Heartache With Hard Work

2016 hasn’t been the greatest year. Politically, culturally, socially. And unfortunately, as it turns out, musically as well. Not that it was an awful year, just a drab one. Still, even in a comparatively down year for music, there was still tons of great stuff.

For whatever reason, my list was pretty heavily dominated by women this year, and featured a lot more roots, country, and similar styles than I’ve included in past editions. A down year for America as a whole was a pretty solid year for Americana, I guess.

As always, these are simply the songs that I liked the most. I make no claims to objectivity. And if your favorite missed the cut, it might just be that I missed it, so don’t hesitate to toss me recommendations.

If you’re a Spotify person, you can get almost the whole list here.

40. Best to You – Blood Orange

A great, slinky song, with a wonderful vocal performance from Empress Of. The line that kills me is: “I can’t be the girl you want but I can be the thing you throw away.”

39. You Just Want – King Creosote

A deeply meditative song that digs down into the cross section of sacred and profane.

38. Higher – Rihanna

I didn’t care much for the Rihanna songs that got significant play this year, but this little one from the end of Anti really does it for me. It was apparently recorded very late in the night, when she was more than a little intoxicated. And it sounds exactly like that, in all the best ways.

37. Annie – Petite League

Punk rock is a young man’s game, mostly. But that’s alright because there are always more young men waiting to fill in the ranks.

36. Guns Of Umpqua – Drive-By Truckers

I really wanted to love the Truckers going political, but the album mostly didn’t stick with me. I do love this song, though.

35. Black Beatles (feat. Gucci Mane) – Rae Sremmurd

I could take or leave the Mannequin thing – which I somehow managed to mostly miss while it was going on – but the song more than stands on its own.

34. Breakers Roar – Sturgill Simpson

A strange, dark lullaby. Ruminations on loss and the transience of suffering, as told to the singer’s infant child.

33. Beached – Julianna Barwick

A piano, cello, and a wordless chorus – all trying to find their way together, moving in and out of phase, proving that there can be great beauty in disalignment.

32. Congratulations – Dessa

There wasn’t much on the Hamilton Mixtape that struck me as essential, but this track definitely qualifies. It’s a shame it was omitted from the original production, since it provides an important capstone on the Angelica/Hamilton relationship. So getting the song now–and performed by Dessa no less–is a welcome surprise.

31. 29 #Strafford APTS – Bon Iver

For the most part, I found the Bon Iver record to be interesting more than enjoyable. This song is the beautiful exception.

30. Kismet Kill – Haley Bonar

The bass line is the star here. It’s the engine under the hood that keeps the whole thing humming.

29. My Church – Maren Morris

The ‘mainstream’ vs. ‘authentic’ country debate is tiresome and pointless, exhibit #183,393. Just enjoy the song and stop worrying so much about what counts as the ‘real’ Nashville!

28. Trailer – Mudcrutch

This song was supposed to end up on Petty’s Southern Accents (where it would have been an excellent fit), but ended up stuck on the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” b-side. Finally, thirty years later, it’s getting a proper release, and it sounds better than ever. Petty seems to be really enjoying the ‘have fun jamming with your friends’ part of his career. It hasn’t produced much in the way of classics, but sure does seem like it’s a lot of fun.

27. Open Your Eyes – School of Seven Bells

It’s really depressing to know that we’ll never get to find out where this band could have gone from this. They took an interesting turn in their sound here, and I’d love to have been able to hear them develop it. RIP Benjamin Curtis.

26. Those Better Days – Mimi Page

A beautiful tapestry of a song, built around a simple guitar riff, a few plinking piano notes, and layers of electronic texture doled out in precise amounts. It builds an entire world in just under two minutes.

25. Hidden Driver – LVL UP

It opens with the guitar riff from “Ghost” by Neutral Milk Hotel, and the similarities don’t end there. It’s not pure NMH-mimickry, which would be a pretty hard sell. But it’s got that same sense of careening just beyond the edge to control.

24. Fill In The Blank – Car Seat Headrest

I really do like this song, which is a nice mixture of Replacements+Cars+Green Day. But I need to take a slight detour here and express my utter confusion at the effusive praise this band has been getting. They made a decent indie rock record. A solid B- or maybe a B. In a weak year for rock records, it would probably make my top 10 for the genre. That’s about it. Get a grip, people!

23. White – HANA

Dance music for a dreamscape. HANA toured with Grimes, and you definitely can see the overlap of their styles here.

22. Colors In Space – Explosions In The Sky

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

21. Lullaby – Dori Freeman

The closest thing I’ve heard to Iris Dement in a long, long time.

20. What Happened to Us? – Shura

The classic combos: peanut butter and jelly, Frodo and Sam, synths and feelings.

19. Ether – Mogwai

A single deep breath, spaced out over five minutes. Drink it all in, and then push back and let yourself drift away into the quiet nothing.

18. Your Best American Girl – Mitski

The chorus of this song is just fireworks layered on top of more fireworks.

17. Folk Arp – Minor Victories

Q: What do you get if you form a supergroup out of members from Slowdive, Mogwai, and Editors? A: This song.

16. Troublemaker, Doppelganger – Lucy Dacus

Three minutes of bluesy riffs that converge into a minute of pure explosive joy to finish things off. This is basically musical catnip for me.

15. I’ve Got Wheels – Miranda Lambert

Miranda Lambert, in the classic tradition of the American troubadour, concludes her long journey through the dark night of the soul with a bit of hope. There’s redemption to be found out there somewhere. “Whatever road, however long. I’ve got wheels. I’m rolling on.”

14. BWU – Tegan & Sara

Tegan and Sara have made a career out of reversing that classic Tolstoy line (‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’). Their best songs consistently dwell in the space between the specificity of happiness and the universality of heartbreak. This song is another delightful entry in the canon.

13. Burn The Witch – Radiohead

Finely measured strings trace the outlines of a prison.  Inside, Thom Yorke paces in measured steps, just waiting for the chance to leap the walls.

12. Daddy Lessons – Beyonce

If you ask twelve people, you’ll probably get twelve different favorite songs from Lemonade. Not surprisingly, given the number of other Americana tracks on this list, I found myself gravitating toward this one. It’s not quite ‘Bey goes to the country,’ but it’s not too far away.

11. ACD (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder) – Nothing

10. Radio of Lips – The Joy Formidable

9. I Wish I Was Sober – Frightened Rabbit

In a year without much in the way of great rock and roll, these three tracks provide a nice counterpoint to the general malaise. None of them expand the genre in any significant ways, but they all make clear that there’s plenty of space for music to be exciting without necessarily breaking new ground.

8. Prayer in Open D – Phoebe Bridgers

It’s the rare cover that outshines the original. And when the original is by Emmylou Harris, well, that’s really saying something. I adore this song and can’t wait for a full-length from Phoebe Bridgers.

7. Highway Anxiety – William Tyler

Don’t let anyone tell you that there’s no more magic left in the world. As long as the guitar exists, there are infinite illusions still waiting to be unfurled. There are few sorcerers of this craft better than William Tyler, and this is his finest work yet.

6. Watching the Waiting – Wye Oak

Jangly guitars and a galloping beat, which can lift you far up into the sky, if you’ll just let it take you there.

5. Into You – Ariana Grande

The best pop song of the past five years. I was already a fan, but this is the song that put me 100% in the tank for Ariana Grande.

4. All of These Years – Vanessa Peters

There is no song this year that made me smile more than this one. Not even close.

3. Words – Outer Spaces

This is the song that 2016 needed. That opening guitar riff says that no matter how dark it gets, there is still so much right in this world.

