Point Austin: A Halcyon Day

This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings – no limits – on any of us. And this is our moment to come together.

– Hillary Clinton, June 7, 2016

On my handy soapbox, I'm taking this moment to congratulate Hillary Clinton on being the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president, and also (inextricably) becoming the first woman nominee for a major U.S. party. I won't wander into the weeds about the primaries (open or closed) and the caucuses and the media and the conventions and the superdelegates and the voting machines and a whole host of ancillary matters to this great achievement. Within the awkward, baroque, and confounding processes of U.S. elections, Clinton has overcome great odds to do what no other woman has done before. It's a grand and historic day.

Beyond that news – confirmed by Tuesday's six-state primary voting, in which Clinton won the biggest prizes – it is but one more instance of one of the strangest election campaigns in my memory. It's a given that in our nearly petrified political system, the Demo­cratic and Republican campaigns should be extremely polarized, and in nominating Donald Trump, the GOP may have finally gone over the edge in its determination to fanatically push the public conversation to the extreme right. Trump is saying out loud what other Republican officeholders and candidates have been dog-whistling for decades, at least since Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. The fact that he's both crass and incoherent about it only exaggerates the absurdity of the political moment.

When a major party nominee accepts Alex Jones' Infowars as a legitimate news source – and persistently seeks Jones' support – our political system is certainly broken, and we need to work hard to mend it. Republicans can attempt to fix their own party – and purging the racism out of the "conservative" message, as difficult as that would actually be, would be a good place to begin. But the Democrats have plenty of work to do as well, not least because of the ideological and structural rifts reflected in this campaign.

Lessons from History

I'm certainly familiar with political absolutism, having been among the young crowds in August of 1968 along Chicago's Michigan Avenue, shouting "Dump the Hump!" (Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee) at the top of my lungs until the Chicago cops beat and arrested some of us and chased the rest away (I was much quicker on my feet in those days). Nothing we did that week would have tipped the balance in the subsequent election of Richard "Peace Candidate" Nixon, but in retrospect I've come to regret my single-minded self-righteousness (shared with millions of others) about the best political course for the nation.

Young Hillary Clinton may have learned a similar lesson in 1972, as she and her then-boyfriend Bill campaigned valiantly in Texas for George McGovern – who didn't just lose the election, but was humiliated nationwide by incumbent Nixon. (For the record, the 1972 campaign became the trigger for the eventual creation of "superdelegates," in hopes of avoiding similar debacles – although superdelegates have not, in fact, determined subsequent nominating outcomes.) There's a thin line between vigorously supporting a candidate and concluding that only that candidate can save the nation (or the world) from disaster.

A Victory in Common

Plenty of Bernie Sanders' supporters appear to have crossed that line, although Sanders himself conceded early on that "on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day" (and that was long before we learned it would be Trump). Sanders hasn't sounded that conciliatory of late (it's an embittering campaign process), but in her Tuesday speech, Clinton declared that "Sanders' campaign, and the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase upward mobility, have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America."

Partly because of GOP incompetence and egregious overreach, should the Democrats come together in a unified, progressive campaign, this fall's election has the chance to be transformational. Political dominoes could change down ballots even in reactionary redoubts like Texas, thereby altering the public consensus on inequality, institutional racism, reproductive rights and health care, climate change and environmentalism generally – the whole range of progressive issues. The Obama legacy is broad but fragile – too often defending contested ground, holding off reaction, rather than pushing forward. With a more liberal Congress, a rational Supreme Court, and at least a few more legislatures concerned about something other than fetal personhood and bathroom etiquette, we might actually, as Clinton put it, return to "working toward a better, fairer, stronger America."

In the meantime: It's important that we pause and celebrate a long-delayed and hard-won victory which, as she emphasized, "is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible." A moment to come together.