Smashing The Neoliberal Democrat Echo Chamber

The chart above is a real-time illustration of one of the most beautiful events in American political history: the official waking-up of the majority of the American left. Up until very recently, most Democrats didn't seem to care about the corruption within their party. For the most part, liberals did not speak out when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. They did not abandon the belief that Obama represented real progressive change when he supported Bush's Wall Street bailouts as a senator. They did not work vigorously to replace the Democratic Party's current leadership throughout the decades-long saga of warmongering, neoliberal policies, and unconstitutional surveillance perpetrated by Democrats. And yet in 2016, they finally became willing to embrace a genuinely progressive option, with Bernie Sanders having had more support among Democrats than Hillary Clinton at one point during the race and then won the nomination in the alternate universe where the Democratic primaries weren't fraught with voter suppression and electoral fraud.

But while the majority of liberals have stepped up, that majority is for now a very narrow one. At the most, Sanders was found to have been winning against Clinton nationally by two points, and while that number would doubtless be many times larger had it not been for the anti-Sanders tactics that I mentioned, a little less than half of Democrats remain loyal to their party's status quo.

And this claim is backed up by polling of Democrats on other issues. 54% of Democrats feel represented by their party, a number which, while no doubt bigger than it would be if all of the Democrat-leaning independents who have Demexited in recent years still considered themselves Democrats, is a disappointingly high one. All of the potential establishment Democratic candidates included in the latest 2020 Democratic nomination poll (Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Al Franken) enjoy the combined support of 46% of the Democratic electorate, though the survey also shows Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner. In other words, almost half the left still does not understand the nature of corporate power and the grip that it holds over their party, and convincing them otherwise is an important step in revolutionizing Democratic politics.

Easier said than done.

Occasionally on my online browsings of the political landscape, I've encountered people on social media who represent that 45% or so of liberals who still think the Democratic Party and its leaders represent their interests. And aside from the occasional sensible-or moderate, if I may-member of this bunch, they show themselves to be extremely closed-minded and hostile towards anyone who questions their party. When I've criticized Obama for refusing to adequately reform the banking system and thus setting us up for a new Wall Street crash, they've correctly accused me of "thinking I know more about this than the president." When I've shown Hillary Clinton supporters who incredibly knew nothing of their candidate's legendarily destructive foreign policy record a comprehensive history of it from a credible source, they responded by calling it lies and right-wing propaganda. When I most recently showed a supporter of the DNC's new chairman Tom Perez an article about how their leader enabled massive tax breaks for hedge fund mangers as Secretary of Labor, I was told that this wasn't the case because "Democrats don't vote for tax cuts."

I could go on for maybe three more paragraphs recounting the impressive efforts that I for one have seen loyal Democrats take to maintain their belief that their party and all of its members (except, of course, for the Berniecratic ones) are reliable defenders of progressive values. And when they do, on the rarest of occasions, acknowledge an illiberal action that a Democrat has taken, they re-frame it by saying progressives who criticize the given Democrat are looking for purity, or worse, that the given Democrats' action is completely acceptable. It's a seemingly impossible task to convince the typical pro-establishment liberal that they're wrong in supporting these "liberal" corporatists-or, more often, that they're supporting corporatists in the first place.

"I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to bring up a legitimate concern about the Democratic establishment in a debate with a party loyalist and been told that I’m crazy or ridiculous because it’s a concern they’d never encountered before" Caitlin Johnstone vents in her own essay on the problem of what she calls the neoliberal echo chamber. "Whether I’m discussing a WikiLeaks release that didn’t get much coverage or the fact that Hillary Clinton really seemed to be gearing up for an all-out war with Russia, I have never, ever been met with sincerity or had my concerns directly addressed in an earnest debate of ideas with a Hillary voter. Not once. Not one single time, ever, to this day. And I’ve spoken to a lot of them." As she also said, "We now live in a society where sources that don’t confirm one’s bias are immediately dismissed as 'fake news,' and nothing is considered true unless Wolf Blitzer says it. This is killing political discourse in America, and it’s turning us all into idiots."

It's also hurting the success of a genuinely progressive movement at a time when it's needed most, both by depriving this movement of members and distracting its members with hours of unsuccessful efforts to change the minds of party loyalists who refuse to listen to facts. In this essay, I'm going to avenge the frustrations of me, Johnstone, and no doubt millions of other Sandersists by attempting to provide a guide to changing the minds of the seemingly unreasonable.

I say "seemingly" because as is evidenced by the massive amounts of superstitious, bigoted, and just plain strange beliefs that most human beings on the planet have been able to give up over the last several centuries, decades, and even years, people are generally much more capable of reason than they appear. Prior to 2010, most Americans did not support gay marriage, and now 61% of them do according to the latest public opinion poll on the issue. Just a few years ago, most Republicans denied climate change in spite of all evidence being against their belief, and then in 2015, a narrow majority of Republicans were found to now acknowledge climate change. A similar shift in consciousness can happen among the "fauxgressives," and there are several ways you individually can bring it about.

While this piece doesn't contain some sort of fool-proof guide to immediately converting every Clintonist you see towards the Sanders revolution, it does include the next best thing. Namely, a guide to setting these individuals on a path that ultimately leads to them changing their minds.

Enter the case of Michael E Sparks. His story is probably a common one among the millions of former loyal Democrats who were transformed into revolutionaries during last year's primaries: prior to around the middle of 2015, he was someone who deeply cared about bringing change, but was largely clueless about how to do so. He always assumed Democrats represented a threat to the status quo. He planned to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. He even exemplified the behavior of watered-down, pro-establishment liberalism in that he was convinced recycling would help the environment despite the exact opposite being the case. "I was delusional…" he  wrote in his confession of this period in his life. "And I was enjoying my delusions. I really have no one to blame but myself." But at some point in the early stages of the 2016 election, he then says, he had an awakening.

"I was blissfully ignorant," he writes, "just trying to make up my mind which amazing Democrat to vote for when my friend sent me a text. 'I notice you post a lot of pro-Hillary stuff. As an ally, how do you feel about the idea that Hillary only shifted her stance on gay rights, now that it is political suicide for her not to?' I was so ignorant. I replied 'Hasn’t she always been for gay rights?' My friend started sending me links and videos.

After about 20 minutes, my head was swimming. 'How was this possible?!' Hillary sounded like a Republican. And it wasn’t just recent comments she had made before The Senate. She had toured the country in support of DOMA. How did I not know this? I listened to NPR. I took reusable bags with me to the grocery. I was a hardcore liberal. How did I not know this?!?!"

