Becky is right, even If it sucks to admit. Unfortunately politicians are, for the most part, putting on a show when they want to get elected/re-elected. And what a show it is, enough that people would fight over who deserves to be elected.
Grant destroyed the 1st KKK and did his best to undo what Johnson rolled back to try to re-institute the Antebellum South. So he’s not quite the failure everyone makes him out to be.
She would get just enough done to be absolutely miserable. It would shrivel her soul like a raisin in the path of a UV death laser.
The sad case of Dotty is that she’s a good person from a healthy family who had every reason to believe that she could right the injustices of the world so long as the world played by the rules, which hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaaahaa noooope
She’d probably actually be more like Hillary than Bill – smart, ambitious, talented, but lacking in an abundance of stage presence or charisma. Also silently bitter and resentful that she can’t lean on her strengths to compensate for that weakness NEARLY as easily as her male peers with similar abilities. And knows she has to ruthlessly conceal those feelings from ever showing in public, which also intensifies them.
I agree with all this, but she’d also lack one of the key failings of Hillary–who is the most lied-about woman in the country, but she makes it so, damned, easy for her enemies.
If there was a blurb piece on FOX claiming that Hillary had jaywalked, here’s how it would play out:
HRC: “I was out of town that day.”
Real Reporters: “Ma’am, you were in town for a conference.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a secret meeting of Jewish bankers? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Well, yes, but it was on the opposite side of town.”
Reporters: “It was in a building on that block.”
Tucker: Tucker: “Was Hillary in a hurry to perform a late-term abortion? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, but I crossed at the corner.”
Reporters: “We have video taken from a window by an office worker.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a Pedophiles Anonymous meeting? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, okay, fine, I crossed in the middle of the block because we were running late, the traffic had been closed off for the conference, and even then, I checked traffic both ways, even though it was on a one-way street.”
Real Reporters: “Huh, yeah, guess it was.”
Tucker: “Tonight on Jaygate: Did Hillary cross at that exact point so that she could finish the final leg of a summoning circle to bring for the dread Shog’Hgoth? I’m just asking questions.”
While Dotty sometimes shows a reluctance to admit to errors, she’s a little too self-aware to fall to this kind of absurdity.
Dorothy seems to definitely want to be like the good kinds of presidents you see in fiction, not the real presidents who act like good people but do all sorts of terrible things when they think nobody will notice. Or when they think they can get the media to spin their bad deeds as good.
She should honestly just figure out how to become a billionaire. Then she could use her money to influence politics more than the president ever could by lobbying corrupt politicians into campaigning for her agenda. Or she could buy tons of media outlets to subtly or not, influencing public opinion through mass disinformation. Or she could develop the next big social media app and just have near complete control of how every person of influence communicates.
The Carnegie model of billionaire philanthropy is based on the assumption that 1) billionaires know better than everyone else what people need, 2) that accomplishing that is best done by consolidating money and power in their hands, and therefore 3) they are entitled to exploit their workers for all they are worth—low pay, long hours, unsafe conditions, strikebreakering, etc.—so that they can then do a philanthropy. This is before we can get to the deleterious effects of market manipulation and monopolistic tendencies.
Even if you think the philanthropy outweighs the exploitation (how many of Carnegie’s workers had the time and leisure to enjoy a public library?) and the anti-democratic ideas underlying that thinking, billionaire philanthropy usually ends up being a way to burnish the billionaires’ reputation and enhance their power.
Yeah this. Pretty much all billionaires become that wealthy through a combo of exploiting their workers and being born to a family that was already kinda wealthy..
I mean I would take the Carnegie model over what we have currently. At least they built public works and had a sense of style, our current crop of rich assholes can’t even manage that
The idea that anyone even suggests she should become a billionaire because being a politician requires too much moral compromise is just really mind-boggling
I honestly feel like a whole lot of Dorothy’s character arc is sort of like Robin’s in that Willis has gone through the entire cycle a whole hell of a lot of us have since 2015 or so, where we started out as progressive Democrats really excited about the future of electoral politics, and then Bernie lost, and then Hillary lost, and then Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa, and then maybe Grandpa wasn’t so bad because he at least wasn’t an open fucking fascist, but then Grandpa decided the pandemic was over, and at this point basically all of us are either rabid anarchists or refuse to engage on the basis of existential despair. Plus tbh social media has spread around enough verifiable history that it’s a lot harder to look away from the fact that we’re literally an empire built on genocide and war crimes in such an inttense and complicated way that it may bee that the only way to ever begin to stop doing that would be to stop existing.
So like… the idea that there could conceivably be a future President who’s a sympathetic character is… harder to swallow.
Basically yeah, lol. Her political ambitions worked well back in, like, 2010 when the comic started, but at this point seeing someone dream of being President makes me think they’re either morally suspect or just incredibly naive
There were a lot of young people who put a lot of faith in Obama. And a lot who put faith in Bill Clinton, back then. Probably Carter as well, but I was small.
Now it’s Sanders, but he didn’t get the nomination, so they get to focus more anger on Democrats and pretend Sanders would have saved us.
I guess every generation has to go through the cycle themselves. Hopefully wrapping back around to not thinking of Presidential candidates as heroic saviors, but just someone we’re getting to do a really tough job. They’re inevitably going to compromise and disappoint, but that’s different from betrayal and corruption, even though it’s seen that way.
Maybe if we could break the cycle of turning on Democrats when they fail to fix everything all at once, we could actually make some progress, since we wouldn’t be having Republicans break the entirely country on a regular basis.
I don’t think Sanders would have saved us so much as that his failure to be elected prolonged the inevitable. I was too busy dealing with much to be particularly politically active in that way during the Obama administration so I just assumed he was doing a good job because at least he wasn’t the guy who caused a recession and dragged us into multiple wars based largely on lying.
But… I mean, fundamentally, a lot of people’s politics have changed such that we’re not “turning on” the Democrats, we believe fundamentally different things that they do. We don’t believe they know how to fix things because the things they say are the problems are not what we think are the problems, and a lot of their actual actions are things we think exacerbate the problems. And vice versa! They don’t like our actual beliefs either!
I don’t know whether Willis is one of those people, but like… it’s quite a bit more complicated than “aww you thought everything would magically be okay and then it was complicated”. Lot more like “aww you thought society might improve somewhat and now you’re lucky to get by working three part-time gig jobs that fire you if you make 20.01 hours a week, have a quasi-legal place to live, and your best means of communicating with others are constantly divebombed by a combination of people who want you dead because they’re literal, weapons-carrying Nazis and people who want you dead because they mistook you for someone who said something problematic about a fandom five years ago”.
Tl;dr shit’s gotten bad and if nothing else that makes a lot of people pessimistic.
1) “Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is just pure conspiracy theory. Sanders didn’t have a chance at the nomination. He was never in the lead. He was wildly popular with a certain subset of young activists, but not with the rest of the Democratic voting base. Especially not with black voters. If things had stayed divided, he might have eked out a plurality, but candidates were always going to drop out and the voters would consolidate.
2) Yeah, we’re an empire built on genocide and war crimes (and slavery). Like all empires. Like all great powers. Still, without downplaying what we’ve done as a great power, I’d say we’re closer to a benevolent overlord than past great powers were (or than our likely replacements would be). We do our dirty deeds, but not nearly to the level of older colonial powers or to Imperial powers before them.
