The Chris Moeller Archives

As the campaign ends

The dirty work of politics and the media happen when no one is looking. Unpopular studies and required disclosures get dumped on Fridays so that they can be swallowed by the weekend. The news cycle turns on a dime when too much thinking becomes required. The Bernie Sanders campaign received almost no media coverage in this past week's run up to the South Carolina primary. It was a return to the near-blackout that occurred throughout 2015. And the results are the results. The mad Socialist was flying too close to the sun.

His race against Hillary Clinton was already being treated as if it was over this week even though the delegate count was dead even. Meanwhile, the Republican race is still being treated as a three-man race, even though Donald Trump has 81 delegates to Cruz and Rubio's 17 a piece. Now, after South Carolina, Clinton leads Sanders by 25 delegates, though that's still not many when you consider there are more than 200 delegates in play this coming Tuesday alone. Have the cards been stacked against Sanders from the beginning? Of course. But members of the news media betray their consumers when they refuse to spend time talking about the method in which votes are actually counted. They obsess, instead, over the "momentum" of the candidates, simultaneously never acknowledging that, as the media, they are the "momentum."

They have been looking for the very first excuse to write Sanders' presidential obituary because Clinton-- again-- is the candidate of the political establishment. Meanwhile, Cruz and Rubio are getting their heads handed to them by the rebel Trump, and we're still being fed a narrative of a "three man race."

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We have been profoundly failed by our news media in this electoral cycle. Seeing Trump play the careerists so effectively and reduce their establishment figures to nothingness has caused some perverse thrills on my part. Think of how unusual this year has been. There's a Republican candidate, attacked by the Koch brothers, that refuses to cooperate with FOX News. There's a Republican that has blasted George W. Bush and the war on Iraq in debate after debate-- and been rewarded for it. It's as if Trump has given many Republicans the cover to stop bullshitting the rest of us. It's actually a relief. For years, I thought to myself, you guys really can't see what a clusterfuck this war is? This president is? It's never easy for a person to admit that he or she has been taken for a ride. I sympathize with these people even though their base instinct to exclude and to wall themselves up inside a false image of the country are so pathetic. They are true believing American patriots, but smothered now by hopelessness and powerlessness, dwelling within a collapsing empire. It happened to the British too, and today, further removed than we are from the end of their folly, they can laugh at themselves much more easily than we can.

I don't blame them for fearing the future. They should be fearful. And I definitely don't blame them for their decision to vote against the establishment of their party. I've personally been voting against the establishment of their party since I was 18. Emotionally, the nation has returned to the 1930s. It's not, formally, an economic "depression," but it is a depression. Poverty and suffering were worse then, but there was more hope, thanks to a strong labor movement and active third party political forces. There were a few Donald Trumps in the U.S. in those days too-- men such as Father Couglin. (Of course, there was an even more terrifying form of xenophobia and nationalism in Europe.) It's a tumor that can be excised. Bernie Sanders, alone among the candidates of the duopoly, recognizes what the tumor is, and his message has been alternately muted or distorted by the citizenry's primary media sources.

In an interview this week, Noam Chomsky pointed out that we're seeing something unprecedented in American life. Despite vast wealth and scientific advancements, mortality rates are increasing. Health is deteriorating most rapidly and unusually among poorly-educated white men, and it's not diabetes and heart disease that serves as the usual culprit. It's suicide, alcoholism, overdoses on heroin and prescription drugs. "No war, no catastrophe," Chomsky identifies, "Just the impact of policies over a generation that have left them, it seems, angry, without hope, frustrated, causing self-destructive behavior."

Hillary is right that there is a similar strain in the campaigns of Sanders and Trump. Politics are so broken that the two men can be linked together simply by both pointing out how untenable the establishment's grasp on the nation's institutions really is. But the candidates are on opposite ends when it comes to advocating solutions. Sanders believes that people at the top of the social stratosphere are swinging the club. Trump strangely implies to these justifiably-angry voters that the threats come from the other powerless people at the bottom.

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How important has Bernie been to the world? If only one thing results from his presidential run, I will deem it an overwhelming success: If I never again hear somebody call Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton a Socialist.

That's been driving Socialists crazy for ten years.

posted by CM @ 11:45 AM