To those of you who are beginning to suspect that something is indeed rotten in the state of DemMark but are quite understandingly unwilling to let go of a lifelong belief in the Democratic Party as “the good guys”…the smart guys, the liberal guys, the “feeling” guys…I offer the following from Paul Street by way of Counterpunch.
I have given up trying to converse or even respond to the kneejerkers here…their minds are either already completely made up or they… and their so-called beliefs…may well themselves be made up out of whole digital cloth. I really don’t know which way that question goes on an individual basis, but either way they apparently will not consider the possibility that the Democratic Party is now simply the Tweedledee Left of the Deep State, cooperating in a gigantic scam on the U.S. electorate with the Tweedledum Right.
Paul Street argues a good case.
Read it and weep.
Better yet…read it and think!!!
Read on.
Rotten to the Heart: Authoritarian Chickens Roosting at Home by Paul Street
Yes, He’s Awful
Much of what liberals say about Donald Trump and the chilling political moment the Trump presidency represents is true enough.
Trump really is the arch-authoritarian malignant narcissist that liberals say he is. Trump thinks he deserves to rule the nation like an absolute monarch or some ridiculous Banana Republic dictator. He believes he’s above all the law, consistent with Louis XIV’s dictum L’etat, C’est Moi (“the state is me”). The notion that Trump can pardon himself from any crime really is the height of imperial arrogance.
Trump really does value nothing but the advancement of his own wealth and image. There is no person, no principle, no higher loyalty he is not willing to sacrifice on the altar of self.
Trump really is the almost perfect embodiment of venal malevolence that liberals say he is. The idiotic military parade Trump has scheduled for the next Veterans Day is an exercise in proto-fascistic, Mussolini-like imperial-presidential self-adulation.
This racist and sexist beast befouls the nation and world with his ghastly, eco-cidal presence. The sooner he draws his last undeserved breath, the better for all living things (or maybe not: Mike Pence could be worse).
The Authoritarian and Inauthentic Opposition
Fine, but why does this despicable, orange-tinted insult to common human decency occupy the White House? He holds the most powerful office in the world because the Democratic Party has long been and remains what the late liberal-left Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the Inauthentic Opposition. “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in early 2008, they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The corporatist Democrats would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”
Wolin called it. A nominal Democrat was elected president along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What followed under Barack Obama (as under his Democratic presidential predecessor Bill Clinton) – a different and possibly more dangerous kind of malignant narcissist– was the standard “elite” neoliberal manipulation of campaign populism and identity politics in service to the reigning big-money bankrollers and their global empire. Wall Street’s control of Washington and the related imperial agenda of the “Pentagon System” were advanced more effectively by the nation’s first Black president than they could have been by stiff and wealthy white Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney. The reigning U.S. system of corporate and imperial “inverted totalitarianism” (Wolin) was given a deadly, fake-democratic re-branding. The underlying “rightward drift” sharpened, fed by a widespread and easily Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal, as the Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular base.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did nothing to correct that problem. Quite the opposite. With a colossal campaign finance war-chest fed not just by the usual Wall Street and Silicon Valley suspects but also by many traditionally Republican big money donors who were repelled by Trump’s faux “populism,” the transparently corporate establishmentarian candidate Clinton could barely deign to pretend to be a progressive. She ran almost completely on the argument that Trump was too terrible and unqualified to be president. Making candidate character and qualities her sole selling point was a critical and historic mistake given the angry and anti-establishment mood of the electorate and her own epic unpopularity. So was calling Trump’s flyover county supporters a “basket of” racist and sexist “deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic “progressive”-neoliberal world view) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.
Authoritarianism? Single-Payer national health insurance had long been supported by most U.S.-Americans when Obama ascended to the White House. Who cared? Not the “radical socialist” Barack Obama. Like the Clintons before him, Obama coldly froze Single Payer advocates out of the health insurance policy debate. He worked with the leading drug and insurance corporations and their Wall Street backers to craft a richly corporatist “reform” that preserved those companies’ power to write their super-profits into the obscenely exaggerated cost of American medical care.
As our greatest intellectual Noam Chomsky noted two years ago, Obama “punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined.” The Obama administration repeatedly defended George W. Bush’s position on behalf of indefinite detention, maintaining that prisoners (US-Americans included) in the US global “war on [of] terror” were not entitled to habeas corpus or protection from torture or execution. Obama carried overseas assassination (by drone and Special Forces) – execution (even of U.S. citizens) without trial or even formal charge – to new levels. Regarding Obama’s drone assassination program, Chomsky wrote acidly about how “the [Obama] Justice Department explained that the constitutional guarantee of due process, tracing to Magna Carta, is now satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch alone. The constitutional lawyer in the White House agreed. King John (1199-1216) might have nodded with satisfaction.”
