We Know Why GOP Politics are Dangerous. What About Liberal Democrats?

Essays & Excerpts, Series V – Analyzing the Duopoly

Many readers may find the insinuation that the Democratic Party is dangerous to be off putting. However over the course of this post I will rebuke what the Democrats stand for and present readers with evidence as to why our liberal party is more insidious than the GOP, and just as much of a driver for the fall of American democracy. We know the GOP is pushing a full fledged fascist agenda now; burning books (including Night and other literature that depicts horrors of the holocaust and its causes along with books like How to Be Antiracist and Caste, critical analyses of the massive inequality in America), eroding democracy through guaranteed gerrymandered wins that allow local politicians to push radical policy without fear (for example Dems received 53% of the vote in Ohio yet conservatives won 65% of the seats; a supermajority with under 50% of the vote won), playing the victim and inciting violence against vaguely defined enemies of “others,” using conspiratorial misinformation to keep their constituents in an echo chamber of fear and hatred, massive voter suppression campaigns, the rise of outright neo-Nazi groups such as Oath Keepers or Patriot Front…the list could go on for its own post in and of itself. But this isn’t my focus because we know how dangerous the American right is, at least I believe (I hope) the majority of leftists and Democrats do. I will discuss that danger in more depth during upcoming posts.

Conservatives are radicalizing so quickly and effectively because they lure disillusioned people in with partial truths and then direct their anger at leftists and “others” with outright lies. The idea that the establishment capital owning class has an agenda to mislead the public and make us complacent in our own enslavement to them is correct, but it isn’t a deep state Jewish cabal headed by Soros and baby eating liberals. Conservative talking heads and other agents of Republican agitprop are agents of the upper class the same way that the liberals on CNN and Democratic leaders are. The goal of most (if not all) prominent talking heads, on either side of the aisle, is to fuel capital growth for the establishment by preserving a strict status quo. Turning the people against each other through culture wars, encouraging racism and blind hatred of the other side, and viciously attacking anyone who dares counter the narratives being fed. Millionaire pundits like Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Steven Crowder, or any number of big names you can think of, don’t care about you. They care about their paychecks, and will continue to receive big ones as long as they don’t question the lines put in front of them by their puppeteers.

Even among the so called ‘progressive’ Democrats we’ve elected the trend is the same. AOC and the squad got to Washington and immediately fell in line with the establishment in order to maintain their status and power, dropping all pretense of leftism or ‘fighting for the people.’ Last election cycle AOC funneled over $150,000 through the DCCC to establishment candidates who were running against progressives. Why would AOC, a ‘progressive’ according to herself, blatantly betray up and comers in the movement who she supposedly wants more of in Congress? Ilhan Omar and Jamal Bowman voted ‘yes’ on a $3.3 billion military spending package to the Israeli government, more aid fuel their apartheid against the Palestinian people. All of the squad was in favor of increasing the Capitol Police budget and none of them made a peep about Biden increasing the State Department’s budget by 12% (over $63 billion). For claiming to be leftists, the squad has been as complicit as any Congressional Republican throughout the last few years in advancing US imperialism and supporting state funded domestic terror via the police.

The worst part about this is that at least a Manchin or Sinema is obvious in their corporate shilling, if their voters aren’t happy about seeming betrayal when that lack of morals was apparent, it’s their own lack of knowledge on the candidate at fault. But AOC and the squad were harassing working class folks for donations while putting on a convincing facade that they were champions for struggling Americans and that they’d follow through on those progressive promises. Now, not only has their grifting people who were looking for hope turned many folks cynical and led them to mistrust more than ever, any future candidates running under ‘progressive’ banners are all but guaranteed to lose as those voters who were betrayed by the squad don’t want to get burned again. AOC’s ilk have become a more effective barrier to advancing leftist thought than any right wing propaganda could, because they have metastasized distrust and feelings of betrayal within the leftist base. Their performance has been cheered on by America’s corporatist elite; I’m sure Bezos wrote AOC a personal thank you card for abandoning the Bessemer unionization effort.

Yes, Trump pushes proto-fascist rhetoric and has committed atrocities against immigrants, Muslims, and civilians abroad, but Joseph Biden “the new FDR,” has done all of the exact same things and more. Nick Cruse has a very well thought out essay on the ways in which Biden’s policies have only been acceptable for privileged white Americans; a soaring migrant detention and deportation rate under Title 42 (he and Obama have both been worse than Trump in that regard), increasing police funding and killing the movements that demanded accountability and re-allocation of the hundreds of billions law enforcement receives to brutalize Americans, no real attempts at repealing restrictive voting and bodily autonomy laws in GOP states, and using performative actions to appease white moderates and distract from the thriving ecosystem of incarcerated exploitation and human rights abuses that Biden himself masterminded. Middle class moderates allow these atrocities to continue because the Democratic Party is effective at virtue signaling, coddling white moderates and making them feel like their performative actions have accomplished something. With their sense of righteousness affirmed and tucked safely into their 4 bedroom suburban houses, moderates don’t care that some population across the ocean is being massacred by US funded death squads or starving from our sanctions; they only care that their own life is comfortable and every talking head on the news is telling them that we’re the good guys.

