So, with the Ohio train disaster being REALLY BAD and a lot of progressives jumping on Pete Buttigieg for his slow response, I feel like the left is being way too quick to just decide "yeah he's done, he's never going to become president."
Before I get into my main argument, where I'm going to explain why this won't matter in the grand scheme of presidential elections, I'm just going to say, "first time"? How many times have a previous democratic corporatist, like Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, done something questionable and it didn't really matter come election time? A LOT. And you know what it matters? Not at all. Because years later, people will forget all about this, and this incident will be drowned out in the noise that is your typical presidential campaign cycle. All of these candidates have their skeletons in the closet, from the crime bill, to Benghazi, to being abusive toward staff and eating a salad with a comb, and at the end of the day, unless it's something truly major, this is going to be a nothingburger. Especially if it turns out he's actually doing his job behind the scenes and simply isn't tweeting about it publicly. But let's assume the worst case scenario, and Buttigieg is actually bad at his job. So what? Because if the democrats want this guy to be president, they will try to strongarm it.
That said, let's actually go through the process of how democrats choose their presidential candidates.
1) Selection process
Honestly, it should be quite clear by now that the democratic party is run by machine politics and a system of political patronage. Political candidates for president are insiders who work their way up from the inside, and who spend years, if not decades, playing the long game and dedicating their lives and political career to the advancement of the party. The democrats are "team players", whatever the group decides, the rest of the group has to go along with it, and anyone who openly challenges them gets the axe. As long as Buttigieg remains in the party's good graces, he will be in the running in future presidential election cycles. And so far, he's been a nice little team player. He backed out to clear the way for Biden, and he chose to work within the administration. Do you think Pete Buttigieg was actually QUALIFIED to be transportation secretary? Probably nowhere near the best guy. But he got the job because the democrats reward positions according to a spoils system.
It's unclear whether democrats go into presidential elections with specific candidates in mind, or a short list. In 2016, it seemed obvious Hillary was always "the person", with most other centrist democrats refusing to run in the primaries. Only people no one ever heard of and outsiders like Bernie Sanders dared challenge her. I'll get more into how the machine reacted to this in the next section, but yeah, it's possible that due to previous back room deals, like a potential one brokered between Hillary and Obama in 2008 where Hillary conceded and backed Obama, that they do promise the position in the next open election, but it's also possible that they operate with a short list.
2020 seemed like a "short list" year. I don't think the democrats were sold on any individual candidate, which was why everyone and their mother jumped in, and we had like 20-25 candidates, with around 15 of them being the same brand of neoliberal and fauxgressive. Generally speaking, in years like this, they might not have anyone in mind, but they do have a profile that they want to fit. First of all, the candidate HAS to be a team player. They have to be moderate and espouse the ideology of the leadership of the party. They likely are experienced, and operate as political insiders, working their way up through the party. From there, it's just a matter of who stands out and who polls best. They might send up trial balloons with various candidates seeing if the electorate bites. For example, it seemed pretty obvious they were grooming Kamala Harris for the role, and trying really hard to push her in the media, given she was this hip black female who was slightly more progressive than the others (but not TOO progressive), and she could probably "excite" voters who wanted someone other than a white male and were nostalgic over Obama. But the public didn't bite, and I really don't think that they really had "their guy" until Biden won south Carolina. Given Bernie was an early juggernaut, I figured that the democrats all got together the weekend before super tuesday and Obama played kingmaker and made Biden "the guy", encouraging everyone else to get out, potentially in exchange for cabinet positions (looking at you, Pete). And then everyone got behind Biden just before super tuesday, and they crushed Bernie.
But yeah, even if they don't have a specific candidate in mind, it seems obvious that there are a few that are in the party's good graces and anyone else is shut out. They'll fawn over Kamala Harris but then downplay and ignore Bernie and Andrew Yang. heck, I think Yang outright said the media wasn't allowed to talk to him or take him seriously. Gee, I wonder why...
