In an age of unreason, who better to lead the Empire than a man suffering from mental illness? As a practical matter, it makes no sense to put the deranged in charge, but there is an artistic flair to it. We often hold up guys like Caligula and Commodus as examples of what happens when the culture rots. America is now run by ululating fanatics so putting Algore on the throne makes sense.

Democrats need a debate about where their party goes next. Obamacare’s passage marked the rough completion of the social safety net that liberals began constructing during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. The end of the Iraq War drained Democrats of their foreign policy fervor. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has robbed them of the next civil rights fight. There is work left to be done in all these arenas, but over time, the party will need to discover new dreams, much as Republicans have found the Ryan budget.

Serious people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism have dismissed Ezra Klein as a light weight. They don’t say it, but that’s the case and they are not wrong. Still, he does hit on something once in a while and here’s a good example. Utopian cults are dogs chasing a car. They must never ever catch the car, or else their existence is called into question.

They also need bogeymen. When this wave got cooking, the Cult had Bushitler and Iraq. Then it was the Tea Party and now it is the pale penis people. Hating white men is not without its merits, unless your a white man, like Ezra and the rest of the Vox boys. Jewish males are finding out that they cannot play the victim card as they have been declared white. Ooops! So, it’s time to wind down the war on whitey and find a new villain.

The closest thing Democrats have to an organizing concern is income inequality. But their solutions are neither sufficient to the scale of the problem nor quickening to the pulse. Raising the marginal tax rate on dividend income is not the clay from which political movements are crafted.

To many Democrats, the fight the party needs is clear: Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. But the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear. Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound: tightening financial regulation, redistributing a little more, tying up some loose ends in the social safety net. Given the near-certainty of a Republican House, there is little reason to believe there would be much difference between a Warren presidency and a Clinton one.

The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and whom no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore.

Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.

Climate change is a real and growing threat to the world’s future. In 2009, nearly every country in the world agreed that global warming must be held to less than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on pace to blow through that — warming the planet four degrees or more is horrifyingly plausible. No one really knows what that kind of temperature change — a swing that approaches the difference between most of human history and the Ice Age — would mean for humankind. The World Bank says there is “no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

Income inequality is a serious problem. But climate change is an existential threat.

I guess the Vox boys have learned something after all. If you’re going to have a bogeyman, make sure s/he does not look too much like you. More important, make sure the bogeyman is supernatural. Villains are not much use if you can actually beat them. Imagine if in Barman #1 the police rounded up all the goofy villains in one shot. What’s the point of having Batman around?

HotColdWetDry has the advantage of being as fickle and elusive as the weather, because it is the weather. No matter what happens, the Cult can point to the heavens and swear Gaia is angry with us. “She gave us this beautiful spring day, because she is vexed at our lawnmowers.” It is a villain for all seasons!

The thing with Algore, peace be upon him, is he has purged himself of all the deviationism he picked up in the Clinton years. He has submitted himself to the self-criticism sessions and has emerged like a butterfly, a pure man of the one true faith. The big thing here is Algore could shift the focus from the corrosive war on the PPP, which is dangerous to guys like Ezra, and refocus the Cult’s attention on something less like Ezra.

As ridiculous as it sounds, Gore has won a lot of elections and he grew up in politics. If not for his nervous breakdown, Gore probably would have won in 2000. But, Gore is a PPP and it is hard to imagine the SJW standing aside while Hymie the Robot attack Cankles¹. Vagina trumps Gaia on the piety pyramid. That’s just another reason to hope it happens.

¹I’ve noticed some media bigfoots using my Cankles bit as their own. As this blog get more traffic, this will happen more often. That’s flattering, but failure to give me credit will have consequences!