Why The Berniecrats Aren't Going To Back Down

The houses above, like tens of thousands of others in Detroit, obviously used to look very different. But then came the advent of what was at first seriously referred to as "free market capitalism," followed by what was initially called "job-creating" free trade, followed by what was at least honestly referred to as the Great Recession. Throughout these developments, most in Detroit and America overall have seen the opposite of freedom or job creation. They've seen their livelihoods taken away for the benefit of a few corporate executives. They've seen their tax dollars used to fund unending wars (the volunteers for which largely came from poor areas of color like the one pictured), along with trillion dollar bailouts for the billionaires who caused the economy to crash. They've seen the system be redesigned to make it much harder for people like them to live happy, secure lives.

They've also seen the way those responsible for their misfortune have overwhelmingly responded to it: by blaming the victims. Just like hatred towards blacks had to be propagated for slavery (and the parts of its legacy) to be widely accepted, hatred towards the poor has been instrumental in selling the neoliberal enterprise. Thus the countless statements over the last few decades from corporatist politicians, right wing media figures, and thus tens of millions of ordinary people about how poor people aren't trying hard enough, how they aren't entitled to anyone else's money, how they should be self-reliant, etc. At no point has the majority of the population accepted this classist ideology, but the fact that it's been pushed so aggressively has had the desired effect: everyone who's grown up in lower class lifestyles throughout the last forty years or so is familiar with the view that people like them shouldn't be complaining about their situation.

The unintended problem with this is that when people are told their struggles are illegitimate and they should just accept the status quo, they do the opposite of become compliant. Except in the statistically rare cases where they've shown to fall for this neoliberal gaslighting, those left behind by the current system have overwhelmingly come to reject the oligarchy's agenda in recent years. This is clear in how the majority of Republicans now support single payer health care, higher taxes on the rich, and ending neoliberal trade despite their different views on these things in the recent past. More importantly, this awakening has shown in the emergence and so far spectacular success of the Bernie Sanders revolution, with tens of millions of people now actively working towards bringing the changes our society desperately needs.

But once again, while the dissenters represent the majority, we haven't been able to do our work for this movement without intense disdain from within the beltway. The attacks against us involving Stalinism have thankfully been relatively rare, but the more mainstream anti-Sandersisms, as articulated by outlets like the Washington Post, haven't been any less disingenuous: Bernie Sanders and his supporters are fringe, are purist, are unrealistic, etc. When the majority of the country backs Sanders and his ideas, the best the oligarchs can do is try to convince those in that majority that they're naive. And once again, as I'll illustrate, such tactics have a way of backfiring.

To the rank and file establishment loyalists, corporate news columnists, and occasional Goldman executives that denigrate what we're doing, I'll say it in a more complete and direct way than I've said it before: the Berniecrats will not back down. Just like we wouldn't accept that the status quo shouldn't be challenged, we will not accept that challenging it is naive.

We will not accept that a party which has hurt people of color through mass incarceration more than Reagan did, reordered the global trade system to benefit large corporations, caused the Great Recession by deregulating Wall Street, made the difference in Senate votes for the Iraq War, set us up for a new crash by refusing to adequately re-regulate Wall Street, escalated Bush's wars, took us to the brink of climate collapse, and so much more is an adequate alternative to the GOP. Nor that this party did not undeniably and directly steal the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders, who the majority of the Democratic base has embraced.

We will not accept that goals like keeping corporate money out of politics, ending the paradigm of perpetual war, and single payer health care are unrealistic when all of Bernie's agenda is not just practical, but politically attainable due to the revolutionary dynamics that are emerging amid staggering economic inequity. Nor that the American people, who are found in every public opinion poll to support these reforms, will reject Sandersist candidates in the coming years for offering them.

More to the point, we will not accept that those on the receiving end of the destructive policies Sanders' critics often champion shouldn't see their concerns addressed. We will not tell the Detroit workers who've lost their homes because of neoliberal trade and Wall Street greed that they're naive for wanting these things stopped. We will not act like the tens of millions of Americans now living in third world conditions because of lack of an adequate minimum wage, lifetimes worth of student loan debt, and an outrageously racketeered health care system aren't realistic for wanting these problems alleviated. We will not dismiss the struggles of the millions of people who've been unjustly incarcerated, the tens of millions who can't afford their obscenely overpriced prescription drugs, or the countless families throughout the global south who've been literally torn apart by the U.S. military empire because anyone says doing so would be impractical.

The political establishment essentially used this strategy of telling disadvantaged groups that their concerns are naive as a means to beat Trump last year. As a result, enough lower class and nonwhite people chose to opt out of voting for Hillary Clinton, and enough downtrodden Rust Belt residents chose to vote against Clinton, that the unthinkable happened. And now, as the majority's concerns continue to be sneered at by the members of the McResistance, an insane specter looms: when a major U.S. terrorist attack inevitably occurs sometime soon, and the Trump regime no doubt lays the case for totalitarian lockdown in response, most Americans, I predict, will jump on board the push towards nationalistic fanaticism. Because at least the faux-populist right wing extremists in the White House are different from the "moderates," who mock the very idea of change and barely even pretend to care about the needs of ordinary people.

Society is on the brink of willing self-destruction because of the political establishment's condescending and callous attitude towards the have-nots, and Berniecrats aren't going to stand for it. We will continue promoting our progressively populist message as an alternative to the Trump team's reactionary temptations. It may not be what Paul Krugman wants us to do, but it's what the people who used to live in the houses above would probably want us to do.

Reminder To Democratic Loyalists: You're Now The Chief Opponents Of Progressive Change

Inflated leverage over the political system is rarely the main method dictatorships use to maintain their control. Every time an oppressive regime has been established, the powerful have fabricated every kind of justification they can come up with for continuing the status quo. They say it's the will of deities, natural principles, and other larger forces for the hierarchy to have reached astronomical proportions. They say the victims of the self-serving system they've created are poor or powerless because they've made themselves so. They say the current order is inextricably in place, and all efforts at change are naive attempts to rebel against reality itself.

So what do we make, amid this sickeningly advanced stage in maybe the most effective authoritarian takeover in history, of the justifications provided by the power structure's gofers in the Democratic Party? The Republicans have largely rallied support for the oligarchy with the mentioned tactics of claiming natural principles are at work and blaming the victims, but the neoliberal propaganda aimed towards the left has been less blatant-and thus more insidious.

The goal of the Democratic establishment propagandists is not so much to convince ordinary people that the status quo is justified, but to make them accept the institutions and leaders that keep the status quo in place. When Democratic leaders serve the oligarchy's interests, they blame their actions on scapegoats, or hide that they took those actions at all, so that their supporters remain complicit.

Like all pro-status quo deceptions, its laughably transparent nature from the perspective of those who haven't accepted it is matched by its unassailable logic from the perspective of those who have. The downside to this spasm of revolutionary momentum that's come in the last two years is that it's made the pro-establishment strains more vocal as well; as was definitely not the case a few years ago when the neoliberal order was safe and sound, rank and file supporters of the Deep State's Democratic wing are coming out in full force these days.

