The Big Difference Between Sanders and Clinton, Shown via Graph

With so much always up for debate in the political world, it brings a certain satisfaction whenever a piece of data comes out that proves exactly what you've been saying for months. But I should stop myself before I go off into the realm of "I told you so," strutting around rooster-like, chest puffed. This isn't about gloating. It's about information that's important for anyone planning to vote in the Democratic primary.

We've commonly heard the refrain that Clinton and Sanders aren't that different in terms of their political positions. Sure, Sanders is a little more progressive, but the real difference is that Clinton is a pragmatist, not some dreamy-eyed, guitar-strumming socialist hippy who doesn't understand politics. So suck it up and be realistic, they voted the same way 93% of the time--why do you Sanders supporters act like they're so unlike each other?

My answer has always been that I act that way because they are so different. You can throw statistics at me, but we just have to look at who backed the Iraq War, who destroyed Libya, who voted for the bailouts, who supported welfare reform, and doesn't want to bring back Glass-Steagall, or have a $15 minimum wage, or free college. Need I go on?

But now my ilk and I have our own statistic to throw. The Political Compass, an organization whose analyses I've read and respected for years, and that offers (in my view) one of the best tests to determine your own standing on the political spectrum, has released their first analysis of the 2016 candidates, and they've concluded exactly what I, and many others, have said: Clinton is a lot closer to the Republicans than she is to Sanders.

The graph from Political Compass

The Political Compass plots each person on a graph, with the left-right x-axis representing economics and the up-down y-axis representing personal liberty. This gives us four quadrants: left-libertarian, left-authoritarian, right-authoritarian, and right-libertarian. The farthest you can go in any direction one on axis is ten units: ten units right, left, up, or down.

I want to focus on the x-axis first, because economics is the main issue that's focused on in the Democratic primaries. So how much separates Clinton from Sanders? Two units? Three? Surely no more than four, right?

Wrong. Try nine. Sanders is two units to the left, Clinton seven to the right. The Republicans, meanwhile, are all around eight or nine to the right. This is exactly what Sanders supporters have been saying about Clinton since the beginning--she's practically a Republican, she's so right-wing.

And the big difference isn't because Sanders is "far-left," as some have claimed. He's only two units to the left, out of a possible ten--the definition of center-left. For comparison, look at the score that dangerous radical H.S. Buchana got--9 units to the left. There's a crazy extremist for you. But despite only being a little to the left, Sanders has the distinction of being the only major candidate who is a leftist of any kind. For anyone who claims to be left-wing, or progressive, or to want any real change in a positive direction, this should be a significant piece of information.

My score on Political Compass's grid.

Looking at the y-axis, the picture has a few more colors than the image of stark divide one finds on the economic question. What stands out the most is Trump's nine out of ten on the authoritarian side; Vlad the Impaler could hardly best him. The difference between the cluster of Republicans and Clinton is more significant here, as they all score to the higher end of the authoritarian scale and she gets a four, meaning she's far from being any kind of libertarian, but lacks the same crazed lust to oppress that the Republicans have.

Still, if you support personal liberty, Sanders is easily the best. He scores an exact zero--neither authoritarian nor libertarian. But in a field of would-be tyrants, he looks like an anarchist in comparison. It's easy to see how he gets the better score: he's been the one to take a stand against NSA spying, and to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Clinton still stands by her vote in favor of it.

But how do you know which candidate you're closest to? Well, you're in luck, because like I said, they have a test that puts you on the exact same grid that all the candidates are on. For anyone undecided, please take a few minutes to take the test--it's simple multiple choice and the questions are straightforward and opinion-based. It's well worth your time if you're going to vote. Even if you think you know which candidate represents your priorities best, I urge you to take it. The results may take you by surprise.

Scalia Will Be Missed--But Not By Me

Once Richard Nixon died, Hunter S. Thompson penned an obituary titled "He Was A Crook." I could just as well call this piece "He Was A Troll." It's certainly the first word that comes to mind to describe Antonin Scalia. His writings will have to go down as some of the most petty and unabashedly partisan ever written by any Supreme Court Justice to sit at the bench.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (taken from Above the Law)

I'll say one thing: I'm not happy he's dead. I'm certainly glad he's not on the Supreme Court anymore, but I would have been no less so if he'd retired or been impeached and kicked off the court--in fact, that would have been more fitting. I don't have the hatred of the man himself required to rejoice at his death, but I certainly despise his legacy enough that I would have loved to see him leave disgraced rather than hold office until his death.