We could do better. We probably even have the room to do better without being replaced as a great power. Maybe I’ve just gotten more cynical as I’ve gotten older and studied more history, but if we stepped away from the imperial role, China would likely fill the gap and it’s hard to see how they would be preferable for the rest of the world.
1) Exactly. Bernie’s entire strategy in 2020 relied on the field staying huge all the way to the convention so that he could win with 30%. His team admitted this. It was, to quote Tony Stark, “Not a great plan.” The fact of the matter is that Bernie ran a doomed campaign based on the false assumption that most of his support in 2016 was about liking him instead of being anti -Clinton.
Also, I find it hilarious that someone would attack Biden as “grandpa” when Bernie is *older* than him.
1) I’m… not really positing that there was a conspiracy so much as that he lost because the field consolidated around Biden but gg. Also “he was never in the lead” is just wrong. He was ahead the first three votes- Iowa was wonky because he got more votes but not as many delegates so sure, that one was weird- and Buttigieg was in second delegate-wise. It was pretty clear he was badly off after Super Tuesday, yes. He was still in second with 38% of the total delegates.
2) We’re certainly not the only Evil Empire out there and I doubt we’ll be the last but uh… you can certainly believe we’re the kinder and gentler murderous assholes. We might even be compared to some of them? Sort of like how during the African slave trade Britain and France et al. were kind of surprised Belgium was so brutal and cruel. I feel like you will understand why other people may disagree as to the relevance.
DoA started in 2010. I was definitely a liberal back then, and very naive about all the terrible things presidents and federal-level politicians from both major parties do in this country. I’ve pretty much always despised Republicans, but it took Bernie getting screwed out of the Democratic nomination twice for me to realize how bad that party really is. I went from a liberal who was clueless about the bad and corrupt stuff Democrats did to, as of a few years ago, well look at that hammer and sickle in my avatar.
Which is exactly what I’m talking about.
Too many Sanders supporters can’t accept that he just didn’t have the support within the Democratic base to win, but have to invent conspiracy theories about how he was screwed out of the nomination.
He didn’t have the votes. He never had the votes. There was never polling that suggested he had the votes.
These ideas are the left-wing equivalent of the “Stop the Steal” nonsense, with the only real distinction being the Sanders himself isn’t claiming them – though some of his former staffers do use them to attack Democrats.
I thought the point of Dorothy’s dream was to be a woman president. That still seems something to cherish. Taking Hillary Clinton as the model inspiration maybe was more acceptable in 2010 than nowadays, but I took that to be a clue Willis left to warn us that Dorothy has her own bunch of issues to deal with, like the rest of the main cast.
that kinda youthful naivety in contrast to her being ‘academically’ smart is a nice contrast, i mean she’s not as knowingly naive as some others but i’d assume that’d be the term/somewhat chalks up to ‘youthful optimism’ that’d make a (non power hungry) 18 year old have the ‘ambition’ to be the president
always made me wonder, i’m sure there are some but how many 6 year olds saying “i wanna be an astronaut” actually ended up working for nasa lol
Maybe she should examine her moral principles vis a vis the work of the job she wants. When all choices are evil, usually the evil of any given choice is unevenly distributed. Turn it upside down and it becomes a choice of goods. Refusing the choice is also a choice, with its own balance of evil and good.
Real-world examples are hard to find, probably because nobody wants to talk about them afterward. For a fictional story that illustrates the conflict well, consider ST:TNG “Thine Own Self.” Order Geordi to fix the problem: he dies, everyone else is saved. Don’t give the order: Geordi lives a few minutes longer and then all die. Which is better? There is no provable answer to that. What you choose depends on your values.
Dorothy, what are your values? If you value the troop more than the individual, then you could be a good leader (in every sense), but individuals will be hurt along the way. If you place a higher value on the individual, then politics is not for you, because it’s all about group dynamics.
Is it just me or is the time delay getting worse and worse? Today my clock read 11:09 before the new comic loaded. Normally it was around 11:00 – 11:03.
The moment of truth that has been building up since day one is finally upon us… Dorothy’s too good for politics. Or at least, not self-righteous enough.
God, the looks on Dorothy’s face in Panels 4 and 5 are just heartbreaking. I swear I can see her going through all five stages of grief in just two images.
One trait Joyce and Dorothy share is that, as atheists, they’re basically unelectable on a national scale.
Becky is willing to accept Joyce’s lack of faith but it would probably kill their friendship if Joyce started cynically posing as Christian for political gains.
Best shot at a political career would still be Becky as she’s willing to act against her personal morals enough to come out ahead while putting on a smile and personality for the camera. Roz despite having better people skills then Dorothy would actually have the same problem I think regarding going against some morals for the greater good.
She’s 18. (19?) She’s got decades to lose the naivete, make some compromises, pick up a little corruption and still turn out to be a damn good politician.
Dorothy doesn’t even have the problem of being wrong about being too good for politics. Though she is. She’s never going to be President because being President requires decades of favor trading, networking, and being a supporter of the system until you’re picked by their super delegates.
Dorothy focuses on her grades over social-fu and deal making. Roz, really, is a better example of how it works.
Yeah. For most of this comic I was against Dorothy going to Yale, because attending Yale was wrapped up in her master plan that included a completely unrealistic goal along with a quest for perfection in every area of her life that was extremely unhealthy.
If Dorothy can learn to live an inspired life that doesn’t include the unrealistic goal and allows herself be human instead of perfect, then I could probably be in favor of her going to Yale.
Go get some connections! Do something interesting with your life! But do it as you, for you. Not as a manufactured version of you, for everyone else.
I agree her drive for perfection is unhealthy but you’ll never reach long shot, ambitious goals by not trying for them. If Yale is something she thinks will give her a leg up, then she should try for it.
Ted Cruz. Josh Hawley. The Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court. They all went Harvard and Yale. Elizabeth Warren went to a state school and is a better model got Dorothy.
Missing the point entirely. Dorothy doesn’t want to go to a state school. She wants to go to Yale. I want this not to be the fifty millionth story where FOR WHATEVER REASON, the ambitious woman doesn’t get her ambition. So yeah, I want Dorothy to go to Yale.
It’s no more unrealistic than any other long shot ambitious goal and while I agree the way she does things can be unhealthy, I don’t think the answer to that should be ‘just jettison the whole ambition’.
I’m actually reassured by the framing this is now getting. I was thinking the acceptance was for this semester and she’d already turned it down.
Now that we know she just hasn’t responded, it’s probably for next year and there’s definitely room for the end of the arc to be her accepting it and making ready to to next spring.
Yeah, that and Willis repeatedly saying her ambition wasn’t going to be a character flaw is making me hopeful but I gotta admit the comment section has been very tiring for me in that regard these last few days. I might take a few days, I dunno.
No, but I’d still be super sick of “her ambition will destroy her” “She can’t handle it” “It’s unrealistic so she gave it up” “She changed her mind for a less ambitious thing” “Her ambition didn’t make her happy” “She gave it up for a relationship (whatever kind it is)” “She wasn’t suited for it” and all the other reasons that come up to avoid ambitious female characters reaching what they’re aiming for. It’s exhausting.
I agree with you on principle I think. I also don’t want yet another story on which the successful, ambitious young woman learns to compromise her dreams and settle for less than she’s worth to be happy. I want this story to be about the young woman who dreams of becoming president and then does it and it’s AWESOME.
But I also think that Yale isn’t really where Dorothy’s ambitions are. She wants to be president. Yale is the path she wants to take there, but Harvard or Stanford will get her there just as well and with just as much prestige. I’d be happy if she decided to Pinoy to Stanford while keeping the oval office in her line of sight as long as it’s clear that she made the choice because Stanford was the better offer.
