As much as we must loathe and castrate the 21st century American version of Trump and his neofascist MAGA Republican Party, the senior Democrats’ subordination to corporate, financial, and military-industrial authority - our Nation’s concentrated wealth and power - has once again compromised too much of their electoral platform, pandering to the "dirty energy" ego of Manchin and the greed of Sinema, instead of holding to their promises like a healthy and functional party would choose to do.
Too often, once they win elections, Democrats often reveal their progressive-sounding rhetoric for what it is: minority voter manipulation, followed up with post-election inauthenticity.
Unfortunately, this disappointing pattern bizarrely gives the dominant Trump-hostage, white supremacist wing of the Republican Party the ability to exploit the immediate national disappointment that is the result, especially with uneducated blue collar whites and the Party's criminal elite (e.g. the Donald Trump crime family and their cronies).
This is largely how Reagan, the Bushes, and the most corrupt of all, Donald Trump, used nationalist lies, scapegoating, and fear-mongering to con their way into the White House.
Bill Clinton and the making of the current Republican Party
When the Democrats shifted from their 20th century New Deal and Great Society commitments - and become a consolidated corporate-neoliberal party under the pro-big corporate Bill Clinton, the Democrats rendered irrelevant most of the Republican Party’s traditional Big Business constituency and policy agenda.
As a result, to keep functioning as a competitive force in our duopoly two-party system, the Republicans chose to move further to the racist, nativist, and xenophobic right to reinforce their “white identity” legitimacy as a viable (and separate) political party.
Ugly “Duopoly” Party Agendas and Narratives
During the 1990's, the Clinton administration cynically collaborated with the Gingrich Republicans to kick Black and minority mothers and their children off federal family cash assistance - in the name of 1) “free markets personal responsibility” and 2) the “capitalist duty” of unprivileged Americans engaging in a lifetime of low-wage labor.
The Clinton Dem cabal then joined with his Republican allies to force ever more Black men into prison with his racist “Three Strikes” crime bill. This gave Bill Clinton the "useful idiot" label in spades!
Not surprisingly, conman Bill Clinton also started up plans for a southern border Wall to stem the surge of migrants resulting from his US labor outsourcing scam - the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - which displaced millions of Mexican farmers with subsidized U.S. agricultural exports.
Barack
Eight years into the 21st century, after the Republican Party lost its remnants of leadership credibility under W. Bush (with the costly intel deception of the Iraq War and the Wall Street complicit "Great Recession," Barack Obama was essentially elected to model for poor Blacks on their personal and cultural responsibility to act civil and responsible in spite of their position at the bottom of the nation’s race-class hierarchies. In other words, Obama served as “proof” that racism no longer posed serious obstacles to Black upward mobility.
Obama also scolded legitimate Black resisters of racist police violence on the sanctity of “law and order” – deeply empty words in a nation that provides liberty and justice only for the privileged Few.
Not done yet, to prove his corporate credentials, in Obama’s first term his administration sabotaged efforts to make health care a “right” - instead advancing the flawed ACA healthcare scheme that preserved and advanced hugeprofits for insurance and drug companies - as well as the broader medical-industrial complex.
Duopoly Militarism
Yet history shows that spurts of “nationalism” (including tariffs, xenophobia, and domestic violence) are directly a result of fading military power and bankrupt “defense” budgets.
Not withstanding the new evils of global neofascist authoritarianism, the Democrats are still deeply committed to the U.S. military empire, which eats up more than 20% of federal discretionary spending to maintain more than 800 military bases spread across more than 100 “sovereign” nations.
As a nation we can credit Clinton and Obama with keeping the American military machine set on “active duty” - exemplified by Clinton's bombing of Serbia and the Obama's drone attacks which killed civilians.
Even today, Joe Biden's new "War on Dangerous Autocrats" could be used to advance an even more massive Pentagon budget that will cancel out desperately needed social and environmental expenditures.
The Democrats are more skilled than the Republicans when it comes to managing the American warfare state and selling its actions as “democracy promotion.” Just look at how the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld wars are remembered.
Bipartisanship Corruption
Unfortunately, out of a deranged political desperation, the Republican Party has become ever more “fascist” over the last 30 years.
