because enough people who voted him or her in cares about those issues, rather than it being the totality of the political world, the better off we will be.
I'd rather Bernie Sanders be the president rather than Hilary Clinton because the conversation would be starting a little more to the left and he's less beholden to fundamentally undemocratic political forces, but, at the end of the day, he's an imperfect person who holds public office who will never be anywhere near the perfect progressive hero some people want him to be. Candidates should not be the center of the political process, but tools. Consequently, I wish people would stop with this toxic snark (on both the Sanders and Clinton sides), and just show up to fucking vote. Better yet, actually try to engage in some sort of political process that actually deals with the lived political realities of people, you know actual politics. It's this sort of insulated, myopic, horse race focused bullshit that leads so many people to think this shit doesn't matter in the first place. Stay focused on the actual politics of day to day life and maybe these apathetic people (who Bernie Sanders only begins to reach the tip of) might actually start engaging in political processes.
Of course Bernie is a false prophet. Who cares. They all are. Of course Hilary Clinton is an "establishment" candidate. They all are to a certain extent. That's how you get power. The job of citizens is to coerce candidates with existing power into doing shit that they want, not picking a team and narrowing your political imagination. That sort of shit just leads to shitty moral blackmail (get in line or your'll have to deal with Trump). Of course Trump is awful, but the reason he even got this far in the first place is because he knows how to manipulate this stupid system in which we give far, far too much of a shit about candidates and not about things that actually matter.
Stop using candidates as short hands for concepts like "ideological purity," and "compromise." Nobody who has ever been a part of an establishment political process has not compromised to get something he or she wanted, and nothing has ever gotten done without ideology driving the process. Candidates aren't ideas. They're vessels for policy and should be nothing more.
Rant over I guess. I don't normally post in political threads, but this snarky culture is really preventing me from enjoying any of them.
