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.

A Repeat Of The Tea Party Isn't Enough-We Need A Revolution To Counter The Trump Regime

Like most every other disaster throughout history, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Democratic elite had just committed perhaps the worst affront to democracy this country has ever seen by stealing the presidency from Bernie Sanders, and the Sanders supporters, who'd grown more than numerous enough to decide the election, were largely convinced that if Clinton could do this and get away with it, she could no longer claim the title of the lesser evil. Indeed, the rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries, and the disturbing McCarthyite tactics that establishment Democrats launched after this rigging was revealed, have made it so that I personally find Hillary and Friends just as frightening as the Trump regime.

A big mistake many of my fellow anti-Clintonist progressives made, though, was becoming so eager to get rid of Clinton that they'd taken to talking down the threat of the alternative. "As bad as Trump is," wrote the otherwise always spot-on leftist blogger Michael E Sparks in his breakup letter to the Democratic Party, "he would just spin his wheels for four years. Both Republicans and Democrats would vote down everything he tried to do. The insiders hate him. He has no government experience. He can’t navigate it. He would just be a four-year Jon Stewart punchline." Those exact sentiments were expressed by a great deal of other former Sanders supporters, me included; how bad could Trump really be, we reasoned, given the facts mentioned above?

I'll get to exactly why this view of Trump is not accurate in a second, but the reason I think so many on the anti-Clinton left dismissed the notion that Trump posed much of a threat had to do with something I call the Tea Party Fantasy. When Trump got in, a lot of progressives believed, the left would do in 2017 what the right did in 2009 and easily overwhelm the new regime, along with the establishment of one of the major parties, with a years-long festival of grassroots political action. And so far things have for the most part lived up those expectations, with the fierce progressive backlash having likely ruined the GOP's hopes of repealing or even reforming Obamacare while the power structure of the neoliberal Democrats gets chipped away at more and more every month. At this rate, you'd think, by the time the Tea Party of the left is finished, Trump and Friends will be pretty much irrelevant as president-elect Bernie Sanders prepares to take office as the leader of the now corporatism-free Democratic Party.

The hard truth, though, is that our task is far bigger than staging an inverse repeat of the Tea Party. Because this is not 2009, and Donald Trump is not Barack Obama.

Consider these words, as written by the staunch anti-Clinton leftist Chris Hedges shortly after the election:

We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.

When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?

The specter he anticipates is one that anyone can objectively see coming, but that many of my fellow left-wing opponents of the Democratic establishment still refuse to acknowledge can happen because of their attachment to the Tea Party Fantasy: during Trump's term, perhaps sometime very soon, there will inevitably be a major crisis, most likely, I think, in the form of a terrorist attack. And as we saw almost sixteen years ago with the case of the dystopia portrayed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, such an event can easily lead to extremely violent and authoritarian behavior on the part of the government. Especially when that government is headed by the likes of the Bush or Trump administrations.

And seeing as the Bush team looks warm and fuzzy compared to the current regime, this time the aftermath of the attack will no doubt be horrifying on a level that Americans have never been forced to confront. Trump himself may not be competent enough to create an autocracy, and he and his administration may be for now reviled by the vast majority of Americans including most in Congress, the Senate, the media, and the Deep State, but terrorist attacks have ways of shaking things up. Immediately after this event, Trump's approval ratings will no doubt go way, way up merely because of his position as the commander of a nation in crisis, and frazzled as he'll be, his far smarter and ideologically committed top aides will see to it that he wastes no time in taking some very big actions. As most of the House, the Senate, the press, and the public becomes compliant towards the president, his egoistic and domineering personality will partner with the terrifying cunning of behind-the-throne rulers like Mike Pence and Steve Bannon to bring about an exponential expansion of executive power and the irrelevance of laws saying that power can be challenged. And by the time the following period of wild military ventures, mass arrests of any perceived dissenters, and expanded corporate power makes most people again turn against the regime, it will be too late. As Chris Hedges says, the pretense of democracy will be ended, and fighting back will be virtually impossible.