If the story were going to go long enough that she might become President, I could agree with that too. We’re never going to REACH the point of an election though – we’re probably never leaving this semester. So for me, Yale’s kinda acting in the place of her overall ambition because it’s the part we can actually SEE. I don’t really want this story to go ‘She keeps her ambition – but she gives up on the part you could actually see her pursuing’ either.
That’s totally fair. I see that. It’s good to have a proper W that we can actually see and celebrate. I suppose a constant state of “she’ll be successful later, I promise” would get stale fast. And reading all these replies insisting that her dreams are too “unreasonable” are making me want to see Dorothy become empress of the universe if only out of spite.
People go to Yale. About 1500 every year. No reason why Dorothy being one of them should be unrealistic or unhealthy.
She should consider alternate ways of establishing prestige and contacts. Is she expecting “lots of movers and shakers went to Yale” to magically imbue her with electability? And IU’s poli sci program is nothing to sneeze at.
That’s going to depend on how you define “good”. The nature of politics means it’s very difficult to engage in and succeed at without compromising on your values, so even for people who had a broadly positive influence and meant well you’re going to be applying some qualifiers
Probably depends on what you mean by good and corrupt.
Let’s say you’re Dorothy. You have a strong moral sense and a good vision of how society should be better. But, you’re not dictator who can just do it. You have to get elected, by voters, many of whom disagree with you. And then you have to work with a legislature (whether as a governor/president as a member), full of other people who disagree with you, and themselves answerable to people who disagree with _them_. The chance that you can get things done while getting everything you want, or avoiding any unpleasant compromises or favor-trading, is vanishingly small.
Basically politics means working with other people, who are not you and have their own goals. And it’s unavoidable and for high stakes.
If you “throw all the bums out”, the new bums will have the same problems of cooperating despite divergent goals to solve, and probably reach similar solutions.
But working with other people and compromising to accomplish what you can isn’t inherently evil.
Compromise is only evil if you’re starting from the position that you have the perfect vision that everyone else must follow – which is kind of evil in itself.
It’s not inherently evil. But it may mean having to vote for things you dislike or even consider evil, in order to get votes for things you actually want to get done. It’s inherently at the other end of the ‘grubbiness’ scale from “following my artistic vision while being financially independent”, say.
Depends not only on how you define “good” but also “politician”. For example, Martin Luther King was a politician – although he never served in government, he was still in the business of influencing people to support an agenda. Most of us would consider King good overall, although he had flaws like any other person.
Ultimately, though, if you want to be an effective politician, it’s difficult to do so by being a “better person” than the people you’re trying to lead. As Mencken said, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it – good and hard. Many times the people have gotten exactly the leaders they deserved.
Dorothy has strong sense of morality to do what she thinks is right & sensible and to do right by others instead of what’s beneficial to her. That’s good, we need more political leaders like that since it means we wouldn’t haft to twist their arms into doing the right thing. Unfortunately that also a handicap at times.
Genuinely being “Mr/Ms Pure” both in word and action means two things:
A: You going into a profession where only a few aren’t corrupt and everyone in the system but you is cut throat and willing to take the low road if needed.
B: There will be different factions and people behind the scenes wanting to get you to fall in line into their ranks and abide by their way of doing things for their benefit, a term for this I heard of is “kissing the ring,” and doing so might involve having to go against your principles. Refusing do that and trying to change the whole system yourself means the system itself will go against you.
Some places are much, much worse. Whether in terms of open corruption of supposedly democratic governments or just in terms of being blatant autocracies.
It’s foolish to think the US government is immune, but it’s a different kind of foolishness to think we’re especially bad.
It’s also a bad idea at think of politicians being “corrupt” as a binary. There are few who manage to remain completely pure, but many who aren’t just in it for the grift.
I honestly get tired of that refrain. Just feels like something that only benefits the worst sorts out there. Sure, the concept of knowing how the sausage gets made is entirely valid for politics, you have to do scheming and wheeling and dealing and such in order to get things done.
But the notion that the only way to be decent at politics is to be a scumsucking, backstabbing jerk just makes us all go “and that’s why nothing can ever change”. It’s hard to do things well, and your hands will get dirty, but there’s a wide gulf between that and the excesses that people treat as normal and inevitable.
And please don’t respond with a snide joke about how I’m a sweet innocent naïve soul, its just as trite and cliche as anything else.
Defeatist political nonsense is what people use to suppress the vote and erode faith that government can ever work. Then what’s the point? Cut all government services, give the billionaires free reign.
Government is hard. It’s hard to get right, hard to keep right. All sorts of things can bring it down, from corruption to incompetence, lies to poorly conceived economic concepts. But getting it right is the best option we have, so we might as well invest ourselves in the doing.
No, Becky is right. You don’t need to do dirty stuff to be a good politician, but you DO need to be able to push your feelings aside. You need some level of ability of turning off your emotions just to deal with all the hate you WILL receive
There’s a reason sociopaths tend to be found more in positions of power like this – You need to be willing to actually hurt people. Not necessarily in a way that is evil, per se, but for example, a CEO needs to be able to shut down an inefficient plant and put potentially thousands out of a job to save the tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be destroyed if the company went out of business, or be willing to make hard cuts to a governmental budget in order to keep essential programs functioning
Becky might be right, but she’s not saying what a lot of commenters are saying. There’s a strong “Yeah, you have to be corrupt to get anywhere in politics” strain going around.
All that does in my mind is wipe away the difference between the worst and the best in politics. None of them are perfect, but the differences matter.
I’m with you, it’s not a great refrain. I understand it in the context of existential despair, though, which I know a lot of former political idealists suffer from (Dorothy included).
I think in Dorothy’s particular case it’s that as she is now, a bright young thing raised by good, responsible middle-class parents to believe that you can change the world and play by the rules at the same time that’s got her running headfirst into a very sad wall.
As to the system that grinds her and all of us down, well, I take a lot of comfort in the words of Ursula K. LeGuin: “Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage criticizing ‘career politicians’ as if he wasn’t one. All his ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric. And people on the left sometimes fall for it too.
Government works, exactly as well as we make it work.
Hell, Trump ran as an “outsider coming in to clean up the swamp” and people bought into that too. Including some on the left bewailing Hilary’s corruption.
When almost all politicians in this country are bought and paid for by the wealthy and large corporations, it’s hard to imagine a lot of successful politicians who aren’t corrupt and terrible. I highly doubt a system this corrupt can be changed from within by just electing the “right” good people.
Let me issue a correction on your post there, Dana, regarding the open fascist and violent conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene: you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to her
YEEEEEEESS! HOORAY for Becky for saying that! Probably that’s the only way for make Dorothy wake up and make her accept that she can go to Yale. Becky is the friend that Dorothy needs for kick her in the right direction, almost like Dorothy do with Joyce.
I feel for Dorothy. I was much older than her when I was forced to let go of a cherished ambition. I can’t imagine how I would have handled it at nineteen.
I hope this makes her friendship with Becky stronger.
I belive it will strengthen their friendship. This is the first time Becky has told Dorothy an unpleasant truth not to get her angry but because it’s something she thinks she needs to hear.
For all her progressive upbringing Dorothy is very much like Joyce in that she has strong morals and has lived a very sheltered life not fully ready to accept that her uncompromising beliefs might not get her to her chosen destination because she has always banked others listening to logic and reason like herself.