2. So Here We Are – Gordi

It’s a beautiful melody, and the production is wonderful. But it’s more than that. There’s something here that slices through me in a way I don’t fully understand and certainly can’t explain. Some songs just disarm you.

1. In Heaven – Japanese Breakfast

It shimmers in the dark, like a distant city skyline on a cold November night. Then she starts singing and your breath catches in your throat, the way it does when someone’s about to tell you bad news and is just shuffling around, looking for the right words. But just as the bleakness threatens to overwhelm, she unleashes a chorus – so pure, so heartbreakingly sad, so beautiful – and the whole world shifts under your feet.

Michael: Gee, it is my business model. I mean, if you had a business model, then by all means, you go in there and do…

For the last few weeks, frantic liberals have been checking the 538 election forecasts, and discovering a lot of reasons to worry. Their model – which famously predicted a relatively easy win for Obama in 2012, against the wisdom of pundits who insisted it was a 50/50 election – dropped Clinton down into the 60s at the start of November, and only finally ticked slightly back over 70 last night.

This compares to a host of other models, which have all consistently put the race in the 80s and 90s – a virtually sure thing.

Meanwhile, Silver has been quite pugilistic with his critics, making two key arguments. First, predictions are difficult and our knowledge imperfect. Our models ought to incorporate that doubt, something that he thinks the other forecasting systems don’t do enough of. Second, drawing on information sources outside of a systematic model introduces bias. People will cherry-pick information that matches their desires, and the introduction of that bias will pollute the conclusions.

What Nate Silver gets right about forecasting

Both of these arguments have value, and deserve attention. Models are only as smart as the work that we put into them. They organize information, providing stable techniques for analyzing and unfolding the meaning contained in the data. But all the assumptions of the model are the assumptions WE humans generate. And there’s good reasons for us to be skeptical about the quality and reliability of our guesses.

Which is to say: broadly speaking, Silver is right to encourage us to frame our thoughts through rigorous models, but also right to remind us that rigor is not the same thing as certainty.

However, and it’s a big however, threading the needle between those two premises can be difficult. And Silver has definitely failed to execute it perfectly in this cycle. In part, this seems driven by his notable failure in the Republican primary, where he famously declared Trump had virtually no chance. Of course, so did many others (including your humble blogger here), so that’s hardly a specific fault of Silver’s. But regardless, the experience seems to have left him a little snakebit. In his autopsy of that prediction, Silver noted that the basic error was one of punditry – shooting from the hip based on anecdote and guesswork, rather than constructing and then trusting a systematic model. And there’s some truth to that, as I’ve just explained. But there’s also a serious risk of overcorrection.

Remember: models only produce useful information to the extent that we build them on solid foundations. That means that good analysis often requires both assessing what the model tells us, and then assessing what information it might be failing to capture.

What’s ‘missing’ from the 538 model

In the 2016 presidential election, there are a few crucial pieces of information that 538’s model doesn’t include, which someone interested in improving the science of forecasting should care about a great deal.

First, the model doesn’t ‘know’ anything about turnout operations. The political science here is scattered, and mostly suggests that turnout has relatively little effect. But ‘little’ isn’t the same as zero. Particularly when one campaign is a well-oiled machine and the other is, to put it politely, a dumpster fire.

It’s important to note that 538 makes no claim to incorporate this sort of information. Nor should it. Turnout probably does matter, but given our current state of knowledge, it would be wrong to suggest we have the tools to meaningfully incorporate it into a rigorous system. So this isn’t a knock on the model, per se; it’s just a reminder that ‘unmeasurable’ is not the same thing as ‘nonexistent.’

Second, the model doesn’t ‘know’ anything about other forecasts. This is a big deal. Research has shown that the ‘wisdom of crows’ holds with forecasters, as much as it does with polls themselves. Just like you shouldn’t remove outlier polls, you shouldn’t remove outlier forecasts. But it’s important to place them in context. And the context of 2016 makes clear that 538 is a fairly significant outlier. Does that mean that Silver’s model is wrong or broken? Of course not. It might end up being the most accurate! But a good forecaster will acknowledge the questions raised by their outlier prediction, even if they believe that their method is in fact the best one.

And that’s something that 538 hasn’t made particularly clear. When they talk about other models, it’s usually in terms of ‘who’s right’ but rarely (if ever) is the meta point made that averaging the results might well be more accurate than any single model.  And in all other discussions, the background assumption of all their commentary is that the 538 model is a true representation of the state of the race.

But this is antithetical to the principles I described above: which suggest caution and humility as the benchmarks of good predictions. Silver has every right to be proud of his system, and should do his best to explain why his assumptions are superior. But he also ought to do a better job of communicating the risks of overreliance on any single model.

Third, and from my perspective most important, the model doesn’t ‘know’ how to process two durable and persistent features of the public polling: a stable Clinton advantage and a large number of ‘undecided’ voters.

You can see both of these in the Pollster trendline, which shows A) a clear and unbroken Clinton edge and B) percentages for Clinton and Trump that add up to quite a bit less than 100%.

What is uncertainty, actually?

From Silver’s perspective, this adds a great deal of uncertainty to the race. A three-point lead of 51-48 is very hard to overcome, since one candidate already has a majority of the votes. A three-point lead of 45-42 is much less safe, because it doesn’t require flipping voters to make up the gap.  So, in his model, Clinton’s persistent lead is interesting, but doesn’t indicate all that much safety.

And if those voters really were undecided, that would probably be true. What I’ve increasingly come to believe about this election, however, is that ‘undecided’ is a poor way to describe that missing 10-15%. I think that very FEW of them are genuinely undecided.

Instead, these folks are relatively strong partisans who don’t like the candidate their side is running and would prefer not to vote for them. And as long as the election remains far off, or looks like a blowout, they’ll remain on the sidelines. But when things seem to be getting close, they grudgingly fall in line.

The ‘Clinton wall’ hypothesis

I’ll be the first to admit that I lack a rigorous model to undergird this theory. But it strikes me as exceptionally plausible, and conforms quite nicely with the available facts. This theory suggests that ‘not Trump, dear god not Trump’ is an incredibly stable majority opinion among the electorate, with a significant subset who’d prefer to avoid casting a ballot for Clinton if they can avoid it. And it hypothesizes that anytime Trump draws close in the polling, a number of these leaners will fall in line to buttress the ‘Clinton wall.’

And that’s precisely what we see. Trump has bounced off that Clinton wall quite a few times. That’s partly due to the cycles of the campaign (the convention, the debates, the traditional unveiling of sexual assault tape), but it’s also likely an underlying feature of the electorate itself.

Silver built a model designed to look at undecided voters and extrapolate uncertainty. Given the parameters he set, newer polls matter more than older ones, and they establish trendlines for filtering other information. Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions. But other models don’t approach the question the same way. They take older polls as setting some important Bayesian priors about electoral attitudes.

Those models see a race where one candidate has led from start to finish and interpret ‘tightening’ in the polls as the normal ebbs and flows of a fundamentally exceptionally stable campaign. They are therefore a lot more CERTAIN about the strength of Clinton’s lead.

The problem isn’t punditry; the problem is bad punditry

Who is right? We’ll have to wait to see, and might not know even after the result are in. After all, everyone is predicting a Clinton win, and the difference between 70% and 90% simply isn’t going to come out in a single wash cycle.  And chances are extremely high that no one is really ‘right’ here. Because that’s not how most science works. Our models are rarely correct. They’re just approximations, given what we knew at the time. As we get more information, and encounter new unexpected scenarios, we try to refine and improve our predictions.

