There were some sweet victories last night. Yet, I felt depressed when I went to bed towards 1 am and even more so today. Let me focus on the positive, first:
- District 20’s dream team – Lorig Charkoudian, David Moon, and Jheanelle Wilkins – beat back the ethically challenged Darian Unger.
- Marc Elrich holds a 452-vote lead against Evil Plutocrat David Blair, pending counting absentee and provisional ballots.
- My completely irresponsible Takoma Park city councilman, Jarrett Smith came in 29th place out of 33 in the County Council at-large race.
- Ben Jealous summarily kicked ass against the bland, ethically challenged (his endorsement of David Trone for $39k) Rushern Baker. Jealous offers the hope that a passionate campaign can unseat Larry Hogan this fall.
- An outstanding progressive, Vaughn Stewart, won a delegate seat in D-19.
Oh, but the bad news seems boundless:
- The new County Council was practically hand-picked by the Washington Post and the development industry. Newcomers like Andrew Friedson (D-1) and Evan Glass (at-large) will team up with pave-it-all incumbents like Craig Rice (D-1), Sidney Katz (D-3), and Hans Riemer (at-large) to give away to the developers what little remains of the store.
- In the at-large race, every strong progressive got nearly obliterated: Bill Conway (3.3%), Seth Grimes (1.5%), Danielle Meitiv (3.3%), Jill Ortman-Fouse (3.3%). (By comparison, the fourth-place winner in this pick-four race – Gabe Albernoz – garnered 7.3%.) Two progressives – Brandy Brooks and Chris Wilhelm – did relatively well at 5.9%, but not winning means only bad guys (and, yes, no women won) will be making policy.
- Liquor salesman and plutocrat David Trone successfully purchased his seat in Congress (unless he gets beat by a Republican in the fall) from District 6, destroying progressive hero Roger Manno in the process.
- Elrich could still lose. If David Blair manages to pull this out, we will have by far the worst county government in my 18 years living here.
- Darian Unger and Jarrett Smith got a sufficient number of votes that they might be encouraged to keep living in their alternate universes where time is on their side and they will eventually be swept to glory by adoring crowds. (Someone: please tell me how a content-less city councilman who doesn’t interact with city officials or constituents managed to get ~2,200 votes. Who are these people? Did they just like the name Smith?)
- Turnout was abysmal. I’m not comparing to previous years, but simply looking at the fact that in a county of one million, the county executive winner will have garnered less than 35,000 votes. US democracy is broken and this is a leading indicator.
As if I weren’t feeling glum enough, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement today. There is no way to sugarcoat this: the GOP theft of the seat that went to Neil Gorsuch and the right to replace swing-vote Kennedy give the far right control of the Supreme Court for the coming 20 years. Couple this with our system’s bias towards the GOP (from partisan gerrymandering, to the concentration of Democrats in small geographical areas, to the Electoral College) and a minority band of racists and authoritarians could dominate our politics for decades.
(I don’t mean that Democrats won’t score any victories: they may well take the House this year and Trump seems pretty vulnerable going into 2020. But the victories will be partial and sporadic, hardly enough to rebalance the system.)
Even though US foreign policy has been hypocritical in relation to our stated values more often than not, our rhetorical support for democracy and human rights – as well as our ability to collaborate with allies – has done a substantial amount of good in the world. The damage done by the Cheeto administration in <2 years will never be remediable, especially as democracy retreats all across the globe. And, as we slide ever more towards authoritarianism and minority rule at home, any possibility of domestic or international progress is as good as dead.
I don’t know yet how I will manage to keep fighting for positive change given my present despair, especially when I don’t even see any hope at the local level. If any of my dear readers has a suggestion, please bring it on.
©2018 Keith Berner
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