Is it too late to despair of America?

Well, last year's election doesn't necessarily fill me with hope.

Yes, Democrats retook the House, and gained some governorships. But ....

Project Indivisible may yet turn out to be Project Sheepdogging in the 2020 presidential election, per its history through Nov. 6, 2018.

Carl Beijer recently wrote related thoughts about "left entryism," that is, the issue whether the Democratic Party can be moved leftward, reformed leftward, from inside. He is at least somewhat skeptical. He notes the bar has to be set high. And he's right, with Andrew Sullivan identifying as a quasi-Democrat while openly saying he voted for Obama because:

(I) found in Obama the moderate Republican I’d always admired.

Per my piece on DSA, I'm as skeptical as Beijer that that high bar will be maintained. (I'm also skeptical about Beijer at times; see below.)

That's why, like this gent, I support principled undervoting of individual races, or even not voting at all, if current non-duopoly options implode. Or, as Chris Hedges put it, focusing on the New Jersey Senate race but applicable elsewhere, there's lots of scum vs scum races.

There's a good argument to be made for at least selective undervoting as a refusal to give approval to a corrupt system. On a Disqus thread for a 3 Quarks Daily piece, somebody chided me over this, raising a version of the compact theory of government. I said much of what a lot of people knew or thought they knew about 1783-89 wasn't totally so, first, and second, nobody had renegotiated this compact with me, or offered to.

Given what I've seen both pre- and post-election in comment forums, I think it's probably about right to despair. The DSA roses that do get into office won't quite be ConservaDems, but they likely will become AccommoDems. And, if other roses run in 2020, they may get the message to cooperate first.

Let's also remember that the DSA roses' "Green New Deal" is a pale imitation of the Green Party's offering. Andrew Stewart also talks about the original Green New Deal at Counterpunch. Carl Beijer (who allegedly worked on two Nader campaigns) says, "but the Democrats are the first to talk about the global climate issue."

That may well be true.

At the same time, it's not "the Democrats," Carl; it's a small subsection of Democrats, not a party stance. And, per those links, we'll see how well that small segment does at avoiding being co-opted by national leadership. Given that centrist New York Democratic hack Hakeem Jeffries beat out Barbara Lee (albeit in a close vote) to chair the DNC caucus, I wouldn't hold my breath. Let's not forget, as shown in cases such as Sema Hernandez endorsing Beto O'Rourke without any guaranteed single-payer pledge from him, some DSA roses and their allies are more willing to be co-opted than others.

Indeed, the face of the Roses, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has continued to move rightward since lauding John McCain and backing away from BDS-related issues, as this longform from Mint Press notes. Among specifics on her Twitter? Pulling the old national Democrat tough on crime bullshit by calling Republicans "weak on crime." (And, no, she didn't qualify that by talking about white-collar crime or anything like that. Don't try to rescue her, folks.)

Meanwhile, if a Great Recession 2.0 or whatever hits in the next two years, is there anything that will prevent Dems, who still won't hold the presidency, from going Obama and bailing out the finance sector? Ditto if timing on this is when some Dem replaces Trump?

This is not cynicism, contra a person commenting on a public Facebook page. It's skepticism. The Democratic Party still has a ways to go to prove it has reformed. And the DSA roses entering Congress for the first time have even more to prove that they can stand up to being co-opted (or that some of their talk wasn't PR in the first place).

That was before said person claimed that "wisdom of the goddess" type voting for women would usher in world peace. I reminded her of Hillary Clinton's war on Libya and Margaret Thatcher's war on working-class Britons. And that's not to mention the godawful Theresa May.

Meanwhile, doorknob forbid that a DSA rosey like Sema Hernandez be criticized on Twitter for making a calculated political decision. Scap, who I've thought is overrated in his and other minds, says I called her a liar.

No, Scap, what I said was, was that Sema officially endorsed Beto Claus without any explicit guarantee in public, during the campaign, that he would endorse even Bernie's weaker S 1804 version of single-payer if he were elected. I said at the time, on the update of the "Beto a ConservaDem" piece, that Beto had gone out of his way to trash it early in the campaign cycle, so even if he did promise to endorse it, I'd believe it when I saw it. I also said on it, and hinted to you, that Sema made a calculated, buttering up Texas Democratic Party hierarchy, decision related to a possible 2020 Senate run. That's no secret that she's considering that, and I am not the first person to make the connection between the two, as I also told you.

So, Scap, or Sema, send me a URL dated after Sema's letter in which Beto explicitly backs single payer (and not "universal health care") in public. More on that issue and other such things here.

Andrew Stewart also remains skeptical of the AOC "wave election" and other things related to it.