The Democratic Party propaganda line
As America is cast into ruins, heedlessly plundered by its elites both financial and political --
-- while it endures a second senile President, we might ask about how it came to be. How did it come to be that the US became a place where businesses act as if their customers are made of money, politics is a commodity, "defense" means a global police state, mass shootings occur every day, and where the standard approach to the problem of the unhoused is “sweeps,” which is to say moving them somewhere else?
How did it come to be, that n the America of today, education, health care, and housing are affordable at the cost of deep debt servitude, and maybe one in a thousand citizens will publicly ask why the US can't have China's high-speed rail, Finland’s education system, Canada's universal health care, Germany's solar power, or Europe's mass transit?
How did it come to be, that in 1973 the US was, fundamentally, granted permission to print or encode as many Dollars as it wanted with the expectation that said Dollars would retain their value -- and how did it come to be that the US government used this magical ability it had merely as a series of grifts, grifts which continue to this day?
Most specifically, how did it come to be that America came to vote for, and love, its Democratic Party, a party which gave away about eighty percent of government in the US to the Republican Party during Obama's tenure, a party of creatures of money which stands for money and only for money, the party most distinctly responsible for teaching Americans how to expect nothing from its politicians unless they have paid in advance? Let's keep in mind, as we discuss the matter of the Democratic Party, that this will be the victorious party in 2026.
The approach I will take here will lean upon the canons of rhetoric. Now, once upon a time, in the Greek and Roman worlds, there was a commonly-acknowledged recipe for creating speeches, and these were the canons of rhetoric. To make a good speech in such a world, you had to pay attention to each of the canons of rhetoric: 1) Invention, or how you come up with an argument, 2) arrangement, or how you put your speech together, 3) style, or which words you choose, 4) memory, or what you do to remember your speech, and 5) delivery, or how you display your speech with other things than just words. You, in short, had to pay attention to your use of each of the canons of rhetoric if your speech was to be any good.
Two things, though. 1) the canons of rhetoric apply to all of the new media that have come into being since Greek and Roman times, and 2) the most important of these canons is invention, which is important in identifying the topic of a speech or other communication.
So here are the Democratic Party's preferred appeals/ topics -- how it came up with arguments over the past forty or so years -- its sense of inventio:
1. "We're triangulating."
This, if I recall correctly, was the Clinton administration's primary excuse for its rhetoric. What they were arguing was that they could peel off votes from the Republican Party if they talked like Republicans. When push came to shove, as it turned out, they also voted like Republicans. This was an appeal, I might add, which did not apply to Joe Biden, whose Ukraine grift met its main opposition from within the Republican Party.
2. "Nader was a spoiler."
This was the appeal they used to discourage voters from voting for alternative political parties. Either you vote for the Democrats, or you vote for the Republicans. Your vote for the Greens is a vote for the Republicans, they would argue, because our God is a jealous God, like in the Bible. At this late date we might ask what is being spoiled here.
3. "You have to vote for us."
This appeal is similar to the previous appeal, but it appeals to the common appeal to the so-called Left to save Biden's skin in the 2020 election. "You can save America by voting Democrat!" the nice liberals with big egos echoed in one chorus. Never mind that, later on in 2024, the Democrats stood by with fingers firmly up their noses while Joe Biden perpetrated a genocide and sent the rest of the money and weapons to Grift Ukraine.
4. "We can take control of the Democratic Party!"
This was an appeal to liberals, staged by entities such as the Justice Democrats. Never mind that the same people making this appeal are the ones who in actual practice fortify those who most need taking over.
5. "Russia! Russia! Russia!"
This was of course the appeal to the theory, popularized by (among others) Heather Cox Richardson, that the Russian government is buying ours. Today, of course, the big issue among a couple of renegade Republicans (see the Due Dissidence video above) is the US government's enslavement to another important entity, the Zionist entity, which cannot be mentioned by either the Democratic or Republican Parties for obvious reasons. The main one of these reasons is, of course, that the Zionist entity has penetrated the United States' power structure to a far, far greater extent than Russia could ever hope to achieve.
