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.

The Only Ideology That Can Defeat Trumpism, According To Math

A long while back in American political history-which is to say, before the election of Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders supporter John Laurits wrote a piece titled The Only Candidate That Can Defeat The GOP, According To Math. In it, as you've no doubt guessed by now, he laid out the simple facts, which were that Sanders, not Clinton, was the Democratic candidate who could appeal to enough Democrats and independents to be able to win against Trump.

But to consequences yet to be fully determined, Democratic leaders chose to disregard this and other pieces of evidence that their preferred candidate was not up to the job of beating Trump, and they blocked Sanders' nomination. And now, with our political system having hit what the writer Michael E. Sparks considers to be rock bottom, the need for an effective electoral counter to Donald Trump and those who share his neo-fascist political brand is greater than ever.

So it's imperative that as Democrats and others who oppose Trumpism work to defeat it going into future elections, they don't repeat their mistake from this year.

Just as establishment Democrats continue to dismiss the possibility that Sanders would have defeated Trump, they dismiss the possibility that Sandersism has the potential to defeat Trumpism if made the standard ideology of the Democratic Party. Paul Krugman, for instance, who has ironically made passionate arguments in favor of economic populism, has lately adopted a more neoliberal attitude when responding to the idea that Democrats need to start appealing to the working class; another defender of the Democratic political status quo is Nancy Pelosi, who has said she doesn't think Democrats need a new direction because "Our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families."

I'm going to make the case now, like Laurits and others tried to earlier this year, for Sandersism, not a continuiation of Clintonism, being the only way to go forward. And I'm going to start by providing the evidence of why a failure to embrace Sandersism resulted in Trump's victory.

The reason Clinton lost had nothing to do with the third party candidates or Bernie Sanders (the latter of which actually helped her get more votes), but rather a failure on the part of her and the Democratic Party to present a compelling case that they intended to help working people. Specifically, the working people who live in Rust Belt. If Clinton had won just a few more states in that region, she would have received the majority of electoral votes, but that proved to be impossible after the approach she used to this election.

The people who decided the outcome of those races, exit polls indicate, regarded economic issues, especially trade, as highly important. And when presented with Clinton vs Trump, a consequential number of them understandably went with the latter. Clinton, despite having branded herself earlier in the race as pro-worker on trade, was hard to trust on the issue for many people due to her history of supporting neoliberal trade deals, the fact that she had since appointed a Trans-Pacific Partnership advocate to be the head of her transition team, and how her campaign received massive donations from corporate executives who stood to benefit from the TPP. All of this evidently cost her the election in what Michael Moore calls a "Rust Belt Brexit."

Another way Clintonism proved to be an ineffective strategy for the Democrats this year was that it depressed voter turnout. As Moore has also noted, the demographics made it so that Hillary Clinton always easily had enough support to win, but due to her unwillingness to appeal to the Democratic base, not enough people showed up to make it happen. 

The low Democratic voter turnout this year which cost Clinton the election for the most part did not occur because of Republican voter suppression efforts, and the reasons for this fact are easy to guess. Even after the victory of Clinton's extremely unpopular opponent, polls continue to show around 55% of Americans view her negatively, and in a stunning demonstration of how suspicious Americans are of her, one poll from earlier this year found that 68% view her as untrustworthy compared to 43% for Donald Trump. The same survey also showed just 38% would be proud to have her as president, compared to Trump's 39%.

And the reason for this does not have to do with decades of Republican smears on her as she has alleged. Polls have shown that most Americans know how to sift through the false accusations that have been leveled against Clinton, indicating their dislike for Clinton has more to do with the fact that they disagree with her on many important issues.

Just 29% of Americans think that trade deals like NAFTA have benefited the country, 78% want an end to Citizens United and money in politics, 62% are in favor of breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, 58% support a federally funded universal health care system, 63% prefer a $15 minimum wage, and on the list goes of ways in which vast majority of the public wants to end the neoliberal paradigm and make the economy work for everyone. But given Hillary Clinton's corporate campaign donations and her open opposition to many of these goals, it's clear that she was not the right option for those who hold such views, and as a result, she's been proven unable to win a national election.

It's this same problem that has gotten the Democratic Party into its current crisis. Despite Pelosi's assertions to the contrary, for the past forty years the party's values have mainly involved supporting corporations and the super rich rather than working families, and just like Hillary, they've failed politically because of this. It's no coincidence that the Democrats' gradual decline throughout the last few decades has happened at the same time as the party has pivoted to the interests of big business, with the Democratic leadership's abandonment of their base having made them lose most of the white working class (along with some of the nonwhite working class).