No, Trump is not 2017's equivalent of 2009 Obama. The latter, like the Democratic Party, was prone to tepid liberal moderation and capitulation towards his political opponents, something Trump and Friends are the antithesis of. And the supporters of this president are driven not by the reassuring fuzziness of "hope and change" but by bitterly paranoid hatred and fear. Even before the coming 9/11 event, these facts have been chillingly demonstrated on multiple occasions, such as that of the victory salute a prominent group of neo-Nazis gave for Trump in November which provoked a disturbingly tepid response from the Trump team, and the Trump rally last month that a witness describes as having included a "horrifying" amount of zeal, nationalism, and "demonic activity."

Trump's administration may look like the politically fragile product of a "straw man" candidacy whose power is severely limited by the government's checks and balances, but as will soon be made apparent to all, it's a fascist time bomb that will go off as soon as the next big attack happens. It has a powerful enough movement behind it, it has a path to greatly increased influence, and all it has to do is wait. Michael Sparks himself seems to suspect it, having lately taken to comparing Trump with Hitler. And more than ever, he has some good reasons to justify doing so, what with the Trump administration having recently signed an executive order that in many ways dismantles various aspects of government, including the state, educational, and justice departments, so as to consolidate authority to the executive branch.

So what do we do? The bad news is that in many ways, the opportunity to avoid the course towards this insane future ended when Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. The good news is that to soften the fascist blow awaiting us, all we have to do is ramp up what we're already doing: getting involved in the political process.

We must firmly draw the line between the Sanders coalition's movement and the so-called resistance movement of the Democratic establishment, the latter of which, in addition to serving as a public relations tool for corporate Democrats, is run by people whose political brand makes them inherently unable to truly resist a fascist. We must talk to all of our generally non-political friends, relatives and neighbors about the gravity of the situation so as to make the percentage of Americans who have become more politically involved in the face of Trump go from its current 25% to more than twice that. We must redouble our commitment to donating to anti/Trump and/or anti-neoliberal Democrat organizations, participating in and/or organizing protests and strikes, signing petitions, contacting political leaders, and simply spreading information that increases awareness of the threat at hand. A good opportunity to do so is the "Berniecrats' Day of Action" that I'm organizing, which takes place on March 25, the one-year anniversary of the moment a bird so upliftingly visited Bernie Sanders at one of his rallies.

"Now is the time not to cooperate," writes Chris Hedges in his blueprint for revolt. "Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we." To do so will take more than following in the footsteps of the Tea Partiers; this will require the creation of a movement whose success has no parallel.

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.

It's As If Trump And Friends Are Itching For A Terrorist Attack To Actually Happen

You've probably heard sometime recently about a book, published in 1935 by one Sinclair Lewis, titled It Can't Happen Here. It's a piece of political science fiction which tells of how Berzelius Windrip, a self-styled populist who turned out to be a corporatist dictator, won the 1936 Republican presidential nomination and defeated the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt on a wave of nationalism and contempt for the establishment. Thankfully, no one resembling Windrip appeared in the 1936 election, and Roosevelt would probably still have defeated them if they had because of how grateful the vast majority of Americans were for the New Deal. But especially after taking a good look at the events of this past month, it becomes clear that Lewis' prediction wasn't wrong; it was just eighty years off.

The first thirty days of the Trump administration, aside from some menacing statements from the president and his aides about the press being their enemy and a series of overreaching executive actions, have not quite been qualifiably fascist. But throughout these last few weeks, the president and/or his top aides have made some remarks which seem to very strongly imply they have an intention to take things much, much further. At one of his strange campaign-esque rallies today, Trump invoked the politically self-beneficial specter of a terrorist attack regardless of whether he was talking about a real event, having vaguely referred to a terrorist incident that happened "last night in Sweden."

Okay, you'd think. He said another ridiculous thing. Why make it into a provocative headline? Well, it's established a trend that Trump and Friends have developed of fabricating terrorism incidents for their own political leverage. Last month, as you know, the Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway referred multiple times to a nonexistent "massacre" in Bowling Green, Kentucky that was perpetrated by foreign Muslims to use as an argument for the thankfully now independent court-blocked Muslim ban. Days later, Trump himself cited a wide series of unsubstantiated terror incidents that he said the media was covering up. And now we've seen a remarkably similar piece of rhetoric coming from the highest office.

