People "fleeing" the parties is a good thing. We need to dump these corrupt decrepit parties, the two party system has done immense harm to the United States.
Since they modified the constitution way back when, what we have is a "popularity" contest for President. The nation has grown too big. We need a better chain of command like the Constitution was originally designed for:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Notice the word "appoint" at the beginning - NOT "vote".
And go where? The Green Party is a club for academics that emerges from its cocoon every four years to run an academic for President to the loud cheers of everyone who thinks it's about voting for a party instead of for a person. Working-class voters have had that sort looking down their noses at them all their lives; they're not going to vote Green because the party candidate makes pretty speeches.
I prefer "disrupter" candidates. I supported, campaigned and voted for Obama twice. I then supported Bernie because I saw Hillary as corrupt and fake. When the DNC axed Bernie, I switched to Trump who I supported and voted for twice. Now, I feel truly excited about RFKJr, a candidate who offers real hope; a disrupter that I think will actually upend the corrupt corporate apple cart. Hope he can overcome the enormous roadblocks that have been put in his place. And I pray every night that God will keep him safe!
This article is largely right, as is Bobby Jr. However, to attribute homelessnessl (or whatever the morons call it today) is to ignore the obvious -- we are a nation of drug addicts.
I believe Kennedy's proposed end to the War on Drugs is misguided. The legalization of that wonderful medicinal "herb", marijuana, is already proving to be the disaster anyone with a brain would have predicted.
Maybe jail isn't the best answer, but something needs to be done to turn around the root cause of America's ridiculous addiction to addiction.
I have volunteered with homeless folks since they were "Street People" in te late 1970's. We have to ask WHY do we have so many more addicted people now that we had in 1977?
I gather you never heard what John Ehrlichmann said in 1994 about why the War on Drugs was declared: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
I gather you've never heard of or seen the damages that addiction does to its various victims. But probably worse than addicts are do-gooders like, presumably, yourself.
My father died of an alcohol-induced illness, and several members of his family were also alcohol addicted. In my first job as a journalist, I interacted regularly with recovering addicts. But do take it upon yourself to shake your schoolmarm finger at someone you know nothing about but whose comment you chose to interpret in a manner that gave you that nice jolt of superiority while at the same time ignoring an established fact that causes you cognitive dissonance.
Kennedy will have to end up running as an Independent. The sooner he comes to terms with this the better. He needs to tap Tulsi Gabbard as his VP and just go ahead and split off from the DNC. He'll pull good numbers from the moderate Dems and even more from the GOP. He'll have a lock on unaffiliated, libertarian & independents. If he tried to team up with West, it will be a disaster.
Kennedy is a leftist with totalitarian tendencies. Republicans, conservatives and libertarians would do well to remember this. He s a climate alarmist and to him, every problem has a big government solution.
Like an apple with significant rot, the Demagogues at the top level are beyond redemption, at least since their overt sabotage of Bernie in 2016. As an independent, RFK, Jr. will gain enthusiastic support form mans sides.
The Democratic Party desperately needs RFK, but are determined not to have him. If he runs third party, he will be the first third party President. All the Trump voters want someone better as a human being than Trump, he has just seemed to be the best choice of those available. With RFK in a three way race between Trump and Biden, RFK will defeat them both
Trump vs Biden = Awful vs Terrible. Down with both. Trump has no concept on the intricate interactions of Nature we call ecology. Biden is in a permanent brain fog, and his overt corruption re: Ukraine is there for all to see.
That's incorrect. There's not a MAGA supporter on the planet who believes Trump is or ever was a lesser human being. In fact the massive swell of support Trump has garnered since 2016 is based almost entirely on the fact that Trump has been savaged by the Left over any and every mundane issue imaginable - not one of the accusations are true, they were made up whole cloth by Clinton and the DNC, and a whole lot of American tax dollars have been wasted on entertaining a fruitless and endless witch hunt.
