Smashing The Neoliberal Democrat Echo Chamber

The chart above is a real-time illustration of one of the most beautiful events in American political history: the official waking-up of the majority of the American left. Up until very recently, most Democrats didn't seem to care about the corruption within their party. For the most part, liberals did not speak out when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. They did not abandon the belief that Obama represented real progressive change when he supported Bush's Wall Street bailouts as a senator. They did not work vigorously to replace the Democratic Party's current leadership throughout the decades-long saga of warmongering, neoliberal policies, and unconstitutional surveillance perpetrated by Democrats. And yet in 2016, they finally became willing to embrace a genuinely progressive option, with Bernie Sanders having had more support among Democrats than Hillary Clinton at one point during the race and then won the nomination in the alternate universe where the Democratic primaries weren't fraught with voter suppression and electoral fraud.

But while the majority of liberals have stepped up, that majority is for now a very narrow one. At the most, Sanders was found to have been winning against Clinton nationally by two points, and while that number would doubtless be many times larger had it not been for the anti-Sanders tactics that I mentioned, a little less than half of Democrats remain loyal to their party's status quo.

And this claim is backed up by polling of Democrats on other issues. 54% of Democrats feel represented by their party, a number which, while no doubt bigger than it would be if all of the Democrat-leaning independents who have Demexited in recent years still considered themselves Democrats, is a disappointingly high one. All of the potential establishment Democratic candidates included in the latest 2020 Democratic nomination poll (Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Al Franken) enjoy the combined support of 46% of the Democratic electorate, though the survey also shows Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner. In other words, almost half the left still does not understand the nature of corporate power and the grip that it holds over their party, and convincing them otherwise is an important step in revolutionizing Democratic politics.

Easier said than done.

Occasionally on my online browsings of the political landscape, I've encountered people on social media who represent that 45% or so of liberals who still think the Democratic Party and its leaders represent their interests. And aside from the occasional sensible-or moderate, if I may-member of this bunch, they show themselves to be extremely closed-minded and hostile towards anyone who questions their party. When I've criticized Obama for refusing to adequately reform the banking system and thus setting us up for a new Wall Street crash, they've correctly accused me of "thinking I know more about this than the president." When I've shown Hillary Clinton supporters who incredibly knew nothing of their candidate's legendarily destructive foreign policy record a comprehensive history of it from a credible source, they responded by calling it lies and right-wing propaganda. When I most recently showed a supporter of the DNC's new chairman Tom Perez an article about how their leader enabled massive tax breaks for hedge fund mangers as Secretary of Labor, I was told that this wasn't the case because "Democrats don't vote for tax cuts."

I could go on for maybe three more paragraphs recounting the impressive efforts that I for one have seen loyal Democrats take to maintain their belief that their party and all of its members (except, of course, for the Berniecratic ones) are reliable defenders of progressive values. And when they do, on the rarest of occasions, acknowledge an illiberal action that a Democrat has taken, they re-frame it by saying progressives who criticize the given Democrat are looking for purity, or worse, that the given Democrats' action is completely acceptable. It's a seemingly impossible task to convince the typical pro-establishment liberal that they're wrong in supporting these "liberal" corporatists-or, more often, that they're supporting corporatists in the first place.

"I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to bring up a legitimate concern about the Democratic establishment in a debate with a party loyalist and been told that I’m crazy or ridiculous because it’s a concern they’d never encountered before" Caitlin Johnstone vents in her own essay on the problem of what she calls the neoliberal echo chamber. "Whether I’m discussing a WikiLeaks release that didn’t get much coverage or the fact that Hillary Clinton really seemed to be gearing up for an all-out war with Russia, I have never, ever been met with sincerity or had my concerns directly addressed in an earnest debate of ideas with a Hillary voter. Not once. Not one single time, ever, to this day. And I’ve spoken to a lot of them." As she also said, "We now live in a society where sources that don’t confirm one’s bias are immediately dismissed as 'fake news,' and nothing is considered true unless Wolf Blitzer says it. This is killing political discourse in America, and it’s turning us all into idiots."

It's also hurting the success of a genuinely progressive movement at a time when it's needed most, both by depriving this movement of members and distracting its members with hours of unsuccessful efforts to change the minds of party loyalists who refuse to listen to facts. In this essay, I'm going to avenge the frustrations of me, Johnstone, and no doubt millions of other Sandersists by attempting to provide a guide to changing the minds of the seemingly unreasonable.

I say "seemingly" because as is evidenced by the massive amounts of superstitious, bigoted, and just plain strange beliefs that most human beings on the planet have been able to give up over the last several centuries, decades, and even years, people are generally much more capable of reason than they appear. Prior to 2010, most Americans did not support gay marriage, and now 61% of them do according to the latest public opinion poll on the issue. Just a few years ago, most Republicans denied climate change in spite of all evidence being against their belief, and then in 2015, a narrow majority of Republicans were found to now acknowledge climate change. A similar shift in consciousness can happen among the "fauxgressives," and there are several ways you individually can bring it about.