2) Setting the stage/manufacturing consent
Okay, so the party has their guy, or short list of guys. What now? Well, ultimately we live in a democracy, and they need to at least have the pretense of voter support, so the party sets out very early to set the stage. They clearly work with the media in setting the narrative around the race. For example, in the 2016 election cycle, I noted that the democratic friendly media like MSNBC and CNN would fawn over Hillary and paint her as the next nominee, while any time someone suggested she might be challenged from the left, by, say, Sanders or Warren, the host would suddenly cut to a commercial and when they come back, that person they were talking to was gone. Do you really think that is a coincidence, that they do that? Of course it isn't. Because ultimately, their job is to sell Hillary to the public.
In 2016, Hillary was considered to be "inevitable". She was "the guy" or, given she isn't a guy, "the person." She was the presumptive nominee. And the media and social media handlers were given the job of selling a turd. Hillary didn't have much going for her. She wasn't exciting. She didn't offer any interesting policies that anyone actually wanted. She was boring, no one really liked her, outside of the weirdos who are obsessed with the democrats and their brand of politics, and yeah, she kind of sucked. So rather than leaning into policy, she leaned into her experience, her electability. It really was set up like the whole thing was "her turn", "her time to shine" (sorry, couldn't resist a sabaton reference here). She acted with almost an air of entitlement that after 2008 and giving years to the party this was her election cycle. And honestly, that's probably how the outsiders saw it. This was what the party owed her after she backed Obama in 2008, she gave up her aspirations in 2008 for the party and now the party owed her big.
But yeah, for us little guys, the party basically got on selling Hillary, the turd. The candidate of nothing will fundamentally change, we can't have nice things. They spun it from a perspective of weaponized incompetence. Oh, we CAN'T do that. You have to be "pragmatic", you have to be "incremental", you have to "compromise". It was all a bunch of nonsense buzzwords to save face on the idea that they DIDN'T WANT TO DO SOMETHING. They didn't want to give us universal healthcare, they didn't want to give us UBI (even though she secretly believed in it, seriously, still pissed over that one). They just wanted us to give up our aspirations and back Hillary.
They even started in early against the Bernie supporters, as if they knew to expect trouble. They would start saying that "we had to support whoever the nominee was", while at the same time going "it's going to be Hillary", and pushing her as "inevitable." They started saying that we had to vote blue no matter who, and blah blah blah. Ironically, for me, they basically Streisand effected themselves here. I didn't go into 2016 with any intention of voting third party. But after I saw the democrats doing this kind of BS on me, and not taking too kindly to it, because I believe that the politicians are responsible to the voters, not the other way around, and that I don't owe them crap, and that if they were going to try to strongarm me into voting for Hillary, I was explicitly not going to do it because screw them. And I didn't, by the way. Still don't regret it, despite the damage Trump caused.
Which, gets us to what they did next. They basically decided to run a campaign about how much worse their opponent was. They would start going on about how old the SCOTUS justices were and how we needed to vote for the court (they were technically right, yes, but that still doesn't justify them trying to use that fact to strongarm voters as it basically amounts to holding the system hostage to manufacture consent for their candidate). They actually ran a pied piper strategy of elevating the most crazy GOP candidates, including trump, so that they could convince people to vote for them instead.
They would astroturf message boards, including reddit, with paid trolls in order to bully people into supporting their candidate. There was nothing they would not do if it meant getting Hillary elected. They would manipulate the perception of the candidates to the public, elevating Clinton, and the most extreme GOP candidates, while simultaneously suppressing those dangerous to Clinton's campaign. They tried their darndest to nip Bernie's campaign in the bud, only to effectively Streisand effect the guy, where his supporters got more hostile and obnoxious. For as purity testy and obnoxious as Bernie supporters are these days, let's not forget that it was these tactics against Bernie supporters in 2016 that drove them to those extremes to begin with. And let's not forget that I was one of those guys until they got too crazy for me and then I noped out and I'm now just doing my own thing.So yeah.
Beyond that, they would start all of these nonsense social justice fights, using social justice ideology to divide the party. As I said in a recent article, the social justice virtue signalling is a speech check to test one's dedication to the cause, and it was weaponized by Clinton and the democratic party in order to divide and conquer. They would portray Bernie voters as sexist and racist for not supporting clinton, and going on about how we hated hillary because she was a woman, and OMG T3H BLACK VOTE T3H BLACK VOTE! you see, you white progressives, you dont get black people.