One of my regular publicizing sites Medium abounds with often very popular articles from former Hillary Clinton supporters who feel the need to keep aggressively pushing their leaders' repugnant agenda. Online forums being besieged by comments from usually rude and hostile Democratic loyalists is more common than ever. And this typical hostility from establishment liberals hasn't just been widely observed on the Internet.

This phenomenon represents an inevitable point in every transformative movement which Sanders campaign organizer Becky Bond calls the counterrevolution, wherein the supporters of the status quo lash out when they see change coming around the corner. In that case, we shouldn't let it bother us as it shows our effort is succeeding. But in the hopes of expanding this movement, I'll give a friendly reminder to the counterrevolution's members: by attacking Bernie Sanders' revolution, you are acting as the biggest obstacle there is right now to progressive change.

When establishment loyalists attack Bernie's revolution, they are attacking the only hope the Democratic Party has of ever again becoming a dominant force. The Democratic Party in its current form, along with the dangerous agenda it represents, are disfavored by respectively around two thirds and at least six out of ten of the country, while Bernie Sanders is America's most popular politician and his goals are supported by the majority in virtually every respect. Naturally, the Democrats have been beyond decimated in the last eight years, while the Berniecrat candidates have so far won by far larger proportions.

Already Berniecrats are breathing new life into the party, with Montana democratic socialist Rob Quist leading in deep red Montana, while establishment Democrat Jon Ossoff has performed relatively poorly in his bid for Congress. By backing the latter type of candidate out of spite for Bernie Sanders, loyal Democrats are ironically exhibiting the same behavior of the Bernie or Busters they like so much to decry.

To be fair, when establishment loyalists judge the Sanders wing to be unworthy of their support, they're not doing so with the same kinds of justifications Bernie or Busters had for not supporting Clinton. Despite all the inaccurate stereotypes and old primary attack lines that Clintonists still direct at Sanders supporters, we're objectively ideal allies in the progressive cause.

Sandersists are disproportionately women and people of color, shattering the "Bernie Bro" characterization. We've shown ourselves to be typically very committed to working for change, as evidenced by how we've built a serious presidential campaign and a major movement without any help from the corporate elite. And our top goals are to get money out of politics, end the paradigm of perpetual war, bring about social and economic equality, and bring about climate action, regardless of which party we're holding accountable in those regards. By demonizing us, loyal Democrats are attacking an essential resource for bringing about positive change.

And when loyal Democrats say Sanders supporters are unrealistic or naive, as I've illustrated, they're directly setting themselves up against the goals many of them want. The image above is satire. But its sentiment is accurate; those who align with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party are supporting an agenda that represents 21st century civilization's endgame, and the consequences of that will soon make themselves impossible to ignore.

Because of the Democratic establishment's embrace of the militaristic foreign policy that's done so much to increase terrorism, a major attack on the United States will soon occur. Because of the Democratic establishment's cheating the only candidate who had any real chance to beat Trump, the administration will use the crisis as an opening for staggering autocratic takeovers and an insane burst of military aggression. Because of the Democratic establishment's pushing lately for war with Russia, the aggression will include just that. And because of the Democratic establishment's refusal to adequately re-regulate Wall Street or fight climate change, this will all take place amid an epic economic crash that's already in its early stages, and yet more increasingly intensified steps towards environmental apocalypse.

History doesn't care whether anyone thinks the status quo is moral or sustainable. Monumental injustice and instability are what await us so long as the status quo is in place, and no number of Medium articles asserting the contrary are going to change that.

The Democratic Establishment's Strange Behavior

Foreword: I recommend you read this linked article before continuing.

The Washington Post put out a column yesterday, titled Bernie Sanders' strange behavior, which expressed some adamant concerns over the need for unity among the Trump regime's opponents. But the Post, like the Democratic Party establishment that it represents, is not really helping in regards to that cause.

Over the last few years, the DNC and its media gofers have at times offered some odd comments and actions for a group pushing for party unity.

To wit:

• They actively conspired within the DNC leadership to interfere with the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, and at one point considered painting Bernie Sanders' Jewish heritage in a negative light as a way to hurt his campaign.
• They went far beyond just considering interfering in the democratic process, having rigged or allowed their allies to rig the Democratic debate schedule, the major media coverage, and even the voting system itself against Sanders.
• After nakedly attacking Bernie Sanders in both personal and ideological ways on a notable amount of occasions, the Washington Post and other pro-Democratic establishment publications like it ran a similarly disingenuous and hateful campaign against Jill Stein and then Tulsi Gabbard. They're currently working on a Bernie smear campaign 2.0, with pro-establishment liberal columnists having started to frequently put out articles attacking him and his supporters as "purists," "Russian agents," etc.
• Speaking of which, McCarthyism, McCarthyism, McCarthyism, and-wait for it-McCarthyism. 

But the most puzzling development this week is their reaction to Sanders' deciding to keep Georgia special election candidate Jon Ossoff candidate at arms length. When Sanders hesitated to endorse Ossoff (which he's done today) no doubt partly because of the favorable treatment Ossoff is receiving from the DNC and the DCCC in comparison with their abandonment earlier this month of Kansas Berniecrat James Thompson, establishment Democrats acted strangely outraged that someone they know stands against them in almost every way would be wary of jumping on their latest public outreach effort.

"It's an odd statement to make about a guy who has been running in such a high-profile race and in whom Democrats have invested so much money and blood, sweat and tears," reads said Post article about Sanders' bizarrely sensible statement on Ossoff.

Establishment Democrats qualify this baffled response to Sanders' behavior by the fact that they don't seem to really know much about what he stands for and what his mission is, so perhaps it should be taken at face value-that they truly don't know enough about Sanders to view his actions correctly. But it's an odd thing for them to do in regards to a guy who they've so happily claimed to want to be like.

Here's a tellingly strange response to Sanders' Ossoff statement from Daily Kos Elections' David Nir, as quoted from two of his tweets the other day:

"Bernie Sanders isn't helping—he's hurting. He should either endorse Ossoff and raise money for him, or keep his silence."

"On second thought, Sanders shouldn't endorse Ossoff. He should just remain silent and not hurt the efforts of those of us helping in."

Perhaps the strangest thing about this is that the Democratic establishment isn't vouching for the progressivism of more eagerly Sanders-endorsed candidates like Montana's Rob Quist, even as they're doing so for another Democrat of pretty questionable credentials. That would be how unlike Quist, Ossoff does not seem to support a $15 minimum wage despite running in one of the poorest states in the country.

As Heavy.com notes, Ossoff does want to raise the federal minimum wage from its current slavery status of $7.25, but not explicitly to $15, and only to the loosely defined extent that it's "indexed to cost of living." Indeed, there's a lot in that for progressives to be suspicious of.

Yet establishment Democrats defend their full-on support for Ossoff by noting the terrain on which Democrats are trying to win. Ossoff's more ardent supporters like to say he's simply doing the best he can to advance progressive goals while running in an area that's highly conservative, but partisan labels aside, those in the overwhelmingly impoverished southwest would probably receive a platform of populist economic reform very well.