Dorothy lacks the ability to deal well with people who are not in the same boat as her. A good politician, a good president for the USA, needs to see lots of divergent needs, strategies, and ideas and find a way to get a majority for the things she thinks best.
She is too much invested in the rational to do this, because you get people behind you on emotions, not rationale.
Fascists get elected bc they manage the crazy stunt to get people to feel they are seen and promised a better future while the politician in question don’t care squat about them and actually says contradictory things.
Get Dorothy to discover Non-violent communication which teaches her that words make up less of 30% of communication (she will be shocked as hell by this because THATS NOT RIGHT) but if she manages, she will at least understand why she fails at leading people.
And can find a way to influence the world with her strengths. We need people who can think clearly. I just don’t see her ever being able to sell the better way to the masses.
Great questions, that she very much needs to answer!
(IMO, based on available evidence: to fix everything for everyone, because she knows what’s best – to be Busybody Mom to the whole nation. And (she thinks) only by being President will she have the power to do so.)
I care deeply about a lot of social issues, have a fantastic speaking voice, never get stage fright, and have degrees in political philosophy and law. People ask me all the time why I don’t go into politics. I tell them I’d be a horrible politician. I care too much about actual, real people to make the sort of compromises politicians have to make. Also, I value my privacy too much.
Go into education or law, Dotty. You’ll be able to make a difference and won’t have to compromise your values (as much).
Dorothy wanted (past tense) to be a West Wing style president. But that show was as much a fantasy as Star Wars. Does she want to make a difference? Change lives? A Big Ten university will do just fine. Then law school. Then don’t get co-opted by money. Leslie is changing lives though I wouldn’t recommend adjunct faculty as a career path. Most Yale graduates don’t change the world, they just get a share in running the status quo.
Recommended reading. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all
Good to see her kicking imaginary objects. She learned her lesson from kicking the dryer.
To be fair here she’s like 18.
Most people would make terrible politicians at 18.
She’s got like ten years before she’s at the age where even an extremely good politician can get elected to the most minor of offices.
She already knows everything she needs to just like everyone else in the comic.
And the sooner everyone realizes that, and that they’re better off letting her manage their life for them because she’s doing so well at that for herself, the better it’ll be for everyone!
:p
Honestly, Becky should be in politics and fight the evils of homophobia and economic evils. She has a very strong idea about what she’d DO as a politician. Dorothy wanted to be President as a personal goal.
The sliding time scale is also something at work here. I can easily believe in a Dorothy that was going to be super-into HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT in 2016 and a massive Obama fan in 2008 but the Dorothy that would be after the Trump administration would not be someone I believe who would think, “clearly, you become President through merit.”
I mean, I knew that after Dubya got elected but I could believe someone might ignore that.
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Dotty not doing what she says she’s doing? That sounds EXACTLY like a politician tho
And doing it for a fourth-wall photo op. Textbook.
Coming from Becky, that’s definitely not an insult, not after her experience.
It’s basically a compliment.
Tbh it’s generally a compliment
Becky is a fantastic politician and I welcome our first Lesbian President.
She’s terrible at raging too. Horrible barbarian honestly, bet she can’t even lift an axe.
She can probably lift an ax. She’s an athlete.
That an NPC class in d20 modern? I don’t keep up.
She’s a runner tho, runner’s bodies see arms muscles as useless weights. she can probably kick an axe.
She’s got strong leg muscles…so if she had prehensile toes, she could wield an axe with her foot! xD
Okay, maybe that’s where we should draw that line… xD
Dorothy is absolutely a caster of some sort, probably wizard.
Well she ain’t a charisma based class, that’s for sure…
…… goddammit now I want a Willisd comic of the Walkyverse but D&D.
Would upvote if I could.
Upvote
THANK you, Becky.
(words I thought I’d never say)
Becky is right, even If it sucks to admit. Unfortunately politicians are, for the most part, putting on a show when they want to get elected/re-elected. And what a show it is, enough that people would fight over who deserves to be elected.
I’m trying to imagine what someone like Dorothy would be as president and I’m failing. Anyone else want to weigh in on that thought?
The kind of President you see in (some) movies, or on TV. Attractive, charismatic, wholesome and good.
… oh, did you mean Dorothy as she actually is, rather than how she imagines herself? I believe the usual term is “wonk”.
That is possible, the latter part I mean. If she was, then I don’t know whether she would get everything done, or nothing done.
Wants to be Obama.
Would settle for Clinton.
Turns out to be Carter (who is top 5 by IQ, but sadly wasn’t particularly effective).
Grant. She”d be the Next Great Teapot Dome Scandal.
Grant destroyed the 1st KKK and did his best to undo what Johnson rolled back to try to re-institute the Antebellum South. So he’s not quite the failure everyone makes him out to be.
She would get just enough done to be absolutely miserable. It would shrivel her soul like a raisin in the path of a UV death laser.
The sad case of Dotty is that she’s a good person from a healthy family who had every reason to believe that she could right the injustices of the world so long as the world played by the rules, which hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaaahaa noooope
^ thiiiiiis ^ 🙁
“To protect the world from devastation…
To unite all people within our nation…”
Clinton like without the intern action; unless Walky interns?
She’d probably actually be more like Hillary than Bill – smart, ambitious, talented, but lacking in an abundance of stage presence or charisma. Also silently bitter and resentful that she can’t lean on her strengths to compensate for that weakness NEARLY as easily as her male peers with similar abilities. And knows she has to ruthlessly conceal those feelings from ever showing in public, which also intensifies them.
Yup. 🙁
I agree with all this, but she’d also lack one of the key failings of Hillary–who is the most lied-about woman in the country, but she makes it so, damned, easy for her enemies.
If there was a blurb piece on FOX claiming that Hillary had jaywalked, here’s how it would play out:
HRC: “I was out of town that day.”
Real Reporters: “Ma’am, you were in town for a conference.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a secret meeting of Jewish bankers? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Well, yes, but it was on the opposite side of town.”
Reporters: “It was in a building on that block.”
Tucker: Tucker: “Was Hillary in a hurry to perform a late-term abortion? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, but I crossed at the corner.”
Reporters: “We have video taken from a window by an office worker.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a Pedophiles Anonymous meeting? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, okay, fine, I crossed in the middle of the block because we were running late, the traffic had been closed off for the conference, and even then, I checked traffic both ways, even though it was on a one-way street.”
Real Reporters: “Huh, yeah, guess it was.”
Tucker: “Tonight on Jaygate: Did Hillary cross at that exact point so that she could finish the final leg of a summoning circle to bring for the dread Shog’Hgoth? I’m just asking questions.”
While Dotty sometimes shows a reluctance to admit to errors, she’s a little too self-aware to fall to this kind of absurdity.
Dorothy seems to definitely want to be like the good kinds of presidents you see in fiction, not the real presidents who act like good people but do all sorts of terrible things when they think nobody will notice. Or when they think they can get the media to spin their bad deeds as good.
The system would tear her to shreds as she desperately tries to please everyone.
I can’t see her signing up to a party at all, never mind getting enough support within that party to run for anything.
The episode of THE SIMPSONS where Lisa is President.
yeah idk dotty it kinda sounds like you should set a life goal for yourself that doesn’t involve constantly betraying your own moral principles
because, like, being a decent human being makes you unelectable
Hope she ends up finding a new career path that will be meaningful to her while letting her keep her soul
Lawyer? Judge? DA? Cabinet member?
Probably not the last one.
