An article published today (March 3, 2020) by Caitlin Johnstone (“Dems Converge Around Dementia-Addled Warmonger Ahead Of Super Tuesday”) made me think of zombies storming voting booths all over the United States, and, disappointed, walking away, having found no brains to consume.  Poor zombies, poor, poor, zombies, but then again poor us, poor, poor us, especially if we’re progressives.

Democracy has no place in today’s Democratic Party.

Not satisfied with its partially successful putsch to overthrow the federal government elected in 2016 (it did “capture” the House of Representatives in 2018), the Democratic Party is seeking to repeat its successful intra-party coup d’état of 2016.  And why not.  It succeeded  At least at the candidacy stage when betrayed progressives, like good little stooges, stayed put.

Analyzing the situation within the Democratic Party it is probably unfair to criticize the movement to derail the Sanders nomination, … again.  The reality is that at least since the Clintons’ takeover of the party in 1992, it has not been progressive.  It has instead devolved into a win-at-all-costs political movement without ethics, morals or principles.  Just blind ambitions.  If that is what the Democratic Party has become, what it is, then it has no place for decent progressives like Gabbard or Sanders or Kucinich or Webb.  The Democratic Party that too many progressives feel they can save from within is dead!

What’s left is even worse than the GOP which at least has some principles (even though in some extreme cases they include elements that are anachronistic and to some extent can be made to seem misogynist racist and xenophobic).  At least the GOP stands for something, even if it is different than that in which I believe.  The Democratic Party stands for nothing although it is chock full of platitudes and slogans and empty promises.  It is merely a tool for economic elites and the Deep State, albeit purportedly in the name of the working classes, minorities, and deluded liberals.

As has been obvious to many of us on the real left since the Clintons assumed control, the Democratic Party is not our political home.  Unfortunately, too many very decent people, very bright people have been utterly manipulated through the polarizing tactics of Identity Politics, especially since the Clinton fiasco of 2016 and the putrid, malevolent reaction to that electoral defeat which left no tradition of bipartisanship or statesmanship standing.  A scorched earth policy that has almost destroyed the precarious political system in place since the Civil War.

Hmmm.

Perhaps it has been destroyed and we can replace it, but not until progressives abandon the rat infested wreck too many call home and form a party of our own.  Perhaps the latest machinations of the DNC to deprive progressives of a candidate will finally prove to be the last straw.

Perhaps, but not likely.

Given the death of journalism in the corporate media and its replacement by a 24/7 propaganda propagation monolith, any change based on reasoned analysis and discourse seems improbable.  Still, the rise of populism all over the planet, from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum, provides some basis for hope.  Those revolutions are, in large part, reactions against the stream of fake news, incomplete news and outright lies that we’re all fed daily.

Perhaps that wave will come and revisit us again this November, but with more positive results given the popular revulsions against the putrid political tactics of the last three years.

Here’s hoping.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen).  Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.