Initial support for Trump hinged on the fact that he too had to consider running as an Independent, because the Republican party sought to squeeze him out of the process, much like the DNC squeezes out the voice of their own "deplorables". To date the Republican Party, that is, what's left of it (Mitt Romney, Ronna McRomney and co.) has employed the law firm Holtzman Vogel and spent $37 million in an effort to keep their own frontrunner's name (Trump) off the ballot. So the RNC is resorting to DNC tactics and trying to force its people's favorite candidate out of the process on procedural grounds.
I can assure you the RNC isn't trying to keep Trump's name off the ballot because they are worried that Trump voters will fall for the next outright lie hatched by Democrats to tarnish the reputation of America's favorite President.
Trump was impeached for nothing. America now knows Russian Collusion was a complete Hillary Clinton fabrication. Because American tax dollars were pissed away for years on Congressional hearings, and a grand impeachment production (twice) MAGA has grown exponentially. Much of America has received the hard evidence of what MAGA knew all along - Russia collusion was a hoax, the Obama admin spied on a sitting President, and every single Democrat who wailed about it for years KNEW Russia Collusian was a hoax while they wailed of it. Lets have a look at Trump's taxes, find absolutely nothing incriminating there, but now continue to fund Obiden's rogue DOJ who are aggressively pursuing the Democrat whistleblowers who've spoken out in regards to the Obiden crime family's taxes. MAGA is furious, blood shooting out of the eyes furious, that this Congress has wasted untold billions and there are 1100 Americans sitting in a federal pen (some with life sentences) merely for attending a Trump rally on J6, and being caught up in the Pelosi fedsurrection grand production. We're furious too that tech corporations think they can silence the President of the United States, and half of America, merely because a handful of cowardly Democrats deemed Trump's tweets as unpleasant, or "mean".
Trump and Kennedy both appeal to Independents BECAUSE their respective parties have resorted to unprecedented deceit in trying to oust their own party frontrunners. The RNC doesn't want Trump in the running because he has already laid waste to their party. MAGA has taken over and exponentially grown the Republican base. The DNC doesn't want Kennedy on the ballot because they know he will obliterate any regressive progressive candidate that the Clinton/Obama machine puts forward. Both parties have shown nothing but contempt for the Americans that compose their voter bases.
If Kennedy and Trump could unite as Independents somehow....are you kidding me? It would all be over but the crying. No amount of brazen electronically manipulated voter fraud could fly again with these two baskets of deplorables. This looks also like the only way possible for the government gangsters who got us into this mess to be dismantled and finally held accountable - our intelligence agencies are, quite literally, the mafia that the Kennedy family took on, and paid dearly for with their lives. The ordeals that President Trump has lead us through lay bare the fact that they hide behind secrecy of what they are doing by saying it's "classified government information". A hint though: it's only secret because these are unspeakable crimes against the governed, the American people. They've assassination John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Now we're supposed to keep funding their show trials, and their set up of a fedsurrection against the American people who came to DC to protest an obviously stolen election???
This is our government. It's our country. We the People; we have to take it back from both of these national committees who've entrenched themselves as the avowed enemies of all Americans. And we better do it quick before the damage they've done internationally gets us nuked.
One of the first things Trump did when he got into office was to get rid of the TPP free trade agreement which was a HORRIBLE treaty that Hillary Clinton supported (though she tried to tip-toe away from that support while campaigning)
JIMMY HOFFA'S SON called Trump to thank him for ending the agreement. Hoffa is, of course, the President of the Teamsters Union.
Just back home from a meet the candidate in Rye, NH. RFKJr was the only other candidate invited this season by the Republican couple hosting nearly all the other candidates. We were told the crowd tonight was double the next best night! Impressive!
There is no Democrat or Republican Party...All is merely UNIPARTY pretending to be two parties. The Demonic City of London ran by the Rothschilds has corrupted all the U.S. and sought to economically enslave the people even as they GENOCIDE the whole planet and have for centuries of their 'Wars For Profit' and CHEATING.
