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A Political Party Named Desire
Blanche DuBois was a teacher, a respected member of the community of Laurel, Mississippi. She was from a good family but in very short order her life began to unravel.
Her marriage fell apart when she caught her husband in bed with another man. Ashamed and guilt ridden he eventually committed suicide. To make matter worse she was thrown out of her ancestral home when the illnesses of others depleted the family fortune. After a series of tawdry affairs, she ended up in New Orleans living with her sister Stella and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski.
Stanley was a rough-hewn man that she absolutely despised. He was an “ape” as far as she was concerned and unfit for a woman such as her sister. Obsessed with the loss of her youthful beauty Blanche finally descended into alcoholism and mental illness, stuck in a fantasy world where she was always about to be rescued by a wealthy old flame.
So goes the storyline in Tennessee Williams’ theatrical masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire.
Since Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the late presidential election, the entirety of the Democratic Party has descended into its own Blanche DuBois madness. They have latched on to fantasy after fantasy on exactly how they were going to stop Trump’s presidency and/or cut off all future instances where a Republican could win the White House through the Electoral College.
And I do mean fantasies. Because every last one of them needs the explicit participation of Republicans. Every last one.
The whole issue of faithless electors needed massive amounts of Republican help.
The whole idea that an election thrown into the House would produce anything but a Trump victory needed massive amounts of Republican help.
Being firmly in minority status in both houses of Congress, any thought of amending the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College needs massive amounts of Republican help. And even if an amendment should pass the Congress, Republicans control 34 of 50 state legislatures in a process that requires the consent of 38 of them. (None of which would be too eager to surrender control of the Executive branch to a California-Illinois-New York axis anyway.)
And if that process is fantastical, last week a liberal law professor suggested in an LA Times Op-Ed that the Supreme Court could find the Electoral College unconstitutional. Think about that. By the time this case winds through the lower levels the makeup of the Supreme Court will have been vastly moved to the right by Trump himself. Yet he honestly believes that the Court will unilaterally nullify vast swaths of the written Constitution on its own volition.
Now the latest fantasy is impeachment. Like the amendment process, that, too is reliant on massive amounts of GOP help. In this world view, instead of tackling issues like repealing ObamaCare, overhauling the tax code, or re-righting the state of our military, the Republicans in Congress are just itching to mess up the best situation their party has been in since 1928.
By what method do they propose going about to create this groundswell of Republican support? Every election since 2000 has seen the nastiness of their rhetoric ratcheted to another extreme. Even as we acknowledged the historical nature of Obama’s and Clinton’s candidacies, they would give no quarter in acknowledging principled opposition. Everything was racist or misogynistic. All policy differences were seen as the one of the evil twins of xenophobia or homophobia. And because we were evil there would be no accommodation to any of our concerns. Religious liberty? HA! Gun rights? HA!
And as of November we all fascist brownshirts, cheering on as Trump’s generals are poised to lead a military coup. After all, we “stole” their election, just as we “stole” Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat, surely now we would steal the country itself.
Despite all of the above, according to progressive logic, we should all be totally willing to provide them the needed votes to fulfill any and all of their anti-Trump dreams at a moments notice.
At the end of Streetcar, Blanche is being led away to a sanitarium by a kindly doctor and nurse. After a brief struggle she finally snaps, losing all contact with reality. She smiles and delivers what is perhaps the play’s most famous line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Published in Politics
This is actually a situation where the Republicans might think about some Constitution Amendments of their own. 34 state legislatures. When are they likely to be here again?
Excellent analogy well-played.
Fitting that the GOP primary season was a version of Caddyshack, the election was watching the US hockey team in 1980 and now you have nailed the post election meltdown with perfection.
Nicely done EJ.
And then again the Dems always did rely on a kind of strangeness.
Breaking News: It has been proven without a shadow of doubt that one in three Hillary supporters are as stupid as the other two.
Main page analogy.
On the other hand, there have always been once-wealthy Republicans who are just itching for an excuse to come to the rescue of Democrats so they can resume being dominated by them.
In August 2010, Massachusetts became the sixth state to sign on to the National Popular Vote bill. It’s an interesting notion. The idea is that the state’s electoral college votes automatically go to the candidate who wins the popular vote.
Since the states can each do whatever they want in terms of instructing their Electoral College delegates, by adopting the NPV plan, the Democrats could make it possible in the next election to win the EC vote by winning the popular vote. I suspect that is where this issue will land four years from now. It’s not something that would come up at the Supreme Court. It is something Republicans need to be aware of going forward.
I don’t know why the blue states wouldn’t all do this. It is very easy to accomplish.
Needless to say, I am opposed to it on principle, but I respect the states’ rights to do this.
Quote from that Op-Ed:
This is a remarkably illogical statement: X is in Y but X is not a part of Y. This is direct evidence that the Left is not governed by the rules of logic and reason.
I would say the madness predates this, it in fact goes back to the election of Obama himself. The difference is now it is a delusional madness of terror where as before it was one of senseless euphoria.