One explanation for this bizarre pattern is that Conway's the kind of counselor that tells her patients to listen to rather than ignore the voices in their heads. Another is that Trump and his inner circle have privately decided that focusing on terror attacks, real or not, is a way to create political capital for themselves out of thin air.

To be clear, I'm not going to pander to any "false flag" suspicions in this piece. I don't believe the Trump administration is plotting a terrorist attack any more than I believe Bush was behind 9/11. But I do have some solid reasons to suspect the Trump administration would welcome, and is even preparing for, the enormous position of power they'll be given in the event of a major terror attack during their term.

A Trump supporter gives his interesting take on this situation.

We've all seen the ghastly political shock waves that terrorism tends to have. 9/11 brought about one of the darkest periods in American history for our country's constitutional and democratic values, allowing the Bush administration to create a surveillance state, violate human rights, and tear apart the middle east for profit all while the vast majority of Americans backed the president out of "national unity." Most recently, the 2015 ISIS bombings in Paris that killed 130 people let the French government declare a prolonged state of emergency which threatened the country's pretense of democracy. And in the Trump era, as Phil Torres writes today after referring to the president's Islamophobic rhetoric, attacks on the judiciary, and demonization of the media, we are in greater danger than ever of losing our democracy because of terrorism:

So the dominos are in place for a major, sudden constitutional crisis. What’s frightening about this unstable equilibrium is that another terrorist attack will almost certainly happen within the next four years, if not the next year or coming months. It’s not so much a matter of if but when this takes place, as terrorism scholars unanimously agree. And once this does happen, those who still believe in American democracy will need to be vigilant and proactive in defending the only branch of government [the independent courts] that currently stands between democracy and autocracy.

And so when I see Trump and his top aides regularly fabricating terrorism incidents to strengthen their case for the persecution of Muslims, the dangers of a free press, and the expansion of the executive branch's powers, I get the impression that they're scratching an itch they have, consciously or not, for the things a real terrorist attack would let them do. Indeed, many in Trump's cabinet are anticipating, with an unsettling amount of conviction, the event of a terror attack and/or civilizational war between America and the Muslims of the world. Michael Anton, Trump's senior director of strategic communications, apparently expects Islamic terrorists to attack the U.S. with a nuclear weapon "any day now." And Steve Bannon insists that in accordance with a dubious, cycle-based view of history wherein world conflict is scheduled to peak around every eighty years, an epic global war is sure to come very soon.

The irony of this is that as has been the case with the Islamic fundamentalists who believe they're on the verge of winning a coming apocalyptic war between good and evil, Trump, Bannon and the rest are beginning to realize their visions of turmoil and the end times regardless of whether these expectations are based purely on myth. And both of these forces are helping the others' similar aspirations be brought about, with the middle east power vacuum that Obama's unnecessary military involvement created now showing hints of being filled as members of the Islamic State hail the things they're gaining from Trump's anti-Muslim actions. And the Trump administration, obviously, is using the Muslim extremists to further its own ends of gaining partisan advantage, consolidating economic and political power, and the allegiance of the American people.

I almost can't blame Bannon for believing in the eighty-year cyclical view of history, because so many disasters that developed in the 1930's are repeating themselves now. But in this case, things are in many ways far worse than they were eight decades ago. Instead of just the Dust Bowl, there's a global and irreversible environmental catastrophe. The economic inequities and corporate control over society now surpass in magnitude the similarly plutocratic conditions of the early 21st century. In addition to a new Great Depression that's expected to hit this year, we now have an unprecedented coming era of natural resource scarcity to deal with. And as wasn't the case eighty years ago, the new rise of fascism has occurred in not just Europe but in the United States.

And as long as we're talking about parallels, here's one of the songs in praise of Windrip's regime from It Can't Happen Here, which I suspect will soon be a very accurate description of the state of the country:

Bring out the old-time musket,

Rouse up the old-time fire!

See, all the world is crumbling,

Dreadful and dark and dire.

