I was looking over some of my old essays, particularly the ones from four years ago, before the 2016 Democratic Convention. I thought it would be interesting, with the virtue of hindsight, to consider my impressions at that time in light of what's happened since.

The following essay, "The Birth of a Movement, the End of Democracy," (https://caucus99percent.com/content/birth-movement-end-democracy) was published on 6/6/2016, roughly a month before the Democratic Convention. I'm skipping over the bulk of the essay, which was a general assessment of what the last forty years or so of American history has done to the country, the people, and the likelihood of forming any successful and persistent movement. What I'm looking at here are the specific observations and predictions I made about 2016, noting how those impressions hold up in the light of the last four years' events.

First, we have a genuine people's movement growing in the womb of the Sanders campaign. It should be our hope to deliver it, healthy and alive, into a larger world. And it's healthy! But we could be looking at a rocky delivery, and we may or may not have Sanders' help in bringing it to birth. In my opinion, as much as I like Bernie, we'd better not count on him being there as a midwife.

I still think there was a nascent people's movement implicit in the Sanders campaign, something which, if provided with the right tools and conditions, could have grown into a prominent and persistent force. I may have been a bit overly sanguine about its stage of development and vitality. As for Bernie, my impressions haven't changed in four years. I like Bernie, I appreciate much of what he did--and I was right that we couldn't count on him as a movement leader.

It doesn't matter that we don't like the fact that it's growing in this particular womb. There's no point in beefing about the dangers that the electoral womb presents--like, for instance, the possibility that various corrupt or crappy actions taken by politicians such as Barack Obama, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and their backers could negatively impact the movement trying to be born. There's no point in beefing about the fact that Bernie, though honest, is not as radical as the movement he inspired, and is far more willing, apparently, to settle for somewhat useless concessions like progressive planks in a platform nobody pays attention to anyway. There's no point beefing about any of this. The people's movement is--where the people's movement is. We might all wish that it hadn't happened this way. We might wish that it had arisen as a bunch of leftist non-partisan political kibbutzes in 500 American cities and towns, engaging in a mass experiment of alternative currency, non-corporate economics, and organic homegrown vegetables. But it didn't. It is where it is. It's our job to try to bring it to birth.

In fact, it would have been far better for all of us had the movement-fetus grown up in the womb of Occupy, rather than the womb of the 2016 Sanders campaign. If only Occupy had managed to make the transition from protest to movement, from a single tactic to a network of small, persistent, independent communities. We might at least have gotten an organized network of indie media news reporters out of it, which we were (in my opinion) really close to getting while Occupy was going on--and we might have gotten far more. But most Occupiers and their supporters accepted the battle for the public square as the paramount battle, the determinant of their success or failure (if paramilitary forces drive you out of the park, your movement has failed). That set of assumptions ended Occupy, and once people were convinced that Occupy had "failed," that conviction kept Occupy from recurring. The next available frame for such work was the Sanders campaign, as many here have pointed out.

I was right, I believe, that once the people's movement arose within the Sanders campaign, no amount of grousing or reasoned analysis was going to change that fact. We had to deal with what was, no matter how far from optimal the conditions were.

Second, we should keep an eye on those politicians and what they're likely to do, so that we can come up with possible countermeasures. For instance, I believe that the DNC is going to jettison Hillary Clinton, or let her sink under her own weight, and replace her with Bankruptcy Biden, with Warren as a VP. This will sideline Warren and stifle her voice against Wall St--which has mostly been words rather than deeds, but I'm sure Wall St will be happy to have her silenced anyway. More importantly, it turns Warren into a poisoned apple which many in the movement will be tempted to accept, turning her from a critical voice into a force of co-optation. In my opinion, this move--which likely comes from Obama--is the most potentially dangerous blow the plutocracy could strike at the infant movement, because if enough people are placated by a Biden/Warren ticket, a large part of the movement could dissipate. It is, in essence, the attempt to do again what Obama did so effectively in 2008--get in front of the movement and dismantle it.

I'll take this in pieces.

I believe that the DNC is going to jettison Hillary Clinton, or let her sink under her own weight, and replace her with Bankruptcy Biden,

This was an instance of me assuming that my enemies were at least as smart and rational as I was. Mainly because I don't think of myself as any kind of genius, I make this mistake all the time. It would have been highly intelligent, if the DNC wanted a Democrat in the White House--and I think they did, always assuming that the Republicans had sufficient numbers in Congress to protect them from any kind of accountability--to jettison Hillary and replace her with a Biden redolent with the images and feelings associated with the Obama administration. Perhaps I underestimated the size, or more likely, the efficacy, of Hillary Clinton's ego in controlling other people's behavior.

However, they did go to Biden as their next move--just four years later than I expected them to. Given his association with Obama, I suppose it wasn't a particularly impressive leap to assert that they would run Biden--except that he's old, white, and had already run for President multiple times without success.

replace her with Bankruptcy Biden, with Warren as a VP. This will sideline Warren and stifle her voice against Wall St--which has mostly been words rather than deeds, but I'm sure Wall St will be happy to have her silenced anyway. More importantly, it turns Warren into a poisoned apple which many in the movement will be tempted to accept, turning her from a critical voice into a force of co-optation.

Wow, was I spot-on about that.

In my opinion, this move--which likely comes from Obama--is the most potentially dangerous blow the plutocracy could strike at the infant movement, because if enough people are placated by a Biden/Warren ticket, a large part of the movement could dissipate. It is, in essence, the attempt to do again what Obama did so effectively in 2008--get in front of the movement and dismantle it.

and that is, indeed, what the Warren candidacy was all about. If her 2020 run had been even a little more successful, as opposed to being mostly embarrassing, I think she would have been the VP choice. As it was, the PTB basically used Warren to draw away a large part of Bernie's support, and then, when she had done as much damage as she was likely to do, had her blow the rest of her wad in a well-timed pre-Iowa character attack, which also had the desired side effect of hamstringing feminism with yet another well-publicized, nasty accusation of sexism based on nothing. Such attacks abound on social media, but one would hope that any public figure who gave a shit about feminism would refrain from making such a gesture. Movements lose credibility when their claims are based on lies or nothing at all.

But more than that, it is a way of getting people to accept, because they are desperate, a President and Vice-President who didn't receive a single vote during the primary process, and who, in fact, were essentially appointed by the DNC. Although this process has always been legal, in the current age, in which journalists ask billionaires whether democracy itself isn't the problem, and Hillary supporters say on Twitter that superdelegates exist to control the passions of the people, it represents a dangerous move in an ongoing psy-op to convince people that the public is a bunch of untrustworthy fools who need experts like Barack Obama and the DNC to give them what's good for them.

It looks like they're not going to have a brokered convention (assuming we even have an election). However, as I said in "Nobody's Voting for Joe Biden," (4/12/2020), https://caucus99percent.com/content/nobodys-voting-joe-biden, Biden's dementia, and the inescapable knowledge that he is, therefore, a figurehead, has much the same effect. If you vote for someone who can't reliably remember that he's running for President, you're expressing unconditional trust in the Democratic leaders who will, one supposes, choose who will actually be pulling the strings and running the Oval Office--since Biden obviously won't. Barack Obama and the DNC will give you what's good for you. It's your job to pull the lever they want you to, and trust.

Apart from an assault on the Internet itself, which the movement uses to talk to itself, this is the greatest danger I see to the movement trying to be born.

Well, we're certainly seeing both those dangers, in spades.

I don't often revisit my former work, but I thought it was interesting to see where my ideas were right, where they went wrong, and where they were, oddly, both right and wrong.

How are you all doing today?