The End of the Two-Party System

This may sound like a vindictive leftist smear to the one remaining liberal who reads this newsletter, but I promise I don't mean it to be. (Even if I do intend to dunk on the Dems as much as possible, because they're garbage.) I do so with purpose today, though, and that purpose is to get you to cut any ties you may have left with the Democratic party, and to start showing your middle fingers to anyone who tells you otherwise.

It's not just that the Dems oversaw the start of the genocide in Gaza by the Israelis. It's not just that they ran a presidential campaign on thin air and vibes. It's because they are not who you might think they are. The GOP is a legitimate party in that it will do what it says and sometimes what it promises. The Democrats, on the other hand, are a party of losers–and I mean that not as a dig but as their all-but-stated goal. They have, for years, demanded of you loyalty while making promises they don't fulfill nor ever intend to. The needs of this country, and the world, have been clearly stated for years and the Dems, our supposed standard-bearers, have compromised their way to a doomed planet and an oligarchical government swiftly moving toward fascism. Despite having the means to fix our broken electoral system, or at least try, they have done nothing–because they like to lose. It gets them money, which is pretty much all they care about. The next time we have an election, if we do, the Democratic party will front a candidate who is to the right of Ronald Reagan, call it a victory of representation, and placate roughly half the population of the country by pasting over any and all crimes of the previous administration with the same cliche "equality" sticker meme I trot out because it's so accurate.

Whence Goeth The Dems

Rank-and-file liberals, politicians, and media figures alike started the blame game even before the election went up in smoke, and it didn't sound like the kind of tolerant left we've come to expect–it sounded like the kind of castigation you get from the GOP. I don't take this as empty talk. It took no time at all for the liberal apparatus to blame Arab people, leftists, Black men. Anyone that voted against them. Rhetoric before and after the election was dirty, with a lot of animosity from liberal civilians that, again, was reminiscent of conservatives.

The Dems' swing to the right has been noted here previously, but this is the first time that I've felt like it wasn't a betrayal of their constituency–or, perhaps, that the constituency moved swiftly rightward to match the candidates. This can be noted, besides by trawling through social media, by looking at conventional media: MSNBC's Morning Joe anchors met with President-elect Trump in the last week or so in order to figure out how exactly they would cover his term. CNN just ran a bit where they specifically called out Nazis, marching in Columbus, Ohio, as being undetermined on the political spectrum. They were stated as typically being on the far right, but "leftists have demonstrated against Zionism," so, draw your own conclusions, apparently.

If we were just talking about future elections, this might not be an issue. But the Democrat Bulwark against the general rightward slouch of the country was–emphasis on was–a real thing. It no longer is. This means that, while there are plenty of liberals in the country who believe in, say, LGBTQIA+ rights, they may no longer believe all races belong in this country, or do believe that leftists are a scourge, or that Trans rights need to be sacrificed in the spirit of compromise. That is a big deal. It turns a dynamic that we had counted on, a coalition, on its head. For us, there is virtually no distinction between liberals and conservatives at this point. They are, put simply, opponents to our survival.

Hawks All Along

Despite their outward appearance as peaceniks, which the Dems have long exploited, they haven't been opposed to war since, perhaps, a very brief window around 2006. Before that and since, they haven't really minded it–though they'll certainly be more opposed to it during any GOP presidency. This is underscored by Biden's recent move to allow the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine into Russian territory. He's also trying to forgive billions in Ukrainian debt. Now, should you need reminding, I am on Ukraine's side in this fight–but with hardly any time left on the clock, the Dems are working to escalate conflicts rather than put any safeguards in place against Trump's aspirations. While it won't be Biden's whole fault if we get nuked before Christmas, he sure didn't help.

When you couple this with the genocide in Gaza and our continued armament of Israel, there's really no other way to take the Democratic stance. You can even point to the 2016 election and the labeling of Clinton as a hawk–which wasn't shook at all by her well-staked positions on various conflicts. It was so clear, in fact, that if 2016 is an understandable haze for you, Trump campaigned on keeping the US out of wars, which is just fucking wild.

The Collapse of Our Political System

If we manage to remain a democracy through the 2nd Trump administration, it won't be remotely the same as before. Any vestige of the Democratic party will be in name only, unabashedly caving to the demands of Republicans and refusing to move the needle when given the opportunity (actually, that's not all that different from today). Should they ever take power again, the best we can expect from them is the kind of radical centrism we've seen from Biden–more wars, more money to the military-industrial complex, more cops, more hostility to leftists. Any social victories will be bandages on gaping wounds.

And all of this, of course, only removes all doubt about our response to climate change. There is virtually no chance left for us to reverse course at this point–Trump's re-election puts us over the line, and there is no way that the Dems, if they were to get the wheel again, try at all to dig us out of the pit. The odds of them actually doing anything beyond the bare minimum to mitigate the disasters to follow are likewise vanishingly small. We're locked in, folks.

It's been a long time since we had a genuine two-party system in this country, and that is a shitty ceiling on the possibilities of a democracy. But we don't even have that now, and I don't think that we ever will again. Our choice is between the open fascists or the sneaky fascists. Which leads me back to my usual point regarding politics in America: the system is broken and we can do better. We have got to stop sinking our energy into this pit and start building the movement we've known, for some time, we need. We've just got to be brave enough to do it.

One last thing, before we adjourn for the week: this collapse of the liberal party into a radical centrist dying star makes me think that we can no longer count on the kind of cold, or hot, civil war which has seemed to be in the cards for us–in which the Democratically-led cities and (some) states fought back against a more blanket-red countryside. I, and others, simply did not reckon appropriately with the vacuous greed of the Democrats. Capitalism has eaten this country alive, folks. We've got to climb out of its jaws while we can.