In the last several decades, as neoliberalism and globalization have devastated populations around the world, imperial wars have ravaged the Middle East and Africa, and our civil liberties have been almost entirely stripped away, this system of inverted totalitarianism has skillfully concealed the truth from the people. The fiction of democracy is maintained through allowing heavily policed elections to take place. Realities like the U.S.’ terroristic drone campaigns, the absence of functioning democracy, and the massive poverty caused by corporate capitalism are made invisible by the corporate media. The kleptocracy and oppression that we’re subjected to by corporations is excused by calling this system a “free market.”
Naturally the cultures within the two reigning parties, despite the tribal animus that goes on between them, are almost identical in their drive to consolidate wealth and power. This week, enough House Democrats voted for a bill to expand President Trump’s warrantless surveillance powers for the bill to pass; Democrats have acted similarly with Trump’s illegal and unnecessary April Syria strike, and with Trump’s bill to increase the military budget by $80 billion, and with the plutocratic GOP tax bill, and now with their largely rejecting the crucial senate bill to save net neutrality.
I am not disappointed in the Democratic Party, because this is the role it was given for our current stage in the death of the republic. Its function, just like the Republican Party, is to be an avenue for corporate power. But we need to keep attacking it, because serious revolt won’t be possible as long as the party can sell itself as the solution to our crisis.
Are we supposed to feel protected by the Democrats from Trump’s authoritarianism, for instance, when it was the Democratic Party that blatantly rigged its own primary in the last election cycle? When it was Obama who signedSection 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act into law, which lets the president use the military as a domestic police force? When the mass warrantless surveillance of the last 15 years has been put in place through both major parties? When Obama left Trump with a precedent for assassinating American citizens with drones, torturing whistleblowers, and prosecuting journalists like James Risen? When both parties have perpetrated the forty-year assault on the the social safety net and the rights of working people?
Are we supposed to embrace the mentality of Trump being a singular source for evil in the world, as many act like he is, when Democrats are now championing the evils of neoconservatism? Are we supposed to forgive war criminals like George W. Bush, as Democrats act like we should, because they disapprove of Trump? Should Obama be venerated after his use of depleted uranium weapons against civilians, seven-country-wide bombing campaign, and essentially terroristic drone actions? Are these things what we’re supposed to miss from before Trump was president?
“There is also a tremendous amount of overlap between the people who declare it forbidden to vote for a Green Party candidate and the people who are still saying that Sanders deserved to have his campaign sabotaged by the DNC because he isn’t a Democrat,” Caitlin Johnstone has written about the authoritarian attacks Democrats have used against those who defy their corporatism and imperialism. “The message here is clear: unless you are an unwaveringly loyal imperialist steward of global metastatic neoliberalism, do not run for office. At all. Not inside the Democratic party, and not outside the Democratic party.”
While these critiques need to be voiced, I get the sense that I’m boring my main readers by iterating them. The political establishment’s hypocrisies and outrages are almost innumerable, and they’ve been talked about so much that mentioning them now feels unnecessary and tiresome. This is a good thing; a few years ago these realities of our political system were barely discussed, and weren’t at all the standard parts of the national consciousness they are now.
All the time, around the country and the world, this awakening to the evils of our old systems is still going on. The corporate media ignores it, the Deep State is currentlydoing everything to censor the voices propagating it, but it’s happening. And there’s nothing the ruling oligarchs can do to stop this revolution, though they’ll destroy the world before they surrender to it.
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