The Chris Moeller Archives

Well, what did we learn this year? Democrats, this question is for you

It never ceases to amaze me how somebody could be hit in the head over and over and over again by the powers elite, but then still throw the full weight of their support behind a candidate that only pays them lip service and almost fully embodies as a person the fact of their political suppression. But enough about Bernie Sanders.

Yesterday the Clintons completed the last step in their long campaign to fully annihilate the Democratic Party at the service of their own personal, financial enrichment. It's a bittersweet day. It was no fun while it lasted, but these two are now kind of akin to a reliable old shoe, groping uncle Billy and his monotone wife. I had kind of gotten used to their empty platitudes and their casual dishonesty. Members of the Washington news media certainly did-- to the point of no longer noticing it, even while internet hackers did their watchdog work for them. The pair of degenerates will now skulk away, if not Nixon-like, than certainly George H.W. Bush-like, having been denied a final term (a rare American political tradition, indeed) losing to a con man who cons more skillfully than they do.

The end came not with a whimper nor a bang, but an awful, depressing thud, one heard 'round the world early this morning. They noticed the millions of progressive and "change" voters only to the point of betraying them even as the kids tried to change the crooked system the way they had always been told it was possible to do, if they just put their mind to it. When the kids complained about the way they were treated, the adults told them how childish they were behaving by insisting that a presidential nomination through the channels of the Democratic National Committee was not a coronation, but an actual democratic election. Parents know best, and they knew how vital it was to defeat America's Hitler in this, the fourth consecutive most important election of our lifetime, and they knew exactly how it could be done-- with Madame Secretary Clinton at the charge.

The Clintons don't deserve all the credit for destroying the Democratic Party from the inside. Sure, they popularized the art of lying (the lying always existed, it had just never been glamorized as something called "spin"). They made popular also the concept of having alternating campaign scripts tailored for diametrically-opposed audiences, and of course, they pioneered the science of corporate fundraising. But there was also Barack Obama, who introduced the air of cool detachment toward the plight of working families, and don't forget Al Gore, who deserves a lot of the credit for making famous the sort of condescension that reeked last night and today from the mouths of paid campaign operatives that work as journalists for MSNBC, the kind of patronizing that has infected your news feed for a better part of two years, and that only seemed to ramp up more after the dour election returns came in last night.

Let's talk about Bill Clinton and Al Gore's specific contribution for a second. In 1993, Clinton sent his vice president around the media circuit attempting to sell to the American people a boondoggle of a corporate giveaway called the North American Free Trade Agreement. To the end of financial benefit for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Gore was in a tough spot of trying to convince members of his own party, the party of working people, you know, that this elimination of tariffs between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the erasure of environmental protection laws therein was of any benefit to Joe Lunchpail. Republicans, forever representing the party of big business, could not easily make this case. Democrats had to do it. He was up to the challenge, and NAFTA became law. Below is a still image culled from the well-publicized debate at the time on the Larry King Live television show between Gore and one of NAFTA's chief public critics, Texas oilman H. Ross Perot.



Because Perot was a red-state billionaire (before they were called red states, and when American billionaires were fewer) who was staking out a position in support of factory workers, and Gore, by the gods, was a representative of the party of working people, the line began to really blur for the first time, on a national scale, between what was a Democrat and what was a Republican. Clinton and Gore were both "New Democrats," we were told, ones that believed they could compete with the Party of Reagan when it came to getting money from corporate fat cats. The new logic employed by this formal entity of New Democrats called the Democratic Leadership Council was that the party was better off with the bosses' money than the workers' votes. After all, it worked for the Republicans. This was a generation ago, and we didn't know then that these New Democrats in Washington in the early to mid-1990s would wind up being the last "New Democrats" in Washington.