It is openly hostile to “normal” parliamentary give and take in Congress and now wants to “eliminate” the other ruling class party (the Democratic Party) through decentralized totalitarian means - disguised as repressive “big government” State’s rights and "The Big Lie" racist election fraud propaganda.
Don’t believe your lying eyes!
Shortly after Biden’s victory, the vastly incompetent Trump Republican party’s leaders, along with other Trump-corrupted elected officials, failed to nullify the 100% legitimate 2020 presidential election.
So now many of the pro-Trump Republican states are successfully passing racist big government laws targeting minority voting so they can rig the electoral game in 2022 and 2024, because they know they cannot win otherwise.
This neofascist voter democracy nullification effort even included a traitorous MAGA insurrection assault on the U.S. Capitol, encouraged by Trump and his political goons, leading to a handful of police deaths on January 6th, 2021.
Despite all this and more, it’s difficult to understand why the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats insist on “reaching out” to the ugly Republican white-nationalist party in the name of bipartisan “getting things done.” Again, "useful idiots?"
The only decent thing to do with a vicious party like the Trump Amerikaner GOP is to muster all one’s influence and power to cut off its head and destroy it.
Its unfathomable why the top Democrats won't go down that sensible political warfare path.
In a clear display of political ignorance, the corporate-captive leaders in charge of the Democratic Party seem more concerned with marginalizing the progressive, social-Democrats (Bernie-Ocasio-Tlaib-Omar) faction than they are with routing the anarchistic Trump Republican neofascist party.
Refusing to Dismember MAGA Hate
Moreover, Americans are trapped by the ridiculously antiquated Electoral College and the population-distorted nature of the U.S. Senate - where each state has two senators (e.g. Wyoming has 134 times more representation than diverse and liberal California).
Yet somehow these are “sacred” topics Democrats never broach - all while the nation is being torn apart by violent right wing extremism and corporate neoliberal income inequality.
That is unsurprising since some undemocratic features of the U.S. political order are revered in our Nation's archaic 18th Century slaveholders’ Constitution.
Yet no fundamental alteration of that document is imaginable - short of a popular revolution the Dems would never embrace (but apparently violent right wing extremists would).
As of today, the Wall Street Democrats are afraid to undertake actions deeply needed and permitted within the confines of our venerated national charter: 1) the abolition of the reactionary Senate filibuster; 2) a deep analysis of the antiquated U.S. Supreme Court’s preposterous lifetime appointment rule; and 3) the admission of Washington D.C. as a state.
Surrendering to the filibuster (the 60-vote rule) in the Senate means the blockage of numerous basic and much needed reforms, including a purely democratic Voter Right Bill (supported by 75% of Americans) - which would have outlawed big government Republican voter suppression tactics and the corrupt state-level gerrymandering of Congressional districts.
It’s the same with numerous other measures, vetoed not only by the corporate-financial plutocracy but also by a Louis XVI-era constitution designed by and for slave-owners and merchant capitalists for whom “democracy” was never the ultimate objective.
Embracing Fascism’s Seedbed: Failed Capitalism.
Top Democrats continue to embrace the soulless and anarchic “big corporate” profits system, weeping about its “excesses” all the way to the bank - as they are rewarded for their dutiful service to the nation’s owners (ask future NBA owner Barack Obama about the payoff?).
The ultimate destinations of an elite controlled capitalist system 1) authoritarian rule and 2) environmental collapse, are both currently underway.
These two terrible consequences are interrelated: 1) the American capitalist order has exhausted its global and ecological natural resource frontiers; and 2) it is running out of “cheap nature” to replenish its profit rates.
American capitalism is no longer capable of escaping its deep internal contradictions.
Hence Americans and humanity are faced with the choice between [eco-] socialism or fascist barbarism - if we’re lucky.
Hopefully, in the end top elite Democrats will not ultimately side with barbarism and fascism (fueled by ecological breakdown), when they clearly must adopt sane egalitarian economic solutions every time. They must give up their illusory elite grandiosity.
Punish Political Criminals for Their Crimes
After the Great Recession, Obama promised, but his administration refused, to prosecute the Great Recession’s Wall Street criminals, citing a desire, in Obama’s words, to “look forward, not backwards.”
Even today, one could easily make the case for the tangerine tyrant Donald Trump being in a jail cell for a range of transgressions, even his neofascist and sadistic child separation policy or his deep assaults on environmental protections.
