Look no further:
A wonderful, slightly free-form article from Counterpunch’s Jeffery St. Clair.
Roaming Charges: When the Pterodactyls Came Home to Roost
A few samples to whet your appetite:
They have guilty consciences, they’re afraid – and fear and guilty consciences have a good savor in the nostrils of the gods. Yes, the gods take pleasure in such poor souls. Would you oust them from the favor of the gods? What, moreover, could you give them in exchange? Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom – ah, the soul-destroying boredom – of long days of mild content.
— from “The Flies,” by Jean-Paul Sartre
No one inside the Clinton machine saw it coming. They were whacked from behind, while sitting at the bar, casually ordering cocktails to celebrate their predestined triumph, as clueless of their fate as Luca Brasi in The Godfather.
A half-million computer simulations generated by Robby Mook assured them that their victory was foretold, a sure thing. They had the press. They had Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They had the Council on Foreign Relations, Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger. They had women. They had blacks, Hispanics and Asians. They owned the East Coast, the West Coast and the Great Lakes. Even those flinty Cuban exiles would help them take Florida this time.
You can almost hear the smug snickering oozing through the Podesta emails. Fuck every place else. We don’t need them. Those Jurassic States with their deplorable constituents-their Sunday schools and pick-ups, their deer hunts and bingo parlors-deserved what they were going to get (which, of course, wasn’t going to be much different than what they’d been getting since the rise of the neoliberals in the late 70s: nothing but condescension). This one was in the bag.
Alas, there was a bug in their program, call it the Hubris Virus, that blinded them to the sands eroding beneath the hulking edifice of their own conceit. Mook’s app couldn’t measure human emotion. Their software couldn’t calibrate the visceral mood of the electorate, which any amateur sociologist could detect in almost every bar in America.
One of the trademarks of neoliberalism is that the working poor are to be blamed for their own desperate condition, their failure to adapt to the shock therapy foisted upon them, their refusal to embrace the austere strictures of the new modernity.
This election was the chance for the America preterite, the left behind and demeaned, to strike back at one of their most vulnerable and pious oppressors. From Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, they did so with a vengeance.
The Clinton campaign, like Luca Brasi, now sleeps with the fishes, but that virus persists, gnawing away at the brainstem of the vanquished Clinton team and the leaders of the Democratic Party. The same self-righteous surrogates who assured nervous liberals of the mathematical inevitability of Hillary’s election have now been deployed to rationalize her inexplicable defeat.
Each day a new scapegoat emerges: James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Anthony Weiner, rigged voting machines, Fox News, fake stories on Facebook, Bernie Bros, even Bernie Sanders himself, the man who debased himself by campaigning his ass off for
bernie-the-sandernistas-cover-344×550-e1477943826411a candidate who ridiculed him behind his back and then blamed him for her own predictable demise. Oh, and if it’s Friday, it must be Susan Sarandon’s fault for being one of the few “celebrities” with a conscience and the courage to articulate it. See the online ravings about her by Kurt Eichenwald, Paul Krugman and Joy Reid.In Greek tragedy, hubris is a kind of all-consuming arrogance that blinds characters to the limits of their own power and the ruthlessness of their own deeds, as in the plays of Sophocles. Usually, the hero over-reaches, ignores oracular warnings, commits a grievous crime, falls from grace and then awakens, often near the point of death, to his or her own failures as a human being. Thus the hero and the audience experience a catharsis, a purification through understanding.
But Aristotle, who was obsessed with the notion of hubris, described another variety of this disorder of the power elites, a kind of sadistic pleasure derived from the suffering of others. Here’s Aristotle writing in his Treatise on Rhetoric: “Hubris consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim simply for the pleasure of it. Retaliation is not hubris, but revenge. Young men and the rich are hubristic because they think they are better than other people.”
The Clintons and their acolytes are afflicted by both species of hubris. They are the power-hungry agents of their own downfall, yet shame the victims of their own inhumane policies, from the gutting of welfare to racist crime policies to the obliteration of Libya. They show no remorse, engage in no self-circumspection, admit no culpability for their own actions and deflect the blame for all failures on others. In this sense, they are beyond redemption or purification and richly deserve their fate. Live by the polls, die at the polls.