*****
So why don't people dump the Democrats? The Democrats' primary appeal, in all of the cases mentioned above, is to the voters' great desire to avoid engaging politics. There is an obvious bandwagon effect to American politics -- the most obvious solution to all of our numerous and long-standing ills is for everyone to vote Green, but the Democrats were the consensus choice from the get-go, and so people vote Democrat because the political imagination is moribund in this day and age (unlike, I might add, in the 1850s, when the Republican Party was founded because the Whig Party wasn't measuring up). But, beyond that, Americans want politics to go away, and voting Democrat is the habit that allows their minds to tune politics out. "I did my part," the Dem voters all doubtless tell themselves after voting. One wonders how destitute the bottom 90% has to be before politics becomes interesting, perhaps for the first time.
Comments
A message of hope
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
Wot the hell
.
when you have the likes of a bibi
spokesman as your poster child
for whatever agenda, what else do
you expect as an outcome?
There is no other course but failure.
Human rights do not exist in this agenda.
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Zionism is a social disease
Cass, you've been entertaining a wide range
.
....of political theories and narrative alternatives, lately, as though you were trying them out to see how they connect with the Big Picture. In their own way, they are compelling issues that all hint at external controls and invisible powers. But I don't think that any of these intrigues and scandals hold the key to rescuing the United States of returning the power over the government to the People. I do not believe that exposing any of this corruption to public scrutiny will lead to political reform.
Here's why:
#1. The American People have no political mechanism for imposing reform upon the government. Nor are they properly educated on such matters. The US Public almost always gravitates to demagogues. They don't know any better.
#2. From 1,800 on, the US government and its dueling Parties was used to divide the People and manipulate them. At no time were the politicians who won elections ever focused on uniting the People, with the exception of Lincoln.
#3. Campaign funding is not limited to a fixed amount of Public Funding per candidate, which leads to wide-spread corruption and bribery, and the political domination by the wealthy class.
#4. Very few of our current politicians have the necessary qualifications to hold office in an advanced Democracy, such as the Federal Government of the United States. If they were qualified, the United States would not be the dumpster fire that it is, today. It would have a modern Constitution. It would have a modern infrastructure. The Neocon psychopaths and war mongers would be in mental hospitals, in prisons, or banned from government. They would not be playing musical chairs between administrations, waiting for top-level appointments to the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the West Wing.
I'll write about 'proper qualifications' and motivations for elected Federal leaders another time. At the moment, no one in the US seems to have the sense to care about this. Meanwhile, below is a summary of the thinking that unqualified candidates have established in the Federal Government:
Your #1
Isn't exactly true. I remember my kid taking government and civics in high school. The reality of what goes on outside the class room was just demoralizing. That put what the courses he took, Declaration of Independence, supreme court, governments responsibility etc. in the category of "what a pile of shit".
Mostly the politicians in charge have risen in wealth so far above us that their only contact with us is giving fundraising speeches at rallies, puffing up incremental change as revolutionary. The rest is rubbing elbows with the truly wealthy. If you're not a wealthy pol, you aspire to be one. We know what the problem is. We know that little of what goes on in government is for our benefit. We deserve better. So what are we going to do about it?
Right now we have 2 parties, and they say we should worship them because that's DEMOCRACY!!! In reality it's vote for one or the other. Take it or leave it. What choice do you have?
p.s. your centerist one is right on.
Certainly just electing someone won't solve the problem
Although electing someone might alter things a bit. But I don't think the problem is that "we're stupid." Rather, the problem faced by the West and its conquered provinces is that of a failure of imagination. With the various examples of inventio mentioned above, the various Democratic Party topoi if you will, the problem is of course that they are all garbage and that the Democrats, generally, cannot imagine themselves not doing the triangulation dance, or demanding anything of government, or for that matter holding fair and competitive primaries in their Presidential elections, or campaign promises that are anything more than exercises in pandering.
My thesis is fortified by a reading, not agreeing on all points, of Cornelius Castoriadis' most interesting essays, "The Retreat from Autonomy" and "Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads." I'd be interested in your opinion of these essays, especially of Castoriadis' thesis:
Now, certainly it is true that many of our rulers are "incompetents," and indeed it is true that our donor class prefers malleable politicians over those with minds of their own. But what really distinguishes our political class is their collective failures to do the right thing, or even to imagine what that right thing might be, and so for instance George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were men of some intelligence who most obviously started from the wrong premises and proceeded from those premises in the wrong directions. Obama, for instance, might have imagined that the right thing to do was to follow through on his promise to create a public option in health care, but he couldn't imagine actually doing it, and so it never happened.
