We Will Never Get Over It

Establishment Democrats, I've got some bad news: Bernie Sanders supporters will never get over what happened last year.

Since the end of the primaries, in every way and from every level of rank within the Clinton cabal, we've been told that we need to quit whining and get behind the camp that won. And no matter that I ultimately obeyed them to an extent by advocating for voting for Hillary Clinton in swing states and Jill Stein in non-swing states; in all other respects, I haven't conceded to the Democratic establishment an inch. And neither have virtually all other Sandersists, with nearly half of Democrats, most of whom are no doubt Sanders supporters, now not feeling represented by their party. The fact that the neoliberal Democrats narrowly win the title of the lesser evil doesn't entitle them to the loyalty or even respect of me and the other Sanders supporters, and in this piece I'm going to articulate why this is the case.

There are probably countless good reasons for Sanders supporters not to align themselves with the Democratic establishment. The incredible condescension and hostility that was directed towards us by Hillary Clinton's many allies in the press; the DNC's attempts to undermine our candidate; the saga of ways corporate Democrats have undermined our agenda throughout not just the 2016 primaries but for the last several decades. But out of them all, there are two that work as conclusive deal-breakers.

The first one is the rigging that took place in the primaries. This issue has been ignored and dismissed so much by the corporate media that even many Sanders supporters themselves don't seem to be aware of it, but it's very real. What I'm talking about is the fact that even with the efforts from the DNC and the major media to hurt Sanders' campaign, he would have won the primaries in a landslide were it not for the efforts from overzealous pro-Clinton state party and state government officials to directly rig the primary contests in favor of their candidate.

Consider the following scenario: it's the beginning of February in 2016, and Bernie Sanders has just narrowly defeated Hilary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses. In this alternate reality, the Iowa Democratic Party hasn't very likely stolen the contest from Sanders through a series of autocratic "re-staged" vote counts, arbitrary coin flips, and then a strange refusal to disclose the exact vote count. As result Sanders, who was only around twelve points behind before the Iowa vote, quickly jumps to a near tie with Clinton in an average of polls. After he's also won the contests in New Hampshire and Nevada (the latter of which hasn't been slanted towards Clinton by the backroom deals of Harry Reid in this scenario) Sanders is narrowly in the lead.

The only thing that saves Clinton in this scenario from early obliteration are her large victories in all of the southern states, the contests of which were all scheduled for the first half of March. But Sanders manages to keep the race very close during this period through his substantial victories in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Missouri (all of which haven't experienced statistically impossible vote model irregularities in this reality). After that, it's almost all uphill for Sanders. While fairly far behind in pledged delegates and national polls following Clinton's many victories in the contests from March 1 to March 15, by the end of the month he's established a firm national lead and reduced his delegate deficit from the hundreds to the dozens. He's able to do this by winning every single state since the middle of March due to how, in this scenario, Arizona's March 22 contest wasn't fraught with massive voter suppression.

By the end of April, Sanders is both leading in every national poll and narrowly leading in pledged delegates because the New York Democratic primary wasn't mired with massive voter suppression and electoral fraud, and because his margin of victory in Rhode Island wasn't reduced by many instances of closed polling locations. By the end of May, Sanders is by far the frontrunner in national polls and pledged delegates, and is close to becoming the frontrunner in superdelegates, because in this scenario many of the polling places in Indiana weren't closed before the state's primary, the Nevada Democratic caucus wasn't run in a way which deliberately shut out dozens of Sanders delegates, and thousands of votes in the Kentucky and Oregon Democratic primaries weren't mysteriously lost. By the end of the primaries in June, Sanders is sure to be the nominee because the contests in Puerto Rico and California weren't very likely stolen from him through  staggering amounts of voter suppression. He then, as we all know, defeated Trump in an epic landslide.

For every Sanders supporter, the fact that this didn't take place because of the actions of the Democratic establishment is of course too awful to forgive. What's far worse for not just Sanders supporters but everyone else, though, and the second big reason we will never get over what happened last year, are the ultimate consequences of this subtle coup against Sanders.

There are numerous reasons clear to anyone who's paying attention to the dynamics at work in the world for why the theft of Sanders' presidency was a very bad move for the Democratic elite to make. There's the prospect we're facing under a Trump presidency of exponentially increased risk of terror attacks against the U.S. and the geopolitical catastrophes that those attacks are sure to set off, in contrast to the peaceful foreign policy future America would be entering into were Sanders allowed to become president. There's the prospect of the Trump administration staging a fascist takeover following those attacks in contrast to the era of benevolent government behavior that Sanders would create. But by far the worst thing that's coming about because of Sanders' so-called loss, as Caitlin Johnstone wrote right before the primaries ended, is the climatic effect of Sanders' absence from the White House:

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who has placed mitigating climate change front and center of his platform. He is the only one whose policy is strong enough to save us, and the only one with a voting record that backs up his commitment to enacting it in full.

