It's Not About The Money-It's About The Injustice

In response to the widespread indignance over Barack Obama's having taken $400,000 from the Wall Street firm he'll soon give a speech to, Trevor Noah made a very good point in Obama's defense: "So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards?"

Noah then made an even more keen observation: "Instead of focusing on how Obama can make so much money from Wall Street for a speech, maybe we should be asking why Wall Street has so much money to give people for a speech: the loose regulations, the intensive lobbying and favorable — you know, the truth is, we can't get into all of this, there's too much, there's too much else that's going on that we have to talk about today." I'd like to get into it a lot more, actually, because there's a lot more to it than what Noah and the other liberals we see coming to Obama's aid on this Wall Street speech issue are saying.

The main defense they like to use seems to be that Obama has a right to take speaking fees, Wall Street firm or no Wall Street firm-sure, $400,000 is a lot for one speech, but why not let him make some money? This argument, similar to the one they like to use whenever a Democratic candidate takes corporate donations of "money makes the world go round," misses the entire reason so many aren't pleased with the situation.

Personally, my attitude wouldn't be any different if Obama's speech had paid a dollar, or if he somehow didn't have a legal right to make money in this way. Because as long as he's being rewarded by Wall Street, there is something deeply unjust about the whole thing.

I'm talking about the fact that, in accordance with Noah's righteous calls for focusing on the deeper problem of Wall Street greed, the resentment from progressives and others about Obama's compensation from the banks has everything to do with said greed. Obama and his party, whose financial relations with the major banking firms go a long way back, can be held responsible for virtually all the excessive power Wall Street currently holds. Obama, along with a crucial amount of other Democratic senators, voted to pass Bush's unnecessary and financial control-consolidating Wall Street bailouts in 2008.

Then, no doubt partly at the behest of the Wall Street insiders within the Obama administration, they took basically no action aside from Dodd Frank. They didn't prosecute the bank executives responsible for the crash, and most importantly they didn't undo the Clinton Wall Street deregulations, which are largely behind the crash in the first place. The results of this were disastrous.

Despite Democrats' (not even accurately founded) back-patting about the unemployment rate having gone below 5% under Obama, the recovery has been what I like to describe as a tower made of toothpicks. The housing bubble has blown right back up, along with the massive overestimation of stock and bond prices. This, coupled with the unprecedented financialization of the economy amid Democrats' failure to break up the banks, along with the record federal debt amid Democrats' failure to sufficiently raise taxes on the wealthy, has created grounds for a new economic crisis. And a crisis that's not far off at all, judging from the bursts in parts of the housing bubble that have already begun to appear.

To be fair, this next crash will also largely involve a reckoning with various larger forms of accounting fraud that society is tied in with too deeply for Obama to have fixed, such our dependence on a petroleum economy. But the reality is that a repeat of 2007-2008 is coming right up, and had Obama and Friends enacted the necessary reforms this crash wouldn't be anywhere near as bad. We also wouldn't have had the resurgence of the GOP and the election of Donald Trump, thus making those reforms here to stay, but that's a different story. My point is that while Noah also protested in his Daily Show rant that change doesn't start with Obama, at a crucial point in history, it did. And the unwillingness of Obama and his party to act at that point has had consequences we'll soon see the full catastrophic scope of.

And now Obama is being paid by the same financial institution whose industry he partnered with for eight years to transfer money away from the lower classes, and which is about to evaporate the money of said classes before quite possibly making another profit through new Wall Street bailouts. You see now, Trevor, why some aren't applauding with your show's audience at that?

In regards to this, along with the countless other hypocrisies and injustices that the Democratic Party has been involved with since its leadership's neoliberal transformation around forty years ago, I doubt the producers of the Daily Show or many other pro-establishment liberals will acknowledge there's a problem. Whatever Noah's personal views on Obama's legacy and the Democratic establishment, he and the rest of the beloved late night liberal comedy crew serve major media institutions that are more than fine with seeing these problems ignored or, better yet, re-framed in a positive light. Thus, it's no wonder Noah was allowed to briefly advocate for standing up to the rigged banking system in the quoted segment-as long as he deflects attention from the root causes of said system, him criticizing Wall Street itself is evidently nonthreatening to the oligarchy.

The good news is that as of the last couple years, every time one of the Democratic establishment's spokespersons has made power-serving statements like the ones mentioned, a consequential facet of the population has reacted by doing something to enact change. And 2016 Democratic primary election theft or not, their efforts are working quite impressively. After a month and a half of Medicare for all supporters leaderlessly pressuring House Democrats to support the H.R. 676 single payer bill, 98 out of the 193 said Democrats are now co-sponsoring it; according to the research of one Warren Lynch, Berniecrats have mostly taken over thirteen state Democratic parties; and as membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has grown rapidly in recent months, so has the electoral success of candidates who share its agenda.

So the types of progressives who aren't cheering on this objectively unfair spectacle of an ex-Wall Street president taking Wall Street money appreciate the concern of the Daily Show's corporate string-pullers, but we're not adopting their cheery attitude about it, not to mention about the monumental flaws in our economic and political systems that it represents. And when extreme financial concentration soon results once again in economic disaster, we expect many of the remaining loyal Democrats, who will suddenly find themselves scarcely able to pay for basic needs let alone cable to watch The Daily Show shortly after Obama left office, to join us in working towards the creation of a society that works for all of us.

But hey, Obama has a right to make money.

How Obama And The Democratic Party Saved The Country

As Barack Obama signs off with his farewell address ten days before he leaves office, he and his party leave behind a legacy which will be appreciated for generations. What follows is a look back on it.

One of his administration's first and most important accomplishments was bringing sufficient reform to the nation's banking system. After voting against and outspokenly opposing the Bush administration's Wall Street bailout as a Senator in 2008, Obama took immediate action upon entering office to call it off and rein in the financial sector. By the end of 2009, Obama and the similarly anti-corporatist Democrats in the House and the Senate had prosecuted all the banking executives who were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, repealed Bill Clinton's disastrous Wall Street deregulations, and broken up the too-big-to-fail banks which once threatened our economy.