What followed was a powerful account of how, after this incident, Sparks went down a slippery slope that his friend had set him on. He started looking into other potentially surprising parts of Clinton's record and found things about her he never would have guessed; she'd voted for the Iraq War. She had deep and secretive ties to Wall Street. In almost every way, it seemed, she had betrayed the values of the progressives who were keeping her campaign alive, and Sparks' newfound awareness of this fact ultimately led to him not just adopting a nuanced view of the Democratic Party, but declaring it to be the exact opposite of an ally. "We are all being duped by a Republican in disguise," he wrote at the end of his story.

The bad news is that I don't know if this can happen with every remaining Democratic loyalist. As Sparks notes earlier in his account, he had signed a petition asking Bernie Sanders to run for president and was thus already theoretically open to choosing Sanders over Clinton. Sparks is also a generally very inquisitive and open-minded person. That doesn't seem to be the case with a great deal of Clintonists, including a Hillary supporter and close friend of his that he later recounts having one time tried and failed to convert. His friend, like seemingly most other Democratic loyalists, was simply unwilling to listen to evidence that goes against their beliefs. The good news is that as I said, all human beings are capable of reason, and Sparks has put together a guide to bringing that reason out of anybody.

Sparks' guide to successfully smashing any given echo chamber, as he lays out in a piece from  earlier this month, is genius, because it so closely resembles what his friend did two years ago to turn him into a Sanders supporter: give up on trying to change the other person's mind. By this I mean that while in an argument with a Clintonist or anyone else, your goal should be not to completely transform their worldview on the spot, but to simply try to open their mind, through patience, respect, and then an offering of some but not too many arguments for your position. This will likely make the other person very much open to accepting other aspects of your viewpoint. Again, you won't be able to radically change someone's worldview with this approach, but you will be able to change it just enough that they'll be inclined to start further looking into your view on their own. At that point, as was the case with Sparks' own experience, the formerly ardent Democratic loyalist will be on a slippery slope where the more they learn about the true history and dynamics of their party and its leaders, the less they'll like it.

Please read Sparks' article in full, and try to apply the methods it details on every Democratic loyalist you encounter. As the political pendulum swings away from Trump and the GOP, the Democratic establishment and its allies in the Deep State are using every means at their disposal to regain power in these next few years, quite possibly culminating in the new Cold War-entailing election of guess who in 2020. And the continued allegiance of much of the Democratic electorate is essential in their terrifying quest for the establishment of an Orwellian state of never-ending war and autocracy.

We must win over the Democratic loyalists, or else when they do all eventually turn against their leaders, it will be too late for them to avert disaster.

Get Over It, Establishment Democrats

Hillary Clinton in December after giving a speech on the problem of fake news. Because there's no time in her schedule these days to focus on things like the political ineptitude of the current Democratic Party.

What upsets me the most about the benefactors of the current political and economic system is not that they support environmental, economic, and social exploitation. It's the fact that they deny their support for these things. If someone is poor, the elites figure, it's not because they've been denied the path to success by an economic system that's massively slanted to benefit the already successful-it's always because they've made bad choices. If the planet is becoming ecologically crippled, it's not because of environmentally destructive actions on the part of corporations-it's because the interests of the natural world aren't as important as business interests. If large portions of the electorate are rendered unable to vote by archaic voter ID laws and limited opportunities for coming to the polls, it's not because they're the victims of an electoral process designed to shut out poor people and minorities-it's because these groups haven't earned their right to vote or are too lazy to vote.

So it's no surprise that when those who don't hold this worldview tried to gain control of the political system last year with the Bernie Sanders campaign, the same people who believe the things above didn't acknowledge that the process was massively rigged against us. A corporate media blackout on Sanders' campaign, a Hillary Clinton-helping debate schedule, a grossly unfair Nevada Democratic caucus, a disgustingly Clinton-slanted Nevada Democratic State Convention, closed primaries in eleven states, and widespread instances of voter suppression and electoral fraud in Iowa, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Michigan, Missouri, Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and California didn't mean a thing to Clinton's supporters. All claims of bias in the primary process from Sanders supporters have been met by establishment Democrats with denial, or at the very least significant downplaying, and accusations of us being sore losers.

Get over it, the Clintonists have said time after time. We rigged the contest fair and square, and we and our friends in the corporate media are never going to admit it, so you might as well accept the falsehood that you're in the minority and unite behind us.

Now, of course, the tables have been turned. The Democratic establishment's political viability has been utterly repudiated with Clinton's coming-from-in-front loss to Trump last year, and it's now an undeniable reality that corporatist "liberalism" is not supported by the vast majority of the American people. Except the corporatist liberals are denying it.

The excuses that Hillary Clinton supporters have come up with for their candidate's loss are almost completely without basis and often sound far fetched in and of themselves. The notion that the Russian government "hacked" the election by providing Wikileaks with the DNC emails is backed up by no real evidence and is very likely no more than a tool for the McCarthyite campaign that Democrats have been running. The grievances about an online epidemic of fake news having hurt Clinton's reputation with false scandals would no doubt be unnecessary if Clinton hadn't made herself a vulnerable target for such attacks, baseless or not, by having recently provoked an FBI criminal investigation. The case for James Comey's actions right before the election having swung it for Trump is very hard to make. The claim that third party voters tipped the election is simply not supported by the numbers. And as for the assertion that Bernie Sanders is responsible for Clinton's loss...well, there's a reason most of even the most ardent Clinton apologists don't seem to believe that.

And establishment Democrats' denial has naturally included a baseless view that most support their political brand in addition to their claims about the election being rigged against them. In December, Nancy Pelosi infamously said that she doesn't think Democrats want a new direction, in spite of the fact that 46% of Democrats do not feel represented by either party. And that number would doubtless be well above 50% if it were to include the tens of millions of people who have left the Democratic Party since the days of false hope and change in 2008.

Corporate Democratic congressman Adam Schiff said in January in regards to the Democrats' relationship with the electorate: "Did we lose because we were too far to the left and we had too small a tent, or did we lose because we are too mainstream and didn’t energize the base?" This was in contradiction to the fact that the left's tent makes up the vast majority of the American population, meaning what he considers to be "mainstream" is anything but.