Since the U.S. Revolution, 'The City of London' declared it the worst enemy of all time...And, the Constitution a travesty as installed the CREATOR TO ENDOW INALIENABLE RIGHTS ONTO HUMANITY and removed all power from the Psycho/Sociopathic ESTABLISHMENT only providing 'Human Rights' to sycophantic cowards as the DEMOCRATS ARE TODAY.
Income Tax being made illegal and viewed ROBBERY OF THE PEOPLE was not viewed very positively as it DISABLED THE CORRUPT BANKERS TO GET THEIR HANDS ON THE RICH RESOURCES OF NORTH AMERICA'S U.S.
Without The Constitution, the U.S. is just another 'BANANA REPUBLIC' SLAVE STATE OF THE ROTHSCHILDS.
The contemporary Democratic Party does indeed have a problem created by it favoring the interests of the "PMCs" (or "minions of the corporatist oligarchs" as I prefer to call them) over the working class and more generally all the productive classes, since the self-employed and people who engage in thrift are also getting strip-mined by our predatory corporatist elites.
Since the mid-1960s, the share of GDP devoted to net private capital goods investment has declined, almost exactly mirrored by increases in the share of GDP devoted to government spending. America has been gradually deindustrializing and the productivity and living standards of ordinary Americans stagnating over this period, starting decades before the rise of China ever became a thing. Even worse, since 1971 (when Nixon cut off the last gold backing of the dollar) the financing of this shift has been driven by the creation of fiat dollars out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. The merger of state and corporate power that RFK Jr. is crusading against has largely been a consequence of the joint dependency of Wall Street and the federal government on the funding of their fiscal recklessness via Fed debt monetization.
Every once in a while, Republicans have stirred up false hopes that real economic growth could be revived by cutting tax rates on investment returns and on high income earners, but of course that approach hasn't worked. It turns out that tax rates on investment income don't matter much if pre-tax interest rates are kept artificially low thanks to loose monetary policies, if government promises of benefits and bailouts crowd out the perceived need for investment income, and if whatever thrift-financed savings that are generated get diverted into financing gigantic government deficits instead of building productive factories, machines, etc. More recently, Republicans have been scapegoating imports from China and immigrants from Latin America as the bane of the working class, but building walls and imposing tariffs are even less relevant to the problem of reviving private thrift-financed investment in American industries than the "supply-side" tax cut dodge of yore.
Politically speaking, the productive classes have lost ground because the growth of government spending and the metastasizing of the Wall Street financialization/asset-stripping process has been funding an ever-expanding number of dependent clients as well as swelling the ranks of the regime's minions. The clients and the minions together now outnumber the productive among all voters, and clients on the lower end of the income spectrum have pretty much lost all hope in the possibility that a growing economy can rescue them from their plight and thus the need for government support. Even those clients who remain in the Republican base are inclined to quickly desert their party if any Republican politician dares to suggest that their Social Security or Medicare benefits need to be cut. Most clients, especially the younger ones, are fully aligned with the minion class in supporting Democratic candidates, albeit the more stridently socialist ones.
There are of course a number of culture war issues that motivate strong partisan loyalties too, sometimes cutting across the economic class loyalties described above. Within the productive classes, there are many women, mostly unmarried, who are incensed and in some cases feel personally threatened by the Republican crusade against their self-ownership of their own bodies. On the other side, the role that public school teachers have played in promoting a Democratic crusade against parental influence over the formation of the sexual identities of their children is generating enormous blowback against Democrats even among a portion of the traditional Democratic base. Then again many Americans, regardless of their economic class, are simply fed up with the culture warriors of both parties as well as with the inability of either party to improve the economy and don't bother to vote at all.
