(In a comment on my most recent post [The War At Booman Tribune Between the Kneejerk Neocentrists and the Thinkers.], TarheelDem asked the following question. “Who were the original Centrists that the Neo-Centrists are the “new” of? And who are the non-kneejerk neocentrists?” He followed it up with this statement. “I don’t think that taxonomy works at Booman Tribune. Everybody seems pretty Third Estate types to me.” I answered; it grew, and it is now the standalone post below.)
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Tarheel…
The neocentrists are those Republicans and Democrats that have (originally privately but now quite publicly, to use HRC’s terms) allied with each other to prevent change from outside of the Deep State box. They have been under some sort of effective attack since at least the Perot candidacy. Now? Last year? Sanders and Trump attacked them more effectively then ever before, from both sides of the political spectrum. This was a first. The success of this set of attacks was economically-driven. More and more U.S. citizens have begun to suffer economically than at any time since the Great Depression, and they are beginning to see that both parties are owned and controlled by an oligarchical .01%, the greed of which now has no legal bounds.
The response of the neocentrists to Trump’s win…a win caused largely, in my opinion, by the success of the Sanders candidacy in stripping the leftiness costume off of Hillary Clinton and revealing the Democratic Party as it now stands to be nothing but another vessel for the Deep State…was to double down in opposition against the new threat to its decades-long hegemony that the Trump right represents. Thus the unprecedented media war against him from almost all sides of the political media. WAPO, the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Time and Newsweek magazines, the Associated Press, all major News TV purveyors except Fox, the front page of Google News? All unanimously agreeing that Trump must be destroyed and cooperating with each other and the intelligence services to try to do so?
Absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history.
Read on for more.
“Neocentrism” isn’t really new, Tarheel. It successfully fixed every threat to its existence from the ’70s on by using the media to demonize every effectively dissenting, non-centrist politician from George McGovern and George Wallace right on through Ross Perot, Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders. Assassination by media. Non-personing. So much neater and safer than a bullet to the head, and just as effective. All this time it managed to preserve the fiction that the Democratic and Republican parties truly “opposed” each other. They did so only in terms of who got the lion’s share of the winnings. WWE writ large. One party the villain, the other the good guy. And then…when that setup begins to lose public interest…they switch.
Like dat.
But this tactic failed with Trump, and in doing so…helped by Trump, who quite clearly took the cover off of the magician’s table from the very beginning of his campaign with the story of how he could pretty much force the Clintons to come to his daughter’s wedding because he had given them lots of money…it had to further publicize what had really been going on by publicly allying both parties and their media in opposition to Trump.
U.S. politics will never be the same again. The UniParty secret is now out; the evil genie has finally escaped its bottle.
Watch.
The next national election? 2018? If the Dems do not field candidates who are clearly and effectively left-wing, they will get their asses thoroughly kicked. Previously reliable Dem segments of the population will either stay home in even greater numbers than they did in 2016 or vote for Republicans. If that happens (provided the whole political system doesn’t break down before that, of course), the Dems are done. It will be too late to reorganize for 2020 and become an FDR-level, semi-socialist party.
And the whole electoral fix system will disintegrate as a result.
Watch.
AG
P.S. You also seem to be asking about who the neocentrists might be here on Booman Trib.
They include anyone who supports in any way the continuing move to the right of the Democratic Party, including those who seem to be applauding the latest Schumer/Pelosi-led, faux-leftiness rebrand. It’s just the same centrist Coca Cola in another can. Still poison. Bet on it.
Some are just crafty politicians…crafty in the old ways, blind to the new. They are living in the past. The others? The downraters, the two-sentencers, the ones who continue to believe that the Democratic party is anything at present other than the left arm…the weaker arm as well…of the Deep State?
Them.
Them.
Clomp, clomp, clomp.
Bet on it.