It's Not About The Money-It's About The Injustice

In response to the widespread indignance over Barack Obama's having taken $400,000 from the Wall Street firm he'll soon give a speech to, Trevor Noah made a very good point in Obama's defense: "So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards?"

Noah then made an even more keen observation: "Instead of focusing on how Obama can make so much money from Wall Street for a speech, maybe we should be asking why Wall Street has so much money to give people for a speech: the loose regulations, the intensive lobbying and favorable — you know, the truth is, we can't get into all of this, there's too much, there's too much else that's going on that we have to talk about today." I'd like to get into it a lot more, actually, because there's a lot more to it than what Noah and the other liberals we see coming to Obama's aid on this Wall Street speech issue are saying.

The main defense they like to use seems to be that Obama has a right to take speaking fees, Wall Street firm or no Wall Street firm-sure, $400,000 is a lot for one speech, but why not let him make some money? This argument, similar to the one they like to use whenever a Democratic candidate takes corporate donations of "money makes the world go round," misses the entire reason so many aren't pleased with the situation.

Personally, my attitude wouldn't be any different if Obama's speech had paid a dollar, or if he somehow didn't have a legal right to make money in this way. Because as long as he's being rewarded by Wall Street, there is something deeply unjust about the whole thing.

I'm talking about the fact that, in accordance with Noah's righteous calls for focusing on the deeper problem of Wall Street greed, the resentment from progressives and others about Obama's compensation from the banks has everything to do with said greed. Obama and his party, whose financial relations with the major banking firms go a long way back, can be held responsible for virtually all the excessive power Wall Street currently holds. Obama, along with a crucial amount of other Democratic senators, voted to pass Bush's unnecessary and financial control-consolidating Wall Street bailouts in 2008.

Then, no doubt partly at the behest of the Wall Street insiders within the Obama administration, they took basically no action aside from Dodd Frank. They didn't prosecute the bank executives responsible for the crash, and most importantly they didn't undo the Clinton Wall Street deregulations, which are largely behind the crash in the first place. The results of this were disastrous.

Despite Democrats' (not even accurately founded) back-patting about the unemployment rate having gone below 5% under Obama, the recovery has been what I like to describe as a tower made of toothpicks. The housing bubble has blown right back up, along with the massive overestimation of stock and bond prices. This, coupled with the unprecedented financialization of the economy amid Democrats' failure to break up the banks, along with the record federal debt amid Democrats' failure to sufficiently raise taxes on the wealthy, has created grounds for a new economic crisis. And a crisis that's not far off at all, judging from the bursts in parts of the housing bubble that have already begun to appear.

To be fair, this next crash will also largely involve a reckoning with various larger forms of accounting fraud that society is tied in with too deeply for Obama to have fixed, such our dependence on a petroleum economy. But the reality is that a repeat of 2007-2008 is coming right up, and had Obama and Friends enacted the necessary reforms this crash wouldn't be anywhere near as bad. We also wouldn't have had the resurgence of the GOP and the election of Donald Trump, thus making those reforms here to stay, but that's a different story. My point is that while Noah also protested in his Daily Show rant that change doesn't start with Obama, at a crucial point in history, it did. And the unwillingness of Obama and his party to act at that point has had consequences we'll soon see the full catastrophic scope of.

And now Obama is being paid by the same financial institution whose industry he partnered with for eight years to transfer money away from the lower classes, and which is about to evaporate the money of said classes before quite possibly making another profit through new Wall Street bailouts. You see now, Trevor, why some aren't applauding with your show's audience at that?

In regards to this, along with the countless other hypocrisies and injustices that the Democratic Party has been involved with since its leadership's neoliberal transformation around forty years ago, I doubt the producers of the Daily Show or many other pro-establishment liberals will acknowledge there's a problem. Whatever Noah's personal views on Obama's legacy and the Democratic establishment, he and the rest of the beloved late night liberal comedy crew serve major media institutions that are more than fine with seeing these problems ignored or, better yet, re-framed in a positive light. Thus, it's no wonder Noah was allowed to briefly advocate for standing up to the rigged banking system in the quoted segment-as long as he deflects attention from the root causes of said system, him criticizing Wall Street itself is evidently nonthreatening to the oligarchy.