Had they not done this, a new and even bigger financial crash would likely be looming by now.

Other major ways Obama and the Democrats ended the control which corporations and the super rich held over our society at the time included de-consolidating the major media companies, reforming campaign finance so that corporate cash no longer had any say in the actions of politicians, drawing out of and avoiding "free trade" agreements, repealing the tax cuts of George W. Bush and other past presidents to make way for a tax system similar to that of the FDR era, granting the homeowners hurt by the 2008 crash a sufficient bailout, and raising the federally mandated minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Had they not done these things, economic inequality in America, now at its lowest in decades, would no doubt be higher than ever.

On foreign policy, Obama thankfully governed in antithesis to his predecessor. From the start, he and his similarly anti-war cabinet made every effort to get the U.S. out of the War in Afghanistan and then the War in Iraq after Bush's 2008 extension bill of it expired in 2011; they wisely abandoned the U.S. military's drone program; they greatly reduced America's at the time massively bloated military budget; they avoided U.S. involvement in the 2011 "humanitarian intervention" in Libya; they maintained good relations with Russia; they were careful to avoid escalating the conflict in Syria; and they avoiding what would have essentially been a repeat of the Invasion of Iraq by declining to go to war with ISIS in 2014.

Had they not done these things, George W. Bush's foreign policy model would have more or less continued for eight more years, dealing thankfully untold damage to global stability.

Thanks to all this, along with the passage of universal health care in 2010 and the dismantling of Bush's surveillance state in 2009, Obama and the Democratic Party retained their initial popularity throughout the next eight years. Democrats were able to beat back the right-wing populist movement that appeared in 2009 and 2010 by sweeping the latter year's midterm elections. Obama won re-election in a landslide in 2012 as Senate and House Democrats were able to largely do the same as well. And while Republicans made some gains in 2014, the Democrats were once again able to hold onto the majority in the Senate and the House.

Had they not been able to keep the Republicans at bay, America's enormous gains these past eight years in the effort to combat climate change would likely not have been made.

And perhaps most fortunately of all, Obama was able to ensure a reliable protector of his legacy succeeded him. Had Obama not worked to change the Democrats into a party of the people, the Democratic National Committee and many Democratic primary election officials would likely have tried to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. But Obama's would-be secretary of state Hillary Clinton was of course again defeated, allowing Sanders to become president-elect in 2016.

Had Obama and his party not done any of this, faith in the Democratic Party and other established institutions would likely have deteriorated by now, allowing for some sort of right-wing demagogue to fill the political vacuum.

But fortunately, they took a far wiser path. Thank you, Obama and your party, for everything you've done.

2016: The Year Inverted Totalitarianism Went Belly-Up

The final weeks of Barack Obama's term have sadly been defined by some of the worst crackdowns on civil liberties the United States has (so far) seen this decade. Last month, his administration introduced a law called H.R. 6393, which, if passed, would allow the government to counter-act websites that the state deems to be fake news outlets. And on Christmas Day, Obama signed the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which establishes a government agency with the purpose of suppressing such sites.

These measures are just the tail end of the saga of unjust actions that the U.S. government has taken throughout the last several decades, and indeed for the last several centuries. Genocide, slavery, economic exploitation, perpetual war, environmental destruction, the creation of a surveillance state, and countless other unjustifiable policies have been justified by the country's leaders to the public through fear, disinformation, and scapegoating, with the government's effort during the last few months to justify the laws mentioned above with a good old-fashioned Red baiting campaign being no exception.

The good news, though, is that I'm convinced this will be the last time the state can succeed with such propaganda efforts for quite a while.

The tactics I've mentioned all fall under one category of effort on the part of the state to gain public support for its oppressive actions: inverted totalitarianism. The methods that this term signifies, as Chris Hedges assesses, is applied to American society as follows: "Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent."

What's recently disrupted this order, though, is something somewhat counterintuitive: the (minority-decided) election of a leader whose political brand is invertedly totalitarian to the extreme. The means Donald Trump has used to gain support fits every part of the definition of inverted totalitarianism; by almost consistently misrepresenting the truth while making public statements, seeking to portray himself as a victim of biased media and governmental institutions, and inciting anger towards groups and individuals that he chooses to scapegoat, he has effectively created a cult of personality wherein his supporters (literally) pledge allegiance to him despite the encyclopedia of evidence that he is not someone worth following.

What's backfired about this approach, though, is that aside from his loyalists, it's caused the country to turn against him. According to some surveys, 70% of Americans view him unfavorably, and while just 54% view him as honest and trustworthy, a minuscule 29% said in September that they would be excited to see him as president, and 24% said they would be proud. Especially considering how this may be one of the higher points of his popularity since the favorability ratings of presidents tend to peak early in their terms, it's clear that the next president will not be welcomed by the vast majority of the population.

The result of this, I believe, will be an effort on the part of all save the members of Trump's ever-diminishing personality cult to overthrow him and the oppressive system he represents. I believe this will be the case because when this revolution inevitably materializes, it will in a lot of ways be led by those on both the liberal and conservative sides of the political spectrum. In a piece from earlier this month, I predicted Trump's presidency would provoke the rise of a possibly unprecedented progressive backlash against the new president and his agenda. It turns out, though, that a great deal of those on the right could join this effort, because liberals and conservatives in fact share many goals.

A survey from 2014 shows that the majority of Republicans, like most other Americans, want an end to the failed Drug War and do not think someone should be arrested for marijuana possession. The views of Republicans on taxes have radically shifted in recent years, with 53% of them supporting the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy. The same is the case for their beliefs about the environment, with 54% of Republicans acknowledging the existence of climate change. The government's mass surveillance programs are generally opposed by conservatives as well, with about as many Republicans as Democrats being opposed to the Patriot Act in its original form and 56% of them disapproving of the NSA's electronic communication surveillance. Most Republicans favor raising the minimum wage (though unfortunately only a quarter of them want it raised to $15). And 80% of them want Citizens United, and by extension the role of money in politics, ended.