While this piece doesn't contain some sort of fool-proof guide to immediately converting every Clintonist you see towards the Sanders revolution, it does include the next best thing. Namely, a guide to setting these individuals on a path that ultimately leads to them changing their minds.

Enter the case of Michael E Sparks. His story is probably a common one among the millions of former loyal Democrats who were transformed into revolutionaries during last year's primaries: prior to around the middle of 2015, he was someone who deeply cared about bringing change, but was largely clueless about how to do so. He always assumed Democrats represented a threat to the status quo. He planned to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. He even exemplified the behavior of watered-down, pro-establishment liberalism in that he was convinced recycling would help the environment despite the exact opposite being the case. "I was delusional…" he  wrote in his confession of this period in his life. "And I was enjoying my delusions. I really have no one to blame but myself." But at some point in the early stages of the 2016 election, he then says, he had an awakening.

"I was blissfully ignorant," he writes, "just trying to make up my mind which amazing Democrat to vote for when my friend sent me a text. 'I notice you post a lot of pro-Hillary stuff. As an ally, how do you feel about the idea that Hillary only shifted her stance on gay rights, now that it is political suicide for her not to?' I was so ignorant. I replied 'Hasn’t she always been for gay rights?' My friend started sending me links and videos.

After about 20 minutes, my head was swimming. 'How was this possible?!' Hillary sounded like a Republican. And it wasn’t just recent comments she had made before The Senate. She had toured the country in support of DOMA. How did I not know this? I listened to NPR. I took reusable bags with me to the grocery. I was a hardcore liberal. How did I not know this?!?!"

What followed was a powerful account of how, after this incident, Sparks went down a slippery slope that his friend had set him on. He started looking into other potentially surprising parts of Clinton's record and found things about her he never would have guessed; she'd voted for the Iraq War. She had deep and secretive ties to Wall Street. In almost every way, it seemed, she had betrayed the values of the progressives who were keeping her campaign alive, and Sparks' newfound awareness of this fact ultimately led to him not just adopting a nuanced view of the Democratic Party, but declaring it to be the exact opposite of an ally. "We are all being duped by a Republican in disguise," he wrote at the end of his story.

The bad news is that I don't know if this can happen with every remaining Democratic loyalist. As Sparks notes earlier in his account, he had signed a petition asking Bernie Sanders to run for president and was thus already theoretically open to choosing Sanders over Clinton. Sparks is also a generally very inquisitive and open-minded person. That doesn't seem to be the case with a great deal of Clintonists, including a Hillary supporter and close friend of his that he later recounts having one time tried and failed to convert. His friend, like seemingly most other Democratic loyalists, was simply unwilling to listen to evidence that goes against their beliefs. The good news is that as I said, all human beings are capable of reason, and Sparks has put together a guide to bringing that reason out of anybody.

Sparks' guide to successfully smashing any given echo chamber, as he lays out in a piece from  earlier this month, is genius, because it so closely resembles what his friend did two years ago to turn him into a Sanders supporter: give up on trying to change the other person's mind. By this I mean that while in an argument with a Clintonist or anyone else, your goal should be not to completely transform their worldview on the spot, but to simply try to open their mind, through patience, respect, and then an offering of some but not too many arguments for your position. This will likely make the other person very much open to accepting other aspects of your viewpoint. Again, you won't be able to radically change someone's worldview with this approach, but you will be able to change it just enough that they'll be inclined to start further looking into your view on their own. At that point, as was the case with Sparks' own experience, the formerly ardent Democratic loyalist will be on a slippery slope where the more they learn about the true history and dynamics of their party and its leaders, the less they'll like it.

Please read Sparks' article in full, and try to apply the methods it details on every Democratic loyalist you encounter. As the political pendulum swings away from Trump and the GOP, the Democratic establishment and its allies in the Deep State are using every means at their disposal to regain power in these next few years, quite possibly culminating in the new Cold War-entailing election of guess who in 2020. And the continued allegiance of much of the Democratic electorate is essential in their terrifying quest for the establishment of an Orwellian state of never-ending war and autocracy.

We must win over the Democratic loyalists, or else when they do all eventually turn against their leaders, it will be too late for them to avert disaster.

The Perils Of Remaining Loyal To The Democratic Party

For many people, the time between the end of the 2016 Democratic primaries on June 7 and when Bernie Sanders all but formally ended his campaign on July 12 by endorsing Hillary Clinton was a moment when they faced decisions which would define their character. The dilemma of Sanders supporters was whether to start supporting Clinton or to try to continue fighting for their candidate's nomination (which, for at least a time, was worth a shot). But despite the fact that the results of the primaries were utterly fraudulent, the media, the Democratic establishment, and Clinton's supporters agreed that she had won the nomination, which presented them with a different kind of character test.