Rescuing the Democratic Party from the corporatists presents a pretty daunting challenge. RFK Jr. is to be greatly commended for openly acknowledging that there is a destructive economic class war going on and putting it at the heart of his campaign, not just a highly divisive culture war that most Americans agree shouldn't be defining who Americans are. However, the co-dependency of corporatist elites, war-mongering Deep Statists, and an ever-expanding welfare state on fiat dollar creation and its unsustainable deindustrialization of America greatly complicates any efforts to reform the Democratic Party. Winning back workers, etc. could potentially alienate a much broader segment of the current Demcratic base than just the minion class.
This message is not only for the DNC and GOP, but for the rich who trust on their wealth of silver and gold! Zechariah 9:3 weep and wail for what is about to come to you. Job 5:16 and Zechariah 9:7 He will take that bloody meat from your JAW of Injustice!
Very good essay, I agree with all of it with one exception: "deplorables" is not a reference to working-class voters, it's a reference to racism. At the time of Hillary Clinton's gaffe, an opinion poll showed that half of respondents supporting Trump held white-supremacist views. She at first used the word as an adjective in the phrase "deplorable views," but then she doubled down by using "deplorables" as a noun.
A stupid gaffe on her part, as it gave the Trump campaign a label to rally people around, and to misrepresent as a slam on the working class. Most of Trump's supporters were and are middle-class, but as we've all seen it has been spun as mostly working-class.
It's certainly true that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class, but you undermine this worthy argument by perpetuating what is at best an error and at worse a campaign falsehood.
People "fleeing" the parties is a good thing. We need to dump these corrupt decrepit parties, the two party system has done immense harm to the United States.
Increasingly, this seems to be the inevitable conclusion, even for those clinging on to their institutional allies.
Since they modified the constitution way back when, what we have is a "popularity" contest for President. The nation has grown too big. We need a better chain of command like the Constitution was originally designed for:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Notice the word "appoint" at the beginning - NOT "vote".
Of course a key to this is that the state governments themselves must not be corrupt. So the clean up really needs to be started at a lower level.
Everyone focuses on President when what we need is a *complete* clean up.
Keep in mind that each state now is far larger than the entire United States was at the time of drafting the constitution.
And go where? The Green Party is a club for academics that emerges from its cocoon every four years to run an academic for President to the loud cheers of everyone who thinks it's about voting for a party instead of for a person. Working-class voters have had that sort looking down their noses at them all their lives; they're not going to vote Green because the party candidate makes pretty speeches.
Don't vote for a party. Vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.
I prefer "disrupter" candidates. I supported, campaigned and voted for Obama twice. I then supported Bernie because I saw Hillary as corrupt and fake. When the DNC axed Bernie, I switched to Trump who I supported and voted for twice. Now, I feel truly excited about RFKJr, a candidate who offers real hope; a disrupter that I think will actually upend the corrupt corporate apple cart. Hope he can overcome the enormous roadblocks that have been put in his place. And I pray every night that God will keep him safe!
Thank you, Deborah!
Border control is another issue for the working class. Women's sports being restricted to biological women is a non-economic, kitchen table issue.
Indeed! Can any one think of a man who has menstrual periods? 3 year olds know the difference. There is an ominous agenda to introducing confusion.
Other cultural issues as well.
This article is largely right, as is Bobby Jr. However, to attribute homelessnessl (or whatever the morons call it today) is to ignore the obvious -- we are a nation of drug addicts.
I believe Kennedy's proposed end to the War on Drugs is misguided. The legalization of that wonderful medicinal "herb", marijuana, is already proving to be the disaster anyone with a brain would have predicted.
Maybe jail isn't the best answer, but something needs to be done to turn around the root cause of America's ridiculous addiction to addiction.
I have volunteered with homeless folks since they were "Street People" in te late 1970's. We have to ask WHY do we have so many more addicted people now that we had in 1977?
Amen, Steven.
Exactly! "Why" is perhaps the most important word in the English language, if one wants to solve problems.
Why?
Can we do a Thought Experiment, and consider whether legalization of marijuana is going to reduce or increase our drug addiction problem?
Agreed. That fentanyl is coming right across the southern border. Annual overdoses in six figures and rising!