In short, most Americans support policies which advance social, environmental, and economic justice, with conservatives in many ways being no exception. And with Donald Trump being viewed as hard to like by half of Republicans, I expect the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party will join the rest of the country in resisting the efforts on the part of Trump and leaders like him to ignore climate change, drive up the wealth gap, and expand mass incarceration and with the surveillance state. And especially given how the current income disparity has made it so that the conditions are now very hospitable for such a movement, I also believe this revolt's success is most certainly assured.

The irony of this situation is that inverted totalitarianism's death was caused by inverted totalitarianism itself. Trump won because he played on the anger that so many are feeling towards traditional institutions and leaders, and now that he's president-elect, he, along with the political and economic establishment that he pretends to oppose, are about to lose their power.

Green Party's Lithuania Victory May Foreshadow A Similar Event In The US

Ballots being cast in this month's Lithuanian parliamentary election.

Chances are if you're reading this, you don't often follow Lithuanian politics. But if you do, you've recently seen something interesting take place: on Sunday the 9th, Lithuania's Peasants and Green Party, despite its candidates generally trailing in the polls, won 20 out of the 70 available parliamentary seats during that day's election.

Because several parties were competing with them (a common phenomenon in democracies other than the United States), this means that they've taken the most seats in Lithuania's parliament. And though they're still behind in the polls ahead of the second phase of the elections, which will take place on October 23, this could mean that they'll defy the odds again and take control of the country's government.

This comes as good news for the Lithuanian Greens' American counterparts.

Though I've only begun to look into the country that I'm talking about (oh, now I see it on the map...it's that one between Russia and Poland), I can report that there are striking similarities between the factors behind these election results and the situation in the United States.

Let's flash back to the Great Recession, which, for Lithuania, began in 2009. In response to it, the country's government, headed by the center-right Homeland Union Party, passed austerity measures that drove up poverty by raising taxes while at the same time cutting public services. Though to be fair, such actions were necessary at the time to save Lithuania from a debt crisis, their consequences for the poor and the middle-class were made apparent by how the Homeland Union was voted out of power in the 2012 elections because of growing populist sentiments.

But for many Lithuanian voters in 2016, the policies of the newly elected Social Democratic Party have not been enough as the recession's effects continue to be widely felt. And so two days ago, the Peasants and Green Party's promises of more radical reforms to the economy contrary to Social Democrats' center-left approach won over undecided voters and earned it a possible position as the new ruling party of Lithuania.

This story has a lot of parallels to what's happened in the U.S. since the start of the recession. After the 2008 financial crisis, which President Bush shared much of the blame for, Republicans were voted out in 2006 and 2008 because of this and other failures to protect peace, the environment, and the economy.

However, since then, Democrats have proven to not be much better, with the Obama Administration's efforts to revive the economy being insufficient, its health care bill failing to address the health care crisis, its trade deals hurting American workers and the environment, and its wars wasting enormous amounts of tax money. As a result, income inequality has continued to increase at about the same rate regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is president. Worst of all has been the unwillingness of both Republicans and Democrats to keep the financial sector under control, with their support of the Wall Street bailouts and their failure to break up the big banks having created the factors for another economic crash.

And just like in Lithuania, Americans are increasingly showing a commitment to overthrowing the neoliberal order that both of its most established parties represent. This is reflected in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which, had it not been derailed by widespread voter suppression and electoral fraud, would have made it so that a self-described democratic socialist is well on his way to becoming the next U.S. president.

Because Sanders' run can be considered a last-ditch effort to reform the Democratic Party into something genuinely populist, the movement that it represented will most likely find a new home in the same place where Lithuania's leftist movement has: an alternative party which isn't tethered to corporate capitalism. Already, the Green Party of the U.S. is experiencing a major surge in support, with its 2016 presidential nominee Jill Stein (and also, perhaps, the dozens of other Greens running for the House and the Senate) on track to receive a lot more of the vote on November 8 than most polls estimate. And given the recent ideological fractures in America's party system, it's entirely possible that in the next several election cycles we'll see the rise of a third party that's capable of reforming America's economic system, which, by default, will likely be the Greens.

Sadly, the response to the worldwide trend in income inequality hasn't always taken such positive forms. Lithuania is unique in how it's one of the few democracies that has yet to see neo-fascist demagogues gain prominence in its government because of the economic hardships that its citizens are experiencing, with the neoliberal policies that so many countries have adopted in the last few decades producing a trend towards reactionary, far-right politics.

Right next to it in Poland, for example, representatives of such movements have gained control of the parliament, with their cracking down of civil liberties accompanying the nationalist culture that their presence has created. In the UK, June's Brexit vote may only be a foreshadowing of the victories that the country's burgeoning hard-right movements have the potential for winning in the next few years. And in the United States, though the current manifestation of this global movement Donald Trump is on his way to losing, four more years of the status-quo centrism that his opponent Hillary Clinton represents could very well result in the rise of something far more sinister in 2020.

These events resemble the vision of the future conjured by author Peter Moore who, after the 2008 financial crisis, wrote an account of what the future of global politics might look like if the current economic paradigm persisted. This paragraph, written in the context of some mentions of nationalist demagoguery being prevalent in the new political environment, indicates where he believes such trends would lead:

The new president might have better heeded his predecessor’s first, prudent steps toward silencing political opposition in time of national emergency. Instead, his glasnost-like policies met with that idea’s same ruinous results. A gesture of openness to the frivolous American media was only met with the usual anarchic outcries for still more information. Overtures of friendship toward leaders of the opposition faction in the Congress, such as Senators McConnell, Bond, and Cornyn, and Representatives Boehner and Hoekstra, were viewed as signs of weakness, and merely solicited further demands for power-sharing. It will seem strange today to many in Asia, or even in the “Failed World” of the West—where nation after nation has of late moved away from the constraints of the multiparty state—that such individuals were not summarily charged with high treason. But such were the logical endpoints of American-style “democracy.”

