Democracy Is Deeply Wounded

The Deep Blue Sea

For some days I've been trying to write something sensible about the end of Bernie Sanders' Presidential campaign and how Hillary Clinton is now the last standing hope in stopping Donald Trump from becoming POTUS. The thing is, if Donald Trump is the devil, then Hillary Clinton surely is the deep blue sea, and so one cannot in good conscience say that the latter is a better candidate because they are the lesser of two evils.

This is not to be childish and scream Bernie-or-Bust, but more a long distance sketch of how things stand. In many ways it reminds me of the 2013 Australian Federal Election whereby PM Julia Gillard mired in bad polls would point at Tony Abbott as the terrible threat coming our way. In the end she was ousted by her own party and worse sill, the electorate voted in the dreaded Tony Abbott and Australia has had a basket case government ever since. It has the same quality of a not very popular person pointing at a terrifying opponent saying they are the only person who can stop the unspeakably awful from happening. We in Australia have been here, and continue to live through the horror of government by oligarchical interests with scant attention for good public policy. There's not much advice we can offer Americans in how to survive this horror.

Of course in that likening, I do Julia Gillard an immense disservice, for as unpopular as she was, she was not wrapped up in some strange twilight zone of corruption and coverups that is the hallmark of the Clintons. There was Whitewater, there was Mena Arkansas and the gun-running, the Vince Foster thing, the Monica Lewinsky affair (and the distraction of Operation Desert Fox), and above all else the strange charity that is the Clinton Foundation which takes money from dodgy oligarchs to create access in very strange places while the Foundation itself accepts colossal sums of money in exchange for the influence of the Clintons. It's nuts. It really is. That's not a few skeletons rattling around in the closet, it's like a mass grave after a genocide hiding in their closet. It's so bad that when Wikileaks leaks more and more emails from Clinton's past revealing terrible deeds and judgment, the world greets it with an indifferent shrug because we are so inured to the Clintons being scandal-prone.

It goes without saying hat Donald Trump is a terrible candidate. He is such a bad candidate that people really think it's some kind of elaborate hoax or joke. And yet the opposite number American democracy has managed to throw up against him is Hillary Clinton, the dodgiest nominee since maybe Richard Nixon. Talk about your wildest nightmares. If democracy really was just a popularity contest, it's amazing the two finalists are two of the most disliked candidates out of a field of dregs. They've scraped the bottom of the barrel and found there was shit down there - and they must really love shit because they're waving it around like a trophy.

The End Of Bernie's Run

It all came out in the leaked emails how the DNC were far from impartial and went out of their way to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign. In the end, Bernie Sanders ended up being the only sane candidate with a decent plan and policy platform that withstood rational scrutiny out of a large field of candidates. He's still more popular than Hillary when polled and more importantly far more popular than Donald Trump. And yet the DNC is hellbent on going with their gal Clinton, so it's anybody's guess what's going to happen to the Democratic Party after this election.

It tok more than a generation since Robert F Kennedy's ill fated campaign in 1968 to Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016 to bring the properly progressive agenda back to the Democratic Party. 48years is a long time between drinks. Maybe the good news is that the Progressive bas that supported Bernie is young, and so the future belongs to them to push forwards. Things can still change in the future, but for now the progressive push back into the Democratic Party platform is stalled. The flip side of the constituency dialogue is that the Baby Boomers are not yet the minority and with the help of a few dirty tricks can keep the Boomer candidate in Hillary Clinton going.

This may not work out the same way in say 2020. The youngest Boomer will be 55 then. One would imagine it would be harder to wage the kind generational demographic war the Boomers of the DNC waged this time around. They would have fewer numbers and less of an influence. Whatever happens in the next 4 years, Bernie sure won't be back to run again next time, and that is the shame of it.

In the mean time, the sensible people are asked to get behind the corrupt candidate to beat the unthinkably awful candidate. The DNC created this mess by insisting on the corrupt candidate - surely they will rue the turn of events they fomented by trying to manipulate the democratic process.