And perhaps most absurdly in this collection of elitist fantasies is the claim from neoliberal Democrat Al From that economic populism based on promises of increased governmental intervention can't be effective because "Too many in the forgotten middle-class have already lost faith in government’s ability to help them." By that logic, we should simply ignore the wishes of the 86% of Americans who think government should do more to fight poverty because they know the government is currently too corrupted by corporate and billionaire interests to be able to do so.

It isn't 1992 anymore, and every aspect of the political landscape is hostile towards the old "Third Way" Democratic brand. And yet its supporters continue to cling to the belief that it remains robust, and that the Democrats' staggering losses throughout these last eight years are due to anyone but themselves. This is what being a sore loser looks like. This is what turning to conspiracy theories when one doesn't get their way looks like. This is what being naive looks like. The elegant irony of the situation is that everything the Clintonists accused the Sandersists of being last year, the Clintonists themselves are now perfectly exhibiting.

So as establishment Democrats continue to chastise Sanders supporters for not overlooking the fact that last year's primaries were enormously tilted towards one candidate (the latest attempt to bury what happened is a piece titled Shame On Bernie Supporters Who Claim The Primary Was Rigged), I'd like to do a little chastising of my own for something that's in this case legitimate. I'm calling out all of the old guard Democrats who refuse to accept that their candidate lost fair and square, and thus that their political brand is not accepted by the vast majority of the American people.

The Democratic elites lost because they ran into the battlefield with a political bomb strapped to their chest, and they'll lose again in 2020 if they're allowed to run into the battlefield again with that very same bomb. That's why in the meantime, the Sandersist majority will be working to change the Democratic Party's leadership at every level so that the old guard won't be able to steal the 2020 Democratic primaries from our new candidate. At that point, the system of economic exploitation, environmental destruction, rampant militarism, and violations of the democratic process will quite possibly have come to an end, regardless of whether its defenders believe there's a problem with it.

Don't Count On Establishment Democrats To Stand Up To Trump

As 2017 gears up to quite possibly become the new 1933, the two thirds or so of Americans who oppose you-know-who are spending this bleak political winter doing their best to prepare for taking part in the massive resistance effort which is certain to bloom in the spring. But as history has shown us, a significant portion of that two thirds might not stay committed to the fight.

Before I continue, I'd like to make it clear that this piece is not intended as a means to divide Trump's opposition between the moderate and far left. While I hold no allegiance to the Democratic Party until fundamental changes are made to it, and I will under no circumstances embrace the neoliberal agenda that it currently represents, I know that in the context of resisting Trump, it's important to know that the enemy of your enemy is always (to an extent) your friend. The main way in which I'm about to attack the moderate left has do to with how it can't be relied upon to remain part of said resistance.

Enter the instance of what happened after 9/11. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration used the circumstances to go on a rampage, infringing on many constitutional liberties in the name of security and doing you-know-what in the middle east. What enabled the U.S. government's reign of terror, though, was not just the compliance of Republicans, which was to be expected, but the compliance of many liberals, namely the ones of the centrist persuasion.

Mainly among these "liberal" enablers of the administration were the ones in the House, the Senate, and much of the major media. Throughout the years following the attacks, far too often did most House and Senate Democrats vote in favor of Bush's proposals, such as when all but one Democratic Senator approved the Patriot Act and when enough of said Democrats supported the Iraq War for it to be able to pass. Others in this effort to unite the left and the right at whatever cost included those in charge of "liberal" publications like The New York Times and the "liberal" UK prime minister Tony Blair.

"I hold Blair more responsible for the Iraq War than I do George W. Bush," Michael Moore has said in a brutally honest assessment of the role that Blair and others like him played in this shameful affair. "Because I expected that of George W. Bush. That wasn't a surprise, all right. But Bush only got away with it because he had the cover of Tony Blair, because he had the cover of liberals, the liberal New York Times, the liberal New Yorker magazine, the 'liberal' Tony Blair."

Now enter the situation we're going to be in when Donald Trump is president. While I, like too many others, used to view the claims that Trump is a threat to the republic as alarmist, I've lately come to believe that image many have gotten of "Fuhrer Trump" has a lot of merit. While I have every reason to believe he'll govern in a relatively center-right, congress-restrained fashion at first, at a certain point I expect things to indeed get very scary. Namely, when a terrorist attack similar to that of 9/11 inevitably occurs, the only way one can realistically imagine the Trump administration reacting is with an amount of authoritarianism and reckless military action which may be unprecedented in the history of America's government.

Right after the crisis hits, Trump and his party will no doubt get an enormous boost in popularity, giving them a powerful political aura throughout the next several years which allows them to get away with a lot more corrupt and/or dangerous deeds than usual. Just how useful this aura turns out to be for them, however, depends on what his opponents do. And from everything we can tell, those in the moderate, corporatist wing of the Democratic Party will abandon their initial (supposed) effort to resist Trump right when the attacks occur.

Again, I make this prediction not because I want to provoke division within Trump's opposition due to the ideological differences I have with establishment Democrats, but because I have good reason to doubt said Democrats, who are unfortunately the main people in charge of the resistance movement, will share any parts of my cause after a certain point. If my prediction seems implausible now, just look at what these Democratic leaders did during the post-9/11 period of the Bush administration.

Take the case of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader who voted for and outspokenly supported the Patriot Act, the Bush tax cuts, and the Iraq War. She's also on record for stating that "We stand shoulder to shoulder with the president" when asked about how she viewed Bush's efforts to violate civil liberties. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, can be trusted even less than Pelosi to continue opposing Trump, having both supported the Bush policies mentioned above and having been named by the president-elect as more likable than the Republican leadership because of his articulated willingness to compromise. And given how the agenda of the rest of the Democratic Party's leadership generally matches up with the corporatist, militaristic views of these two, I suspect most other House and Senate Democrats will act similarly compliant to the wishes of the GOP.

In short, after these "liberals" have inadvertently helped Trump win with their embrace of the politically impotent Clintonist ideology, they're no doubt going to aide him in the second phase of his rise to power by capitulating to his agenda after the next 9/11 occurs. If progressives and anti-Trump conservatives want to weather the coming fascist storm, they'll rally around leaders who can't just be considered "liberals," but genuine advocates for systemic change.

The Only Ideology That Can Defeat Trumpism, According To Math

A long while back in American political history-which is to say, before the election of Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders supporter John Laurits wrote a piece titled The Only Candidate That Can Defeat The GOP, According To Math. In it, as you've no doubt guessed by now, he laid out the simple facts, which were that Sanders, not Clinton, was the Democratic candidate who could appeal to enough Democrats and independents to be able to win against Trump.