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential ticket partner, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), is currently a leading sponsor of the “Forever AUMF 2018” (SJRes 59) (Authority for the Use of Military Force). As the ACLU’s Renee Parsons explains, the measure would ” eliminate Congress’ sole, inviolate Constitutional authority `to declare war.'” It “would remove Congress from its statutory authority as it transfers `uninterrupted’ authority on `the use of all necessary and appropriate force’ to one individual.” That would garner another thumbs-up from King John.
Such examples are just tips of the richly bipartisan “deep state” iceberg of authoritarian class and imperial rule that lurks beneath the visible-state surface dramas of “our” so-called and oxymoronic “capitalist democracy.” (See my book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy for a more comprehensive account, just one of many studies here’s a recent one] that document the eclipse of anything like democracy in New Gilded Age America)
The Democrats: Corrupt, not Feckless
The Democrats could well have won the 2016 election by running Bernie Sanders. Bernie would have tapped popular anger from the center-left, advancing a policy agenda and anti-plutocratic sentiments consistent with longstanding majority-progressive public opinion in the U.S. But so what? The Democratic nomination process was rigged against Sanders for some very good ruling-class reasons. As William Kaufman told Barbara Ehrenreich on Facebook last year, “The Democrats aren’t feckless, inept, or stupid, unable to `learn’ what it takes to win. They are corrupt. They do not want to win with an authentically progressive program because it would threaten the economic interests of their main corporate donor base… The Democrats know exactly what they’re doing. They have a business model: sub-serving the interests of the corporate elite.”
The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party.
Among other things, Russiagate is the Inauthentic Opposition, following its business model, doing its job, working to cover its tracks by throwing the debacle of its corporatist politics down Orwell’s memory hole and attributing its self-made defeat to Russia’s allegedly powerful interference in our supposed democracy. Russiagate is meant to provide corporate Democrats cover not only for 2016 but also for 2018 and 2020. It advances a narrative that lets the Democrats continue nominating business-friendly neoliberal shills and imperialists who pretend to be progressive while they are owned by the nation’s homegrown oligarchs. This year’s crop of Democratic Congressional candidates is loaded with military and intelligence veterans, a reflection of the Democrats’ determination to run as the true party of empire.
—snip—
What Goes Around: “Trampling on the Helpless Abroad” Comes Home
A final matter concerns the problem of imperial chickens coming home to roost. Liberals don’t like to hear it, but the ugly, richly documented historical fact of the matter is that their party of binary and tribal choice has long joined Republicans in backing and indeed crafting a U.S. foreign policy that has imposed authoritarian regimes (and profoundly undemocratic interventions including invasions and occupations) the world over. The roster of authoritarian and often-mass murderous governments the U.S. military and CIA and allied transnational business interests have backed, sometimes even helped create, with richly bipartisan support, is long indeed.
Last fall, Illinois Green Party leader Mike Whitney ran some fascinating numbers on the 49 nation-states that the right-wing “human rights” organization Freedom House identified as “dictatorships” in 2016. Leaving aside Freedom House’s problematic inclusion of Russia, Cuba, and Iran on its list, the most remarkable thing about Whitney’s research was his finding that the U.S. offered military assistance to 76 percent of these governments. (The only exceptions were Belarus, China, Central African Republic, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria.). “Most politically aware people,” Whitney wrote:
“know of some of the more highly publicized instances examples of [U.S. support for foreign dictatorships], such as the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US military assistance provided to the beheading capital of the world, the misogynistic monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and the repressive military dictatorship now in power in Egypt… apologists for our nation’s imperialistic foreign policy…try to rationalize such support, arguing that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are exceptions to the rule. But my survey…demonstrates that our government’s support for Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not exceptions to the rule at all. They are the rule.”
The Pentagon and State Department data Whitney used came from Fiscal Year 2015. It dated from the next-to-last year of the Obama administration, for which so many liberals recall with misplaced nostalgia. Freedom House’s list should have included Honduras, ruled by a vicious right-wing government that Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped install in a June 2009 military coup.