The good news is that as of the last couple years, every time one of the Democratic establishment's spokespersons has made power-serving statements like the ones mentioned, a consequential facet of the population has reacted by doing something to enact change. And 2016 Democratic primary election theft or not, their efforts are working quite impressively. After a month and a half of Medicare for all supporters leaderlessly pressuring House Democrats to support the H.R. 676 single payer bill, 98 out of the 193 said Democrats are now co-sponsoring it; according to the research of one Warren Lynch, Berniecrats have mostly taken over thirteen state Democratic parties; and as membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has grown rapidly in recent months, so has the electoral success of candidates who share its agenda.

So the types of progressives who aren't cheering on this objectively unfair spectacle of an ex-Wall Street president taking Wall Street money appreciate the concern of the Daily Show's corporate string-pullers, but we're not adopting their cheery attitude about it, not to mention about the monumental flaws in our economic and political systems that it represents. And when extreme financial concentration soon results once again in economic disaster, we expect many of the remaining loyal Democrats, who will suddenly find themselves scarcely able to pay for basic needs let alone cable to watch The Daily Show shortly after Obama left office, to join us in working towards the creation of a society that works for all of us.

But hey, Obama has a right to make money.

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.

This Is How We're Going To Break The Democratic Establishment's Control Over The Anti-Trump Movement

Things are looking up. Bernie Sanders' poll numbers are at all-time highs while his opponents wallow in increasing unpopularity and public distrust. Political involvement among young people and those in among the progressive majority in general is quite possibly higher than it's been for a generation. As a result, despite the U.S. government's behavior being ever more militaristic and authoritarian, corporate power and economic inequality in many ways being at record levels, and the climate being on the brink of catastrophe, society is looking a lot like it's on track to overcome all these obstacles.

And then, on April 19, 2016, the revolution is dealt a big setback.

Largely because of the voter suppression and electoral fraud that occurred in the 2016 New York Democratic presidential primary on April 19 (which, by the way, were so substantial that even the New York Times was prompted to report on them), the nation's political trajectory was sent into an unprecedented tailspin last year. But even as Bernie Sanders' supporters are making enormous gains in turning the situation around by essentially doing outside of presidential politics what they were doing this time last year, the power structure has the potential to pull off the 2017 equivalent of stealing the New York primary.

Yes, they can do it again, and they can do it even more stealthily than last time. By co-opting the anti-Trump movement, and at the same time aligning themselves with Trump and Friends in regards to the goals they share, the neoliberal Democrats, the Deep State, and their many allies in the corporate media are essentially smothering the effectiveness of the effort to defy the Trump regime. In other words, without genuine progressives in charge of The Resistance, a lot of focus may be put on things like Trump's tax returns and unpleasant personality, but things like his wars, neoliberal policies, and infringements upon civil liberties will get dangerously insufficient attention seeing as the Democratic establishment very much shares these parts of Trump's agenda.

And as the specter of a Trumpian bout with fascism provoked by a world war and/or terrorist attack looms closer than ever, with Trump and the Deep State's newfound mutual enemy Russia continuing to issue far more blatant threats towards the United States than usual, ending this fake resistance movement is an urgent need. There's no hope for defying the regime, after all, without a sincere and united effort behind that defiance, and this goes not just for the ineffectual "McResistance" movement but for the currently elitist and politically inept Democratic Party.

So how do we take The Resistance away from these narrow and ulterior motive-filled interests? Easy: by simply letting those interests make their intentions so blatantly narrow and ulterior motive-filled that they ultimately drive away their initial supporters.

Throughout these last eight years, with the epic electoral failure of corporate Democrats post-2008 and the rise of a progressive movement within the Democratic Party whose victory could only be prevented last year through actual electoral fraud, the traditional Democratic bosses have been confronted with the harsh reality that Americans aren't going to support predatory capitalism and real-life Orwellianism whether an R or a D is involved. So since the virtual collapse of the Democratic brand on November 8 last year, they've decided to transfer their political investments into another letter: "A" for anti-Trump movement.

For some this bait-and-switch of theirs has been apparent from the start, but a great deal continue to assume anything "resistance" is good news. But as the months have passed, allegiance towards the leaders of the McResistance has in many ways started to drop-and not so much because of what anti-McResistance commentators like me have done, but because of what those McResistance leaders themselves have done.

The first self-induced partial tear-down of the McResistance facade began in February, when progressives responded to the fact that more than a dozen Democratic senators had been voting for all of Trump's cabinet nominees by starting a PAC called We Will Replace You. Its goal was to primary any Democrats who cave into the Trump agenda. This organization, unlike groups like Justice Democrats and Our Revolution, was impossible for establishment Democrats to denounce as GOP-helping "purity testers" without exposing themselves as the true obstacles to countering the Trump agenda, because it only went after Democrats who were acting as direct assets for the president. Thus, I've encountered otherwise devout Democratic Party loyalists who fully agree with We Will Replace You's objectives, because the last thing they want is to be a Trump enabler.