That entire justification-we can't step outside the perceived mainstream of the political spectrum, or else voters will dismiss us as fringe-can be applied in the minds of establishment Democrats to seemingly every situation, even the one of Ossoff in the radical change-eager south. Sure, they like to reason, the majority of the country is behind Bernie Sanders on virtually every issue, but he and candidates like him just can't win because he's a "socialist" or a "radical."

It all makes the Democratic establishment's decision not to back Thompson, Quist and others even more conspicuous. Perhaps they're much more concerned, as their behavior over the last four decades or so suggests, with helping their corporate and wealthy donors than the voters they need to succeed. But they're really contradicting themselves here, creating divisions where they say they want unity by continuing to favor oligarchy-friendly candidates and goals over most of the electorate that they're counting on to bring them back into power.

Whether this is all a series of wayward comments and actions or something more targeted at Sanders' brand of progressivism, it's unlikely to help Democrats "come together" very soon. And the current Democratic leadership, perhaps unsurprisingly, is proving a questionable messenger for that cause.

We Will Never Get Over It

Establishment Democrats, I've got some bad news: Bernie Sanders supporters will never get over what happened last year.

Since the end of the primaries, in every way and from every level of rank within the Clinton cabal, we've been told that we need to quit whining and get behind the camp that won. And no matter that I ultimately obeyed them to an extent by advocating for voting for Hillary Clinton in swing states and Jill Stein in non-swing states; in all other respects, I haven't conceded to the Democratic establishment an inch. And neither have virtually all other Sandersists, with nearly half of Democrats, most of whom are no doubt Sanders supporters, now not feeling represented by their party. The fact that the neoliberal Democrats narrowly win the title of the lesser evil doesn't entitle them to the loyalty or even respect of me and the other Sanders supporters, and in this piece I'm going to articulate why this is the case.

There are probably countless good reasons for Sanders supporters not to align themselves with the Democratic establishment. The incredible condescension and hostility that was directed towards us by Hillary Clinton's many allies in the press; the DNC's attempts to undermine our candidate; the saga of ways corporate Democrats have undermined our agenda throughout not just the 2016 primaries but for the last several decades. But out of them all, there are two that work as conclusive deal-breakers.

The first one is the rigging that took place in the primaries. This issue has been ignored and dismissed so much by the corporate media that even many Sanders supporters themselves don't seem to be aware of it, but it's very real. What I'm talking about is the fact that even with the efforts from the DNC and the major media to hurt Sanders' campaign, he would have won the primaries in a landslide were it not for the efforts from overzealous pro-Clinton state party and state government officials to directly rig the primary contests in favor of their candidate.

Consider the following scenario: it's the beginning of February in 2016, and Bernie Sanders has just narrowly defeated Hilary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses. In this alternate reality, the Iowa Democratic Party hasn't very likely stolen the contest from Sanders through a series of autocratic "re-staged" vote counts, arbitrary coin flips, and then a strange refusal to disclose the exact vote count. As result Sanders, who was only around twelve points behind before the Iowa vote, quickly jumps to a near tie with Clinton in an average of polls. After he's also won the contests in New Hampshire and Nevada (the latter of which hasn't been slanted towards Clinton by the backroom deals of Harry Reid in this scenario) Sanders is narrowly in the lead.

The only thing that saves Clinton in this scenario from early obliteration are her large victories in all of the southern states, the contests of which were all scheduled for the first half of March. But Sanders manages to keep the race very close during this period through his substantial victories in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Missouri (all of which haven't experienced statistically impossible vote model irregularities in this reality). After that, it's almost all uphill for Sanders. While fairly far behind in pledged delegates and national polls following Clinton's many victories in the contests from March 1 to March 15, by the end of the month he's established a firm national lead and reduced his delegate deficit from the hundreds to the dozens. He's able to do this by winning every single state since the middle of March due to how, in this scenario, Arizona's March 22 contest wasn't fraught with massive voter suppression.

By the end of April, Sanders is both leading in every national poll and narrowly leading in pledged delegates because the New York Democratic primary wasn't mired with massive voter suppression and electoral fraud, and because his margin of victory in Rhode Island wasn't reduced by many instances of closed polling locations. By the end of May, Sanders is by far the frontrunner in national polls and pledged delegates, and is close to becoming the frontrunner in superdelegates, because in this scenario many of the polling places in Indiana weren't closed before the state's primary, the Nevada Democratic caucus wasn't run in a way which deliberately shut out dozens of Sanders delegates, and thousands of votes in the Kentucky and Oregon Democratic primaries weren't mysteriously lost. By the end of the primaries in June, Sanders is sure to be the nominee because the contests in Puerto Rico and California weren't very likely stolen from him through  staggering amounts of voter suppression. He then, as we all know, defeated Trump in an epic landslide.

For every Sanders supporter, the fact that this didn't take place because of the actions of the Democratic establishment is of course too awful to forgive. What's far worse for not just Sanders supporters but everyone else, though, and the second big reason we will never get over what happened last year, are the ultimate consequences of this subtle coup against Sanders.

There are numerous reasons clear to anyone who's paying attention to the dynamics at work in the world for why the theft of Sanders' presidency was a very bad move for the Democratic elite to make. There's the prospect we're facing under a Trump presidency of exponentially increased risk of terror attacks against the U.S. and the geopolitical catastrophes that those attacks are sure to set off, in contrast to the peaceful foreign policy future America would be entering into were Sanders allowed to become president. There's the prospect of the Trump administration staging a fascist takeover following those attacks in contrast to the era of benevolent government behavior that Sanders would create. But by far the worst thing that's coming about because of Sanders' so-called loss, as Caitlin Johnstone wrote right before the primaries ended, is the climatic effect of Sanders' absence from the White House:

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who has placed mitigating climate change front and center of his platform. He is the only one whose policy is strong enough to save us, and the only one with a voting record that backs up his commitment to enacting it in full.

A vote for anyone else is a vote for the end of your species. If a few years from now, you can look your kids in the eye as they fight wars for water and run from one natural disaster to the next, if you can look them in the eye and tell them “I voted for this, I put saving some billionaire’s share portfolio ahead of your health and safety,” then go right ahead. Your choice. Our children may be fighting for their lives in exactly the same way, but at least my conscience will be clear.

It will be bitter consolation, though. I’d rather them be thriving together in a new age of peace and safety than me having the grim satisfaction of an empty “I told you so.”

Look mom, no future.

Well, that's not necessarily going to be the case. Even as the earth's average temperature drifts very close to the dangerous two-degrees-above-the-pre-industrial-average mark, there's hope yet for the climate as the majority of Americans who acknowledge climate change work feverishly to transform our energy system through for now purely bottom-up activism. And while we can't do much to stop the geopolitical crises that the Trump administration is on track for creating, we can stop its coming attacks on democracy if we play our cards right. Indeed, the people themselves have just as much or more potential than a President Sanders would have to set history on a new course. And Caitlin Johnstone herself, in spite of the fatalistic tone of the article above, believes this.

Still, while Bernie's revolution could very well bring about massive amounts of change to the world in these next few years, grievous harm is also likely to be done as a result of what the Democratic establishment did last year. As John Sanbonmatsu wrote days before the pivotal 2016 New York primary: "This is not a normal election year. It’s the end game. It is a crisis, in the original sense of the ancient Greek word, krisis — the turning point in an illness when a patient either dies, or recovers. Except that the patient, in this case, is both the American body politic and the living earth itself." And in the coming years, it will become clear which choice establishment Democrats made when faced with that crossroads, along with why we will never get over it.

