Forty Short Post-Election Theses: Where We Stand Now and Where We Go From Here
This is a great article from Counterpunch by Anis Shivani, a Houston-based, Harvard-educated writer. Read it, please. It is the only one that I have found in a week of post-election searching that makes much sense to me.
Following are a few snippets from it.
Read on:
1/ Do not underestimate Trump’s executive ability. He ran at least five different campaigns during this one cycle, showing himself swift-footed and quickly able to change staff and ideas depending on the needs of the moment. He will move blindingly fast to enact his repressive agenda, every word of which he meant seriously.
—snip—
3/ The monopoly of political correctness over the media and the intellectual apparatus has had dire results, it has reached its end point in the fascistic reaction. Political correctness diverts attention from the kinds of material issues that propel this kind of election result. How can this monopoly by broken?
4/ When democracy on the left is suppressed–i.e., someone like Bernie Sanders is cheated out of the nomination that should have been his–the result is an extreme reaction from the right, and the victory of the opposite of the suppressed message. This has been true for nearly forty years of neoliberalism.
5/ Fascism arises only when liberalism fails. How has liberalism failed us? The cultural liberalism of the elites doesn’t allow room for economic liberalism, which has been sidelined during the course of the neoliberal ascendancy.
6/ Trump has rewritten all the rules of politics. Those in the elite bubble, both Republicans and Democrats, have been made to look like fools. Trump made a direct appeal to the people, converting American politics into a reality show. Politics is reality TV now, and will remain so. How does a rational message of economic redistribution and justice get through this screen?
—snip—
8/ The demographic wall has been shattered. Trump’s only chance of success was to break through in the Rust Belt, as the Democrats’ weakest point of exposure. Ted Cruz or any conventional Republican would not have won, the demographic wall would have stood. The only way was to scramble the map. Has the Rust Belt been breached for good? Yes, if fortune favors Trump and he can deliver even a small amount of what he promised.
9/ Just as the neoliberal elites were gambling, the electorate took a massive gamble too, they chose to end unbearable stagnation under neoliberalism, even at the risk of bringing on something apocalyptic. They knew the risks, but they could not bear neoliberal precariousness anymore.
10/ The elites had a chance to figure out an amiable solution to inequality, to share the fruits of the biggest economy in the world. They didn’t, and now it’s de facto civil war. Things cannot go back to the status quo ante, the elite consensus has collapsed for good.
—snip—
18/ By not taking the slightest steps to address economic inequality, neoliberals have plunged us into the abyss. Whenever we want even the slightest concessions, as in 2000, the system gives us something ten times more repressive to set us back. It is a system-wide failure, it is not just a failure of either political party. Trump is who we are, it is where we are, it is who we want to be, just as Bush was all those things to at least half the population.
19/ Trump, masterful strategist that he is, saw two bankrupt political parties, and seized control of one, as in his real estate dealings. Who will seize control of the bankrupt Democratic party now?
20/ A new political consensus will emerge eventually, though it may take a while. Both parties are dead, the neoliberal consensus is over. This is the first stage of either an authoritarian/inegalitarian political economy or a participatory/egalitarian one. The false center is gone.
21/ The neoliberal wing of the party had no intention of presenting any policy agenda, they were only prompted to concede a few things because of the pressure put by the Sanders wing. They have lost all credibility and should never be heard from again.
—snip—
25/ Writers, intellectuals, academics, and artists in the public eye are nearly 100% with “the Dems.” When I was in college it was ridiculous to be for the Dems. We were socialists, Marxists, radicals, anarchists, greens, freethinkers, rebels, secularists, hardcore feminists, utopians. What the hell happened to all of that? Young people should get away from the Dems, and build a green/socialist/egalitarian alternative, not just at the political party level but as a living reality, a transcendent goal of existence. Trump has done us a favor by blowing up the corporate Dems, they were never going to change on their own.
26/ This should be the end of the intensely anti-intellectual “liberal” websites and blogs, right? We know who they are, shoveling pure snark at anyone the least bit skeptical of the party line, designed to flatter the hip and cool young professionals with politically correct propaganda and little understanding of the reality of working people. Young people should educate themselves about the history of political economy, stop wasting time with this diversionary new media.
—snip—
31/ The electorate wisely rejected 44 years of a Bush or a Clinton at or near the top, which it would have been by 2024.
32/ We also come full circle in confronting the total decimation of the Democratic party in congress and at the state level under Clinton and Obama. The Democrats had a lock on the House since the New Deal, which they lost permanently in 1994, making any legislative advance impossible. This was a direct result of the Clinton neoliberal cave-in, it’s what happens when you end opposition and turn your own party into a replica of the other side. Essentially, we’ve had one-party rule since the end of the Cold War. And this has created the philosophical vacuum intp which Trump has stepped.
—snip—
34/ The entire Democratic party leadership should resign in shame. How does Howard Dean have the nerve to want to run for DNC chair after having opposed Sanders and having thrown in his lot with the Clinton machine for more than a decade? Sanders has the moral authority to have his choice, Keith Ellison, go forward. A new leadership and new philosophy of resistance needs to mobilize before Trump’s inauguration, and before his anticipated dire first actions, particularly against immigrants. Can the party move that fast?
—snip—
36/ Trump is coming after undocumented immigrants and Muslims in a big way. Mobilize now, be ready to fight. Every liberal institution rolled over in the first two years after 9/11, as registration of Muslims, illegal incarceration, mass deportations, and torture and rendition became the new order. Nothing happened in those first years as a token of liberal resistance. We will soon find out if this has changed.
