The Clintonite Echo Chamber Is Putting Is All In Peril

We shouldn’t be having to deal with this. The estimated climate catastrophe deadline is three years from now. Most of the country is regressing into a third world lifestyle as we sit on probably the biggest market and debt bubbles in history. The U.S. military empire is escalating its wars while preparing for a new one that clearly involves Russia. The Trump administration is slowly turning into a dictatorship, most recently with its practice of reading adoring letters from Trump fans at press briefings. At the same time, we have an opportunity to unite amid crisis and build a peaceful, egalitarian society that transcends the dying old systems-if we can overcome this absurd push to save those systems that’s appeared in the self-described political center.

You know what I’m talking about. The response to the rise of Bernie Sanders and his movement from the more ardent strain of Clinton supporters has been extreme: I can’t find the link to it, but there’s a petition to have the DNC reject Bernie Sanders entirely; wild rumors have spread throughout the extensive online Clintonite sphere after Sanders voted against the Russia sanctions about him being a Russian agent; there’s even a pro-Clinton senate primary challenger against Bernie Sanders (though you probably haven’t heard of him as his campaign is up against someone with a 75%+ Vermont approval rating); these efforts come out the most raw in their articulations on the blogging site Medium, where a popular-within-their-niche series of Clintonite pieces have proclaimed things like “every day I think about Bernie Sanders is and what he represents” (that’s meant in the context of obsessive hate), and “we will never stop talking about Hillary Clinton.”

It’s July 2017, and I’m not here to engage those behind these things in a reiteration of the ancient primary fights. I’m here to point out how dangerous and absurd this campaign to prop up the Democratic establishment is. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way-I mean it in an objective way.

Yes, we’re all entitled to our opinion (if you’ll excuse that essentially meaningless cordial phrase), but I think it’s fair to say fighting for the corporatist, militarist Democratic establishment is at this point a sprint into darkness. Not like that was ever untrue, but now the situation is more precarious than ever; every action in support of a non-imperialist, ecologically sound social democracy brings us a lot further from the precipice, and every action in support of the alternative brings us a lot closer. We who incline to do the former will unwaveringly keep with our job of organizing and educating towards a sane future, but the Clintonites are making that harder with their insistence on keeping the old political order.

Our will to evolve and continue thriving as a species is obscured by a litany of entrenched attitudes, Clintonite and not. And for what? For loyalty to a distant bureaucratic circle’s idea of what the color blue, the letter D, and the outline of a donkey should represent? For the ability to glibly reflect oneself in words like “pragmatism” and “center?” For the legacy of an ex-presidential candidate who has no more objective reason to be so exalted than, say, Al Gore or John Kerry?

More likely it has, at its heart, to do with wishing that the old system’s flaws could be ignored forever, that we won’t have to confront the terrifying consequences of our choices as a society. That’s actually understandable. But it’s a way of responding to this crisis that sets one up for loss, and that those supporting Trump’s policy mode of climate change denial will be the most betrayed by.

I know I’m acting similarly to the Clintonites I critique by attacking something other than the Trump regime. But whoever Berners attack, we’re doing so with the intention of helping our ideas: a living wage, health care as a guaranteed right, an end to rule by the wealthy, social justice, no more American militarism, and a safe and habitable planet. What are the Clintonites trying to help by attacking us for this? It’s hard to say, but I think I’d rather get what the Berners are having.