America! Rise and conquer

The world to our heart's desire!

Toeing The Line Between Revolt Against Trump And Revolt Against The Democratic Establishment

I've got some bad news: the 2016 election is still going on, and it will probably keep going on for a while. All that's changed since November 8 is that the contest now takes place in the general political realm instead of presidential politics. Trump and his team of proto-fascists continue to throw out absurd and dangerous disinformation so as to bend the fabric of publicly accepted reality to their liking. Sleazy corporatist "liberals" continue to use shaming, scapegoating, and failing all else outright lying so as to hold onto the little public support they still have. And as was also the case in 2016, the majority of Americans who aren't buying into the self-serving political brands of either of these two forces are in agony while trying to navigate the tedious and grotesque game that they've been forced into.

Like it or not, the fascists and the sleazebags are in almost full control of the political establishment right now, and before they're hopefully replaced in the following elections, all we can do is work to tie them down best we can. What complicates our hopes for doing so is that instead of being in one piece and thus easy to oppose, these two groups are in competition. This gets in the way of our ability to oppose them because in this situation, attacking them has become a double-edged sword.

Caitlin Johnstone explains this problem in a recent piece:

Every time I write an article suggesting that progressive rebels should focus on attacking the Dem establishment instead of Trump, I get a deluge of comments and messages saying “We can fight both! We can walk and chew gum at the same time!” No you can’t. You cannot do that. You will fail. You will fail because this is a media war, a war of perception, a war of narrative. It is impossible, in our current political climate, to feed into the “Trump is a monster” narrative without simultaneously feeding into the “any Democrat would be better” narrative, because the establishment Democrats are doing everything they can to use anti-Trump narratives to elevate themselves so that they can take back control of the government without espousing a real progressive agenda. 

The national narrative determines how people vote, and they will vote with the Democratic establishment if we support the Democratic establishment narrative by collaborating with their desire for us to focus on Trump.

Going by that, it would seem that the solution is to simply focus on bringing down the corrupt Democratic cabal instead of feeding into its slyly self-elevating narrative about the monstrosity of Trump. But while I'm otherwise an enormous fan of the messages that Johnstone works seemingly every day to spread, I see some big flaws in the approach she's advocating. Namely that putting aside the Democrats' fear campaign, Trump absolutely should be feared.

Johnstone argues in her case for the counter-productiveness of revolting against Trump that while he and his cabinet are certainly very scary and power-hungry people, there's no danger they'll be able to circumvent the larger systems within our government's structure. "The Deep State goes very deep," she writes, "and the power structures entrenched therein are very old. The POTUS faces a long, hard, uphill slugfest of a battle in his attempts to restructure America’s power systems, and the majority in both parties openly or secretly hate him and his stated agendas."

She's partly right. What with said Deep State already being in full-on battle mode against Trump, I don't expect him to take very much control over it, even if he pounds away at its power structure every day for the next eight years. But that Deep State is mainly located within America's military and intelligence agencies, which can only contain Trump to an extent. Many other political facets exist which aren't so impervious to the influence of the president, and they alone may well be what enables his continued rise to power. While this will sound hard to believe, what I'm talking about is the Congress, the Senate, the governorships, the state legislatures, and the American public in general. Yes, the White House does have a way to expand its influence into these areas, and it runs through the last event that brought about an era of president-worship and grotesque nationalism in America: a major terrorist attack.

If and when the U.S. is attacked during Trump's term, the tables are going to be turned in his relationship with America's power structures. As the president, by default he'll become the main figure people will want to be loyal to amid a moment of great uncertainty and grief, and this will give him unparalleled power. With the newfound backing of the majority of the public, he'll easily be able to make the members of lesser elected offices, whether or not they hate him, go along with his agenda out of "national unity." It's then that Steve Bannon and the other terrifying Trump puppeteers will move in for the kill, suppressing dissent, going on reckless military ventures, and generally laying waste to the constitution and our democratic institutions. If you think I was led to believe this by the eager-to-fearmonger establishment Democrats at the Vox or The Washington Post, just look at what the avid Democratic Party critic Chris Hedges thinks about what will happen under this administration.