And once again, the Democratic Party has suffered a similar fate to that of Hillary Clinton due to its shift towards neoliberalism, with Democrats now holding as few elected offices as they did in the 1920's. This is due to a failure on their part to sufficiently motivate their base to show up at the polls. And if the party continues to try to appeal mainly to the quarter or so of the electorate which supports neoliberal policies, their decline will only continue.

However, if the efforts of Bernie Sanders and others succeed, the Democratic Party can yet become an institution which advances both identity politics and economic populism (which, contrary to the narrative of the corporate media, are not mutually exclusive approaches) and assume the role of the dynamic political tool needed to fight Trump's agenda. And should the Democrats remain a party of the economic elite, it will be replaced by an alternative organization, be it the Green Party or something else.

But electoral politics isn't the only political aspect wherein Trump's opposition will need Sandersism to succeed. Should a major crisis develop during Trump's term, he and his administration will likely try to use it as an excuse to gain bipartisan support for a series of authoritarian and hawkish measures they'll surely push for in response to it. And if the main opposition that they face consists of Clintonist Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who aims to act as Trump's ally, a forceful response from progressives will be absent and enormous damage will be done to global stability, the rights of working people, and America's constitutional liberties.

In short, if the left wants to have any success, it will stop letting its leaders pivot to "moderates" and "the center" and have them appeal to the majority of the Americans, who  support the ideals and values of Sandersism. Lack of a major Sandersist presence in the 2016 general election resulted in the victory of a tyrant, and lack of a major Sandersist presence afterwords will result in a victory for that tyrant's agenda.

The 2016 Election Is The Only Thing Holding The Two-Party System Together

In a past article, I once made a (seemingly) shocking prediction: that in the near future, the combined number of people who affiliate with the Republican and Democratic parties will make up less than half of the electorate. The reasons I give for believing this duopoly-imperiling event is on its way have to do with the fact that according to a January Gallup poll, combined Democratic and Republican identification is at 55%, and because the events of this election have left so many people alienated with the two major parties, that percentage is bound to soon drop below fifty.

However, as I recently discovered, Gallup takes their party affiliation poll a lot more frequently than I assumed, and when I looked at the most recent survey (taken in September), to my dismay I found that the combined number of Democrats and Republicans had since gone up to 59%.

How could this be, I thought. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the most disliked (and probably the easiest to dislike) presidential nominees in history. About half of both Republicans and Democrats wish that someone else were their party's nominee. Trump is driving evangelicals, women, and Latinos away from the Republican Party, while Clinton is alienating the most important part of the Democratic Party's base-progressives. These ideological rifts within the two major parties are just the latest and most dramatic in the massive decline of support that they've both been experiencing for the last several years, and there's evidently no reason to think that that trend will start to reverse. To say that Democratic and Republican membership has respectively went from 29 and 26 percent to 32 and 27 percent since the beginning of the year seems to defy all logic, or at least prove that Americans are far too intrenched in party loyalty for the two-party system to end anytime soon.

The current party affiliation polls notwithstanding, though, Democrats and Republicans are in just as bad shape as intuition would have it.

When looking at the long-term history of Gallup's party affiliation polls, one notices an intriguing phenomena: identification in the two major parties always reaches a high point around the time of presidential elections. In 2012, the poll that put independents at 33%-by far that year's lowest estimation of independents-was taken days before the election. In 2008, the poll that put independents at 32%-a notably low number for that year as well-was taken in late October. And in 2004, the two polls in a row that put independents at 27%-down from 40% at the beginning of the year-were taken in the weeks before Election Day. I know these examples are far from conclusive evidence, but they seem proof enough to me that as elections approach, people tend to coalesce around the party that they prefer will win.

Just as the support for third party candidates always drops approaching election day while many of their former backers get behind the major party candidate that they're the least dissatisfied with, the same appears to be true for party affiliation. This theory of mine seems to be further supported in how during the primary season this year, loyalty to the two major parties began to drop with Republicans making up 25% of the electorate in April and Democrats making up 28% of it in May. And since then, after things have switched into the next phase of the campaign, the polls have generally shown a higher amount of "support" for the Democratic and Republican parties. The lack of sincerity among many of the 59% of Americans who say they side with the two major parties is betrayed in how, at the same time, 57% of Americans say they think a third major party is needed.

