Obligatory Political Post

I tend to have complex feelings about elections.

I don’t buy the idea that there’s “no difference” between the major parties. I think the Democrats are in most ways clearly superior to the Republicans. The incremental changes that Obama has made have brought measurable good to peoples’ lives, even as the choices Bush made (and that McCain or Romney would likely have made) surely have made life harder for a great many people.

But at the same time, I am constantly frustrated by how constrained our choices are. I am far to the left of Obama. If I had my way, all elections would be publically funded, the government would manage health care, there would be far more stringent transparency and anti-monopoly laws for corporations, we’d have fair trade laws and not free trade laws, all drugs would be legalized, and DC would be a state. There might even be a gauranteed minimum income.

I’ve found few politicians that actually represent my views. So I’ve never really seen anyone get elected and honestly thought, “Great, now what I want to happen will happen!” It’s more a mixture of relief that worse things won’t happen, and a cautious optimism that some terrible thing the Republicans did might get repealled.

That said, this election cycle had a few things to be thrilled about.

My home state of Maryland, along with Maine and Washington, passed ballot initiatives recognizing the right of gay people to get married same as everybody else. In Minnesota, voters rejected a ballot initiative that was against marriage equality. And Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin made history by becoming the first openly gay person to be elected to the US Senate.

Along with Tammy Baldwin, the election of Elizabeth Warren, Deb Fischer, Mazie Hirono and, after a long day of careful ballot-counting, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, increases the total number of women in the Senate to a record twenty. Warren and Baldwin, especially, seem poised to be strong liberal voices in the upper chamber. Also of note: for the first time in US History, white men will no longer be the majority of a house caucus (the Democrats, of course.)

Does these historic gains wipe away my fears about the ever-growing influence of money on the government of our country? The quiet eroding of civil liberties in the name of national security? The frankly insane wealth inequality? Of course not. But they give me some hope that the people in this country share some of the same values that I do - and that somehow, someday, there will be an election I can be uncomplicatedly happy about.