I think she would make a decent judge, but the most fitting job choice would be manager.
She should honestly just figure out how to become a billionaire. Then she could use her money to influence politics more than the president ever could by lobbying corrupt politicians into campaigning for her agenda. Or she could buy tons of media outlets to subtly or not, influencing public opinion through mass disinformation. Or she could develop the next big social media app and just have near complete control of how every person of influence communicates.
Too bad ‘good billionaire’ is an oxymoron.
Not an oxymoron, but a contradiction in terms. It there was an actual good billionaire, it would be a paradox.
First tell me what you mean by “good.” Andrew Carnegie caused an awful lot of public libraries to be built.
The Carnegie model of billionaire philanthropy is based on the assumption that 1) billionaires know better than everyone else what people need, 2) that accomplishing that is best done by consolidating money and power in their hands, and therefore 3) they are entitled to exploit their workers for all they are worth—low pay, long hours, unsafe conditions, strikebreakering, etc.—so that they can then do a philanthropy. This is before we can get to the deleterious effects of market manipulation and monopolistic tendencies.
Even if you think the philanthropy outweighs the exploitation (how many of Carnegie’s workers had the time and leisure to enjoy a public library?) and the anti-democratic ideas underlying that thinking, billionaire philanthropy usually ends up being a way to burnish the billionaires’ reputation and enhance their power.
Yeah this. Pretty much all billionaires become that wealthy through a combo of exploiting their workers and being born to a family that was already kinda wealthy..
Don’t forget monopoly power.
I mean I would take the Carnegie model over what we have currently. At least they built public works and had a sense of style, our current crop of rich assholes can’t even manage that
Is that, not what an oxymoron is?
We’re looking for a path that will let her keep her soul.
The idea that anyone even suggests she should become a billionaire because being a politician requires too much moral compromise is just really mind-boggling
I mean I thought I was making a pretty obvious joke here, but maybe Dorothy could pull it off?
I honestly feel like a whole lot of Dorothy’s character arc is sort of like Robin’s in that Willis has gone through the entire cycle a whole hell of a lot of us have since 2015 or so, where we started out as progressive Democrats really excited about the future of electoral politics, and then Bernie lost, and then Hillary lost, and then Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa, and then maybe Grandpa wasn’t so bad because he at least wasn’t an open fucking fascist, but then Grandpa decided the pandemic was over, and at this point basically all of us are either rabid anarchists or refuse to engage on the basis of existential despair. Plus tbh social media has spread around enough verifiable history that it’s a lot harder to look away from the fact that we’re literally an empire built on genocide and war crimes in such an inttense and complicated way that it may bee that the only way to ever begin to stop doing that would be to stop existing.
So like… the idea that there could conceivably be a future President who’s a sympathetic character is… harder to swallow.
Basically yeah, lol. Her political ambitions worked well back in, like, 2010 when the comic started, but at this point seeing someone dream of being President makes me think they’re either morally suspect or just incredibly naive
Were you a kid in 2010?
There were a lot of young people who put a lot of faith in Obama. And a lot who put faith in Bill Clinton, back then. Probably Carter as well, but I was small.
Now it’s Sanders, but he didn’t get the nomination, so they get to focus more anger on Democrats and pretend Sanders would have saved us.
I guess every generation has to go through the cycle themselves. Hopefully wrapping back around to not thinking of Presidential candidates as heroic saviors, but just someone we’re getting to do a really tough job. They’re inevitably going to compromise and disappoint, but that’s different from betrayal and corruption, even though it’s seen that way.
Maybe if we could break the cycle of turning on Democrats when they fail to fix everything all at once, we could actually make some progress, since we wouldn’t be having Republicans break the entirely country on a regular basis.
Agreed and upvoted, +1.
There were also a lot of people who imagined things Obama never promised, and then castigated him for being him and not them.
I don’t think Sanders would have saved us so much as that his failure to be elected prolonged the inevitable. I was too busy dealing with much to be particularly politically active in that way during the Obama administration so I just assumed he was doing a good job because at least he wasn’t the guy who caused a recession and dragged us into multiple wars based largely on lying.
But… I mean, fundamentally, a lot of people’s politics have changed such that we’re not “turning on” the Democrats, we believe fundamentally different things that they do. We don’t believe they know how to fix things because the things they say are the problems are not what we think are the problems, and a lot of their actual actions are things we think exacerbate the problems. And vice versa! They don’t like our actual beliefs either!
I don’t know whether Willis is one of those people, but like… it’s quite a bit more complicated than “aww you thought everything would magically be okay and then it was complicated”. Lot more like “aww you thought society might improve somewhat and now you’re lucky to get by working three part-time gig jobs that fire you if you make 20.01 hours a week, have a quasi-legal place to live, and your best means of communicating with others are constantly divebombed by a combination of people who want you dead because they’re literal, weapons-carrying Nazis and people who want you dead because they mistook you for someone who said something problematic about a fandom five years ago”.
Tl;dr shit’s gotten bad and if nothing else that makes a lot of people pessimistic.
Knowing is half that battle, but that still doesn’t help that I know to much and what I know upsets me constantly.
1) “Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is just pure conspiracy theory. Sanders didn’t have a chance at the nomination. He was never in the lead. He was wildly popular with a certain subset of young activists, but not with the rest of the Democratic voting base. Especially not with black voters. If things had stayed divided, he might have eked out a plurality, but candidates were always going to drop out and the voters would consolidate.
2) Yeah, we’re an empire built on genocide and war crimes (and slavery). Like all empires. Like all great powers. Still, without downplaying what we’ve done as a great power, I’d say we’re closer to a benevolent overlord than past great powers were (or than our likely replacements would be). We do our dirty deeds, but not nearly to the level of older colonial powers or to Imperial powers before them.
We could do better. We probably even have the room to do better without being replaced as a great power. Maybe I’ve just gotten more cynical as I’ve gotten older and studied more history, but if we stepped away from the imperial role, China would likely fill the gap and it’s hard to see how they would be preferable for the rest of the world.
1) Exactly. Bernie’s entire strategy in 2020 relied on the field staying huge all the way to the convention so that he could win with 30%. His team admitted this. It was, to quote Tony Stark, “Not a great plan.” The fact of the matter is that Bernie ran a doomed campaign based on the false assumption that most of his support in 2016 was about liking him instead of being anti -Clinton.
Also, I find it hilarious that someone would attack Biden as “grandpa” when Bernie is *older* than him.
1) I’m… not really positing that there was a conspiracy so much as that he lost because the field consolidated around Biden but gg. Also “he was never in the lead” is just wrong. He was ahead the first three votes- Iowa was wonky because he got more votes but not as many delegates so sure, that one was weird- and Buttigieg was in second delegate-wise. It was pretty clear he was badly off after Super Tuesday, yes. He was still in second with 38% of the total delegates.
2) We’re certainly not the only Evil Empire out there and I doubt we’ll be the last but uh… you can certainly believe we’re the kinder and gentler murderous assholes. We might even be compared to some of them? Sort of like how during the African slave trade Britain and France et al. were kind of surprised Belgium was so brutal and cruel. I feel like you will understand why other people may disagree as to the relevance.
“Openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is not “the field consolidated around Biden”
DoA started in 2010. I was definitely a liberal back then, and very naive about all the terrible things presidents and federal-level politicians from both major parties do in this country. I’ve pretty much always despised Republicans, but it took Bernie getting screwed out of the Democratic nomination twice for me to realize how bad that party really is. I went from a liberal who was clueless about the bad and corrupt stuff Democrats did to, as of a few years ago, well look at that hammer and sickle in my avatar.
