It’s Not A Protest Vote, It’s An Eviction Notice
Hey America! How would you like to send shockwaves of fear through the elite echelons of the oldest political party on Earth by setting the stage for the most significant political upheaval in human history?
By voting for a brilliant but humble doctor from Massachusetts this year, you can help serve the warmongering, election-rigging, oligarch-coddling Democratic Party an eviction notice on the seat of power they’ve occupied for the last 188 years, making way for a radical upset of the careful alliance of power they’ve built with the crumbling Republican Party, transforming America and thereby the world.
Oh. Is this not obvious to you? Sorry. Let me back up a bit.
So, we’re clear that the primaries were a sham, yeah? Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter, also known as the Impartiality Clause. I believe I’ve mentioned this once or 900 times in previous articles. “The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” Compare the preceding sentence against a few of the conversations revealed in the DNC leaks, from this small compilation by Heavy if you like, and tell me you don’t see then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz being included in, and even participating in, unashamedly biased and even conspiratorial conversations supporting Clinton over Sanders.
So that’s clearly undeniable; nobody loves debating Hillary supporters more than I do, and I’ve never met a single one who can deny or refute any part of the above. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a conspiracy fact. The DNC violated their own rules, Clinton’s nomination is illicit, the only people responsible for regulating the presidential nominating process for their incredibly powerful party are now known to actively manipulate said process, yada yada yada. But that’s not what I’m pointing at right now.
What I’m calling your attention to here, dear reader, is this: now that we have the luxury of a little time to take a breather and the clarity of hindsight, look how hellbent they all were on keeping Sanders out of the Oval Office. Why were they so freaked out by him?
When you were younger, did you ever use to wonder why the world is so crazy? Why we have wars when it’s such a stupid, senseless thing to do, or why we’re killing our ecosystem when it’s the only one we’ve got? Well, Americans got the answer to those questions this year. Even better, if you want to get technical about things: they got to actually meet the answer to those questions. The Bernie Sanders campaign forced the hidden manipulations of American politics right out into the light, the first time the beast has ever been forced to extend itself so far out of the deep, dark comfort zone it had been hiding in up until that point.
The elites of the Democratic Party, when faced with a showdown between a loyal insider who was certain to help further their neoliberal agendas and a rabble-rousing outsider who promised to oppose those agendas at every turn, figured they could count on their usual tactics like media blackouts and debate scheduling to minimize public exposure to the disruptive agitator and breeze through to the general election with their anointed queen. What they didn’t count on was social media. Sanders wouldn’t go away, because the public’s suddenly widespread ability to network and share information at an entirely unprecedented pace kept him in the public spotlight, even while network television cameras avoided him like the plague throughout most of his campaign.
So the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party had to do a lot more moving and shaking behind the scenes than they were used to, and they got caught red-handed. They panicked, and they got caught.
Naturally, they had to push so hard and take so many risks because allowing a true progressive to take the lead of the Democratic Party would be the end of the party in all but name. Democratic politicians have long been forced to walk a precarious line between stringing along their progressive base on one hand and keeping their corporate bosses happy on the other.
Should those bosses stop funding the party, they’ll all lose their jobs and the Democratic Party as we know it would cease to exist. Should they lose their progressive base, they won’t have enough voter support to win elections. It’s a tricky balancing act.
Well, in 2016 they stepped far to the east of that fine line as we all caught a head-on glimpse of the disgusting beast behind the curtain, and we’re not going to just forget what we saw. The casual, routine way the DNC brass are shown brazenly assaulting American democracy over and over and over again in those emails shows that none of this was in any way new or outside the normal way the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs behind closed doors. And as I pointed out the other day, rank and file Dems are all acting as though this is perfectly normal and acceptable, which of course means that none of it is going to change.
I literally had a Hillary supporter tell me today that the illicit primary isn’t a big deal because elections don’t matter, that it’s organization and activism that gets things done. He ran away (as they so often do) when I challenged him on this, so I’ll just share what I would have told him with you, dear reader:
Organization and activism is not to sway politicians, it’s to sway the people. Get enough people looking at the issue your activism is calling attention to, and you get them talking to their friends and writing their congressman and getting journalists salivating over a hot story, and eventually it becomes a hot enough issue that the politicians say “Holy smokes I’d better appease the people or it’ll cost me the next election!”
Notice how it comes right back to elections? No elections, no activism. The people do not have a voice if their election process is manipulated by the people responsible for ensuring their fairness.