Of course, such a dark turn of events is anything but inevitable. The lowbrow appeal of Trumpism can be countered with the leftist radicalism offered by Sanders and the Greens, and if Americans build the Green Party into something viable by 2020-a task less daunting than it sounds-we'll easily be able to defeat the neo-fascists. For those in countries not dominated by two irredeemably corporatist parties, the necessary mission will be to make the already established leftist parties strong enough to fight the gathering political demons. But if these efforts fail, at least moving to Lithuania will still be an option.

The Democratic Party's Demise Began Long Before Obama

This year will be the last wherein Shaun King plans to remain a registered Democrat. He announced his decision to abandon ship this May, when it was becoming apparent that the Democratic primaries had been stacked against Bernie Sanders too much for him to go into the convention with the majority of delegates. The reasons he gave for doing so, though, were bigger than him simply being disappointed with the results of an election; "Right now, the Democratic Party, which I have called home my entire life," King wrote, "is deeply in love with money. Consequently, its leaders have supported and advanced all kinds of evil, big and small, in devotion to this love affair."

I'm not the only one who agrees with him. Prior to this year's movement among many other Sanders supporters to leave the party after what its leaders in both the top and the lower levels did to undermine democracy, Democratic membership has been in free fall since 2009, with their numbers having dropped by 6% since then and independent identification having soared. This is no doubt the consequence of the fact that, despite the overwhelming public opposition towards corporate power in the midst of record income inequality, Obama and the rest of the Democratic elite have very much failed the poor by passing Wall Street bailouts, anti-worker "free trade" deals, a profit-based health care plan, and even cuts to the social welfare system. King and the millions of others who have left the party in recent years are right to think that the Democrats do not represent the interests of the people.

But the Democratic Party's abandonment of its base, and its base's abandoning of it, has been going on for a lot longer than seven years.

Though Democratic membership dropped and rose many times prior to 2009, there's another, perhaps even more important, way of determining a party's success: how many state legislatures its members hold. And according to this Washington Post chart from last year, when examining the recent history of that factor, a striking decline for the Democrats is noticeable.

This decline can partly be attributed to the rightward shift that occurred in American politics and culture during the 1980's, but a factor that can't be ignored is how this was when Democrats began to shift to the right themselves.

As I talked about in my last article, after Carter lost, Democrats began to shift their economic agenda towards something more elitist, letting Reagan pass his upper-class tax cuts and business deregulations despite holding the majority in Congress throughout his entire presidency. And though these things evidently drove away parts of their leftist base, causing them to lose some of their former hold on the majority in state legislatures, this was only the beginning of their fall.

As you can see, Democrats saw a drop during the mid 90's that ended their half-century period of electoral dominance. After the party's drastic pivot to the right in the 1992 election, they lost the Senate and the House in 1994. Again, while that wasn't the only factor that caused the Democrats to lose, it very much played a role.

And then came the 2000 election, wherein Ralph Nader revealed to many the hypocrisy and corruption of the Democratic Party as it had come to be. This contributed to their loss of the House that year, and their loss of both the House and the Senate in 2004. While the public's overwhelming disgust with the Bush Administration during the end of his term bought Democrats four brief years of hope with their taking back the legislative majority in 2006 and 2008, their refusal to move away from the right as their base was moving increasingly to the left has since caused that trend to be reversed.

While the dirty tactics that Republicans have employed in recent years such as voter suppression and gerrymandering have played a large part in the Democrats' decline since 2008, the evidence is undeniable: Democrats have been sowing their own gradual doom for the past thirty-five years or so by shifting to the right and creating voter apathy among their base.

And as this phenomenon is expected to continue in this and future elections, which will make America more vulnerable to being taken over by the dark, neo-fascist brand of populism that the Republican Party is becoming a vessel for, the solution is clear: scrap the unreformable Democratic Party and work towards the rise of a third party for the left. The Democratic ship has been sinking for decades, and when it finally goes under in the next few years, we'll need to find another one, or drown.

Democrats Share As Much Of The Blame As Republicans Do For Trump's Rise

As Donald Trump's campaign appears to be collapsing, with the weeks-long period of him refraining from doing anything politically self-destructive that allowed him to nearly take the lead in national polls ahead of September's presidential debate now over, Democrats can once again bask in the comfort of having such a weak opponent.

It's in times like these that Democrats can also take Trump's nomination as a means to feel superior to Republicans. There are many internet memes which include things like a picture of a laughing President Obama saying, "And then my successful, scandal-free administration pissed them off so much, they actually lost their minds and nominated Donald Trump for president!" The real Obama's take on why Trump succeeded is basically an elaborated version of that: "What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. I mean, the reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time — that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts. That you just deny the evidence of science. That compromise is a betrayal. That the other side isn’t simply wrong, or we just disagree, we want to take a different approach, but the other side is destroying the country, or treasonous. I mean, that’s — look it up. That’s what they’ve been saying."

His view of the race, undoubtedly shared by most other Democrats, is very much accurate. The Republican electorate's embrace of Trump can indeed be largely attributed to the reactionary rhetoric, escalated partisanship, and, frankly, anti-intellectualism of conservative figures in politics and the media over the course of the past several decades.

What Obama and Friends would rather not focus on, though, is the fact that they've played their own role in this.

The Trumpist electorate

Before I move to the main focus of this article, I'll provide some background as to who exactly Trump's supporters are.

While it would be somewhat of an overstatement to say that those responsible for Trump's nomination are generally as economically disadvantaged as, say, Bernie Sanders supporters, their judgement has certainly been influenced by financial circumstances. Though an analysis from Gallup has found that most of Trump's supporters are in fact relatively well-off economically, when income inequality is at record levels, "relatively well-off" can in itself be a relative term.