Which is exactly what I’m talking about.
Too many Sanders supporters can’t accept that he just didn’t have the support within the Democratic base to win, but have to invent conspiracy theories about how he was screwed out of the nomination.
He didn’t have the votes. He never had the votes. There was never polling that suggested he had the votes.
These ideas are the left-wing equivalent of the “Stop the Steal” nonsense, with the only real distinction being the Sanders himself isn’t claiming them – though some of his former staffers do use them to attack Democrats.
I thought the point of Dorothy’s dream was to be a woman president. That still seems something to cherish. Taking Hillary Clinton as the model inspiration maybe was more acceptable in 2010 than nowadays, but I took that to be a clue Willis left to warn us that Dorothy has her own bunch of issues to deal with, like the rest of the main cast.
that kinda youthful naivety in contrast to her being ‘academically’ smart is a nice contrast, i mean she’s not as knowingly naive as some others but i’d assume that’d be the term/somewhat chalks up to ‘youthful optimism’ that’d make a (non power hungry) 18 year old have the ‘ambition’ to be the president
always made me wonder, i’m sure there are some but how many 6 year olds saying “i wanna be an astronaut” actually ended up working for nasa lol
Maybe she should examine her moral principles vis a vis the work of the job she wants. When all choices are evil, usually the evil of any given choice is unevenly distributed. Turn it upside down and it becomes a choice of goods. Refusing the choice is also a choice, with its own balance of evil and good.
Real-world examples are hard to find, probably because nobody wants to talk about them afterward. For a fictional story that illustrates the conflict well, consider ST:TNG “Thine Own Self.” Order Geordi to fix the problem: he dies, everyone else is saved. Don’t give the order: Geordi lives a few minutes longer and then all die. Which is better? There is no provable answer to that. What you choose depends on your values.
Dorothy, what are your values? If you value the troop more than the individual, then you could be a good leader (in every sense), but individuals will be hurt along the way. If you place a higher value on the individual, then politics is not for you, because it’s all about group dynamics.
She’s still good, she got the theatrics part down
I still won’t be riled up if I was kicked like that poor chair
Today’s strip was sponsored by Rooms To Go…
Is it just me or is the time delay getting worse and worse? Today my clock read 11:09 before the new comic loaded. Normally it was around 11:00 – 11:03.
it has been at about 6-8 minutes past for me. Usually it fixes itself after a couple days/weeks, I think it’s a hiveworks thing
In my experience it gets progressively worse, I think because the clock’s version of a day is longer than an actual day.
chanting activist activist activist
The moment of truth that has been building up since day one is finally upon us… Dorothy’s too good for politics. Or at least, not self-righteous enough.
God, the looks on Dorothy’s face in Panels 4 and 5 are just heartbreaking. I swear I can see her going through all five stages of grief in just two images.
Of course it only took 2 images, Dorothy wants to be efficient with her own grief just like with everything else.
I feel like the ironic thing is that Joyce would actually make a decent politician once she gets over her internalized shame.
She’s creative, hyperfocused, and not above some sly manipulation. Plus she ‘knows’ how religious people think if she wanted to court that vote.
One trait Joyce and Dorothy share is that, as atheists, they’re basically unelectable on a national scale.
Becky is willing to accept Joyce’s lack of faith but it would probably kill their friendship if Joyce started cynically posing as Christian for political gains.
Best shot at a political career would still be Becky as she’s willing to act against her personal morals enough to come out ahead while putting on a smile and personality for the camera. Roz despite having better people skills then Dorothy would actually have the same problem I think regarding going against some morals for the greater good.
I have never understood how Dorothy expects to be a politician. She is just too darn… good.
She has a very very naive/idealistic/sanitized concept of how politics works. Or did when she set that goal for herself.
Or is she so evil that she is thinking of refusing to use her evident talent and energy for the good of all, for selfish moral reasons?
[Great: now I have to ask myself that question….]
That is to say: refusing, for selfish moral reasons, to use etc.
She’s 18. (19?) She’s got decades to lose the naivete, make some compromises, pick up a little corruption and still turn out to be a damn good politician.
Dorothy doesn’t even have the problem of being wrong about being too good for politics. Though she is. She’s never going to be President because being President requires decades of favor trading, networking, and being a supporter of the system until you’re picked by their super delegates.
Dorothy focuses on her grades over social-fu and deal making. Roz, really, is a better example of how it works.
You are also a terrible chair kicker.
You can always prove her wrong, Dorothy. By going to Yale.
I don’t think it would change much, except she would be losing faith in herself without any friends nearby to help her and support her.
Yeah. For most of this comic I was against Dorothy going to Yale, because attending Yale was wrapped up in her master plan that included a completely unrealistic goal along with a quest for perfection in every area of her life that was extremely unhealthy.
If Dorothy can learn to live an inspired life that doesn’t include the unrealistic goal and allows herself be human instead of perfect, then I could probably be in favor of her going to Yale.
Go get some connections! Do something interesting with your life! But do it as you, for you. Not as a manufactured version of you, for everyone else.
I agree her drive for perfection is unhealthy but you’ll never reach long shot, ambitious goals by not trying for them. If Yale is something she thinks will give her a leg up, then she should try for it.
I don’t think Dorothy is the sort of person who dedicates her entire life to proving somebody wrong out of spite.
Lets have a flashback to kindergarden where someone said “girls can’t be president” and she went “I’ll show you!”
Ted Cruz. Josh Hawley. The Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court. They all went Harvard and Yale. Elizabeth Warren went to a state school and is a better model got Dorothy.
Missing the point entirely. Dorothy doesn’t want to go to a state school. She wants to go to Yale. I want this not to be the fifty millionth story where FOR WHATEVER REASON, the ambitious woman doesn’t get her ambition. So yeah, I want Dorothy to go to Yale.
the problem, IMO, is that the entire reason she wants to go there is as part of an unhealthy plan to reach an unrealistic goal.
It’s no more unrealistic than any other long shot ambitious goal and while I agree the way she does things can be unhealthy, I don’t think the answer to that should be ‘just jettison the whole ambition’.
I’m actually reassured by the framing this is now getting. I was thinking the acceptance was for this semester and she’d already turned it down.
Now that we know she just hasn’t responded, it’s probably for next year and there’s definitely room for the end of the arc to be her accepting it and making ready to to next spring.
Yeah, that and Willis repeatedly saying her ambition wasn’t going to be a character flaw is making me hopeful but I gotta admit the comment section has been very tiring for me in that regard these last few days. I might take a few days, I dunno.
Would you support her ambition if it was to make wings out of wax and fly to the sun? Because that, IMO, is what she’s setting herself up for. 🙁
No, but I’d still be super sick of “her ambition will destroy her” “She can’t handle it” “It’s unrealistic so she gave it up” “She changed her mind for a less ambitious thing” “Her ambition didn’t make her happy” “She gave it up for a relationship (whatever kind it is)” “She wasn’t suited for it” and all the other reasons that come up to avoid ambitious female characters reaching what they’re aiming for. It’s exhausting.
Solidarity.
I agree with you on principle I think. I also don’t want yet another story on which the successful, ambitious young woman learns to compromise her dreams and settle for less than she’s worth to be happy. I want this story to be about the young woman who dreams of becoming president and then does it and it’s AWESOME.
