The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin's gang. That is to save the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship. It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now. And take Evan Bayh with them.
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues -- in a way that reverses its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration. The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington."[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC. If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's pretended embrace of Bernie's opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility -- and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that "Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering wage withholding into the stock market did not help -- especially her hedge fund campaign contributors. Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let "socialism" be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, "The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy," November 11, 2016.
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