Of course, that hasn't stopped the Democratic establishment's most zealous defenders from attacking the effort to remove Trump-helping Democrats, as exemplified in a slightly unhinged column from a few days ago that stated supporting We Will Replace You is "suicidal." But its message falls on liberal ears that are currently distracted by the second big "I'm not on your side" announcement from the leaders of the  McResistance: the voicing of support from top Democrats for Trump's Syria strike earlier this month. While I've witnessed some incredible incidents of liberals wishing Hillary Clinton were president as Trump ordered the attack, the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and droves of other party bosses including Clinton herself support Trump's action has no doubt caused a lot of anti-war liberals who like to think Democrats share their foreign policy views to stop and think.

And as this general unraveling of the old political order which is 2017 drags on, the McResistance will only  further unravel as well. Virtually no rank-and-file Democrats, however much they think they can count on their party's leadership now, will stand for public figures who call themselves members of "The Resistance" while helping Trump and GOP carry out their dangerous agenda. When Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton voted for post 9/11 Bush proposals like the Patriot Act and Iraq War, the former was nearly defeated in the 2004 primary by the (more) principled Howard Dean and the latter lost the 2008 primary to the (at least marginally) more principled Barack Obama. And the backlash this time towards Democrats who are unwilling to counter a Republican administration bent on autocracy will, it seems, be far greater.

Then again, don't let my somewhat anecdotal case for the Democratic base's intolerance of Trump-enabling party leaders make you become complacent. I could be wrong about the McResistance being so politically vulnerable, especially considering the formidable propaganda machines its string-pullers have in place. To be safe, let's do all we can to expose the hypocrisy and inadequacy of this "resistance" movement whose top members so often do the opposite of resisting, and of this Democratic Party that claims to represent an opposition to Trump while acting as his greatest asset.

We can turn both said movement and said party into a genuine force for good, and if the leaders of the McResistance keep capitulating to Trump as they of course intend to do, our job will be easy.

Why The McResistance Is Just As Dangerous As The Trump Regime

Last month, I penned an article that would go one to become one of my most popular works, titled Why I Fear The Democratic Establishment Just As Much As I Fear Trump. In it, I chronicled the saga of egregious acts employed by Democratic elites throughout the last two years-rigging the 2016 Democratic primary, then denying doing so, then starting a McCarthyite campaign that could result in war with Russia. You know, the usual-before concluding on the more hopeful note that these tactics have been employed because the oligarchs in control of the party know their reign is in danger of coming to an end. And now I'm following it up with a piece articulating why, in addition to fearing Trump and the neoliberal Democrats equally, I view the so-called resistance movement and the Trump administration as equally big threats to the country's future.

Namely, because the neoliberal Democrats are now aiming to continue their reign by going so far as dismantling the democratic process itself.

I'd first like to make clear to any pro-establishment liberals reading this that when I attack this movement-which my fellow blogger Caitlin Johnstone has so appropriately classified as the "McResistance"- I'm not helping Trump in the least. Because as David Rosen assesses, the persons and entities behind the McResistance are not actually resisting Trump: "Trump changed the game of establishment politics and now is president. The Democrats are floundering, unsure of how to face the demands of a trying historical test. The Democrats, overseen by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Wall Street’s inside man, have no clue as to what to do. The social order is in crisis, undercut by the restructuring of global capitalism, and he lacks the vision to see what’s going on, let alone do anything to address it. Equally challenging, he seems to be losing party discipline, with Wall Street Democrats in panic. Most revealing, today the Democrats follow — do not lead! — the popular insurgency spreading the country."

Additionally, Democrats like Schumer clearly don't even have any desire to fight against most of Trump's agenda, such as expanding the U.S. military empire, transferring wealth to the top, and taking away civil liberties, seeing as they share those goals with Trump. So by going after the McResistance, I'm not hurting a movement that fights the Trump agenda, but quite the opposite.

What is the point of this movement entities like the Democratic Party, the military and intelligence community elites, and much of the corporate media have gone to so much trouble in putting together if they don't even truly intend to fight Trump? That question was cleared up for us on March 8, when Politico published an article titled The Resistance Will Be...Underwritten By Corporations. You'd assume from the headline that it's a piece sarcastically denouncing the involvement of corporate and billionaire money with a movement whose anti-corporatism is crucial for its success, but in a political landscape so defined these days by Orwellian logic, intuition doesn't apply to things like this. The piece, it turns out, is a happy endorsement of corporate money.