But I also think that Yale isn’t really where Dorothy’s ambitions are. She wants to be president. Yale is the path she wants to take there, but Harvard or Stanford will get her there just as well and with just as much prestige. I’d be happy if she decided to Pinoy to Stanford while keeping the oval office in her line of sight as long as it’s clear that she made the choice because Stanford was the better offer.
If the story were going to go long enough that she might become President, I could agree with that too. We’re never going to REACH the point of an election though – we’re probably never leaving this semester. So for me, Yale’s kinda acting in the place of her overall ambition because it’s the part we can actually SEE. I don’t really want this story to go ‘She keeps her ambition – but she gives up on the part you could actually see her pursuing’ either.
That’s totally fair. I see that. It’s good to have a proper W that we can actually see and celebrate. I suppose a constant state of “she’ll be successful later, I promise” would get stale fast. And reading all these replies insisting that her dreams are too “unreasonable” are making me want to see Dorothy become empress of the universe if only out of spite.
People go to Yale. About 1500 every year. No reason why Dorothy being one of them should be unrealistic or unhealthy.
Thankfully, as far as I can tell, she has until May to decide whether to go, so she has time.
She should consider alternate ways of establishing prestige and contacts. Is she expecting “lots of movers and shakers went to Yale” to magically imbue her with electability? And IU’s poli sci program is nothing to sneeze at.
Panel 4: Anger
Panel 5: Realization
I read 4 as realization and 5 as defiance.
First an imaginary current president in a chair, and now a future president kicking an imaginary chair.
Has there ever rly been a ‘good’ politician or has it always been corrupt since politics were invented?
james Buckley was a good politician. He only lasted one term.
By good politician, I mean a good person.
AOC tried her best.
That’s going to depend on how you define “good”. The nature of politics means it’s very difficult to engage in and succeed at without compromising on your values, so even for people who had a broadly positive influence and meant well you’re going to be applying some qualifiers
Probably depends on what you mean by good and corrupt.
Let’s say you’re Dorothy. You have a strong moral sense and a good vision of how society should be better. But, you’re not dictator who can just do it. You have to get elected, by voters, many of whom disagree with you. And then you have to work with a legislature (whether as a governor/president as a member), full of other people who disagree with you, and themselves answerable to people who disagree with _them_. The chance that you can get things done while getting everything you want, or avoiding any unpleasant compromises or favor-trading, is vanishingly small.
Basically politics means working with other people, who are not you and have their own goals. And it’s unavoidable and for high stakes.
If you “throw all the bums out”, the new bums will have the same problems of cooperating despite divergent goals to solve, and probably reach similar solutions.
But working with other people and compromising to accomplish what you can isn’t inherently evil.
Compromise is only evil if you’re starting from the position that you have the perfect vision that everyone else must follow – which is kind of evil in itself.
but if your intentions are good – and Dorothy has so many of those – that makes everything OK!
/s
It’s not inherently evil. But it may mean having to vote for things you dislike or even consider evil, in order to get votes for things you actually want to get done. It’s inherently at the other end of the ‘grubbiness’ scale from “following my artistic vision while being financially independent”, say.
And that’s a very valid way of doing art.
Following your own pure vision and rejecting and compromise with others is a really, really shitty way of governing.
Depends not only on how you define “good” but also “politician”. For example, Martin Luther King was a politician – although he never served in government, he was still in the business of influencing people to support an agenda. Most of us would consider King good overall, although he had flaws like any other person.
Ultimately, though, if you want to be an effective politician, it’s difficult to do so by being a “better person” than the people you’re trying to lead. As Mencken said, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it – good and hard. Many times the people have gotten exactly the leaders they deserved.
Plot twist: Dorothy actually enjoy politics and in a next future, she also run her presidential project. But she’ll run by Republican Party.
Minutes later, Dorothy tearfully hands Becky an imaginary handwritten apology note for kicking the imaginary chair and bursts into tears
(AND THEN THEY FINALLY HUG, LIKE BAGGE HAS BEEN SAYING ALL WEEK THEY SHOULD AND BAGGE IS RIGHT)
I KNOW, RIGHT!
As Dorothy drops dream about politics she try her luck as anime character by calling her attacks
Lazy Apathetic Dorothy Arc incoming?
That’s pronounced Dorothy Taking Time Out to Reorganize Her Worldview Arc.
And that’s the harsh reality.
Dorothy has strong sense of morality to do what she thinks is right & sensible and to do right by others instead of what’s beneficial to her. That’s good, we need more political leaders like that since it means we wouldn’t haft to twist their arms into doing the right thing. Unfortunately that also a handicap at times.
Genuinely being “Mr/Ms Pure” both in word and action means two things:
A: You going into a profession where only a few aren’t corrupt and everyone in the system but you is cut throat and willing to take the low road if needed.
B: There will be different factions and people behind the scenes wanting to get you to fall in line into their ranks and abide by their way of doing things for their benefit, a term for this I heard of is “kissing the ring,” and doing so might involve having to go against your principles. Refusing do that and trying to change the whole system yourself means the system itself will go against you.
That is the ugly truth of American politics.
All politics. Everywhere, everywhen.
I guess even I’m still too optimistic about how the world is ran.
Some places are much, much worse. Whether in terms of open corruption of supposedly democratic governments or just in terms of being blatant autocracies.
It’s foolish to think the US government is immune, but it’s a different kind of foolishness to think we’re especially bad.
It’s also a bad idea at think of politicians being “corrupt” as a binary. There are few who manage to remain completely pure, but many who aren’t just in it for the grift.
Yer a Ravenclaw, not a Slytherin.
Better yet.
Your trying to be Master Yoda and a game the favors Lord Sidous.
You think you’re late-story Sansa, when you’re really early-story Ned.
Clint Eastwood is going to be pissed.
half expected her to hit the side of the bed and stub her toe lol
Sigh, Politicians bad, upvotes to the left.
I honestly get tired of that refrain. Just feels like something that only benefits the worst sorts out there. Sure, the concept of knowing how the sausage gets made is entirely valid for politics, you have to do scheming and wheeling and dealing and such in order to get things done.
But the notion that the only way to be decent at politics is to be a scumsucking, backstabbing jerk just makes us all go “and that’s why nothing can ever change”. It’s hard to do things well, and your hands will get dirty, but there’s a wide gulf between that and the excesses that people treat as normal and inevitable.
And please don’t respond with a snide joke about how I’m a sweet innocent naïve soul, its just as trite and cliche as anything else.
even if she somehow /did/ become president, realistically, she could still make all the ‘right’ choices and still get backlash/hate/blamed for stuff
i’ve seen ppl say “the president doesn’t do as much as you think” be the same that’d turn around and be like ‘thanks obama’/blame him for stuff
Defeatist political nonsense is what people use to suppress the vote and erode faith that government can ever work. Then what’s the point? Cut all government services, give the billionaires free reign.
Government is hard. It’s hard to get right, hard to keep right. All sorts of things can bring it down, from corruption to incompetence, lies to poorly conceived economic concepts. But getting it right is the best option we have, so we might as well invest ourselves in the doing.
No, Becky is right. You don’t need to do dirty stuff to be a good politician, but you DO need to be able to push your feelings aside. You need some level of ability of turning off your emotions just to deal with all the hate you WILL receive
There’s a reason sociopaths tend to be found more in positions of power like this – You need to be willing to actually hurt people. Not necessarily in a way that is evil, per se, but for example, a CEO needs to be able to shut down an inefficient plant and put potentially thousands out of a job to save the tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be destroyed if the company went out of business, or be willing to make hard cuts to a governmental budget in order to keep essential programs functioning
Dorothy is likely not capable of that
Becky might be right, but she’s not saying what a lot of commenters are saying. There’s a strong “Yeah, you have to be corrupt to get anywhere in politics” strain going around.