The study also shows that they tend to live in communities in which their younger, poorer neighbors tend to have a difficult time getting ahead. Because of this, and perhaps also because these older, middle-class whites recall times where there was more economic opportunity, it may well be that they're embracing Trump's bigoted but still economically populist message because they worry for the livelihoods of their children. As Washington Post writer Max Ehrenfreund observed when writing an article about the Gallup survey:

Trump supporters might not be experiencing acute economic distress, but they are living in places that lack economic opportunity for the next generation.
Rothwell [the economist who conducted the analysis] used data from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, who studied how children born in the 1980s moved up or down the economic ladder depending on where they grew up. Children raised in places with high economic mobility, such as Boston or Pittsburgh, often surpassed their parents in socioeconomic status. Children raised in places with low economic mobility, such as Raleigh, N.C., and Indianapolis, struggled just to do as well as their parents in adulthood.
Trump was especially popular in these parts of the country.

In short, though Trump's brand of reactionary, xenophobic populism deserves no appreciation, and his economic agenda in fact does nothing to help working people (aside from his admittedly correct stance on trade), he would not have been able to get this far without having taken advantage of the public's mounting dissatisfaction with their place in the economy. This is just one part of a larger phenomenon that's appeared throughout the industrialized world in the last several years wherein demagogues like Trump are succeeding by capitalizing on people's growing economic insecurities, and misguided as Trump's followers are, it's not enough to simply write them off as products of an unenlightened facet of our culture. This is where the Democrats come in.

Reaganomics for the left

Most Americans are in agreement that the elite-oriented, neoliberal policies of the past thirty-five years or so have not helped their economic interests. But while Republicans have naturally been worse than Democrats on protecting the middle-class and helping the economy grow, the latter party certainly deserves much of the blame for getting us where we are today.

Firstly, though Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats who succeeded him in the following decades do deserve credit for their commitment to the rights of workers compared to that of the Republicans, they in fact share some responsibility for ushering in Reaganomics. Because, as Tony Wilsdon writes regarding the deeper economic effects of Roosevelt's Democratic Party:

Roosevelt was elected in November 1932, four years into the Great Depression – which was caused by the collapse of the financial speculation of the 1920s – as a fiscal conservative. Unrest was growing across the country as tens of millions of unemployed and impoverished workers were close to starvation. Determined demonstrations and strikes – including local general strikes – began to multiply, and growing numbers of workers were starting to criticize the capitalist system that had so wantonly cast them aside.

Roosevelt saw the radicalizing labor movement and the growing influence of socialists as a potential threat to the capitalist system. He abandoned fiscal conservatism, which was only making the conditions of ordinary people worse and preventing economic recovery, and instead adopted policies based on pumping money into the economy to support demand. This approach was most famously advocated by the British economist John Meynard Keynes and such policies are often described as “Keynesian.” Sections of the ruling class opposed Roosevelt’s policies as “socialism” but, as he explained, his intent was to save the system, not undermine it.

In other words, unlike the methods that the Scandanavian countries employed around that time to fight corporate power, the policies of Roosevelt's Democratic Party didn't go far enough to curb the problems of the established economic system. This, argues Wilsdon, led to the recession of the 1970's, which gave advocates of big business an excuse to make America give up the Keynesian spending on social programs that had gone on during the past several decades. What followed, of course, was the normalization of neoliberalism in the politics of the U.S. and most other countries.

The Democrats' response to this trend, especially after having contributed in part to the factors that set it in motion, was utterly irresponsible. Rather than fighting Reaganomics, they worked to help it, with Ronald Reagan being able to get his 1981 and 1986 tax cuts through Congress despite Democrats holding a majority in the House in both cases. The same is true for Reagan's ultimately disastrous deregulation bills, all of which were approved by a Democratic Party that had drifted disturbingly far from its more populist past since the 1980 election. Walter Mondale admitted this ideological shift in his 1984 DNC speech, saying that "After we lost we didn't tell the American people that they were wrong. Instead, we began asking you what our mistakes had been." He then pointed out that the Democrats' platform now included no business taxes that "weaken our economy."

Though if you look at the history of income inequality in the U.S, embracing neoliberal policies turned out to not be such a good idea, that didn't stop the Democrats from continuing to do so. The Democratic Party of the Clintons thankfully wasn't an extension of its past enthusiasm for tax cuts, but it did introduce the Democrats to another, similarly destructive facet of neoliberalism: the violation of worker's rights, or as it's more often referred to, "free trade."

The North American Free Trade Agreement-praised by Bill Clinton after signing it as something that meant "good paying American jobs"-has since killed over 1 million jobs in the US and wrecked Mexico's economy. Clinton's implementation of the world trade organization has had similar consequences. Obama has repeated Clinton's policies on trade, with the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement of 2011 having so far destroyed more than 106,000 American jobs. And perhaps the most destructive "free trade" deal that Democrats are responsible for is been the 2011 U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreement, which allowed thousands of wealthy individuals around the world to avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.

The worst, though, may be yet to come, as the Obama Administration continues to pursue the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an even more ambitious version of NAFTA which would kill jobs and consumer protections. Although the TPP has an almost zero chance of passing this year, and Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton claims that she opposes the deal, it's almost certain that that isn't her true position on the matter.

Additionally, since their ideological transformation during the 1980's and 90's, Democrats have killed welfare, instituted Wall Street deregulations that played a large part in the 2008 financial crisis, passed a trillion dollar Wall Street bailout at the expense of taxpayers, and even narrowly given George W. Bush the majority of House votes needed to pass his disastrous 2003 tax cut bill. These and other instances of Democrats betraying their middle and working class base during the past few decades have played an important part in the enormous transfer in wealth towards the top that's occurred since the late 70's. Had Democrats been willing to sufficiently confront the problems with our economic system during its Roosevelt era, or at least have not resorted to neoliberalism during the Reagan era, it's safe to say that the economic factors which produced Trump would not have come to be.

