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 Deemocrats' primary appeal, in all of the cases mentioned above, is the avoidance of 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. One wonders how destitute the bottom 90% has to be before politics becomes interesting, perhaps for the first time.