It begins as follows:

Late last month, a few hours before the Democratic National Committee elected Tom Perez as chair, party officials held a vote on whether to accept donations from corporate political action committees. The debate was not conducted in the backroom, but in front of C-SPAN cameras. And Democrats, loudly and proudly, chose to accept corporate cash.

On the floor, California’s Bob Mulholland, after conceding, “I’m not a member of Mother Teresa’s sisters’ organization. I am a member of the Democratic Party” swam against the populist tide: “All those corporations in North Carolina, who stood up for the Democratic Party platform against the law there to try to outlaw or discriminate against transgender [people], why should the Democratic Party say now, ‘Hey, great what you did, but we’re not gonna take your contributions?’” Charles Stormont of Utah contended Democrats can safely accept money from corporations “as long as they understand I will treat them no differently because of it” while warning, “We cannot afford not to take corporate money, or we disappear.”

Any half-respectable journalist would have followed up by pointing out the outrageousness of those statements. Namely: A, Mulholland basically bragged about the Democrats choosing not to do the most good possible, B, he then simultaneously implied both that Democrats can't choose to fight for transgender rights on their own and that there's nothing wrong with those corporations because they did one good thing, and C, Stormont told the two biggest lies about corporate money, which are that it doesn't necessarily influence the actions of politicians and that politicians can't keep afloat without it. Instead, because war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, the piece's author, Bill Scher, writes:

The optics may be lousy, but the DNC made the right call. To maximize resistance to Donald Trump, Democrats need to win as many 2018 midterm election races as possible. And they can’t do it on $27 checks alone.

Of course, that’s not how the progressive populists see it. After watching Bernie Sanders raise millions for his presidential bid with small donations, and watching Hillary Clinton get skewered for her Wall Street ties, they are convinced the party is worse off with corporate cash. Jon Gardzelewski, a new DNC member from Wyoming, said on the floor, “This last election cycle, there was a fire lit under the voters of the American people [who] supported a message to get money out of politics … We’re going to need them … We need the votes a lot more than we need a little bit of corporate money.”

Scher then goes on with an attempt to disprove this notion which, to his credit, consists of some very creative distortions of reality. He entirely dodges the point made by the Cenk Huegur quote included in the article correctly saying large amounts of money haven't done a thing for the Democrats' ability to win elections in these last eight years when that money has come from oligarchs. Scher instead doubles down on the claim that the amount of money candidates spend is always the chief decider of who wins. And when the time unavoidably came to acknowledge that Clinton lost the election last year despite wildly outspending her opponent, he somehow managed to twist it into a defense of Citizens United after implicitly acknowledging what refuted the claim he'd just made, which is that ideas can easily decide elections regardless of who spends the most money.

And it gets worse. As Scher goes on to state:

Furthermore, the parts of the Trump agenda that most disgust the left are not supported by Big Money. Most corporations do not have an interest in a border wall, mass deportations, a refugee ban, discrimination against the transgendered or the denigration of the free press. The business community likes Trump’s deregulatory zeal, but it’s divided over his border tax and trade war musings. The health insurance industry is nervous that repeal of the Affordable Care Act will cause market chaos, and the loss of the individual mandate will rob them of customers.

When one reads that twice, one easily realizes Scher is not just minimizing the significance of big business' support for policies that transfer wealth to the top, but trying to get us to subconsciously support a number of those policies. If I understand Scher's reference to Trump's trade war correctly, he's talking about Trump's opposition to neoliberal trade deals like NAFTA. And the aspects of Obamacare Scher names that are supported by Big Money all include the corporatist parts of the law. This subtle effort to get us to believe corporations have our best interests at heart Scher then implicitly contradicts with this whopper of a paragraph:

Forging a big donor-small donor coalition is hardly unprecedented; it’s what the Democratic Party has done for decades. Obama had 4 million small donors in 2008, but 66 percent of his money came from larger donors and 20 percent came from Wall Street. Obama’s Wall Street take was a tick smaller than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 25 percent in 1932. Woodrow Wilson was a small-donor pioneer in 1912, but also had ample Wall Street backing. The trust-busting progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt also had a “monster 1904 slush fund” from Wall Street sources. All of these liberal icons did not hesitate to regulate corporations in office despite their funding sources, so there’s no reason to assume the taking of corporate money will cause a deathblow to the progressive agenda.