Theirs was a position of illegitimate, but widely accepted, victory. And how they acted towards their candidate's former challenger and his supporters during this moment of advantage would say everything about what kinds of people they were. According to Shane Ryan in his June 29 piece The Psychology of Why Hillary Clinton Supporters are Still So Angry at Bernie Sanders, the majority of them behaved just as immaturely in such a situation as the title implies. After giving some examples of pro-Clinton pundits expressing disdain for Sanders because of his momentary refusal to concede, Shane talks about the mentality among Clinton's supporters:

Now, getting past the mainstream media minds, there’s the widespread anger among her supporters on social media, the lesser blogs, and IRL at Bernie’s actions. They use the same arguments—why can’t the arrogant loser accept that he lost?—and fail to understand how he’s maximizing his leverage while he’s still got it, which won’t be for long. They also fail to understand that the slow negotiations [a reference to Sanders' attempts to influence the Democratic platform] actually make it more likely that his supporters will come around, since he’s creating the perception that Clinton has to “earn” his vote.

The reasons he gives for why they refused to give Sanders any credit or respect even though they no longer perceived him as a threat can be described as follows: in spite of largely holding progressive views on the economy, foreign policy, and other issues that Hillary Clinton is in a lot of ways a Republican on, Clinton's supporters chose her because of identity politics relating to her gender and her superficial "progressive" image. But as Bernie Sanders challenged their comfortable assumptions with his exposing of Clinton's ideological inconsistencies, their only logical (or, actually, illogical) response was to accuse Sanders of being the source of their discomfort instead of facing their own mistakes.

This wasn't just a failure among them to express humility, though, but a sign of something far more troubling.

The Democratic electorate, including those who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, is overwhelmingly left-wing, with more Democrats than ever identifying as liberals, more than 80% of them thinking that the wealth distribution is unfair, over 70% of them wanting a single-payer universal health care system, and far more of them than Republicans or independents thinking that withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 was a good idea. Though some try to de-emphasize how progressive the party's base is, the polls-and the fact that Democratic candidates tend to lose elections when they move right-prove that Democrats are generally very far to the left.

But if one pays much attention to what the Democratic Party actually stands for, they find that its actions do not match up with the wishes of its supporters. Its leadership, under the control of wealthy oligarchs, is unwilling to pass the systemic economic reforms needed to reverse income inequality, as demonstrated in how it's increased under Obama's policies. The necessary (and completely realistic) idea of universal health care is rejected by the Democratic establishment in favor of the costly, profit-based system which is the so-called Affordable Care Act. And most notable among these and other key issues that Democratic leaders lean right on is foreign policy, which they've taken a highly militaristic approach on in the past few years.

And increasingly, Democrats are waking up to these ideological inconsistencies. The Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries-which make up half of the party, according to Sanders' polling history-are largely seeking to distance themselves from the organization after it sabotaged their candidate, as reflected in their "Demexit" movement. This is just the latest part of the exodus from the Democratic Party that's taken place among progressives in recent years, illustrated in how Democrats made up 35% of the electorate in 2008 but now make up only 29% of it. This means that since the start of Obama's presidency, his party has diminished by over 17%, a number that's sure to keep going up as the left continues to be alienated by Democrats in the years to come. This could easily lead to the rise of a populist third party post-2016 which overtakes both Democrats and Republicans.

I'm confident that as Bernie Sanders' Democrats abandon the party and join the already vast population of independents, they'll have an excellent opportunity to advance progressive goals. What worries me is what will become of Hillary Clinton's Democrats, who are certain to remain in it.

As was illustrated in that account of Clinton supporter's behavior after the primaries ended, they tend to twist themselves into increasingly complicated logical knots when they'd rather not admit that they're wrong about their candidate and their party representing progressive values. The more corrupt their party becomes, the more otherwise inexcusable actions they condone by continuing to make excuses for it; "everything is morally relative to Clinton supporters," writes HA Goodman. "If Bill and Hillary Clinton receive $153 million from Wall Street since 2001, then it’s viewed as money to battle Republicans. If Clinton voted for Iraq, or was Secretary of State during Obama’s worst mistake of his presidency, then attention shifts to future Supreme Court nominees."

And as the Democratic Party itself remains an institution which represents such values without any hope of reforming it, the progressive views which its loyalists largely hold could shift to the right as well.