A vote for anyone else is a vote for the end of your species. If a few years from now, you can look your kids in the eye as they fight wars for water and run from one natural disaster to the next, if you can look them in the eye and tell them “I voted for this, I put saving some billionaire’s share portfolio ahead of your health and safety,” then go right ahead. Your choice. Our children may be fighting for their lives in exactly the same way, but at least my conscience will be clear.

It will be bitter consolation, though. I’d rather them be thriving together in a new age of peace and safety than me having the grim satisfaction of an empty “I told you so.”

Look mom, no future.

Well, that's not necessarily going to be the case. Even as the earth's average temperature drifts very close to the dangerous two-degrees-above-the-pre-industrial-average mark, there's hope yet for the climate as the majority of Americans who acknowledge climate change work feverishly to transform our energy system through for now purely bottom-up activism. And while we can't do much to stop the geopolitical crises that the Trump administration is on track for creating, we can stop its coming attacks on democracy if we play our cards right. Indeed, the people themselves have just as much or more potential than a President Sanders would have to set history on a new course. And Caitlin Johnstone herself, in spite of the fatalistic tone of the article above, believes this.

Still, while Bernie's revolution could very well bring about massive amounts of change to the world in these next few years, grievous harm is also likely to be done as a result of what the Democratic establishment did last year. As John Sanbonmatsu wrote days before the pivotal 2016 New York primary: "This is not a normal election year. It’s the end game. It is a crisis, in the original sense of the ancient Greek word, krisis — the turning point in an illness when a patient either dies, or recovers. Except that the patient, in this case, is both the American body politic and the living earth itself." And in the coming years, it will become clear which choice establishment Democrats made when faced with that crossroads, along with why we will never get over it.

Get Over It, Establishment Democrats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Self-Defeating Argument That The Democratic Party Represents Meaningful Change

Both morally and politically, the Democratic Party has failed after forty years of pivoting to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a great deal of people are now taking action to fix that. Bernie Sanders, despite having been prevented from becoming the new face of the party last year by pro-Clinton Democratic leaders, he and others are making another go at reforming the Democrats. And should this effort fail, these progressives will still have the option of letting the already sinking ship which is the Democratic Party go underwater and rally around an alternative organization.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Democratic base appears to be satisfied with their party's current form. During the 2016 campaign, more Democrats were found to be satisfied with Hillary Clinton than there were Republicans who felt the same about Donald Trump, and 56% of Democrats feel that their party represents them. While that latter figure would no doubt shrink to less than 50% if it were to include all of the left-leaning individuals who no longer affiliate with the party, an overhaul of the currently neoliberal Democratic leadership will be difficult for as long as so many Democrats remain unaware of what their party represents.

So in this piece, I'm going to attempt to change the minds of those who believe the Democratic Party in its current form represents a serious threat to the corporate state. I've made this argument many times before, but in those cases a mistake I might have made is focusing only on the actions of the party's leaders. A more effective way of proving the Democratic establishment represents the oligarchy is pointing out the fact that the oligarchy works to accommodate it.

The reality is that if Democrats were a party of the people, the political system in its current form would not allow them to have any power. When Bill Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone," had he meant this genuinely, said forces would have immediately started doing everything to sabotage him. His campaign would have been attacked and/or ignored by the corporate media, he would have been shut out of the presidential debates and had a difficult time getting onto all of the ballots, and either Bush or Perot would have prevailed. So is the case with every other corporate-funded Democrat like him who claims to want systemic governmental change.

Just look at what's happened to the few politicians in the last several decades who have actually tried to bring about what Clinton promised. When Ralph Nader tried to enter a 2000 presidential debate simply as a member of the audience, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization run by evidently very partisan representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, barred him from entering the area. Something similar happened to him in 2004 when Democratic officials hurt his campaign by filing pointless and resource-draining lawsuits against it. Nader wasn't the only candidate like him who was sabotaged during that election cycle, as evidenced by the successful attempt by the corporate media to wreck Howard Dean's campaign. Another instance of this systemic effort to block out non-corporatist candidates occurred in 2012, when the NYPD, which has a history of attacking those who threaten the neoliberal order, arrested Jill Stein for trying to enter the site of the New York presidential debate.

But never has the oligarchy-friendly nature of the modern American electoral process been made more apparent than in 2016. While some have tried to claim the fact that the DNC officials who expressed bias against Bernie Sanders had little control over the results of last year's primary proves the contest wasn't rigged, WikiLeaks' findings were only one part of the picture.

