When It's The Pragmatists That Want War With Russia

Reality doesn't have much cultural favor in modern American society. When forty years of escalated economic exploitation has made the country regress to third world status for the majority of the population, we tell ourselves it's because the majority of Americans aren't trying hard enough. When seven decades of perpetual war has destabilized the middle east and driven up the national debt to record levels, the countries we've invaded and welfare recipients are respectively to blame. When two centuries of carbon emissions have created a new, perilous period called the Anthropocene, the entire problem is fabricated in an elaborate conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel business. Pay no attention to the dilapidation of your house, the fact that you can't remember a time when we weren't in some way at war, the reports of permanent flooding in places like Miami. Trust what the non-CIA appointed Washington Post writers and legitimately elected politicians say, because they're the ones who led us into this of course genuinely depicted period of 4.4% unemployment, and they're the ones who will make the good times continue so long as you let them stay the course.

On a more current note, don't be troubled by that tweet this week from the Democrats' favorite Russiagate expert Louise Mensch stating "war is what they [Russia] will get" for supposedly meddling in the election-she's just understandably venting over the fact that Russia invaded us last year. Don't give any skeptical thought to how the known CIA front the Washington Post has recently published a piece naysaying the notion that the U.S. should create stronger ties with Russia, which at this point is to say the two countries shouldn't soon let things come to military conflict-that article is just pointing out what it calls the "realpolitic" of letting such a conflict happen. And should said conflict hypothetically materialize as soon as the next big geopolitical upset happens-which, like the last one, will have some sketchily reported but undeniable link to Russia-don't worry. Those beautiful Tomahawk missiles will keep you safe.

No, don't give any credence to the Russian propaganda blogs that draw attention to the finely tuned campaign that's been going on for the past ten months to get you behind such a war. Don't feel uneasy about the major media's universally religious acceptance on contact last July of the still unproven claim that Russian hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails; to Rachel Maddow's effort at one point last year to make her audience believe, going against their memories, that Russia was something we considered an enemy in 2015; to the bizarre project the war propagandists started last month of creating a fake Twitter account, which featured supposed calls from a seven-year-old refugee girl to have her homeland further torn apart (you can't make this up). Because these things, like the dramatic events you'll soon see playing out, are the work of the only pragmatists here.

Yes, it's people like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the moderates, the centrists, the smartest people in the room, who seek to take us down this fractious route. They're the ones that recognize we need to be realistic about things, that we mustn't be too ideologically extreme, the ones who know how politics works and the compromises that need to be made, etc etc. And luckily they've been lately taking control of things back from the naively anti-interventionist model that the Trump administration initially embraced, having pressured Trump to adopt their sensible approach to Syria last month through their theatrical series of "Russiagate!" outcries. So as these sensible leaders ramp their focus on Russiagate back up to speed in recent weeks, making Trump's caving in to their implicit lobbying towards military action an again imminent possibility, rest easy. This next bout with geopolitical flustercluck will be the outcome of careful, serious considerations on the part of qualified leaders, etc etc, about what realism calls for.

It's just like when these clear-eyed rationalists said we needed to embrace an economic ideology that's designed to create more inequality. Or when they concluded we had to go with what the Bush administration's intelligence said and invade Iraq. Or when they calculated, based on nonexistent polls showing the vast majority of the country shares their neoliberal views, that nominating a candidate who most agree with on virtually all issues had an unsafe shot at beating Trump. They've always been the ones that know best, that acknowledge we can't make promises to ourselves we can't keep, etc etc. So if they say going to war with Russia is the only pragmatic thing to do, why not question simple logic?

Of course, not everyone is so sensible. When the war effort gets started, there will be a large portion of the populace that insists ideology is more important than hard realism, and that will use the formidable power of the internet in 2017 to spread their irrational attitudes like never before. Luckily the pragmatists are already moving to prevent such interference, with the FCC being poised to end net neutrality tomorrow and the internet freedom-killing TiSA deal quietly slouching towards deployment. But there's no reasoning with the unreasonable, so we're just going to have to put up with their no doubt explosive efforts towards dissent-massive antiwar demonstrations, frantic efforts to kill belief in the Deep State's psy ops, and surging involvement with groups like World Beyond War and Tulsi Gabbard's campaign for peace will unfortunately happen in response to the coming messy but logic-driven military adventure.

In seriousness, my fellow opponents of this push for national suicide, don't let the real fanatics here tell you that you're the one who's crazy. It is not sensible for working people to give up our economic rights because someone says that's what's "fiscally responsible." It is not sensible for voters to accept candidates that want to financially starve us, take away our constitutional liberties, and literally sell out our planet because that's what someone says is politically viable. And it is not sensible, no matter how many times you'll hear it in the news in the coming months, for America to get involved in a conflict that could well end in a scene out of Dr Strangelove.