Why I Fear The Democratic Establishment Just As Much As I Fear Trump

People's interest in the book 1984 has been more prevalent than ever this year. The reason for this isn't hard to guess; they're correctly getting the sense that with the rise of Trump-or rather the far smarter and scarier figures who rule from behind his throne-our government is set to try to eliminate the pretense of freedom and democracy. The reason I'm participating in this spontaneous movement to read Orwell's warning, though, having finally begun to look at a copy of it, has to do with more than fear of the Trump administration. It also involves my similarly present fear of the Democratic Party establishment.

That's right. I view the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as just as dangerous to democracy and independent thought as I do the Trump regime. And the object of my fear isn't as non-threatening as it appears; as the political pendulum thankfully begins to swing away from the interests of Trump and the GOP, neoliberal Democrats are doing everything they can to use this as a means to regain power. And in the meantime, they're able to do a lot of damage by partnering up with the Trump government to advance their shared goals of economic exploitation, perpetual war, and governmental efforts to fight dissent through mass surveillance, state censorship, and the persecution of whistleblowers.

So in the following paragraphs, I'm going to be providing in depth why I see the Democratic establishment as nearly or just as fascist as the Trump regime. I'll do this by breaking up into three parts the troubling actions that Democratic elites have taken in these last two years.

Part 1: the primaries

It at first seemed like nothing more than a healthy and interesting political game. And indeed, the contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was in many ways a beneficial process, with the Democratic Party, for the first time in a very long while, having the opportunity to question whether it's on a good path. Due to that aspect of the primaries, Rolling Stone wrote: "Hillary and Bernie have waged campaigns full of vision, ideas and promise — and have shown us the best in American politics."

What ultimately turned things dark and nasty, though, was that this contest was not simply a rivalry between the politics of idealism and the politics of compromise. This was much more complex and serious than that polite, mutually pleasing assessment of Bernie vs Hillary; this was a fight between the belief that economic injustice, warmongering, and other atrocities are somehow acceptable if they're perpetrated by one's own party, and the belief that these things are acceptable under no circumstances. While most of Clinton's supporters liked to think otherwise, the contrasts between the two candidates made this fact objectively clear; Clinton's campaign was funded by many of the country's most powerful (and dangerous) corporations and oligarchs, while Sanders' campaign was funded almost entirely by his largely lower-class supporters. Clinton's record was filled with support for "free trade" deals, Wall Street bailouts, and other such crimes of the neoliberal era, while Sanders had none of these past demons to reckon with. Clinton had been instrumental in bringing about many of America's legendary recent foreign policy missteps, while Sanders, despite not having a record that was exactly anti-war, would right now be on his way to ending America's paradigm of perpetual war if he were allowed to become president.

I say "allowed" because so much was at stake in this primary election, and the powers invested in maintaining the status quo had so much potential to influence the contest's outcome, that Sanders was deprived of becoming the nominee in a truly Orwellian affront to democracy. The subtle coup against Sanders, as I like to call it, started with the Democratic National Committee's efforts to deny Sanders useful exposure by arranging a minimal amount of Democratic presidential debates. As the months went by, this proved to be the least of the institutional obstacles that had been put in front of Sanders-and I'm not just talking about the contest's eleven closed primaries and the corporate media's blackout of the Sanders campaign. As I've illustrated, through numerous instances of voter suppression and electoral fraud, Iowa, Nevada, Massachusetts, Missouri, Arizona, New York, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California were stolen from Sanders, while his victories in Oklahoma, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Indiana were manipulated to be smaller than they would have been if they were run fairly. It's more than reasonable to say that if all of those tactics had not been employed to sabotage Sanders, he would have come out as the primary's landslide winner.

The truly Orwellian aspect of what happened, however, was not so much the fact that Democratic elites rigged the primaries, but the fact that they denied doing so. The Democratic establishment's main media gofers at The New York Times responded to the cries of fraud from Sanders supporters with the egregiously condescending headline: Bernie Sanders and Rigged Elections: Sometimes You Just Lose. Such efforts to bury the true history of the 2016 Democratic primaries have since then been participated in by many others, even one of Sanders' supporters Bill Maher, who said in his post-California primary episode of Real Time that Clinton had beaten Sanders "fair and square." Sickeningly, the show's audience applauded at this remark.

When I look back on things like that, I can't help thinking of the power that the government had in 1984 to revise the past in any way it wanted. The Party, as it was called, could claim that it had invented the airplane or produce a completely absurd version of history, and no one could disprove its lies because all of the world's books, newspapers, and other means of information were stealthily revised whenever the government found the need to change the public's view of the past. Thanks to this tactic, whenever the Party did a historical revision, the true facts existed only in the minds of those who cared to remember them, and those people were readily denounced and vaporized if they questioned the new narrative. So is the case with the Democratic Party's campaign to pull the wool over the public's eyes as to the rigging of the 2016 primaries, and to denounce anyone who still brings up the true version of what happened as a "sore loser" and a "conspiracy theorist." And usually, of course, these denunciations are followed up by vaporization in the form of censorship imposed upon the offending individual.

Regardless of whether it has me denounced and vaporized, I'm continuing to the next phase of this report on the Owerllianism of the modern Democratic Party.

Part 2: the general election

After the "Democratic" primaries ended, and things moved on to the "Democratic" convention, a great deal of new Orwellian actions by the Democratic establishment appeared at one time. Foremost among them the emergence of the party's modern-day McCarthyite campaign.

In the wake of the not-so-shocking revelation on July 22 by Wikileaks that the DNC had actively conspired to bring down Bernie Sanders, the first thing many Democrats did was to jump to the at-the-time murky and still very much uncertain conclusion that Putin's hackers gave Wikileaks the emails. This move, as Current Affairs' Nathan Robinson wrote on July 27, clearly had an ulterior motive: "It should be noted, first, that all of these figures are supporters of the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, and that the hack of the DNC emails proved deeply embarrassing for the Clinton campaign. The shift from discussing the emails themselves to discussing who leaked them is tremendously helpful in taking negative attention away from the DNC and Clinton. As one BuzzFeed writer put it, 'Now Russia is the story.'"

When reading that, I can't help thinking of the tactics that the Party used in 1984 to distract the public from its evils by re-directing attention towards hatred for whatever nation the fictional country of Oceania is currently at war with.

As we would learn later, this was just the beginning of the Democratic establishment's new Cold War. But in the meantime, the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was filled with its share of Orwellian aspects. There was the display of clearly ant-semitic Bernie Sanders t-shirts at the convention, as pictured above and as documented on Reddit, near posters that made Hillary Clinton look like a North Korean dictator. There were efforts from the evidently anti-Sanders organizers of the convention to put the thumb down on Bernie by giving his delegates a deliberately unpleasant experience, having after a certain point used any excuse they could find to throw out people with anti-war signs, anti-TPP signs, and anyone else who seemed to oppose the party's status quo. Speaking of which, perhaps the most disturbing part of the convention were the fascist cries of "USA! USA" in response to general John Allen's militaristic DNC speech. All of these incidents display a grotesque culture within the Democratic Party's establishment of autocracy, conformity, and barely-veiled contempt for outsiders, and they foreshadowed well the things that this Big Brother-esque entity would do next.