The problem here isn’t just liberal hypocrisy and double standards. The deeper issue is that, as the great American iconoclast Mark Twain knew, you cannot maintain democracy at home while conducting an authoritarian empire abroad. During the United States’ blood-soaked invasion and occupation of the Philippines, Twain penned an imaginary history of the twentieth-century United States. “It was impossible,” Twain wrote, “to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
“Just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy has observed, “colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.” The nation’s first Red Scare, which crushed left and labor movements during and after World War One, drew heavily on the lessons and practices of colonial suppression in the Philippines and Cuba. As McCoy shows in his latest book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,the same basic process – internal U.S. repression informed and shaped by authoritarian and imperial practices abroad and justified by alleged external threats to the “homeland” – has recurred ever since. Today, the rise of an unprecedented global surveillance state overseen by the National Security Agency has cost the US the trust of many of its top global allies (under Bush43 and Obama44, not just under Trump45) while undermining civil liberties and democracy within as beyond the U.S.
“The fetters imposed on liberty at home,” James Madison wrote in 1799, “have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.” Those are wise words well worth revisiting amidst the current endless Russiagate madness, calculated among other things to tell us that the FBI, the CIA, and the rest of the nation’s vast and ever more ubiquitous intelligence and surveillance state are on our side.
Not much more to say.
Is real progressivism practical?
It is if the ongoing foul results of the leftiness/rightiness scam finally wakes up the U.S. electorate…especially those who have so far refrained from voting. And…if a politician with the equivalent talent and vision of an FDR successfully rises to power in the Democratic Party.
Let us pray.
Or be preyed upon!!!
AG
When I read query letters for a literary agent, every week I’d see at least one version of a book–sometimes fiction, sometimes non–in which the Outrageous Twist was that Big Insurance Company (sometimes Big Hospital) CARE MORE ABOUT MAKING MONEY THAN HEALING THE SICK!
What do you say to that, Hippocrates?!!? They’re in bed with the Capitalism! SHOCK! AMAZEMENT! I AM BLOWING YOUR MIND!
The problem wasn’t merely the juvenile and overweening self-satisfaction in identifying a problem of which everyone else was already aware (like Preznit Dollhands crowing about previously-undiscovered complexity in … everything), the problem was that clinging so frantically to an obvious and unsophisticated prognosis seemed to actually prevent the writers from considering any solution other than ‘but they’re BAD!’
Well, that’s an obviously valid observation, but why would you think it relevant here, of all places?
Oh, right.
You oversimplify.
There is…or at least there was well within living memory…a balance in the U.S. between profit-making/profit taking and a system that functioned well for its people. That balance still exists in many nations of Europe, especially Western Europe and even more especially, in Northwestern Europe. I have traveled widely…not as a pampered tourist, but as a not-particularly-honored-in-a-financal-mner performer of people’s music…throughout the world, and in he process I have gotten a very good taste of the relative well-being of the places in which I have played. I see this balance almost nowhere else. Cuba had it despite the efforts of the U.S., and so did Argentina and Chile. Also Japan. Very few other areas of the world have had that balance, in my own experience.
No matter how you define it in a technical, governmental sense, that “balance” is called Democratic Socialism. A system which works well for its people while neither stymying the growth of profitable businesses nor being run totally by and for the rich. It is a delicate balance. The U.S. had a taste of it from FDR’s Great Depression correction right on through to the assassination years, but since that time the balance has steadily shifted toward oligarchy.
We need another correction, and it is quite plain that we are not getting…nor are we going to get… that correction from the Democratic Party as it now stands. We are only going to get more of the same…a faux leftiness routine on the Clinton/Obama level.
You are who you work for, and the the Democratic Party is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the same kinds of corporate interests that own the Republican Party.
So it goes.
Solutions?
I have only one.
Tell the truth about what is happening.
Which is what I am doing here.
You think that this ongoing calcification of Democratic progressivism is not happening after the way Bernie Sanders was treated in the primaries? “WTFU” is not a strong enough exclamation!!! He was defeated by the same monied interests that own the Republican Party. End of story, except for the…unexpected by those monied interests and the people who swallowed the neocentrist lines of both the Democratic and Republican parties…except for the Trump phenomenon. Criminal outlier that he is, he out-lied them.
And now both sides of the largely non-existent fence between the DemRats and the RatPubs (and their wholly owned media as well) have been…failingly, for the most part…howling for his downfall.
So that goes as well.
You think that I am some sort of wild-eyed, crazed revolutionary?
I am not.
I just want checks and balances.
Why?
So we can all go back to pursuing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” instead of running around in circles swatting at media-produced fear memes.
Now?
The only “checks” and “balances” that remain in place and in positions of real power are those that exist in the financial statements…themselves largely falsified and covered up…of the .01%.
