On Booman’s recent cri de cour “Sometimes Thing Break and They Don’t Get Fixed,” poster das monde wrote a comment that was not entirely in Booman’s post’s corner. There was an immediate neocentrist/DNC-style Democratic Party attack from a couple of posters. It pissed me off, and I wrote a rebuttal. Go there to see it in context, because otherwise the “clientelism” references will not be clear.
[<http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2018/4/19/1034/77674>]
Thank you.
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From Wikipedia:
Clientelism is the exchange of goods and services for political support, often involving an implicit or explicit quid-pro-quo.[1] Clientelism involves an asymmetric relationship between groups of political actors described as patrons, brokers, and clients. Richard Graham has defined clientelism as a set of actions based on the principle take there, give here, with the practice allowing both clients and patrons to gain advantage from the other’s support. Moreover, clientelism is typified by “exchange systems where voters trade political support for various outputs of the public decision-making process”
Do you really think that the Democratic Party doesn’t work on similar principles?
It’s just representing different clients…and rewarding them in different ways…than does the Republican Party.
Are the Democratic “clients” more in need of help that those of the Republican Party? I don’t know. Are the victims of the offshoring of U.S. industry (sometimes referred to as “deplorables,” at the least the white ones have been called that by HRC and her supporters) in less need of some “quid pro quo” from the people that they elect than are the white, educated middle class and minorities that are the primary “clients” of the Democratic Party?
Read on.
Booman writes in his post regarding the “brutal test[s] and assault[s]” that our government has endured over the last 20+ years or thereabouts:
…the effort to impeach Bill Clinton and following on with a series of almost ridiculous disasters that included the botched and stolen election of 2000, the 9/11 attacks, the decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, the complete meltdown of the housing market and ensuing global recession, and most recently the catastrophic election of Donald Trump with the connivance and assistance of Vladimir Putin.
With the possible exception of the first and last actions and 9/11, the Democratic Party was on board with every part of that list. And…I say possible exceptions because I am not totally convinced that the Dem leadership was not in on those games to some degree as well…certainly not the surrender of the stolen elections of 2000 + 2004 and the various and sundry wars, overt and covert.
Both parties have served their “clients” very badly since the assassination years…I often refer to those years as “the Long Coup”…as far as I can see. The only changes have been that now the majority of residents of the U.S. are both less sure of their position in the world…especially economically…and are simultaneously being misinformed/disinformed by the media in a much more efficient manner.
Booman’s post…and chetsky’s/seabe’s kneejerk reactions to what das monde wrote…are partisan responses. That’s understandable, because the are obviously all loyal Democrats.
It is also unforgivable considering the role that the Democratic Party (in its current neoliberal/neocentrist robes) has played in this history.
Sorry, Charlie…AG don’t play that game. And neither do a rapidly increasing number of others.
If…as looks quite likely…the Democratic Party (DNC version thereof, of course) does not reform itself into a more effectively FDR-like stance in the next year or two, then this “Things Break and They Don’t Get Fixed” system of which Booman speaks will simply soldier on into further decay and eventual collapse.
Blaming messengers like das monde and myself (let alone Bernie Sanders and his supporters) won’t cut it.
Not anymore it won’t.
The worm is about to turn, one way or another.
And no matter which it turns…it’s a worm with teeth!!!
Whether it bites the enemies of real democracy or the enemies of this country’s current UniParty system, things are still blowing up a storm. And yes, apparently there are a lot of people who do need a weatherman or two to tell them which way the wind is blowing.
Nothing new there, I guess.
And so it goes.
Later…
AG
