The Democratic Party social imaginary

Over at RBN they posted this short, six minute video:

Kyle. Dude. Here is the problem, in a nutshell. You think you have a choice. You don't. (You have owners, they own you, as George Carlin said.) There is of course the obvious lack of choice you have, insofar as you can really only have a say in who the President will be if you live in a "swing state." But your delusion that you have choice goes further than that.

What got you into this great pretense that you participate in a democracy is the rhetoric about "defending democracy" that filled your brain from the "news" pieces you saw during that tiny amount of time you spent in recent months thinking about Ukraine. (More on Ukraine below.) Jaime Harrison made the Democratic Party candidate choice for you several months ago when he said Biden was going to be the nominee. CNN is now out there telling people that Joe Biden has no serious opposition as the Dem nominee, while RFK Jr. stands outside the CNN building, pounding on the plexiglass and yelling "I exist." If you persist in being a Democrat, you will vote for Biden, or Harris or Newsom or whomever the Democratic Party replaces him with, and that candidate will very likely lose in next year's election. That should pretty much end the conversation. But if you persist in being a Democrat, it doesn't, and so the conversation drags on in irrelevance. Here's the most recent polling:

Well, maybe Newsom has a chance, mostly because -- unlike Biden or Harris -- he can campaign, but that chance dwindles if the Dems wait until the convention to choose, and they're not moving now. Note to Kyle Kulinski: please prepare yourself to oppose the next Republican administration in 2025. Also, Kyle Kulinski, prepare yourself for a future in which the United States is in the semi-periphery, and Russia and China are the reactionary core nations of the world. Joe Biden has been and is a contributing factor in the decline of your favorite nation-state.

Since the Democratic Party social imaginary appears at its most unhinged in its notions of Ukraine, let's take a look at the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mainstream Democratic Party line on Ukraine. AOC's perspective is interesting because she once represented some ideals which transcend the Democratic Party and is now trying hard to represent a more "realistic" stance. Here is what she said:

“It’s a legitimate conversation. I think on one hand, it is important for us to underscore what a dramatic threat to global order Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is and continues to be. We must defend democracy. We cannot allow this reversion into almost a late 19th-century imperial invasion order – it is so incredibly destabilising and dangerous. We must fight against that precedent. We must protect the democracy of Ukraine and the sovereignty of Ukraine 100%.

"We must defend democracy." Only in the Democratic Party social imaginary does this sentence have anything to do with Ukraine. In the physical world, Ukraine is not a democracy, and the United States is not defending it. AOC, then, is spouting nonsense, intended to defend existing policy.

The term "social imaginary" defines that aspect of society which must be imagined, and which cannot merely be represented by physical objects. Since our human brains are built for imagining things, it must be said that the social imaginary is us, and we are it. The social imaginary is our collective mindset, the aggregate of our personalities, the zeitgeist, the weltanschauung.

(Indeed it must be observed that, as imagining beings, our imaginations are so big as to constitute threats to our own survival, both individually and collectively. Why do you think we fought two disastrous world wars? Why do you think climate change is an existential threat, just as nuclear war still is?)

The Democratic Party social imaginary, like the Republican Party social imaginary, is full of concepts which are obsolete or which have no basis in reality. Nonsense, it must be observed, is a great tool for social cohesion among human beings, as any offhand observation of the Catholic Church or of Scientology will reveal. The most pernicious of concepts within the Democratic Party social imaginary is the fake "you have a choice" concept. There's nothing wrong with actual choice, but -- within the Democratic Party social imaginary -- "you have a choice" is typically unhinged from any square analysis of what choices we actually do and don't have. The "you have a choice" social imaginary, in its Democratic Party version, was once used to promote Bernie Sanders' candidacy as ground to death in rigged elections, and now serves largely to make Democrats feel they are champions of democracy, while in actual practice the Democratic Party works 24/7/365 to deprive the voters of choice.

Perhaps, then, the cure for the Democratic Party social imaginary rests in that same square analysis of what choices we -- individually and collectively -- do and don't have. Since the Democratic Party does not confront the mass public with a choice, but, rather, with the results of its elite consensus, the mass public is fully justified in rejecting or accepting those results when convenient, and also in pursuing the much more difficult task of organizing an alternate choice for itself, through "third party" organizing.

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https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4211189-newsom-defends-biden-am...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) jumped to President Biden’s defense amid concerns over the incumbent’s age and reelection, saying he wants a “seasoned pro.”

“I want a seasoned pro that knows how to get things done,” Newsom said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. “I’m a little old fashioned. I want a guy who produces results and the results are in, it’s been a masterclass.”

“There’s simply no administration in my lifetime that’s been more effective producing more substantive results and we haven’t even started the campaign,” Newsom continued.

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lotlizard's picture

International Talk Like a Pirate Democrat Day.

Arrr, matey, if yer ain’t backin’ Joe Biden then yer ain’t black.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@lotlizard

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"The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States." - Tim Walz