I'm Increasingly Convinced We're Doomed to a 2nd Trump Presidency and the Fascism He Threatens

The liberal media focus is on how Donald Trump has turned the old Republican Party into a cult, but the Democratic Party meanwhile has been destroyed by decades of caustic neoliberalism

Two candidates who are damaged goods — one crazy and dangerous and one too old and dangerous. Blame the two failed zombie parties. (Biden charicature by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, Trump image by I'm H. Michael Karshis is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Liberal pundits, looking at the increasingly “shocking” polls showing Trump leading among all eligible voters, among registered voters, in most of the key swing states, and even peeling away parts of the staunchest Democratic voter blocs like Blacks, Latinos and young people, have taken to offering improbable theories to explain why Biden can still win in November.

The more pessimistic among them are already starting to analyze why he will lose — and why Democrats will also lose one or both houses of Congress — blaming the media for not reporting fairly on the contest, preferring a false even-handedness between a “competent” president and their serious down-ballot slate and a crazed sociopath, his cult following, and his lick-spittle candidates for Congress.

While not a liberal or even a Democrat, having long ago realized that the two major parties in this country — both wings of the same pro-capitalist, pro-war political organization — count myself among those pundits who are pessimistic about this November’s outcome. But I’m not shocked.

Here’s my analysis of why it will go badly for Biden and the Democrats, who have really only themselves to blame, not Trump.

Don’t get me wrong: I do believe Washington in the hands of a Trump White House and a Congress dominated by Trump-loyalists in Congress, with a Supreme Court filled by pro-Trump justices and limp, mostly centrist pro-corporate Democratic appointees, is a terrible danger to us all.

But the truth is, we are talking about an election not between a man who is definitely too old to be running for a second four-year term in the White House and a man who is to corrupt, too self-centered, too crazy, to be trusted with almost absolute power, but rather between two massively flawed candidates of a decaying and still carefully rigged two-party system in which not just one party but two have been destroyed and in which the needs of the public are almost completely ignored and betrayed by both.

The Republican one has morphed into a personality cult, while the Democratic one has been slowly but effectively hollowed out into a dry husk of its former self, destroyed by an ideology of neoliberalism that preaches hardship, self-blame, and a worship of aggressive capitalism, an obscene wealth gap and an obsession with global domination through military power.

In a situation like that, the advantage goes, in my view, to the party that has a huge passionately committed following of true-believers who will go to the polls and vote for their hero however wacky, self-involved, gaffe-prone, and criminal he may be. That of course would be what is still referred to as the Republican Party.

What is still oxymoronically called the Democratic Party, meanwhile, from 1932 to 1944, and really on through most. of the Johnson administration until 1968 and the crushing of liberalism arrival of President Richard Nixon, was an electoral juggernaut. With its army of working-class people convinced that the party was on their side, an army of black people who came to see it, even if largely by default, as the vehicle most likely to win them real equality in jobs, education, the military, etc., and an army of women who saw it as being on their side, supporting equal rights, abortion rights, sexual freedom, etc. the Democrats had a huge advantage in national elections.

There were of course exceptions along the way to the Democratic Party’s collapse. President Truman, a southern racist from Arkansas who was forced on an ailing Franklin Roosevelt at a contested 1944 convention by a block of mostly southern Democrats, blocked FDR’s preferred choice of his left progressive VP Henry Wallace (Truman received nearly half the delegate votes for VP that Roosevelt received in his re-nomination for president). This maneuver set the stage for a lurch to the right in the White House when Roosevelt died less than three months into his unprecedented fourth term, making Truman the president for almost a full term. When Truman ran for a second term in 1952 he nearly lost to NY Gov. Thomas Dewey, winning that election with less than 50% of the popular vote cast and winning the electoral tally by a narrow 303 electoral votes, just 37 more than needed to win. (The race was so close, with the electoral count going Dewey’s way for much of the night, that Truman’s victory wasn’t confirmed until 4 a.m. the next day. Indeed had independent candidate Strom Thurmond, a Southern racist committed to segregation forever, not run, the 39 electoral votes he received might will have gone to Dewey, giving Dewey. and Republicans the White House.)

Truman was followed by the 1952 election of WWIi hero Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a hugely popular man whom both parties had sought as their candidate, but who chose the Republicans. He handily defeated the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson two times.