And when the piece of partisan glue which is the 2016 election becomes irrelevant on November 9, there will be nothing to stop that 57% of the population from acting on their wishes and changing the party system.

After the election is over and the nation's partisanship has returned to a sane level, the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with the major parties will have an opportunity to defy them. Regardless of whether Trump or Clinton wins, Trumpism and Clintonism will retain their control over the agendas of the Republican and Democratic parties throughout the foreseeable future, and that will not sit well with most Americans. The ideological split between traditional Republicans and those in Trump's camp will likely continue to grow, quite possibly resulting in a sudden success for the Liberitarian Party or something similar to it in future elections. Meanwhile, the divide on the Democratic side between those who embrace neoliberalism and those who want to fight it (which I think is hurting Democrats more than the right's ideological split is hurting Republicans) could very well result in the rise of a populist party like the Greens.

If you think such a shift isn't realistic, keep in mind that the main factor behind the current split within the two parties, wherein most of the Republican base now embraces Trumpism and most of the Democratic base now rejects Clintonism, is the now historic amount of economic inequality which has appeared because of the pro-big business policies that the Republican and Democratic establishments have supported for the past four decades. And as the trend of growing economic inopportunity continues throughout the next four years, with Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton presiding over an ongoing assault on the middle class and a new financial crisis, populist sentiments on both the left and the right will only become more intense, making the creation of a four-party system by 2020 a serious possibility.

So in the meantime, Democratic and Republican insiders should enjoy the increased amount of support for their parties while they still can.

How Jill Stein Can Get 5% Of The Vote

No, that is not a picture of one of Bernie Sanders' rallies. It's a Ralph Nader rally that took place in the summer of 2000.

The fact that Nader received a mere 2.74% of the vote gives people a false image of just how big a presence his campaign had at one point. During June of that year, the movement that he had generated among those who were disillusioned by the Democratic Party's descent into Clintonism had him polling at 6%.

But as the election approached, as always happens with third-party campaigns, more voters became focused on helping the major candidate that they preferred most, and his support fell. Though Nader didn't end up swinging the election, the Democratic spin that he had-along with the important goal of stopping Bush in 2004-effectively killed the Greens' hopes for overtaking the Democrats anytime soon.

Several election cycles later, Americans are finally learning the consequences of continuing to support the two-party system. This destructive paradigm has resulted in the two most detested figures in American political history being the nominees of both major parties, and even though 57% of the electorate wants a third choice, in all likelihood they aren't going to see one win this year.

Though factors such as record income inequality and an increasingly independent electorate make it so that a third-party upset in 2020 is dramatically more likely than it was in 2004, the current state of the race indicates that such an event will be somewhat difficult to realize. If Nader had received 5% or more of the vote in 2000, his party would have qualified for federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next election cycle, which would have significantly shaken things up. And though the Liberitarian Party's Gary Johnson is set to receive more of the vote share than that, Jill Stein of the Green Party-the only party with the ability to break the grip that banks and corporations have on society-is polling hopelessly far beneath that number.

Or at least, that's what we've been told.

A frequent complaint from insurgent candidates during this election (legitimate or not) has been that the process is rigged against them. This claim has had a lot of basis, particularly in the case of Bernie Sanders, who's campaign would have likely succeeded had it not been for the voter suppression, electoral fraud, and biased coverage from the corporate media that plagued the Democratic primaries. If you suspect that similar things are happening to Jill Stein, your intuition is correct.

First and foremost comes the way Stein has been treated by the mainstream media. As columnist Caitlin Johnstone writes about the attacks Stein has received from corporate news outlets:

Countless pages of editorial have been spent deriding Jill, Ajamu, and their entitled-white-privileged-but-also-basement-dwelling supporters. How exactly does that work, oh million-dollar media hacks? How can someone be overly entitled, but stuck living in their Mom’s basement, at the same time?
So there’s that. Just look up “Jill Stein anti-vax,” the creation of a neoliberal think-tank, and you will come up with pages and pages of superficial editorial and smear. On that one lie alone, there are thousands upon thousands of deceitful and maliciously manipulative words written on it designed to paint her as anti-vax without any actual evidence. That’s a tricky two-step. Takes a lot of creativity to make up such ornate lies.
They sure do spend a lot of time on us. Anyone who didn’t know better would think we were a threat.