And that’s been the real problem with 538 this cycle. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the model. It may in fact be the most accurate! But there has been something wrong with Silver’s attitude toward this kind of criticism. Faced with this sort of error, he’s tended to retreat into the bunker, more invested in defending the legitimacy of his assumptions than he is in improving the quality of forecasting in general.

That’s perhaps understandable, given the monetary incentives that drive the forecasting business, and given his desire to avoid another embarrassing incident of underselling Trump’s chances.  After all, it’s easy to default back to the model, and to refuse to speculate much beyond what it tells us. But that’s a form of intellectual laziness, and one that doesn’t acknowledge that one of Silver’s greatest strength has always been his ability to blend data and analysis. That’s a crucial skill, and it’s one he’s been letting atrophy a bit, in favor of playing the role of iconoclast and destroyer of ‘conventional wisdom.’

So, if his mistake in the primary was to ‘act like a pundit,’ he hasn’t really fixed the problem. He’s doing less ‘pundit-like’ speculation, sure, but he’s replaced it with a different sort of punditry: where people take a baseline set of information with which they feel comfortable, and then do their best to minimize and ignore everything else.

In effect, Silver is behaving a little like the crusty old sportswriters he’s always criticized: certain that the stats they know tell the whole story, and nothing else is deserving of their attention.  The 538 forecast is a heck of a lot better than batting average and game-winning-RBIs, of course, but it still needs improvements. And it’s more likely to get those improvements if it’s understood as a technique for assisting analysis, rather than as a form of analysis itself.

The most enigmatic musician of the modern era, and now a Nobel laureate to boot. In some ways, it’s tough to write about Dylan’s genius. Some aspects are so obvious that it feels pointless to belabor the point with further words. Other parts are so ephemeral that language struggles to meet the task of description. Talking about his art, that is to say, feels all too much like ‘dancing about architecture.’

But we persist nonetheless. Because the other thing about Dylan’s work is its deep emotional resonances. His music invites us to reflect on our own beliefs and our own deepest feelings. To encounter the strangeness of life, in all its particularity and its universality. To make our inner reflections on selfhood into a shared communal experience.  To bridge the horizons between what we know and what we feel to be true.

In writing this list, I set out on that path myself. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a personal list, with at least a couple idiosyncratic choices. I haven’t listened to all his catalog (by any stretch), and I have my own proclivities about when Dylan was truly at his best. So with that in mind, I’m even more interested than usual in hearing from my readers about your favorites. Particularly the more obscure ones. The bootleg recording from 1973, when he tuned his guitar to a Modal D and breathed new life into an old b-side…tell me what you’ve got!

10. Blowin’ in the Wind (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)

Dylan arrived on a folk scene interested mostly in singing the old standards, and on unearthing the lost gems of a previous era. He played that game for a little while himself, but quickly stepped forward. And in doing so, he changed the world. Blowin’ in the Wind is a protest song, but it’s so very much more. The questions aren’t simply rhetorical devices, meant to shame and inspire action; they’re ruminations on the stark limits of human experience, on the blind paths we all walk down, the infinite possibility of the open sky.

In the end, he wrote a song that was both perfectly of its time, and also entirely outside of time. It’s a song we might well still be singing a thousand years from now. A little closer to the answers, hopefully, but still all too aware that the wind sometimes whispers words in a code that humanity may never fully unlock.

9. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bringing It All Back Home)

Not satisfied with one earth-shaking contribution to the American musical landscape, Dylan released Bringing it All Back Home a scant two years after Blowin’ in the Wind had hit the scene. In his first incarnation, he was the savior of folk music, the symbol of the new depths that could be explored by a boy and his guitar. But now, Dylan turned his attention to rock music—only a decade old, and already in steep decline. It needed a swift kick, and a reminder that rock was meant to snarl, to dislocate, to burn away all that tied us down.

And so he took aim at all of his own idols, and the idols of all his fans. You can almost read it as a form of self-sabotage. They’re going to hate the electric turn, anyways, he muses to himself, so why not let them have it with both barrels? The result is an avalanche of words, which gains momentum with every second – as that underlying chord progression refuses to let up, as Dylan snarls out the litany of abuses inflicted by the simple act of trying to stay alive in a world that cares not one whit for your success or your failure. And as with many of Dylan’s best works, the words sometimes get beyond his capacity to corral them. In a song that shares a great deal of DNA with the proto hip-hop that would come a decade later, the one thing Dylan absolutely can’t do is maintain an even flow. He rushes and waits, just trying to keep from being consumed by the avalanche that he set free.

And good god, the brutal efficiency of “20 years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.”

8. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again (Blonde on Blonde)

The imagery is brilliant, but more than any other song on this list, I think this track is primarily defined by the backing band.  The organ weaving through and around Dylan’s lyrics, sometimes as a counterpoint, sometimes as an emphasis. And the percussion is superb. The ratatat holds the entire enterprise together, preventing the madness of the words from becoming overwhelming. In a less deft performance, this song would quickly become a parody of itself. But somehow, for all seven minutes of its length, they keep everything in balance.

And, in a certain sense, whatever meaning I can glean from the song comes from precisely that point. The truest words of the song are spoken right at the beginning, when the narrator admits: “deep inside my heart, I know I can’t escape.”

7. Most of the Time (Oh Mercy)

I wrote a long post about this song back in the early days of the blog (over 10 years ago, if you can believe it), with a particular focus on its use in High Fidelity. I’ll just quote a little bit of it here…

Bob Dylan’s voice (a handicap at times in his career) is perfectly suited to this situation. Gravelly, wise, but also tender, he tells of the regrets we feel about those we have left behind. The song is about beginning anew, leaving behind the person that you loved. But, there is a delightful tension in lines like:

Most of the time, she ain’t even in my mind
I wouldn’t know her if I saw her, she’s that far behind
Most of the time, I can’t even be sure
If she was ever with me or if I was ever with her

Most of the time, we are fine. But, only most of the time. Sometimes, it hurts so bad you can’t stand it. And I think the singer is in one of those moments. In his constant repetitions that “most of the time” he is okay (doesn’t even miss her, doesn’t even notice that she’s gone), I see as him struggling for something to hold onto. Most of the time, I can survive, but at times like these, it feels very hard. It is not a hopeless song, because he does know that the pain eases and life moves on. But it is a song about how hard it is to lose love, and the struggle that goes on inside.

6. Mr. Tambourine Man (Bringing It All Back Home)

If you want to make the case for Dylan’s Nobel Prize, this song has to feature prominently. The last verse, in particular, is arguably the most beautiful imagery ever put to melody:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

There are a vanishingly small few songs ever written that feel as if they come from beyond this world. This is one such song. It speaks to truths that exceed our own limited understanding. And you can’t help but think that there must be so much more out there somewhere, if only we could hear it. We were lucky enough to be gifted one genius who briefly tapped into the right wavelength and managed to catch four verses. But somewhere out there, all truths are sung, and all worlds are made possible.

5. Mississippi (Love and Theft)

It’s an old man’s song, but not in the straightforward way it’s sometimes understood, as a personal reflection from Dylan on his own age and mortality. It may well be that, but far more importantly it’s a song about what it means for each of us to inhabit our own futures, to flee from that which we once were.

We look forward, resolutely, with all attention on the time still to come. And yet, with each passing day, it becomes harder to avoid glancing back. And when we do, we see that the past never left us. It remains there, patiently waiting, unmastered. We can flee our mistakes, and attack those who force us to remember. But in the end, the evils of our past cannot be escaped. We signed the Declaration of Independence. We fought a Civil War. We envisioned a reconstructed south, one of equality and justice. And then we watched it all crumble and drift away. And all of that is still with us, as much as we’d like to forget it.