The upside is that everyone but the members of the Deep State themselves intuitively know a war with Russia is a beyond bad idea, and iterating the fact that all this buzz about Russian hacking and special prosecutors is part of a carefully orchestrated effort to get regular people behind such a war bursts the establishment's psy op efforts. It immediately shakes the potential buyers of this plan out of their fragile path toward militaristic fanaticism, and does so much to ensure the Deep State won't pull off another Iraq this time. So FCC decision and TiSA or not, do all you can to bring attention to this issue. We may not be pragmatic, but as it's turned out so much lately, our ideas are the only ones it's pragmatic to listen to.

We Need To Call The "Centrist" Democratic Establishment What It Is: A Dangerous Extremist Group

When you're in a position of privilege, even the relative kind, it can be easy to dismiss the concerns of those on the receiving end of your leaders' destructive actions. If you have access to health care, it's no challenge to say the idea of single payer universal health care is unrealistic or that it's not politically feasible. If you haven't felt the effects of neoliberal trade deals like NAFTA, haven't been impacted by a criminal justice system designed to keep poor and nonwhite people incarcerated, or haven't had to live on a $7.25 minimum wage, you can comfortably say those who want to get rid of these policies are unserious radicals. And if your community isn't being literally pummeled by another operation of the U.S. military empire, you can feel reasonable in saying "we're always at war, what's one more?"

So it's only natural that as Democratic Party loyalists were responding to my previous article with all the obligatory hostility towards anything not approved by the party bosses, among the far more typical ad hominen attacks were actual arguments like "as I've said, if you want to beat the far right you need to go through the center." That remark's author was concurred by the other pro-establishment liberals on the thread; indeed, this silly Berniecrats' calls for things like health care for all and living wages are just the ravings of an extremist. You need to appeal to the center if you want to get anything done in the first place.

Oh right, the "center." I hadn't thought of that. No matter that representing such supposedly radical goals would be a dynamic electoral strategy, as both the public opinion polls and the fact that Bernie Sanders won last year point towards. And no matter that those goals are the only path we have to addressing climate change, ending the paradigm of perpetual war, and bringing about social and economic equality.

All those mainstream polls saying Berniecrats' goals are supported by the vast majority of the country are fake, after all, and all those well documented incidents of voter suppression and electoral fraud in the 2016 Democratic primaries are conspiracy theories. So let's pat each other on the back for defending the "center."

Meanwhile, the politicians, top Democratic officials, and major media figures who these sensible "centrists" support for also representing "moderation" aren't exactly living up to those values. They're going on television calling the Syrian missile strikes that have killed 9 civilians, including 4 children, as well as brought us within an inch of World War Three, "beautiful."

They're using the most incendiary language possible in regards to America's extremely delicate situation with Russia-which, it can't be reiterated enough, is a nuclear power. They're helping confirm Trump cabinet nominees that want to further expand America's already Orwellian surveillance and police states.

This isn't the first time the "center" hasn't quite exemplified moderation. It was "moderate" Democrats in the House and the Senate who enabled the passage of the Fourth Amendment-obsolescing 2001 Patriot Act, and it was a "moderate" Democratic president who's expanded Bush's surveillance state to Thought Police-esque levels.

It was the same "moderate" president who's committed the country to thirty years and a trillion dollars of new nuclear weapons program spending while pushing us into a new Cold War with Russia in the last weeks of his term.

And more broadly, it's the "moderate" Democratic Party that's done half the work towards creating an unprecedented plutocracy, bringing the climate to the brink of collapse, and destabilizing the middle east several times over.

And when the circumstances provide the Trump administration an opportunity for really letting loose in regards to authoritarianism and military aggression, perhaps in the form of a North Korean nuclear attack that can easily be blamed on Russia, there's little doubt how these "moderate" leaders will take charge. Only in the interests of not approaching things through too extreme an ideological lens, they'll go along with the war effort, the Trumpian autocracy effort, and all the rest.

No use standing up for constitutional freedoms and an at least survivable degree of world conflict; if we want to stop the far right, we need to go through the center.

Then enter the one part of this coming development that isn't so certain: will the present defenders of these "centrists" change their views on so-called moderate liberalism when establishment Democrats are partnering with Trump to end the pretense of democracy?

To be fair, I'm sure many of them will. But the unfortunate reality is that sometime soon, we're going to see liberals joining in on the coming frenzy of self-destructive nationalism in jingoistic solidarity with the authoritarian right. Fortunately, those on both the far left and the far right largely don't feel comfortable enough with the status quo, as those in the "center" evidently are, to support it.

And as the anti-establishment left and right unite around our shared goal of taking down the power structures these "moderates" feel the need to defend, I suggest we should stop playing into their rhetorical hands by calling them centrists. It's time to refer to the "center" as what it now represents: an extreme and completely immoderate agenda.

