What to do? What to do? This upcoming presidential election has me in a quandary. There are quite clear choices within our dominant two-party system. However, both choices pose some seemingly overwhelming problems.
Donald Trump
One candidate, Donald Trump, says he will gut the legal system as we have come to know it. All of this in an apparent need to get-even with those who have disagreed with his policies while he was president and those who have been trying to make him accountable for his actions as a businessman and as a president. He also wants to exonerate all who supported him in his attempts to override the last presidential election, keeping himself in office instead. The final result being to get rid of all of his political enemies and rule by fiat, a seeming end to democracy as we know it in this nation. His apparent goal is to change this nation into Corporation USA with him as CEO and all the tools of the presidency at his beck and call, like the divisions of that corporation, to be used to further his vision of a successful policy to make that corporation economically successful and dominant. What could possibly be worse?
Modern Democratic Party
In most situations that should be a no-brainer. But wait, we have underestimated the modern Democratic Party and its national leadership. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Democratic National Committee has bet the farm on becoming Republican Lite, relying on funding from big money rather than the support of the ordinary citizenry. In the process, they have turned their back on their primary constituency while expecting the continuing political support of that constituency at the polls, in a kind of blind obedience to the party. That betrayal has slowly eroded the base and made that base vulnerable to inroads by another leader who promises to attend to their needs and desires. There has been a genuine disenchantment with the current direction of the Democratic Party, while many continued to hope for a resurgence of the Democratic Party of the New Deal, "The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" as Paul Wellstone called it.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party continued its manipulative ways as good businessmen are wont to do. As a party, they put George Bush in office in the highly questionable 2000 election, leading to eight years of very questionable policies, tax cuts for the wealthy, wars, restrictive domestic policies, rampant corruption and eventually, a major financial debacle.
The 2008 Election
It was that financial debacle that affected nearly everyone, that put Barak Obama in office, in hopes of a return to more of the traditional, New Deal change, as FDR had done in response to a similar over-reach by Republican blind support of business with the 1929 Crash and the ensuing Depression. But people had forgotten about the seismic shift that had occurred within the Democratic Party leadership since the new millennium had begun, now willing to curry favor with the big money. So, the first move by Barak Obama was to put Wall Street and the big money leaders in charge of the economic recovery. That team bailed out banks and businesses and left the ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. The economy and Wall Street is restabilized and "the economy" appears to be healthy again, all on the backs of ordinary Americans. None of those responsible for that debacle suffered anything approaching disaster, much less punishment. Free-market capitalism was allowed to work out the details and the system continued on much as it had been before, and income inequality continued to grow. I might add that the larger income inequality grows, the less likely democracy can thrive since money begins to trump everything else. By the end of the Obama presidency the Congress had devolved into a body stuck in limbo, unable to act decisively while being so evenly split.
The 2016 Election
So now both parties had thrown in with big money, and the ordinary American voter had no real options and no longer had any real voice in the political process. This provided a constituency looking for a leader who might attend to them and restore their voice. This provides a real opportunity for someone to step up as a leader, to speak for them, or to simply exploit them.
Well, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but Bernie Sanders. Bernie saw that constituency as the people he had always spoken for, the ordinary Americans who relied on democracy to provide stability and justice for them. These were the folks who had been forgotten by both parties while those parties slavishly pursued the big money. Bernie, as anyone could guess, spoke their language and had instant appeal, especially to many disillusioned Democrats.
The national leaders of the Democratic Party assumed that no candidate could possibly succeed without the support of big-money and/or the attention of the national media. Well, to everyone's surprise, he became very popular and eventually had to be attended to by the national media due to his popular success.
It was then that the national leaders had to make a choice; do we allow Bernie to become the candidate as a "voice of the people" and possibly give us a different candidate who might threaten some of our corporate support for the Democratic Party, or do we double down on our big-money, corporate Democrat bet. This seemed important since in the run-up to the election, Hillary had spent much of her time and energy quite openly finding corporate support and funding.
We all know how they chose. They chose to sabotaged Bernie's candidacy, assuring Hillary Clinton's candidacy under the assumption that, no matter what, people would not vote for Donald Trump.
There were many faulty assumptions that the national democratic leadership made. First was that, once they eliminated Bernie, democratic voters would flock back to Hillary, the corporate candidate, even after they came to realize they would still have no voice. Secondly, they assumed that the corporate democrat label would neither bother ordinary voters, nor bring up latent animosity toward the leadership of big money as the source of their no longer mattering much in the national conversations. But the ordinary people knew that Wall Street was far removed from Main Street, where they lived. The third assumption was that the Republican Party was nearly moribund, leaving the field to them, by choosing what they supposed was no more than a clown, Donald Trump. And the faultiest of their assumptions was that the voiceless electorate would meekly support the Democratic candidate and would never respond to the siren calls of Donald Trump, the demagogic oligarch. Or that he would step into that void and give that leaderless constituency a voice and a focus for their anger and frustration.
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