The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

Continue ReadingThe Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Democrats Have Lost their Advantage with Working People

Michael Shellenberger, writing at Public:

Democrats hoped that Biden’s everyman appeal might win back some white working-class voters back to the party. That hasn’t happened. In fact, now the Democrats are losing non-white working-class voters.

Every election cycle, Democrats lose more and more of this demographic. Despite his virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric, between 2016 and 2020 Trump gained support among Latino voters. Joe Biden did 16 points worse among Latinos than Hillary Clinton had four years earlier. The Democrats have an increasingly tenuous hold on the Asian vote and their support even from black non-college-educated voters has begun to slip. As of last summer, Biden fell short of earning the support of a majority of non-white voters without a college degree (a third of these voters preferred Trump).

Today, the Democrats and the Republicans are virtually tied in voters’ perception of which party is best for the middle class. Americans as a whole no longer take the Democrats for granted as the party that fights for ordinary people, and are just as likely to regard the Republicans as such. This is a historical sea change.

Continue ReadingDemocrats Have Lost their Advantage with Working People

Totalitarianism / Authoritarianism versus Democracy

Excellent list by Caitlin Johnstone. Here is an exceerpt:

In totalitarian regimes they have massacres and wars. In free democracies they have humanitarian interventions.

In totalitarian regimes they use torture. In free democracies they use enhanced interrogation techniques.

In totalitarian regimes they fund extremist groups to create instability. In free democracies they fund extremist groups to create stability.

In totalitarian regimes evil dictators bomb their own people. In free democracies we do it for them.

In totalitarian regimes a single party upholds and enforces the status quo. In free democracies, two parties uphold and enforce the status quo.

In totalitarian regimes the government controls the press and determines what information the public is allowed to have access to. In free democracies it is billionaires who do this.

In totalitarian regimes you know exactly who rules over you. In free democracies the true rulers hide behind fake puppet governments. . . .

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The Democratic Party to the People: We’re in Charge, not You.

If the DNC is so confident that Joe Biden is the best choice to be President again, they should brush off his cobwebs and roll him out to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson. It would be revealing to hear the two challengers discuss the issues, but equally important to see whether Biden could make sense for more than five minutes without a teleprompter.

But does the DNC think that the People should have a meaningful say in determining who will represent the Democrats for President? The answer is no, based upon a 2016 lawsuit against the DNC:

Update: A federal judge dismissed the DNC lawsuit on August 28. The court recognized that the DNC treated voters unfairly, but ruled that the DNC is a private corporation; therefore, voters cannot protect their rights by turning to the courts:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary."

Rather than reflecting on the consternation everyday voters are having over the conduct of the Democratic presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee is doubling down on the assertion that the primary election belongs to the people who control the party -- not voters.

In the transcript for last week's hearing in Wilding, et. al. v. DNC Services, d/b/a DNC and Deborah “Debbie” Wasserman Schultz, released Friday, DNC attorneys assert that the party has every right to favor one candidate or another, despite their party rules that state otherwise because, after all, they are a private corporation and they can change their rules if they want.

From the Chicago Tribune:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary," Judge William Zloch, a Reagan appointee, wrote in his dismissal. "To the extent Plaintiffs have asserted specific causes of action grounded in specific factual allegations, it is this Court's emphatic duty to measure Plaintiffs' pleadings against existing legal standards. Having done so . . . the Court finds that the named Plaintiffs have not presented a case that is cognizable in federal court." ...

Bruce Spiva, representing the DNC, made the argument that would eventually carry the day: that it was impossible to determine who would have standing to claim they had been defrauded. But as he explained how the DNC worked, Spiva made a hypothetical argument that the party wasn't really bound by the votes cast in primaries or caucuses.

"The party has the freedom of association to decide how it's gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party," said Spiva. "Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way."

This was news to me in 2017 when the DNC took this position (for more on the DNC arguments, see the Plaintiff's appeal here).  How many times has DNC rhetoric suggested that the DNC looks to the People to make this decision? But they clearly don't care about our opinion.  This, the party that made repeated dramatic false claims that  "Russians" cheated them out of winning even when the DNC itself cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination in 2016, as exposed by Wikileaks.

Continue ReadingThe Democratic Party to the People: We’re in Charge, not You.

Greg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.

Excerpts:

“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”

. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.

One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.

Continue ReadingGreg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”