In these last few years, the Democratic Party’s leadership has reacted to their loss of political dominance by turning their sphere of influence into a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole, but a simple assessment of which form of government the DNC’s recent policies most resemble.
The following log of these policies shows the extent that bourgeois institutions like the Democratic Party will go to hold onto their control-something useful for us to know as we try to overcome the larger corporate oligarchy.
The party rigs its own elections
The electoral fraud, voter suppression, and backroom deals that the were used to steal the presidency from Bernie Sanders in 2016 were too visible for most people not to see them. This was proven, to my surprise, when a Rasmussen poll came out last year showing only around 30% of Americans think Hillary Clinton had won that primary contest fairly. But as long as the party’s leadership is being supported by a powerful plutocracy, they won’t care what the voters think.
So the party has lately served as a front that the centers of power use to keep populist insurgents out of elected offices. Last month, an audio was leaked of Democratic congressman Steny Hoyer pressuring congressional primary candidate Levi Tillemann to drop out of his race so that the DCCC could secure the win for its preferred candidate Jason Crow. This was no doubt just one of the dozens of similar conversations that have been happening inside private DC meetings lately, as the political establishment responds to this year’s unprecedented grassroots efforttowards running non-corporate candidates.
The DCCC has also worked to undermine James Thompson, Rob Quist, and many other Bernie Sanders-backed candidates, usually through underhanded tactics like refusing to sufficiently fund their campaigns. And the DNC’s refusal to stop using superdelegates for 2020 hints at what we’ll see next. When the party is confronted with its anti-democratic behavior, its spokespeople don’t even attempt to deny it anymore; they rationalize it by saying that it’s best for the party.
“These people are violently opposed to democracy, and yet they call themselves ‘Democrats,’” writes Caitlin Johnstone in reaction to all of this. “And Americans are so alienated from what democracy is that this is accepted as normal.”
The party accuses its opponents of being traitors, and seeks to shut down media that exposes it
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Julian Assange are among the people that establishment Democrats have accused of being Russian agents. All of these charges are false, including the most widespread ones; there is still no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, and even Obama has stated that there’s no proof Assange and WikiLeaks are working with Russia. As Glenn Greenwald wrote two years ago, when this McCarthyite campaign was starting, “Democrats’ tactic of accusing critics of Kremlin allegiance has [a] long, ugly history.” And it’s escalating to dangerous heights.
For instance, Greenwald was more recently forced to comment that the Democratic Party’s actions pose “a dangerous threat to press freedom.” He was referring to the lawsuit that the DNC filed last month against Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks, as justified under the guise of the Democrats’ unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about all of them having conspired to steal the 2016 election. By suing WikiLeaks simply for publishing information that’s damaging to them, Greenwald describes, the DNC has violated the constitutional rules of a free press.
This is just part of a worldwide ruling class effort to crush dissent. RT has been forced by the Justice Department to register as a foreign agent; online companies are waging all-out war on anyone who opposes corporate power and the neocon war agenda; police have become militarized in anticipation of social unrest. The Democratic Party’s crackdown against free thought is ahead of the rest of the oligarchy, and we can know what to soon expect from our rulers by seeing the party’s current actions.
The party is starting to look into having its members do loyalty pledges
Last week, a county Democratic committee in New York voted down a measure to have its members do mandatory pledges of loyalty to the candidates that the party chooses. This proposal is just a step ahead of how the Democratic establishment has been treating nonconformity in recent years.
Bernie Sanders delegates were mistreated and excluded from the 2016 Democratic convention. Jill Stein, and Sanders to a lesser extent, have been subjected to wildly dishonest public attack campaigns from establishment Democrats. Most alarming has been the recent online habit from ordinary Democrats of accusing people they disagree with of being “Russian trolls” or “Russian bots,” a McCarthyite mindset that the media has no doubt propagated deliberately.
“Every single time I try to substantiate my argument with a link or a source when debating a neoliberal, they tell me my source is invalid unless it comes from one of the mainstream news sites that have consistently avoided covering anything that made Clinton look bad,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone in late 2016, when the current media psyop campaign against dissenting information was just getting started. “The talking heads on TV are telling them that it’s okay to do this now, that they no longer have to look at a news story and address its content anymore, because unless it comes from NBC, CNN or the New York Times, it’s fake.”
This war against dissent, both in and outside the Democratic Party, will go on for as long as the deep state sees its dominance threatened. And the people leading that effort to dethrone the deep state will keep disrupting the power structure until they get the freedom they demand. Until this conflict reaches a conclusion, we have to keep working.
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