So now that we know corporations can be trusted but it's still good that taking corporate money doesn't influence the decisions of politicians, we can relax and let the oligarchs take charge of the resistance. Except Scher has just presented us with utter nonsense. The links Scher provides to the situation with Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt reveal that in the case of the former, the Wall Street backers were advocates of progressive causes, and that in the case of the latter, the slush fund had resulted in the appointment of corporate executives to high positions within the White House and the Republican National Committee.

As for FDR, the only reason the New Deal came to be was that Roosevelt caved into enormous public pressure after his 1932 presidential campaign and abandoned the cause of his Wall Street donors, who up until then had held great influence over him. And it's a flat-out lie that Obama's Wall Street donations didn't affect his actions, as evidenced both by how he voted for the bank bailouts as a Senator and refused to sufficiently re-regulate Wall Street as president, not to mention how he admitted himself at one point that big donors' money influenced him.

Scher then signs off with the assertion that what he so authoritatively calls "The Resistance" is only viable if what he so self-revealingly calls "corporate shmoozing" can take place. I apologize for the length of the preceding deconstruction, but that article reveals a lot about the intentions of those behind the McResistance. And while the views it reflects are very much fringe (a glorious 84% of Americans think money has too much influence over the political process), it reflects the overwhelming consensus among current Democratic Party insiders, big-time corporate media pundits, and the other champions of the McResistance.

This is evidenced not just by the poll results that prove the members of the top 0.1% are generally less inclined towards a democratized political and economic system than most others, but by the opinions that they and their propaganda gofers express, with Scher's article being no exception. Corporate media outlets, Politico especially, have responded to the political awakening in regards to money in politics caused by the Sanders campaign with variations of Scher's piece like Why Hillary Clinton Can't Stop Raising Wall Street Cash and Why It's OK To Accept Wall Street Campaign Cash, complete with the same excuses for corruption that I just refuted.

"One of the most embarrassing aspects of U.S. politics is politicians who deny that money has any impact on what they do," wrote The Intercept's Jon Scharz in summer 2015, even before Bernie and his millions of small donors stirred up so much trouble. "For instance, Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s notoriously fracking-friendly former governor, got $1.7 million from oil and gas companies but assured voters that 'The contributions don’t affect my decisions.' If you’re trying to get people to vote for you, you can’t tell them that what they want doesn’t matter. This pose is also popular with a certain prominent breed of pundits, who love to tell us 'Don’t Follow the Money' (New York Times columnist David Brooks), or 'Money does not buy elections' (Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner on public radio’s Marketplace), or 'Money won’t buy you votes' (Yale Law School professor Peter H. Schuck in the Los Angeles Times)."

But by the time Democratic elites were finally able to get rid of Sanders a year later, the plutocracy and its defenders had seen their already flimsy narrative of how "money doesn't hurt democracy" had for the most part been irrecoverably blown apart, and many of them adopted a new one: "screw democracy."

It started with a lengthy piece, published on May 1st, 2016 by the these days occasional blogger Andrew Sullivan which, despite being in many respects brilliant, included some troublingly inaccurate diagnoses of the factors behind its subject Donald Trump. The article, titled Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic, had just that message. Sullivan rightly pointed to "global economic forces" as the reason so many in the Rust Belt and Middle America now felt inclined towards Trump's protectionist and isolationist rhetoric, but failed to mention that those global economic forces were engineered by powerful corporations rather than brought about naturally as Sullivan implies. Sullivan also, rather absurdly, pointed to American society these days being more democratic than in the past as the reason for demagoguery's rise, brushing off the proven fact that America is now not a democracy or even a republic but an oligarchy run by billionaires with anecdotal accounts of large amounts of big donor campaign cash not helping candidates. He then vaguely but strongly advocated for a far less democratized system as a means to stop Trumpism.

It continued with a similar piece in the July 2016 issue of The Atlantic, written by Jonathan Rauch, which proclaims political sanity has been done in by not just too much democracy but too little political influence among elite interests. The latter of which Rauch also ludicrously describes as more common in the past, and Orwellianly says "play a vital role as political bonding agents."

It really began to gain steam when beltway commentators, in reaction to Brexit, largely started saying the root of the demagoguery problem was allowing dumb people to vote and even seek information out for themselves, such was the case with the June 2016 piece It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses. Not to mention the even more pro-autocracy U.S. News article by one Harry Jaffe, praising the newly exposed top DNC officials for showing bias against Bernie Sanders.