Fast-forward to this new time and place-- to November 8th, 2016, and we see an autopsy map of America in which its entire rust belt appears redder than the marching band section of a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game. Gone Republican is Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, and West Virginia, all gone through the belt but through the buckle of Obama's Chicago, and that is a snapshot of globalism-- pockets of concentrated high tech success surrounded by mile after mile of economic abandonment and misery. The Democratic Party looks upon the working people in these vast outlands as beneath its contempt, not worthy of respect. Their party is now the party of urban elites. In the words of the LA Times' Vincent Bevins, the elites have "been taking all of the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anybody else talks." They are now, he says, "watching in horror as voters revolt." The party faithful watch their fellow Americans wholeheartedly reject Clinton, and the image they see is a colletion of sexists, xenophobes, and racists. Forget that eight years ago Barack Obama, a black man and the son of an immigrant running with the same outsider vibe as Trump, both directly counter to the public image of Hillary Clinton, was delivered the White House. Forget that four years ago, he was delivered it again. And he now exits, according to their own crowing, with a higher approval rating than what Reagan had when he left Washington for Santa Barbara in 1989.

The signs of revolution were there if you bothered to look. Michael Moore saw it. He wrote that Trump came to speak to Ford Motor Company executives in Michigan and didn't deliver the normal Republican spiel about expanding markets for their product. He told the carmakers that if they took their manufacturing to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on each of those cars before they could be shipped back to the United States. Heads spun. Meanwhile, Clinton as an example, assumed she had the state of Wisconsin in the bag from the beginning and so did not even make a campaign stop in that state for the last seven months leading up to election day.

I didn't see the signs to appreciate them, and I have an unhealthy preoccupation, as you know, with the Clintons. I had noticed that there was a surprising dearth of political signs in my urban Iowa neighborhood this season, usually home to a plethora of Democratic campaign promotions, yet on a weekend trip to the country, the small town of Earlham west of Des Moines was overrun with Trump/Pence signs. It caught my attention for sure, that's why the memory lingers, but the media was telling a different story, it sounded convincing, and so it slipped from me. Less than two weeks ago, I wrote this actual line on the blog about the presidential campaign, "Clinton's got the receipt." Well, she better show it to us now if that was ever the case. I'm not afraid to say it when I was wrong. Maybe I am too conspiracy-minded at times. Sometimes democracy is really democracy, dirty as it is.

Are the Democrats going to learn from this, as the title of this post posits? The positive indicators are not there. Today, as they have made routine since 2000, they are blaming everyone but themselves-- Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, the media, the FBI, Russia, WikiLeaks, disgruntled Sanders voters, Nader probably, just for nostalgia's sake. The party of superdelegates hates the Electoral College again, and what have they done about getting rid of it in the 16 years since the last time they wore the distinction of losing the big race even while claiming the majority vote of the populace?

The defeat couldn't possibly have been about a deeply unpopular candidate, the later-exposed crimes and misdemeanors that led to her nomination in July, the selling of public access to government at all junctures of her political life for more than a quarter-century, whether it be to Saudi royalty, tinpot dictators, or Wall Street bankers, even up to the point that the Clintons used funds raised ostensibly for their unholy foundation to pay for their daughter's wedding. A large majority of Americans wanted Hillary Clinton to prosecute bankers in the public square, not pocket their money instead in exchange for giving 45-minute speeches to them in secret. The performance of her arrogant and immoral campaign staff revealed plenty also about the internal collective mindset of the losing team. Blaming their embarrassing defeat on any of the above would require a metaphorical mirror they don't possess. The band of conspirators that is the Democratic National Committee should be broken up into as many individual pieces as possible, and none of them permitted to work on important political campaigns again at any level.

Somehow the people that tried to warn them about the danger are the ones they feel deserve the blame for Trump's ascendancy. So I say they deserve everything they got from the voters for this fact, and for their craven dishonesty, their cowardliness, and their condescension. Clinton was clearly so devastated by having her bubble of entitlement unexpectedly burst, she couldn't even see clear to come out and concede the election last night, as her supporters and the world watched and waited to see her dignify herself, her family, and her party.

Trump is all of these horrible qualities as well, but he's an outsider, so he held a, forgive the word, "trump" card during his long con of 2015 and 2016. He effectively latched onto working class resentments, much of it horribly mean-spirited, but much of it precise, particularly the issue that no wags are talking about today-- his sincere or insincere opposition to NAFTA and similar trade deals, some still in the making, like TPP, which the Democratic president still supports, and that Hillary Clinton claimed to voters to be against, even as hacked emails revealed she favors it. NAFTA actually wrecked two countries-- Mexico being the other. The rush of undocumented immigrants to our southern border has been largely due to the collapse of the agricultural economy in Mexico. Their farmers cannot compete against our farmers for price. The result is an emptying of the countryside.