The time between the convention and the election was filled with a series of intense efforts from the Democratic elite to crush progressive dissent. Namely the demonization of the Green Party, and the demonization of anyone who generally criticized Hillary Clinton in a way that was deemed to be related to Russia. The former propaganda campaign was explained in August by Counterpunch's Margaret Kimberly as follows: "The screeds have become more and more extreme and defy the run of the mill rationales that progressives use to justify remaining within Democratic Party lines. Holding one’s nose and voting for the 'lesser evil' democrat is passé. So is fear of Republican judicial appointments. Concern for abortion rights doesn’t cut it anymore. Liberals are no longer going through the motions of criticizing the Democrat. Instead they openly show love for Hillary Clinton and disdainfully pile on Stein and Baraka with fury. The blog Wonkette called Jill Stein 'cunty' and 'a mendacious nihilist piece of shit.' The site Very Smart Brothas declared that a vote for Stein was akin to putting it in the trash. They also threw in a dig at Cornel West because he dared to criticize Barack Obama. The Huffington Post chose to deride Green Party convention delegates because they ate at McDonald’s. Gawker tried to link Ajamu Baraka to holocaust denial. His unassailable human rights credentials didn’t mean much when the media decided to go into attack mode."

That's some hard-core hostility towards those who dared to question the Democratic Party, reminiscent of the events put together by the Party in 1984 that consisted of getting a crowd of people together and having them express two minutes of pure, wild hatred towards the enemies of the status quo. So was in other ways the case with the McCarthyism exercised so frequently by establishment Democrats throughout those months.

In her recent article looking back on the rampant Russia-related scapegoating of establishment Democrats throughout the general election, particularly that of Rachel Maddow, Caitlin Johnstone writes: "There’s no public figure who’s been such a virulently Russophobic nutcase and so relentlessly aggressive in their attacks upon third parties as one Rachel Anne Maddow. The photo in question [of Jill Stein sitting at a table years ago with Russian leaders], of course, was taken long before Americans were being told every single day by every talking head on TV that the Russian president was someone they’re supposed to hate and fear. It was taken in 2015 when Stein took a trip to Moscow to attend an event at which Putin spoke, during which, as the phenomenal Glenn Greenwald reported last year, she made a video in which she 'criticized Russia for diverting scarce resources into military spending while its people suffered.' This somehow got twisted into an act of treason in which Americans were duped into imagining that Russia was a nation they'd considered an enemy back in 2015 in an incredible feat of revisionist Orwellian doublethink."

The fake Democratic campaign to blame the Russians, for which the stories above are just a sample, served as yet another foreshadowing to what this terrifying cabal of "liberal" fascists would do post-election.

Part 3: November 9 to the present

When one really thinks about it, it becomes reasonable to construe that a Hillary Clinton victory would have spelled a similarly Orwellian future to the one spelled by a Trump victory. If Clinton were president right now, I believe the United States would be quickly inching towards a new Cold War with Russia that could easily turn hot, while anyone who disagrees with the president's course of action would be frequently labeled a Kremlin puppet. None of this is to say, though, that Clinton's allies haven't done their best to bring about that scenario regardless of Trump's victory.

Establishment Democrats wasted no time in blaming all the convenient scapegoats for their spectacular 2016 failure. As also reported last year by Glenn Greenwald, Democratic elites pushed all the responsibility for their loss onto hypothetical Russian hackers, third party voters, and even Bernie Sanders. And they then, naturally, proceeded to use their flimsy evidence against the former scapegoat as an excuse to go on with the new Cold War idea for as long as they still had control over the White House. In the last months of Obama's term, he capitalized on the Russia narrative to expand the Deep State's power, push sanctions on Russia, and, most Orwellianly of all, essentially establish his own Ministry of Truth.

No matter that the latter action gave Trump even more power as soon as he took office. By the calculations of the establishment Democrats and the Deep State, it seems, allowing Trump to have their tools was worth the risk, as he certainly won't dismantle those tools, and giving him access to them is a small price to pay for them being able to resume power in 2020 with all the assets they put together for themselves in 2016. At that point, assuming all has gone well for them, their long-planned war against Russia will be able to finally commence. And in the meantime, they're doing a great job at consolidating and expanding the base of people who would potentially support this project.

Once again, Orewellianism is deeply present in the recent actions of establishment Democrats. With the help of the "liberal" echo chamber that Democratic elites began to lay the goundwork for nearly a decade ago, Rachel Maddow and the other gofers for this masked brand of fascism have been constructing a powerful and resilient political machine. They're attempting (thankfully so far with little success) to have their useful gofer David Brock create a "Brietbart for the Left" which expands on the Thought Police-esque army of pro-Clinton internet trolls that Brock set up during the 2016 election. They're using their staggering amount of influence over public discourse in America to get the relatively small but substantial facet of the population that still supports them to denounce and vaporize (in this case through purely social means) anyone who stands up to the Democratic establishment. And they're continuing to try to revise the public's view of history, namely by pushing the narrative that the the Democratic Party's status quo shouldn't change because it's already a mechanism for helping the lower classes. (For instance, Democratic apologist David Greenberg wrote in December after listing a laughable series of easily refuted lies and exaggerations about how the Democratic Party has consistently stood up for the 99% that "The calls for Democrats to become more 'populist' seem to amount to a matter of tone — marshaling an emotionally satisfying us-against-them rhetoric that blasts banks, big business and the 1%.")

The truth of the matter, as most Americans have thankfully by now found out, is that the Democratic Party in its current form is not an ally but a dissent-crushing, cruel cabal that's been a reliable tool of the oligarchy since the Carter administration. And in many ways, it's even more useful to the oligarchy than the Republican Party is, because it's capable of masking its corporatist and power-serving agenda behind a nauseatingly hypocritical veil of populist-sounding rhetoric about how its leaders are "fighting for us." So naturally, it's very much capable of employing fascist tactics like the ones documented in the event of a brewing public rebellion against it. And as just such an anti-Democratic establishment movement has emerged throughout these last two years, the Democratic establishment has responded in a predictable way. As HA Goodman wrote in 2015, George Orwell would not have voted for Hillary Clinton, and he no doubt wouldn't have approved of what Clinton and those who share her political brand have done since then.

The good news is that as wasn't the case with the Party in 1984, the Democratic Party establishment hasn't been able to make it so that its opponents have almost no opportunities to mobilize. Without asking the approval of David Greenberg, Bernie Sanders and his vast coalition have ignited a movement post-election to overwhelm the neoliberal Democrats, and they're so far for the most part successful, with Berniecrats having taken over numerous state and local aspects of the Democratic Party. Will this ultimately lead to a transformation of the entire party? That's no guarantee, given how Debbie Wasserman Schultz clone Tom Perez is about to be undemocratically appointed by Democratic insiders to the DNC chairmanship. But no amount of the Democratic establishment's tactics can change the fact that it's trying to do something that can't be done, which is to endlessly elevate a state of oppression within society. History has shown that revolt among the public is inevitable in the event of a state-perpetrated consolidation of power, especially one which involves increased economic inequality, and the Democratic establishment is experiencing just such a revolt.