Throughout the primaries, pro-Hillary Clinton election officials often went out of their way to sabotage Sanders, starting with the first contest in Iowa wherein widespread reports surfaced of voter suppression and a highly suspicious "re-staged" vote count took place. Similar (and successful) efforts to rig the primary against Sanders occurred in Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, the Nevada State Democratic Convention, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California. Lesser but still consequential instances of electoral fraud took also took place in many other states, as evidenced by the numerous statistically impossible Democratic primary vote models which favored Clinton in every case. Another way Sanders was felled by a corporate-controlled political process, predictably, was the media blackout which plagued his campaign.

And then, to add insult to injury, Sanders' ideological successor for the 2016 election Jill Stein was sabotaged as well, with the corporate media having launched a smear campaign against her and the Commission on Presidential Debates having deliberately chosen polls which underestimated her support while deciding who could participate in the debates.

Judging from these and other ways the oligarchy has rigged our electoral process to benefit candidates and parties that represent it, one can only conclude that the best way to tell if a candidate or party doesn't intend to protect the people's interests is to see whether or not the media and the major political institutions are trying to get them out of the picture. And clearly, the Democratic Party fails this test simply because of the fact that it's succeeded in the current political system.

Fortunately this sad state of affairs, wherein one can only trust a politician to uphold the popular interest if they're being shut out of the political process, will have a good chance of changing in the very near future. Economic inequality is now at a level not seen since the late 1920's, right before the public rose up to bring about the New Deal, and a similar event is certain to take place within the next few years. But in order to make this overthrow of the corporate power structure effective, we'll need to take a firm stand against the corporatists who currently control the Democratic Party.

The Struggle For American Democracy Has Only Begun

According to PBS, Bernie Sanders is "gaining against Clinton in early polls." Salon's Bill Curry believes "Hillary Clinton is going to lose," primarily because millions of voters longing for a truly progressive candidate will nominate Sanders. POLITICO explained recently that Early-state polls hint at a Bernie Sanders surge, a headline that was unthinkable only several months earlier. Yahoo's Meredith Shiner calls Sanders a "progressive social media star and pragmatic legislator" and states that "Sanders also has a much more substantial legislative history" than any GOP challenger. In Iowa,1,100 people packed a gym to hear Bernie Sanders speak in May.

That was the first paragraph in an article from the columnist HA Goodman called It's Official-Bernie Sanders Has Overtaken Hillary Clinton In The Hearts And Minds Of Democrats. Published on July 25, 2015, it was the first Goodman published after he first started to believe that Sanders would win the nomination.

And up until a certain point, he had good reason to keep believing so; despite a rigged debate schedule and limited media attention, Bernie Sanders' poll numbers continued to go up. By January 31, the day before the voting started, Sanders' Real Clear Politics average had gone from 5.7% at the beginning of his campaign to 37.2%.

But after gaining momentum from his poll-defying near tie in Iowa and his blowout win in New Hampshire, something strange happened: with the help of Hillary Clinton supporter Harry Reid and his collusion with those who ran the polling places in Nevada, the state's contest was quietly stolen from Sanders. And as the primaries went on, things only got stranger. On Super Tuesday, the results in Massachusets were manipulated as well, along with those in Arizona, and, it turned out, Iowa. Though those were the only states so far that had experienced serious election fraud, there were many other factors, such as closed primaries and media manipulation, which, if subtracted, would have likely resulted in him being ahead at that point.

And before long, it looked like he was on his way to pulling ahead regardless. After a nine-state winning streak, which included a victory in Wisconsin that was both unthinkable a few weeks earlier and by an even larger margin than the polls indicated, his national poll numbers had risen to only one point behind Hillary Clinton. After the Wyoming primary on April 9, he only needed to win 56.5% of the remaining delegates to take the lead (and even if he didn't, he would still have a chance to win). And with the turning point approaching in the New York primary, despite the polls there, his chances were looking better and better as early voting showed him far surpassing expectations.

But the exclusion of independents from voting in New York, combined with the massive amounts of voting irregularities that occurred on the day of the election, all worked to steal the primary from Sanders on April 19, along with much of his chances for winning the nomination.

Despite the drop in Sanders' polls that followed, he dutifully continued into the predictably unfair April 26 contests, the blatantly rigged Nevada state convention, the suspiciously run primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, the practically predetermined Puerto Rico contest, and the clearly manipulated California primary.

Not all of the primary contests were rigged, but enough of them were that the results should be seriously called into question, and even if the highly unlikely outcome of this election were true, there's no question that Hillary Clinton won without a level playing field. Even Harry Reid thinks Sanders never had a "fair deal."