The reason establishment Democrats can only rely on ‘orange man bad’ lines and continue beating the war drum against GOP policy in the culture war is because they themselves don’t have a shred of legislation to help Americans. In fact, their policy does the exact opposite, and often accomplishes the same corporatist end results as conservatives’. This is due to the Overton shift and neoliberal takeover that Clinton ushered in, and has only continued into the modern era. Cancelling the child tax credit, abandoning Medicare for all, fervent imperialism alongside the GOP, no loan forgiveness, and a decades long list of broken promises. Democrats have become agents of the upper class, and the ‘progressive’ candidates who were supposedly going to bring about change have all become establishment politicians worried about maintaining their good graces with the public.

Think of how much change the squad could push for, or at least inspire among the population, if they weren’t complacent in helping the 1% exploit us at every turn. They could have demanded concessions on votes like the Infrastructure Bill and other Biden sponsored agendas, used their influence on social media (AOC has over 12 million followers) to show people exactly what was wrong with our system and how we go about fixing it. But they are firmly on the side of capitalist overlords in the American class war, and this is my most important point; the battle is not right against left, or black against white, it is we the people versus forces that want us to be subservient for their exploitation and capital gain in America’s imperialist system. Think about someone like Elon Musk being firmly against any workers rights (and notoriously abusing and exploiting his employees), yet whining about how the birth rate is slowing and how we need to pump out more babies. They only want human capital to maintain their boosted profits. It is no coincidence that Roe v. Wade is in danger of being repealed when a pandemic and ‘worker crisis’ are upon us. If you’re wealthy or privileged enough you could always find access to an abortion, but the low income single mother who relies on corporate paychecks to survive soon may not be able to, being forced to raise chattel for corporations to profit off of in several years time. Better yet, that mother or parent isn’t able to be present due to insane work hours and being exhausted, leading to their child falling down the wrong path into the waiting arms of the prison industrial complex and modern slavery.

We aren’t crazy to lack trust in government, to rebuke any and all establishment policy, when we know it is being done not for our benefit but for the gain of a select few. Unfortunately Trump’s wave of false populism swept people up into its conspiracy laden cult and now they are too far down the rabbit hole to simply come back to reality. But Democrats have only fueled this disillusion and created an echo chamber isolated from facts among their own constituents, lying to our communities and then doing exactly what Republicans would in a neoliberal hellscape. The complete censorship that liberals immediately call for when someone like Dave Chapelle makes a joke about trans people, or Joe Rogan has misinformation about COVID, is not the right way to go about social change. Of course there’s going be misinformation on a podcast that interviews a spectrum of different backgrounds and ideologies because nobody has been 100% correct about the pandemic, not even the CDC or any government entity who adjusted safety standards at corporations’ behest. While Rogans wide reach and lack of challenge to the blatant lies being told by his guests is undoubtedly dangerous, the point is that pure censorship will only lead to reactionary echo chambers which allow the ruling class to sow misinformation that turns us against each other.

Glenn Greenwald has become analogous to a right wing shill who overlooks encroaching fascism and collapsing democracy in favor of wild binary identity rants that demonize all Democrats, but he makes some good arguments about why Democrats obsession over cancellation is doing harm. (I just wish he would acknowledge how dangerous it is that the right is quite factually and literally burning books alongside false dog whistling about Rogan’s cancellation as metaphorical ‘book burning’). Were we to have opened a collaborative pandemic response in which there were multiple options and opinions tested and heard out, we may have known sooner that cloth masks aren’t very effective (if at all against omicron), or that vaccinated people could still transmit COVID (Maddow misinformed her audience many times they couldn’t).

British intelligence and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) created a ‘countering pseudo science’ organization which funds prominent liberals to attack anyone questioning big Pharma and the reasons for mandates, including misinformation campaigns similar to the one that Obama used to justify Syrian intervention. No, something like Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine isn’t a magical cure and there is plenty of evidence to support that (which we’ve known for some time and I’ve gone in depth on in previous essays about pandemic grifters). Yet the obvious attempt at profiteering for corporate sponsors and denial of any other voices that our government’s pandemic response turned out to be pushed folks into these politicized frenzies to try and one up each other with some new revelation, many of which turned out to contain some ‘misinformation’ because we were so quick to cancel or shut out anyone who had evidence to the contrary. We simply called for censorship upon anyone challenging planted misinformation meant to make us comply to government and corporate desires (such as the 5 day quarantine change), even if there was some validity in those challenges.

There are undoubtedly some people who are off their rocker, but in general many Americans are skeptical of government and big business collaborating for good reason. Why wouldn’t they be? The pandemic has fully exposed America’s class divide and is widening it exponentially. The wealth of U.S. billionaires has risen nearly 62% during the pandemic, going collectively from $2.9 to $4.1 trillion, while the working class bled out $3.7 trillion. (Not coincidentally). A major part of why the vaccine based response is failing and leaving hundreds of thousands dead is due to someone like Kamala or other establishment Dems being elitist pricks, acting like those who are against vaccines are uneducated and dumb, which in turn pushes those on the fence even farther to the right. This has only fueled people’s resistance to vaccination; it’s basic human nature that if someone is skeptical and you tell them ‘just do it no questions,’ many will resist that out of spite and principle. With all the other obvious corporatist policies Democrats have fucked people over with (TARP bailouts come to mind as a radicalizing one), there is more than enough precedent for paranoia about a vaccine that raked in record breaking profits for two corporate pharmaceutical behemoths.