But to consequences yet to be fully determined, Democratic leaders chose to disregard this and other pieces of evidence that their preferred candidate was not up to the job of beating Trump, and they blocked Sanders' nomination. And now, with our political system having hit what the writer Michael E. Sparks considers to be rock bottom, the need for an effective electoral counter to Donald Trump and those who share his neo-fascist political brand is greater than ever.

So it's imperative that as Democrats and others who oppose Trumpism work to defeat it going into future elections, they don't repeat their mistake from this year.

Just as establishment Democrats continue to dismiss the possibility that Sanders would have defeated Trump, they dismiss the possibility that Sandersism has the potential to defeat Trumpism if made the standard ideology of the Democratic Party. Paul Krugman, for instance, who has ironically made passionate arguments in favor of economic populism, has lately adopted a more neoliberal attitude when responding to the idea that Democrats need to start appealing to the working class; another defender of the Democratic political status quo is Nancy Pelosi, who has said she doesn't think Democrats need a new direction because "Our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families."

I'm going to make the case now, like Laurits and others tried to earlier this year, for Sandersism, not a continuiation of Clintonism, being the only way to go forward. And I'm going to start by providing the evidence of why a failure to embrace Sandersism resulted in Trump's victory.

The reason Clinton lost had nothing to do with the third party candidates or Bernie Sanders (the latter of which actually helped her get more votes), but rather a failure on the part of her and the Democratic Party to present a compelling case that they intended to help working people. Specifically, the working people who live in Rust Belt. If Clinton had won just a few more states in that region, she would have received the majority of electoral votes, but that proved to be impossible after the approach she used to this election.

The people who decided the outcome of those races, exit polls indicate, regarded economic issues, especially trade, as highly important. And when presented with Clinton vs Trump, a consequential number of them understandably went with the latter. Clinton, despite having branded herself earlier in the race as pro-worker on trade, was hard to trust on the issue for many people due to her history of supporting neoliberal trade deals, the fact that she had since appointed a Trans-Pacific Partnership advocate to be the head of her transition team, and how her campaign received massive donations from corporate executives who stood to benefit from the TPP. All of this evidently cost her the election in what Michael Moore calls a "Rust Belt Brexit."

Another way Clintonism proved to be an ineffective strategy for the Democrats this year was that it depressed voter turnout. As Moore has also noted, the demographics made it so that Hillary Clinton always easily had enough support to win, but due to her unwillingness to appeal to the Democratic base, not enough people showed up to make it happen. 

The low Democratic voter turnout this year which cost Clinton the election for the most part did not occur because of Republican voter suppression efforts, and the reasons for this fact are easy to guess. Even after the victory of Clinton's extremely unpopular opponent, polls continue to show around 55% of Americans view her negatively, and in a stunning demonstration of how suspicious Americans are of her, one poll from earlier this year found that 68% view her as untrustworthy compared to 43% for Donald Trump. The same survey also showed just 38% would be proud to have her as president, compared to Trump's 39%.

And the reason for this does not have to do with decades of Republican smears on her as she has alleged. Polls have shown that most Americans know how to sift through the false accusations that have been leveled against Clinton, indicating their dislike for Clinton has more to do with the fact that they disagree with her on many important issues.

Just 29% of Americans think that trade deals like NAFTA have benefited the country, 78% want an end to Citizens United and money in politics, 62% are in favor of breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, 58% support a federally funded universal health care system, 63% prefer a $15 minimum wage, and on the list goes of ways in which vast majority of the public wants to end the neoliberal paradigm and make the economy work for everyone. But given Hillary Clinton's corporate campaign donations and her open opposition to many of these goals, it's clear that she was not the right option for those who hold such views, and as a result, she's been proven unable to win a national election.

It's this same problem that has gotten the Democratic Party into its current crisis. Despite Pelosi's assertions to the contrary, for the past forty years the party's values have mainly involved supporting corporations and the super rich rather than working families, and just like Hillary, they've failed politically because of this. It's no coincidence that the Democrats' gradual decline throughout the last few decades has happened at the same time as the party has pivoted to the interests of big business, with the Democratic leadership's abandonment of their base having made them lose most of the white working class (along with some of the nonwhite working class).

And once again, the Democratic Party has suffered a similar fate to that of Hillary Clinton due to its shift towards neoliberalism, with Democrats now holding as few elected offices as they did in the 1920's. This is due to a failure on their part to sufficiently motivate their base to show up at the polls. And if the party continues to try to appeal mainly to the quarter or so of the electorate which supports neoliberal policies, their decline will only continue.

However, if the efforts of Bernie Sanders and others succeed, the Democratic Party can yet become an institution which advances both identity politics and economic populism (which, contrary to the narrative of the corporate media, are not mutually exclusive approaches) and assume the role of the dynamic political tool needed to fight Trump's agenda. And should the Democrats remain a party of the economic elite, it will be replaced by an alternative organization, be it the Green Party or something else.

But electoral politics isn't the only political aspect wherein Trump's opposition will need Sandersism to succeed. Should a major crisis develop during Trump's term, he and his administration will likely try to use it as an excuse to gain bipartisan support for a series of authoritarian and hawkish measures they'll surely push for in response to it. And if the main opposition that they face consists of Clintonist Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who aims to act as Trump's ally, a forceful response from progressives will be absent and enormous damage will be done to global stability, the rights of working people, and America's constitutional liberties.

In short, if the left wants to have any success, it will stop letting its leaders pivot to "moderates" and "the center" and have them appeal to the majority of the Americans, who  support the ideals and values of Sandersism. Lack of a major Sandersist presence in the 2016 general election resulted in the victory of a tyrant, and lack of a major Sandersist presence afterwords will result in a victory for that tyrant's agenda.

The 2016 Election Is The Only Thing Holding The Two-Party System Together

In a past article, I once made a (seemingly) shocking prediction: that in the near future, the combined number of people who affiliate with the Republican and Democratic parties will make up less than half of the electorate. The reasons I give for believing this duopoly-imperiling event is on its way have to do with the fact that according to a January Gallup poll, combined Democratic and Republican identification is at 55%, and because the events of this election have left so many people alienated with the two major parties, that percentage is bound to soon drop below fifty.

However, as I recently discovered, Gallup takes their party affiliation poll a lot more frequently than I assumed, and when I looked at the most recent survey (taken in September), to my dismay I found that the combined number of Democrats and Republicans had since gone up to 59%.