In short, Johnstone may be right for the moment in assessing that revolting against Trump is an act which feeds into the narrative of the larger threats at work, but that very likely won't be the case a year from now after circumstances allow him to take far more control. So returning to this article's main point, what's to be done about all this? Every time we attack Trump, we're inadvertently helping the Democrats. And every time we attack the Democrats, we're inadvertently helping Trump. The paradox that people like me find ourselves in when faced with this dynamic is maddening, and it's no doubt provoking a lot of us into hopelessness and apathy.

Rest assured, though, there is a solution. And it's as uplifting as it is simple: rather than spending all our effort on attacking our opponents, which, in spite of its partial importance, is ultimately an act which feeds into the revolution-strangling dynamic of the two-party system, we mainly try to build up alternatives. The hidden weakness in the system of mutually controlled opposition that the Trumpists and Clintonists have created is that ultimately, in spite of their over-emphasized differences, they serve the same interests. Which is to say the interests of the corporations and oligarchs that prop up both of them. If we can take away, for just one example, the ability of Goldman Sachs to lobby and donate to political candidates, Trump and the neoliberal Democrats, who are both deeply influenced by the bank in different ways, will lose massive amounts of money to run their campaigns and organizations. Then they'll be forced to rely on individual contributions from their ordinary supporters, who largely have far more positive desires than those of Goldman Sachs, or else be politically flattened by the dynamic small-dollar funding operations of the Berniecrats.

In this and many other respects, fighting the system of predatory capitalism is a highly effective way to kill these two big, ugly birds with one stone. Another is to advance leaders, organizations and ideas which represent our agenda. This approach may have proved ineffective when the 2016 election was in presidential campaign mode because of the deep institutional obstacles faced by Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, but in this new political landscape, we have a lot more options. We can run candidates in state and local level races, where it's a lot harder for the neoliberal order to rig the game against us than was the case with the presidential election. We can build organizations and movements from outside of electoral politics, putting us in an excellent position to enact change where it matters: in the bottom-up. And we can force the political establishment to work in our interests by making clear to it, with strikes and boycotts and calls to political offices, that an uprising is coming if they don't start working for the people.

None of this is to say attacking the Trump administration and the Democratic establishment directly won't often be necessary. But if we can refrain from making it a central priority, and focus on ending the neoliberal status quo in general, their card house of controlled opposition will fall down.

I Hope He Fails

 

Many of my fellow Americans will probably not appreciate the title of this article. It would seem that I'm stooping to the level Rush Limbaugh did eight years ago right before Barack Obama took office when, on his radio show, he famously used those same words to describe his view of the next president. I've seen a lot of people, whether or not they supported Donald Trump, urging me to "give Trump a chance" and "get behind our president," with those of them on the liberal end of the political spectrum saying we mustn't treat Trump the way Republicans treated Obama because "we're better than that."

To these people, as Limbaugh also said to those conservatives who felt an obligation to get behind Obama, I'll have to say I disagree fervently. Because unlike was the case with Obama, I believe Trump is quite seriously the greatest existential threat the United States has faced since the Confederacy.

Before I begin my case for this, I'd like to clarify that I don't view Trump and his party as the soul problem with who's running our government. I'm well aware of the enormous corruption, neoliberalism, and hypocrisy of the modern Democratic Party, and indeed I've voiced dissent to it and its leaders just as much as I've done with Trump. Nonetheless, I feel the need to iterate just how much danger we'll be putting ourselves in if we don't do absolutely everything we can to resist him.

I say this because while criticizing Trump is obviously a right of passage for the 37% of Americans who disapprove of him, I believe in the very near future, it will be very difficult to do so.

Let me go through a scenario which, while I've illustrated before, is something I believe must be repeated many times: it's months into Trump's term, and he's so far been little more than an embarrassment to the republic he's infiltrated. His opponents on both the left and the right are putting up a formidable fight, and with the help of his abysmal and dropping approval ratings, they're for the most part winning. That is, until something happens which ruins everything: a major terrorist attack. 