Given that African Americans vote democrat by a margin of like 97%, and given how, like just about everyone else, most of them were not super politically engaged and just followed politics on the news (note, not only black people are guilty of this, this is most of america, where everyone is encouraged to have an opinion, and almost no one actually knows wtf they're talking about), and they just went along with it. And given the demographics of the party, most people ended up just trending hillary.
And then we get to the actual race. While Iowa and New Hampshire were customary "firsts", and they had to abide by that until this election where they quickly broke tradition (I'll get to that a bit later, but I've written two articles on this, we know they changed the schedule to favor Biden), after that, what did they do? Well, they front loaded all of these southern states full of rural African Americans who would vote for whatever establishment candidate they ran. The goal is to set up the narrative where Clinton wins the early states and that it's over and he needs to drop out and we need to unify behind Clinton. Once the immediate threat of their favored candidate(s) losing is passed, they will focus more explicitly on trying to encourage any challengers to drop out and to unify the party. The reason they wanna do that is they want all the voters behind the candidate in time for the general election.
Again, this ends up Streisand effecting the insurgents who won't give in though. If you're smart enough to see through this, it makes you LESS likely to support the upcoming candidate ebcause you realize they're doing this to push your favored candidates out and get their way. And me, being committed to my own ideals, wasn't willing to do that. Hence why I encouraged people up to election day to vote their conscience and I myself voted green.
Now, 2020 they did a different variation of this. They didn't have a specific candidate, so they trial ballooned several, and then once Biden won south Carolina, the first southern state full of African Americans, they threw their support behind him, encouraged all of the other team player centrists to back out, and the party got behind Biden. While Bernie is a trooper and would normally stay in it to the bitter end, COVID forced him to drop out because then there was the risk of voters getting sick because of the primary still going on. Yeah, democrats would never NOT weaponize that.
But yeah, the result is the same. The candidates they want taken seriously are taken seriously. The candidates they want suppressed they'll try to suppress. They set up the political battlefield on their terms, and design it to manufacture the result they want. It's all about picking their candidate, and then pushing them down peoples' throats whether they want them or not. Most voters aren't that smart, they follow politics relatively casually, as they're too busy just...surviving in this capitalist hellscape (or they actively benefit from the status quo), so they'll be too distracted to actually think about these issues. And they'll win. They'll get early wins for the candidates they want, claim that they're inevitable, push everyone else to drop out, and then focus on the general with an emphasis on further suppressing the competition and manufacturing consent.
If they want this system to work with Pete Buttigieg, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't work. No progressive will stand a chance in the democratic party, because they'll get the Bernie or Yang treatment, and they'll just tilt the playing field to get the result they want. Thinking about this dude's role in some random train disaster 5 years later in say 2028 is gonna be a nothingburger. No one's gonna care. Given this guy is like 40, they could just run him again in like 20-30 years and he'll STILL be "young" enough to reasonably get the nomination. I mean, Biden's first run was in 1988. And many of the issues surrounding that first run like plagiarism weren't even brought up in 2020. Because no one cared. And Biden was electable. And he was the guy we were stuck with.
That said, to discuss the general election.
3) Strategies for the general election
After the primaries are over, the convention is held, and the issue is "settled", the hammer comes down in full force on the dissenters. You WILL give your support to the democratic party OR ELSE. Not doing so is not an option. Or so they'll have you believe.
As I noted in 2016, after the democratic primary, the internet suddenly changed. Everywhere, all day, every day, the internet was FLOODED with people trying to pressure the remaining dissenters to vote for Hillary. CTR's astroturfing was in full effect, and I was clearly arguing with paid trolls. Of course, you can't exactly call them out or the mods will ban you, but it's obvious what is going on. It's sickening the amount of institutional influence these guys got on reddit in 2016. It's like some subs just got flat out taken over by democratic operatives, and they just quashed any dissent. Which was how the Bernie or Busters ended up on their own subs, and since 2016, radicalized into the crazed monsters they are now. Originally, back in 2016, these guys started out with good intentions, but yeah, by 2020 they started getting cray cray and now I can't even deal with these guys. The toxicity, obsession with insane levels of ideological purity, and unhinged craziness and conspiracy nonsense is too much for me. But again, kinda what happens when the dems push all of these people into the same corners of the internet. Same thing I mentioned with incels recently. They just end up radicalizing if they aren't participating in the mainstream.