How could this be, I thought. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the most disliked (and probably the easiest to dislike) presidential nominees in history. About half of both Republicans and Democrats wish that someone else were their party's nominee. Trump is driving evangelicals, women, and Latinos away from the Republican Party, while Clinton is alienating the most important part of the Democratic Party's base-progressives. These ideological rifts within the two major parties are just the latest and most dramatic in the massive decline of support that they've both been experiencing for the last several years, and there's evidently no reason to think that that trend will start to reverse. To say that Democratic and Republican membership has respectively went from 29 and 26 percent to 32 and 27 percent since the beginning of the year seems to defy all logic, or at least prove that Americans are far too intrenched in party loyalty for the two-party system to end anytime soon.

The current party affiliation polls notwithstanding, though, Democrats and Republicans are in just as bad shape as intuition would have it.

When looking at the long-term history of Gallup's party affiliation polls, one notices an intriguing phenomena: identification in the two major parties always reaches a high point around the time of presidential elections. In 2012, the poll that put independents at 33%-by far that year's lowest estimation of independents-was taken days before the election. In 2008, the poll that put independents at 32%-a notably low number for that year as well-was taken in late October. And in 2004, the two polls in a row that put independents at 27%-down from 40% at the beginning of the year-were taken in the weeks before Election Day. I know these examples are far from conclusive evidence, but they seem proof enough to me that as elections approach, people tend to coalesce around the party that they prefer will win.

Just as the support for third party candidates always drops approaching election day while many of their former backers get behind the major party candidate that they're the least dissatisfied with, the same appears to be true for party affiliation. This theory of mine seems to be further supported in how during the primary season this year, loyalty to the two major parties began to drop with Republicans making up 25% of the electorate in April and Democrats making up 28% of it in May. And since then, after things have switched into the next phase of the campaign, the polls have generally shown a higher amount of "support" for the Democratic and Republican parties. The lack of sincerity among many of the 59% of Americans who say they side with the two major parties is betrayed in how, at the same time, 57% of Americans say they think a third major party is needed.

And when the piece of partisan glue which is the 2016 election becomes irrelevant on November 9, there will be nothing to stop that 57% of the population from acting on their wishes and changing the party system.

After the election is over and the nation's partisanship has returned to a sane level, the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with the major parties will have an opportunity to defy them. Regardless of whether Trump or Clinton wins, Trumpism and Clintonism will retain their control over the agendas of the Republican and Democratic parties throughout the foreseeable future, and that will not sit well with most Americans. The ideological split between traditional Republicans and those in Trump's camp will likely continue to grow, quite possibly resulting in a sudden success for the Liberitarian Party or something similar to it in future elections. Meanwhile, the divide on the Democratic side between those who embrace neoliberalism and those who want to fight it (which I think is hurting Democrats more than the right's ideological split is hurting Republicans) could very well result in the rise of a populist party like the Greens.

If you think such a shift isn't realistic, keep in mind that the main factor behind the current split within the two parties, wherein most of the Republican base now embraces Trumpism and most of the Democratic base now rejects Clintonism, is the now historic amount of economic inequality which has appeared because of the pro-big business policies that the Republican and Democratic establishments have supported for the past four decades. And as the trend of growing economic inopportunity continues throughout the next four years, with Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton presiding over an ongoing assault on the middle class and a new financial crisis, populist sentiments on both the left and the right will only become more intense, making the creation of a four-party system by 2020 a serious possibility.

So in the meantime, Democratic and Republican insiders should enjoy the increased amount of support for their parties while they still can.

Why Clintonism Will Fail

Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president. Her opponent's outrageous behavior, both recently and in years' past, has landed him in an electoral ditch too big for him to claw his way out of in time for November 8, which means that in spite of Clinton generally being a vulnerable candidate, the fact that she's running against someone like Trump will let her defy the odds.

However, as we all become rightfully appalled by the revelations about Donald Trump's behavior towards women, information is being leaked about Hillary Clinton that's arguably even more troubling.

This piece is aimed towards those who supported Clinton in the primaries and intend to continue supporting her and her party in future elections. Clintonists, I feel the need to tell you that your leaders are giving you a completely false picture of the future that they're going to create.

To begin this argument against Hillary Clinton's agenda, I'll talk about those leaks mentioned previously. Specifically, the Podesta Emails. This series of documents uncovered by WikiLeaks (which, to be clear, is not part of a Russian plot) reveals that the Democratic nominee is not who she makes herself out to be; her private remarks to bank executives show that she's in fact in favor of so-called free trade deals like the TPP, thinks that she thinks Wall Street is able to sufficiently regulate itself, and that she doesn't see environmentalism as much of a priority.

So what, the Hillary Clinton Democrats reading this are probably thinking. She said all (or at least most) of these things years ago, and telling from how she's assured us so many times during the campaign that she understands the problems related to Wall Street, climate change, the TPP, and other issues, and that she intends to address them, we shouldn't take the Podesta Emails seriously.

While some of that defense is legitimate, I'm going to make the case that it's a lot more complicated than that. And this complication could very well be what makes all of her promises moot-which will have dire consequences for the future of the country and the planet.

Climate

Clinton's exact remarks on the matter, made in September 2015 in the context of talking about her encounters with environmental activists, where "They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, ‘Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?’ No. I won’t promise that. Get a life, you know." She also said about their concerns, "They are after everything and I’m just talking through them. And of course they go support somebody else. That’s fine and I don’t particularly care. But I do think I have to say, look, given everything else we have to do in this country, this is not an issue for me that I’m going to say I support. I want to work on other stuff."

From the way she talked about the issue, you'd think that it was the time of her youth in the 1950's and 60's, when the public was only starting to become generally concerned with climate change. But these (presumably) young people aren't entering life in the same situation Clinton was.

As she made those statements, the hottest summer on record had just concluded, with average temperatures being 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above what they typically were in the 20th century. 2015 then turned out to be the hottest year ever recorded, just as the last nine years previous surpassed all others before them in average temperature. What was different about 2015 is that it seemed to signal a trend of acceleration in global warming, with it having had a mean temperature of 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average compared to 2014's 1.33 degrees.

As a consequence, Eric Holthaus wrote in August of that year that "Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan." Signs of climate catastrophe, as the article recounts, were becoming dramatic enough that the emotional displays from the protestors that Hillary Clinton described were entirely appropriate. The point of no return on climate, wherein no amount of cutting carbon emissions could prevent  calamity, was fast approaching, with the average global temperature only having to rise 0.4 degrees more from the pre-industrial level before the 2 degree mark which scientists agree is the tipping point would be reached.