I gather you never heard what John Ehrlichmann said in 1994 about why the War on Drugs was declared: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
I gather you've never heard of or seen the damages that addiction does to its various victims. But probably worse than addicts are do-gooders like, presumably, yourself.
My father died of an alcohol-induced illness, and several members of his family were also alcohol addicted. In my first job as a journalist, I interacted regularly with recovering addicts. But do take it upon yourself to shake your schoolmarm finger at someone you know nothing about but whose comment you chose to interpret in a manner that gave you that nice jolt of superiority while at the same time ignoring an established fact that causes you cognitive dissonance.
Kennedy will have to end up running as an Independent. The sooner he comes to terms with this the better. He needs to tap Tulsi Gabbard as his VP and just go ahead and split off from the DNC. He'll pull good numbers from the moderate Dems and even more from the GOP. He'll have a lock on unaffiliated, libertarian & independents. If he tried to team up with West, it will be a disaster.
Kennedy is a leftist with totalitarian tendencies. Republicans, conservatives and libertarians would do well to remember this. He s a climate alarmist and to him, every problem has a big government solution.
You probably need to head back over to facebook. The deep end of the thinking pool is for critical thinkers. Just sayin.....
Like an apple with significant rot, the Demagogues at the top level are beyond redemption, at least since their overt sabotage of Bernie in 2016. As an independent, RFK, Jr. will gain enthusiastic support form mans sides.
The Democratic Party desperately needs RFK, but are determined not to have him. If he runs third party, he will be the first third party President. All the Trump voters want someone better as a human being than Trump, he has just seemed to be the best choice of those available. With RFK in a three way race between Trump and Biden, RFK will defeat them both
Trump vs Biden = Awful vs Terrible. Down with both. Trump has no concept on the intricate interactions of Nature we call ecology. Biden is in a permanent brain fog, and his overt corruption re: Ukraine is there for all to see.
That's incorrect. There's not a MAGA supporter on the planet who believes Trump is or ever was a lesser human being. In fact the massive swell of support Trump has garnered since 2016 is based almost entirely on the fact that Trump has been savaged by the Left over any and every mundane issue imaginable - not one of the accusations are true, they were made up whole cloth by Clinton and the DNC, and a whole lot of American tax dollars have been wasted on entertaining a fruitless and endless witch hunt.
Initial support for Trump hinged on the fact that he too had to consider running as an Independent, because the Republican party sought to squeeze him out of the process, much like the DNC squeezes out the voice of their own "deplorables". To date the Republican Party, that is, what's left of it (Mitt Romney, Ronna McRomney and co.) has employed the law firm Holtzman Vogel and spent $37 million in an effort to keep their own frontrunner's name (Trump) off the ballot. So the RNC is resorting to DNC tactics and trying to force its people's favorite candidate out of the process on procedural grounds.
I can assure you the RNC isn't trying to keep Trump's name off the ballot because they are worried that Trump voters will fall for the next outright lie hatched by Democrats to tarnish the reputation of America's favorite President.
Trump was impeached for nothing. America now knows Russian Collusion was a complete Hillary Clinton fabrication. Because American tax dollars were pissed away for years on Congressional hearings, and a grand impeachment production (twice) MAGA has grown exponentially. Much of America has received the hard evidence of what MAGA knew all along - Russia collusion was a hoax, the Obama admin spied on a sitting President, and every single Democrat who wailed about it for years KNEW Russia Collusian was a hoax while they wailed of it. Lets have a look at Trump's taxes, find absolutely nothing incriminating there, but now continue to fund Obiden's rogue DOJ who are aggressively pursuing the Democrat whistleblowers who've spoken out in regards to the Obiden crime family's taxes. MAGA is furious, blood shooting out of the eyes furious, that this Congress has wasted untold billions and there are 1100 Americans sitting in a federal pen (some with life sentences) merely for attending a Trump rally on J6, and being caught up in the Pelosi fedsurrection grand production. We're furious too that tech corporations think they can silence the President of the United States, and half of America, merely because a handful of cowardly Democrats deemed Trump's tweets as unpleasant, or "mean".
