Progressives: Reform is not enough.

The familiar cycle of reform, revolution, and purge is happening now within the Progressive left.

I witnessed at first hand Republicans do their own purge as I visited with attendees at rallies for Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina and others in New Hampshire:  Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and John Kasich were RINOs.  You were pure or you were the enemy.  Ted Cruz was the least electable traditional Republican but he was the most pure, so he was the finalist against Trump, who is scarcely a Republican at all.

Ted Cruz supporters drew sharp black and white distinctions against Rubio's policies, and did it with anger and indignation.

Bernie announcement:  Pure and Righteous

Now it is the turn of progressives. The purge is on.   Revolutions upset order which involves teamwork and unity, thus releasing the active participants from the constraints of cooperation and allows them--indeed requires them--to struggle over purity of ideology.  Revolutions burn themselves out by eating their own.  The French and Russian Revolutions are examples familiar to many people.  Some readers will remember the life and death distinctions observed by the "separatists" of Plymouth Plantation who considered the Church of England irredeemably corrupt versus the Puritans of Boston who also considered it corrupt but wanted to reform it from within.

Today Americans are witnessing a reprise of the struggle that dominated Massachusetts from the founding of Plymouth in 1620 through the aftermath of the Salem witch trials in 1693 when the godly Salem residents realized they had gone too far and executed some 20 people.   Oops.

Progressives are early in the purge cycle.   The Democratic Party survived the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s by becoming "New Democrats."  They embraced technology and free trade.  The GOP was still the party of big business for extractive industries like oil and timber, but Democrats made friends in the office suites of the financial and technology industries.   Democrats stayed "left" by embracing identities that faced oppression: women, ethnic minorities, sexual preference minorities.  The result is that Democrats became the party of teachers unions rather than industrial unions, educated tech workers rather than factory workers, urban office workers rather than rural blue collar workers, and women who used contraception rather than men who preferred not to use a condom.

Protest at my house 2 weeks ago.  Even Sen. Merkely is not our enough.

Having become separated from its blue collar anchors the Democratic base voter observes environmental issues like a consumer, not a producer.  They cook with natural gas but hate natural gas pipelines.   They drive cars but hate oil drilling.  They use electricity but hate power generation sources because dams kill salmon, wind turbans kill birds, generation with coal pollutes the air, solar panels and power lines are ugly.  They eat meat--most of them-- but hate slaughterhouses.  They live in wooden houses but hate logging.

Bernie Sanders' campaign had a brutal honesty to it.  Like Roger Williams, he observed compromises and condemned it; he was pushed out of Massachusetts, but he had followers who agreed with him that the mere reformists in Boston were good but not good enough which made them dangerously bad.  

Sanders observed accurately the compromises that establishment electable Democrats have made in order to survive in office.  They compromised with producers, not just consumers.   Hillary Clinton is, as Bernie Sanders noted, comfortable with billionaires and many of them contributed to the Clinton Foundation and to her campaign.  From Hillary's point of view, there are good billionaires, ones who support women, oppose racism, address global poverty.  Sanders does not say that "property is theft" but he does say that billions of dollars concentrated in one person represents theft.   Hillary Clinton has attempted to reform and control Wall Street institutions, not break them up or prosecute them.  Sanders says that the whole system of campaign finance is corrupted and Hillary, as a successful practitioner in the current system, is corrupted.

Activists voters agree with Sanders: compromising Democrats are in the system, and they are part of the problem.  In the past 24 hours I received copies of letters from local political activists sent to Oregon governor Kate Brown.  I received them because I am listed prominently as a sponsor of a fundraiser held for her.   Here are pieces of the letter:

"Many voters, especially young ones, have no strong affiliation with a political party. Simply saying you are a Democrat or that we have to keep the Republicans out of office is, for many of us, no longer enough. In the two-party system, the third alternative is to leave certain races blank if we have not been given strong reasons to vote for a candidate."

He went on, insisting on a kind of "Contract with America" list of exactly what environmental policies she would support wrote:

"I personally am only going to be voting in November for candidates who have made those kinds of commitments, and I think a lot of other voters feel the same way."

But its a TIE with the Libitarian and Green party included

The important thing to note is that the author specifically denies the importance of a strategic vote or a comparison with the Governor's GOP opponent, whose policies are dramatically opposed to the author on both economic issues (minimum wage) and environmental ones (open support for the natural gas pipeline).   Compromise is reform and reform preserves the system and the system is corrupt.  Reformers are not allies; they are just another enemy.

Which brings me to Jill Stein, the candidate with the potential to elect Donald Trump president.  When the Libertarian and Green Party candidates are included Hillary Clinton's lead evaporates to the margin of error.   CNN poll: too close to call when Jill Stein is included

Anecdotal information--conversations with and emails from Bernie Sanders supporters--suggest that a significant number of people consider "reform" simply unsatisfactory.   Reform is not "better"; it is arguably worse because it preserves a system that is, as the Massachusetts separatists understood it, so intrinsically corrupt that it must be destroyed, not improved.

Tomorrow I post the ad scripts that I and other readers have written that might be persuasive when broadcast widely, funded by Koch brothers or other conservative sources who will use progressive voters' desire for purity to elect a conservative.  Progressive purists will be used by others but they will not feel used because the ads will reflect what they really believe: that reform and incremental change is no change at all.