Thankfully, they won't be able to keep doing so for much longer.

A breaking point

It's been made clear this year that as a consequence of the facts above, Clintonism-the neoliberal, politically triangulating strategy of the modern Democratic Party-has wrought its own doom by alienating working class people on both the left and and the right. Well, it's not quite dead, obviously, given Hillary Clinton's most recent poll numbers, but were she running against any of Trump's former Republican challengers, things would be very different. In this way, we can consider Donald Trump the life support for Clinton's campaign-and for Clintonism in general.

But even life support might not be able to keep Clintonism alive for much longer.

Because of the increased concentration and financialization of the economy that occurred because of the 2008 Wall Street bailout which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other Senate Democrats voted for, the meager economic recovery that Obama has given us is about to go out the window. The dangerous re-wiring of the economy that the bailouts caused, wherein the big banks are now firmly in control of the world's markets, has set the stage for another financial collapse. And given the massive debt bubble that's occurred globally, along with the development of a new housing bubble and a stock market that's ripe for another crash, this catastrophic event could very well begin before the election-which, I believe, would easily give Trump the presidency as voters become dissatisfied with the Democratic Party.

Whether such a thing transpires will all depend on how the stock market behaves this next month. If the financial dike can hold until after then, Clintonism and the Democratic Party will be able to survive for a few more years, with Hillary herself making its final stand before being dislodged in the politically transformative 2020 election. Hopefully by then, given how reforming the Democratic Party into something better is pretty much impossible, we'll have seen the rise of a populist third party that takes its place. But in the meantime, as the unfortunate phenomenon which is Trumpism threatens our country in this election and will continue to threaten it in the coming years, it's important to cast the blame where it belongs: on the political establishment, Republican and Democratic.

Why The Revolution Won On Tuesday

So that's that. As of today, 2016 will officially be a race between the two most despised presidential nominees in American history. One is a consistently neoliberal and militaristic moderate conservative approved by Charles Koch and Dick Cheney that claims to be the best choice for the country's self-appointed liberal party, and the other is, well...you know enough about him.

The circumstances that made this possible are appropriately bizarre; one of these candidates won through manipulation of the electoral system like has never been seen before and outright defiance of the law, and the other one won legitimately, but through arguably even more unethical means.

But moving beyond the limited scope of presidential politics in the US, things aren't looking good. The climate continues to move towards catastrophic instability, with the majority of people in control of the government of the country that needs to address the problem most either adamant that it isn't an issue at all or convinced that it isn't too important an issue.

After a period of roughly forty years of tax reductions for the wealthy, free trade deals, nearly perpetual military efforts, and cutting of aid for the lower classes on the part of both parties, the legacy of the last Democratic Socialist Americans elected in 1932 has been effectively demolished. Even with the Affordable Care Act, 33 million Americans are living without health care. Any limits to the amount of influence the super-wealthy can have on the electoral system through campaign contributions are now irrelevant. Six major corporations control 90% of the media that Americans are exposed too. As of this month, income inequality in America has reached a point never before seen in the history of the country, with the top 0.1% owning as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. And worldwide, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, up from 40% ten years ago.

And aside from all that, there are things happening which uncomfortably resemble the state of the world in 1932; starting five years ago with President Assad's overly aggressive response to the Arab Spring uprisings, Syria's civil war, along with the war in Iraq caused by the rise of ISIS, 65 million people have been displaced worldwide. That's more refugees than at any point in history.

The way societies in North America and Europe are reacting to the influx of desperate people is equally disturbing, with millions of white, mainly poor or working class individuals in many countries accepting the nationalistic, xenophobic manipulations from Trump and others as a way out of their non-immigrant related problems. And whether such a degenerate brand of politics will come out on top this November in spite of the American electorate's increasingly remote resemblance of colonial times very much remains to be seen; Hillary Clinton has forever lost the respect and potential support of millions of voters, not just former Bernie Sanders supporters, who were appalled by the massive suppression of votes during the primaries and her legal invincibility. She needs those voters, and they're not going to help her when Trump starts to surpass her in important swing states and maybe even in national polls.

And meanwhile in the economy, there are strong signs that a recession is coming sometime this year. The confirmation of imminent disaster may have come on June 23, when Britain voted to leave the EU; the size of the eventual ramifications aren't clear, but the decision will very soon result in many investors around the world looking to their governments for financial support as the economy weakens. It was predicted on June 24 by Chris Hedges that this will lead to the Democratic Party being hurt in November. As it was in 2008, says Hedges, Republicans in the senate will reject any bailout of Wall Street because it's against the ideals of the free market, while the Democrats will ignore the objections of both the populists and the capitalists and help push for such an entitlement.

When this happened eight years ago, Obama's victory was all but guaranteed with his support for the bailout in September 2008 because of the awkward and incoherent way John McCain had objected to it during It's proposal on the senate floor. Should history repeat itself with another financial collapse, the exact opposite will occur this year. “The Democratic Party, by rescuing Wall Street,” wrote Hedges in his piece in Truthdig.com, “will be unmasked as the handmaidens of the financial elite.”

As 1932 more or less repeats itself, with the rise of reactionary politics and maybe even outright fascism in many parts of the world, economic catastrophe, and an environmental crisis to make the Dust Bowl seem minuscule, there will not be another FDR to become president and help fix things in the years to come. The state of our electoral and legal systems have changed too much since then, and we're just not going to get salvation that easily.

And so you all, of course, immediately know the reaction appropriate: laughter.

That's right, laugh at it all. Laugh at the media manipulation. Laugh at the DNC's deliberate limitations of the number of debates. Laugh at the voter fraud, voter exclusion, and refusal to count exit polls. Laugh at the contempt so many Democratic leaders have expressed for Bernie Sanders and his ideas. Laugh at the disregard for the law FBI director James Comey displayed in his dismissal of Hillary Clinton's obvious criminal activity. Laugh at every defender of the unjust system of the two pro-war, neoliberal parties, because what you've seen for the past year or so (or maybe decades farther back,) has been a big joke.