If the idea of Democrats doing an ideological 180 doesn't sound believable, consider the history of the Republican Party. Though Republicans seem to have always had some hostility towards what they consider reckless government spending, for a time they were actually the more liberal party. As we all know, their very origins involve the abolitionist movement, which meant that at one point Democrats, not Republicans, were the ones with race war-advocating militia members and secessionists in their ranks. Under Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans became the party of environmental protection-a position that they maintained for a long time afterwards, as was made apparent in Richard Nixon's similarly green policies. They were even more economically populist than the Democrats for some time as well, with Roosevelt breaking much of the power that large corporations held over the economy during the 1900's.

But then, of course, came the Republicans' fall from grace. Because Republicans did little else to help racial progress after ending slavery, Democrats eventually became the party of marginalized groups. Starting in the 1920's, Republican leaders shifted their agenda away from that of Roosevelt and adopted the same pro-big business, "small government" rhetoric that they've used ever since. And after the end of the Cold War, Republican leaders decided to start mobilizing their base with outrage towards environmental regulation rather than communism, effectively reversing the roles of conservatives and liberals as the party that cared about ecology. Then followed the Republican Party's descent into the kind of anti-intellectualism and divisive rhetoric which helped produce Donald Trump.

In short, during the past century or so, Republicans went from the relatively left-wing party to one who's current presidential nominee advocates barring Muslims from entering the country. The main reason the Republican electorate is more conservative, it seems, is because their party leadership's lurch to the right began several generations ago. And though the Democrats have only been on such a path for about one generation, beginning with the centrist shift that took place in the party during the 1980's and 90's, there are signs that the Democratic electorate itself is starting to become more aligned with the beliefs of their representatives.

In May, columnist Lucy Steigerwald assessed the eagerness among Clinton Democrats to excuse her foreign policy record-and thus their eagerness to embrace war in general:

Clinton also has the nomination because war doesn’t bother Democrats. They like to think it does, when they remember it exists, but they will risk no political capital whatsoever on making sure it stops, or making sure a warmongering candidate isn’t nominated or elected.

During the last few decades, any semblance of an antiwar movement has withered under Democratic presidents. Not since “hey/hey/LBJ/how many kids did you kill today?” has a warmonger from the left side of the isle provoked ire. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have much blood on their hands, but not enough to push people into the streets. There are encouraging exceptions, as there are to all rules. Code Pink and other activist groups come out and protest Democrats, and don’t seem to have any plans to stop. However, it seems the anti-Iraq, antiwar movement of the early 21st century was a Dubya blip and nothing more. Part of that may be the public’s feeble attention span for atrocities far away. But it certainly appears that another aspect is that polite Democratic wars are easier to accept than grand Republican ones. Even if they both lead to the deaths of innocent people.

This disturbing trend towards hawkishness among Clinton Democrats can also be illustrated by how, during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, General John Allen's aggressively pro-war speech was met with enthusiasm from most of the Clinton delegates. It's just one incident, but it seems to reflect how much the group is being influenced by the rhetoric of their leaders.

Though foreign policy is the main issue which the Democratic base is being pushed to the right on, trade seems to be not far behind; though Americans are largely hostile towards anti-worker trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, polls indicate that supporters of Clinton (who supports the TPP) are generally in favor of them more than others. Just as troubling is how Democratic leaders, whose embrace of money in politics and Citizens United should be regarded by the party's base as clear evidence that their leaders are on the side of the oligarchs, is largely being written off as acceptable on the grounds of "pragmatism."

This rightward shift among Clinton supporters and supporters of the Democratic establishment in general was assessed by Walter Bragman in his piece Hillary Clinton's Democrats are America's Next Republicans:

They’ve been called the “post-hope” Democrats by Jacobin Magazine, but a more accurate term for many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters would be “New Republicans.” After the primary, and several more election cycles, these voters will likely end up representing America’s conservative party.

Hillary’s Democrats tend to be older and more affluent. Many have decidedly negative views of Bernie Sanders, and the kind of economic populism he is promoting. Not only are they turned off by his class-driven rhetoric — viewing it as too radical, divisive, and disruptive — they are also wary of too much government action. Clinton’s Democrats, consciously or otherwise, hold to some of the main tenets of the Reagan Revolution.

That said, these are not the New Democrats of the 1990’s, though that is where their roots are planted. Socially, they identify as progressives — hypersensitive to privilege and prejudice — but outside those issues, their ideology rests on the belief that nuance dictates moral ambiguity, and is beyond the understanding of common folk. Such sentiment gives deference to authority, and assumes that every side must have a valid argument in the face of impenetrable complexity.

As I said, these people do not represent the future of American politics. Outside of this insulated, diminishing group of largely older, upper-class Democratic loyalists, the political environment is changing, with millennials set to dominate the electorate in time for the next election amid extreme levels of income inequality-the latter factor being historically proven to result in populist uprisings. But despite all of these things, the damage to those already enamored with the Democratic establishment has already been done.