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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
My apologies for not being clear. I meant that the states have a right to instruct their Electoral College representatives.
They are governed by feelings only. Whatever makes them feel good. That is why they construct such illogicasl statements and why they accept the notion that results don’t matter, only intentions. And that’s what makes them so dangerous.
That would require some forethought.
Because to end Americas as a representative republic is precisely what they want. Which is one of the primary reasons that they love open borders and the direct importation of third world mohammedans. Besides getting to poke a stick in the eye of us privileged old dead white slave traders, they also get additional forever voting blocks that reproduce faster than the gun clinging, Bible clutching, and totally deplorable white middle class. Win-Win. No the Dems want a pure democracy – you know, one man, one vote, one time. By the way, Obamacare is supposed to lead to single payer, leading to the death and demise of our republic. Hugs & kisses – ST.
Brilliant post.
However,
They aren’t that crazy. They have good reason to believe Republicans might help them.
I used to believe some influential Republicans were simply naive or clueless, now it’s worth considering that they are saboteurs, traitors. After this election, things certainly point in that direction.
The NPV is very interesting. The practical upshot of it is, a state that passes this is really saying “we don’t care what our voters said.”
I have a problem with the Census and apportionment. Were illegals not counted in California their representatives (and the EC votes) would have been re-apportioned to the south.
They are certainly spineless and many find themselves enthralled by media types. However, the lure of the media has certainly taken a hit with this cycle.
Still, I concede the most dangerous place on this earth remains the space between any politician and a tv camera.
Is Trump a traitor for going along with the Gang of eight recommendations after getting the Republican nomination by attacking the Gang of eight stuff? For saying that the free market fails everytime or for his daughter’s silly worries about income equality for mothers who lowered their economic efficiency by choosing to take time off to raise their children?
What defines a traitor anyway?
It would take me a while to find them at this point (would have to go dig out my old ConLaw textbook from college), but there was a series of cases (may have been as many as 5 or 6 as the states kept trying to appease Warren’s notorious fickleness) under the Warren court where states were sued for not allocating their state-senate seats by population, and Warren kept declaring these sorts of apportionments as unconstitutional violations of equal rights. This is why all bicameral state legislatures have both chambers allocated by population.
That is one of the best lines…ever.
I glanced through the NPV site and I didn’t see how they get around Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution:
Do they have a petition to Congress allowing them to enter into this compact? The site talks a lot about the Constitution but I don’t see this question being addressed. To my untrained eye, it would be a show stopper.
This is what was happening in the 1820 and 30’s. I think we are in the same boat with similar projections over the next 20 to 30 years. I am been praying and wishing we were not but evidence just keeps saying otherwise.
It could be a show stopper, but you would have to prove that this was a compact. If the legislation just says that the electors must vote for the national popular vote winner without coordinating with the other states then it could be help constitutional.
There doesn’t need to be any compact, formal or informal involved. The head of the Democratic Party in states in which the Democrats are a majority, such as Massachusetts, simply do it.
There are no barriers to this that I can see from a national perspective.
They will do it because those states want to do it.
It will just happen.
I was on a law journal in law school. Sadly, I cannot say that the quality of thinking that this represents surprises me.
Well, if we are right in diagnosing their insanity, then Trump is the center of evil in the Universe and if only he can be prevented from becoming president, all will be good, because then they can deal with the “normal” Republicans, rather then the extreme, evil, racist Republicans. Of course, if it were to happen, President Pence, on his first day in office would be shocked to discover that he had been magically transformed by the elite commentariat into the personification of sis-gendered, racist, evil. And the left would wander around crooning about how he hadn’t even been elected as president.
The first rule of holes – stop digging. They asked for a recount in close states that went against them and lost votes. They told electors to vote their consciences and more Hilary electors defected than Trump electors. If they end up passing this bill in a sufficient number of states (which itself is unlikely as so far only Democratic dominated states have passed it), I would expect the result to be a Republican candidate winning an election because he won the popular vote and thus “stole” electoral votes from the Democrat. The Cosmos hates Democrats.
Huh?
Meaning, State senators are elected from districts – not “at large”
I think it depends on what kind of districts. If a state senate had, say, one representative per county, that would mimic the federal structure. But I don’t know of any state that allocates representatives by county or county equivalent. County boundaries are not much honored when it comes to setting up electoral districts. This method of apportionment that cuts across local governmental boundaries keeps people from identifying too strongly with a local government. If they did identify more with a local government, it might foster a community spirit that would be dangerous to the centralizers.
That’s why I am interested in learning more about how the current state of affairs came to be.
Thank you good sir.
This has been an excellent political discussion. And I have hesitated to make the following comment because it probably doesn’t serve the current purpose of the thread. But now that the conversation has basically played out, I will add it as a post script for thought.
The original analogy of this post does make a fascinating comparison of the Democrats’ current political fantasies with the illusional world of Blanche DuBois. And while part of the tragedy of Blanche’s eventual demise can certainly be attributed to her inability to face and adapt to the reality of the modern world, she is far from a wholly unsympathetic character. Remember that Blanche is without malice in her deceits. In fact, the case can be made that she primarily uses her fantasies to protect herself from the harsh brutality that Stanley represents. Tennessee Williams’ sympathies surely reside with Blanche, who is often painted – like Don Quixote – as someone who sees the world “as it should be.” She is a defender of civilization and beauty, however fleeting. Stanley, on the other hand, is more than a simple realist. He is completely amoral and a barbarian, who rapes his sister-in-law and drives her to madness without an apparent second thought.
Williams is famously quoted as lamenting that “The apes shall inherit the earth.” In this light, we probably don’t want to to take EJ’s (still) excellent political analogy to its final dramatic conclusion.
They used to be be though, as a way of balancing city power with rural dispersion. That way state senates, like in New York, would not be dominated by NYC, or Chicago, or LA. This is no longer the case.
States used to be allowed to set those districts by geographic size, not population size. Now, states senators are, like state house reps, supposed to each represent some uniform number of people.
Thank you sir.