While it's not an impeachable offense, there can't be much doubt that Scalia was a bigot on multiple levels. He was the Archie Bunker of the Supreme Court, a man with common prejudices and uncommon power, and no qualms about using the one to further the other. He despised the gays perhaps most of all, as he made clear time and again, in and out of the courtroom. He took a certain perverse joy in coming up with other sins to indirectly compare homosexuality to--murder, drug use, prostitution, child pornography.

His personal venom translated one hundred percent into his jurisprudence. At every turn, he attempted to thwart the "homosexual agenda," which he warned about in one of his dissents. There was no discrimination against gays that was too much for Scalia, whether it be personal or governmental. "Homosexual sodomy" was wrong and disgusting, and anyone who wanted to protect themselves from the unholy reprobates who engaged in it was in their right, morally and legally, to do so. He had no respect for the idea of gay relationships, sexual or nonsexual, sneeringly comparing "the 'life partner' of a homosexual" to the roommate of a straight person.

He hated that the court kept giving more rights to gays, and he made it clear early on, accusing them of taking sides in the "Culture War" by ruling against sodomy laws and condemning homophobic discrimination in 2003. The climax came with his unhinged, apoplectic screed of a dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. He accused his colleagues of a "putsch," railing against the "egotistic" style of the majority opinion and comparing its ideas to the "mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie." He praised the idea of letting states ban gay marriage as an exemplary exercise of American democracy, which is how he saw every law passed to the detriment of gays.

He didn't have much more regard for the blacks. His comments last December about how they might do better in "less-advanced" schools instead of more prestigious universities was just the latest example of his white supremacism finding its way to the surface. The Voting Rights Act, he said, was just a "racial entitlement." He snarled at affirmative action not just as something he viewed as unconstitutional but as an attempt to elevate blacks to a position they didn't deserve.

Scalia pretended to be a constitutionalist or an originalist, but he could have been best described as a loyal foot-soldier for the entrenched powers in society, whether those powers be governmental, corporate, racial, or anything else. There was hardly a time when he wouldn't choose the brute over the brutalized, the torturer over the tortured, the oppressor over the oppressed. His ideas of how to interpret the Constitution and the law twisted and turned like a plumber's snake going through sewage pipes, depending on the circumstances.

He claimed to abide by the interpretation that the Founders wanted, but he used the First Amendment to hand over to corporate behemoths the right to pour advertising money behind their favorite candidate, because corporations had the right of people now. That's the sort of idea that has to make Thomas Jefferson and James Madison pound on the lids of their coffins in a futile attempt to stop the sheer depravity that's engulfed the country in the years since they left this world.

His love of the idea of self-government, which he cited whenever the court struck down some law he liked, didn't keep him from joining the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore and appointing his man president, shutting down the democratic process in Florida. Rumor has it he was even the driving force behind that scummy decision, the decision that most deserves to be called a putsch, out of the recent rulings from the Supreme Court. He was a Republican Party loyalist, happily toadying up to the Grand Wizards of the GOP and ranting against Democrats. 

In keeping with his love of society's monsters and bullies, he had no problem with spitting in the eyes of the people who didn't like his decisions, like when he told the critics of Citizens United that if they didn't like unlimited corporate money financing ad campaigns for candidates, they could just shut off their TVs. When he was questioned about Bush v. Gore in 2008, he dismissively told his critics to "get over it." We can't know how much of his racist and homophobic commentary was sincere and how much of it was just part of him trying to jab at liberals and progressives for kicks and giggles. He was a provocateur posing as a jurist, and he knew it.

Most striking about him was his readiness to abandon any sort of stateliness and turn his position on the bench into a way for him to be top right-wing political commentator--Rush Limbaugh with a black robe and a taxpayer-funded salary. When the Supreme Court had to decide whether Arizona's immigration law was constitutional, he used his opinion as an opportunity to launch a partisan attack against Obama for a recent and totally unrelated executive action.

Scalia was the sorest of sore losers, not just willing to attack the winners when he lost but willing to attack the game itself. He warned of black-robed tyranny, of an unaccountable panel of nine destroying the people's will, every time the court ruled down the laws he liked, but he had no problem with the idea of imposing his own will when it came to shredding affirmative action or campaign finance reform.  He was the epitome of modern conservatism, fetishizing the ideas of small government and constitutionalism while abandoning them at his own discretion in practice.

