Barack Hussein Obama did for the Democrats what George Walker Bush did for Republicans — each undermined his own party. But while Republicans sort of figured out that something went horribly wrong, Democrats have not done the same . . . though a few may be coming around.
But there will be little blaming of Obama, who will probably loom large in the future of left-leaning America, just as Reagan has in right-leaning America. In both cases, however, the looming is illusory. Neither lived up to their promises, and both destabilized the political-economic system in important ways, leading to the current ideological and political impasse.
It is important to remember: the American people did not unite behind Donald Trump. What happened is easy enough to explain: the backlash against Hillary Rodham Clinton (many Democratic and independent voters merely staying home, others voting for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein) was great enough to allow Trump to squeak past the gatekeepers and into the White House.
Since then, things have gotten extremely interesting.
The last ten months have given stage to an amazing mass hysteria against Trump, especially by partisan Democrats, and this hysteria has had several important effects:
1. It has solidified huge hunks of the population against the Democracy brand, perhaps enough so to ensure a re-election for the man they hate three years hence;
2. It has become a rallying point for those left of center, thus serving to typify the importance of symbolic action and matters of style over substance that has grown up on the left since the 1960s. In this, it will likely marginalize current Democratic core constituencies, insulating them from any viable future mainstream ruling coalition.
3. It has blinded both the hard left and the alt- and hard-right to the obvious fact that Trump is a paper sack of a leader: empty and easy to tear apart. He has few real convictions, and proceeds mainly on the bluster that he is a good manager. As if the current ideological impasse in America can be fixed by “management”!
I had a few more effects in my head when I started this, but now I’ve forgotten my other points!
Mainly, though, the ideological impasse deepens. I don’t think Trump will solve much of anything, though I have greatly enjoyed his constant barrage against the media. Trump learned from Perot that media ridicule was a winner in the American heartland, and amongst independents as well as Republicans nearly everywhere.
Democrats tend not to understand this, as far as I can tell. They seem in denial of the most obvious truth of our time: that they are the ones in charge, that it is their tribe that has captured the commanding heights of Western culture, and that this power has corrupted their own ideas in amazing ways.
It appears that the anti-Trump mania is dying down a bit. Maybe the Democrats will wise up. But they are so tribal these days, that I don’t think they can see the way out.
I hazard that it would have been easy to carry on the Democratic hegemony another two presidential terms, even with Horrid Hillary, had Democrats done the thing most needful at the beginning of the BHO presidency: co-opting the Tea Party. It would have been so easy. But they just had to engage in racism-baiting and class hysteria against those whom Hillary later dubbed “the deplorables,” and the Occupy movement sealed the fate. The rift was in. Solid. Embedded in stone.
In 2000, I had been astounded that the Republicans could so stupidly piss away their advantage by choosing George Bush as the standard bearer. The GOP would have lost everything had not 9/11 happened, Bush being such a lightweight. But incompetence is bipartisan. In 2009, I was astounded to witness the Democracy piss away its advantage, preferring the moral comforts of classism and intersectional victim-mongering.
Right now, both parties are despised by a majority of Americans.
A major realignment is in the offing. What it will become I’m not sure. Now is the time for a Mule to really change things. (Though Trump was a political Mule, he has proved to be anything but a governing Mule. He has been so predictable — though he has not proved as similar to Obama in substance as he otherwise would have simply because of the anti-Trump protests. Understandably, he doubled down to please his base, though that he has done with mixed effects.) But there remains the nagging problem behind everything: the fragile instability of Late-Stage Churning State Capitalism. When the financial system collapses again, almost anything could happen, but the most likely will be something Democrats will be most unhappy with: a real fascist. Not paper-sack Trump. A real tyrant with a demonstrable and quite substantive nasty edge.
He (she?) could be worshipped by desperate millions.
Were I a major party mover/shaker, I’d be preparing for that right now, to get “my” Antichrist in the lineup to steal the limelight.
As it is, I’m plotting ways that my kind might influence future political and governmental shifts . . . in a positive way. I’m trying to be sneaky. For now is not the time to stumble-bum our way away from the precipice — the Abyss — we all will face, perhaps soon.
Crisis is just around the corner.
twv
Second illustration courtesy of James Littleton Gill.
Wirkman Comment 