The Democrats regained their footing in the 1960s, narrowly electing John F. Kennedy (who likely only “won” only because of a corrupted vote count in Chicago managed by the Democratic machine of Mayor Richard Daley which gave Illinois’ electors to the Democratic candidate).

Then, after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, his V.P. Lyndon Johnson proceeded to attempt to revive FDR’s sagging New Deal with the launch of his Great Society program, which included a “War” on Poverty, passage of the Civil Rights Act, the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, and a period of solid support for labor rights. But the signs were already visible of major problems, as Johnson turned what had been a smoldering US involvement in resisting a popular Communist-led insurgency in the former French colony of Vietnam into a full-scale war. So strapped for funding was the US government in this war of Johnson’s choosing that ultimately had half a million troops into battle in that country halfway around the world, that Johnson had to raise taxes and even launch a new federal phone tax to help cover it!

His bloody war in Indochina, which ultimately killed at least three-million Indochinese people, mostly civilians, and 58,000 US troops, almost single-handedly ignited a major anti-government insurgency among young voters who opposed it en masse, as did many mutinous men and women in uniform.

From there things went downhill for Democrats as the party’s leadership first sabotaged popular anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic senator from Minnesota who stunningly, with almost no. campaign funding, won 42 percent or the vote to Johnson’s 48 percent in the first presidential primary in New Hampshire in ‘68. That surprise showing by a candidate whose whole campaign was ending the war, convinced war-President LBJ not to seek or accept the nomination for a second term. With Johnson gone, McCarthy was knocked out of contention for the party’s nomination as Robert Kennedy, younger brother of the slain JFK, to seek the nomination. His subsequent assassination, coming just after Kennedy learned he had decisively won the California primary, led party leaders to sabotage any chance for another anti-war candidate to arise by promoting as their electoral chance against the Republican Richard Nixon Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey. A man linked inextricably to the increasingly unpopular war in Indochina, he was beaten handily by Nixon (who promised he had a “secret plan” to end the war, which turned out to be expanding it.

After four years, Nixon in his campaign for a second term crushed South Dakota senator and WWIII hero B-24 Liberator bomber pilot George McGovern, but his defeat was as much because of the sabotage of the Democratic leadership as well as Nixon’s dirty tricks, as it was to his bold stance on ending the war in Vietnam.  

It was at that point, in after the 1972 election,  that the neoliberals began to take over the Democratic Party in earnest, beginning with Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, who while still having some democratic and socially liberal instincts (he notably pardoned a generation of draft dodgers), preached a kind of belt-tightening politics that turned away many Democratic voters, leading to the election of Ronald Reagan.

The real undermining of the old FDR New Deal and LBJ New Society came with the advent of the Clintons, Bill and Hillary. Together with a so-called “neoliberal” cadre of economists, Wall Street bankers, neoliberal think-tankers and campaign aides, they sought to forge a new “third-way” identity for the Democratic Party. It was to be a party of lowered expectations, balanced budgets, self reliance for the poor (who were to lose much of their so-called safety net, a new tough-on-crime policy, support for industry to move factories to cheaper labor locations abroad, the undermining of the unionized labor force, weakened regulation of things like worker safety, environmental protection, and a focus on cutting the federal deficits—but by cutting social spending, not military budgets.

It was sophistry that allowed the neoliberal Clinton, a smooth-talking charmer with a gift for speechifying and with a down-home familiarity that he could pull off much of the time. But it wasn’t a gift that was easily passed on. Certainly Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis didn’t have it when he ran for president against Texas Gov. George W. Bush, his Republican opponent, who had a counterfeit touch of it.

But the important thing is that by that point in the 1990s, the Democratic Party was becoming a shadow of its former self. The coalition that had propelled FDR to a record four election wins, and that filled both halls of Congress with genuinely liberal (and even some openly socialist-leaning) Democrats, like Ron Dellums, Ron Conyers, David Bonier, Major Owens, Bernie Sanders, Danny Davis, etc., was no more. And in more recent decades, the Democratic leadership has actively sought to undermine socialist or simply left-leaning liberal Democratic candidates and even incumbents, even risking losing key seats to avoid their even being in the House or Senate.

