I’ve been worrying a great deal about President Trump’s disregard for the rule of law and his demolition of valuable publicly funded programs and institutions. At the same time, perspective is important: it’s important to understand that Trump and the MAGA movement didn’t just appear out of thin air, or arise because a cohort of alleged racists who never before voted decided to come out of the woodwork and cast ballots.
The MAGA movement and Trump are the logical outcomes of a rotten system and the repulsiveness of Democrats on a national level.
Americans are exhausted and angry at the corruption and hypocrisy in D.C. They’re hungry for radical change. And if they can’t have the change they seek, they seem content to watch the whole enterprise implode. They’re content to settle for someone who will take an axe to whatever object they’ve been conditioned to project their anger on, such as social programs or immigrants, rather than the wealthy and powerful.
The Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on America. They’re funded and controlled by the same cohort of wealthy special interests: the military industrial complex, big pharma, big ag, insurance companies. Just take a look at campaign finance reports. Sure, there are some differences in policies and funding between Democrats and Republicans. But what’s more telling, and more important, is their unity; the funding and agenda of elites on whose behalf they legislate, while they virtue signal and handwave about the sanctity of our democracy.
But it isn’t just the fact that we live in an oligarchy in which our votes at the national level are essentially theater. The Democrats have not only dropped the ball; they’ve popped it with a knife and thrown it into a dumpster fire. I constantly hear from Leftists that Democrats are “the lesser of two evils;” they’re confused about why so many people clearly disagree. First of all, evil is still evil, and secondly, it’s worth examining at least some of the reasons why voters have every right to reject Democrats. Let’s survey just some of what Democrats have brought us since President Obama: Obama took us from two wars to seven, bombing seven countries in his first six years in office; prosecuted and terrorized whistleblowers; suspended habeas corpus; and assassinated a U.S. citizen. The Democrats shelved a public option for healthcare even when they had an historic supermajority. They bailed out Wall Street, and then, afterwards Obama went on a speaking tour for the very banks he bailed out to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech.
The Democrats foisted Hillary Clinton, one of the most corrupt and unpopular politicians in the country, upon the Democratic base, with the DNC openly cheating Bernie Sanders in the process. Then they had the audacity to call people sexist for not voting for her, as if there were no other possible reasons why people wouldn’t cast their ballots for Clinton.
During Trump’s first term, all the Democrats managed to accomplish was to spread Russiagate propaganda. And they fell in love with neocons critical of Trump, including Liz Cheney and George W. Bush, even though they got Obama elected largely on the back of how awful Bush was, the same president who greenlit two illegal wars and a sadistic torture program.
Four years of President Biden brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia. His administration colluded with social media companies to censor political speech. It tried to implement a de facto vaccine mandate that would have affected upwards of 80 million workers while at the same time calling itself “pro choice.” Its health authorities promulgated pandemic policies that took a sledgehammer to public education and detonated a bomb on small businesses.
And the administration, in conjunction with mainstream media, ran cover for Biden’s cognitive decline before, and on the campaign trail, gaslighting everyone who questioned his mental fortitude. Finally, the Democrats cemented their unpopularity by canceling primary debates, denigrating anyone who dared to call for an open and fair competition. Then they coronated Vice President Harris (who, by the way, no one thought was qualified until the very last minute). They publicly displayed their disdain for democracy.
Democrats today prioritize spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars in foreign aid, most recently Ukraine, while a majority of Americans can’t even afford a $500 emergency. They openly embrace our economic reliance on low-wage non-citizen workers while blaming Republicans for average wages not keeping up with the costs of living. They holler about social justice, yet they’ve become a party of war and censorship that has turned its backs on the working class.
Chuck Schumer summarized their indifference to the working class best when he declared, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
To my mind, the only strategy that sets Democrats apart from Republicans on a national level since at least 2016 has been to scream about Trump and lecture people about identity politics and microaggressions. They’ve deluded themselves into thinking that enough people are sufficiently fixated on abortion that they can cross the electoral finish line. All they have left is a smug unearned sense of moral superiority, and most regular people would rather vote for an untethered allegedly fascist billionaire than them.
If Democrats can’t convince people to vote for them over a man who proclaimed he’d be a dictator on day one, then maybe the problem isn’t Trump and the people who voted for him.