And with the climate situation having since seemed to reach such a point, Clinton's attitude can be compared to that of the captain of a sinking ship being annoyed with the alarmed mood of the passengers. Naomi Klein describes the position the next president will be in when they come into office as having "their back up against the climate wall." And as I'll talk about in a second, Klein also believes that Hillary Clinton is unsuited to confront the problem.

Though the list of actions to combat climate change offered in Clinton's website includes some worthwhile goals, it's ultimately the equivalent of trying to patch up the already severely damaged hull of the ship that I mentioned. Too often do her promises on the matter involve general or vague language that provides potential loopholes for not fulfilling the extremely ambitious task of saving the climate, and everything we know so far indicates she'll take full advantage of those exceptions.

Many parts of Clinton's record, from her being responsible for the worldwide expansion of fracking, to her support (in both the past and the future) of the climate progress-imperiling Trans-Pacific Partnership, to her being in favor of oil drilling in public lands as well as offshore, show that she cannot be relied upon to take this threat seriously.

By now, those who believe Hillary Clinton will be a better president than that might be thinking I'm not being fair to her-she did those things in the past, after all, and despite those flaws in her promises that I mentioned, surely we'll be able to live up to her generally proclaimed goal of fighting climate change.

Once again, it's not that simple.

Though Paul Krugman doesn't like to hear this, there is a reliable indicator as to whether a politician is genuine in their promises to stand up to any given special interest group, and it is whether that politician has decided to take money from the same group. The Clinton Campaign's ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep, and they warrant simply no other explanation other than that she in fact has every intention of helping it when she's in office. As is the case with all of the other facets of big business which she accepts money from; contrary to a popular excuse that her defenders give, her campaign can absolutely afford to stop taking these donations. If she decided to give up this corrupt political model, her millions of average supporters would be compelled to make her campaign rely upon small donations as was the case with Bernie Sanders. There's no avoiding it; all you need to do to find out Clinton's positions is follow the money.

And as Naomi Klein explains, this is bad news for those who hope she will be the kind of climate president we need.

While Clinton is great at warring with Republicans, taking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural that the candidate is openly struggling to see why any of this has blown up at all.

In short, given all of what I've said so far, it would be extremely (and dangerously) naive to think that Hillary Clinton will come through and sufficiently tackle climate change after she's elected. Just when we need reform to climate policy the most, the next U.S. president is set to be a representative of the powers behind the problem. And as Klein also says, those aware of this are very worried.

Eva Resnick-Day, the 26-year-old Greenpeace activist who elicited the “so sick” [see what Klein is referring to here] response from Clinton last week, has a very lucid and moving perspective on just how fateful this election is, how much hangs in the balance. Responding to Clinton’s claim that young people “don’t do their own research,” Resnick-Day told Democracy Now!:

As a youth movement, we have done our own research, and that is why we are so terrified for the future…Scientists are saying that we have half the amount of time that we thought we did to tackle climate change before we go over the tipping point. And because of that, youth—the people that are going to have to inherit and deal with this problem—are incredibly worried. What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species. And that’s why we’re out there…asking the tough questions to all candidates: to make sure that whoever is in office isn’t going to continue things as they’ve been, but take a real stand to tackle climate change in a meaningful and deep way for the future of our planet.

No, Hillary, it's not necessary to tell those young people that they should get a life. They already have lives. They're just concerned that your policies will make it so that climate change ruins them in the long-term.

Geopolitics

It's well-known that Hillary Clinton's foreign policy decisions have favored war over diplomacy in almost every case. But to help any Democrats in the crowd who may have glossed over her record on this issue, it's something that should trouble anyone concerned with keeping peace in a global stage that's ready for another world war. 

I'm not just talking about her Iraq War vote, though that certainly was an incident that reflected very bad judgment on her part. She has supported a 1998 military intervention in Kosovo which destroyed innocent lives and turned the region into a hotbed for Islamist terrorism. She has participated in the violent 2009 overthrow of the Honduran government, which created a new era of tragedy and instability for the country. She has partnered with the Saudi Regime to instigated a 2011 conflict in Yemen. That same year, she helped start a war in Libya with consequences similar to that of Iraq. She has played a role in escalating the War in Syria. And she has voted for a 2007 measure that would have enabled America to go to war with Iran had the charges against it of WMDs not been debunked.

Again, to find out why Clinton has acted this way, you need only look at her connections. She openly embraces legendary war criminal Henry Kissinger, and her eagerness to instigate wars which benefit the oil industry and the military-industrial complex can of course be explained by the campaign donations from big oil that I mentioned earlier, as well as her support from the defense industry and the Saudi Royal Family. It's no wonder that Christopher Hitchens once warned "The last thing we need is a Clinton in charge of foreign policy."


What does this mean for the effect her presidency will have on the geopolitical scene? It may literally be worse than you can imagine.

WikiLeaks has shown that in addition to wanting to increase troop levels in Syria and try to implement the dangerously naive "no fly zone," she has a desire to escalate the violence in the region seemingly for no other reason than that it will somehow help fulfill her unrealistic and costly goal for regime change. As Caitlin Johnstone explains in her piece A Vote For Hillary Clinton Is A Vote For nuclear War, this plan can be considered not only irresponsible, but insane:

Whatever your position on the confusing situation in Syria, this is clearly a profoundly stupid and dangerous thing to do. Even if you’ve somehow managed to convince yourself that Putin and Assad are the only bad guys in the conflict and that America’s only interest in Syria is as the noble protector making sure no innocent civilians get hurt, even if you are that brainwashed and brain dead, it should still be obvious to you that shooting down Russian military planes won’t end well for anyone.

Military attacks against another nation’s military can only elicit military retribution. Acts of military retribution can easily escalate to full-scale war. America currently has 6,970 nuclear warheads that we know of, ready to launch at the drop of a hat. Russia has 7,300 nukes that we know of, with thousands in the chamber ready to fire. The two nations are, by a truly massive margin, the largest nuclear forces on planet Earth.

This extremely sensitive situation can only be made worse with someone like Hillary Clinton in charge. And if worse comes to worst, her foreign policy decisions may have as big an effect on the future of the human race as her climate decisions will.

The economy

Once again, Hillary Clinton's donor list says everything about what kinds of actions she'll take. Her ties to the financial sector are famously significant, with Wall Street being behind her even more than it's behind her Republican opponent. And while the representatives of the industry who have donated to her are relatively few and in some cases support higher taxation or greater regulation of big business, overall much of her campaign is made possible by defenders of the economic status quo.