—snip—
38/ Here come Fareed Zakaria and Jill Abramson and all the rest of the liberal prognosticators, blaming themselves for their failure to understand the agony of people in the rural areas. They are sorry they didn’t go to the South. The South? They’re right under your nose, in the urban areas, do you need to travel thousands of miles to find poor people?
39/ Blaming poor white people for taking advantage of white privilege is another part of runaway political correctness. The poor white person is as subject to police and surveillance authority, as subject to arbitrary employer exploitation, as is the poor person of any color. Can that meme end now?
40/ A forceful seizure of the Democratic party is necessary, and at the moment only Bernie has the moral authority to do it. In the longer term, there must be electoral reform, campaign finance reform, space for third parties and viewpoints beyond the two centrist parties. But in the short-term, Bernie is the youngest 75-year-old in the land, so take it away!
And, as always…sigh…
WTFU!!!
Later…
AG
Frenzied screams of self-referential, self-righteous anger?
Whatever.
Feel free.
I do.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
I won’t have much time for a while to get deeper into this post…I am working (in Trump country, coincidentally…mid-PA) with the transcendentally gifted jazz composer Maria Schneider at what the music education business calls a “clinic” for several days. All day/part of the night teaching, rehearsing and performing with college-level students and other pros. Even deep in the belly of the beast there is good light if you look for it…possibly the real message of Jonah and the Whale, come to think of it.
Anyway, I want to make one comment on one part of the above quotes before I go to work:
And how did he do this?
He simply held them up to scrutiny that the bought-and-sold media had heretofore refused to provide. As did Wikileaks. The clown shoes are now on other feet.
Bet on it.
HRC et al actually lost this election the day that Trump informed the U.S. population that he had essentially bought Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presence at his daughter’s wedding by “donating” money to their various and sundry organizations.
He actually acted as would a deep cover spy, shining them on while he awaited his chance to take them down.
If the so-called progressive left does not find some non-clowns to run the
Dumbshow…errr, ahhh, Dem show…some incorruptible idealogues…the Democratic Party is as good as finished except as a part (the losing part, at least for a while) of the PermaGov-operated WWE-stlye fix machine.So it goes, and…
Wake the fuck up!!!
Later…
AG
I agree with 1.
“When democracy on the left is suppressed–i.e., someone like Bernie Sanders is cheated out of the nomination that should have been his”
This is bullshit. He lost because he couldn’t win black votes, and as a result got killed Southern primaries. He also lost New York, Pennsylvania and California.
So right away I know this is delusional crap.
“Ted Cruz or any conventional Republican would not have won”
Nonsense. Romney led Clinton by 10 in a trial heat the week before the election.
At what point do these screams – its not real analysis – remember the name Comey.
25 is idiotic. I was a student at UVM in the 80’s – the cradle of the Sanders movement. Dems dwarfed the left even there.
32 the lock on the House was based on Southern Democrats who start leaving when the Civil Rights Bill was passed.
The rest of this is mostly drivel – the sort written by Nader people after 2000. Free of facts, a rather well developed form of narcissism.
You find it at Zerohedge too.
Zerohedge hasn’t been right in 8 years. this guy probably hasn’t been right once in his life.
There’s some half-truths in it. But this:
Tells us nothing about how any of the other ’16 GOP contenders would have fared in the general election. A week before the election, almost all the polls had Hillary ahead, generally by a comfortable margin. It doesn’t tell us if Mitt could have won the GOP nomination. He chose not to test that proposition; so, that’s the first guess. The second guess, made by those that were polled a week before the election, was free of having seen a Romney campaign for the sixteen months before the ’16 election. Those polled can do no more than substitute what they recall of Romney from four years earlier and assume that it wouldn’t have altered Hillary’s campaign.
Left out of that imaginary general election is that many were disgusted with Hillary’s negative campaign that went hard on Trump’s boorishness around women.
What that poll does confirm, seen in other polls and anecdotally, is that a nominee better than Trump would have won more handily against Clinton and a nominee better than Clinton would have beat Trump. Those voting FOR Clinton and FOR Trump was far less than the votes each of them received. The size of the FOR voter pools for each of them can’t be known or if another nominee in either party would have done better on the combined “for and against” vote that the two received.
It’s difficult not to imagine that Trump would have received fewer “not Clinton” votes had Bernie been the nominee. OTOH, the rage among those truly all in with Hillary could easily have swung the election to Trump. My guess is that tea-bag rage if Trump hadn’t been the nominee and those voters responded by opting out of opting for Johnson would have been a wash with the “never-Trump” voters that would have returned to the GOP fold.
It wasn’t that Bernie lost because he couldn’t get black votes. It was that those votes were more locked in before the primary season began than the tea-bag or fundie blocs were locked in for one candidate. Cruz spent four years working both blocs, but against Trump and the others, Cruz couldn’t lay claim to either bloc. Both would likely have held for him if he were the nominee, but that failure in the primaries is telling. At a visceral level, Cruz’s “oh, yuck” factor is higher than Trump’s and that would have been magnified in a general election if he were the nominee.
The GOP has nothing to be proud of in their win. They exploited the worst of what beats in the hearts of humans. Campaign promises to deliver that worst to the country. Yet, something almost always beats nothing. A lesson that the DP refuses to learn.