You really have to suspect that something is wrong when someone as clearly possessed of the criminal mentality as Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner in the 2016 Presidential race. You can see this in the electoral fraud that has accompanied a great number of primaries, from Iowa to Illinois to Arizona to New York and much, much more.

Now, of course American history has featured Presidents with the criminal mentality before -- Richard Nixon comes to mind, although Nixon's policies were far to the left of the ones we can expect from Clinton Mark Two. And we've certainly seen Presidents elected by syndicates -- Reagan and Bush Junior come to mind, although neither of those personalities had the syndicate talent outside of the obvious public speaking abilities of both. But Clinton Mark Two will in all likelihood be the first President to be elected while her criminal mentality is on clear display.

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So what is at play here? One thing that is certainly at play is that Democrats, as individuals and as a group, have circulated a reactionary mythology, which grants all sorts of nice-sounding names to itself while reconciling us to the same old disastrous world order. As Kees van der Pijl said in a book about myth and religion in foreign policy:

All historical societies rely on some form of transcendent logic to legitimate their political-economic order and motivate people to abide by its routines; in emergencies, this aspect of collective will is only intensified. (ix)

It's not clear, however, that everyone is going to believe in a particular order's mythology. Those of little power watch the great battles between the believers in various mythologies, maybe participating, and maybe not. But as Elizabeth Janeway points out in her masterwork Powers of the Weak, there is an initial stage toward collective self-assertion in which "the weak look consciously at the world-definitions of the powerful and find them questionable." (160) If we are to be a movement to change the world, we should first recognize ourselves as being in the position described by Janeway.

The task at hand, then, is to examine the Democrats' reactionary mythology as a world-definition, one among many, promoted by the powerful -- to be accepted by the weak. A demonstration of the Democrats' reactionary mythology is now on full display at AmericaBlog, in John Aravosis' article "Mrs. Sanders suggests Bernie's supporters won't vote for Hillary." Here it is:

Bernie Sanders’ wife Jane said yesterday that few if any of Bernie Sanders’ supporters would support Hillary Clinton in the fall, ensuring Bernie’s induction into the Ralph Nader hall of fame.

If Mrs. Sanders’ threat is correct, then Sanders and his supporters would be assuring a Trump victory in the fall, and would be stepping into the shoes of Ralph Nader, who is roundly reviled on the left for handing the White House to George W. Bush back in the year 2000, when an disgruntled Nader ran as a third-party candidate and stole enough votes from Al Gore to cost him the election.

For believers in the reactionary mythology, Ralph Nader is to be regarded as the Devil incarnate, for "stealing" the 2000 election. Never mind the Supreme Court vote awarding the Presidency to Bush, never mind the 200,000+ Florida Democrats who voted for Bush, never mind that the count might have in fact been awarded to Gore had he bothered to demand a recount of all disputed votes. Never mind that the outcome of a hypothetical race without Nader can't be predicted through hindsight given that Nader's presence might have attracted otherwise undecided voters to Gore. The mythology blames Nader, and so all third parties and, in fact, anyone who doesn't vote for the Democrat in a November Presidential election, is equivalent to Nader.

The invocation of this mythology is meant as a cudgel -- any Democrat who harbors the least thought of not voting for reactionary Democrats in final elections is meant to think of the evils of even imagining Republican victory, presumably the end of the world (even though by the same token capitalism is assumed to last forever), and thus to vote, sing the praises of, and campaign for (for instance) John Kerry as if he were George McGovern's second coming.

The True Believers in the Democrats' reactionary mythology see the whole of history as a succession of good (D) Presidents alternating with bad (R) Presidents. No substantive reason is of course given for why the (D) Presidents could possibly lose to those evil (R) candidates from time to time -- maybe they were "bad campaigners" or, in the 2000 case, Nader of course, which set the standard for all future hippie-punchings. True Believers don't really speculate about why the public could be so evil as to elect and re-elect an (R) President.

There is no room in the reactionary mythology's version of history for books such as Robert Pollin's Contours of Descent, in which Clinton's misdeeds enabled Bush's. There's certainly no room in the Democrats' reactionary mythology for the vast rightward descent of politics accompanying the ascent to the Presidency of Barack Obama. (Of course, True Believers in the reactionary mythology would like to blame the Republicans for the sequester, and tell us that Federalized Romneycare ("Obamacare") is the most progressive innovation in American history.) Remember that the Republicans had an environmental policy before Obama? The True Believers don't. Said environmental policy is written up in Gingrich's book A Contract With The Earth. At any rate, it can be shown that the Republicans consistently offer policy "to the right of" the Democrats, and that Democrat "triangulation" thus pushes the whole system to the right -- so if you're willing to vote for a right-wing Democrat, you should be held accountable for the Republicans you've thus produced.

The Democrats' reactionary mythology praises the Obama administration's education policies as "progressive" while in reality Obama policies are as bad as Bush's if not worse. At least the Bush minions did not go around closing schools and calling it "progress."

The Democrats' reactionary mythology is not, then, a history of capitalism. A history of capitalism would start with an understanding of the dynamics of the capitalist system and its general trend, beginning with the early "conquest" capitalism of the 16th and 17th centuries, through to the capitalism of the Industrial Revolutions, to the consumer capitalism of the period after World War II and to the neoliberalism of the period after 1973 and (more strictly) after 1980. The Democrats' reactionary mythology is not about the reality of an elite ruling class which in historical time has merged into elite associations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum; rather, elites have to be separated into (D) and (R) baskets so that True Believers can know which elites to trust and which ones to declaim. One sees the thinking behind True Believership in the reactionary mythology in the sort of rhetoric which pretends that the Koch brothers are the only billionaires influencing public policy in America today. Everyone else knows better.

The Democrats' reactionary mythology is not, to be sure, a history of capitalism like what one can read in the economist Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence, in which we are told that "the odds therefore favour a still further opening up of the already enormous chasm between the income and profits actually produced by the world economy and the paper claims generated by it" (343). Rather, the Democrats' reactionary mythology seeks to cherry-pick statistics (using mostly those which emphasize paper claims while ignoring others which discuss real-life outcomes) to advertise the merits of the "Obama recovery" while ignoring the enormous regression in working-class net wealth that began with Obama and which persists to this day.

In sum, the Democrats' reactionary mythology is about blaming Ralph Nader for something Barack Obama himself said:

Republicans and Democrats actually are “fighting inside the 40-yard lines” on key issues, President Obama said Tuesday, and anyone who doubts that needs to visit other countries to get a look at real political and ideological divides.

Consistency, you see, would have demanded that the True Believers call Obama a "Naderite" for professing such beliefs. (And here you're supposed to remember when Ralph Nader said, during the 2000 campaign, that there wasn't a "dime's worth of difference" between the Democrats and the Republicans.)

So what motivates the Democrats' reactionary mythology? In this era of capitalism, profit-taking has moved increasingly from productive capital into finance capital. This, more than anything else, would account for why (as the economist Bill Black puts it) Obama has given banking fraud a free pass whereas banking fraud was in fact prosecuted during Reagan's administration.

In this era of end-times capitalism, when profit-mongering runs rampant over increasingly desperate masses in the absence of a frontier to exploit, the two party system acts as a sort of "good cop/ bad cop" routine. The Democrats' reactionary mythology, then, is the siren song of the good cop.