But yeah. By this point, the goal of the party is to unify everyone behind it. Which means bullying everyone into voting for the candidate. Hillary, Biden, whomever. They will pull out every trick in the book. They'll go on about how the two party systems means you only got two options and if you dont actively support one you're implicitly supporting the other (never mind that no support means no support and no one is morally obligated to support a cause they disagree with). They will go on with the privilege politics, call you racist, blah blah blah. They will do everything they can to get you to support the candidates...instead of the things that SHOULD get you to support the candidates. They wont offer change or REAL policy concessions. Sure, Hillary and Biden shifted a little left to win over the Bernie supporters, but the concessions were the bare minimum window dressings, and the democrats will basically tell you that that's good enough and you better support them. They'll also say if you dont support them they'll ignore you next time because it's clear that we vote against them to get attention. Cool, continue digging yourselves in a hole I guess, I can do this all day.
In 2020, they even went so far to get Howie Hawkins removed from the ballot in a few states by technicality. Yeah, removing the competition. How "democratic" of the democratic party.
I know I'm kind of using this topic as an excuse to discuss how the dems rig the primaries, but I also do wanna talk about Buttigieg here. Do you really think, in this general election stage, that anyone would reasonably dissent from the democrats over Buttigieg's potential mishandling of the East Palestine crisis? If it's say, November 2028, and Buttigieg is the nominee, do you think anyone would reasonably dissent from voting for Buttigieg here? Maybe a few rural people in Eastern Ohio or Western Pennsylvania, but given the immediate area around the crisis is rural as fudge, will it impact the results much at all? Probably not. Especially since Buttigieg could point to Trump's deregulation as his excuse for it happening. The point is, given the immense pressure to vote blue, even if the candidate is a turd, even if no one actually wants the candidate, most will do so. Because they aren't voting third party, they arent staying home, and they aint voting for Trump.
Sadly, dissenters like me are rare. Only like 1% of people vote green party, or something disgustingly small like that. Most people will vote for Buttigieg in 2028, just like they voted for Hillary in 2016, just like they did for Biden in 2020 and presumably 2024. And if Buttigieg loses, there are likely MUCH larger issues at stake than the East Palestine thing, which will be five years old and forgotten in memory by then.
This is the crisis of the month, and if it happened on Buttigieg's watch in October, 2028, sure, an October surprise like that would have an impact. But five years from now? No. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now? East Palestine? What was that? No one will care. Maybe a couple progressives will bring it up like they always do with their insane purity tests and coming up with excuses to hate on people, but most people will have long forgotten, and it likely won't have a statistically significant result on the election.
Conclusion
As such, it should seem clear that the democratic party is run by machine politics and a patronage system just like in the Boss Tweed days, the primaries are largely just for show, and the real decisions are made behind the scenes. If the democrats decide Buttigieg is "the guy" in 2028, then he will be the nominee in 2028. And we will be given the same crap sandwich of being told to vote for him or we get either 80 something year old Trump, Ron Desantis, or god help us all, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Because in the two party system, they got us by the balls, and they choose the real candidate behind the scenes, and everything else is just about justifying them to the public by giving it the pretense of being free and democratic, despite the "invisible hand" of the democratic party machinery being at work guaranteeing exactly that result. It's why we keep getting the same crap candidates every 4 years, and then we end up having to hold our nose and vote for them anyway. Buttigieg could very well be a successor to Biden. And if the party decides he's the guy, then he's the guy, and we all have to put up with it or kick rocks.
That's how politics works in America, and I'm sure you know it too. If you've been around the block long enough and paid attention, you know what is gonna happen.
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