For now, though, I remain scared.

Trump Is Right About The Major Media Being Fake News. There, I Said It.

As a strong believer in the Trump administration's ability to do great harm to our democracy, I was naturally left with an ominous feeling when, during a press conference three days ago, the president demonized the media for more than a little often portraying him negatively. When I witnessed the reactions that this incident typically received from the representatives of the media establishment itself, though, I started to get a similarly uneasy feeling.

The narrative that the major media and its fans have consistently and slyly tried to promote following Trump's remarks is one which has left little room for nuance. Outlets like CNN and The New York Times, we've been told in ways subtle and not almost every time we've been exposed to talk of Trump's comments, are obviously very reliable sources if Trump attacks them. How dare he call organizations like these fake news, the aghast TV pundits have said, earnestly frowning at this egregious offense while conversing on split screens (I'm talking about something I actually saw, by the way). Perhaps to protest the injustice of it, they'll organize a "National Freedom of the Press Day" where everyone tries to constantly read and watch the information that they provide.

If you're someone from my target audience, you no doubt know why I'm refusing to defend the major media. And if not, you can read Caitlin Johnstone's brilliant and righteous explanation for why she isn't defending these organizations either. But whether or not you insofar agree with me, I think we ought to revisit some of the things the major media outlets have done to lose the respect of me and more than two-thirds of the rest of the American public.

Again, I'd like to make it clear that not all of what these media outlets produce can't be trusted, or that the way Trump attacked them isn't petty and hyperbolic. But the fact remains that in spite of all the hand-wringing about the freedom of the press being endangered, we already have a mainstream media that's been manipulated towards being a tool for narrow, power-serving interests. By this I of course mean that virtually all of the major American news organizations are controlled by powerful corporations.

It hasn't always been like this. Before corporations and the super rich pulled off their coup within the U.S. government around forty years ago, more than 50 companies controlled the majority of American media sources. But by the time Bill Clinton signed the infamous Telecommunications Act, that number had been cut into a fifth of what it had once been, with Clinton's 1996 deregulation law acting only as an extra push to the rolling snowball of media consolidation that had been happening for decades. So it was no surprise that by the early 2000's (when 5 corporations controlled the majority of the media), these news organizations famously showed a staggering amount of bias towards the interests of the corporate state, with the major media having made no effort to question the Bush administration's WMD claims prior to the Iraq War, purposely taken down the campaign of Howard Dean, and generally acted as propaganda outlets for the White House and its agenda.

Since then, the concentration of media ownership has gotten even worse if that's possible, with 5 companies controlling 90% of U.S. media outlets. This has naturally made it so that the mainstream media's behavior during this last election cycle, which I'll mainly be focusing on in this article, has been stunningly power-serving.

I'll of course start with big media's coverage of the early months of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sanders himself has found it worthwhile to review the way he was treated by the corporate media in his book Our Revolution, wherein he rightfully complained about the media blackout which surrounded him during that time. Just as the major media goes out of its way to cover things like sports and celebrity gossip rather than things like climate change and economic injustice, wrote Sanders, it predictably went out of its way to cover things like Donald Trump and trivial political gossip rather than Sanders and the issues he was trying to bring to the table. He recounted his experiences with the major news networks wherein the interviewers, reporters or debate moderators tried to steer clear of focusing on Sanders' message and instead asked him questions like "Do you think it’s fair that Hillary’s hair gets a lot more scrutiny than yours does?" (he was really asked that, by the way). He cited the incredible statistics about just how much effort the major media put into avoiding giving him exposure, such as the fact that as of December 2015, Jeb Bush had received 56 minutes of combined network news coverage compared to Sanders' 10 minutes.

The media blackout of the Sanders campaign was undeniably prevalent, and it greatly tipped the scales against him. However, what I find the most notable about the media's treatment of Sanders is not the instances where it ignored him and his ideas, but the instances where it directly attacked his anti-corporate agenda. As Thomas Frank assessed in his essay Swat Team about how the people who run outlets like the Washington Post viewed Sanders' goals, "As we shall see, for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed."

And so in a great deal of cases, the corporate media decided to skip the step of simply pretending like Sanders' ideas weren't relevant to the political scene and go straight to attacking them. This may have first been apparent in December 2015, when The New Yorker published an article titled What Hillary Clinton Gets (and Bernie Sanders doesn't) About Wall Street. The piece's author, who revealingly says that they work in the financial sector, attempts to distract from the fact that a new financial crisis is now inevitable because the economy has been largely turned over to a handful of mega-banks whose business model is based on debt accumulation and fraud by discussing the relative decline of profits on Wall Street in recent years, while not addressing the now greater-than-ever financialization of the economy. "So why is Sanders so obsessed with Glass-Steagall and the big banks?" they wrote after making this evasive counter-argument. "It seems to be a matter of personal style and historical tradition: as a socialist, Sanders is echoing political ancestors who railed against Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Everything. He also appears to be fighting the last war, of the 2008 financial crisis, out of a conviction that the 'too big to fail' banks still pose a systemic risk to the economy."

And as the campaign went on, the efforts from the Big Media (does my use of that term make me a "socialist" too?) to paint Sanders' agenda as something absurd continued. Also in December of 2015, recounts Frank in Swat Team, the New York Times published an article that criticized Sanders' focus on the hollowing out of the middle class by declaring that "Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality." You can stop with the class rhetoric now, Senator, most of the 7 in 10 Americans who have less than $1000 in savings just don't have money on their minds anymore. This condescending presumption about the beliefs of Americans, along with the slander that Sanders is a socialist, were both echoed, as Swat Team said, with a January Post article titled Nominating Sanders Would Be Insane which stated that Sanders couldn't win because "socialists don’t win national elections in the United States." Indeed, socialists probably don't. But non-socialists whose views are shared by the vast majority of Americans most certainly do.

And on and on went the barrage of neoliberal propaganda. Stop Reviling TARP, Frank recounts one Post editorial read regarding Sanders' opposition to the disastrous Wall Street bailouts before giving a simplistic and inaccurate history of the cause and aftermath of the financial crisis. Level With Us, Mr. Sanders, Frank says a headline piece in the Post blared indignantly before denouncing Sanders with the familiar charge of his ideas not being practical. And in some cases, as Frank wrote, the Post's attacks on Sanders got so nakedly pro-corporate that they were one step away from a literal endorsement of an oligarchic model for society:

The paper’s piling-up of the senator’s faults grew increasingly long and complicated. Soon after Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, the editorial board denounced him and Trump both as “unacceptable leaders” who proposed “simple-sounding” solutions. Sanders used the plutocracy as a “convenient scapegoat.” He was hostile to nuclear power. He didn’t have a specific recipe for breaking up the big banks. He attacked trade deals with “bogus numbers that defy the overwhelming consensus among economists.” This last charge was a particular favorite of Post pundits: David Ignatius and Charles Lane both scolded the candidate for putting prosperity at risk by threatening our trade deals. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer grew so despondent over the meager 2016 options that he actually pined for the lost days of the Bill Clinton presidency, when America was tough on crime, when welfare was being reformed, and when free trade was accorded its proper respect.

