Thread by @AlexandraErin

New thread! I want to talk about something we might call naive savviness. Naive savviness is... okay. There's this roleplaying game called Vampire: The Masquerade. High concept is: vampires are real, they enforce a "masquerade" to hide their existence from mortals.

There's the real world, where powerful vampires vie with each other for power, prestige, and control over territory inhabited by unwitting mortals, and the world mortals see, where none of that happens.

And there are other games by the same company in a shared world that have a similar concept, where there's the actual real world we know, and the real-real world of monsters and machinations, and something that acts as a curtain between them.

Now imagine you're an intrepid mortal investigator and you somehow, through ingenuity or luck or the intercession of a guide, you get a peek behind the veil and see vampires holding council.

The peak of naive savviness would be, in this moment of hyperclarity, to declare the truth about the world: human beings are secretly vampires! All of them! You know, because you saw people who had pretended to be people, and they were vampires! You know that's what vampires do!

It's seeing past the veil but keeping the veiled mindset, accepting that the world is not what it seems to be but holding onto the idea that it's exactly as simple as it had seemed to be.

Less peak naive savviness would be something like concluding if THIS political power broker is actually a vampire using ancient riches, hypno powers, and a network of minions to advance an agenda, then the guy running for mayor of Perth Amboy, NJ must be one, too.

Let's move this out of the realm of vampire RPGs, but stay in the political world.

"In the USA, representative democracy means We The People get to decide who leads the government in our name."

That's the naive illusion, the world before the veil.

Savviness is understanding that the world is more complicated than that simplistic slogan.

Naive savviness is understanding that simplistic slogan can't be wholly true, so it must be wholly false.

There ARE political power brokers who wield more influence over the process than you or I do. There are organizations and entities that have agendas to advance and which attempt to do so by influencing the competitive field in an election. This is all true!

And when they're successful enough and ruthless enough, they can even twist the process in ways that give their agendas ongoing structural advantages in the contests to determine "the will of the people".

But they don't have it all their own way! "Their own way" depends a lot on the will of the people being sufficiently willing to go along with them, while the will of the people is also one of their main currencies.

Compare these two statements:

"A sailor in a sailboat has to go wherever the wind blows them."

"The wind doesn't matter to a sailboat because the sailor steers."

Which of those statements is true?

Neither.

Which is more true?

Neither. They both rely on an absolute.

All of which brings me to this good, short thread by Ana Mardoll.

https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1236321279940136960

I had a few threads, back in 2017 when a lot of us were becoming acutely aware of party politics for the first time, about the nature of party politics and how one of the most important things to grasp in this age is there's no such thing as The Democrats.

Or rather, there is no one such thing as The Democrats, but several of them. There's the DNC, there's the Democratic Congressional and Senate Caucuses (tee hee), there's the loose body of politicians and people running for office as Democrats, there's the registered voters...

...there is the wider body of registered voters who tend to vote Democratic even if their registration doesn't say they're a member of the party, there's the narrower body of voters who are active participants and possibly dues-paying members of various Democratic clubs and orgs.

And then there are the power brokers and megadonors and so on, and there's overlap among these groups.

But all of this gets flattened to "The Democrats", so if a superdelegate, who controls one (possible) vote in the convention, says they'd put someone else up to stop Sanders...

...then headlines and tweets can blare that The Democrats or even more specifically The DNC said they would haul disgraced dogcatcher Finky V. Bratwater out of retirement to make him the candidate if Bernie has the plurality when it was more like a couple of bitter guys dreaming.

And it's like, yeah, those couple of guys wield outsized influence and maybe nobody actually needs to have that influence but there's a bunch of other people who wield the same influence and they're not all working together just because these guys said so.

The system that exists to divine the will of the people and convert it into a result also dilutes and distorts the will of the people, but... a lot of will of a lot of people went into those systems over the years, too. It's complicated. The whole thing is complicated.

Among the ways to become part of The Establishment and fulfill, in some way, the role of that mythical Shadow Council of Five that Ana referenced is... get elected repeatedly by people who want you to represent them, or work to help people elect the ones they want to do so.

And yeah, there's billionaires who are just out for themselves and power hungry people who mainly want power for its own sake, but mostly it's people who went into politics because they believed in better things, being hampered by their own biased worldviews.

"You can't be so naive as to think the people in power would just..."

Man, you can't be naive enough to believe anyone would *just* anything. Welcome to The Other Just World Fallacy: the fallacy that things are simple enough to be "just" one way or another, one thing or another.

(I realize I said "just out for themselves" in the tweet before that one. Eh, we all go a little reductive sometimes. My motto of "Mostly the Sith deal predominantly but not exclusively in absolutes." does not preclude the possibility that anyone else will, from time to time.)

The world is more complicated than The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and it's also more complicated than The Shadow Council of Five.

I honestly don't know how anyone could look at Joe Biden and think he'd be the Shadow Council's first choice for anything of consequence. If there were such a group of individuals, they would take advantage of his likability in a position with no power.

"What likability? He's a creepy old neoliberal warhawk who voted for the crime bill and can't keep his hands tohimself!"

Yeah, and millions of people are voting for him. Millions find him charming and find he inspires a feeling of safety.

"But you can't deny there's a concerted effort to get him elected!"

That's called a campaign. They are very normal and everybody in the race has one.

"But they got other people to drop out to make way for him!"

That's called politics. They're all running to do that stuff.

The Powers That Be among the Democrats, to the extent that they're even Powers That Are, have backed Joe Biden to the extent they have because *of the people who are running and have sufficient popular support*, he's their favorite.

They didn't pick him.

They settled on him.

And they had to settle for the same reason we all have to settle, sooner or later:

because in a democracy, nobody gets to have it all their own way.