So I say the hell with them all. Let’s collapse their progressive base; should be easy enough to do, seeing as it’s us. Centrists will stay with the Democrats, Democrats will compensate for the loss of our support by absorbing votes from the crumbling Republican Party like they’re already doing now, and the Greens can take their place as the major party on the left.
They’ve stopped paying their rent on this slot of the political spectrum, so we serve them an eviction notice on it. They keep losing elections, we keep picking up steam, they consolidate with the Republican Party (if it survives) to pick up their 270 electoral votes for elections to the executive branch, and we become their powerful opposition. The Bernie Sanders campaign revealed that there are vastly more progressives in America than anyone had previously suspected, and as the word gets out about how sane we are compared to those raving lunatics, there will only become more of us.
The Democrats have kept their beady eyes locked on the Greens as soon as they began the slow process of forming a cohesive party in the ’80s, and they jump at every possible opportunity to dismiss and diminish them while consistently pretending not to feel threatened. They’ve been aggressively pushing the narrative that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000 (debunked in Disinfo here, for the record), even to this day as they hypocritically back a candidate who actively supported all of George W. Bush’s worst decisions (the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, and the bank bailouts, for whoever’s counting).
This frantic smear campaign continues against Jill Stein today. Typing the words “Jill Stein anti science” into a Google search bar currently yields about 283,000 results, full of Correct the Record shill blogs and attack editorials by corporate journalists trying to get on the good side of what they hope will be the next administration. They persist with these baseless smears even though Stein is a medical doctor who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and taught medicine there for years, and she is published in many scientific journals. Even Snopes debunked the accusations that she was anti-vaccine months ago. That’s a low bar for journalistic integrity if you’re publishing smear that even Snopes debunks.
Why do they attack her so frantically? Same reason they attacked Sanders. Democrats don’t fear the right, they fear the left. Please give yourself the gift of watching this impressively lucid five-minute video when you get a chance, which explains in detail how members of the major political parties are bought by corporate donations (which Green Party members are expressly forbidden from accepting) and shows clearly how those donations affect their decisions. Democrats have built themselves an enormous palace made from the mortar of corporatism and the bones of oil war victims, and if the progressives take control of, or worse, replace their party, it all comes crashing down, because progressives oppose the Wal-Mart economy, Wall Street cronyism, predatory trade agreements, and the propping up of the U.S. dollar with U.S. military might, all of which are intrinsic elements of neoliberalism, the predominant ideology of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
If the Democrats lose power, they will no longer be the only thing pretending to keep the Republican Party in check by being somewhat slightly to the left of them. This left-foot, right-foot game of inching deeper and deeper into corporatist plutocracy via pretend compromise after pretend compromise between the two pretend-oppositional parties will come grinding to a halt and fall to pieces. All that needs to happen is for us progressives to cease feeding into that movement with our votes, and throw in a green foot that’s marching unequivocally in the other direction.
This can’t happen if we write in Bernie. As much as we love him, the Democrats have no fear of the Bernie write-in; there’s even a rumor that the idea is being actively encouraged by Hillary super PACs. Bernie is in an abusive relationship with the Democratic Party, like a battered wife who keeps saying her bruises are from falling down the stairs.
We can’t throw a monkey wrench in the plutocracy machine by writing Bernie in, nor by writing in Gary Johnson, since the New York Times reports that he’s taking votes from Trump and Clinton equally, effectively cancelling out the damage he does to the two-legged beast we’re fighting here. Anyone who’s ever made a study of muay thai knows that it’s much more efficient to chop down one of your opponent’s legs than to try and target them both equally, since they need both to move anyway. Pouring all our votes into an attack from the left is a vastly more efficient assault on the beast we’re trying to take down.
If we refuse to go back to sleep and keep aggressively and uncompromisingly pushing the progressive revolution, the plutocracy machine will be shrugged off like a heavy coat on a warm summer day. If we take down the plutocracy machine, we save America. If we save America, we save the world. Keep assaulting the beast from the left and we’ll either replace it or take it over. And it all starts by filling out the box for a skinny Massachusetts doctor who eats berries instead of drinking coffee because she finds it more energizing.
The Democratic Party has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it has no interest in serving the people. It therefore deserves to die, just like the many, many other political parties all over the world that have died as a result of becoming too corrupt to serve the people.
Turns out 188 years is too long. Here’s your eviction notice, donkey party. Get out.
[Featured Image by Alex Brandon/AP Images]