But the country at large is about to pay a heavy price for the Clintonian tragedy. The malign incompetence of this vain neoliberal coterie has unleashed a chilling and lethal force on the Republic: intolerant, self-righteous, bigoted and violent. There’s no way to diminish the threat that Trump poses to the most vulnerable among us. These aren’t chickens coming home to roost, but ravenous pterodactyls, emerging from a cthonic darkness, with maximum havoc on their minds.
We are, however, blessed that the Democratic Party, always little more than a vaporous sanctuary for the American underclass, no longer exists as an oppositional force. Their frail Maginot Line has been breached, routed and trampled. Like the French Resistance, we are now responsible for our own collective defense.
Let us unite in a new “refus absurd.”
—snip—
+ Last week, the Democrats were calling Trump the American Hitler. This week, new Senate Minority leader, Chuck Schumer, Wall Street’s new favorite on the Hill, says he may be willing to work with Trump to end the “Washington stalemate.” Who will break the news to Rachel Maddow?
—snip—
+ The International Energy Agency has just issued a report saying that the Paris Climate Accord didn’t go far enough to reverse or even halt climate change and that even those targets would be impossible for most, if not all, signatories to the treaty to meet. Doomed under Obama, doomed under Trump. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
By the way, 2016 will be the hottest year on record, after the hottest year on record, after the hottest year on record. Over to you, Myron Ebell.
+ I get a lot of groans for talking this way, especially at the kitchen table here in Oregon. Why are you always so depressing? That’s no way to motivate people! But regardless of how we speak about it, climate change is beyond control now. The time to act was 50 years ago. What some recent evidence of the way things are heading? Temperatures at the North Pole this week are 36 degrees higher than normal. The living planet will survive, though our species, speaking of hubris, likely won’t in the long term. Life on earth survived the Permian Extinction, when more than 98 percent of the species on the planet were wiped out almost overnight geologically speaking. From that extinction new forms of life emerged, evolving in wild new directions. See Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, which might be considered an uplifting book if your timeline is expansive enough.
—snip—
+ The DNC’s Record of losses Under Obama / Kaine / Wasserman Schultz: 1 Presidency,
11 Senate seats, 60 House seats, 14 governorships, 900 state legislative seats.Try, try, try again. Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry. (I mean that in both senses of the word.)
—snip—
+ Lena Dunham breaks down the election: “It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up at the polls for him, too.”
If only Hillary had used Ms. Dunham more aggressively on the campaign trail … she might have lost California, too.
—snip/snap—
Very mark Twainesque…read on.
Later…
AG
Too busy laughing until you almost cry?
Yeah.
Me too.
From Luca Brasi to Lena Dunham in several easy steps.
Priceless!!!
AG
thanks AG.
that’s good rant, but all of his elegant literary and historic and scientific references are just too much.
“From Luca Brasi to Lena Dunham in several easy steps.”
via Aristotle and Stephen Jay Gould, is to me a journey in “look how smart I am” that adds little to his basic argument. I can’t take that stuff even though I think he’s right about hubris and the failure of identity politics.
He’s not speaking to Trump voters or even to most Hillary voters, but to the liberal elite smarty-pants. Do have to wonder how many of them are familiar with Gould’s work much less have bothered to read it. Not being among the “liberal elite smarty-pants” coterie, I appreciate any positive reference to Stephen Jay Gould, a first rate scientist, researcher, thinker, and a pretty good writer as well.
Gould was a wonderful writer. I had the privilege to hear him speak in Portland once; six months later, he was dead of cancer. As a popularizer of science, he had no equal. Richard Dawkins can be as erudite as Gould was, but seems to be unable to resist the temptation to apply sneering Oxford debate society tactics to all human interactions.
That’s kinda like what the controllers of his day said to Mark Twain.
He outlasted them all.
How?
Why?
