Why do I keep focusing so much on the Clintonites? It’s not because I’m living in 2016 or don’t have my priorities straight. It’s because this subject provides an interesting and encouraging way to look at where we’re headed as a society.
That’s not how it would at first seem from seeing this noxious part of the neoliberal oligarchy’s effort to prop itself up. Donald Trump and his cult are pathological and threatening to democracy, but the deeper power structure, the one the Clintonites represent, is far more scary; the inner forces within the American government are doing everything they can to escalate tensions with Russia, in what seems to be an insane gamble between nuclear annihilation and the massive benefits elites would get from a new Cold War. And the Clintonites are making all this possible, accepting every absurd claim the warmongers put out while intensely attacking the Bernie movement-which, though it’s hard to believe, is only here to create a just and peaceful social democracy.
While that business with the Deep State’s war ambitions can give one terrified paralysis when seriously considered (see John Pilger’s piece about this from yesterday called How The World May End), comfort comes in seeing just how close the pathologies behind it are to disappearing.
Maybe it’s because of how nearly 3.7 billion people have internet access with around ten joining in every second. Or because nearly everyone has experienced some kind of economic decline in the last few decades with half the country being officially poor. Or because the government, the media, and conventional academia have lied to the people on every major bad decision we’ve recently made, from the Iraq War to “free trade.” But like with ecological awareness or racial equality or gay marriage, a general awareness has come that the old systems and authorities the Clintonites so aggressively support are not to be trusted.
This shift has come with a lot of new paranoid and unconstructive attitudes, but that’s an inevitable part of having societies grow out of their repressive old molds. A plurality of Americans now support the crucial work of WikiLeaks; almost two thirds don’t feel represented by either major party; over two thirds distrust the major media and the U.S. government; a clear majority like Bernie Sanders and his “radical” reforms (and they actually voted him in last year). And then there are the holdouts, the one tenth that wants Obamacare as is, the one third that feels represented by the Democratic establishment, one-twentieth that feels their Democratic Party is threatened by Sanders (around 30% are Democrats and around 80% of Democrats like Bernie).
That’s all the Joy Reids and John Podestas and James Clappers have been able to sway towards joining their apocalyptic mission. This is why the majority of the population has not given permission to escalate the war in Syria, and why it will only take a Pearl Harbor event to get them to support what the neocons are advocating. And the neocons’ feeling the need to apparently prepare for that event, as well as to attack the Bernie movement, reveals an insecurity about whether society will allow their plans to go through.
To get past all that rambling optimism, the war-loving, corporate capitalist, blindly tribalist old systems are dangling on the precipice, about to be driven out by the compassionate paradigm that history has been moving humanity towards for millennia. The ruling powers and their surrogates are reacting to this by going into a frenzy, rallying the cult that’s emerged around the Clintons and the DNC towards atomic holy war by scapegoating and maligning the progressives who are trying to put some kind of reason into the debate. But ultimately this cult will prove to be something unique to one small part of history, really just an overzealous spillover of the intense Democrat partisan sentiments which happened in 2016-and that won’t feel relevant enough five, ten, or fifty years from now for its current followers (or the younger generations around them) to invest in. In the year 2050, will anyone still be saying things like “we need to stop the Bernie Bros because they stole the presidency from Hillary?”
But what the Berners and the anti-establishment people in general have signed onto will be relevant forever. Because it represents the unrepressible human urge to defy bullies and tyrants, to act compassionate, to move things in a better direction. Keep stirring up dissent. Keep doing whatever you can to stand with the destitute and marginalized. Keep up the revolution.
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