America already has a Third Party — The Republocrats
At a dinner party recently, a friend from Germany wondered why Americans are so united against Bernie Sanders. He wondered why the media and the Democratic Party portray him as some sort of menace, because in Germany Sanders would just be a run-of-the-mill Centrist politician. Which started me to thinking, as I often do, about how far to the right our country has lurched after recurring cycles of perpetual war, the whittling away of social safety nets, the demonization of government and taxes by both political parties, the instigation of civil unrest around the world with regime change, sanctions and the propping up of right-wing dictators in Central America, the promotion of “Free Trade” deals which have helped to decimate the working and middle-class, and the transformation of our health-care system into a profit center run by the health care conglomerates, and the alignment of the Democratic Party with The Third Way.
All of these things have transpired over the past 40 years with the complicity of not only Republicans and Democrats, but a media consolidation catalyzed by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who signed legislation which allowed a few massive media conglomerates to control virtually everything we see and hear. Media conglomerates that represent the interests of their respective political parties, presenting arguments that favor the interests of the ultra-wealthy and powerful which logically would preclude arguments that favor those with less money and power. The top six NBC/MSNBC “news” anchors have a total combined net worth of 180 million dollars, so it would come as no surprise that issues such as access to health care, affordable housing, student debt, and Social Security would not be at the top of their list.
Democrats promised to end welfare as we know it, plunging more black and brown people into extreme poverty, and have passed legislation leading to long-term incarceration of millions of black males for low-level crimes. Democrats have deported millions of immigrants and refugees, put kids in cages, and have ordered nighttime ICE raids (even on Christmas Eve) of refugee women and children. Democrats have promoted the ideology of sending children back to almost certain death to the Central American countries from which they have fled. Democrats have voted in favor of massive military spending increases over the past forty years, even though we spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined. Democrats voted in favor of funding Trump’s border wall. Democrats have cut billions from food assistance and housing programs and have enthusiastically promoted the spread of for-profit and unaccountable Charter Schools that drain money from the already teetering public education system. It was a Democrat who, while joining the non-binding Paris Climate Accord, drilled more oil out of the earth than any previous president and opened 24 million acres to drilling in the Gulf Coast after visiting a Lousiana ravaged by the worst flooding in its history. I could go on. And on. And on.
So it should come as no surprise as we enter the 2020 election that the choice of candidates is now presented as one that has nothing to do with policy, reality or history. It has nothing to do with who stands up for what were once considered Democratic Party values, things like Medicare, Social Security, organized labor and public education. It has nothing to do with honorable traits like honesty or integrity. It has nothing to do with who actually cares about the welfare of the American people and has a track record of humanism for their entire lifetime. It has nothing to do with standing up against race-to-the-bottom Free Trade deals like NAFTA and PNTR and the TPP. It has nothing to do with consistency, like someone who would chain themselves to a black woman in protest of segregated housing at 22 years of age, and then 25 years later be the only white politician to dare endorse Jesse Jackson’s presidential run. It has nothing to do with tirelessly standing up for unions and loudly opposing the origins of “Right to Work” laws when Democratic Party leaders including President Obama remained utterly silent. It has nothing to do with being right about issue after issue even before they happened, whether it’s the Iraq War or the financial collapse of 2008 or the dangers of placing pharmaceutical industry executives in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services (the former head of Eli Lily, a major producer of insulin, after whose appointment insulin prices soared over 100 percent).
What it does have to do with is speculation, political expediency and, above all, fortune-telling. Yes, the presidential primaries have now become a shell game, a toxic ball of confusion wreaked by the party that calls itself Democratic. The game is played by not only making certain there are too many candidates to declare a frontrunner, but by making the election process itself as divisive and chaotic as possible. Invent an app designed by the opponents of a particular candidate just a couple of months before the first votes are cast, have it fail, have vote counts from precinct after precinct not line up with those of elected caucus officials, and then declare a tie. Erode confidence in a particular candidate, the one who does not align with the donors who your party is serving, by having your media spread fear of “socialism” and berating that candidate’s supporters while your party leaders claim that “nobody likes” their candidate and that he has “accomplished nothing”. Hold a meeting with one of the candidates, a nice-looking, well-spoken virtual unknown, who fits the Democratic National committee sponsorship jacket adorned with billionaire donor patches, to stop the candidate who the jacket does not fit. Then put out the rules of the game to an electorate who you have turned against public education, the expansion of Medicare and Social Security, and the socialism that those programs symbolize.