It was a joke whose punchline goes as follows: the fate of a country is not determined by what any kind of conventional wisdom imposed by the political and economic establishment says about how a certain person has “lost that election,” or how an idea “isn't realistic,” or how millions of people who are seeing the ruling class destroy their democracy and their planet should simply “fall in line” and allow the old paradigm of inequality, lack of accountability, and endless excuses to continue.

What happened in these past five-and-a-half months can most simply be described as a group of people, after being given a lot of money and power and other toys for adults, were confronted by the population that gave them these toys about their abuse of them. We tried to take their toys away, but they of course refused, and now it's time for them to face the consequences.

Inadvertently, through the last several decades, as the banks, the corporations and the politicians have carried on with their little game, the device that they use to control the world has grown weak. And it's about to get a lot weaker.

To bring up an almost obligatory subject when talking about American political revolutions, let us think back to the election of 2000. After eight years of a Democratic president that was called by Michael Moore “the best Republican president we've ever had,” politics had grown disturbingly tribal; despite all the evidence that Ralph Nader was vastly superior to Al Gore on progressive issues, most liberals saw him as an enemy, a benefit to Bush, a disturber of the peace, and even an extremist. Not everybody thought this, but the party's corporate masters very explicitly did, falsely accusing Nader of costing them the election and shutting him out of the audience of one of the presidential debates despite him having a ticket to it.

And they could do so from a comfortable perch, too; their pseudo-progressive party was currently enjoying the membership of 33% of the electorate, with 29% of the rest political Independents and 28% Republicans. With support like that, it was easy to marginalize those who genuinely wanted to fix the system with a smug “we're Democrats, and we don't care what some radicals think, because we're the only alternative to the very worst option.”

There's no telling where this could have lead if Gore had been allowed to succeed Clinton as the “liberal” representing a neoliberal party, but we know where Bush took us; aside from the historic debt, massive violence, and undermining of the constitution, the following years brought some new hope. By 2007, Democratic membership was still at 33%, but many Republicans had left their party, and Independents were at 34%. The incredibly destructive conservative administration had also driven the Democratic Party to the left, with the centrists among it no longer able to criticize liberalism from the right (at least not explicitly.)

But then something interesting happened; after all the Obama fervor died down (the electorate was 35% Democratic in 2008, with only 31% of it Independent), and the reality of he and the rest of the Democratic leadership's resistance to change was made apparent, Independents again edged them out in 2009, with 35% to their 34%.

And here's where it gets scary, Hillary and friends; since then, the gap has only been growing larger. When the Democrats failed to pass universal health care in 2010 despite having the majority in congress, their membership compared to Independents became 33% to 36%. When the Obama administration proposed cutting social security in 2011, that gap was at 32% to 37%. When Obama was was re-elected in 2012 still without having ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that gap had not changed from the year before. When Obama wanted to prosecute the defender of the constitution Edward Snowden and listened to his militaristic Secretary of State's advice to start a disastrous series of attacks on Libya in 2013, that gap was at 32% to 38%. When Republicans took firm control of the senate in 2014 because the alternative option had discouraged so many liberals who would have otherwise participated, that gap was at 32% to 39%. In 2015, when the president embraced a free trade agreement that, should it pass, will be more destructive than NAFTA, that gap was at 30.4% to 40.1%. And this year, when Democrats have created a platform that's halfway as conservative as that of the Republican's, oversaw a primary election arguably more offensive to Democracy than Bush v. Gore, and nominated a proven criminal for president, that gap is at 29% to 43%.

And that almost doesn't compare to what's happened to the Republicans. The last time they even had the majority in electoral membership was in 1995, with 31% to the Democrat's 30%. And the year in which they've more or less since been in decline is an interesting one: 2003. Republican popularity had been rising, though never exceeding that of the Democrats or Independents, since 2000. The number of Democrats had also drastically fell since 2001, with the implementation of a vast pro-Bush Administration propaganda campaign post-9/11 undoubtedly playing a role. With the help of a compliant corporate media and largely pro-war Democratic leadership, the GOP had started the invasion of Iraq with more than seventy percent of public support, and their other policies went nearly unchallenged by the left.

But most of the country was not really behind them. As of that year, 57% of Americans supported a woman's right to choose. 73% wanted mandatory background checks on those seeking to purchase guns. Half believed that gay and lesbian couples should receive the same benefits as heterosexual couples. Eight in ten of them wanted universal health care. 62% wanted nonviolent drug offenders to be rehabilitated, instead of sent to prison. 72% thought that the problems in corporate America were due to greed, instead of “the consequences of a free market.” And perhaps most importantly, 83% of them agreed with the goals of the environmental movement.

The consequences of these ideological inconsistencies began to materialize the year after, when Democratic membership rose to 33% and Republican membership fell to 29%. How Bush was then re-elected is anybody's guess. Then in 2005, when the Republican-run government took two days longer than necessary to start rescuing the victims of Katrina, those numbers remained the same. When the Bush Administration considered the use of nuclear weapons on Iran in 2006, the gap went to Republicans 28% and Democrats 33%. When a worldwide financial meltdown started in 2007 because of the failure of Republicans to regulate Wall Street, that gap was 25% to 33% (though thanks in part to Wall Street having originally been deregulated by Bill Clinton, independents were at 34%).

And their slight rise since then to 26% is of little comfort to them. As of this year, 54% of Americans support taxing the wealthy to aid the poor. 63% are in favor of a $15 minimum wage. 86% want mandatory police body cameras. 76% are against sending conventional ground troops to fight ISIS. Well over half want to replace Obamacare with a single-payer system. The overwhelming majority of Americans, including Republicans, are against Citizens United. And majority support for the goals of the environmental movement is clear, even among Republicans themselves.