So, in the end, recognizing that it’s totally inadequate, we look for solace in a single human connection. And we say: “I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry, too.”

4. Desolation Row (Highway 61 Revisited)

Cinderella, who seems so easy. Ophelia, burned out by 22. Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood, hiding from his past as an electric violin player. The agents and the superhuman crew. They’re all packed together, feeding off one another, growing closer and more fevered in the process.

Each character represents a certain kind of hope, a certain dream. For some it’s escape. For some, it’s simply about finding a way to make meaning out of the chaos. And there’s a certain hopefulness implied in the process, one that’s supplemented by the melody—probably the prettiest Dylan ever composed. But the more time you spend with the song, and try to find the meaning in the words, the more you find yourself trapped by its shifting mirrors. And you begin to understand how so many people could have let themselves into Desolation Row in the first place.

In many respects, this is peak Dylan. A story that invites you in with open arms, and yet which remains utterly inscrutable. It asks you to interpret, even while it challenges the very idea of interpretation. This is Dylan as the anti-Virgil, the perfect guide through the divine comedy of modernity.

3. Like a Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited)

With this song, Dylan showed the world what rock music was truly capable of. It doesn’t bury the 3 minute pop song, but instead elevates it, shows that there’s so much more potential buried in those simple structures. From the first drum kick to the final harmonica solo, this song bulldozes through every limit previously imposed on the genre. How does it feel? It feels great.

2. Just Like a Woman (The Concert for Bangladesh)

The studio version is a good song, no doubt, but probably not even among the five best tracks from Blonde on Blonde. But if you haven’t heard the version from the Concert for Bangladesh, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to check it out. For an artist so totally defined by the endless proliferation of outtakes, alternate versions—and whose vocal efforts varied so widely over the years—I genuinely think that concert represents his peak performative capacity. He played five songs: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Blowin’ in the Wind, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and Just Like a Woman. And they’re all perfect. But none more so than this one.

The basic sadness of the song has always been in tension with its deep cruelty, and has driven so many to read it as pure misogyny. And in other versions, that feels completely fair. But on this night, we were gifted with something else. A version of the song that doesn’t erase those meanings, but reveals something far deeper within them. Because, in his voice, on this night, the cruelty is reflected backward as well as forward. It’s a song about what we do to each other. About the intolerable pain that we inflict, unrealizing and unwanting, upon those that we love. About the lengths to which we drive them. About the expectations we impose, and the debts we underwrite, while trying to hold something together.

The song begins “nobody feels any pain” – and only through this version of the song does the hollowness of that claim finally become clear. Because of course there is pain, and of course he feels it too. He watches, he sees her trying to brush it aside, and he recognizes the falseness of that mask. But only because he himself understands all too well what it would mean to let the pain overtake us. After all, later in the bridge he says “But what’s worse, is this pain in here, I can’t stay in here.”

And suddenly all the cruelest lines take on new meaning. Yes, she is shallow and boring and immature. But no more so than him. Together they weaved a story, and together they tried to make it real. But just as most love stories do, this one cracked apart, and they were rent and torn in the process.

So now he offers a lamentation. That their time together brought so much pain, that he himself is the cause for so much of it, and that this very fact makes it impossible for him to offer any solace. She has broken, he has done it, and he bows heavily under the weight of that responsibility. Because, every way he turns, there’s pain.

I know that this isn’t the only possible interpretation of the song, and I don’t discount the more straightforward take that it’s simply a brushoff, directed at a woman in pain, wielded by a man who understands precisely how to use dismiss that pain as valid. But, the way he sings that song on that night, I simply can’t accept that meaning. This version of the song springs from a well of deep sympathy. If it is cruel, it’s cruel in the sort of way that we are all cruel—in the terror that comes from realizing that every time we open our hearts we don’t just risk losing something of ourselves, we also risk taking something from someone else.

1. Tangled Up in Blue (Blood on the Tracks)

The perfect Dylan song. The lyrics are brilliant: endlessly evocative without losing the sense of cryptic meaning. A set of interlocking stories, not connected in any obvious sense, but bound together by a shared sense of recurrence. This has all happened before and will all happen again. And yet, the eternal return is not simply a matter of repetition. The stories change, the characters shift, context blurs, and meanings shift. Time can’t be escaped, nor understood. It circles around us, forming memories and then taking them away.

The result is a song told in a series of moments, flashes of possibility. Each scene carries its own internal structure and coherence. And in each case, the narrator achieves some sort of epiphany. A flash of recognition (“I just kept looking at the side of her face, in the spotlight so clear”), of transition (“Lord knows I’ve paid some dues, getting through”), of memory (“I seen a lot of women, but she never escaped my mind”), of passion (“And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal”), of limitation (“the only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on”).

Is it the same man, encountering different women? Or vice versa? Or are these the same two souls meeting again and again, but unable to remember? Or are these simply random encounters with no connection at all, other than the simple reality that every encounter carries hints of all the others. And in the end, there’s nothing to be done except take another step down the road, see what waits beyond the next rainbow’s end.

Honorable mentions:
11. Shelter From the Storm (alternate version from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack)
12. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (Blonde on Blonde)
13. Love Minus Zero/No Limit (Bringing It All Back Home)
14. I Want You (Blonde on Blonde)
15. Not Dark Yet (Time Out of Mind)

I’m currently reading The Three-Body Problem, and it got me thinking about third parties. Here’s the analogy: the problem with third parties in US politics is that the law of physics under which they operate create impenetrable barriers for a three-party equilibrium.

To be specific: first-past-the-post victory conditions, for single-member districts, layered on top of the Electoral College (state-by-state) presidential system, all doused in a healthy draught of Madisonian federalism. Bring all this together, and you have a set of institutions that are structurally hostile to third parties.

And yet, for some reason, the ‘two party duopoly’ is almost always blamed on things like media refusal to acknowledge third parties, the cynicism and/or stupidity of voters, and efforts by the existing parties to isolate and exclude other alternatives.

Now, to be clear, all those things do matter. But they are mostly the effects, not the causes, of our political system. The media tends not to treat third parties as viable because, given the institutional setup I just described, they aren’t viable, except under truly extraordinary circumstances.

The problem: ‘third parties’ aren’t really parties

We run into trouble on this point, largely because our indeterminate language fails to really capture the nature of the conflict. For the average third-party-curious voter, parties are primarily ideological coalitions, organized around a package of issues. So, if the two main parties fail to reflect your particular package of values, you defect and seek out another option.

The problem is: given the structures of our political system, that’s not what parties are.

Sure, the two main parties have ideological positions, and those do generate the terrain on which most partisan separation takes place. But those values aren’t the core functions of parties. The core function is, quite simply, to win elections. Obviously, winning elections in a country full of people with deep political and moral values means that parties have to become vehicles for the expression of those values. But they must constantly balance those interests with the baser objective of maintaining a coherent organizational structure upon which to mobilize future action.

To put it as bluntly as possible: that’s what it means to be a party, given the underlying physics of the American political structure. But that’s precisely what existing third parties refuse to do, and for obvious reasons. After all, they are organized (to the extent that they are organized at all) around dissatisfaction with the transactional structure of the existing parties.

This simple fact generates a huge amount of conflict among partisans of both models. Much of the ‘throwing away your vote’ rhetoric lobbed in both directions stems from a failure to understand what the other side even wants.