Trump and Kennedy both appeal to Independents BECAUSE their respective parties have resorted to unprecedented deceit in trying to oust their own party frontrunners. The RNC doesn't want Trump in the running because he has already laid waste to their party. MAGA has taken over and exponentially grown the Republican base. The DNC doesn't want Kennedy on the ballot because they know he will obliterate any regressive progressive candidate that the Clinton/Obama machine puts forward. Both parties have shown nothing but contempt for the Americans that compose their voter bases.
If Kennedy and Trump could unite as Independents somehow....are you kidding me? It would all be over but the crying. No amount of brazen electronically manipulated voter fraud could fly again with these two baskets of deplorables. This looks also like the only way possible for the government gangsters who got us into this mess to be dismantled and finally held accountable - our intelligence agencies are, quite literally, the mafia that the Kennedy family took on, and paid dearly for with their lives. The ordeals that President Trump has lead us through lay bare the fact that they hide behind secrecy of what they are doing by saying it's "classified government information". A hint though: it's only secret because these are unspeakable crimes against the governed, the American people. They've assassination John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Now we're supposed to keep funding their show trials, and their set up of a fedsurrection against the American people who came to DC to protest an obviously stolen election???
This is our government. It's our country. We the People; we have to take it back from both of these national committees who've entrenched themselves as the avowed enemies of all Americans. And we better do it quick before the damage they've done internationally gets us nuked.
This essay is too true!
One of the first things Trump did when he got into office was to get rid of the TPP free trade agreement which was a HORRIBLE treaty that Hillary Clinton supported (though she tried to tip-toe away from that support while campaigning)
JIMMY HOFFA'S SON called Trump to thank him for ending the agreement. Hoffa is, of course, the President of the Teamsters Union.
https://teamster.org/2017/01/hoffa-withdrawal-tpp-right-choice-us-trade-policy/
Just back home from a meet the candidate in Rye, NH. RFKJr was the only other candidate invited this season by the Republican couple hosting nearly all the other candidates. We were told the crowd tonight was double the next best night! Impressive!
There is no Democrat or Republican Party...All is merely UNIPARTY pretending to be two parties. The Demonic City of London ran by the Rothschilds has corrupted all the U.S. and sought to economically enslave the people even as they GENOCIDE the whole planet and have for centuries of their 'Wars For Profit' and CHEATING.
Since the U.S. Revolution, 'The City of London' declared it the worst enemy of all time...And, the Constitution a travesty as installed the CREATOR TO ENDOW INALIENABLE RIGHTS ONTO HUMANITY and removed all power from the Psycho/Sociopathic ESTABLISHMENT only providing 'Human Rights' to sycophantic cowards as the DEMOCRATS ARE TODAY.
Income Tax being made illegal and viewed ROBBERY OF THE PEOPLE was not viewed very positively as it DISABLED THE CORRUPT BANKERS TO GET THEIR HANDS ON THE RICH RESOURCES OF NORTH AMERICA'S U.S.
Without The Constitution, the U.S. is just another 'BANANA REPUBLIC' SLAVE STATE OF THE ROTHSCHILDS.
The contemporary Democratic Party does indeed have a problem created by it favoring the interests of the "PMCs" (or "minions of the corporatist oligarchs" as I prefer to call them) over the working class and more generally all the productive classes, since the self-employed and people who engage in thrift are also getting strip-mined by our predatory corporatist elites.
Since the mid-1960s, the share of GDP devoted to net private capital goods investment has declined, almost exactly mirrored by increases in the share of GDP devoted to government spending. America has been gradually deindustrializing and the productivity and living standards of ordinary Americans stagnating over this period, starting decades before the rise of China ever became a thing. Even worse, since 1971 (when Nixon cut off the last gold backing of the dollar) the financing of this shift has been driven by the creation of fiat dollars out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. The merger of state and corporate power that RFK Jr. is crusading against has largely been a consequence of the joint dependency of Wall Street and the federal government on the funding of their fiscal recklessness via Fed debt monetization.