Stepping back from the media's portrayals of a thriving electoral system, it's not looking good at all for both parties. 55% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, while 7 in 10 dislike Donald Trump. Only 68% of Republicans have a favorable view of their party, and going by the most recent estimates, 50% of Americans disapprove of the Democratic Party. Twenty-one percent of voters from both parties are backing neither of their nominees, and that number is sure to grow. (13% would prefer a giant meteor hitting the earth to both of them-at least it would be honest in its intentions.) When comparing the combined votes the two nominees (officially) received in the primaries to the 219 million eligible voters in America, they were only picked by 15.7% of those capable of voicing an opinion.

And finally, on a somewhat related note, only 29% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

These are the numbers and facts you should be paying attention to. Not biased polls about Hillary's support reported in a way that makes it seem as if the left is submissive as ever to the will of the corporate DNC. Not claims that progressives who oppose the Democratic party are mainly just privileged young people (which is a group that's becoming increasingly rare). Not smug assertions from representatives of the established party system that our objections are irrelevant because Bernie Sanders supposedly lost. The buildup has been long, but the two parties have reached a point where their support, their common agenda, and their reasons for self-justification are doomed.

Devin Reynolds, someone who very much recognizes this fact, summed up the reason for this in a June 20 Medium.com article:

“The divide between the top 1% and the top 10% makes our political system look competitive, and there are legitimate diverging interests between those two classes. That said, in practice, our two political parties split the vote for the working class, then both ignore it in favor of their primary constituencies. The simple reality of this dynamic is that the majority of the population’s interests go unrepresented. While Republican members of the working class are exploited by their low-information status into voting for policies that benefit the top 1%, the Democratic members of this group allow themselves to be browbeaten into supporting policies that largely benefit the top 10% based on the dubious supposition that those policies are “better than Republican policies.” With one half of the working class deceived into voting Republican and the other half treated like it has no choice but to vote Democrat, 90% of the population has its interests treated like an afterthought. Bernie’s entire campaign was an attempt to change that.”

When you're talking in terms of nine out of ten Americans being left out of the interests of the political system, and of that minority acting like the system should be accepted as normal, it's only a matter of time before the majority takes it's power back.

As Democratic elites dismissed us as young white “Bernie bros,” and booed our candidate for saying that his goal is not to win elections but to transform the country, and claimed that our ideas for making this as sane and just a society as the rest of the developed world were based on fantasy, these same old obnoxious attacks were quietly but surely losing their validity, assuming they had any to begin with.

The national sentiment has changed. It's changed in the direction of rationalism, it's changed in the direction of self-interest, and it's changed in the direction of common sense. No longer do most Americans believe that poverty is caused by laziness, or that endless war is the consequence of perpetual security threats, or that environmental problems should simply be ignored. And perhaps even more importantly, no longer do we believe that any politician should be excused for working against the interests of the people because of the title of the party they're affiliated with, or that dishonesty and corruption should be accepted because that's “the only way to survive in politics,” or that any given person, no matter how powerful, should not face the consequences if they commit a crime.

Come to think of it, we never even really believed these things at all.

All the real statistics support one fact, which is that we are headed for a profound transformation as a nation and even as a civilization. And I'm not just talking about protests, petitions and other types of activism, which have always been occurring, if not on the scale that we're seeing today, but real, lasting change within our government.

Sometime very soon, maybe even at the next opportunity, Americans are going to go to the polling places and make a statement to the same people that worked to suppress their votes in the Democratic primaries this year: no, we do not think that the current economic system is acceptable. Yes, we do believe health care, food and housing are the right of all people, not just a group of the wealthiest citizens. No, we are not satisfied with what the two parties have had to offer in terms of real change. To put it succinctly, enough is enough.

If you heard a loud voice with a Brooklyn accent at some point during that last paragraph, it proves that Bernie did not go away at all when he conceded, and that he never will.

So we have the support, we have the historical advantage, and we have the moral high ground to pull off the rise of a genuinely populist third party that actually wins elections, but will the system allow for us to do so? That is unfortunately worth considering, seeing what the oligarchy has done to the first real threat to them in a long time during these past few months.

The answer to that is both no and yes. The powers that run the the way our democracy functions-therefore not making it a democracy at all-will try to stop us at every turn. But the future of American politics will be a whole new game, one where we'll be free to run candidates and promote our agenda within parties that are not controlled by the billionaires. As soon as we unite the millions of voters not enamored with the dying establishment behind a third party with a serious chance to win elections, most of the battle will be won, and undemocratic obstacles like the Electoral College will have quite a lot to worry about should they decide to deny us a victory outright. As long as democracy is even more or less intact, we will be able to win.

And in fact, we've already started to. Several genuinely progressive politicians across the country have won their primaries because of Bernie Sanders' efforts, and while we may not see much change from this election cycle, it will without a doubt be very different the next time around; there's no telling how far these new types of leaders will get in the elections of 2018, or 2020 for that matter. And I'm certainly not the only one who will be helping them along the way.

As for the present situation, I personally see the Green Party's candidate Jill Stein as the best option, but whatever you choose to do is no concern of mine and ultimately won't matter too much. The media wants you to ignore it, but a change has occurred in this country that Bernie's concession in New Hampshire only made even more sure to have influence on the future.

But above all, keep in mind that I am not talking about some kind of fun little club that disappointed former Bernie Sanders supporters will put together so that we can meet with like-minded people. Yes, I am ideologically very progressive and supported Bernie for as long as there was any hope for him to win, but if this movement were only for people like me, we would slowly fade into irrelevance. This will be a movement for every American to be apart of who is concerned about the massive inequalities, injustices, and threats to our planet that absolutely must be addressed. This movement's base will be made up of every person who cares about the needs of the many, and not the wants of the few. A new party for the people does exist; it's just waiting to find an organization to help advance it's great power. To repeat a line from a different revolution, both ironically speaking and not, yes we can.

No, the revolution was never meant to be easy. But as of now, it will only get easier.