Third parties and the three-body problem

So what does this all mean for third party debates?

Well, put simply: the barriers to meaningful third party participation in politics have almost nothing to do with top-level votes for president, but have everything to do with the nitty-gritty details of the electoral process.

Since there is no plausible equation for a stable three-party system in our existing physics (the three body problem), those third parties that do successfully intrude into an election are certainly capable of producing chaos, but the terminal result is always ejection. Usually of the upstart party, though it’s always theoretically plausible for one of the existing two parties to collapse.

But, and this is crucial, even if the upstart party somehow knocks one of the others off the perch, it won’t really change anything. Because the reasons why parties act like they do (as transactional entities—with all the corruption, side-dealing, and collaborative elitism that this entails) has nothing to do with their ideologies. It’s a function of basic two-party equilibrium. No matter how radical a new entrant might be in its conception, victory inevitably drives out that radicalism. You only need look at the Republican Party of the 1860s, which went from Radical Reconstructionism to an elite-driven Corrupt Bargain in under a decade.

Much like The Santa Clause, if you kill one of the old duopoly, you merely end up taking its place.

These are the two possible effects of third party voting in a presidential race: 1) a bee-sting campaign, which inflicts pain on the target but also kills the bee, and 2) a Santa Clause campaign which fails to resolve the underlying problem of two-party dominance.

The mutable physics of two-party systems

However, none of this is to say that the situation is hopeless.

Because, it turns out, the physics of the political universe aren’t locked into place. While it takes a lot of work, they can be changed. It just requires reorienting your attitude toward the problem. Fighting this out at the level of the presidency is like trying to put out a burning building with a squirt gun. But if you go further upstream, far less pressure is necessary to shift the course of events.

And here is a place where Madisonian federalism becomes an advantage. Because our system as a whole is exceptionally difficult to move. But each individual polity does have the freedom to set its own election laws. Which means there’s room for experimentation at lower levels. And election reform at the state/city/town level is absolutely doable, and has the potential to spill up, if people genuinely prefer it.

There’s plenty of options here: proportional representation systems with multi-member districts, single-transferable vote models, systems that let you indicate all acceptable candidates, etc.

None of these systems are perfect, either. But they are at least real alternatives, in the sense that they create room for third parties to function as ideological agents without being crushed by the weight of our institutional structure.

So who should you vote for in the presidential election?

Vote for whoever you like!

I’m not making a categorical argument against third party voting. A ballot for Johnson or Stein (or someone else) DOES have real effects, and you might well decide that those effects are positive ones. A few examples:

• You might want to send a message, playing the role of the bee whose sting can punish those who moved away from your issues.
• You might hope cultivate a viable party, capable of replacing one of the current kings of the roost. This was at least a plausible scenario for Johnson in the winter and early spring. It hasn’t turned out that way, which suggests that we’re not too likely get a new Santa Clause anytime soon. But if ever there was a time for an external revolt, Trump is likely the guy against which to act.
• You might simply feel that your vote simply reflects your personal convictions, and you have to go with whoever is closest to those convictions.

Now I don’t happen to agree with any of those approaches, but they are reasonable, grounded positions. My only argument here is that ‘striking a blow against two-party-ism’ is simply not one of the plausible outcomes of a Johnson/Stein vote.

So if you can tolerate one of the major party candidates, but are hesitant to vote for them mostly out of disgust for the duopoly, my advice is to find other more useful avenues for expressing that frustration, and cast a vote for one of the major parties in the meantime.

To criticize the media is to tread into disputed territory, even before the content of one’s criticism is unfurled. There is no such thing as ‘the media’ in the sense of a monolithic entity. But to the extent that anything binds together the mainstream media, it would be a shared commitment to neutrality of coverage. The media’s job is not to issue subjective opinions but to lay objective facts on the table.

This is a noble goal, and one that I genuinely do respect. But ‘neutrality’ is a slippery concept. And in recent months, as we draw near to the endpoint of a half-century’s worth of conceptual development, the modern understanding of media ‘neutrality’ is nearing the point of structural collapse. In an age of heightened partisanship, the complexities of neutrality have been stripped away, leaving it a mere husk of its former self. In this age, ‘neutral’ is now virtually synonymous with ‘nonpartisan.’

That has long been an economic necessity, as Josh Marshall points out in an excellent piece on the age of single-paper cities. But increasingly, the economic need to avoid directly antagonizing significant portions of the reading public has been internalized, regarded as the defining feature of journalistic integrity. That trend has only been exacerbated by the proliferation of partisan media outlets, who clearly do put their thumb on the scales in terms of editorial judgment. ‘Mainstream’ sources therefore (quite understandably) have seen this sort of objective treatment of ‘the issues themselves’ as the benchmark of good journalism.

The consequences of this shift have long been problematic. But this year, we have watched the media’s allergy for attacking the opinions of a significant voting population crowd out all other considerations, including the pursuit of truth as such. The laudable premise (that the media should report stories, not become stories themselves, that nonpartisanship is a shield against subjectivity) has now been exposed as an autoimmune deficiency.

In seeking to protect itself, the media is exterminating all of the life-sustaining mechanisms that are supposed to give it strength.

The problem of ‘how will this play?’ journalism

‘How will this play’ is the watchword for this sort of reporting, which has no problem with flights of fancy, so long as those flights operate within the terrain of valid speculation.

To opinionate on the baseline horribleness of Trump is impermissible, because reporters must remain distinct from advocates or pundits. By the same token, to opinionate on the fundamental grossness of Clinton’s attitude toward political power is also beyond the pale. But these topics are by no means inaccessible. They simply have to be unlocked through the mediating structure of popular opinion. When a reporter asks ‘how will this play,’ they filter the question through a legitimating device. It’s no longer the reporter making the argument; they are simply asking a question on the behalf of an imagined public.

However, once we recognized this function, it immediately becomes clear that Clinton and Trump will be differently exposed to its effects. Because, to be blunt, we already know how voters will respond to these stories. New evidence of his lies, his corruption, his abuses of power, his sexism, his racism, his utter cluelessness about matters of public policy, his lies about giving to charity, his stealing 9/11 recovery funds, his authoritarianism…his voters will shrug of the shoulders, or (more likely) with an attack on the media for daring to report these facts at all. Everyone else will see the new event as simply one more example of his manifest unfitness for office. In either case, the needle doesn’t move.

Result: at best, there’s no ‘news’ here, because all these things are ‘already baked into the cake.’ At worst, the reporter will actively shy away from poking the beast, because it would risk undermining the delicate latticework of ‘neutrality’ upon which the whole edifice of contemporary campaign coverage rests.

Meanwhile, the Clinton scandals produce endless coverage, not because they are more important (‘importance’ is verboten as a basis for selection – see this recent, horribly depressing theory of media responsibility from Liz Spayd), but because they can easily be integrated into the journalistic decision tree. While Clinton supporters are willing to tolerate her various problems, they also find them upsetting. This means a new discovery about emails, the Clinton Foundation, a cough, or virtually anything else is a ‘legitimate’ story—because both sides of the partisan divide will regard it as at least potentially newsworthy. And this is completely independent of the intrinsic news value of the issue.

The Tinkerbell effect and perverse faith in journalism

But surely not all Clinton stories work this way. In some cases, her partisans really are united in their utter dismissal of a story, in the same way that’s far more common with Trump supporters. So why doesn’t this quash stories in the same way?