Because he was correct.
That’s why.
So is St. Clair.
Bet on it.
AG
While you far exceeded fair use standards, there are more goodies in the article.
Unfortunately, must note that an erroneous claim presented as fact (and one that couldn’t be easier to fact check) always cast doubts on the other facts and claims of a writer. This is incorrect:
Bernie did vote in lockstep with the majority of Democrats in the House in opposition to to the Iraq War Resolution. Obama didn’t send the Libya bombing proposal to Congress; so, Sanders couldn’t have voted for it even if he were so inclined to do so.
This is a fun observation:
Disagree with his opinion of Hanks’ acting chops but otherwise his take is apt.
Exceeded fair use standards?
When it’s that good…ah jes’ cain’t he’p mahself!!!
Besides…if they wanted to enforce “fair use” standards the Counterpunchers wouldn’t put their stuff up every day on a site that takes no outside advertising. What they want is clicks!!!
AG
Even if Counterpunch wanted to enforce it, they can’t afford to do so.
I know it’s tempting when something is very good, but for me, it’s question of respecting the source and writer. Pull out a few teasers and give them the clicks. Although I recognize that clicking and reading is only a practiced by a few (unless it’s porn, etc.).
Since this is a Counterpunch thread…
The Democrats haven’t learned anything from losing the election. They continue to lie to the American people and treat us like idiots.
Dave Lindorff: Obama’s Last Big Con
I must say I have no idea of what goes through Obama’s head when he says such obvious lies.
Sound like something his PR shop came up with him to say when the question was asked. Difficult to believe a con-law teacher wouldn’t know that it was false, but that sort of ignorance would make it easier for an actor to hit his marks when delivering the line. So, he’s either better actor than he claims to be or not half as well informed as his supporters think he is.
He’s a world class liar.
Probably comes with the job and a necessary skill to get the job in the first place.
Didn’t the better skilled liar win the nominations in both parties this year? How many general election voters believed the lies of their preferred candidate? Hell, Trumpsters had to convince themselves that Trump is a man of the people and not just another crooked rich guy looking out for his own. If they could believe that, no snake oil they wouldn’t buy.
Well yes, it is politics after all.
But we don’t have to accept it. And a small number didn’t in this past election. Much to the wailing and gnashing of teeth of one of the two big cults on offer.
There is an obvious alternative, isn’t there? Perhaps Barack Obama sincerely believes that Snowden ought to appear in court and go through a criminal trial before a pardon should be considered. (Yes, I do realize that this does not deal with your correct statement about the constitutional limits on a president’s pardon power.) Maybe President Obama even believes that Snowden’s actions were wrong and deserving of criminal penalties. The fact is, I don’t know Obama’s present thoughts about Snowden, nor, I suggest, do you.
By the way, I know plenty of self-identified Democrats who are going through lots of introspection. In my discussions with such folks–and I ought to add that I’m a registered Green but do sometimes vote for Democrats, including, earlier this month, for Hillary Clinton–I never felt they were lying to me.
I realize that by “the Democrats” you mean something other than self-identified Democratic voters. But perhaps you ought to specify just who you do mean, as you’re painting with an awfully broad brush.
I count 18 days since the election. The Clintons are finis as a political force; Obama follows in their footsteps to political irrelevancy to the extent he follows the same path.
Flogging a dead donkey does not bring it back to life. Nor is it twisting the tail of a donkey to write cliches that have been created by urban lefty and liberal penitentes who have been blind to the situation in “flyover country” for decades and have participated in the same contempt that they now condemn.
It was not a popular movement. It was not a populist movement. It was a reactive movement to a lot of what has happened over 50 years and not just to neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics is at the root of the proscriptions of the incoming government to fix it; do not forget that.
Hillary Clinton did fail for the reason that she failed in 2008; the hubris of underestimating her opponent and thinking that character assassination would put him away (no matter how close to true the half-truths were). Her campaign staff did run her campaign as badly as did Mark Penn in 2008, leading one to conclude that the candidate was the one with the poor judgement.