He readily went off in his dissents with dire warnings and condemnations that had no bearing on the actual legal question. When the Court decided that people held at Guantanamo without any charge were entitled to Habeas Corpus, he claimed that the decision impeded the war the country was involved in (against radical Islamists) and that it would almost certainly kill Americans. He was a doomsday preacher whenever things went his opponents' way, and cavalierly dismissed their concerns whenever he got his. When the constitutionality of the death penalty was being discussed, he tried to justify it by citing a case where an 11-year-old had been raped and murdered, calling lethal injection "enviable" in comparison. As it turned out, the man Scalia thought was in an "enviable" position hadn't even done the crime--DNA evidence later exonerated him.

Scalia hated judicial activism, but shredded any ideas, no matter how embedded in the constitution, that didn't conform to his view of society. Thomas Jefferson wrote about a wall of separation between church and state, but Scalia said that it was fine for the government to favor religion over non-religion, just so long as it didn't pick any single denomination to favor. You could call him a relic, but there's probably no point in American history where the country looked the way he wanted it to. He wasn't satisfied with the idea of gays being kept in the closet or blacks being kept in their place; he also wanted a country that openly used Christianity as its moral guide, readily reminding all non-Christians at every turn that their beliefs didn't matter and this country wasn't really theirs. Non-Christians were just another of the many downtrodden groups that Scalia had no problem keeping downtrodden.

He was a theocrat, along with a homophobe and a racist. He had the sort of mindset that would be more at home in the government of Iran or Saudi Arabia, that saw religious values and norms as entirely legitimate for the government to push onto its citizens and the end of a bayonet. That was where his disgust for gays traced back to: his desire to see the country forced to conform to "Christian" values. He accused his colleagues of having taken sides in the Culture War, but there was no judge who had done so more openly than him.

We have already been subjected to hearing about the hero, the patriot, the great jurist that we lost. If I tried to abide by the ideas of political civility, I would find something nice to say about Scalia--that I disagreed with him but that he was a great Justice. I don't, and I won't. He was toxic, and his legacy is toxic. It's an ugly fact that the longer people like Scalia are around and in power, the longer it will take for any sort of civilized society to really be achieved. I'm not happy to see Scalia die. I'm not even truly happy to see him off of the court; I'm just relieved that the lowliest member of the high court is no longer there to wreak his havoc.

Hillary's Victories Are Not Victories for All Women

Of all the lousy arguments that have been used to boost Hillary Clinton's candidacy, one sticks out as being both particularly annoying and particularly common: the "she's a woman!" argument. Clinton herself has not shied away from using this argument, and it's also been used in ways that, deliberately or not, only distract from the actual substance of the campaign and glorify Clinton, such as this piece gushing over her "historic" "victory" in Iowa.

Hillary Clinton (biography.com)

Implied, if not explicitly stated, is the idea that if Hillary Clinton wins, that in and of itself is a stride for women everywhere. For me, this has never appeared as anything but a self-serving fairy tale made up by Clintonites who are either less-than-honest or downright delusional. But apparently it's a powerful enough argument that we've even gotten a self-described socialist feminist promoting Hillary.

The thing is, there's just no substance to this idea. Hillary's maybe-victory (still all I'm willing to call it, given the continued controversy) in Iowa--and any other electoral successes she has, including if she manages to claw her way into the Oval Office--only prove that a lot of people are willing to vote for a woman for president. That's great, of course, but we already knew that--reliable polling data has shown that better than 9 out of 10 Americans are willing to vote for a woman for president, if they view her as well-qualified. This simply isn't like when JFK had to overcome the actual obstacle of being a Catholic when Catholics were still widely distrusted and convince the voters he wouldn't turn America into a Vatican City puppet state. Convincing Americans that a woman could be president is essentially a fait accompli, so Hillary Clinton is not making some historic stride, in a meaningful sense of the word, by winning Iowa, any other state, or even the presidency.

Nor will electing Clinton somehow help erase sexist attitudes in America. To disprove that idea, you just have to look at how things have been under our first black president. Given the level of partisan hatred for Obama, racism has actually gotten worse since he's been in office, and, of course, we continually see cops killing unarmed black men and walking away without any criminal charges. I'm not blaming this on Obama, but plainly enough racism has not disappeared because of Obama's election--it's intensified. The Republicans already despise Clinton, so we might see the exact same thing if she gets elected.

When it comes to actual policies, we can say without a doubt that Clinton is better than any of the Republicans running. The frontrunner for the Republican nomination is a more or less open sexist, and we couldn't expect much from the creepy religious zealot Ted Cruz or the slimy hack Rubio. But Clinton hasn't made it to the general election yet, so we aren't forced to make that choice. We have an alternative to Clinton in the form of Bernie Sanders. Sanders is old, white, and male, though. How could he be better for women than Clinton?

