The Democrats Gave Us Trump — Don’t Listen When They Blame the Left
It’s 11:00 PM on election night on the West Coast. The Democrats are in shambles, Trump has all but win. The media wing of the DNC — i.e. pretty much everyone but Breitbart and the Daily Caller — are about to start casting blame. They will blame the left. They’ll say “Bernie bros” and “brocialists,” and sound about as insightful as conservative commentators ranting about “libtards.” They’ll say it’s our fault for not uniting behind Hillary Clinton when Bernie Sanders told us to. Maybe they’ll blame Russian agents again as well. That has worked about as well for them as blaming the left. Hell, maybe they’ll blame Bernie Sanders again.
They won’t talk about how the Democratic Party bent over backwards to hand Clinton the nomination, while her banker speeches, multiple corruption scandals and dismal approval ratings hung over her head. They won’’t talk about how, when the scandal broke during the convention, Clinton rewarded the ringleader — Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — with a position in her campaign, and left Donna Brazile in charge, despite knowing she was right in the middle of it.
They won’t talk about how, instead of confronting Democratic Party corruption, the media went to war with Wikileaks and the few remaining independent journalists they could find. They won’t talk about how, with every new revelation of corruption Clinton’s campaign and their extended network of shills went deeper into full-on Cold War reenactment freakout mode, with transparently false allegations of collaboration between Trump and Putin. They certainly won’t talk about the fact that lying to people and insulting their intelligence repeatedly betrays a politically fatal disdain for your constituents. And they won’t reflect on the fact that, with every celebrity and every respected media figure on her side, Clinton still lost — and what that might mean for the current course of the Democratic party.
They also won’t talk about how Hillary Clinton, as soon as she clinched the nomination, began to recruit a team of America’s leading war criminals — people like John Negroponte and Henry Kissinger — to reassure the deep security state that she was their candidate. They won’t talk about her constant messaging that Muslims were only alright because they could be our “eyes and ears” in the war on terror — as if the Muslim community is just full of terrorists, and Muslims exist to be the pawns of white, Christian America. They won’t talk about her racist jokes, past support of racist policies or dismissive treatment of radical black voices. And they definitely won’t talk about the fact that Clinton refused to offer anything but “America is already great” — more of the same.
No. They’ll blame it on the left. They’ll lecture us on how this is our fault for not falling in line — like they did when they allowed Dubya to steal an election with virtually no objection. They’ll do the same thing they always do. They’ll tell us we’re unrealistic and unreasonable for wanting a candidate who represents us, and a party that doesn’t treat nominations as corronations. They’ll do everything they can to set up a future victory for the center-right of the Democratic party, no matter how unpopular they are. They’ll blame us despite the fact that the left is the only political ideology that fielded a candidate who was well-liked during this election.
They’ll do it all for two reasons. First, because they think the left is stupid and easily led, and will do what they us to if they can only shame us enough. Don’t worry, it’s not personal — they think that about pretty much everyone.
But more importantly because, however many times they tell us that Trump is Hitler and Mussolini and Franco combined, they prefer an unhinged reactionary like him to a moderate, progressive reformist like Sanders who might antagonize their rich donors. I’m not going to dive too deeply into the obvious Wiemar parallels. The way liberal hacks have spit on the victims of Hitler by rewriting the rise of the Nazism and whitewashing the treachery of the Social Democrats speaks for itself, and anyway, hey — a Social Dem was the good guy this time. People change. Allegiances change. It’s a different fight now — and this is my point. We’re not a radical faction of the left fighting against a moderate one. We’re the entire left fighting against the party of bankers and weapons manufacturers and the private prison industry. A party that thinks we are stupid and will try to turn us against each other by pretending they’re our leader despite delivering us to this psycho. Whatever happens, remember, they did this to us. If you’re a reformist, it’s time to take the Democrats over and kick out the neo-liberals. If you’re a radical, you’re fighting the same fight today as you were yesterday. I’m not naive — I don’t think we’ll suddenly walk down the street, arm in arm with no disagreements. But we need to remember that, while the Republicans were responsible for nominating Trump, only the Democrats could put him in power. We need to understand who our enemies are, — and none of them are on the left.