But at a certain point in the middle of last year, the openly professed desire among elites to use Trump as an excuse to do away with democracy grew strong enough to compel Matt Taibbi to write an article titled In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears, which concludes as follows:

Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society is "We are the white cells, voters are the disease" is comparably scary in its own banal, less click-generating way.

These self-congratulating congoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.

Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.

Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this election season couldn't get any worse.

Given recent developments, though, the fact that Taibbi was wrong in that election prediction implicates an even bigger threat to democracy.

Since Trump's victory, the calls for ending democracy among McResistance leaders have only gotten more vocal. In a late 2016 piece that's oddly contradictory given how Trump was able to win because of the Electoral College, Michael W. McConnell praised the Electoral College as well as the two-party system (the allowance for viable third parties in other democracies, he says, lets "fringe factions" exert excessive control, presumably by making it so that anyone who supports the party that most aligns with their views can, reprehensibly, vote for that party as easily as any other). Citing the repugnance of the 2016 major party nominees, McConnel also advocated for the elimination of voting in the presidential nominating process, saying party elites can be counted on to choose the best nominees because  they "have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill." This movement to alleviate the plight of today's power-deprived elites has since lived on with the corporate money-endorsing Politico article above, along with the statements from Democratic leaders about corporate money that the article quotes.

No matter that lack of a multiparty system and insufficient opportunities for regular people to get their views represented are at the core of why so many chose to support Trump last year, as evidenced by how most Republican voters do not feel either major party has listened to them. No matter that on the Democratic side, party elites actually did handpick their nominee last year, and chose a candidate who was neither willing to govern wisely nor evidently able to gain popular electability. And no matter that money in politics is what made "The Resistance" necessary in the first place. Because for the Deep State, the Trump-wary neocons, and the establishment Democrats, "The Resistance" is not about preserving democracy or even, in many ways, resisting Trump.

It's about getting towards the endgame of an attack on democracy that these forces started forty years ago, and that they don't intend to stop just because the majority of the American people now want them to stop it.

Throughout these next few years, we are going to see the neoliberal Democrats at their very worst. We're going to see more and more corporate media articles advocating for corporate and elite control over the Democratic Party and the centers of power in general. We're going to see more and more defiant and frequent actions from neoliberal Democrats to shut out progressives, possibly going so far as widespread election fraud and voter suppression in the 2018 elections. We're going to see escalating rhetorical attacks on Bernie Sanders and his movement, ranging from the personal to the ideological. And when the inevitable terrorist attack gives the Trump administration an opportunity to vastly expand its authority and quite possibly destroy the pretense of American democracy, the neoliberal Democrats will simultaneously partner up with Trump and Friends to work towards eliminating representative government and greatly ramp up their theatrical McResistance efforts, complete with all the blabber about "uniting against Trump," to marginalize progressive dissent.

When Debbie Wasserman Schultz responded almost a year ago to Bernie Sanders' complaint that the DNC wasn't treating him fairly with the private gripe, "Spoken like someone who has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do," what she meant likely wouldn't fully be made apparent till several years afterward.

And then, of course, the Sandersists will fight harder than ever, manage to retain what's left of our democratic system, and ride what will ultimately come to be overwhelming public opposition towards Trump and the neoliberal Democrats to landslide victories in 2018 and 2020. But in the meantime, not just Trump, but the phony and ulterior motive-driven movement that he's made possible, deserves our utmost concern.

For Democratic Elites, "The Resistance" Isn't About Saving The Country-It's About War

We all knew it was coming. The buildup to it had been happening for months-years, in fact, if you counted the whole history of this drama. But when the inevitable did at last appear, it felt no less shocking and appalling than in any other case for the fairly small minority of Americans who disapproved of it. On March 4, 2021, the new president has announced the U.S. is now planning to send forces into Russia.

Some have seen this coming for a lot longer than others. For many on the far left and the far right-who, it turns out, have a lot more in common than it would appear-expectations of something like this happening have been experienced for as long as four-and-a-half years ago, when establishment Democrats started doing to their opponents what Republicans used to do to them and went on a relentless Red-baiting campaign. In this case, the Red Scare was based on the still unsubstantiated claim that Putin's hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails. From there on things only got crazier.