The answer is both depressing and perverse. Put simply, the problem is that Clinton supporters, broadly speaking, seem to share the media’s fascination with how stories will play. As a result, they tend to regard media treatment as important and worthy of discussion on its own terms, even when the specific claims are flawed beyond repair.

That is: because they accept the media’s gatekeeping role, they therefore fear the power it can wield in judging the behavior of candidates. Somewhat bizarrely, then, their collective faith in the importance of objective adjudication actually helps to sustain the drumbeat of negative coverage. Like Tinkerbell, this sort of coverage can survive only so long as people believe in it. So as long as the media can identify partisans across the spectrum who regard a story as worthy of deeper investigation, the stories will continue to be written, and the wound will continue to bleed.

This is because the vast majority of campaign coverage isn’t actual coverage of the campaign itself, but is coverage of anticipated reactions.

Bring this back to Trump, and it becomes even clearer what’s going on. Think about Trump’s lies—about Iraq, about Libya, about his supposed charitable giving, about his tax policy, about literally everything else in the world. ‘The media’ has reported all these stories. They laid the facts on the table, and the issue is undisputed. From their perspective, that means their job is done. That story has reached completion. To hound him further on these topics would be gauche, partisan, unseemly. And it wouldn’t go anywhere.

Trump’s brazen refusal to believe in media norms, and the willingness of his supporters to follow him, renders the media toothless. The scripts they write—committed as they are to this sort of neutrality—provide no entry point for further attack.

The crisis of modern reporting is a crisis of crypto-punditry

So what’s really going on here is a fundamental blurring of media responsibilities, to serious detrimental effect. If you really want to know ‘how a story plays,’ you can simply wait a couple days and read the polls. Or you can wear out your shoe leather actually talking to voters. Both have limitations and problems, but both are capable of producing actual knowledge.

But pre-heated speculation by reporters, about whether something ‘raises questions’ or ‘casts a shadow’ or ‘might not play well’ serves no purpose and adds nothing to the conversation. It’s a form of crypto-punditry, which adds nothing to the conversation, which explains nothing about the candidates or the issues, which merely exists to translate argumentative attacks into objective-seeming language. And, importantly, which primarily works for attacks on Clinton, while mostly failing to support attacks on Trump.

What should the media be doing instead?

The deep irony of all this is that in attempting to sustain the principle of objective reporting, many members of the media are doing more than anyone to undermine and corrupt those values. The problem is emphatically not the premise of media as an external check on political culture. It can and must continue to play that role. The problem is the belief that existing techniques (which presume collective buy-in to the basic premises of civic engagement as truth-seeking) are utterly incapable of successfully characterizing a candidate and partisan base who reject those values.

The media doesn’t need to sacrifice its independence or aspirations toward neutrality to cover this election. They just need to recognize the existence of tools and techniques that go beyond crypto-punditry, which regards voter opinion as the endpoint of all political conversation. The goal is truth, but truth comes in many flavors and with many shades, and the media should be in the business of exploring them all.

Does Trump constitute a violation of historical norms? Of course he does. Does Trump represent a truly unprecedented degree of secrecy and double-dealing? Of course he does. Does Trump offer a breathtaking degree of cluelessness about basic incompetence that ought to give us pause about electing him grand marshal of a parade, much less president of the most powerful country in the world? Of course he does.

Those are truths, too. Those things don’t stop being important stories just because 40% of the country seems impervious to those truths. If anything, such commitment in and of itself is a massive story that reporters should be frothing at the bit to investigate.

There should be daily investigations asking people why Trump’s constant lying doesn’t seem to matter. There should be front-page exposes about the impossible breadth of Trump’s corruption. Every interviewer of Trump (or any surrogate) should pick a topic about which Trump has lied, and simply refuse to give it up. And if they refuse to do those things, in fear that it might make some people mad, they need to seriously ask themselves why that has become a decision rule for campaign coverage.

Why does this matter?

I say all of this not because I worry all that much that this coverage will swing the election. I don’t believe many voters are all that confused about the ultimate stakes, nor do I think that many people are open to persuasion in either direction. My concern is less for the winner and loser of the election and more for what this sort of coverage is doing to the fabric of our public political life.

One party nominating a lunatic is bad, but it isn’t a crisis in democracy. But it becomes a crisis when it infects those institutions of public life that should be working against the corrosion of our normative structures.

By dragging Trump up, the media legitimates his bigotry, grants it a sense of normalcy. This is terrible. But just as terrible is the way that the media drags Clinton down, grades her on the same terms as Trump, and encourages people to understand her flaws (real, but fundamentally normal) as on the same sort of plane as Trump’s. When they do so, they contract the scope of political possibility. They wipe away the transformative, the uplifting, the generous. They tell us that politics is nothing but disgusting people saying disgusting things for disgusting reasons.

That is a real problem.

And, in the final irony, by encouraging the population to think in those terms, they cultivate ever more anger and frustration about shared institutions of public culture, of which ‘the media’ itself is an important part.

“He’s not anti-American; he’s just against the bad parts of America.”
“They’re not attacking white people, just attacking the systems of racial exclusion.”
“Patriotism means criticizing the bad just as much as it means celebrating the good.”
“Of course all lives matter; but our system  doesn’t reflect that premise, so saying ‘black lives matter’ is an effort to make the promise a reality.”
“It’s not an attack on cops; it’s an attack on bad, racist cops.”

These are common phrases, which come with all the best intentions. And they often do reflect reality.

But there’s a real danger here as well. Are you sure Colin Kaepernick isn’t anti-American? Are you sure that the black lives matter protester truly believes the American dream can be redeemed? Are you sure she sees herself as a patriot? Are you sure they value blue lives in general and are merely trying to criticize the bad practices of a few?

Or are you displacing onto them what you want their protest to mean?

This is an important question, and one that reveals the diverse ways in which the American cultural landscape is deracinated. The most obvious form of racial depoliticization is to attack protest as illegitimate. We see this when Colin Kaepernick is denied the right to speak—because he’s not ‘really’ black, because he’s rich, because he’s pampered, because he’s not protesting ‘in the right way’ and so forth. Here, the right of the speaker to bring the experience of black life into contact with white comfort is directly denied.

But this is not the only way in which race is rendered invisible. The same basic process takes place when well-meaning liberals take acts of protest and refigure them, shape them to fit their own narrative structures. To see protest purely as a form of ‘conscientious objection,’ as a call to honor the underlying promise of equality, is also a form of depoliticization. Against radical protest, we dissemble and domesticate. We impose a belief in the larger promise of racial harmony where such belief does not exist.

This act of translation is understandable. Conversation across the boundaries of experience is difficult under the best of circumstances. And the topic of race is hardly the best of circumstances. But this is precisely why we need to be careful.

Not every scream into the chasm of injustice is an invitation to build a bridge.

For those of us who believe in the possibility of rehabilitation, this is a difficult truth to face. It’s deeply uncomfortable to encounter a claim for which we can offer no reparation. Against such cries, we desperately look for points of entry. And this is what leads us to speak the truths (as we see them) that must be buried in their claims.

But in doing so, we replace their politics with ours. And in its own way, that’s equally an act of dismissal, a form of racial violence.

No good answers

So what is to be done? Should we simply stand aside? In some cases, maybe. But there are no pure choices here, no perfect answers. Detaching ourselves entirely from these conversations is clearly no solution. That simply replicates the initial problem: leaving protest to fend for itself within a market of ideas heavily stacked against it.

And after all, my point is certainly not that the goal of racial redemption is purely an invention. That promise is, quite emphatically, not the sole property of White America. And we will do well to honor and reflect the gestures toward this kind of politics which are being engaged. But we can only genuinely honor those efforts if we are capable of recognizing them as choices, rather than as the inevitable and necessary endpoint of racial critique.