Hostility towards real Wall Street reform and a defense of the bailouts. The assertion that economic inequality isn't much of a problem. The lie that anyone who doesn't subscribe to the corporate ideology is on the political fringe. The implication that there isn't a plutocracy right now in America. The endorsement of neoliberal trade deals, mass incarceration, and neglecting the needs of the poor. When you pay close attention to the nature of the corporate media's attacks on Sanders throughout the campaign, it becomes clear that the oligarchs who control outlets like the Times and the Post aren't shy to use them as tools to promote their self-serving views.

And the media's offensive towards the Sandersist political brand has continued beyond the day that the media itself helped get Sanders out of race by declaring Clinton had clinched the nomination right before the California primary. To make extra sure that a non-corporate candidate wouldn't win in 2016, the corporate media started a smear campaign against the Green Party's Jill Stein after the convention, prompting Counterpunch's Peter Lavenia to write regarding the motivations behind this decision: "Marx once opined that 'the ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,' and in an era of (potential) mass political upheaval, the media plays an active role in silencing dissent to those ideas. Indeed, they are linked to the continued profits generated by the political order." To assure themselves that a non-corporate candidate couldn't have won in 2016 in any case, neoliberal columnists have been writing op-eds saying Sanders wouldn't have beaten Trump. And to make sure a non-corporate candidate doesn't win the next time around, the Washington Post has lately been slandering Tulsi Gabbard.

"Keep in mind," writes Caitlin Johnstone in another piece telling the corporate media to get over being called fake news, "this is the mainstream media crying victim right now. These people wear suits that cost more than I make in a year, and right now, they’re mopping up their crocodile tears with a sleeve that would feed both our families for a month. Somewhere along the line they’ve taken up the Taylor Swift challenge of loudly playing the victim card while quietly stealing the spoils, which is pretty much the whitest thing a person can do. Remember that these people were responsible for relentlessly broadcasting the WMD story, a fake news invention that sent the world in a war-driven death spiral from which we have not recovered. They’ve published so many pernicious lies as truth over the years that those reporting a great deal of trust in the mainstream media is now below ten percent. They invented the pejorative specifically to destroy alternative media, but now they’re all Scarlett O’Hara 'Hand me the smelling salts!' about it being used anywhere in their vicinity? Yeah, I’m not buying it."

When you see Trump and these news organizations dramatically clashing, you are witnessing a side show designed to keep you unaware that both of them depend on the other to keep their respective charades going. Trump needs the Democratic Party establishment that the corporate media represents to keep up his easy job of having a weak political opposition, and even Trump is smart enough to know it seeing as he preferred to be running against Hillary Clinton rather than Bernie Sanders. And the establishment Democrats need Trump's utter awfulness to keep up their role in the public eye as the "not exactly perfect" but necessary lesser evil.

It's time for the American people to stop buying into the kinds of manipulative, power-serving political theatrics that we're seeing with this outrage over the corporate media being accurately called fake news. And to include yet another article from Johnstone, that's exactly what they're doing.

How To Tell When An Oligarchy Is Scared For Its Life

It's somewhat fashionable these days for a political writer to conjur up a dystopian vision of what things will be like by the end of Donald Trump's first term, so here goes: it's the day after Election Day in 2020, and the president has just been re-elected. If you can call it an election. The results of this contest, as they were with that of 2016, have been fraught with examples of voter suppression and statistically impossible exit poll discrepancies. And the means Trump used to gain support this time around have been similarly sketchy.

In the aftermath of the great economic unraveling of the first half of 2017, the president's approval ratings, along with the public support for the political and economic system he represented, looked like it would never recover from their staggering dip. But then, of course, the United States was attacked by terrorists in an epic breech of national security. Following the tragedy, Trump's poll numbers rose astronomically, along with his tendency towards engaging in corrupt and authoritarian behavior. He (by which I mainly mean the far smarter and scarier people who control him) went on a terrifying rampage, suspending virtually all constitutional liberties, eliminating the few remaining protections set in place to protect the bottom 99% of the population, and ultimately creating the now undeniable climate catastrophe we're experiencing today, all with the blessing of his unwilling-to-fight "opponents" in the Democratic Party establishment.

And when this inevitably started to bring Trump's poll numbers back down, he fulfilled the plan he'd once hinted at of starting a new War in Iraq to "take their oil." All of this, along with the massive efforts made by the Trump administration to take away the voting rights of nonwhites, caused Republicans to continue their eight-year streak of increased domination over electoral politics, with the GOP having retained the House and the Senate in 2018 and "won" the White House by a large margin in 2020. Meanwhile, the economy has become more unfairly ordered than ever, with the bottom 99% being mostly very poor while those at the very top enjoy as much wealth as ever due to the trillions of dollars they were awarded in bailout money after the 2017 economic crash.

As the recent behavior of Trump and Friends indicates, though, they expect a very different future. When one looks closely enough at how the benefactors of the political and economic status quo act these days, it becomes clear that they're trying to mask a deep, sometimes subconscious sense that the system they've created is in its death throes.

It can't be a coincidence that right after the existence of the neoliberal Democratic establishment came into peril with the rise of Bernie Sanders and his army of change-hungry activists, Democratic elites took wildly extreme measures to try to hold their crumbling base of support together, having started a clearly McCarthyite campaign and blamed everyone but themselves for their November defeat.

It's impossible not to at least speculate that Trump and his fellow oligarchs have grown very worried about their beloved neoliberal system being overthrown when, after a series of notably popular movements to take society back from corporate domination emerged in the form of Occupy, the Bernie Sanders campaign, and others, they filled their new government with former corporate executives, planned for the creation of an unprecedented police state, and threw out baseless claims about terrorist attacks to keep the public in a state of useful fear.

It's blatantly clear that those in power have largely become aware that their empire is close to crumbling when many members of the billionaire class have started seriously preparing in recent years for a coming crackup of civilization as we know it, often one which involves an uprising among the lower classes.

That last example is different from the first two, as it reveals certain members of the oligarchy have already surrendered themselves to the fact that their system is certain to fail, but for the most part, it seems, the world's elites are reacting to the growing signs that business as usual can't continue by doubling down on their faith in it. Through the launching of increasingly absurd propaganda campaigns, the prepared assembly of autocratic states, and the wholesale takeover of the government by big business, elites are attempting with redoubled vigor to take more control so that when the uprising inevitably comes, they'll be better suited to counter it.

And they have good reason to expect this challenge. In the 1930's, the last time economic inequality in America was as extreme as it is now, those left behind by an exploitation-based economic paradigm made every effort to break the power of corporations and the super-rich, and they very much succeeded. The 21st century's movement for economic justice (and by extension environmental, social, and geopolitical justice) are quickly moving in for the kill as the ever widening wealth gap forces public sentiment to become more and more favorable towards their agenda. And when this populist energy hits critical mass around the year 2020, a likely nonviolent but highly disruptive and polarizing battle between the masses and the oligarchy will be under way.