You support the gradualism…the so-called “pragmatism”…of the current Democratic Party?
Fine.
Feel free.
It is just more “gradual” calcification of a once fairly loose and free-swinging system.
Enjoy.
Rigor mortis is only a few steps away now, with the Trumpists poised to land the killing blow.
Watch.
And if they are actually defeated?
Great.
Then we have a new prognosis.
A kinder, gentler, more gradual strangulation by the .01%
Once again..Scylla and Charybdis.
I choose neither.
Ulysses was wrong.
There is always another course to follow.
Get some new chart-makers.
Later…
AG
Reactionary rhetoric from a Ron Paul evangelist.
It just happens that Arthur’s ultra-cynical philosophy here serves to empower Trump and rush along his agenda.
I am shocked, shocked to find that radical right-wing bullshit is going on in here.
The knife cuts both ways.
We will…soon enough…see which way strikes a deathblow.
Won’t we.
AG
You got nothing.
link
link
This has been your occasional reminder that
P.S. Believe it or [who gives a shit?]: I had actually made the decision to let this latest shit of yours sit here unmolested on the right wing, where it belongs, as long as it also continued to molder unrecommended and without comment, as it deserved. So you can blame oui for instigating this latest episode of accountability.
I see Arthur, like Oui, has never heard of the Fair Use Doctrine (and doubtless would dismiss it with a sneer if he had).
. . . punchdrunk like him, we could just go there and read it ourselves!
To read (ok, glance at the length of) ag’s copyright violating here, we must have internet access. With internet access, we could just read anything we wanted to at Counterpunch.
I guess it must be the value-added of the unique insights in his own special curation of his unfair use that ag imagines/pretends to be his, erm, “contribution” here.
You and your little band of neocentrist kvetchers should actually try reading Counterpunch, oaguabonita. You might learn something, I know you don’t read it…it’s like silver to werewolves for you folks…nor do you even want to learn anything outside of your little neocentrist shoebox.
But I do keep trying…
Enjoy the rest of your day.
Later…
AG
As predicted. Nothing but a dismissive sneer and a bit of preening posturing. Because at bottom that’s all he’s got.
Repetitive, nasty lectures that we should swallow all of the most outlandish claptrap Counterpunch dishes out are attempts to dominate and humiliate. It’s propagandistic performance art that Trump would admire, and it’s absolutely meant to support Trump’s agenda.
Arthur Gilroy opposes enforcements of strong Federal civil rights laws. He supports voter ID laws. He believes that unemployment insurance and other social welfare programs sap initiative. He believes that things were better for African-Americans under Jim Crow laws. He’s defended these and other rotten positions many times.
We haven’t seen AG articulate support for policies which increase bargaining power of working people, equal rights for women, or other parts of the modern progressive agenda.
That’s unsurprising. He’s an unrepentant Ron Paul supporter. He’s an enemy of our movement.
Or of course, you and your allies’ own argument ricocheting back in true “What goes around comes around” fashion:
Sauce for the goose is always sauce for the gander.
Enjoy your meal.
AG
Thanks for confirming that you hold all the repellent policy positions I named.
Tell us again how Cliven Bundy was “fucking right”.
Tell us again how Cliven Bundy was “fucking wrong!!!”
AG
Atta boy. Knew you had it in you.
Tell us more.
. . . the origin story of “Counterpunchdrunk” (wherein I provided evidence from direct personal experience that Counterpunch lacks both credibility and journalistic ethics).
Much like conveniently “forgetting” that — and how — Clinton very precisely and specifically (and accurately!) defined “deplorables” as “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it“, in order to lie that she ‘impli[ed] that working class whites are “deplorables”‘.
How perfectly you of you! Really, hard to imagine how you could have illustrated any better what’s so very wrong with you and why you’re persona non grata with zero credibility here.
*or pretending to
How perfectly “you” of all of us.
God bless.
We shall see which of us are left standing, soon enough.
Trump’s second act approaches somewhere around November.
Can your essentially Uniparty, neocentrist hustle beat him?
I sincerely hope so.
But if so, then the worm will only have turned halfway. And backwards at that.
Back to the policies of the Bill Clinton/Bush II/Obama years.
Then what?
More PermaWar?
More globalist selling off of the working classes to other working classes that cost less?
If that’s a win, it is a very small one.
Too small to save humanity.
See you at the finish line.
Have a nice race.
AG
You’re working quite earnestly and energetically to enable Trump.
Spare us these tiresome lies this evening, please.