And again, this should be regarded as a red flag that she's not up to the task of reforming the economic system. Liberals trusted Bill Clinton to fix it despite him running the most big donor-funded Democratic presidential campaign so far, and then he signed NAFTA, killed welfare, deregulated the financial sector, and got America involved in the WTO, which contributed to the fact that income inequality spiraled out of control during his administration. They trusted Barack Obama to do the same despite the vast majority of his campaign money having come from big donors, and then he helped pass Wall Street bailouts, failed to sufficiently regulate Wall Street and revive the economy, and passed the trade deal that led to the Panama Papers scandal, resulting in a faster transfer of wealth towards the top than the one that occurred during Bush's term.

It's laughable to think that Hillary will be an exception. Under the policies of her predecessors on both the Republican and Democratic sides, income inequality in America has risen to levels that may be higher than at any other point in history, and if such an estimation isn't the case now, it likely will be by the end of her first term.

But the gradual, steady draining of wealth on the middle class that such policies will create isn't all we'll have to worry about in the next four years. Thanks to the Wall Street deregulations that Hillary Clinton's husband is responsible for, and the Wall Street bailout that she voted for as Senator in 2008, the economy is set for another recession. In spite of claims from bankers (who would have guessed?) that breaking up the big financial institutions would harm the economy, in reality it's the opposite, with the economic paradigm that such actions ushered in having created a market so financialized and concentrated that the next time the banks go under, the rest of us are going down with them.

There's of course no telling just when this crash will start to occur, or how big it will be when it does. But factors indicate it's going to be bigger than 2008-and that it's getting more likely all the time. The stock market rally that's been occurring since the last crash will, as this chart of the market's historical trends  illustrates, set off the next one as soon as it ends.

When the market reaches the top of the hill, the economy will be in deep trouble. And since this bubble looks likely to pop in time for 2017, President Hillary Clinton will be entering office while having to manage what may be the largest economic downturn in history. When her administration inevitably pushes for new Wall Street bailouts, which would endanger the middle class in addition to her other neoliberal policies by setting the economy up for an even bigger crash several years later, a backlash from the American people is going to occur. And it won't necessarily be a positive one.

Politics

Precedent tells us that the elitist, business-as-usual paradigm which Clinton and Clintonism represent is always bound to be overturned by the people. Chris Hedges writes in regards to this inevitable shift that "History has amply demonstrated where this will end up. The continued exploitation by an unchecked elite, and the rising levels of poverty and insecurity, will unleash a legitimate rage among the desperate. They will see through the lies and propaganda of the elites. They will demand retribution. They will turn to those who express the hatred they feel for the powerful and the institutions, now shams, that were designed to give them a voice. They will seek not reform but destruction of a system that has betrayed them."

Intuitively, this sounds hopeful. But Hedges then says that "Failed states—czarist Russia, the Weimar Republic, the former Yugoslavia—vomit up political monstrosities. We will be no different."

By this, he means that the populist movements that eras of income inequality produce often take the form of negative, not positive, social change (the regimes that followed the examples Hedges gives are, respectively, Leninism, the Third Reich, and the nationalist movements that sprung up amid the breakup of Yugoslavia). And indeed, following the neoliberal shift that's been implemented in the economic systems of so many countries throughout the last four decades, the fascist, reactionary model of populism-what Americans recognize as "Trumpism"-has emerged as opposed to the more constructive, sane alternative offered by the left.

From Poland to the UK to France to Germany (yep, you read that last one right), nationalist demagogues are enjoying increasing success due to neoliberalism. And Trump's loss this year is anything but proof that America's own fascist movement is dead.

Liberals like to cite the demographic changes in America's electorate as proof that the right, or at least the far-right, is doomed. Michael Moore has called Trump's campaign "the last stand of the angry white man," likening the angry complaints of Trump supporters to the final cries of the dinosaurs before they died out ("build a wauuull! build a wauuull!" is his imitation of them). The truth is that after 2016, Trumpism will be stronger than ever.

In the months following Hillary Clinton's inauguration, I expect an unprecedented backlash from the right to begin. As occurred in 2009 after Obama became president, we may well witness a rise in right-wing media demagogues-this time bolstered by the nationalist propaganda empire built by Donald Trump-rallying the hordes of angry former Trump fans for the battles ahead.

In the 2018 midterm elections, I predict that we'll also see something resembling the Tea Party's victories in 2010, except in this case it will be more significant. This upset could come in the form of the rise of a new, neo-fascist party, or in many establishment Republicans facing primary challenges from the far right, but either way, Trumpism is bound to make a major comeback that year. And that will only be the start of it. As the 2020 election approaches, we'll likely see the rise of a presidential candidate that's just as bad or worse than Donald Trump.

These are serious possibilities. The person who's warning that Hillary Clinton and America are "headed for a larger reckoning" and saying that the policies of her administration will produce a demagogue "possibly far worse" than Trump isn't some street corner ranter-it's Robert Reich.

And just like how Clinton and the Democratic Party will be the ones who created such political horror shows, they won't be able to protect us from them. The alienation that Hillary causes her progressive base with her politically triangulating tactics makes her a very weak general election candidate, and the only reason she's winning this year is because Trump is such a terrible opponent. In 2020, when she's up against what will probably be a more competent and skilled demagogue, she won't stand a chance. The same will be true in the case of the hundreds of races in the House and the Senate wherein "mini-Trumps" are running against Democratic candidates, most of whom are similarly centrist and politically impotent.

I'll conclude this analysis with another Hillary Clinton quote from the Podesta Emails: "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."

This vision of an ideal America-which also involves what she describes as a political system dominated by two "moderate" parties, along with, no doubt, what she considers a strong military-may make sense on paper, but on so many levels it's absurd. As long as the country has two corporatist, militaristic parties led by people like her starting unnecessary wars, passing anti-worker trade deals like the TPP, allowing banks and corporations to wreak havoc over the economy, letting the climate deteriorate, and leaving the door open for dangerous figures like Donald Trump to gain control of politics, the future will be bleak.

Four years from now, with Hillary Clinton in charge, this will not be the same country. After so many decades of the status quo, just four more years of it will have driven many facets of modern civilization to the breaking point.