But Bernie Sanders' campaign is continuing in a different form, this one outside of the cruel game that the DNC has created for populist insurgent candidates, and this time it actually has a chance to win.

With three months until the election, Jill Stein and other Greens running for office won't get too much farther this year, but they will make crucial progress. Following the voting on November 8, which the Greens will most certainly take an unusually large share of, factors larger than any DNC propaganda campaign will begin to come into play. As I've written about previously, support for a third party alternative has been building up for decades, independents will soon outnumber both major parties combined, the state of the country points towards the coming rise of a populist third party, and there's even a historical precedent for what I'm predicting.

Everything indicates that a major Green Party sweep is inevitable in the coming years. But there's still one looming, uncomfortable question: can we expect the system to allow it after what happened to Bernie Sanders?

As I make a prediction similar to the one HA Goodman made last year, I keep in mind that the one thing he did not take into account was outright electoral fraud in favor of the candidate that the oligarchy backs. Who's to say it won't happen again in a different context?

I'm going to attempt to look into the future, imagining all of the methods of voter suppression that may (or will) be used against the Greens, and how we can defy them. All of these methods can be put into three categories, which I call false-appealing, smearing, and electioneering.

False-appealing

Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton said in his Democratic convention speech that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: Your time has come and gone." And eight years later, even after he had continued Reaganomics by signing NAFTA, killing welfare, and creating what later turned out to be the most dangerous deregulations in recent history, most on the left were still willing to believe his successor Al Gore when he said at the 2000 convention that "They're for the powerful-and we're for the people."

But by 2008, Democrats were finally losing patience with the corporatization of their party. After nominating Barack Obama in a wave of populism, they heard him say at the DNC that we're "a better country" than the one that allows Wall Street to crash the economy-and then saw him pursue a Wall Street bailout that set the stage for another financial crisis years later.

That was the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party's esteem among progressives. By 2009, the percentage of voters who affiliated as Democrats went from 35% the year before to 34%, and political independents edged them out after only being at 31% in 2008. Since then, we've seen a steady increase in independents going along with a steady decline of Democrats that stands apart from all the other times in recorded party affiliation history where a certain group has been in the majority. This shift in the electoral landscape can no longer be considered a trend, but a consistent pattern that's sure to continue, and it can only mean one thing: people are waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party does not represent the 99%.

But will enough of them wake up to end the Democratic Party?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are locked into a battle of who's campaign can fail the least. While Clinton is at risk of being indicted before the election, a credible source has reason to believe Trump is actually sabotaging his campaign, so whatever the polls say, the race is too close to call. But whoever becomes the next president, I believe the ultimate fate of American politics will be the same.

Though it's unfortunate, what we need to indict the Democratic Party in the court of public opinion as a tool of the oligarchy is a major economic crisis. And we'll get just that, as this Truthout op-ed explains:

Although there is a role for banks to play in the economy -- they facilitate commerce, after all, when just doing "normal banking" -- 30-plus years of Reaganomics have made banks increasingly vulnerable and prone to crisis. Giving banks this kind of powerful role to play in the economy is just asking for trouble. Wall Street is literally a ticking time bomb, and when it explodes it will take the rest of the economy down with it.
This is not hyperbole -- it's fact, and we're seeing more and more evidence every day that the moment when the Wall Street time bomb will explode is rapidly approaching. As Greg Ip points out in the Wall Street Journal, housing prices and stock prices are now hovering around decades-long highs.
The last time they were this high? You guessed it: 2007, right before [the last] crash.

That was written on August 1. This crisis will most likely hit before Obama leaves office, and in that scenario, when he and the rest of the Democratic elite pursue Wall Street bailouts as they did eight years ago, they will create a political nightmare for themselves. According to a poll from three years ago, 96% of Democrats, 95% of independents, and 89% of Republicans at least see financial regulation as somewhat important. And though when asked the less general question of whether they wanted more regulation on companies, that number goes down to 71%, when middle and working class voters suffering the consequences of the lack of business oversight see their leaders pushing for bailouts, a lot of politicians, Democrats especially, will see their careers crippled.

And though Democrats were able to remain popular in 2008 despite having largely supported the bailouts, this time it will be very different. Like I said, whether Hillary Clinton will win remains to be seen, but after this election is over, she and her party will be in trouble. As the 2018 midterms approach, not just the Republicans but the Democrats will be seen by all but their most loyal members as the party of the rich. Before long, given all the factors I mentioned earlier, large numbers of voters will start moving to a populist third party, most likely the Greens.