Finally, to the accusations of racial and sexual bigotry in the Trump campaign. I'm not going to deny that that bigotry exists in America. It's a frequent topic here. It's rampant, it's insidious. But it manifests itself in corporate boardrooms, in the criminal justice system, law enforcement, housing, and employment. It's not in the rejection of horrible, horrible, absolutely horrible presidential candidates. Half of the half of Trump supporters that Clinton called condescendingly "a basket of deplorables" voted for Sarah Palin, or for Ben Carson. I don't think progressives considered themselves bigoted when they rejected those two minority candidates, and even laughed at them. I can't stand Clinton, would never vote for her, and yet I haven't voted for a man for president since I checked for Nader in 2004. What's your record on supporting women in politics? You think Trump is a racist because he said there should be a border wall, and that Muslims should be subjected to questions about their loyalty to the United States before entry (something, incidentally, that's already done to a degree in all immigration cases in the U.S.) And I will agree that shit's racist. I also think that governments led by Democrats that only drop bombs on brown people are also racist. I think that campaigns that talk privately by email about how Africans, Muslims, and "Gypsies" are "professional never-do-wells" that are ruining Europe are also racist. I just don't use it as a go-to complaint when I lose an election. I try to avoid verbal gymnastics in the service of political tribalism. I don't give free passes based on what party letter, R or D, comes after someone's name.

There are hard-core racists in Trump's voter base. There are many more in there that are hard-working, poor residents of a dying empire state that hold valid complaints about the collapse of their nation, and those types of people, coming in all colors and shades, are particularly vulnerable to bitterness, to scapegoating, and to candidate promises to blow up the entire system. Political demagogues are very capable of fostering racism and xenophobia, and they do, but, overwhelmingly, the major virus that spreads these diseases is economic suffering. I have just as much sympathy, and just as little, for self-professed liberals that wade through identity politics at all times in their own nation, but rarely express any empathy or interest at all in the well-being of people that lie without their borders. Nobody in Afghanistan, Yemen, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Iran, Syria, Russia, Libya, or Palestine is more fearful of a Trump presidency than a Clinton one. My fellow Americans often piss me off too, like they pissed you off yesterday, but for me it happens when they uphold a wild obsession over what public figures say, but completely ignore what public figures do. Trump says terrible things. Clinton has done them. Her leadership has given us drone bombings in a myriad of Muslim-predominant countries. She orchestrated a coup in Honduras, and attempted to rig an election in Palestine. She supports the recent military buildup along the Russian-Ukrainian border, and her election would have meant a certain escalation of the tension in that very volatile part of the world.

We had a horrible choice this year, if you're only judging it by the two candidates the media treats as serious. It was a match-up between the representative of the worst in American government versus the representative of the worst in American culture. The next cycle promises an improvement. It has to. As always, progressive Democrats will start from a position that completely overlaps a separate political party that already exists, the Green Party, but they will hold out, hope against hope, for a Democratic savior, wanting so badly to still have hope that some of their candidates have resorted in the past to plastering the word itself on every one of his yard signs and all over his campaign literature. The good news for Democrats is that because Clinton finally got sent packing, they don't know who their 2020 candidate will be. The Republicans will be more or less stuck with an incumbent. My hope for them, personally, is dead in the womb. The Democrats' disappearance from all levels of government, and arguably from major party status, should put them one step closer to the entire overhaul that's required, yet the corporate blockade that routinely denies that effort is still firmly in place, and there has not been piece of evidence number one that the leaders of the Democratic Party, or its members, are capable of internalizing these hard lessons that are being presented to them free of charge and at an increasing rate of occurrence. They rest comfortably in their own little urban bubbles, chatting in small social circles jerking each other for their supposed collective intelligence and tolerance, while reinforcing their own common beliefs that the rest of us are racist, stupid, or irrational. They think we're too dumb to look past their carefully-scripted rhetoric about racial harmony and little girls growing up to be president and see the globalist greed, the handouts to bankers that conspire to steal from the treasury, and still the unending wars.

posted by CM @ 8:04 PM