But it’s Trump’s “pandemicide” incompetence - ignored and fostered by his own party - and the attempted subversion, nullification and 1-6 violent insurrection related of the 2020 presidential election that completely justifies Trump being locked up.
But Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland (whose 2015 Supreme Court nomination was insultingly torpedoed by the McConnell controlled Republican Senate) apparently has “no stomach” for indicting Trump on any of his criminal behavior.
And now the orange Cancer is back on the hate rally campaign trail, still selling his “Big Election Lie” and otherwise stirring the neofascist pot without serious consequences from a government he tried to overthrow.
Choosing elections over “street activism”
Sadly, corporate Democrats will never call citizens into the streets and public squares - out of their low wage workplaces - to challenge the environmentally destructive corporate-financial plutocracy, or to destroy the racist Republican electoral structure, and thecapitalist-imperialist order - that gives rise to the GOP neofascism that has congealed around what is “the most dangerous organization in America.
Moreover, Democrats won’t call people into the streets even for basic reforms like their “For the People Act.”
When millions of Americans take to the streets on their own initiative to protest the folly of US policy corrosion, the Democrats and their media machine will do everything they can to co-opt and pervert popular rebellion, steering it into a power-friendly sinkhole of major party electoral politics, or try to make fundraising profits off the movement.
Back when the genuinely populist, anti-plutocratic Occupy encampments rose up in the late summer and fall of 2011, the Wall Street-captive Obama administration - and its blue (Democratic) metropolitan police allies worked to infiltrate and dismantle the protest sites even as Obama and his party deceptively appropriated Occupy’s language and spirit for his 2012 campaign (used against the made-to-order 1%er Republican candidate Mitt Romney).
Selling violence with the “White victim card”
The current Trump “Amerikaner” Republicans are finally being accurately reproached for their ugly white supremacy, but they have no monopoly on the power-serving irrationality and silly, anti-scientific standpoint of identity politics.
The Democrats and their media allies have constantly stoked the identity flames in their own deeply conservative fashion, privileging the placement of Black, LatinX, female, and gay faces in high places over truly serious engagement with the oppressive underlying structures that create the nation’s horrible income inequities affecting class, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities.
Plus, the Democrats’ “liberal” media regularly pushes the white “heartland” guns and violence buttons even as it promotes a TV and film culture of cop show and gangster violence that psychologically steers deranged and armed whites into acts of violence.
Let’s face it: Liberal” and “politically correct” Hollywood manufactures and celebrates powerful images and sounds of bloodshed on a mass scale.
The Nice Cop Needs a Crazy Cop
As a ruling class party, the Democrats are now challenged in their effort to win the votes they need to stay viable in an electoral system that is dysfunctionally all too constitutionally tilted to the far right.
Given their ownership by the capitalist class, Democrats gain electoral support less by advancing a positive vision of progressive change (though pretending to possess such a progressive vision is central to their electoral marketing) than by intelligently exploiting the economic fear of the other ruling class party.
This invests them perversely in the continued existence and awfulness of the Republican Party. In other words, you can’t be the “nice cop” (lesser evil) without a “bad cop” (greater evil) on hand to scare the jailhouse captives.
The fact that the Republicans, having insanely crossed into fascist space - and really are a greater immediate evil, does not make the Democrats’ co-dependent complicity in the game any less at fault.
Summary
The most important and most relevant truth of the [January 6] riot is that it was not the culmination of the insurrection, but its prologue.
If the Republican Party, as currently constituted, takes back the House and Senate next year (an outcome that is not only plausible but, as history tells us, likely), and if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2024, it doesn’t seem likely that the neofascist controlled Republikaner Congress will certify the victory. And then the four horsemen will most certainly ride.”
The 4 horsemen will ride with pathetically little resistance from the so-called “party of the people,” - the dollar-drenched neoliberal Dems - who may go down in the history books as the junior partner party in the rise of an American fascist order inthe third decade of the 21st Century.
It will be up to the people themselves to write a different history. They must form new organizations appropriate to the tasks of refuting and destroying “Republikaner fascism“ - and creating the kind of society that doesn’t breed the deadly fascist bacteria like “Trump disease” - while also destroying our livable ecology.
SoberMoney.org
“There’s nothing more frightful than political ignorance in action.” - Goethe