Well, pretty easily. Who has the better plans for dealing with poverty, which disproportionately affects women? Or the prison-industrial complex, which has incarcerated increasing amounts of women? Or healthcare, where women have their own specific set of needs? If your answer to those questions is "Hillary," then I can only say we'll have to agree to disagree.

Not surprisingly, there have been genuinely sexist attacks on Clinton. People have complained about her raising her voice, which is pretty absurd in a campaign with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. And perhaps some of her hawkishness can be ascribed to a need to show she'd be just as tough as one of the guys. But that doesn't mean that electing her will achieve something big for women. The idea that it would is the sort of toxic myth that applauds the success of the people at the top while ignoring the continued struggles of those at the bottom. Some of the biggest challenges for women lower down on the economic scale come not from misogynist attitudes, but institutional sexism. The only way to remedy that is to go after the institutions themselves with a hatchet. And Clinton is plainly not the person to do that.

Reaction to Iowa

The great circus that is the Iowa caucus has passed, and primary season has begun in earnest. I made a set of predictions for Iowa, so I might as well share my thoughts now that we know what actually happened. Or sort of know, as the case may be.

Ted Cruz in Iowa, after his victory
(Brendan Hoffman/Getty, taken from the National Review)

My prediction for the Republican Iowa caucus's winner was lousy. I gave Cruz a twenty percent chance of winning and Trump an eighty percent chance, and Cruz won by several percent of the vote. Like many, I didn't see that coming--and I expected that if Cruz won it would be due to a lower turnout; but turnout was fantastic, apparently. I guess I underestimated the appeal that this creepy-looking, serpentine preacher-man has for the evangelicals in Iowa, and probably the rest of the country. Kind of a stupid oversight on my part, given that they gave a victory to the dull block of wood that is Rick Santorum four years ago, and Cruz panders to the faithful like a faith-healer skilled in his charade.

On one hand, it's great to see Trump lose. The planetoid ego that he holds just had an asteroid crater into it. Watching his supporters react is even more of a perverse delight, as the online white nationalist community threw a tantrum and shrieked about how Microsoft had stolen Trump's votes and given them to "Jubio." But Cruz is a scarier candidate in many ways. Like I've said before, Trump may very well be a complete phony, putting up a front to get power and prestige; Cruz is a true believer, the sort of figure who could be at the head of a suicide cult somewhere out in the West. He believes he has God on his side, and the last president to think that broke to bits an entire damn country in the Middle East. And Ted Cruz makes George W. Bush look like a moderate in comparison.

But the people who think they're dancing on Trump's political grave have got it way wrong. Iowa's caucus system means participants have to be a lot more involved than your average primary, and Trump's supporters are not the type to be too engaged in politics. Plus, he leads in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida by far more than he did in Iowa. Santorum won Iowa four years ago, and Huckabee in 2008, so the Republican Iowa caucus is not much more than a badge of honor given to the craziest and most depraved religious extremist running for president; it can hardly be counted on as a predictor of who lives and dies.

On the Democratic side, it was every bit as close as I would have anticipated; I gave Sanders a slight edge, but they say Clinton won now. But who knows, given the coin tosses, talk of missing votes, and whatever else. Sanders hasn't conceded, nor should he. But whether or not Clinton is the ultimate winner, it's clear that Sanders is a serious threat. He's taken a sledgehammer to the foundation of the corporate establishment and made the whole thing quake. The Clinton campaign is certainly happy to avoid losing to Sanders by a few points, but to call this a real victory for Clinton is delusional. At best, she barely won Iowa, and is way down in the polls in New Hampshire, the first actual primary of the election. Sanders has proven that he's a real candidate, not just an also-ran trying to make a point.

The New Hampshire primary in a little less than a week doesn't hold much of the same suspense as Iowa did, with both Trump and Sanders boasting double-digit leads in the polls. Trump's lead mig
ht be threatened a little by Cruz, but I doubt it'll be enough to tip the state (though, then again, I doubted Cruz would win Iowa). The "virtual tie" between Sanders and Clinton probably only adds fuel to Sanders campaign's engine, so if the polls are right--and they were about right in Iowa for the Democrats--he should cruise to an easy victory in the state Clinton won in 2008. It seems we probably have two long primaries ahead of us, and the outcomes couldn't be more important.