Which of these two will prevail, though, and get to define the next phase of history? I'll take my best guess in another hypothetical scenario: It's the day after the election in 2020, and President Trump has just been defeated in a staggering landslide by a non-corporate funded opponent who may or may not be an 80-year-old but still fighting Bernie Sanders. This candidate's long path to victory has been tied in with the enormous gains that their supporters have made throughout these last four years.

Those gains started with the enormous movement ignited right after the 2016 election by Bernie Sanders and his supporters to remake the Democratic Party and the nation in their image. And they very much began to do so in 2017, having earned major victories in California and other states while generally making establishment Democrats uncomfortable. Their efforts picked up a lot of additional support from former Trump supporters and pro-establishment liberals when you-know-what happened to the economy in 2017.

And while things got frightening for those who professed their agenda in the aftermath of that year's terrorist attack, it proved to be a temporary setback. Many of them carried right on with their activism work away from the government's newly dissent-hostile gaze, giving them a wide series of victories in the local elections of November 2017. And as time went on, their fortunes for the most part improved, with Trump's approval ratings falling back to below 50% fairly quickly and many of those who'd thrown their support behind the administration amid the nationalistic fervor of the 2017 terrorist attacks' immediate aftermath moving back into the movement of the Berniecrats. This surprising resilience of anti-Trump and anti-neoliberal sentiments, which was no doubt due to the economic factors of the time, for the most part continued throughout the War in Iraq that the Trump administration launched to provoke renewed compliance from the public.

And the rest is an unsurprisingly uplifting story. Through relentless involvement in electoral politics, Sandersists took the majority in the Senate and the House in 2018 (they won the latter in spite of Republican gerrymandering thanks to Brand New Congress' brilliant strategy of running some candidates on the Republican ticket). Through intense public pressure, they provoked a widespread effort among local, state, and sometimes even national government officials to pursue creating a living wage for all, universal health care, and other necessary measures. And most fortunately, through a great deal of bottom-up climate action on their part, they were able to take advantage of a narrowing window of opportunity for averting climate meltdown.

As a result, the Trump administration became politically tied down in spite of its best (and most maniacal) efforts, poverty began to drop fairly rapidly, and things generally became less uncertain and more hopeful. This has been especially the case throughout the 2020 election cycle, wherein the overwhelming surge of progressively populist energy that elected Trump's successor has correlated with the emergence of a new and more resilient version of Occupy Wall Street. And while the president-elect faced some obstacles when overzealous pro-establishment Democratic primary election officials in several states perpetrated voter suppression and electoral fraud, the Democratic Party's state and local leadership has been taken over by Berniecrats so much throughout these last four years that the rigging of the 2020 Democratic primaries wasn't half as extensive as the rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries. So like so many other recent efforts from the Sandersists, their presidential insurgency prevailed.

Which of these futures do you think is most likely? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Self-Defeating Argument That The Democratic Party Represents Meaningful Change

Both morally and politically, the Democratic Party has failed after forty years of pivoting to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a great deal of people are now taking action to fix that. Bernie Sanders, despite having been prevented from becoming the new face of the party last year by pro-Clinton Democratic leaders, he and others are making another go at reforming the Democrats. And should this effort fail, these progressives will still have the option of letting the already sinking ship which is the Democratic Party go underwater and rally around an alternative organization.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Democratic base appears to be satisfied with their party's current form. During the 2016 campaign, more Democrats were found to be satisfied with Hillary Clinton than there were Republicans who felt the same about Donald Trump, and 56% of Democrats feel that their party represents them. While that latter figure would no doubt shrink to less than 50% if it were to include all of the left-leaning individuals who no longer affiliate with the party, an overhaul of the currently neoliberal Democratic leadership will be difficult for as long as so many Democrats remain unaware of what their party represents.

So in this piece, I'm going to attempt to change the minds of those who believe the Democratic Party in its current form represents a serious threat to the corporate state. I've made this argument many times before, but in those cases a mistake I might have made is focusing only on the actions of the party's leaders. A more effective way of proving the Democratic establishment represents the oligarchy is pointing out the fact that the oligarchy works to accommodate it.

The reality is that if Democrats were a party of the people, the political system in its current form would not allow them to have any power. When Bill Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone," had he meant this genuinely, said forces would have immediately started doing everything to sabotage him. His campaign would have been attacked and/or ignored by the corporate media, he would have been shut out of the presidential debates and had a difficult time getting onto all of the ballots, and either Bush or Perot would have prevailed. So is the case with every other corporate-funded Democrat like him who claims to want systemic governmental change.

Just look at what's happened to the few politicians in the last several decades who have actually tried to bring about what Clinton promised. When Ralph Nader tried to enter a 2000 presidential debate simply as a member of the audience, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization run by evidently very partisan representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, barred him from entering the area. Something similar happened to him in 2004 when Democratic officials hurt his campaign by filing pointless and resource-draining lawsuits against it. Nader wasn't the only candidate like him who was sabotaged during that election cycle, as evidenced by the successful attempt by the corporate media to wreck Howard Dean's campaign. Another instance of this systemic effort to block out non-corporatist candidates occurred in 2012, when the NYPD, which has a history of attacking those who threaten the neoliberal order, arrested Jill Stein for trying to enter the site of the New York presidential debate.

But never has the oligarchy-friendly nature of the modern American electoral process been made more apparent than in 2016. While some have tried to claim the fact that the DNC officials who expressed bias against Bernie Sanders had little control over the results of last year's primary proves the contest wasn't rigged, WikiLeaks' findings were only one part of the picture.

Throughout the primaries, pro-Hillary Clinton election officials often went out of their way to sabotage Sanders, starting with the first contest in Iowa wherein widespread reports surfaced of voter suppression and a highly suspicious "re-staged" vote count took place. Similar (and successful) efforts to rig the primary against Sanders occurred in Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, the Nevada State Democratic Convention, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California. Lesser but still consequential instances of electoral fraud took also took place in many other states, as evidenced by the numerous statistically impossible Democratic primary vote models which favored Clinton in every case. Another way Sanders was felled by a corporate-controlled political process, predictably, was the media blackout which plagued his campaign.

And then, to add insult to injury, Sanders' ideological successor for the 2016 election Jill Stein was sabotaged as well, with the corporate media having launched a smear campaign against her and the Commission on Presidential Debates having deliberately chosen polls which underestimated her support while deciding who could participate in the debates.

Judging from these and other ways the oligarchy has rigged our electoral process to benefit candidates and parties that represent it, one can only conclude that the best way to tell if a candidate or party doesn't intend to protect the people's interests is to see whether or not the media and the major political institutions are trying to get them out of the picture. And clearly, the Democratic Party fails this test simply because of the fact that it's succeeded in the current political system.

Fortunately this sad state of affairs, wherein one can only trust a politician to uphold the popular interest if they're being shut out of the political process, will have a good chance of changing in the very near future. Economic inequality is now at a level not seen since the late 1920's, right before the public rose up to bring about the New Deal, and a similar event is certain to take place within the next few years. But in order to make this overthrow of the corporate power structure effective, we'll need to take a firm stand against the corporatists who currently control the Democratic Party.