So we do have a responsibility to stay engaged. We just have to be careful, willing to live with the discomfort that comes from knowing that nothing we can do is free from harm. We can be allies, friends, amplifications. We can try to lend the legitimacy afforded to us by our social position to those denied such legitimation, while also remaining attentive to the ways that this process always risks overwriting the very concerns we are hoping to assist.

And for any of that to work, it has to come from a place of really listening. Even when that means listening to perspectives we find deeply disquieting.

It’s easy for those on one half of the political divide to call on the other side to abandon their terrible candidates. After all, you already disagree with the basic ideological commitments they represent! But for those who share a partisan affiliation, the issue is a lot more complicated.

Because at the end of the day, parties matter a whole lot more than individual candidates. Parties control the agenda, establish what’s possible, set the terms of political engagement. That’s especially true in Congress, where it’s incredibly difficult for individuals to make a significant difference. But it’s also true at the level of the presidency. There are differences between presidents, of course, but most of the day to day business of government is conducted by low level appointees, bureaucrats, and political professionals. Which means the consequences of a presidential election often stem primarily from the party name, and only (very) secondarily from the individual.

All of which is setup for me to say: I sympathize, really and truly, with Republicans who hate Trump but don’t want to vote for Clinton. Because for all of Trump’s flaws, irregularities, and violations of conservative orthodoxy, it’s quite clear that he would govern in more traditionally conservative ways than Clinton. He’d appoint more conservative Justices to the Supreme Court, he’d pursue significant tax cuts, he’d go after Obamacare, and so forth.

What’s more, his broad incompetence might in some ways prove to be a boon. He could stack the executive branch with cronies and sycophants, but would be more likely to just leave the boring day-to-day operations in the hands of professionals. And sure, he’d fight with a GOP Congress at times, but in many areas he simply wouldn’t care enough to bother. Which compares to Clinton, who would fight tooth and nail on small-bore issues, veto bills left and right, and generally make herself a pain in the collective congressional butt.

So, again, I get it. If you believe in the Republican agenda, it really IS reasonable to conclude that Trump would get you a lot more of what you want. And, under normal conditions, that’s a perfectly good reason to hold your nose and vote for the ‘lesser of two evils.’ In a normally-functioning system, party loyalty just matters more than individuals.

But Trump isn’t normal. He’s a walking disaster, in a way that exceeds the limits of traditional liberal/conservative evaluation. A Trump candidacy puts ‘issues’ on the table that used to transcend partisanship. For example, “the president shouldn’t be a sociopath” used to be an unstated position for both parties. A baseline assumption so obvious it didn’t need stating. But now, Trump has put that all into doubt. And Republicans have to ask themselves: am I so committed to the differentiated elements of partisan distinction (taxes and guns and affirmative action and so forth) that I’m willing to abandon those underlying beliefs?

I think the answer is obvious, and I think that’s precisely what President Obama is talking about when he says this election asks us to be patriots, to put our duty to the country ahead of our duty to our own beliefs. There is a real sacrifice here, but one that must be made.

Thinking about this, I’ve been trying to work from a position of empathy. Would I do the same if the situation were reversed? Would I be able to set aside my second-level values and vote against my own party? The answer is hell yes.

It’s hard to envision a ‘Democratic Trump,’ but let me give it a shot: Imagine an Alec Baldwin descended into caricature. He is angry, incoherent, violent. He lights fires and does everything short of inciting riots. Against money in politics, against Republicans, against everyone who disagrees with his populist message. And, let’s imagine, that he’s taken ‘criticism of Israel’ to an extreme point, one verging all-too-closely on outright anti-Semitism. Over the course of the campaign, his language has grown more and more unhinged, dictatorial, terrifying.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have nominated Mitt Romney. Or maybe Paul Ryan.

You’d better believe I’d vote for the Republican. Because some things transcend shared commitment to partisan values. A candidate who threatens to rip apart the core fabrics of our democracy is attacking my beliefs in a way that goes far beyond mere issue disagreement. The president is the most powerful human being on the planet. They absolutely must meet certain minimum qualifications.

Donald Trump cannot be allowed to become president. Not because his ideas are bad (although they are), but because no one so self-evidently incapable of understanding the responsibilities of such power should ever be allowed to wield it.

I started by saying that I understand why partisan affiliation is so strong, and why it’s so hard to break. But to the 20% of the country out there, who is horrified by Trump and who wishes you could win back the soul of your party, I urge you in the strongest terms I can find to take that step.

It’s asking a lot of you, but your country needs that sacrifice.

This weekend, Dara Lind at Vox wrote an excellent piece on the persistent left-wing critics of Hillary Clinton. Its hook is a question that is deceptively simple: “is there anything Hillary Clinton can do to redeem herself to you?”

The context for this question is a process of decaying political legitimacy – and the difficulty many people find in believing that ‘establishment’ politics has anything to offer. Such skepticism is nothing new, of course. American politics has long been defined by suspicion of institutions, lack of faith in elite representation, and paeans to the wisdom of the people. We inhabit a politics of dissent and protest, punctuated by periods of quietude. And given the broader context, it’s wholly unsurprising to observe a growing tumult of protest and critique.

Lind’s question, however, asks us to seriously consider the underlying political commitments of such critiques. If institutional legitimacy is weakening, what is the appropriate response? Is the goal to recuperate our institutions, or to hasten their destruction? To double down on de-legitimization, or to work toward their redemption?

The politics of getting to ‘yes’
Hillary Clinton clearly endorses the curative message. She is the candidate of the status quo, insofar as she represents faith that our politics can accommodate dissent by rectifying the injustices that spur this kind of doubt. And this is where Lind’s question becomes crucial. Clinton sees America as a cacophonous conversation of countless beliefs and creeds and races and identities, but a conversation in which everyone remains open to the goal of finding a way to get to ‘yes.’

Not an uncritical or irrevocable ‘yes.’ Not a ‘yes’ which silences dissent. The only requirement is a willingness to clearly articulate acceptable partial steps, and to bargain in good faith toward those results. This is what transforms delegitimization into critical collaboration. Which says ‘although we don’t agree on many things, we regard each other as shared participants in a political world.’ In effect, she is telling her critics that she will genuinely listen to their concerns. And she is asking them to do the same.

Indeed, if there is an essential motivating force behind the Clinton campaign (and more broadly, behind the modern Democratic Party writ large), it’s the belief that politics should be driven by the effort to include those who would like to be included. That motivation has built an inclusionary party, one grounded in tolerance and diversity, one housed in a big tent with a lot of ideological diversity.

This all helps to make sense of Clinton’s ongoing campaign to win over moderates and Republicans. Those efforts have engendered a lot of (understandable) anger from the left, who have no time for paeans to Reagan’s optimism, for patriotic chants, for Republican endorsements. And it has led many to express serious doubts about the sincerity of Clinton’s commitment to progressive politics, and her flexible political weathervane. If she is willing to speak the language of both sides, does she really believe anything herself?

Beyond ideology
These questions are not entirely unfair, but they risk becoming overdetermined, reducing all questions to their ideological coordinates on a straight line from left to right and thus stripping away the multidimensionality of politics. Missing from this account is a recognition that legitimacy creates a second valence of American politics, which does not simply map onto ideology but instead operates on a tangent to the right/left line.

Clinton’s appeals are grounded in the desire to work toward mutual understanding, and to seek viable terms of collaboration. Her appeals do come from a specific ideological coordinate, to be sure, but they are not wholly defined by that location. She values the process of getting people to ‘yes’ – and further values the system through which such collaboration is possible.

