A parable:
Imagine that you have a friend with a drinking problem. He is slowing destroying his liver and putting himself at high risk of stroke, heart attack and cancer. While he’s still able to function in his day-to-day life the neurological effects are starting to show up; there have been personality changes and his job performance has started to suffer. His career is in jeopardy.
The long-term prognosis is not good. If your friend does not change his ways the odds are that his life will fall apart and he will die a nasty and premature death. But alcohol abuse being what it is, he not only doesn’t want to change, he denies there is a problem.
One night he demands that you give him a bottle of whiskey. When you refuse he gives you an ultimatum: if you don’t give him the bottle he wants he’s going to go to the bar district in your town and drink until the bartenders kick him out. Maybe he’ll wrap his car around a tree, maybe he’ll get into a drunken brawl, maybe he’ll pass out in the gutter, and it will be your fault if you don’t give him the bottle he wants so he can sit at home and drink until he passes out. You weigh the alternatives and decide you cannot enable his alcoholism.
So he does in fact go on an epic bender. He passes out in an alley on a cold night and suffers hypothermia; frostbite and gangrene set in to his extremities. He almost dies but is found by a passer-by and is rushed unconscious to the hospital.
As you wait for the outcome, wondering if your friend is going to lose fingers or toes or more, you think about the path he was headed down before this and how it led to nasty death. You think about how, if these same events had transpired next week when the temperature was predicted to be colder, the damage would have been even worse. And you wonder whether hitting bottom like this might inspire him to change his ways.
You’ll never know what would have happened if you gave him that bottle, but it seems possible that in the long term the result might have been as bad or worse. As horrible as this event has been, perhaps it is the best outcome that was possible.
* * * * *
During the recent Presidential campaign, I encouraged people to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead of the awful major party candidates, war criminal and Kissinger protege Hillary Clinton and racist demagogue and accused serial sexual offender Donald Trump. While neither of those “third party” candidates was going to win, I believed and still believe that it is important to build a structure to get beyond the two-party system.
On several occasions I stated that it was possible that the long-term effects on the world of a Clinton victory could be as bad or worse than the long-term effects of a Trump victory.
Now, third-party votes had no effect on the outcome — add all Stein votes to Clinton’s total and she still loses the electoral college; add all Johnson votes to Trump’s total and Clinton loses even worse. But now that a Trump victory has gone from unlikely to fact, that claim about the likely long-term effects of either candidate winning requires more discussion.
The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics is gibberish from a scientific standpoint, but sometimes it makes for a convenient model when thinking about possible outcomes.
So let’s imagine the next decade or so in those parallel universes where many more Democrats woke up on November 8th, went to the polls, and voted for Hillary Clinton. White professional class Democrats are thrilled, but poor people in the cities, in Baltimore and Ferguson and Flint, know that things are not going to get better for them under Clinton any more than they did under Obama. Both the physical and politico-legal infrastructure are going to continue to deteriorate.
And throughout the red states in the middle of the country, Clinton is seen as even less legitimate than Obama was. The rhetoric of anti-federalism heats up.
The Clinton the Second administration is dogged from the start with accusations and impeachment attempts. Her leadership drags down her party, pulling it further to to right and making it even more of an ersatz GOP; the real Republican Party strengthens its grip on both the House and Senate in the 2018 midterms. With Clinton in charge the progressive wing — the energetic wing, as we saw in 2016 — of the party is marginalized.
All of Clinton’s initiatives are blocked by Congress, with one exception: war. The one thing Clinton and the Republican leadership can agree on is increasing foreign aggression. In some of those parallel timelines, a Clinton no-fly zone over Syria leads to direct conflict with Russia that escalates into nuclear war. In the luckier timelines, American bombing of the world just increases from its current one bomb every 23 minutes rate. Thousands more innocent people die.
All the factors we saw in the GOP primaries in our timeline, the frustration, the rise in Islamophobia and xenophobia and general intolerance, continue to grow worse under a Clinton presidency. Hate crimes and police violence continue to increase.
The GOP, chastised by its loss and realizing that any almost other Republican candidate would have beaten Clinton, returns to form and nominates the “second place” finisher from the previous Presidential campaign — Ted Cruz. Cruz wins an easy victory over the deeply unpopular Clinton. The Democrats, having lopped off the progressive arm of their party and been dragged down by four years of Clinton leadership, are thrown into total disarray. They are unable to mount a strong challenge in 2024 and Cruz wins again.
So in essence, branching off of a Clinton victory we end up getting what we expect and fear from Trump — an authoritarian xenophobic Islamophobic whackjob as President — except four years later and with a weaker Democratic Party to oppose it.
On the other hand let’s try to look forward into the futures that branch off from the timeline in which you and I find ourselves.
In a handful of them, reckless Trumpian foreign policy takes us into that nuclear war endgame. (Probably with China.) Those futures where civilization survives see the American economy continue to deteriorate and the violence abroad continue. Civil liberties are even more endangered and the carceral state shifts back into high gear after it’s minor slowdown under Obama. Hate crimes and police violence continue to increase, a little more intensely than they did in the Clinton-victory branches.
There are two groups of these futures: in one group, the Democrats learn from their loss to Trump and scrub their party clean of every speck of Clintonism. The Sanders/Warren wing, still energized from the 2016 campaign, takes control of the party and leads the opposition against Trump. The Democrats pick up seats in Congress in the midterm and are able to slow the Trump damage. They also start reversing their losses at the state level.
In 2020 they nominate a progressive candidate, who wins an easy victory over the deeply unpopular President Trump.
In the most idyllic and utopian branches of the timeline, the Democrats come to a rapprochement with the Green and Libertarian parties, realizing that giving people more non-Trump options is a good thing. They start backing ranked choice voting and open ballot access, and building coalitions with Libertarians on civil liberties issues and Greens on environmental ones. More voices are heard and more diversity — real diversity of ideas and experiences, not mere identitarian checkboxes — enters American politics
But that’s the utopian option. In most timelines in this group we’re still stuck with a two-headed monster for a while to come. At least the head marked “D” starts to recover from its insanity of the past two decades.
The other group of futures is the one where the Democrats are unteachable. Where Chelsea Clinton is seen as a viable candidate for Congress and where Democrats unable to face facts about their loss construct elaborate conspiracy theories as a psychological defense mechanism — like the one about Trump being a Russian puppet who communicates with his masters via a marketing contractor’s e-mail server.
In those timelines, we get two terms of Trump. In many of them he’s followed by President Mike Pence.
So. We’ll never know what would have happened if Clinton had won the election, but it seems possible that in the long term the result might have been as bad or worse. As horrible as a Trump administration is likely to be, perhaps it is the best outcome that the past two decades of American politics have left us.
But going forward there’s one thing that’s clear: we must hope and pray the the Democratic Party is teachable.
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