Bernie Sanders suffered only from starting too late to complete the deal. Whether he could move from primary level numbers to winning general election numbers is something we will never know. Whether he could have captured the states that Clinton lost also is something we will never know. It is time to give this a rest, confess that the Democratic brand is gone, the Democratic establishment has been discredited as a group of insiders working for the interests of insiders, and the Democratic organization has shrunk even in the states where Clinton won the electoral votes. We also know that the establishment still is resistant to change, and that bodes ill for the future.
The country once again is suffering under the delusion that its problems will be solved without a left wing participating with power in politics. The line to the current state of American weakness runs along this delusion, and so does the growth of fascist institutions and power that now will be in the hands of some of the most craven characters ever to hold power all at once in the US. Putting together all of the worst case labels comes up with “sectarian kakistocratic kleptocracy” run by people who love summary killings and the use of torture and are quite willing to use those practices at the service of the hedge funds, ecological destroyers, and sweatshop employers. This is what this populist revolution will get because there is not institutional opposition strong enough to stop it in the legislative, executive, and judidial processes of the US government. Given what I see since the election, I would not depend on BooMan’s optimistic reading of the splits in the party slowing down the momentum soon. Nor do I see the 2018 elections as a reversing the actions of a rapidly normalizing regime.
And there still are 2 million more in opposition to this direction than there are in support of this direction.
For all the wringing of hands about “liberal urban areas” not understanding the white working class, there is a substantial part of the folks in liberal urban areas that do understand the white working class better than you know. A part of their reaction is that the realities of white working class life are why they went to college, changed their attitudes, became more inclusive, and adopted liberal and even left politics.
What is more true is that there are few left behind in rural, small town, and urban white working class (the portion of the working class who think their problems are exclusive to white people) who understand any of the things about urban life they rail against and are propagandized about on the radio and TV. They do not understand why racial discrimination does not help society. They do not understand how the “free enterprise” system actually works to screw them. They do not understand what the actual issue of control is in the abortion debate. They do not understand about the complexity of sexual identities. They do not understand other people’s experiences are different from their own attempting-to-conform experiences guided by narrow standards enforced by a small insular community. They feel abandoned by their youth who go off to liberal urban areas to escape the narrow definition of human sociality. They feel ashamed that they couldn’t leave too and then a pride of place that they did not. And they blame the government for what primarily were the actions of private corporations who successfully bought off the government to feather the corporate executives nests.
The current tendency of the media and the left after the election is to romanticize the nobility of what are some pretty deluded but well-meaning people and a small number of really mean jerkwads who have their own way of stylin’.
We delude ourselves if we think there was some way to avoid this backlash to a two-term black President who was hamstrung by the opposition party and about 40% of his own party. It will take the story of the inside dealings during the past eight years to determine to what extent Obama brought much of this on himself and to what extent he did as good as could be done with such animosity and opposition.
Give Clinton her due; she did rally her base and more. The geographic location of her base is the problem. Pretending that acres are people, while baked into the Constitution by plantation owners and farm states, does depart dramatically from the well-taught notions of the US as a democracy with one-man-one-vote principles. This was fundamentally a minority rebellion in a majority of states, where states rights is the battle cry. So when do the blue states argue that states right allow them to do single-payer insurance, exceed the pace on moving away from fossil fuels to renewables, defending women’s rights to control their bodies, protecting equal justice for all under a rule of law, and opting out of national moves to total surveillance and militarized policing? California? New York? Illinois? Virginia? Minnesota?
Or are the termites already in your foundations too? Show us how to treat the white working class and turn them leftward. Please do.
Tarheel…
If i could rate this an 8, I would.
Thank you.
AG
If there is some way that the two countries with which we are left after this election could reconcile their differences in time to avoid a total breakdown of the system under the forces that have now got their hands on just about all the levers of power, I cannot see it. Neither can I either predict nor offer any advice on how to continue.