Such an event, which seems inevitable given the ever-increasing threat of terrorist attacks and Trump's dangerous ineptitude at protecting our country, will no doubt bring a profound change to how the president will try to govern and how much power he'll have to get his agenda passed through Congress the Senate. His poll numbers will spike, along with his willingness to take extreme and authoritarian actions, and things will get very scary very quickly.

Just imagine it: the world is in the wake of catastrophe, and Trump and the members of his cabinet are at the forefront of the damage control effort. What kinds of things do you suppose Trump's National Security advisor Michael Flynn, who has written that Muslims are "dead set on killing us and drinking our blood," will do to religious liberties in a situation like this? What do you suspect Steve Bannon, Trump's White House Chief Strategist, who has said that white supremacists are "a much smarter group of people" than others, will do to civil rights? What do you think Trump himself, who's publicly fantasized about assaulting his opponents, arranged for transparently Nazi-esque salutes to be held at his rallies, lied about seeing Muslims cheer on 9/11, bragged about having "called" last year's Orlando attack, and used "Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!" as his New Year's Eve address will do?

The answer, as Chris Hedges assesses in his own essay on this very real possibility, could be something we'd prefer not to know beforehand:

The last constraints will be removed by a crisis. The crisis will be used to create a climate of fear. The pretense of democracy will end.

“A fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols,” Robert Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” “Some future movement that would ‘give up free institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.”

Our ruling mafia will use the crisis much as the Nazis did in 1933 when the Reichstag was burned. It will publish its own version of the “Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.” The U.S. Constitution will be in effect suspended. Personal freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to organize and freedom of assembly, will be abolished. Privacy will be formally eradicated. Search warrants will be unnecessary. America’s emergency decrees will cement into place what largely exists now.

In short, America as we've known it for the last fifty years, and perhaps even for the last two hundred years, will stand a good chance of coming to an end when a major crisis meets an inherently authoritarian and bigoted Trump administration.

Due to factors that have emerged in recent decades such as extreme economic inequality, the corrosion of the democratic process, and loss of public faith in established institutions, in the last several years our country has entered into a phase so many other societies have throughout history: the rise of fascism. As was the case with those past societies, this path of ours has started with an increased public desire to get back at the political establishment which has abandoned their interests and a campaign on the part of demagogues to hijack this anger towards their own maniacal ends. And its next phase will be that of a transition to all-out tyranny.

When we approach our final destination on this road to fascism, though, we'll still have the potential to change course at the last minute. And in order to do this, we'll need to prepare to resist the personality which this toxic cultural energy has congealed around in full force. Despite the doubts some have that Trump poses a threat, I think it's important at this point in time for me and others to flatly say, "I hope he fails."

Preparing For Trump's 9/11 Event

As of this writing, it's been a few hours since the members of the Electoral College sealed America's fate and officially appointed Trump to be its 45th president. But there's some confusion as to just how bad this fate of ours will be; some expect Trump's term to be America's equivalent of the Third Reich, while others hold a far less extreme (and probably more realistic) view of who this man is and what he's likely to do as president.

However, the fact that Trump isn't literally as bad as Hitler comes as little comfort to me.

I've become convinced that the best year in history to compare 2017 with will not be 1933, but 2001. At that time, you no doubt remember, America elected (if you can call it that given how his opponent won the most votes) a highly incompetent and in many ways comical figure. In the first months of his presidency, his administration acted in an unpopular but politically routine fashion, causing his political opponents to easily recover from their loss in 2000 and get ready to start taking back their government in future elections.

That is, until you-know-what happened. After 9/11, George W. Bush's approval ratings went from 51% to 90%, and his party's favorability ratings went from 48% to 59%, giving his administration an opportunity to turn into something authoritarian and dangerous. Bush and Friends created a surveillance state, violated the Bill of Rights with their policies of indefinite detention and trial-less arrest, went against the Geneva Conventions by adopting torture, and used the attacks to push through numerous other less egregious but still corrupt goals, all with the consent of most people of the time.

This story is, quite seriously, that of a time when America had its bout with fascism. And as Trump enters the picture, I believe we'll need to prepare for something many times worse.

