Any informed progressive could easily multiply examples of Democrats doubling down on the same corruption that caused their loss to Trump. For starters, there are the horrific, tone-deaf personnel decisions about party leadership. Like naming corporate donor sweethearts Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi their minority leaders in Congress. Or insisting that spineless establishment hack Tom Perez chair the Democratic National Committee. Or, speaking of the DNC, there's the DNC' scandalous anti-democratic legal argument in defending its fraud lawsuit: an argument best viewed as the party leadership's loving embrace of Hillary Clinton's own scandalous assertio n (in a highly paid speech to her Wall Street "best buds") that a politician needs to have public and private positions on issues. Apparently, for the Democratic leadership, that applies to primary elections too: a phony public claim of neutrality and fairness for the disposable folks in steerage, and a backroom rigging of elections in favor of the well-heeled party-goers who frequent the captain's quarters.
Fortunately, an increasing number of informed people, generally progressives, object strenuously to Democrats doubling down on the party corruption that helped elect Trump. So unsurprisingly, in reaction, Democrats' chief propagandists and media flacks--in another flagrant instance of doubling down on corruption--have created a smear campaign against such informed objectors. In an unspeakably sleazy attempt to conflate us with the racist, xenophobic alt-right, we are the "alt-left"--when fighting plutocracy and militarism is the only thing makes us "alt" at all, considering militarism and plutocratic corruption have become mainstream Beltway policies. Journalist Mike Sainato has insightfully linked this new smear campaign to the Clinton Democrats' earlier-vintage "Bernie Bro" smears. To use Sainato's own trenchant, spot-on formula, the Clintonite Democratic leadership has "weaponized identity politics"--identity politics being the moral fig leaf covering their lackey service of Wall Street and Wall Street--to unjustly smear everyone who cries foul on that lackey service. We can only hope our own vastly more justified smear--"duopoly Democrat"--is vastly more successful in honestly conflating corporatist, militarist Democrats with Republicans than their failed slimeball attempt to conflate correctly critical progressives with the alt-right.
Needless to say, these egregious rejections of reform by Democrats have been less than a blip on the mainstream media radar. Yet, when resisting Trump is a matter of global importance, concealing the unrepentant corruption of the Democratic Party claiming to lead the anti-Trump resistance--when voters' rejection of that same corruption helped elect Trump--surely merits the name of "fake news."
And Democrats' unrepented (and largely unreported) perversity only gets far worse--worse in a way that justifies its own heading.
Bear-Baiting and an Incestuous Orgy: Properly Decadent "Sport" on the Titanic
If you're going to consciousl y party on the Titanic--in other words, party like there's no tomorrow because you've decided there won't be--you might as well do so in truly decadent style.
For anyone who truly groks decadence, it's a matter of knowing that one's civilization is going down the shitter and asserting by one behavior that one doesn't give a flying frack. In other words, it's a matter of stylishly putting an exclamation point on one's moral nihilism. For today's duopoly Democrats and their Wall Street and War Street donors, some hard-core bear-baiting followed by an incestuous orgy seems to do the trick nicely. (But of course, treating most of humanity itself--above all, their voting base--as the toilet paper necessitated by the overindulgence of their "party to end all parties" is a supremely decadent touch.)
By "bear-baiting," I of course mean the scapegoating of Russia for Democrats' own electoral failures and scandals; I mean, above all, the terrifying escalation of hostilities (presumably buried with the Cold War) with the nuclear-armed "Russian bear" such scapegoating entails. Now, merely by itself, the unjustified scapegoating of Russia is a huge--and baneful--news story. For starters, it's the utter quintessence of Democrats' shameless, unrepentant doubling down on their party's corrupt ways in response to their loss to Trump. As Paul Street (reflecting on Jeff Greenfield's correct but misleading criticism of Trump for creating media distractions via Twitter) insightfully puts it, "the biggest single media distraction of all by far has been the Russia hysteria, which Max Blumenthal has aptly described as 'a convenient" way of opposing Trump without having to do anything remotely progressive.'" But beyond making a "non-story" of Democrats' complete current rejection of progressive reform, their Russia hysteria is baneful (as Street correctly emphasizes) in another way: it distracts attention from all the harmful non-Russia-related things Trump is currently doing. Like, say, appointing dozens of right-wing ideologues as judges in the federal courts.
So Democrats' "bear-baiting" is destructive simply as a distraction. It's as if the Democratic party animals on the Titanic had invited the slobs in steerage to gawk at their bear-baiting--simply to divert their attention from the massive iceberg toward which they and Republicans are resolutely steering the ship. But the bear-baiting--the hostility-fueling scapegoating of nuclear power Russia--appears in its full sinister light only once we're aware of the burgeoning incestuous orgy. By which I mean the ever-tightening loving embrace--now promoted by both major parties--between neoliberals and neocons. Or in populist terms, between Wall Street and War Street.
If ever mainstream media failure to report a major, sinister development amounted to "fake news," Democrats embrace of warmongering neocons (read here and here) is it. Far from rejecting the addition of neocon traits to neoliberal ones that made Hillary Clinton such a repulsive candidate, they've clearly made a tighter bond with warmongering neocons their party's charted course.
Now, warmongering neocons and "market-mongering" neoliberals always had prospects of a cozier relationship. On the one hand, military and police might has always served as the enforcement arm for global market domination; Naomi Klein's eye-opening book The Shock Doctrine amply documents that fact. On the other hand, the military-industrial-surveillance complex has always been--and is now more than ever--an obscenely lucrative capitalist industry. And over the past several decades, Republican have made no secret of their love for bare-knuckled capitalism and its enforcing militarism. But Democrats, to appease their working class and progressive base, have traditionally paid considerable lip service to fettering both capitalism and militarism. Democrats' current gung-ho embrace of militarism--documented in Congressional Dems' near-unanimous support for sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea--virtually green lights a perverse, incestuous relationship between neocons and neoliberals: between Wall Street and War Street.
For informed progressives attuned to the importance of Naomi Klein's climate justice vision--that global peace and equitably shared resources are the essential preconditions of addressing humanity's climate emergency--having Democrats (already too neoliberal) deepen their embrace of neocon warmongering is utterly horrifying. It's as if the Titanic party-goers, not finding their bear-baiting and incestuous orgy perverse and decadent enough, had decided to let enraged, rabid bears participate in the orgy. And extend the orgy to whole ship.
For the sake of letting Wall Street and War Street "party hearty," both Republicans and Democrats are embracing the most perverse, suicidal policies imaginable from a climate standpoint. That no major media (and few progressive ones) are discussing this horrifying--and crucially important--story is the biggest conceivable instance of fake news. Yet, in 2018 and 2020, voters will make up their mind in its absence.
Unless a huge movement trumpeting this story becomes the news.
The Indispensable Movement Can Cure Fake News: By Becoming the News
Political movements have always arisen as a means to correct fake news--essentially the fake news of omission. Basically, some major injustice existed in a society--like slavery, or second-class citizenship for minorities, women, or gays--that the ruling powers did not want reported, let alone recognized and redressed. And the exclusion of the oppressed group's grievance from political discourse was such that electoral politics offered no remedy whatsoever. Only organizing political movements could these groups make their grievance news--by making their movements the news. And only after movements had made their grievance a central part of political discourse could political action become feasible.
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