As regards your numbers one, two, and three, I will say this:
1) there are no demagogues anymore. Trump is a senile old man that the Trumpies imagine to be a demagogue. Rather, Antonio Gramsci is still correct: The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.
2) Nobody yet dares to oppose the utopia of money, which is to say, capitalism. But this, too, will pass.
3) As I've suggested above, having a qualified political class is a doable thing. But our donor class, the real rulers of America, don't want to do it, nor can they imagine themselves doing it. It is much easier for them to destroy the universities, which is in fact what they're doing.
I hope that helps.
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
Right on
.
Good points all. Small quibble though.
It goes beyond a failure of imagination.
Suggesting a lack of will and the inability to
stem the tide of 'larger forces' are in play as well.
Zionism is a social disease
Yes the dems are scum and Trump is absurdly rotten as well
And there is an immense amount of propaganda pumped into our collective consciousness every minute of every day. And some portion of the general public believes the lies.
We can either ride it out passively -- or try to do something about it.
My opinion is that the nuts and bolts of conducting American "elections" is vulnerable to computer hacking and therefore elections are unreliable.
No point in elaborating on my take on praxis -- direct action.
Nice screed on the Dems' bullshit.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Both parties are
undergoing some noticeable internal strife, finally. Not that it will be noticed by the party management, of course: their paychecks are secure, as long as there are oligarchs to appropriately fund their lavish lifestyles in exchange for the ruthless suppression of any substantive change.
The rank-and-file (in both parties) are finally starting to experience some discomfort, belated though it may be. Perhaps that will lead to some agonizing reappraisal on their parts. But ultimately, it will require people to actually believe, deep in their heart of hearts, that continuing to knee-jerk vote for the jersey color that they and their parents and grandparents have always voted for is not leading to any improvement in their lives. And that that inertia has, in fact, resulted in a net decline in their lifestyles, incomes, avoidance of war coming to their backyards, and the social dynamic as a whole.
Imagination only enters into it if there is deep enough disgruntlement for people to awaken enough to imagine a change to begin with. The Powers That Be have managed to provide bread and circuses enough to keep the majority of voters at least somewhat satisfied, thus far, even if it has all been purchased on credit.
It is likely that the only thing that will stir most people out of their eternally-somnolescent states will be either bankruptcy or bloodshed: that of their children and their neighbors and their relatives and their towns and their states and their country. Up until then, it will all be just ducky-fine, as always, or at least fine enough for the time being- if they have a flatscreen and an iPhone and Doritos for dinner.
By the time that the vast majority of people will awaken enough to engage their imaginations at all, it will likely be too late to matter. And I think that we can all agree that that will be very sad.
The only other thing that gives me some glimmer of hope would be the possibility of many, *many* of our so-called leaders being perp-walked into anonymous vans by heavily-armed masked men with no visible ID. A few of those on the teevee might awaken the slumbering public consciousness, in a way somewhat similar to bloodshed- but with a whole lot less of that whole "dying" thing.
Ahh, one can hope. In the meantime, I will continue to only vote for people without a red or blue jersey, as if it matters.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
By the way, there's a lot of hype these days about The Sopranos
I was and remain a fan of the show -- great entertainment AND brilliant insight into American culture as it entered a new century. I rarely have any interest in the crap inked from the MSN landing page. This is an exception:
There is more worth reading at the link.
I rankle at the explanation for our political misery being our own stupidity.
As we say in Texas, there's no cure for stupid. So this assessment leads to paralysis.
I take a different tack when assessing the lethargy of the American people as our social order is collapsing before our eyes. I believe most average people know the world from their personal experience, and only a small fraction of our hundreds of millions of fellow citizens imagine themselves as social analysts who understand how the Big World Out There and the Big People in Charge go about their business.
As long as the lights stay on and the water comes out of the tap and down the drain, life pretty much goes on. Downhill for the most part, but that's life. You can call this intentional ignorance lack of intelligence, but I call it common sense.
If and when folks feel new kinds and levels of pain from the decline, organizing becomes possible.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.