Secession might be a way to go if the several segments of the blue U.S. were more contiguous geographically, but split up as they are it simply wouldn’t work. Reforming the Democratic Party while continuing a “loyal opposition” stance is probably a lost cause as well. Too much corporate money is entrenched in the two party system to allow its ongoing “two parties, one fix” tactic to be stopped. At least superficially Trump’s campaign and win was a repudiation of that fix idea, but the fixers are already busily at work co-opting his “revolution,” apparently with his own cooperation. The Sec. Treasury choices Trump has floated say all one needs to know about that subject, as does the “miraculous” stock market boom triggered by his win.
Third party?
Probably too slow.
Thus too late.
If 2018 doesn’t provide a massive backlash to the Trump win, it’s over.
The only (truly outside) chance to reform the Democratic Party lies with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as far as I can see, and the continued presence of old-line DemRats like Chuck Schumer…the Senator from AIPAC, who will most assuredly be allied with the pro-Israel Trump brigade in the back rooms where the deals get done…and Diane Feinstein will at the very least provide a gravitational-level pullback from any truly progressive forward motion that a Warren/Sanders wing might try to effect. The mass media are already doing their mea culpa thing and will essentially back the administration en masse just as they have every other administration since at least the Nixon years. Always remember the Judith Miller fiasco if you have any doubts on that point.
So…I don’t know what to do or say other than hunker down and await the coming bad news. It is quite possible that…through regal hubris if for no other reason…the King and his Roy Cohn-influenced courtiers/advisors will turn this win into a worldwide, Kardashian ass-sized (
T)rump joke in less than a year.Other than that?
So it goes.
Later…
AG
In case you are so culturally isolated…not necessariy a bad thing given the disastrous collapse of the U.S. culture over the past 50 years or so, but certainly an obstacle to understanding what has happened…I present you with an image to ponder while you reference my above “Kardashian” comment:
Both the Kardashian and (
T)rump dynasties are entirely the product of what we laughingly call “reality TV”…the real fake news. I have no doubt whatsoever that if it was possible to have a totally objective survey of the viewing/culture-consuming habits of all of the U.S. citizens who voted in this election, the percentage of voters who consumed massive amounts of fake reality like the Kardashian/(T)rump nexus would be the same as the percentage of voters who voted for (T)rump.After all…even Trump buys into that shit, although not quite so…inflationarily.
Prolly cuz’ his hands are too small to grab anything other than pussy cats.
Bet on it.
AG
AG–apropos your musings about secession, I do believe the Civil War answered that. But where people are wrong is thinking that the Civil War ever ended. We’ve all heard that line from Clausewitz about war being politics conducted by other means; well, the modern GOP, the erstwhile Party of Lincoln, has inverted Clausewitz and turned American politics into the Civil War conducted by other means. And this time they mean to win it.
The Civil War answered only one question….that the (self-identified) states of North wanted to maintain the union and were more powerful militarily than the (self-identified) states of the South during the time frame that said conflict arose and was resolved.
What we have now is an entirely different situation on so many levels that I do not want to waste my time enumerating them to you. You go figure it out, if you wish. One thing I will say is that it is a moot point whether the so-called “red” states really want to continue to be allied with the blues states. If such a thing was put to majority opinion instead of (so-called) “law,” I am not sure which way it would go.
Mutual secession.
We saw the U.S.S.R fall apart in the early ’90s…not so far away in time when you consider that we still have major political powers who were in positions of power then.
“Back in the U.S.S.R.” sang the Beatles.
Maybe it’s our turn.
Watch.
The societal, economic and cultural contradictions rampant in this current union are pointing in that direction.
We shall see…
AG
‘And there still are 2 million more in opposition to this direction than there are in support of this direction.’
I belong more of the-cup-is-half-empty bunch:
Unfortunately ONLY about 2 million voters oppose this direction—and if that’s not bad enough, they’re huddled together in places where their votes are meaningless owing to the Electoral College system. The Democratic Party might be incorrigible. You tell me.
It would be interesting to read what this blog’s severest critics of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama make of what Booman has suggested as ways forward for the Democratic Party.