The rules of the game are as follows:
- You cannot say anything true against any candidate because that will be considered an attack, but they can say anything that is untrue against you because you “aren’t a Democrat”
- If you do say anything true about another candidate or the political system, that is considered an attack, “circling the wagons”, divisive and not in the interest of “party unity”
- The only thing that matters in the decision making process is being a fortune-teller, so have fun! Give your reasons why someone who stands for absolutely nothing, who has repeatedly betrayed the black community, whose foreign policy vision is historically hawkish, and whose only consistency is that they consistently change what they are for or against can beat Trump, and you win!
- Infiltrate the headlines, the chyrons and social media with the narratiave that a particular candidate has won, even if they didn’t, and see if you can change the poll numbers. Watch them go up and down like you are Moe on the Three Stooges.
- Transform television news media into combative and biased panel discussions, with surrogates of corporate America and the political establishment parroting industry talking points over and over until Americans are convinced that’s how they should think. Then the door is open for you to tell them what they SHOULD think, for example telling you to fall into line with a fascist call for “party unity” (the fascists were The Party of National Unity) by stoking fear of Trump, in order to render critical thinking unnecessary and discourage proper vetting of the candidates.
There are other rules, including convincing yourself that your party is the “big tent”, the one that embraces women of color, even if it only does so when those women speak the words the party and their donors would have them say. You can certainly be a staunch liberal and support ICE, the law enforcement agency that routinely violates the human rights and civil rights of thousands of immigrants, can’t you? It’s just fine for party leaders to take the unprecedented step of publicly denouncing newly elected Congresswoman and Somolian refugee Ilhan Omar for telling the truth about the political system as it pertains to the undue influence of the lobbying network AIPAC on our political system (note to Omar: NEVER talk about AIPAC publicly). It’s OK to embrace a party whose leader refused to allow a presidential debate devoted to climate change because “the media will take care of it”, even though that media through eight presidential debates totaling 20 hours has devoted less than 40 minutes to climate change (although one candidate insists on talking about it in the context of other issues). It’s just fine to embrace a party who changes its rules midstream to allow a Republican billionaire who promoted George W Bush at the Republican national convention onto the debate stage, while that same party insists that the one candidate who has caucused with the Democrats for 30 years is not a Democrat.
The truth is that the party that embraces Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic Party. They are a party that makes bad jokes about the prospects of free higher public education, scoffs at the prospect of eliminating the investment bankers (AKA the health insurance companies) from the health care system, does not believe health care is a human right, betrays workers with Free Trade deals that enrich the coffers of their transnational corporation donors, demeans women of color in Congress, contemplates the cutting of Social Security and refuses to support its expansion, votes in favor of Trump’s military budgets and trade deals, and stands and applauds in unison with Republicans to celebrate a puppet replacement for a duly elected president in Venezuala.
The party and the media that brought you Trump by promoting him in the primary and choosing to serve their donors instead of standing up for what is right now tell us the ONLY thing that matters is beating Trump. So step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and place your bets. Or just pull up a webpage with all the candidates, close your eyes, a put your finger on the screen. Or just close your eyes real hard, use your powers of prognostication, and see which candidates face materializes from the swirling mist.
I must admit I have an unfair advantage over most of the electorate, because I have my very own fortune teller. He’s right all the time. The only problem is that he has been coming up with different answers, likely because like the rest of electorate he is confused by the number of candidates. So at this point, because my fortune teller who is usually right seems perplexed by the same factors that are clouding the prognostic capabilities of our pollsters, our media and the electorate (perhaps the same factors that proved all of those prognostic forces wrong in 2016), I will remain undecided for now. I will ask the fortune teller the morning of the Illinois primaries each candidate who is remaining, and whichever one he is most positive about will get my vote.
Now don’t laugh, because that’s the game it appears the Republocrat electorate is willing to play. And as any Republocrat worth his weight in cutting social safety nets knows, any of the Democratic candidates would be better than Trump. And when the qualification for a candidate is that they are “better than Trump”, a Republocrat could arguably vote for George W Bush. So with the compromises Republocrats are making to “Vote Blue No Matter Who”, in 2020 they are positioned to nominate a candidate just to the right of Richard Nixon. So after that Republocrat president says one thing to workers and marginalized communities and does another in favor of his or her donors for the next four years, I wonder who the next Democratic presidential candidate will have to be better than to qualify for the Republocrat nomination. Unfortunately, I think I know.