In a similar manner to other issues such as police brutality, we need to educate people why vaccines are helpful rather than mandate them in an authoritarian way. However the capital holding class wants us to remain uneducated and comply, to ignore those that challenge their dominance no matter the policy. I myself am vaccinated because I believe it was the safest way to prevent myself and those I care about from getting sick, but you can not force that belief upon someone else, especially someone who is already disillusioned with government institutions. This will only further the divide among Americans as we stay inside echo chambers, are fed partisan lines and misinformation from both sides, and aren’t exposed to new ideas or revealing conversations with others that can help shift our mindsets to be more collectivist. The establishment wants us to remain in the ultimate iteration of American individualism so they can keep record profits going and maximum exploitation among a divided working class.

Consider the attacks on workers rights that have been happening under Biden; strikes and unions busted by emboldened companies, the Thedacare debacle, nuking child labor protections with McDonalds now advertising hiring 14 and 15 year olds, Nurses and other laborers worked to exhaustion in overtime with barely any compensation, the child tax credit quietly expiring, corporations forcing people back to work if they’re sick with CDC cooperation (misinformation that the CDC gladly put out at the establishment’s behest). Democratic policy has only pushed people to the fringes and strengthened the appeal of a fascist GOP because at least conservatives are presented with villains to blame their problems on and feel vindicated in a victim cycle rather than simply feeling they’ve been betrayed and lied to (even though ironically, right wing propaganda is full of lies, many believe it because they want to vindicate their feelings of anger and a labelled enemy or ‘other’ lets them do just that). And this is how we have gone so far down the path of identity politics that keep the people divided, because when nearly everything in life is out of your control at least you have the ability to determine what you identify as.

The goal of my work is to help folks understand we live in a corporatist system and unite the working class in solidarity against an encroaching establishment that wants us to have as little autonomy as possible. The whims of the ruling class are what our politicians will support, no matter how hypocritical they look or how much they have to walk back previous beliefs for a paycheck. Obama and Clinton used NATO and the military industrial complex to advance imperialism in the Middle East and Northern Africa just as Bush, Trump and every US President has done since FDR, enacting sanctions that cripple economies and leave millions starving while indiscriminately using superior weapons to either murder civilians themselves or vicariously through funding coups and militia groups such as the Mujahideen. Now Biden’s administration is pushing blatant propaganda against Russia in an effort to spark conflict that would greatly enrich their corporate benefactors.

We need to at least make an attempt at educating those who may have positions we disagree with. For example I believe a better style for a Joe Rogan type of podcast would be to have people from two different ideological stances on at the same time or in back to back episodes, giving a chance for debate and refutation to the people like Jordan Peterson who outright try to deny climate change with heritage Foundation talking points on the podcast. If the liberals who want to cancel Rogan are so concerned about people exposed to misinformation falling further down the rabbit hole, put someone on the podcast that will give the other side of Malone’s takes. Show Rogan’s audience why Robert Malone or Brett Weinstein are grifting hacks who only say what makes them money. Expose the people you claim to care about helping to accurate information so that the culture war dividing us won’t continue so fervently. But liberal Democrats would never do that because they only care about performative identity politics that accomplish nothing besides providing a sense of superiority, and in a binary world view the ‘bad’ has to immediately be shut down, even if that platform of millions can be used to assuage some of the harm it has done. The capital owning class is simply sitting back and laughing as they see their plans playing out to perfection. Within our echo chambers it is much too easy to dismiss someone with a bad take as irredeemable and a terrible person. In cancelling them we don’t provide a chance to refute their lies to those who may rebuke the idea of censorship, thus solidifying their hatred or misled ideals. This tendency from liberal Democrats has only pushed the divide further. It doesn’t mean I agree with someone like Peterson or Rogan, quite the opposite (Peterson especially talks straight out of his asshole). But within reinforced echo chambers wherein each side thinks the other is respectively evil, the people who could have their misguided ideas assuaged through exposure and conversation with others never get that chance.

People make mistakes, we learn from trial and error, and we sometimes let emotions get in the way because we’re human. No one ideology is inherently more successful or above another in theory; it is what the people adhering to that ideology accomplish in practice to better their peers’ lives that make movements successful and adopted by the masses. Solidarity across race, religion, lifestyle, experience, and identity is what will allow us as Americans to topple the unequal structures keeping us under the boot of corporatist capitalism. Demanding change and actually following through on those premises will require holding our elected leaders accountable and reminding them who they serve to better the lives of; the people, not corporations, and if we are too busy hating each other we can never present that united front against the forces urging fascism and hatred along, or against the moderate forces that appear to be on our side but really only care about their own gain.

Thank you, I hope you enjoyed this essay.