All that does in my mind is wipe away the difference between the worst and the best in politics. None of them are perfect, but the differences matter.
Preach
I’m with you, it’s not a great refrain. I understand it in the context of existential despair, though, which I know a lot of former political idealists suffer from (Dorothy included).
I think in Dorothy’s particular case it’s that as she is now, a bright young thing raised by good, responsible middle-class parents to believe that you can change the world and play by the rules at the same time that’s got her running headfirst into a very sad wall.
As to the system that grinds her and all of us down, well, I take a lot of comfort in the words of Ursula K. LeGuin: “Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you into despair”
Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage criticizing ‘career politicians’ as if he wasn’t one. All his ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric. And people on the left sometimes fall for it too.
Government works, exactly as well as we make it work.
Hell, Trump ran as an “outsider coming in to clean up the swamp” and people bought into that too. Including some on the left bewailing Hilary’s corruption.
Hear, hear! This whole thread.
When almost all politicians in this country are bought and paid for by the wealthy and large corporations, it’s hard to imagine a lot of successful politicians who aren’t corrupt and terrible. I highly doubt a system this corrupt can be changed from within by just electing the “right” good people.
Might as well just give up then and let the worst, most corrupt people have power.
“Never give up! Never give up! Never, never, never, never!”
Well sure, but then I don’t believe our system is wholly corrupt and can’t be changed from within.
Becky, she’s still better than that Toehead Majorie.
True, but that’s REALLY not a hard bar to clear.
At least MTG is willing to do what it takes to get elected?
Let me issue a correction on your post there, Dana, regarding the open fascist and violent conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene: you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to her
What if “it” is a pin-pulled live grenade?
…Okay, in that ONE case.
Magic the Gathering had that acronym first. It’s more valuable also.
But which is more oversaturated?
I’d rather have an overwhelming mountain of cards than whatever we’re supposed to call the other thing.
“Empty-G”?
The G stands for “Glass” cuz no drink was (or will be) offered.
GLORY TO PHYREXIA, BAYBEE
Whatever this “phyrexia” is, I’m sure it has better politics than any Republican.
YEEEEEEESS! HOORAY for Becky for saying that! Probably that’s the only way for make Dorothy wake up and make her accept that she can go to Yale. Becky is the friend that Dorothy needs for kick her in the right direction, almost like Dorothy do with Joyce.
I feel for Dorothy. I was much older than her when I was forced to let go of a cherished ambition. I can’t imagine how I would have handled it at nineteen.
I hope this makes her friendship with Becky stronger.
I belive it will strengthen their friendship. This is the first time Becky has told Dorothy an unpleasant truth not to get her angry but because it’s something she thinks she needs to hear.
For all her progressive upbringing Dorothy is very much like Joyce in that she has strong morals and has lived a very sheltered life not fully ready to accept that her uncompromising beliefs might not get her to her chosen destination because she has always banked others listening to logic and reason like herself.
Someone finally says it.
Becky is just repeating what the commentariat has been saying for days.
Commentariat… getting a mental image of Ciaphas Cain reading webcomics on his data slate.
Dorothy lacks the ability to deal well with people who are not in the same boat as her. A good politician, a good president for the USA, needs to see lots of divergent needs, strategies, and ideas and find a way to get a majority for the things she thinks best.
She is too much invested in the rational to do this, because you get people behind you on emotions, not rationale.
Fascists get elected bc they manage the crazy stunt to get people to feel they are seen and promised a better future while the politician in question don’t care squat about them and actually says contradictory things.
Get Dorothy to discover Non-violent communication which teaches her that words make up less of 30% of communication (she will be shocked as hell by this because THATS NOT RIGHT) but if she manages, she will at least understand why she fails at leading people.
And can find a way to influence the world with her strengths. We need people who can think clearly. I just don’t see her ever being able to sell the better way to the masses.
How much do we really know about what she would be selling?
How well does she know that?
We know she wants to lead, but to what objectives?
Great questions, that she very much needs to answer!
(IMO, based on available evidence: to fix everything for everyone, because she knows what’s best – to be Busybody Mom to the whole nation. And (she thinks) only by being President will she have the power to do so.)
She’s 19. (still 18?) She’ll need to answer those questions before she actually runs, but she’s got plenty of time.
she doesn’t wanna have to bring anothe repair order so soon
Maaaaaybe this is a wake-up call that she might be happier, and in the long run have more influence, doing something else.
I very much hope so.
I care deeply about a lot of social issues, have a fantastic speaking voice, never get stage fright, and have degrees in political philosophy and law. People ask me all the time why I don’t go into politics. I tell them I’d be a horrible politician. I care too much about actual, real people to make the sort of compromises politicians have to make. Also, I value my privacy too much.
Go into education or law, Dotty. You’ll be able to make a difference and won’t have to compromise your values (as much).
Dorothy would be a terrible federal or state politician, but she could make a great local leader. There are so many organizations that could use them.
Daaaang. Way to twist the phone, Becky.
Dorothy wanted (past tense) to be a West Wing style president. But that show was as much a fantasy as Star Wars. Does she want to make a difference? Change lives? A Big Ten university will do just fine. Then law school. Then don’t get co-opted by money. Leslie is changing lives though I wouldn’t recommend adjunct faculty as a career path. Most Yale graduates don’t change the world, they just get a share in running the status quo.
Recommended reading. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all
Good to see her kicking imaginary objects. She learned her lesson from kicking the dryer.
To be fair here she’s like 18.
Most people would make terrible politicians at 18.
She’s got like ten years before she’s at the age where even an extremely good politician can get elected to the most minor of offices.
Ugh, all politiicians I know nowadays, at 18, are a bunch of bullies.
Young people just make good activists.
She already knows everything she needs to
just like everyone else in the comic.And the sooner everyone realizes that, and that they’re better off letting her manage their life for them
because she’s doing so well at that for herself, the better it’ll be for everyone!:p
Dorothy just needs a good mentor to show her how to be a successful politician without a pesky sense of integrity. Like Robin!
She needs to George Santos her way through by pretending to be an electable person.
I believe you have done us all a service by verbing George Santos’ name!
I really hope this is what comes next, but I worry the comment section would spontaneously combust.
She’s not wrong. Dotty is a born activist.
That is probably the nicest thing Becky has ever said to Dorothy.
I was going to argue but then I thought about the usual stuff Becky says to Dorothy.
aaaaand here comes the sad reality that is our government. Dorothy is way too nice to survive as a politician ToT
Becky herself is by far the most gifted politician in the entire cast. She is much, much smarter than she lets on.
Sarah might be capable of a similar level of deviousness, but Sarah doesn’t like other people enough.
Honestly, Becky should be in politics and fight the evils of homophobia and economic evils. She has a very strong idea about what she’d DO as a politician. Dorothy wanted to be President as a personal goal.
The sliding time scale is also something at work here. I can easily believe in a Dorothy that was going to be super-into HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT in 2016 and a massive Obama fan in 2008 but the Dorothy that would be after the Trump administration would not be someone I believe who would think, “clearly, you become President through merit.”
I mean, I knew that after Dubya got elected but I could believe someone might ignore that.
HUG!
Is Dorothy referencing Amber kicking over chairs?