Gone are the days when someone like Hillary Clinton can easily (or fairly) defeat a genuine progressive like Sanders, and soon so too will the era where corporate Democrats can skate on their party's "Liberal" brand and expect to succeed with the left. And Democrats are generally either in denial about this fact or assume it won't matter. “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania," says New York Senator Charles Schumer, "We will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia." To Democratic strategists, this plan of appealing to the center may seem like a safe and sensible approach, but when you look at the larger picture, Democrats are basically racing into an electoral ditch.

And so when the Greens start to enter seriously competitive territory, they won't have to worry about losing many supporters to the old Democratic trick of bait-and-switch liberalism. The Democrats will have lost all of their credibility in the minds of voters by then.

And as for those who will still cling to the notion that the Democratic Party represents them-yes, they will be there-you can show them the solid arguments I make against that in these previous articles:

The Case Against The Democratic Party

Yes, It Is Time To Leave The Democratic Party

Make No Mistake, The Democratic Party Is Dangerous

But it won't end there.

Smearing

Though the political and corporate establishment generally doesn't know about the coming electoral upheaval, lately they've been acting as if they're preparing for a long fight against populist insurgents. This is apparent in how the major media has been treating Jill Stein.

From biased polls that make it look like Stein has less support than she really does, to hit pieces on her, to outright mocking, such as the over-promotion of a poll that says Stein is tied with Harambe (which was conducted in the specific instance of Texas, a highly conservative state), the media is going after the Green Party candidate as much as they did with Sanders. The strange thing about it is that they know Stein has no chance of actually becoming president.

This signals that something deeper is going on.

I believe that Ralph Nader's success in 2000 can largely be explained by a failure on the part of the two major parties to offer candidates that excite and inspire voters, increasing the desire for another option (Ross Perot's 1992 campaign may be another example of this phenomenon). And since moderate and triangulating figures like Al Gore are exactly the kind of candidates the Democratic elite prefers, when Nader started to experience a surge in the summer of 2000, the establishment was taken completely by surprise-but it wasn't unaware of the threat to the two-party system that this signaled.

And so after the fictitious election results were certified, the liberal bourgeois found a convenient way to stigmatize Nader and his successors-the propagation of the idea that Greens are the ones who caused Bush to win. And regardless of whether this claim was based on reality, it's most certainly contributed to the virtual dominance Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed since then.

But even if they're able to repeat that spin this year with Jill Stein playing Nader's role-which they've already done to a point-it won't do much to help their case. As Chris Hedges said this year in an interview, our society is experiencing a radical shift of public sentiment in response to the unprecedented income inequality that's resulted from their past support of neoliberal politics. There's one ingredient lacking in this movement, though, which holds back its enormous potential: an avenue for it to unite around. "It’s with us already," Hedges says about the revolution, "but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place."

A populist third party is the perfect means to bring this massive amount of political will under one roof, and no matter what the Democrats do at this point, the Green surge is coming.

But that can only get us so far-the power of media manipulation must never be underestimated, and as long as the mainstream press is controlled by the same forces that back the two-party system, insurgents will be vulnerable.

Still, even this weapon of the establishment, I believe, has grown weak with time.

Howard Dean was the Bernie Sanders of 2004. Or, more accurately, of 2003. In the months before the primaries started, the major media worked very hard to topple the anti-war, anti-big business onetime Democratic frontrunner, and they succeeded spectacularly. But when they tried again this year with Sanders, though things were made a lot harder for him, he still would have won without election rigging. This proves that in the modern political environment, where revolutionary sentiments are so strong and social media is popular, such propaganda is a lot easier for insurgents to overcome.

However, there are still several widely accepted myths about the Green Party that its opponents will take every opportunity to promote, and while whatever attacks on Green candidates that the media orchestrates are for the people of the near future to defend from, we can anticipate a few of them. Here are some of the strongest arguments for the Green Party that we'll need to use to beat the Democrats, ones which I'll elaborate on in future articles:

• The Greens absolutely can win. Post-2016, the combined membership of the two "major" parties will, in all likelihood, drop well below 50%. Though the Democrats will do everything to downplay the significance of this, it will greatly strengthen the case for third parties. We aren't going to start with anywhere near as much support as Democrats, of course, but if we put enough emphasis on that glaring fact, before long they'll be the ones who are "fringe."
• The Greens represent the views of mainstream Americans. No matter how much Democrats attempt to marginalize Greens, in terms of actual ideological appeal, we by far have the advantage. 61% of Americans favor higher taxes on the wealthy, 76% think that most free trade deals have been bad for the country, 58% want a federally funded healthcare system, 78% want Citizens United overturned, 57% think that GMO foods are generally unsafe, and in a poll that proves the Greens won't be hurt in the minds of voters by their environmental brand, 67% would pay higher taxes to reduce carbon emissions. I suggest you show any progressives who choose to align themselves with the Democratic Party the Green platform, or have them take the isidewith.com quiz that shows people which political party most aligns with their beliefs. 
• The Greens aren't dividing the left, the Democrats are. This is the logical conclusion of my first argument; when the Democratic Party diminishes enough, it will be easy to accurately convince liberal voters that since most of them don't even support the Democrats, voting for them only creates more division among the opponents of the Republicans. Which brings me to the last one.
• The Greens are in a much better position than the Democrats to stop the Republicans. Like the fact that Bernie Sanders would have been a better candidate against Trump than Hillary Clinton because of his trustworthiness and consistently progressive views, after the Democrats push for wildly unpopular Wall Street bailouts, they will be severely weakened, making Greens the politically superior option.

And if the defenders of the current party model start calling you a hippie, a communist, or a purist after you lay out your arguments, you'll know they've run out of real responses.

But even after that, the oligarchy will have one more card to play...

Electioneering

"Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth," said the labor organizer Lucy Parsons. I can't find the date between Parson's birth in 1853 and her death in 1942 when she expressed that sentiment, but if she did so before the year 1900, she later found herself standing corrected.

The late 19th century was a dark period in American history. Even though the enterprise of slavery had been broken up, it had left the class that used to benefit from it with so much wealth that it seemed like no other force was powerful enough to challenge them. In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were a "legal person," giving them the authority to make money by any means necessary whether that conflicted with state laws or not. In 1890, New Jersey became the first state to allow corporations to hold stock in other corporations, creating the economically unsustainable system of financial exchange that we now know as the stock market. That same year, John D. Rockefeller's standard oil controlled 88% of the refined oil market in the United States, just one example of the massive monopolization of business that had occurred. You can get a sense of just how bad things had become by thinking of the horrifying stories from that era of child labor, slave wages, extremely long work hours, and abominable living conditions.

And yet at the turn of the century, the people somehow managed to fight back and win. After the newly elected president William McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901, it turned out that his choice for a running mate had saved the country. The extent that Washington had been corrupted by corporate interests seemed too great to overcome, but because nearly all of the public was on the side of Theodore Roosevelt's populist agenda, the members of Congress went along with the president out of political self-preservation. In the next seven years, Roosevelt broke up most of the major monopolies, and though he still endorsed lower taxes, he paved the way for his cousin FDR to become elected later and turn America into a social democracy.

But how does this apply to populist insurgents now, when corporations have become so powerful that they can actually prevent modern versions of the Roosevelts from being elected within the two major parties? Again, we need to ask ourselves why the Greens won't go the way of Bernie Sanders.

According to Ralph Nader, apart from the media propaganda that I mentioned before, there are indeed many built-in obstacles to running a successful third party campaign. In 1988, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization headed exclusively by Democrats and Republicans, took over all aspects of how the debates are organized. After the 1992 election, they changed the polling requirement for getting into the debates to 15%, a number that, as they knew, was nearly impossible for any third party candidate to reach. And though the environment will soon become a lot more friendly to third parties, making it entirely possible for the Greens to overcome that mark, I ask you to sign this petition to make the debate rules fair again.

But that's not even the worst of it. In 2004, Nader's independent campaign was severely hurt by the efforts of Democrats to drain money from it by falsely accusing him of widespread voter fraud. The playing field is also tilted against third parties in that many states require them to petition for ballot access, a process that Nader describes as "easy for the major parties to disrupt" by using the dirty tricks that I mentioned.

But once again, I believe that we can surmount all of these obstacles with our newfound political advantages. Because of a dramatic increase in donations, Green campaigns will easily survive when opponents try to force them to use up their resources, and with the wide popularity that they'll gain, they will no longer have much trouble getting petition signatures. Thus, they're guaranteed to gain major ground, and before long they'll surpass Democrats in the national polls.

And finally, that brings us to the one area where insurgents can really be shut out: election rigging. One can only imagine the methods Democrats will try to use to prevent Greens from winning, though the sabotage of Bernie Sanders certainly gave us a clue. There's one big difference, though, between the primaries and the general elections: in the general, it's extremely difficult to rig the process in favor of the losing candidate. George W. Bush's coup in 2000 only worked because the race was so close, and had Gore been leading in the polls as widely as I expect the Greens will be, the election fraud would have had to be much more widespread and obvious, and the American people would simply not have allowed it. Furthermore, the primaries are ideal for rigging, because they take place over a period of months in many different states, while a national election that takes place in a matter of hours is very hard for someone to try to steal and then get away with it.

