Originally shared by Teodor Poparescu
Excerpt from the article:
“Hague fugitive George W Bush was trending yesterday after drawing accolades from amnesiac liberals everywhere for a speech he gave condemning Trumpism and Russia. The DNC has just held a surprise purge of progressives from its ranks, replacing them with reliably corrupt establishment stalwarts like Donna Brazile. Bernie Sanders has bowed out of his scheduled Women’s Conference speech following outraged cries of sexism from fake feminists and demands that he be replaced with a drone-bombing, Wall Street-coddling female politician like Hillary Clinton.
Get used to this. This is the new normal.
Two years ago journalist Max Blumenthal predicted that “Trump’s true role is expanding political space on the far-right, making the militarists and racists who roundly condemn him seem moderate,” and we see today that this is exactly how he’s being used. After their failed attempt to use Trump’s far-right following to make his fanatically neoconservative opponent look electable in 2016, they simply shifted to using the exact same tactic for 2020. This is less about getting a more presentable face in the White House than it is about herding rank-and-file Americans into supporting the neoliberal neoconservative power structure represented by what is hilariously known as America’s political “center”.”
Never Stop Posting 
The normal response of a party (in the U.S., and I think in most places) that has lost an election is to say to each other, “how can we expand our base just enough to win next time?” The Democratic party today is doing no such thing. They are doubling down on what didn’t work last time (and hasn’t really worked for a while, since the last truly good election for Democrats was 2008). This isn’t normal, and it doesn’t bode well. I fear that the Democrats will have to lose another time or two before they try something different.
One open question: will the Democrats become the party of the (globalist) wealthy elite (who mostly don’t like Trump), and the Republicans (who have been dealing their own wealthy-elite Bush-type candidates some primary defeats recently) become the working class (and nationalist) party? I give that a 50/50 chance.
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I’m not sure I’d characterise what the Republicans are doing as moving into working class politics. It strikes me as another kind of elite politics.
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Well it used to be the GOP deal that the elite got the lax immigration enforcement and low tariffs they wanted, and gave the lower middle class free reign to beat on anybody lower than them on the totem pole. Now, however, and really ever since Eric Cantor (no. 2 Rep in the House at the time) lost his primary in 2014 to an anti-immigration populist, the GOP elite has been steadily losing their grip. The want cheap labor, here and abroad, and that requires lax immigration enforcement and no tariffs, and they are seeing a real erosion in their ability to get it.
All political parties (including Communist ones) are elites, almost by definition, but we are witnessing a real intra-party coup in the GOP lately.
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They are still the party of extreme deregulation and union breaking. Until that changes I still put them in the category of boss’s party. That’s what I mean by elite politics. I don’t see any great flip in alignments going on here. I see two parties moving steadily right as organised labour disintegrates.
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