Even as disaster after disaster unfolded under the previous administration Democrats continued to whistle happily going about their day, “All is well!” Even as the party was slowly decimated across the country in legislatures, governors, the House etc. they continued, “All is well!” Now suddenly reality has come crashing down onto their fantasy world and it is, “This is Armageddon!”
The nature of the madness has changed but the madness was there all along.
Oh yes, the “selected, not elected” nonsense of 2000, the accusations of theft after 2004, the branding of the Tea Party as a bunch of racists… It will never end.
Let me add the most salient of Blanche (aka the Democrats) DuBois’ lines to this excellent analogical discussion: “I don’t want realism! I want magic!”
A great post, EJ, but my god…that photo is going to haunt my dreams.
Let’s say that the Democrats’ fantasy comes true and Donald Trump were impeached. They do realize who becomes president, right? A Trump impeachment will not result in President Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, or Clinton, so what is the benefit to them? Maybe they fantasize that the Supreme Court will somehow find a way to declare Bernie Sanders president.
No, no I do not think that they do.
No no, let them go on about impeachment. If they ever do get around to trying it, all the Trumpers have to say is that they were trying to impeach him before he ever came to office. And they’d be right. By threatening him now, they’re just inoculating him from any future attack.
That is really a great analogy. It firms up all that we have been witnessing through this whole thing.
Part of the madness is that they will assert something, something that one of them just thought up and the rest of them agree with immediately, without any thought process involved, say: “Oh Donald doesn’t really want to win, he’s just self-promoting. He’ll find a way to bail out before the end.”
This is complete fantasy, they have no source, have done no investigation. Yet they proceed as though this is now an established truth, unaware that it is all happening in their heads. The rest of us who are not involved with their delusion – or even aware of it – are brushed off as uninformed boobs.
When later it doesn’t pan out to agree with this delusion, they immediately rationalize in some way: he is now even MORE out of control and he doesn’t have any idea how to get off this crazy ride, or he is now an evil genius (or simply evil), or there’s been some mistake, or it is total luck, or something, anything, other than that they have been missing the reality from the beginning.
I listen to several left-leaning podcasts, and I keep wincing when I hear them banter and hear how they have packed all of these delusions into a great big reality picture of “what happened” and what’s going on that is utterly divorced from the plain and easily-discovered truth. But I’m sure for Blanche it wasn’t easy to discover, no amount of going back seeing what was actually happening instead of what she thought was happening was possible – too far gone. Sad that for so many of my liberal friends that butterfly net might wind up their only solace.
@drlorentz:
A statement so stupid only a liberal law professor could make and believe it.
Oh the great gnashing of teeth.
I agree it’s unlikely the court would end the electoral college, but this would be a fair description of some of their previous rulings.
Don’t think about it for too long, though. I accidentally did and now I’m out of advil.
Was it Michael Savage who said, “Liberalism is a mental disorder”? Further evidence he was right. These people are nuts.
But it’s easier to create something out of whole cloth than eliminate something that obviously exists.
Can I have some fun with quotes from the play? Hillary: Blanche, Trump: Stanley, Mitch: Obama.
This is the same kind of thing that went on in Wisconsin during the Scott Walker recall election. If you can win, great. If you lose, you’re worse off than you would have been otherwise.
I don’t think the states can do “whatever they want”. For instance, if they allowed foreigners living in the state to vote, even if restricted to the Presidential ballot, that would have trouble surviving a court challenge, because it grants suffrage to people who aren’t supposed to have it. Giving out-of-state “foreigners” a say in the state’s Presidential choice would dilute the vote of the citizens, which would not be appreciated by those who don’t expect those out-of-staters to vote the right way. That would partially deny their right to a republican form of government.
Let the Democrats indulge in these fantasy denial exercises like the NPV. I don’t believe there is a single state with a Dem trifecta (there are only 6) which hasn’t already approved NPV. And the Dems just spent two weeks extolling the role of the electors. Anyone think that the electors in OH, PA, MI and WI would have just voted for Clinton if a previous Dem trifecta had approved NPV years ago? Anyone believe that a single Dem elector would vote for Trump whatever the “instructions” from their legislature?
Let them become the party of grand mufti Ellison, sex change for children, Palestinian and Chicago murderers, NPV, BLM, BDS and $8 per gallon gasoline.
What else have they got? The GOP might look like a circus at times but the Democrats are the sleazy sideshow freaks you pass on the way in.
I’m a former law professor, and this guy gives my former profession a seriously bad name. If one-person one-vote applied everywhere, then the Senate could not be allowed to exist!
The Supreme Court was well aware that the Constitution itself does not include pure representative democracy as a core value, citing the very example of the Senate. “Redistricting” is easy for the Senate: one state, one district.
Also, let’s not forget that in the Electoral College, California, New York, Texas, and Florida heavily outweigh Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, and Rhode Island anyway. (True, there are 100 “extra” votes out there, but they have to be picked off 2 at a time.)
In the Senate, on the other hand, the vote dilution suffered by citizens of the biggest states is monstrous. Exactly as planned by the Framers, and absolutely, positively integral to the constitutional scheme.
If only. The court eviscerated states’ rights in the 50s-70s by dismantling their ability to mimic the federal structure.
Which court cases did you have in mind? This is a topic about which I’ve wanted to learn more.