All of this is not to say that our path to victory will be easy. We'll have to fight for it every step of the way. But if we succeed, which I think is likely, the country and the world will be forever changed.

And if you still doubt that that's possible based on a sense that the Greens are simply too far to the left to win, not only are you discounting the opinion polls I mentioned earlier, but you need to hear the story of how HA Goodman came to believe Bernie Sanders would become president.

In June of 2015, as Goodman recounts in an article, he was having lunch with a childhood friend when they started talking about politics. The friend, who was wearing a "Bernie" tee shirt, asked Goodman why he wasn't planning on voting for a candidate who represented everything he believed in, and Goodman's answer was that Sanders could not win because he was a socialist.

But some weeks later, after doing all of the research, Goodman realized that Bernie Sanders was not a Marx-style, ideologically extreme "socialist," but merely had an agenda similar to the Roosevelts. That was the start of his noble mission to help Sanders win, which lasted all the way up until the DNC role call vote on July 26, 2016.

The one thing Goodman was really wrong about, though, was assuming at the time that we would never get another Bernie Sanders in our lifetimes; he realized the flaw in that reasoning when he decided to start supporting Jill Stein, who, whether you also feel is worth voting for or not, is an amazing person and as much (or even more) of an advocate for change as Sanders. And Stein and her successors, whatever the outcome of this election, will be the ones who finish what Bernie started.

Yes, It Is Time To Leave The Democratic Party

In a Salon article titled "Bernie's big lesson: Socialists should occupy the Democratic Party, not abandon it," optimistic person Daniel Denvir makes an argument for propping up the DNC that appears perfectly sound if you take it at face value. He dismisses Jill Stein's pleas for building another party for the 99%, saying that Bernie Sanders' unexpected success proves we can turn the Democrats into such an organization. He's convinced that with just a little more patience and work within the party, it can be reformed.

There are three good reasons that that approach is wrong.

1: The party can't be reformed by trying to beat it at its own game

Though Denvir acknowledges that the Democratic electoral system is rigged, he misrepresents just how corrupt it is. He argues, "Let’s not give Debbie Wasserman Schultz more credit than she’s due: the leaked DNC emails reflect sad griping more than coherent conspiracy. Though the debate schedule was stacked against Sanders, Clinton simply won more votes, which means the left, despite historic gains, still has more work to do to win majority support."

They did a lot more than manipulate the debate schedule.


Aside from the lack of media coverage making things harder for the Sanders campaign, as well as Hillary Clinton's inherent advantage in name recognition alone, there is no question that the DNC played a large role in his loss. And I'm not just talking about the voter suppression in Arizona, New York, Puerto Rico, as well as my home state California along with numerous others, or the untold millions of political independents who were excluded from voting in the primaries, or even the 84.3% of eligible voters who were either unable or discouraged from participating in the process.

Even after you discount all of the factors that make the results of the primary seem implausible from any reasonable standpoint, there is undeniable evidence that the Democratic leadership manipulated the vote.

The next paragraph may look like wishful thinking to someone who doesn't understand its context, so I recommend you first read this article and this article. But omitting the long explanation beforehand that's included within those links, I present to you a line from math genius Richard Charnin which summarizes all the reasons why Sanders rightfully won the primary:

It is important to note that Sanders’ exit poll share exceeded his
1) recorded share  in 24 of the 26 primaries. The probability is 1 in 190,000.  
2) recorded share by greater than the margin of error in 11 primaries. The probability is 1 in 77 billion. 
Is the exit poll shift to Clinton just pure luck? Or is something else going on?
TRUE VOTE MODEL BASE CASE ASSUMPTIONS
1.Sanders won the caucuses with 63.9% 
2.  10% of voters  were disenfranchised  (voter rolls, provisional ballots, etc.) .
3. Sanders won 70% of uncounted votes 
4. 15% of Sanders’ votes flipped to Clinton.

After adding that to the official primary results of Sanders having won 45.7%, of the votes, it shifts to him having actually won 52% of them. (Note: though it's not certain that Charnin's estimate of 70% of the manipulated votes are for Bernie Sanders is accurate, since the DNC singled out Sanders voters for disenfranchisement, it's clear that at least 50% of them are for Sanders, making his victory mathematically obvious.)

It may not be as dramatic or easy to prove as Bush v. Gore or other stolen elections, but the fact remains that the people have not been represented in this primary because of the DNC. Therefore, voters have every reason to believe that if they try to "reform the system" with their votes, as long as the process is controlled by party bosses who are beholden to the interests of their donors from above, it will simply not be possible.

