On waking up and realizing your senior class in high school is now running the United States

With millions of others, I listened to and saw the speeches Monday night at the Demo convention on TV.

The speeches were better than I thought they would be and the whole thing was conducted with aplomb and decorum, with no serious disruptions. Michel Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders ended the night with their speeches. Several other politicians spoke, including Cory Booker, the new senator from New Jersey, who gave an inspired and rousing speech, about bringing Americans together to rise together.

Michel Obama talked mainly about family values and children’s needs. Elizabeth Warren mainly attacked Trump and Repub values.

Bernie Sanders thanked his supporters and summarized his campaign and platform. His main idea was the importance of the revolution he and his supporters started, which he said will continue. He told his supporters to go ahead and vote for him later in the week in the roll call vote, yet he emphatically encouraged everyone to support Hillary for president. He said he had made progress recently causing his platform to be accepted by the Democratic National Committee, including busting up the big banks, bringing back Glass-Steagall, providing free tuition in public colleges and universities, giving debt relief to college debtors, getting rid of Citizens United, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, dealing with income and wealth inequality, making sure the TPP trade agreement is not passed, expanding Medicaid and making Medicare available to all past age 55, making a public option health plan available to all, and probably some others I forgot.

This is progress, but it leaves a choice of Hillary or Trump for president. Voters now have a decent Demo platform but a flawed problematic Demo candidate, in my opinion. The best person did not get selected because he is not popular enough with the masses and the insiders of the DNC known as Super Delegates.

According to countless Demo promoters, Sanders supporters now have no rational choice but to support Hillary against Trump. The most compelling argument for this is that Trump if elected would appoint more right wing justices to the Supreme Court, making it impossible, at least for many years, to get rid of Citizens United, the abominable 5–4 Supreme Court right-wing decision of 2010 that allowed large corporations and the elite rich to spend as much money as they want to bribe federal politicians to change the laws and rules of the US government to lower their taxes and legalize actions to enable them to enrich themselves even more, at the expense of poorer people.

As of today, I am not sure how to vote come November. I have been supporting Jill Stein, MD, of the Green Party for a few weeks, after supporting Bernie Sanders for a few years. I have read she now has about three percent of the vote. There are no signs Bernie Sanders will join her on the Green Party ticket after the Demo convention. Without him the Green Party has zero chance of winning, in my opinion. See statistics backing this paragraph posted on my Facebook page at click here.

There is no doubt in my mind Jill Stein would be a better president than Hillary Clinton. Stein entails a much lower probability of doing disastrous things, such as starting a war with Russia, than Clinton.

Unfortunately, it’s possible I will wind up clicking Clinton for president, on the Georgia electronic voting screen in my booth, come election day in November, barring unforeseen developments in the meantime, not because I think she will be a good president, but because she would most likely be less disastrous than Trump. If so, I will be voting for the platform of the Demo party, not Hillary, thanks to the vision, courage, energy, talents, wisdom, and noblesse oblige of Bernie Sanders, regardless of the low probability Hillary will actually implement Bernie’s platform.

Kurt Vonnegut once remarked how horrible he felt one morning when he woke up and realized his senior class was now running the United States. I now feel much the same. Political parties and their conventions are primarily popularity contests, in which most voters cast votes for those they simply like most, those they deem most likely to do them favors, for childish reasons.

Political parties and their conventions are primarily popularity contests, loosely analogous to a high school senior class, in which most voters vote for members they like most based on how they look and talk, those they deem most likely to do them favors, those they identify with most, for childish reasons.

The policies of the platform of the candidate and the actual abilities, achievements, and record of the candidate are irrelevant for most primary voters.

To piggyback Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” the primary voters of the US, and the people who rigged the US primary voting system to insure a two party system rife with unfairness and corruption.

Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, ethics and entrepreneurship who writes on business and politics at www.effectivelearning.net and on Facebook.