Democrats did this to themselves, and the rest of us

They fucked around and found out

The presidential election that just concluded was a farce from the beginning. I’m grateful for all the grassroots activists who took time and pounded pavement to educate their neighbors.

But sadly, they were failed by the Democratic Party in too many ways to count.

Failures despite warnings

Make no mistake: this was not a Trump victory, so much as a loss by Democrats of an election that could easily have won. Their most glaring failures include:

1. choosing both Biden and Harris through back room deals;

2. blocking a contested primary, which led to nominating an insider from a one-party (i.e., corrupt) city rather than a candidate with broad support;

3. smearing leftists and the candidates of color who have offered real alternatives, exposing their hypocrisy and chasing voters of color into the arms of the GOP;

4. agreeing with Republicans on policy issues from immigration to government secrecy, ethics, foreign policy, and restrictions on grassroots dissent;

5. repeatedly aligning themselves with Wall Street instead of working class Americans struggling to make ends meet, and;

6. allowing Netanyahu to disregard international human rights while waging an escalating and expanding genocide across the Middle East that alienated domestic constituencies on which Democrats knew they would need to rely.

Harris chose to essentially align her campaign with the traditional Republican Party, particularly by treating Liz Cheney as a surrogate, while relying on various acts of political theater to project what amounted to a cultural project with little policy substance.

This was a profound betrayal of the strategy embraced by Barack Obama in 2008. He at least ran on a critique of militarism, even if he came to embrace and embody it as a president. In Harris, Democrats found another mixed race candidate with a three syllable name, but one who offered not even the pandering message that propelled Obama to the White House.

No one should be surprised at the outcome.

Can you hear me now?

I’ve been warning about the rise of fascism in the United States since long before it became fashionable. Oblivious to their own complicity, Democrats have spent decades setting the stage for this moment.

It brings me no joy to observe the overt adoption of fascism as a national ideology. But we need not lie to ourselves.

The rise of the right wing is a predictable result of the Center’s failures to support ideas offered from the Left to support working Americans and their families. I frankly would prefer to have been wrong rather than prescient.

Journalists did this, too

Beyond Democrats and the fealty to capital that unites them, the community of corporate journalists should also bear a great deal of the blame for Trump’s return to Washington. The rise of propaganda and the loss of trustworthy news media has been a crucial part of the recipe on which Republicans relied.

Time and again, journalists have served as propagandists working to justify horrors in plain sight emanating from the bipartisan cesspool in Washington. Yet the grassroots outrage suppressed by institutional voices unwilling to hear it has, for better or worse, now forced itself to the fore.

I’ll leave anonymous one Trump voter with whom I’ve spoken, but want to share his perspective.

He’s a university professor in a blue state agonized by the Democratic Party’s longstanding corruption, as well as the media’s casual deference to it. He perceives in Trump a voice willing to defy business as usual. We discussed the professor’s policy preferences, and how little Trump could be trusted to pursue them, or even match any of his own rhetoric with action.

This voter responded by observing Trump’s invitation of RFK to join his campaign, describing that decision as proof of the iconoclasm that, to him, was more important than any particular policy. Harris had the same opportunity—which alone could likely have ensured her victory—but squandered it.

Voters have clamored for change for decades, only to be rebuffed by a bipartisan establishment more attuned to culture, appearances, war, and Wall Street than to the needs of working families increasingly struggling to survive.

Their repudiation of Harris & her legions of celebrity endorsers represents a populist rejection of elites, dominant institutions, and the public narratives constructed by newspaper editors—to at least the same degree as it might be (fairly) described as conveying any substantive mandate supporting either misogyny or white supremacy.

Thank YOU for overcoming at least one hurdle

To the extent readers need a hopeful coda to process what might be a painful moment, I would just applaud anyone—including you—for participating in and supporting the independent media ecosystem.

Our country’s most informed and insightful voices are routinely suppressed in this country in favor of narratives that support, reify, and enable capital and power. By stepping outside the traditional media ecosystem and curating your own information sources, you’re taking an active and important step towards cultivating the independent insight that no one in Washington wants you to wield.

I hope to continue offering whatever insight I can going forward. Thanks for making it possible for me to continue speaking out!