Every once in a while, Republicans have stirred up false hopes that real economic growth could be revived by cutting tax rates on investment returns and on high income earners, but of course that approach hasn't worked. It turns out that tax rates on investment income don't matter much if pre-tax interest rates are kept artificially low thanks to loose monetary policies, if government promises of benefits and bailouts crowd out the perceived need for investment income, and if whatever thrift-financed savings that are generated get diverted into financing gigantic government deficits instead of building productive factories, machines, etc. More recently, Republicans have been scapegoating imports from China and immigrants from Latin America as the bane of the working class, but building walls and imposing tariffs are even less relevant to the problem of reviving private thrift-financed investment in American industries than the "supply-side" tax cut dodge of yore.
Politically speaking, the productive classes have lost ground because the growth of government spending and the metastasizing of the Wall Street financialization/asset-stripping process has been funding an ever-expanding number of dependent clients as well as swelling the ranks of the regime's minions. The clients and the minions together now outnumber the productive among all voters, and clients on the lower end of the income spectrum have pretty much lost all hope in the possibility that a growing economy can rescue them from their plight and thus the need for government support. Even those clients who remain in the Republican base are inclined to quickly desert their party if any Republican politician dares to suggest that their Social Security or Medicare benefits need to be cut. Most clients, especially the younger ones, are fully aligned with the minion class in supporting Democratic candidates, albeit the more stridently socialist ones.
There are of course a number of culture war issues that motivate strong partisan loyalties too, sometimes cutting across the economic class loyalties described above. Within the productive classes, there are many women, mostly unmarried, who are incensed and in some cases feel personally threatened by the Republican crusade against their self-ownership of their own bodies. On the other side, the role that public school teachers have played in promoting a Democratic crusade against parental influence over the formation of the sexual identities of their children is generating enormous blowback against Democrats even among a portion of the traditional Democratic base. Then again many Americans, regardless of their economic class, are simply fed up with the culture warriors of both parties as well as with the inability of either party to improve the economy and don't bother to vote at all.
Rescuing the Democratic Party from the corporatists presents a pretty daunting challenge. RFK Jr. is to be greatly commended for openly acknowledging that there is a destructive economic class war going on and putting it at the heart of his campaign, not just a highly divisive culture war that most Americans agree shouldn't be defining who Americans are. However, the co-dependency of corporatist elites, war-mongering Deep Statists, and an ever-expanding welfare state on fiat dollar creation and its unsustainable deindustrialization of America greatly complicates any efforts to reform the Democratic Party. Winning back workers, etc. could potentially alienate a much broader segment of the current Demcratic base than just the minion class.
Thank you. I often feel thankful that I'm old these days.
This message is not only for the DNC and GOP, but for the rich who trust on their wealth of silver and gold! Zechariah 9:3 weep and wail for what is about to come to you. Job 5:16 and Zechariah 9:7 He will take that bloody meat from your JAW of Injustice!
Thank you Daniel for the ON TARGET article!
Very good essay, I agree with all of it with one exception: "deplorables" is not a reference to working-class voters, it's a reference to racism. At the time of Hillary Clinton's gaffe, an opinion poll showed that half of respondents supporting Trump held white-supremacist views. She at first used the word as an adjective in the phrase "deplorable views," but then she doubled down by using "deplorables" as a noun.
A stupid gaffe on her part, as it gave the Trump campaign a label to rally people around, and to misrepresent as a slam on the working class. Most of Trump's supporters were and are middle-class, but as we've all seen it has been spun as mostly working-class.
It's certainly true that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class, but you undermine this worthy argument by perpetuating what is at best an error and at worse a campaign falsehood.
But can RFK Jr change the party from within? I doubt it unless he is able to attract enough die-hard Democrats.