So, last post I talked about the relatively dismal showing of the Democrats against the massively corrupt, incompetent and vile Trump Republicans. Then I spent some time talking about how loathsome and disgusting the Republican base is. I neglected to mention their sickening hypocrisy shrieking about election/voter fraud in this election when their hero Trump had already openly stated that he was sabotaging the US Postal Service's ability to process mail-in ballots. Trump was certain that more of his brain-dead supporters would show up at the polls during a pandemic than would Democratic voters. Because his group are shit-heads. So he wanted to exploit that advantage.
These people truly are disgusting. Nauseating self-pity and hypocrisy. They have two modes: Arrogant bullies or mewling crybabies. Fuck them and fuck their stupid feelings.
But just when I work myself into a paroxysm of rage against these idiots I look and I see the enormity of stupidity coming from the pens of liberals and progressives. The insane clinging to the moronic "Russiagate" conspiracy. The hypocritical whining about Republican voter suppression and dirty tricks right after stealing the primary from Bernie Sanders and getting the Green Party USA knocked off the ballot in several states. The same arrogant, entitled delusion of blaming the Left for the party's poor showings when its the Leftists whose voices are excluded and the party's entire message was to appeal to "moderate" Republicans.
Here's a stupid take from one Damon Linker about how the miserable failure of the pro-war, Wall Street slaves Democratic Party leadership is somehow a crushing of the Left.
Democrats didn't just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation's fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College. Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation's history, with white supremacy and racism placed "at the very center." Ensure "equity" not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they'd even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.
No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.
Linker appears to be confusing random statements from Democratic Party supporters and leftists with the official positions of the Biden campaign. Biden did not run on abolishing the police. The corporatist Dems openly rejected expanding the SCOTUS. There is no party platform to eliminate the Electoral College. As well, he misreads Kamala Harris's ad about equality and equity. It says nothing about equalized outcomes. It specifically talks of giving resources to people suffering from societal disadvantages. And the "Truth & Reconciliation Commission" is just a pipe dream or thought bubble floated by individual commentators. For my part, the sentiment is understandable considering how vile and stupid Trump and his political bowel movement of racist, christo-fascist hypocrites is. But what is Linker saying? That right-wing people don't also besmirch the character and intentions of people on the left? What nonsense!
These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn't enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.
Sorry, no. Chris Hayes, Robert Reich, etc., do not set party policy.
And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn't: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of "democracy" has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.
The country's demographics are changing. And it's also a fact that the Republicans only win by utilizing inequities in the US electoral system (where votes in sparsely populated rural states count for far more than do votes in states with higher populations such as California and New York), gerrymandering and open voter suppression. Supposedly leftists must resign themselves to this cheating by their opponents, but any talk by leftists of reform or even complaining hurts the tender sensibilities of Trumpian shit-heads and justifies said shit-heads' desire to destroy them?
There will be no court packing. No added states. Nothing from the toxic progressive-fantasy wishlist will come anywhere close to passing. Instead, we will have grinding, obstructive gridlock. Some will demand that Biden push through progressive priorities by executive order. But every time he does — like every incident of urban rioting and looting, every effort to placate the left-wing "Squad" in the House, every micro-targeted identity-politics box-checking display of intersectional moral preening and finger-wagging — the country will move closer to witnessing a conservative backlash that results in Republicans taking control of the House and increasing their margin in the Senate in November 2022, rendering the Biden administration even more fully dead in the water.
As if there's any chance of Biden wanting to placate progressives in Congress! As if the corporatist Democratic leadership has EVER desired to or felt the need to placate its Democratic wing! As if the Democratic leadership hasn't consistently abused its progressive base for decades!
That's the playbook. We saw it in 1994, when Republicans leveraged opposition to Bill Clinton's effort to pass health-care reform into a successful effort to take control of the House for the first time in 40 years. We saw it again in 2010, when Republicans leveraged opposition to Barack Obama's successful push to pass the Affordable Care Act into the largest shift of seats in the House in 62 years (and far bigger than the one Democrats managed two years into the Trump administration in 2018). This time the leverage is likely to come from culture-war conflict, but the Republican strategy will be the same.
I don't know enough about 1994, but 2010 wasn't about the ACA. Democratic voters were demoralized by the Obama administration's failure to end the wars and rein-in Wall Street even with majorities in the House and the Senate and many of them stayed home. The Democrats did push through the corporate-friendly ACA against Repugnican obstructionism, but that was one of the very few moments when Obama and Pelosi took off the gloves to combat the other side's openly stated policy of rejecting everything Obama proposed. How does Linker propose progressives meet such a toxic attitude from its political opposition? Has he written anything about this?
But it did. And that should give Democrats serious pause. For four years Donald Trump has proven himself a corrupt, mendacious ignoramus utterly unfit for the position he holds. He's led the nation through a pandemic that has left nearly a quarter million dead, is currently surging unchecked across the country, and has devastated the economy. And yet, the current tally shows him beating his showing from 2016 by 3.7 million votes. Trump may well come up short where it counts, but he still gained ground with the electorate relative to four years ago.
So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You're not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you'd like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren't going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It's time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.
American politics is a war of attrition right now. The sooner Democrats learn to live with that fact, the better.
Once again, this is all shit. The right-wing base turned out because they're racist fuck-faces and whining ignoramuses and deluded Christo-fascist chumps. These stupid fuckers don't play fair. They celebrate their own side's cheating and bullying and whine like spoiled brats at the very idea of receiving the same treatment. Also, the Democratic Party did not campaign on a progressive platform. They courted "moderate Republicans." The Democratic Party has been moving rightward for decades and this suppresses their own voter turnout (combined with Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics). Progressive policies have the support of majorities of Republican Party supporters. Linker's whole essay is a waste of time.
And here's a CommonDreams article reporting on the centrist fuck-faces in the Democratic Party themselves blaming the Left for their woes.
These stupid fucking asshole corporate Dems!
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