Remember when your parents used to do stuff to you that you swore you’d never do to your own kids? If you’re a parent, you already know where I’m going with this. You have your first kid, you’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, looking forward to helping create a better generation than your own, then you catch yourself doing that weird spit-clean thing to your son’s face you remember hating when you were little.
We all grow up to become our parents in some ways, but hopefully, we get more of their positive traits than their negative ones. Sometimes it doesn’t go that way, though, and it’s always heartbreaking to realize you’re now the embodiment of your mother’s temper or your father’s emotional incompetence. I wonder if that’s how Democrats are feeling now that they’re becoming the new Republican party?
Falling in Line
Bill Clinton once famously said that in every presidential election, Democrats want to fall in love, while Republicans just fall in line.
That’s because liberals are educated free-thinkers with critical minds who are cynical of abuses of power. Democrats needed to earn their vote. They are hard to herd. They are attracted to their candidate, not forced by shame, guilt or fear. Traditionally, anyway.
But the man people fell in love with this election cycle, Bernie Sanders, saw his campaign fatally sabotaged by the power-base of the DNC elites and their media puppets, and Democrats have fallen in line like good little soldiers behind a candidate nobody even likes.
The DNC/Media/Clinton achieved something remarkable this election cycle. They’ve created bullet-proof loyalty out of Democrats. There’s no sin that Hillary could commit that will sway Dem voters now. No leak will be shocking enough to lose their vote. Dems were appalled when Trump said he could shoot someone and his peeps would still vote for him, but we all know Hillary could too, now.
But they did it with good old traditional Republican fear and shaming tactics. Turns out you don’t have to be religious for those to work on you. Replace “the devil” with “Trump” and it works just fine. It works so well, Democrats have taken to disseminating an authoritarian-style propaganda, which takes us to our next point.
Media Brainwashing
One of the most annoying things about Republicans used to be how they would all regurgitate whatever party lines Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox News told them to say. Now Republicans are communicating almost exclusively in cartoon frog memes, so it’s fallen to the Democrats to spout vapid lines like “voting third party is a mark of white privilege” or “a vote for anyone but Hillary is a vote for Trump.” I swear the dialogues I have with Hillary supporters get less original every single day, because as I’ve mentioned once or twice, the corporate media is being used to misinform the public about what’s happening in this country, and during this election cycle that’s been entirely to the benefit of the Clinton campaign.
So now you’ve got unthinking automatons passing along bumper-sticker-sized sound bytes manufactured by the neoliberal think tank, just like you used to have Republican droids doing for the neocons. The simpler and more vacuous the idea, the faster the mind virus spreads.
Election Fraud
Democrats have been very vocal opponents of gerrymandering, the largely Republican-favoring process whereby voting districts are redrawn in a way that marginalizes the impact that poor and disadvantaged populations can have on elections. Dems have also been voicing outrage over the 2013 repeal of parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has given states the right to demand more stringent requirements from would-be voters before they can access the polls, a practice which again tends to work disproportionately against minorities and the poor.
And yet when the ruling elites of their own party actively conspired to thwart the nomination of a candidate with an unblemished record of powerful support for minorities, the poor and the oppressed, forcefully installing in his place a Wall Street crony whose family has a consistent record of catering to the one percent and pushing for expansion of the prison industrial complex while subverting welfare, Democrats have shrugged and gone along with it. Democracy was assaulted in America this year, but the party which takes its very name from democracy shuffled on in dissociated indifference.
It’s all fine as long as it’s your people doing it, right guys?
Institutional Ecocide
If you haven’t checked out WikiLeaks’ Podesta email number 4081, take a look. If you want to know where the real movers and shakers of the Democratic party stand on environmental issues, this is a perfect glimpse of what happens behind the curtain. In it, you see Clinton staff scoffing at Bernie Sanders’ opposition to fracking, calling him “irresponsible” and “whack,” while also discussing possible ways of appearing less pro-fracking than they are to the public.
You really could not ask for a clearer picture of where the Democratic party sits as a whole with the urgent matter of averting climate catastrophe. As Clinton assured her Wall Street bosses, there is most certainly a public position running alongside a very different private position. The public position is to convert to green energy as quickly as possible, the private position is to “watch our tone and not sound too pro-fracking” while continuing to use it as long as they like like as a “transitional energy.” The very idea of fracking as something dangerous which needs to stop is laughable to them.
Combine that cute little glimpse of their inner workings with the fact that Hillary Clinton is actively pushing for a war with a nuclear superpower, and you’ve got something that is far more dangerous to the earth than Dick Cheney’s wettest of dreams.
Warmongering
Democrats have become warmongers. The same people who protested in the streets over Bush’s war are now rallying behind Bush 2.0, Hillary Clinton, who actively supported all of Bush’s very worst decisions, including the Iraq invasion. Obama dropped 23,144 bombs on Muslim-majority countries in 2015 alone and has bombed twice the number of sovereign nations that Bush did. The Democrats, who assure progressives that they’re going to “hold Hillary’s feet to the fire” to ensure she honors a progressive agenda, are dead silent about Obama’s drone wars, which Noam Chomsky has called the worst terrorist campaign on the planet.
“Oh, we’re always at war, what’s one more?” a Clinton supporter recently asked me when I was on a tirade about Hillary’s blatant push toward a war with Russia. That sort of rhetoric is becoming more and more common in my interactions with these people, and it spooks me out every single time; it’s like talking to a serial killer or a vampire or something.
This is the same party that saw massive riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968 when they announced a hawkish nominee. The entire party nearly collapsed because of it, which is why they completely revised the process by which those nominations occur. The process which they completely violated this year, to the absence of any riots whatsoever.
Democrats used to be agents of change, all about demanding progress and taking the country forward for everyone, not conserving the status quo for the elites. In one year, that has been reversed and the Democratic voters have been co-opted by the forces of evil as a firewall against change.
Take a good, hard look at yourselves in the mirror, Democrats. Take a look at what you’re becoming. Do you see Cheney’s soulless mug leering back at you?
[Featured Image by Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock]