My friends will have to excuse me for not being sufficiently riled up about the second coming of Trump. To me, he’s a phase in America’s inevitable decline, on the way to the end of the US Empire.
I wasn’t surprised or shocked by the outcome of the US elections. My friends who were, thought that I should express more outrage at the prospect of a second Trump presidency. After all, they said, Trump is a convicted criminal and racist who supports mass deportations, federal abortion bans and the weaponisation of the Justice Department. My lack of sufficient anger suggested a serious moral failing.
Don’t get me wrong, I explained, I think Trump is a repugnant bigot and con man who played on peoples’ fears and worst instincts but I can’t summon the outrage because I think he is a symptom of a diseased political system and I don’t know what outrage can accomplish.
Instead, I told them, my anger is directed at the Democrats who have consistently failed their one-time working class base for the past 30 years – starting with the neoliberal deregulator and free trader Bill Clinton whose policies deserted industrial workers, slashed the social safety net, and transformed once prosperous communities across the country into opioid addicted wastelands while he triangulated the Democrat party so far to the right that they were barely distinguishable from the Republicans.
I was furious with Obama who pandered to Wall St and Silicon Valley oligarchs, who staffed his cabinet with the very criminals who brought on the devastating 2008 financial crisis and who enshrined a corporate run health insurance system (created by the right-wing Heritage Foundation) that extinguished any hope of public universal health care for decades to come.
I was outraged by the nomination of Goldman Sachs darling Hillary Clinton whose Wall Street-friendly presidential campaign inspired Chuck Schumer to famously announce that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin” – a political strategy that virtually insured Trump’s 2016 victory.
I was sickened when the DNC installed the weak and unpopular Joe Biden after torpedoing the campaign of Bernie Sanders who was leading in all the polls with a platform of true progressive reform including universal health care, free higher education, the raising of the federal minimum wage and regulating Wall St to address the “obscene levels of wealth inequality” in the US.
And I was outraged again when Kamala Harris totally ignored all the lessons of the past and decided once again to court moderate Republican votes instead of presenting a bold progressive agenda. I thought that going on the campaign trail with arch neoliberal war monger Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban was the Democratic party’s final farewell tour to everything they once claimed to stand for.
So, my friends will have to excuse me for not being sufficiently riled up about the second coming of Trump. To me, he’s a phase in America’s inevitable decline, on the way to the end of the US Empire.
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Publish date : 2024-11-30 04:55:00
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