We will not get "incremental change." We will not get "reform from working within the system." Those who believe that Hillary Clinton and Clintonism are the solution in spite of the corruption that they represent are kidding themselves. When Joan Walsh wrote in her endorsement of Clinton that "I genuinely believe she'll make the best president" in spite of having just admitted that she has reservations about Clinton's agenda, she failed to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation that the next president will be facing.

Hillary and the other representatives of Clintonism are not the future. They're just the veil that the established order has put up in a last, floundering effort to keep the public unaware of what awaits it if society continues on the current path.

However, if enough people can break out of this illusion, there may still be hope to make these next defining four years a victory for humanity rather than a defeat. Though Clinton's victory is not the thing that climate progress needs, it's preferable to one for Trump, who's clearly even worse on environmental issues. At least with her as president, with enough effort from climate activists, we can potentially influence her decision-making on the matter enough that she takes serious steps on it. A strong anti-war movement might be able to prevent her from behaving too recklessly on foreign policy. After the financial crisis hits, a new version of the Occupy Wall Street movement will likely emerge which will give us leverage to pressure the government to stop the bailouts, give up on the TPP, and work to solve the wealth gap. And in order to prevent the next wave of Trumpism from resulting in the implementation of a fascist dictatorship, we can bring about the rise of a genuinely progressive alternative party to the Democrats which has the ability to counter the dark power of the far right.

To realize the future that you want happen, Hillary supporters, you'll first have to give up the belief that the candidate and the party you've chosen to back shares your goals. After the election, I invite you to join me and others in putting aside our past disagreements and taking the job of working towards a sane future into the hands of the people-not Hillary's.

The Fascism Of The Democratic Party

Now that I've drawn you in with that headline, I'd like to be clear that I'm choosing to describe the Democratic Party in such a way out of complete seriousness.

The type of fascism I'm going to be analyzing, though, is not the classic brand of dictatorial nationalism utilized by the likes of Donald Trump, as that would indeed be hyperbole. The fascist governing model that I'm going to discuss, which I think every self-identified Democrat should be aware of, involves not reactionary demagoguery but something called "inverted totalitarianism."

Before I explain what that is, let's take a look at the current state of America. Since 1978, income inequality in the U.S. has been steadily increasing. During that year, the top 0.1% of the population owned a mere 7% of the nation's new income, and today that number is 22%. As a result, half of the American population is under the poverty line, nine to twelve percent of Americans are unemployed, and nearly half of Americans are living on some kind of government assistance. 

The factors that caused this are no accident. During the past forty years, free trade deals, upper-income tax cuts, and business deregulation have worked to redistribute a possibly unprecedented amount of wealth towards the top. The same is true for the unstable geopolitical situation in the middle east, and the staggering amounts of resources that the U.S. military uses to try to control it; the government itself has brought about these affairs, all in order to serve its governing partners in big oil and the weapons industry. The collusion between corporation and state is behind most of the other problems our country is facing, from climate change to the health care crisis to, naturally, the dismantling of American democracy itself.

Though some have differing views on the exact cause of this crisis for liberty in America, pretty much everyone is aware of it. 71% of Americans feel the economy is not working fairly for them, just 19% think they can trust their government all or most of the time, and 65% believe the country is on the wrong track.

And yet, even as the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize corporate power to be the cause of their problems, Democrats, the party which always tries to represent itself as the solution to the issues mentioned above, are failing to sufficiently address them.

They used to be such an institution, but after the reformation of it that occurred during the 1980's and 90's, as Robert Dreyfuss explained in 2001, "Today is not your father's Democratic Party." In spite of recent victories for genuinely populist Democrats who seek to move it back to its roots, the party is deeply corrupted by corporate interests. This is a party who's top contributors in recent years have included Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, and other major entities that are known for typically backing Republicans. This is a party which has gone so far to the right that it's actually trying to reach out to Republican leaders and voters. This is a party who's top officials actively worked this year to undemocratically nominate Hillary Clinton-someone who's foreign policy approach may be more hawkish than that of many Republicans, who's record on trade consistently contradicts the promises she's made to protect workers, and who's ties to Wall Street do the same.

The problem, though, is not that the Democratic Party is corrupt. It's that its base doesn't care.

As I discussed in my previous article, thanks to the increased corporate control over the media and the educational system that occurred during the 1980's, most young people, progressives, and independents became disengaged with the political process, which allowed the appalling neoliberalism of the Clintons and their changed Democratic Party to go largely unscrutinized by the populous. What I didn't mention was that such a political dynamic has a name which you may be able to guess: inverted totalitarianism.

This term, coined by the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, is meant to describe an oligarchical system wherein the citizenry, kept relatively unexposed to the source of their oppression, believe to be living in a democracy. I'm sure it comes as no surprise for you when I conclude that America is such a society. Indeed, as Chris Hedges assesses in his essay on Wolin's worldview, "Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent."

The Democratic Party perfectly fits this model. Though given the events of this year's Democratic primaries, the apathy among the electorate that we saw in the 90's has largely disappeared, the Democratic leadership continues to use inverted totalitarianism as a way to hold onto support. It's become clear in recent years that Democratic voters are more progressive than ever, with the majority of them identifying as liberal rather than the once-popular "moderate." Additionally, 60% of them want to break up the large financial institutions, over 75% want a single-payer health care system, and 86% think that the wealth should be more equally distributed. These and other statistics serve as proof that the Democratic electorate overwhelmingly desires to end corporate rule. And yet, because of the subtle propaganda that inverted totalitarianism employs, they continue to prop up an entity whose goals are essentially opposite to theirs.

In other words, Democrats are being asked to pledge allegiance to a system which works against their interests, which is a clear (if not, as I said, classical) sign of fascism.

And if this continues, the nation will pay an ironic price: the implementation of the other type of fascism.

The embodiment of Democratic fascism Hillary Clinton, in spite of experiencing a setback in the polls in recent weeks, has begun to regain her edge over Trump according to the latest poll. But even if she manages to win this year against the current manifestation of the neo-fascist movement that her neoliberal policies have created, she'll only be facing a new version of Trump in four years. Either way, as the pivotal 2020 election approaches, Americans will be faced with the challenge of defeating a very dangerous politician who uses the degenerate populism of the far-right to their advantage. And given how the Democratic Party will be greatly diminished by then, along with how it will be unable to energize its former base, the incumbent President Clinton or whichever other Democrat running in 2020 will be no match for this candidate.

Fascism cannot win against fascism. Evil cannot beat evil. We must build a genuinely progressive alternative to the Democrats before the next election cycle, or inverted totalitarianism will give way to something even worse.