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.
