Dan Savage on Politics: Just No.
In his apology for urging people to support the Iraq War in a column from 2002 titled “Say ‘YES’ to War in Iraq,” columnist Dan Savage told readers he had learned his lesson. “I was wrong,” he said.
It was a nice moment. Savage’s support of the war had earned him a lot of well-deserved enemies. For the most prominent writer for Seattle’s magazine The Stranger to admit fault was an acknowledgement of error on par with most mea culpas in 2007 (once the war had become a disaster most of its supporters walked back their support).
But Savage’s most recent foray into questions of national politics, a column based on his comments on his podcast titled: “Dan Savage on Jill Stein: Just No.”, shows that the sex advice columnist with a national reach hasn’t learned a damn thing about exhorting his followers to believe in dumb ideas.
This shouldn’t be surprising- Savage has always been quite conservative unless the subject is sex or the withholding of civil rights for his particular group of LGBTQ people. However this latest attempt to shape opinion around national politics is especially vile because of how obviously wrong it is.
Savage says that: “If you’re interested in building a third party, a viable third party, you don’t start with president. You don’t start by running someone for fucking president.”
Well, yes, Dan, you actually fucking do (even though the Greens have been around for decades). As many, many people have pointed out over the years, the US electoral system is fundamentally set up to stymie any attempt by third parties to become part of the national conversation. And that’s just in presidential politics. At the local level things are far, far worse.
Savage: “Where are the Green Party candidates for city councils? For county councils? For state legislatures? For state assessor? For state insurance commissioner? For governor? For fucking dogcatcher?”
At the local level, the two party system makes things even more difficult for candidates. Take Marco Rossi in Olympia, WA, a mere hour drive for Mr. Savage from his home in Seattle. When I interviewed Rossi about his independent mayoral campaign last year, he told me about how not being a part of the two party system- which he rightly loathed- made running for office impossible for anyone who wasn’t incredibly wealthy.
As a nominal Democrat, Rossi’s opponent Cheryl Selby has access to a plethora of resources Rossi does not. Those resources include, for example, Vote Builder, the voter database that identifies demographic information for Democratic nominees.
The advantage that this demographic information can give to prospective candidates is enormous. It allows the campaign to narrow the focus of their targeted get out the vote campaigns. Rossi’s campaign, on the other hand, must knock on each and every door to get out the vote.
Also worth noting is that you never hear Savage say this about candidates from the Republican Party, who have actually threatened to do real harm to the civil rights of gay people.
No, it’s only the Greens, who have stood up for his civil rights for far longer than the Democrats, who come in from this abuse. It’s the end of civilization if every single person to the left of the Republicans doesn’t vote for Clinton, it’s an abdication of personal responsibility. It’s a similar ploy to when he led the second paragraph of the aforementioned Iraq War promotion with comparing Hussein to Hitler.
The “Say YES” article is worth revisiting for how utterly stupid and wrong in every possible way it was then and how absolutely certain Savage was that he was right then.
These developments — a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq — are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory for the American left
Heady stuff.
These developments — a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq — are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory for the American left
It’s easy to mock now, mostly because it’s so obvious even today how idiotic it was then, but look at the Jill Stein article- same arguments delivered in the same punching left snark.
Disaster will come. And the people who’ll suffer are not going to be the pasty white Green Party supporters — pasty white Jill Stein and her pasty white supporters. The people who’ll suffer are going to be people of color. People of minority faiths. Queer people. Women.
(Savage lives in Seattle, one of the whitest and most affluent cities in the country; the Green Party has nominated people of color for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, and women)
I would be SO willing to vote for Green Party candidates who are starting at the bottom, grassroots, bottom up, building a third party, a viable third party.
You don’t do that by trotting out the reanimated corpse of Ralph fucking Nader every four fucking years. Or his doppelgänger, whoever it is now, Jill Stein and some asshole-to-be-named four years from now. You start by running grassroots, local campaigns.
Yeah, bullshit. Just because Savage managed to start a campaign to urban dictionary Rick Santorum (who, again, he has no problem with people voting for) doesn’t mean he knows a damn thing about building a political party.
Fuck off, Dan.
Update: This piece originally said that, “There’s no way Savage will ever vote for anyone to the left of the Democratic Party.” However, as Seattle activist Devin Matthews-Jensen pointed out on my facebook page, Savage “twice endorsed and recorded a robocall for socialist Kshama Sawant.”