Before You Blame Bernie…

by Josh Chernila

Loyal Democratic liberals have been broken-hearted and enraged by recent claims, spurred on by Hillary Clinton, that somehow Bernie Sanders gave the White House to Donald Trump.

First of all, it is clear that low voter turnout for Hillary lost the 2016 election. As many as 9.2 million Obama voters went Trump in 2016. Spin it as Russia or Comey or voter suppression as you like, an inspirational candidate would have overwhelmed the idiot, bigot, sociopath in the White House.

If Obama were running again, he would have destroyed Trump. If a Democrat without Hillary’s negatives had been the nominee, Trump would have lost HUUUUUGE.  Hillary was a particularly bad candidate.  Clearly, she was the only candidate bad enough to have a chance of losing to him.  But this all obscures the real problem for the Democratic party, the central question of this American crisis is much bigger.

What has happened to the Democrats in the past decade and why are we foundering?

Since 2008 Democrats have lost over 1000 elected offices nationwide. Republicans dominate the states. They own 66 of 99 state legislatures, 33 governorships and have absolute control of 25 of the 50 states. Republicans own the House and Senate, White House and Supreme Court.

Democrats are foundering everywhere, and the question is, WHY?

Hillary lost because she is a terrible and unpopular candidate, but no more than the Democratic party as a whole. Even with this depraved narcissistic hatemonger in the White House, even as people flee the Republican party, they aren’t overwhelming the Democrats with additional support. Democrats are losing support in every demographic including 10% among their most loyal constituency, Black women, this year alone.

We should be winning everywhere, but DEMOCRATS KEEP LOSING!  So, what is it about the Democratic party that is so reprehensible to the American people?

There is clearly a difference between Democrats and Republicans in questions of social justice. Republicans use racial, sexual, nativist, and bigoted arguments ubiquitously, where Democrats strive for the opposite. Clearly, there is a difference between the parties, but in terms of economic justice there explicitly is not.

The greatest achievement of Ronald Reagan wasn’t the fall of the Berlin wall or the USSR. It wasn’t the destruction of the Amerian middle class, as his supporters consistently rejoice. It wasn’t even the destruction of unions.

Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement was Bill Clinton.

Bill and the center-leftism he empowered within the Democratic party (“Socially liberal, Fiscally conservative”), made corporate power the American aristocracy. We don’t credit Ronald Reagan with the corporate-written trade deal known as NAFTA, although it was he and Vincente Fox. We give that credit to Bill Clinton. It was he and the center-left (aka, neoliberals) who capitulated to Republicans on economic injustice plans from welfare reform to the drug war to the largest military buildup in the history of the world.

Democrats are complicit in the destruction of the American middle class and the corporate takeover of American democracy. As a result of deregulation, privatization, increasingly regressive taxation, and in a death by a thousand cuts, many of them massive, American democracy died and as of 2014.  America is no longer a representative republic. The war on American democracy that began in 1971 with the Powell Memo, consolidated itself under Ronald Reagan, gained control under Bill Clinton and the NEOliberalism of his DLC.

That war was official won by the commercial class.  Thanks to NEOliberal capitulation to the conservative agenda to dominate society with an aristocracy, the American experiment in liberty is officially over.  Where Democrats should have been fighting for economic justice, they instead opened the floodgates for the conservative agenda of the domination of our society by corporate wealth.

Throughout this time period, center-left Democrats have counted on the reprehensible bigotry of Republicans to drive liberal voting turnout.

President Obama was elected in a massive landslide, partially because of his social justice inspiration, but also because he was perceived to be someone who could address some real economic hardships in the country. In this, he failed abjectly. He failed to prosecute a single banker responsible for the crash of 2008 but allowed 9 million more homeowners to suffer foreclosure. His great promise was to transform the abominable and murderous, for-profit healthcare system. What unfolded in the creation of the ACA was dispiriting to the whole country, but disastrous to the unsteady peace between True Justice liberals and social justice neoliberals.

Perhaps hoping to curry favor with the conservative movement that saw him as an illegitimate usurper because of the color of his skin, the President adopted the most conservative plan available, that envisioned by right-wing think tanks and implemented only by conservative politicians. He started out offering the opposition everything and left out the potential for single-payer or even an option to buy into public plans.