By mid-winter, Obama was spending the last weeks of his term using the at that point religiously accepted "Russia hacked the election" narrative to push sanctions onto Russia while the beloved gang of late-night liberal comedians made really ha-ha funny jokes about taking this feud with Russia further. By spring 2017, top Democrats were blatantly saying they wanted war with Russia, a development that was shortly followed by NATO allies starting to express similar sentiments. As the Russia rhetoric coming from establishment Democrats, anti-Trump neocons, and Deep State officials grew more and more unhinged, so did the conspiracy theories they used to justify it. When the great economic crash of 2017 happened, many of the leaders in the pre-war effort tried to deflect attention from the fact that the crisis was largely the fault of Obama by claiming it was the result of Putin's trying to "sabotage the American economy." By the time much of the pro-Trump fervor following the terrorist attack of 2017 died down, some of them even tried to link the attack to Putin. All the way through, much of the American population accepted this 21st century Cold War propaganda, and the theoretical war's supporters only grew going into the 2020 election.

Hillary Clinton's victory over Trump in 2020 was as narrow and unexpected as her defeat had been in 2016. Having become the Democratic nominee only because of the massive voter suppression and electoral fraud perpetrated by pro-Clinton primary election officials as had been the case in 2016, she'd always appeared to be an even weaker candidate than she'd been the last time around. The one factor behind her coming-from-behind victory, it seemed, was the fact that she and her supporters had run the most rabidly McCarthyite campaign imaginable, which motivated the at that point solid majority who wanted war with Russia to come to the polls. And now, after a month-and-a-half of president Clinton laying the final foundations for this war with sanctions and quiet deployments of NATO forces close to Russia, she's finally done what we've all come to quietly expect. Americans may not have much money these days, or much more time where oil is easily accessible, or hope for a stable climate, but at least they now have an entertaining show to watch.

Dystopian essay concluded. I'm of course not saying this is exactly how I think the next four years will unfold, or that Hillary Clinton will be the one to usher the war in if it does happen (though that's a real possibility), or that things won't go completely the other way. But I am saying that as the members of the Deep State, the Democratic leadership, and the corporate media continue to assess their priorities for the Trump era, this is certainly the kind of future that they intend to bring about. And the so-called resistance movement is their most valuable tool for realizing that future.

We'd all like to think the current dynamic is a contest between the Trump regime and the Trump regime's noble, rightly unified opposition. If that were the case, things would be simple for those who want to avert the nation's slouch into fascism at the hands of Trump and Friends; all we'd have to do is get behind the Resistance movement, and everything would be fine. The complex truth, though, is that there's currently a quiet effort to divert the energy of the anti-Trump movement into something that could very well ultimately create something just as dangerous as a Trump Reich: a full scale war between Russia and the United States.

Anyone who's been paying much attention to the recent actions of the non-Trump forces within the American centers of power can tell they're preparing for a new war with Russia. Half the country believed Russia and the U.S. were heading for conflict in Gallup's latest poll on the matter, and that survey was taken a full year ago, before the breakout of this "Russia hacked the election" business. If that poll were taken now, well above 50% would no doubt think war with Russia is coming, and a significant faction among them would likely approve of this. All of what I said in the second and third paragraphs of this piece preceding the mention of a 2017 economic crash is true, with those in the coalition that's formed between establishment Democrats, Deep State officials, and much of the major media amid the rise of Trump having been engaging in an unsettling campaign of Red baiting. And this campaign resembles an all-out war effort more all the time. Such a war would be very profitable for these forces, both financially and politically, and they're going to be spending these next three-and-a-half years exploiting every bit of the public's righteous anti-Trump sentiment with the goal of building support for this project.

The propaganda they've employed in the effort to do so has been both frightening and amusing. They've created something of a buffer to protect their supporters from finding out their true motives by often strongly implying that any news sources outside of the corporate media's neoliberal Democrat echo chamber are run by Kremlin operatives. They've used every means reality provides them to try to draw a link between the Democratic establishment's opponents and Russia. They've in some cases, like the one pictured above, gotten rank-and-file individuals to become outraged at their baseless McCarthyite claims instead of the real problems our country is facing.