This unfortunate truth can be likened to that picture on the top of Democratic National Convention protestors at the gates of the fence that was built around the Wells Fargo Center in July; they're trying to get the  superdelegates to nominate Bernie Sanders and change the party for the better, but they'll never be able to get inside both the misled minds of the Democratic elites, or the wall that's keeping them out.

Even so, people like Denvir might think, this doesn't mean the powers that currently run the party are immovable. Surely, even with such manipulations currently taking place, no institution is inherently resistant to change-just look at all of the Berniecrats that are succeeding this year.

There's a problem with that too.

Of course, it's not impossible in every case for genuine progressives to win elected positions within the Democratic Party. The primaries take place over several months and involve many different contests, making them easy for the DNC to influence in that since the results are determined through such a broad means, no one can find a simple way to dispute the results. The state and local-level contests that are fought for lesser positions than the presidency are almost always run fairly, because since they take place in one day, it would be a lot harder for the party to manipulate them without being inescapably caught doing so.

But there is another, larger obstacle to reforming the Democratic Party: no matter how many progressive Democrats hold positions other than the presidency, they will always be forced to support the more powerful forces in the party.

Though presidents and presidential nominees don't hold all of the power, they're key players in the DNC's game; first of all, no matter how progressive any politician is, as long as they're members of the Democratic Party, they will have to support its presidential  nominee, who, as this primary has made clear, will always be beholden to the corporate and banking interests. Second of all, even if genuine progressives take control over the other branches of government than the presidency, any actual progress will be prevented by the president's veto power. And third of all, as we've seen at this year's Democratic convention, the DNC has made it clear that they'll always find ways to keep progressives in their place during the presidential nominating process, and therefore in any other case where it will have the ability to do so.

"The establishment," says Denvir, "awash in corporate money and snarky emails, is neither omnipotent nor cunning. It is feckless." Though part of that may be true, as the Democrats are not exactly a tightly-run cabal ruled over by calculating masterminds, they've developed a nearly foolproof method for stopping change. And even with the best efforts from liberal activists, we won't truly see reform of it any time soon.

2: The party won't be reformed

That can't be the end of it, though; the Democratic Party is an organization, not a person, and it's not inherently incompatible with the influence of the people. Eventually, with enough determination, change can be achieved.

The question, though, is not whether reform is possible; of course it is. The question is whether reform is likely to take place, and the answer to that has already come.

The reality is that it's simply too late for the Democratic Party. The combined electoral majority of young, far-left, and independent voters that it needs to survive have given up on it for good after what's happened this year, and if it has any chance of changing in a way that brings them back, because of them that will never happen. The corruption runs so deep that such a radical shift would take at least two election cycles at the very least, and  the historical trends from before the "Demexit" movement even started show that Democrats are on their way to becoming irrelevant, or at least severely weakened, well before then.

The Democratic Party is a ship that's sinking rapidly, and no amount of attempting to repair its damaged hull can save it from going under.

And as anyone who isn't completely beholden to it can see, that's a good thing.

3: We shouldn't try to reform the party

After considering those first two reasons, another fact becomes clear: the world can't afford to invest itself in the possibility of changing the Democratic Party. The climate is rapidly deteriorating, and the level of economic inequality and corporate control over politics has reached a formidable level. If the two-party system is allowed to continue, if any action is taken on these issues, it will happen sooner than later, and by then it will be too late. We need profound, almost immediate governmental reform if we are serious about solving our problems, and that cannot happen if we're tied down to an almost incurably corrupt and rigid political institution.


And what Denvir is most wrong about is that such reform is possible. Though he acknowledges that more radical organizations should be maintained outside of the DNC on at least local levels, his rationale ultimately falls into the old Democratic defense that a serious alternative shouldn't be considered, as doing so would be joining a minority group with no hope of winning. That may have been true in recent history, but much of the country has woken up to the possibility that third parties can win if they support them, and soon enough, an electoral tipping point will be reached.

I'm going to conclude this with a story from this year's Democratic convention. In her acceptance speech for the nomination, Hillary Clinton included a historical anecdote so appropriate for the moment that it had to have been mentioned because of it:

My friends, we've come to Philadelphia – the birthplace of our nation – because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today.
We all know the story.
But we usually focus on how it turned out - and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all.
When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the King.
Some wanted to stick it to the king, and go their own way.
The revolution hung in the balance.
Then somehow they began listening to each other … compromising … finding common purpose.
And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation.

This was most likely an attempt to assess the current situation of her own supporters, who wanted to stick with the king, and the Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted to stick it to the king. It's a clever analogy, but her saying it is ironic, because when those revolutionaries were faced with the choice between remaining with the oppressive establishment and breaking from it, we all know what they did.