The media's response to Stein has been more than simply about a concern that she'll swing the election. The fact that Gary Johnson-who's taking nearly as much of the potential support from Hillary Clinton as Stein is-hasn't endured such a smear campaign further confirms this. The reason for their hostility towards her, as Johnstone continues, seems to be about something deeper.

You certainly would not think that we were a footnote protest vote that will amount to less than a percent of the vote.
Of course, they use that line too. We are merely a percent or two in the polls. But their vitriol betrays them.
Their own polls betray them too. When you drill down in the data of a CNN poll, for example, you will find that they have exorcised all millennials, Gen-Xers, minorities, and anyone not living in a southern state, from their sample set.
That’s a whole lot of people they’re not asking anymore. Basically, if you’re not a fifty-plus white person from the south, you don’t get polled. Now, why is that, I wonder? Hmm. They could not be hiding something…could they?

The name of that piece is "Vote For Jill Because She Can Win." While I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that these things are proof Stein in fact has enough unreported support to do so, I do think it's clear that she has more support than it appears.

That CNN poll isn't the only one which has underestimated Stein's numbers. Many surveys, such as an August Ipsos-Reuters poll and the five polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates used to determine whether Stein and Johnson could debate, have been biased against likely Green voters, having included problems such as underrepresenting independents and young people. Other suspicious factors in how these polls are conducted, as Nathan Francis reports, have to do with how they tend to make unfair assumptions about the people that are participating in them.

One of the biggest factors in Jill Stein overperforming her polling could be in the models these polls use to predict likely voters. Guessing which poll respondents will actually show up on Election Day has always been something of an informed guess for pollsters, and they don’t sound terribly confident this year compared to the past.
“These methods, which have been around for so long, may be losing some of their accuracy because circumstances have changed,” Scott Keeter, a senior survey adviser at Pew Research, told the Atlantic. “Whether there has been a change in our politics in just the last two years that makes all of this less accurate is really impossible to answer at this point.”
And those likely voter models — the ones that are used to show Jill Stein’s low support — are generally weighted to expect fewer young and first-time voters. That happens to make up a large share of the Green Party’s base, so a model that fails to take these voters into account will have Jill Stein underperforming.

In short, the Real Clear Politics polling average, which currently puts Stein at 2%, is not accurate at all. Ignoring these "push polls" and unscientific surveys, she in fact has far more support than that.

Here's some amateur, but reliable enough, polling analysis of mine: 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters now support Jill Stein. While it's difficult to say exactly how much of the electorate is made up of those in that crowd, seeing as about half of Democrats backed Sanders at one point and he won among independents, it's reasonable to assume that if you were to take all of the Sanders supporters and then calculate how much 13% of them is relative to the rest of the electorate, you will get a number close to or even above 5%.

A more certain demographic to look to to find how much support Stein actually has is young voters. Stein has 16% of the support with voters under 30 (to put that in perspective, if this group made up all of the electorate Stein would qualify for the debates), and since millennials make up 31% of the electorate, we can confidently say that counting young people alone, she has more than 4% of the support.

Stein supporters from those two groups, added to the other supporters that she has, gives her an uncertain, but crucial, amount of support above 5%.

So that's that. We've already succeeded in the first half of our mission to make Jill Stein succeed where Nader's supporters made him fail by getting her 5% or more of the vote. The support she needs to do so is already there, and those who run the corporate media, perhaps suspecting this, are doing everything they can to stop us.

And with thirty days until the election, all that we can do now is spread awareness of this fact so that those Sanders supporters and millennials who want to vote for Stein but feel like doing so would be a waste will vote for who they prefer on November 8. And if they feel like stopping Trump is the most important thing, tell them about how voting third party in most states will have no affect whatsoever on the race's outcome, and how Clinton can afford to lose their vote regardless because she's highly likely to win. Though the wind will be at our backs for a Green Party upset post-2016 even if we don't pull this off, we're going to need every advantage we can get.

Though the odds are stacked against us in this mission, as they were with Bernie Sanders' campaign, do not lose the belief that we can reach 5% until it's November 8 and you see that the election results show we've failed. Until then, it's a game of working and hoping. Because, as John Laurits said about the possibility that third-party voters can stage an upset this year in an article similar to this one, "Sure, it’s 'statistically unlikely' — but so is the fact that life even exists at all and yet here we are."