THEY SAID YOU WAS HIGH CLASS, WELL THAT WAS JUST A LIE
Christianity was a no-man’s land at the beginning of the 4th century. Christian communities were largely isolated from one another, and radically different interpretations of Jesus’ teaching sprang up in different parts of the Roman Empire. In 325, the Council of Nicaea was convened to sort things out. One of the hottest debates was over the best word to describe the nature of the Trinity. Were the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost “homoousios” or” homoiousios”? Homoousios meant “same essence,” while homoiousios meant “similar essence.”
Spoiler alert: homoousios won. Advocates for homoiousios were branded as heretics and persecuted. For centuries. All over the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, iota. That’s where we get the phrase “not one iota of difference,” which we use to describe tiny or non-existent differences.
My guess is that the differences between the policy positions of the top two or three Democratic presidential candidates won’t be much more than an iota or two. No one’s going to win the Democratic nomination unless they campaign on a platform that addresses climate change, health care, immigration, voting rights, and (pick any of several other important issues).
Nevertheless, we have been conditioned to obsess over relatively minor differences between Democrats. The press will emphasize the differences, because they like to pit candidates against each other, the better to justify their perpetual “Democrats in disarray” stories. The candidates themselves may play along, because they want to be seen as distinctive. And of course, we can look forward to Republican propagandists and their Russian allies trying to sow dissension among Democrats.
As of this writing, most of the usual suspects, as well as some unusual suspects, have declared their intention to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. The biggest undeclared name is Joe Biden, who, along with Bernie Sanders, leads the early Democratic popularity polls. Since popularity, at this stage of the campaign, is largely a function of name recognition, you’d expect Biden and Bernie to lead those polls.
I have some early favorites among the declared candidates, and maybe you do too. I’m going to try to avoid falling so deeply in love with any one candidate that I begin to resent the others in the field. My third or fourth choice from the current field may win the nomination, and I will vote for that person happily if it means getting rid of Donald Trump.
Getting rid of Donald Trump will require us to develop new ways of consuming information about politics. In an age of social media and fake news, it’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise. One way we can do that is by not adding to the noise ourselves. I’ll try to avoid jumping in with a hot take every time a new rumor surfaces.
I’m writing this to remind myself (and perhaps you, dear reader) to look for similarities between the candidates, even as the press insists on accentuating their differences. And when opposition research teams find embarrassing information about … well, pretty much all of the candidates, I’m going to try to remember St. Paul’s admonition (Romans 3:23) that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
Our signal-to-noise problem is complicated by the fact that the noise will come from multiple directions. First, there will be the outright lies, genuine fake news generated by the Russo-Republican disinformation machine. A little patient fact checking will expose the fabrications.
Another form of noise in the system are irrelevant truths. For instance, sooner or later, every candidate is going to misspeak on the campaign trail. The press will call it a gaffe and get all excited, but everybody knows it was a slip of the tongue, or a simple brain fart at the end of a long day. It happened, but so what?
The inevitable discovery of embarrassing information in some candidates’ past is another source of potentially irrelevant truth. I won’t say that skeletons in the closet don’t matter, because I don’t know what they might turn out to be. Individual cases will differ. But I’d still argue that when negative information surfaces about a candidate, our first question should be, is it true? And the second question should be, so what? Does it really have any bearing on the fitness of the candidate to be president in 2021?
Maybe it does. I’m not suggesting that we ignore embarrassing information, or claim fake news if the information turns out to be true. If there are candidates whose past disqualifies them from the presidency, so be it. Righteous indignation is always fun. But how will obsessing about a Democrat’s decades-old lapse in judgment help get rid of Donald Trump?
We live in an era of too much information, and we’re about to learn more than we need to know about the lives of every serious Democratic presidential contender. I daresay they’ve all done things they regret. I can identify with that. Some of them may be guilty of major screw-ups. I can identify with that, too. What I really care about, though, is what the candidates believe now, how they behave now, and – this is important – how they handle themselves when bad news surfaces.
If the eventual Democratic nominee turns out to be a lifelong liar, cheater, adulterer, bully, and narcissist who admires murderous dictators and takes orders from Vladimir Putin. I promise I’ll reconsider my support. Until then, I’ll continue to maintain that, whatever the faults of the eventual Democratic nominee, they’re trivial in comparison to the trail of sleaze that Trump has left in his wake.
Sarah Kendzior put it this way: A president’s “obligation is to serve the public's interests and get the job done. Nice if they're also personally admirable, but I prefer competence and commitment to the public good. I also look at the 2020 winner as someone who will be shoveling the US out from under a massive pile of shit for the entirety of their term. I don't care if they are fun or pleasant or charismatic. I care whether they remove the massive pile of shit.”