When I think of the future of the Democratic Party I see only two possible outcomes. It dies a horrible and final death or from its dead body comes the basis of a New Democratic Party. Both the Republican Party, the dominate party in American politics now -thanks to Obama’s 8 years in office- on local, state, and national levels, and the Democratic Party are tools of our governing elites. In FDR’s terms the Economic Royalists (ER). The ER, the financial, media, and industrial elites bet on being able to defeat Donald Trump once they had built him into the Republican candidate. The ER and their media chose to be all in for Clinton from the early days of 2015. She was the most qualified presidential candidate in the last seven decades and had demonstrated her commitment to act in in their interests.
They bet wrong. It wasn’t all the fault of the Clinton folk that she lost to Trump however. The Obama administration’s hostility to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, in David Axelrod’s term of derision the Professional Progressives, was much to blame. Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush put thousands of bankers and some politicians in jail for the Savings and Loan melt down. But Obama and Attorney General Holder could not find even one to scapegoat, to hold responsible for the laying waste of the Great American Middle Class. Obama and establishment Democrats for 8 years pushed aside progressive policies that would have benefited the millions badly hurt by the fraud and deception of the financial elites. The 1%, the rebranded Economic Royalists, were not held accountable but were rewarded for their contrivances of greed.
Many people are in morning, visioning a greater diminishing of our democracy, of more destabilization of international relationships in general, and fear a greater loss of peace and environmental sustainability in particular. Trump will delegate most of his responsibilities to others. His ignorance of particulars will be masked by this delegation of responsibility. But to those he is delegating, they are bent on a faster paced change from a government supported by a middle class to a government run by a coterie of oligarchs lead by the captains of finance. We will now be vassals to very same forces that plunged the world into an unprecedented depression and tumult.
I believe that Madelene Albright advised President Bill Clinton, there is no point of having a strong military if you won’t use it. Hillary Clinton accepted that advice and donned the garb of Attila the Hun evidenced by her support of the devastation wracked across the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe in support of the ER. It is still unclear what the Trump Administration’s foreign policy initiatives will be. Democrats are more reluctant towards militarism, environmental destruction, and the unraveling of the social safety net and might have been a check on another Clinton presidency.
But the Republicans are now completely unrestrained. Might the Republicans overreach, move too quickly, and cause the backlash that allows a New Democratic Party to rise up from the corpse of Clinton’s Party? Is that now pathetically Human Civilization’s only hope for survival? Will Our Revolution come as Sanders optimistically proclaims?
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