[Cannot think of good post title off top of head]

Looking through one's blog archives, one learns things that one had forgotten about oneself. For instance, I'm kind of amazed at what a hate-on I once had for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in general. Here is me angrily declaring that I'll NEVER EVER vote for her if she wins the 2008 primary. It's kind of eye-opening to realize that if I met 2008-me, I'd kind of hate him.

To be clear, it's not that my politics have moderated since then--quite the contary; all the Marxist theory I read during graduate school dragged me further left than I was. It's just that now I take a more pragmatic approach to things. If nothing else, the person in comments who talked about Supreme Court nominees was absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong. It's not that there isn't a lot to criticize about the party; of course there is. A lot of that is no doubt down to the two-party system: when you have one party that's absolutely committed itself to hateful nihilism, it forces everyone else into the other party, and then with such a heterogenous mix it's awfully damned hard to find any sort of philosophical coherence. But the system is what it is; and the Democratic Party--imperfectly, painfully slowly, incoherently, and often in a one-step-forward-two-steps-back way--is trying to drag the country in the right direction, and if you refuse to be down with them, well, you don't matter. Yes, I KNOW Democrats do things, especially in the foreign policy arena, that are indefensible, but ferfucksake, do you want ANYTHING to get even a TINY BIT better, EVER, or don't you?  You can make abstract philosophical arguments about how if enough people break away from the Democrats you can force a political realignment, but A) that's never going to work if you're stuck with the two-party system; and B) when goose-stepping ICE agents are dragging people away from the only homes they've ever known RIGHT NOW, you kind of look like a monstrous sociopath for not supporting the party that would reign them in.

I have a dear friend who nonetheless has a less-than-lovable trait, which is that she buys into the whole Democrats-suck/Clinton-sucks thing I was doing ten years ago--and she's like fifteen years older than me, so she doesn't have the excuse of being young and naive. In particular, the continued vociferousness of her Clinton-hate is just perverse. Clinton lost. She's never running for anything again. And yet, the anti-Clinton facebook macros will not stop. Where the hell does this COME from?

She recently shared THIS bizarre thing on her facebook wall:

Um. Has a SOTU rebuttal EVER lead to someone being widely feted as the next Presidential nominee? Survey sez no. I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that it could happen if they delivered a real barnburner of a speech, but this specifies that that can't happen, so...? It's just an out-of-nowhere fantasy from someone who apparently can't come up with enough REAL reasons to hate the Democrats and thus has to create special fanfic on the basis of which to hate them more. It is SO DAMN WEIRD.

But the question is, will the person who wrote this and the people who shared it reexamine their priors at all when this event signally fails to come to pass? You know they won't--anymore than the people predicting apocalypse after Obama's election reexamined theirs. It's not about logic; it's just pure emotion. God knows I have my own biases, but like to think that I at least make an effort to ground my beliefs in some semblance of reality. It is sobering to note that you don't have to wander over to the fever swamps of the far right to find people who don't.