This led to the disastrous rout of 2010. Demoralized liberals stayed home. Conservatives were driven to the polls by deranged propaganda from the far right that blamed President Obama for the limitations of their own plan. They overwhelmed the polls in a critical census year, took over congress and the states, and won the right to gerrymander the potential for a democratic congress out of existence for a decade. They continued to pass regressive policies nationwide, creating such disasters as the failed state of Kansas, and the murder of Flint, Michigan, all while Democrats praised themselves for their magnanimous work for “social justice”.

For 25 years, Democrats have demanded that liberals hew to their cause, because of how awful the Republicans are.  Democrats have not learned anything from recent losses.  Their attempt to savage liberals who are sick of social justice without economic justice may be the last straw.

This neoliberalism as practiced by Republicans and supported whole-heartedly by center-left Democrats has ended our democracy. Where the Party of Jefferson should have been defending liberty, social and economic liberty, they have been capitulating to the conservative agenda and the corporate takeover of American democracy.

Like the military, capitalism is critical to modern society, but like the military, it needs to exist in service to the common good. Democrats have abysmally failed to protect America from the excesses of vulture capitalism, and this corporate coup is every bit as destructive to American freedom as any military coup could be.

Hillary Clinton, not because she is a woman, and not because she is a liberal, but because she is a Clinton, a DLC, corporatist, center-left, NEOliberal.  This center-leftism is a purely a-moral effort.  It is tactical.  It is designed to trade away the soul for short-term gain.  It is not inspiring to the human psyche because we as a species are motivated either by great fear, hate, and greed or by a higher, MORAL calling, something greater than ourselves. Hillary and the Democrats cannot lead the nation and cannot build a lasting, long-term coalition because what they practice is not leadership.  They set no vision for the nation, craft no narrative of who we are as a people, set no direction for a national life worth living.  Their offering is not immoral, as the intentional destruction of American freedom and democracy that is the Republican/conservative agenda:  the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.  The center-left agenda is simply without a moral center, and thus it is incapable of direction, inspiration, or leadership.

As I cast about through history or through literature, it is hard to identify stories of those who deeply fail to protect those in their care by abandoning the call to higher purpose.  I believe this is largely because those who fail so egregiously ultimately lose, and history is written by the winners.  Perhaps those who have allowed misery to fester deeply enough for revolution to result, like the Czars of Russia or the headless Monarchs of France, the degenerate last Roman or Chinese Emperors may give some indication.  Perhaps the best image from literature and most accessible to American readers may be the glorious case of King

Theoden from JRR Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings”.  He fell under the influence of great evil in the form of a craven advisor, just as Democrats have fallen under the influence of failed and destructive economic theories like austerity, privatization, and “free” trade.

Perhaps I am attracted to this example, because Theoden recovers from the madness and the spell of the craven advisor “Greemer Wormtongue”. He goes on to lead his people to victory and freedom.   That’s hopeful, but I don’t know that hope for the Democratic party will be found until they, like Theoden, can be freed from the spell of hate, greed, and fear that is conservative economic theory and the belief that social justice can be achieved without economic justice.

Since 2016, center-left Democrats have been working overtime to blame True Justice Liberals for their failures. It wasn’t Bernie Sanders who lost 2010, the states, the Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court for the Democrats. It was center-leftism, NEOliberalism itself as practiced by Democrats nationwide, by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton herself.

Democratic “centrists” may want to condemn progressives for abandoning their responsibility to American freedom, but they would be better off taking a long look in the mirror.  It is not the fault of the American people for not being inspired by their amoral movement.  At least the immoral conservative movement of the Republican party gives people something to believe in. This, more than anything, more than Comey or the Russians, or voter suppression is a cognitive explanation for the rise of GoP dominance and the election of Donald Trump.

It has been the responsibility of the Democratic party, since its inception, to protect and nurture a healthy, wealthy, powerful and well-informed American middle class as the only force that can oppose the tyranny of aggregated wealth and power. For 25 years they have abandoned that responsibility.

It is not the fault of the discarded and abused “base”, economic justice Democrats, working-class Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and Millennials to fain inspiration at an uninspiring, rudderless, amoral party. It is the responsibility of the party to connect with its central mission and win back the American people.

When that happens, it will be a moral Democratic party with a long-term, national vision that will give America back her democracy and again lead the world.