My consideration of a scenario wherein a 9/11-level terrorist attack occurs during Trump's term is more than speculation; it's a possibility that I believe has a very good chance of being realized. Michael Moore, who has a history of making fantastic but accurate predictions about Trump, has concluded this month that Donald Trump's unwillingness to attend daily security briefings is "gonna get us killed:"

So, my fellow Americans, when the next terrorist attack happens -- and it will happen, we all know that -- and after the tragedy is over, amidst the death and destruction that might have been prevented, you will see Donald Trump acting quickly to blame everyone but himself. He will suspend constitutional rights. He will round up anyone he deems a threat. He will declare war, and his Republican Congress will back him.

And no one will remember that he wasn't paying attention to the growing threat. Wasn't attending the daily national security briefings. Was playing golf instead or meeting with celebrities or staying up til 3am tweeting about how unfair CNN is. He said he didn't need to be briefed. "You know, I think I'm smart. I don't need to hear the same thing over and over each day for eight years." That's what he told Fox News on December 11th when asked why he wasn't attending the security briefings. Don't forget that date and his hubris as we bury the dead next year.

In other words, in addition to the countless other ways that Trump has failed upwards throughout his political career, his incompetence is going to bring him a great reward-a crisis which works to his partisan advantage. It's unclear just how many constitutional liberties will become irrelevant in the aftermath of Trump's 9/11, or how little dissent the government will tolerate, or how destructive the inevitable military conflict will be, but given how the Bush team looks friendly compared to Trump and his cabinet members, it's reasonable to assume that post-9/11 America's fascism will seem tame compared to what's coming.

And I'm not the only one who's anticipating this development. Anyone who acknowledges the dangerous nature of Trump and his transition team can easily imagine them doing some very frightening things in the event of a crisis, among them Chris Hedges, who believes that "The pretense of democracy will end" after Trump's 9/11 event. Another one of these political doomsday believers is Ted Rall, who has written in regards to the actions he expects Trump and Friends will take following this disaster: "Remember how, the morning of the election, the New York Times gave Trump a 15% chance of winning? Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years."

In short, while Trump may not be as big a threat as Hitler was in that he has no plans for mass genocide, and his lack of core convictions make him unlikely to follow through with his promises to deport millions and bar Muslims from entering the country, his state of mind is similar to that of Hitler and his one core value is a desire for attention, respect and control. And should a major crisis occur during his term, his power will be greatly increased, his for now inarticulate and crude brand of fascism will take on a solid and terrifying form, and he'll turn into what could indeed be America's version of Hitler.

But just as Trump's post-crisis rise to authoritarian dictatorship will be far more substantial than that of Bush, I suspect Trump's downfall will be all the more precipitous than Bush's. America has and has been for a long a time a very liberal country, and so the attempted political domination of figures like Bush and Trump is not sustainable. In the case of the former, it only took a few years after 9/11 before Bush and his party became greatly unpopular, Democrats began to win in all aspects of electoral politics, and left-wing ideas came to dominate the debate.

And ultimately, I expect Trump and his Republican Party to meet a similar fate. Since Trump is far less popular or likable than Bush was in 2001, I believe his post-crisis approval ratings will be a lot lower than 90%, and that they'll then go back down to their current level of about 40% within only a few years. This could very well mean that, unlike Bush, Trump won't be able to win re-election. Additionally, the horrific war crimes and assaults on civil liberties that Trump and his party are sure to commit in the wake of the disaster will no doubt come to bite back at them politically, with their opponents being motivated to take an enormous amount of action to combat Trumpism and the neoliberal paradigm which produced it.

Why do I think this will be case, though, if, as Hedges and Rall say, there's a good chance Trump will gut America's system of representative democracy? Well if Trump could defy the supposed odds and win the presidency, I think the American people could very well pull off something similar and successfully fight for the preservation of their country's constitution. If there's anything Trump has taught us, it's that a 15% chance of victory is not the same thing as a 0% chance.

Democrats Are Trying To Fight Fascism With Fascism Lite

In recent weeks, Democrats and others have responded to Hillary Clinton's loss by creating what James Kunstler describes as "The Deepening Deep State." Amid legitimate concerns over the effect that fake news has had on this election, those with the power to regulate online traffic have taken actions which infringe on free speech. For instance, the solution to fake news that Google and Facebook have come up with is cracking down on sites which they deem, based on often unfair standards, as unreliable.

