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.

Realignment

If Jon Ossoff holds on and retains his slender lead in the Peach State over the odious David Perdue, Democrats, Raphael Warnock already having been declared the victor over the poisonous plutocrat Kelly Loeffler, will have accomplished something significant, control of the U.S. Senate, and with it, control of Congress.

With septuagenarian Joe Biden White House bound, unless, of course, Trump pulls off a coup, Democrats will control the national government for the first time in a decade.

Before asking what such a government portends I think it's important to declare, post-Georgia runoff, that we are in the middle of a historic political realignment.

The genius of Trump is his ability to win the votes of the old, weird America, the rural bedrock of the nation mostly ignored by Madison Avenue and inside the beltway. But the problem here is that consistent appeals to this voting bloc cuts against the grain of the historically GOP suburbs, which are college educated, nominally socially progressive and peopled by viewers of CNN. According to a GOP insider:

“Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Mr. McConnell. “I feel like a one trick pony but here we are again. We went from talking about jobs and the economy to Qanon election conspiracies in 4 short years and — as it turns out — they were listening!”

Meanwhile Democrats, with their adherence to the neo-McCarthyism of Russiagate, which requires a tight embrace of the Intelligence Community, have swung to the right. This swing to the right has exposed the irrelevance of the Bernie wing of the party. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are sticking with Trump, leading me to believe that Trumpism has legs.

Going forward what we need to watch for is whether Trump can maintain hold of the GOP; for the Democrats, whether the whole progressive charade of the Squad and Justice Democrats can maintain the allegiance of the left wing of the party.

Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.