Here, I think her long-noted affiliations with the great Saul Alinsky are particularly notable. Alinsky argued forcefully for the necessity of radical action. And, more than that, he argued that those committed to the cause of justice must sometimes be blind to alternative logics. They must believe in their cause forcefully, at a level that exceeds the scope of reason. And yet, he insisted, such radical politics is not just compatible with compromise, compromise is its lifeblood:

If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise on 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum…A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.’

Clinton, of course, is no radical herself. And yet I believe she still regards the political terrain in the same essential terms. If she is no radical, she nevertheless seeks to sustain the function of political institutions capable of engaging with, and facilitating gains by, those who stand outside.

So, for those on the left who remain deeply skeptical of Clinton, this raises a crucial question: to engage in wholly ideological terms—seeing Clinton and the Democratic Party writ large as essentially untrustworthy—or to engage in the politics of collaboration? If they choose the former, they refuse her invitation to enter ‘the room where it happens,’ and thereby offer few incentives for resolution. Someone who cannot say ‘yes’ to any offer is an unwelcome participant in such conversations—not because their ideas are bad, but because they are working to undermine the very structure of decision-making.

The politics of radicalism and the politics of rejection
This is by no means an easy question. There are deep problems in our political order, inequalities that far exceed the limits of marginal tinkering, distrust that blooms all the brighter with each passing year of incremental change. Under those conditions, there is a real argument to be made against accommodation, and I take that argument tremendously seriously.

Nevertheless, I worry that these arguments risk obliterating the distinction between a politics of radicalism and a politics of rejection. Both seek to break the shackles of our imagination, refusing to regard the status quo as fixed, or the terms of engagement as intrinsically constrained. But they differ, in that the politics of rejection tends to dematerialize the experience of justice, seeing collaboration with violence as merely a step removed from its direct infliction, no less cruel in its underlying affect. Radical politics admits many shades of grey; rejectionist politics sees only heroes and villains (friends and enemies).

It’s important to really think through this difference. Not because one approach is ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ in some objective sense. This is a difficult topic, and one where people of good faith and strong beliefs will find themselves in disagreement. And that is as it should be. A politics without dissent would not really be politics at all. So the goal isn’t to discourage dissent, but rather to find ways for it to be more powerfully and productively expressed. And that is something that requires serious self-reflection from all sides.

Conclusion: what are we talking about when we talk about politics?
My argument here speaks to the very heart of contemporary debates within liberalism. So in one sense, it is critically important. A failure to seriously consider the terms of our engagement risks fomenting further alienation and dispossession. At the same time, the stakes are also relatively low. Accepting the existence of differences here doesn’t require surrender or significant reconfiguration of ideological commitments—just a little bit more understanding and self-reflection.

For the ‘establishment,’ it is crucial to remain open to the legitimate concerns of protestors. Even if their commitments appear naïve or unrealistic, they are nevertheless genuinely felt and deserve engagement rather than derision. To regard protestors as illegitimate, and therefore worthy of dismissal, is to counteract the very logic under which institutional legitimacy itself is supposed to operate. The core premise of this mode of politics, after all, is its capacity to listen and take seriously the concerns of all, not just those who already agree.

Put simply, there is a powerful argument for the politics of collaboration, but such arguments are perpetually in danger of becoming hoist on their own petard. That some refuse to engage cannot become a justification for dismissiveness. The door must remain open, in the hope that these powerful ministers for justice might one day walk through. Or, as sometimes happens, to leave an escape route for those times when the drumbeat of justice beats so heavily that it shatters the foundations of normal politics (as, for example, happened in the case of slavery).

By the same token, it’s far too easy for those on the ‘protest’ side to stumble into a Janus-faced mode of critique: pitching critiques as collaborative, but persistently moving the goalposts about what meaningful accommodation really entails. This is dangerous because it tends to provoke further alienation on both sides—especially since this sort of double-dealing is very rarely intentional. That is: those who engage it almost never regard themselves as negotiating in bad faith. But in practice it ends this way, because the process was engaged from a premise of distrust where ideologically distant parties are seen as antagonists who must be tricked or bullied into accession. When such efforts fail (as they inevitably must), future engagement is unlikely. If concessions win no points and earn no good will, they are unlikely to be repeated.

This means that engagement, if it is to be of any use at all, requires serious consideration of underlying expectations and demands. It does not require backing down on ideological commitments, but does depend on the willingness to regard ideological contestation as taking place within a shared universe of (potential) understanding and engagement. It means, like Alinsky, seeing a 30% victory as a real victory, the only sort of victory usually available, and thus worth getting your hands dirty to achieve. And it means having faith that those with whom you disagree may nevertheless become agents for, rather than against, justice.

All resolutions will inevitably be unsatisfactory, diluted. It cannot satiate the demands of justice and will not quell dissent. But it does offer the potential for common cause. Not agreement, but productive conflict. And grounded in a shared world, if not always in shared values.

Every four years, the same conversation repeats itself: whether to vote tactically, for the ‘lesser evil,’ for the person who doesn’t represent your values but can at least be a bulwark against someone even worse. You saw this at the RNC, with Ted Cruz pointedly saying ‘vote your conscience,’ rather than endorsing Trump. You see it on the left, with a lot of speculation about Jill Stein and the Green Party.

But a missing element from many of these conversations is a precise specification of what it actually means to ‘vote your conscience’ and why it is accepted that tactics and conscience are in contradiction. This is a serious lacuna, and one with real consequences for the way in which we think about politics.

To illustrate the point, let me start by saying that I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton. Sure, I disagree with her on a fair number of policy questions, and am far closer to the Green Party’s platform. But platforms aren’t the only representation of ‘values.’

Underneath the policy choices are a broader set of principles that are at least equally important. For me, those include values like: respect, empathy, nuance, commitment, self-sacrifice, love, compassion, intelligence, judgment.

Does Hillary Clinton perfectly align with my values on all these fronts? Of course not. But Jill Stein sure doesn’t either.

Stein’s tendency to regard monumental differences as rounding errors might make her a decent theoretical physicist, but suggests a kind of willful ignorance to facts that would be catastrophic in a president. Her inability to grasp the *reasons* for third party marginalization suggests a total lack of familiarity with the text and history of the US Constitution. And her insistence that the consequences of all actions (a quixotic third party campaign, the anti-vax movement, etc.) must be sublimated beneath an all-encompassing critique of capital suggests a mind uninterested in nuance, and untethered from a complicated world where few choices are purely good or purely evil.

In fact (on these points at least), I might go so far as to say that there’s barely a ‘dime’s worth of difference’ between her and Trump.

Others may disagree with this characterization, and that’s fine. You may regard Stein’s tactical assessment as reasonable, or regard Clinton’s political commitments as so extreme as to push her beyond the pale. But these are not ‘principles’ in some abstract, hermetically-sealed sense. They are differing judgments about the balance between motive and consequence, differing assessments about how to negotiate with evil.

In a universe defined by entropy, every choice exposes us to loss. We build pockets of stability, systems to sustain us. We engage our creative spirits to construct liveable worlds to share with one another. But it’s always against a backdrop of chaos. There are no decisions without risk, no acts so pure that they inflict no pain, no conscience that is fully clean. There is only the question of how we learn to live with the evil that we produce, how we try to minimize it, what meaning we can give to the sacrifices we are forced to undertake.

This is not a flaw of our electoral system; it’s a feature of the human condition.