Speaking of which, these threats posed by the Trump regime-elevated militarism, increasing racial and economic inequality, climate change, expanded government authority to survey, punish, and censor citizens-are not the concern of these "resistance" leaders. All of these things have very much been perpetrated or endorsed by the Democratic Party, the Deep State, and the corporate media, and when they claim to be standing in solidarity with the cause of climate, labor, civil libertarian, and human rights activists who represent the truly productive aspect of the Resistance, it of course isn't genuine. Paul Street assesses the real problems these figures have with Trump in his piece The Deep State's Hatred Of Trump Is Not The Same As Yours:

"The establishment’s contempt for the orange-haired beast, I noted [in a past article on this subject], was different. The nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire were perfectly willing to live with most, if not all, of what the left hated about Trump. After all, I reasoned, they’d been backing or tolerating most or all of those terrible things under presidents from both major United States parties for decades. Trump, I wrote, faced ruling-class disdain because he was considered bad for transnational capital and the American empire. For the most part, the 'deep state' masters who backed Hillary Clinton did not appreciate The Donald’s blustering promises to roll back the neoliberal 'free trade' agenda in the name of the forgotten working class. The foreign policy and 'national security' establishment especially hated his criticism of Washington’s long march toward war with Russia. They did not relish the related threat Trump posed to Brand America. It is longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. ruling-class doctrine that this country is the world’s great beacon and agent of democracy, human rights, justice and freedom. American reality has never matched the doctrine, but smart rulers knew that it would be especially difficult to align those claims with a president like Trump."

Furthermore, as Counterpunch's Chris Floyd observes after criticizing the joke about war with Russia that I mentioned earlier, these figures aren't even truly at odds with Trump: "See how ha-ha funny that is? Especially from the funny ha-ha folks at SNL — who paid Trump to be the host of their show while he was conducting the most racist, hateful political campaign in modern American history. They normalized his hatred, they gave him a national platform to show he was an all-right guy with a sense of humor, no big threat, no big deal. They normalized him, lionized him, helped him reach millions of people who pay little attention to the news. Now, of course, they’re 'leading the resistance' with 'cutting-edge comedy' — Alec Baldwin puckering his lips and fawning on a shirtless Putin — and with really funny ha-ha stuff like saying Trump should totally be more like that gutsy Hitler guy and 'take on Russia.' Meanwhile, Trump and his minions and the Congressional extremists are already rolling back every law and regulation they can lay their hands on in a slavering frenzy to poison the earth, remove all restrictions on corporate rapine, strip millions of health care, roll back decades of hard-fought civil rights advances, double the military budget and build a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border. It’s a full-bore Barbarossa on the wellbeing and common good of the American people (and the world) — but who cares about that? According to the funny ha-ha guys at SNL — and practically the entire Democratic Party and the so-called liberal media — what Trump should really be doing is 'taking on Russia.'"

In short, if you think this picture is as simple as us, the military and intelligence communities, the major media, the Democratic Party, all those wonderful late-night liberal comics, and that similarly lovable George W. Bush against the Trump regime, you're being taken for a dangerous ride. As I've said before, Trump needs these figures to keep up his charade of being an admirable enemy of the establishment, and these figures need Trump to keep up their ruse of being noble protectors of a sane order. Trump, in his usual carelessness, has even blown the cover multiple times on this symbiotic relationship of theirs by tweeting last year that he would rather run against Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders, and then having tweeted last week that he couldn't be happier for the Republican Party now that the neoliberal Tom Perez has been appointed DNC chair. So it's a surprise that about half the left and most of the right still doesn't seem to recognize what's really going on here.

Given that, a U.S.-Russia war isn't the only kind of conflict Democratic elites want to perpetuate-they also stand to gain from a largely theatrical war between themselves and the Trumpists. The staged scuffle between Republicans and Democrats that the oligarchy until recently used to protect its interests has escalated into a war between neo-fascists and sleazy, warmongering neocons. And since the conflict between the Trumpists and the Clintonists is a lot more evenly matched than it appears, with the former camp able to gain a lot more political leverage through terrorist attacks and wars with countries other than Russia, this war could continue for a while, possibly until two election cycles from now. Because by then, the oligarchs who profit from all these wars could very well be forced to retreat into the luxury survival bunkers that many of them are creating for themselves after their half-century long quest for more collapses society as we know it.

The encouraging thing we can take out of all this is that the oligarchy-benefiting war between Republicans and Democrats has been escalated for a reason. The plutocrats are taking notice amid the populist uprisings that have appeared in the recent years, and they're desperate to divert the energy of these movements away from the direction of defeating the neoliberal order. Through determined efforts to resist the war efforts mentioned, we can unite not just the Sandersist left but pretty much all of the 99.9% around the goal of taking away the power of the corporate and deep states. We can set the country in a better direction. But to do so, we'll need to understand the war-related obstacles that are being put in front of us.

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.

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.