Establishment Democrats Aren't Fighting Trump Enough Because They're Essentially On His Side

It's an old stereotype that Democrats never put up as big a fight as their opponents typically do. And it's mostly accurate. Ronald Reagan was able to pass all of his tax cuts and deregulations through a Democratic Congress; Bill Clinton gave into the wishes of Republicans on many occasions; Barack Obama displayed a similar folly of caving into his political opponents all too much; and everyone remembers the tragic consequences of how most House and Senate Democrats voted for the Iraq War.

So it's no surprise that a month after I predicted most top Democrats wouldn't stand up to Donald Trump, my ability to do political forecasts has been vindicated (to mixed feelings on my part). Since then, an unacceptable amount of Senate Democrats (including the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) have voted to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees. Among these bipartisan-endorsed leaders are Mike Pompeo, who wants to expand America's surveillance state into a database for the financial information and "lifestyle" details of U.S. citizens as well as bring back torture, as well as an array of other such extreme and/or unqualified individuals.

Why are these Democrats acting so submissively towards Trump? It likely has to do with the fact that despite all their obligatory condemnations of him, their agenda isn't very different from his.

Let's get beyond all the tough rhetoric Democrats like these have obligatorily directed towards Trump and take a good look at how they actually compare to him: first off, they're for the most part both tied in with Wall Street and corporate interests. Whereas Trump has completed the government takeover Goldman Sachs has long been inching towards by putting a great deal of executives from the bank in his cabinet, Chuck Schumer, like many other Democrats, takes massive amounts of campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs and the other major financial institutions. Whereas Trump and his cabinet display vast inclinations towards increased U.S. militarism, the president that Democrats like Schumer have so unwaveringly backed for the last eight years more or less continued the hawkishness of the Bush administration. Whereas Trump and certain members of his cabinet, as has been established, want to expand on Bush and Obama's surveillance state and bring back torture, Chuck Schumer for one has endorsed both of these things.

The list goes on and on of the grotesque similarities between the Democratic and Republican parties, and thus between establishment Democrats and the Trump administration. Both parties are owned by Wall Street and large corporations, both parties hurt nonwhites through mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and the advancement of economic inequality, both parties serve the oil companies and weapons contractors which benefit from a bloated and over-used American military, and both parties benefit from America's compromised electoral system. So it's no surprise that they tend to work together so often.

Perhaps the eagerness Democrats have shown over these last few decades to submit to Republicans has not been out of wimpiness, but out of a calculated strategy on their part to further their hawkish, neoliberal interests. These always-willing-to-compromise Democrats have rarely stood anything to lose by helping the Republicans expand corporate rule, start wars, and confirm pro-surveillance state cabinet nominees; establishment Democrats, after all, are very much on board with these goals. And the Republicans, who profess them more openly than Democrats do, provide a handy outlet for establishment Democrats to get them passed. When Republicans propose such objectives, establishment Democrats can simply vote along with them and then use "pragmatism" or "bipartisanship" as an excuse.

But make no mistake, this is not about those things; this is about corporate Democrats finding a sneaky way to blatantly (but not openly) bring about their true, center-right agenda. It's no coincidence that in every instance, it's been the more moderate Democrats that have gone along with Republican goals while those on the left have been the ones staunchly opposing them. Rarely, if ever, have we seen one of the neoliberal "progressives" refusing to budge when Republicans call for policies which drive up the wealth gap, destabilize the middle east, and assault civil liberties. It was Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, who has always opposed the Iraq War, Bush's Wall Street bailout, and measures like the Patriot Act and "enhanced interrogation." And it's the Sandersist wing of the Democratic Party, not the Clintonist one, which can be relied upon to protect the country from Trump's agenda.

Sarah Jones argued similarly last week in her piece The Case Against Unity:

It's not enough for Democrats to call themselves The Resistance. They must also explain what it is they're resisting. Is it simply Trump? Or is it the ideology that helped put Trump in power?

Here, Democrats should take a lesson from the left. "Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to strike," Frances Fox Piven recently wrote in The Nation. "[P]eople in motion, in movements, can throw sand in the gears of the institutions that depend on their cooperation." Fight for 15, Occupy, Black Lives Matter: They point the way forward. So, too, did last Saturday's Women’s March. In each instance, people rallied around a cause, not a person or a party. They did not turn out for politicians, they were not attracted by celebrities. They turned out because they wished to identify themselves with a specific values statement. Their actions teach us what it means to do politics—and warn us against defining politics in electoral terms alone.

The Democratic Party will continue to fail unless it understands this. The victims of its failure won't be Hillary Clinton or David Brock but vulnerable Americans whose survival depends on the party's ability to oppose Trumpism. Its left-wing critics have no choice but to reject its calls for unity. The stakes are too high to do anything else.

In other words, whenever establishment Democrats call for an end to the infighting within the left so that we can unite against Trump, they're essentially calling for unification behind the Trump government itself. In terms of both electoral and non-electoral politics, it's become clear, Sandersism represents the best chance Democrats have to defeat Trumpism.

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.