What's really troubling about this rush towards censorship, though, is that the U.S. government is joining in. On November 30, the House passed a bill, called H.R. 6393, which, if approved by the Senate, will empower the state to follow Google and Facebook's precedent by censoring websites that they consider part of Russia's disinformation campaign. This measure, as you can imagine, would also open the door for online censorship on the part of the state.

And the justification being provided for these actions is similarly worthy of suspicion. The Washington Post's evidence for certain websites being tied to the Russian government is highly questionable, as is the CIA's supposed proof for Russia's role in the DNC email leaks. 

In other words, if there's a government campaign to spread false information which advances a corrupt agenda, it's likely coming from the U.S. government. And needless to say, the Democratic establishment is very much participating in this cynical effort. This tactic, in addition to being McCarthyite, is what Glen Ford, the editor of Black Agenda Report (one of the supposed Russian propaganda websites listed by the Post), rightly calls "Fascism with a Democratic Party Face."

"The term 'fascist,'" writes Ford in an explanation for this charge of his, "is bandied about today more than at any time since 1969, but there is little discussion of what fascism actually looks like in the 21^st century. The truth is, it looks like Democrats and Republicans; it operates through the duopoly, the political apparatus of the ruling class. Donald Trump’s fascism is largely the residue of the fascism of apartheid America, under Jim Crow, which had many of the characteristics of – and in some ways presaged – the “classic” fascism of pre-World War Two Europe. The establishment corporate Democratic and Republican brand of fascism is far more racially, sexually and culturally inclusive, but just as ruthless. And, at this moment in history, the corporate Democratic fascists are the more aggressively warlike brand."

And indeed, these Red-baiting antics are just the latest in a long series of similarly authoritarian actions that Democratic elites have taken since their shift to the right began around forty years ago. The modern Democratic Party, as Ford iterates, is a branch of the corporate state which (not coincidentally) has also emerged throughout the last forty years, and this fact has naturally led it to adopt the same fascist tendencies as the institution that it serves.

Namely, though the Democratic Party isn't classically fascist as Ford acknowledges, its brand of fascism takes on a more subtle form than that of Donald Trump: inverted totalitarianism.

The invertedly totalitarian method of fascism, as I've focused on in detail before, gains consent from those it oppresses not through nationalist propaganda, but through convincing the population that they are not in fact being oppressed. And the Democratic Party's political model of making its neoliberalism and militarism seem acceptable to its largely anti-corporatist, anti-war base perfectly fits inverted totalitarianism's description. For decades, the Democratic establishment has used an abundant means of propaganda tactics to keep the left from revolting against it, from the always useful "but the Republicans are worse" excuse to an outright effort to keep the Democratic base ignorant of its party's true agenda, and for the most part, this has effectively kept the Democratic Party safe from replacement or reform.

And even as this dynamic heads toward what will most certainly be political extinction, with most on the left now working to fundamentally change the Democratic Party for the better or, should that plan fail, build a third party such as the Greens, Democratic elites are evidently doubling down on the inverted totalitarianism.

From David Greenberg, the L.A. Times columnist who recently argued that Democrats don't need to shift away from their current economic elitism because, as he insists, their message has "always included a central commitment to economic fairness along with social inclusion and equal rights," to Nancy Pelosi, the re-elected House minority leader who thinks that Democrats don't need to be set on a direction which supports America's working families because "our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families," establishment Democrats are continuing to deny, against all evidence, that their party has become too neoliberal to succeed.

The reason I'm leveling these complaints against the Democrats when a party that's even worse is about to come to power is that, as we've seen in the case of the 2016 election, the current Democratic Party's model of status quo centrism is no match for the populist right. And if we want to defeat right-wing populism in time for the pivotal 2020 election, we'll need to work towards the rise of the politically formidable ideological model presented by the left.

Hopefully by then, this site won't be shut down on suspicion of it being a Russian fake news outlet.