The Ongoing Erosion of the Major Political Parties

Yesterday's brief MAGA occupation of the U.S. Capitol while unprecedented paled in comparison to, say, the storming, occupation and ransacking of the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 2019. No fires were lit or artwork destroyed but four people died. 

Nonetheless political elites are appalled, frightened and enraged by Wednesday's events. The sacrosanct center of the Washington Consensus was shown to be on par with Caracas or Kiev. 

So far the main elitist demand appears to be more Internet censorship. Trump's Twitter and Facebook accounts, his main cybernetic link to his followers, were locked yesterday.

My takeaway from all of this -- Trump's quixotic crusade to overturn the results of an election he lost by seven million votes; the GOP debacle in Georgia's runoff election; and now the MAGA riot in the U.S. Capitol -- is that Trump or a Trump-like demagogic political figure will never be allowed to capture one of the two major political parties again. 

Efforts to erect a version of China's Great Firewall, construction of which has been underway for years in the U.S., will be redoubled. The Republican Party will be encouraged to rejigger its nomination process to prevent a repeat of Trump.

The big question is whether this is possible. Can one branch of the duopoly excise its base of support and still win elections?

I say yes if the other branch of the duopoly is going to do the exact same thing at the same time. That's what were looking at post-#ForcetheVote, post-#FraudSquad. As Glen Ford writes this morning,

In [AOC's] self-pitying funk, the Bronx fashion-plate and champion tweeter -- a rival of Trump, in that regard – sounded no different than the standard “because…Trump” Democrat, blaming the outgoing Orange Menace for her own political cowardice: “[I]n a time when the Republican Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the results of our election, this is not just about being united as a party. It's about being united as people who have basic respect for the rule of law.” Having nothing to offer their “base,” Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters. What will they do when the Orange Ogre is finally gone?

Doubtless, they will blame the Russians and a “handful of outspoken left-wing activists,” as MSN dubbed the #ForceTheVote advocates, for undermining the smooth workings of “American democracy.” However, the exodus of the leftmost ranks of the Democratic Party has finally begun, and will accelerate in the excruciatingly unending Covid-19 crisis, and as the post-Covid corporate economic order emerges with the full collaboration of the Democratic Party. The biggest benefactor of the New Year’s revolt is the Movement for a People’s Party, coordinated by Nick Branna, which vows to run a slate of congressional candidates in 2022 and mount a presidential bid in 2024. For the first time in this century, significant numbers of young people of all races – most of them unabashed Democrats only yesterday, it seems – are expressing raw hatred for the Democrats, who are richly deserving of the utmost contempt.