The proof of how far the Democratic Party has moved from its New Deal coalition days came with the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president. Obama in his first campaign raised all kinds of “hope” for “change” in America, highlighting (and exaggerating) his history of working as an “activist organizer,” his one-time youthful membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, his labor union work, and so on, and promised radical changes in America’s over-priced and economically segregated health care system. making union elections easier for workers to win, and so on. It was on these promises that he had won a powerful mandate for change.

But in office he quickly began backpedaling furiously, refusing to even consider the idea of expanding coverage under Medicare to Americans of all ages, doing away with employee-sponsored health plans, private insurance plans, 2nd-class Medicaid for the poor, and “charity” care, dropping the idea of workers getting a union by simply having a majority of employees sign cards saying they wanted one, and failing to shut down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (In fact he launched new ones).

And what was the result of his waffling and back-pedaling on his progressive promises? Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in the first off-year elections in 2010, the biggest gain in seats for Republicans since 1938. and after losing a few seats in 2012 when Obama rwon a second term, they continued to gain seats in the 2014 election, When Obama ran for a second term he nearly lost to the hardly charismatic Republican Mitt Romney, winning only 51.1 percent of the vote.

The Democratic Party, since its embrace of neoliberalism, has made it clear it would rather lose elections by pursuing the funding of corporate interests than win by supporting popular programs like government-run and funded health care, improved Social Security, more support for public education, free college tuition at public universities, and a reduced military budget. It does not want to run candidates for national office who will advocate things like a Canadian-style public medical care program despite its overwhelming popularity. Even the popularly elected Barack Obama in his first term’ when he had a solid Democratic majority, deliberately ruled out such an option when he called a White House meeting with “stakeholders” to come up with a health plan, choosing instead a model actually developed under the direction of First Lady Hillary during the Clinton years but never implemented. But which later when introduced by Obama was derisively dubbed “Obamacare” by Republicans. That plan handed the whole system over to the insurance industry. 

It won the Democrats little loyalty with its high premiums, high deductibles, and limited coverage (though as the only game in town for people who don’t get health insurance on the job and earn too much to qualify for Medicare, it has gained some grudging fans these days). 

Democrats since Obama have been weak on defending Social Security, with Democratic leaders including presidents toying with reductions in benefits and even privatization of the most popular legacy of the New Deal. And virtually all Democratic officeholders and candidates able to win the support of the party leadership consistently back the nation’s absurdly huge military spending as well as its global policy of permanent war and intervention.

With its abandonment of the public good as a primary policy guide, the neoliberal Democrats are a party without a movement, a party without a hard core of true believers. It has become instead a party backed, at best, by millions of disgusted and frustrated “lesser-evil” voters, which is no match for Trump’s Republican party of cult followers, ready like the followers of Rev. Jim to drink the poison their hero spreads with every public appearance.

Biden can thrash around on the margin, offering aid to some spouses of Green Card holders who have been living in this country perhaps illegally for ten years or more, raising kids, staying out of trouble and holding down jobs, so that they can also receive green cards and stay. He can say he wants Netanyahu to have his army “kill fewer Palestinians” in its genocidal war on Gaza, Or he can say he wants action to prevent climate disaster even as he opens up the North Slope of Alaska to oil drilling. But he is just another neoliberal, unwilling to go to the mat fighting on any such critical issues as climate change, making college free, ending US global militarism and war, and strengthening and expanding Social Security. He cannot because the Democratic Party he supposedly heads is owned by big moneyed interests — the arms industry, the medical industrial insurance complex, the oil industry, the banking and finance industry, Silicon Valley execs, and some corrupted union leaderships who will even go against or manipulate their members into endorsing him using the worn-out the “lesser evil” argument.

In the end he’s losing the passionate voters — the ones who somehow still manage to believe that the Democratic Party still remains on their side and can win, even as Trump and his cultist following is gaining support, including from frustrated former Democrats.

It’s a dismal picture, I know, but the reality should be faced: Both parties are zombies filled with party leaders, candidates and office holders who are walking corpses.

The candidates who win in November will be the political zombies who manage to convince their electorate that they are not zombies. In that contest, Trump is winning against Biden, and sad to say, all too many Republican down-ticket candidates are winning against their Democratic opponents too.