My rant to end 2018: Time for all who want real, positive change to abandon Vichy Democrats and Identity Politics.

Edit: My apologies, the last 3 paragraphs do not appear due to operator error of my workaround to be able to post anything this long due to hamster behavior I do not understand. I cannot post a reply to this thread with them, either. 

Well, here we are, on the eve of New Year’s Eve, about to head into 2019, which promises to be full of interesting times.

The economy is like the opening scene from Macbeth–bubble, bubble, toil and trouble–as the overinflated stock, real estate, student loan, China, and thanks to the effects of climate change, insurance, bubbles can and will burst, probably some time next year. All of the Russiagate hysteria, budget shutdown, and just general disgust with the spoiled man child in the White House may not doom him, but any prolonged recession caused by any of the things I listed easily will.

Meanwhile, the Vichy Democrats, shocked by the strength of a very young progressive political movement, desperately try to frame the 2020 elections in terms of identity politics, Madison Avenue-style branding, and “human rights” abroad solvable only by American military intervention, which not coincidentally fuel their own investments and corporate donors.

Not only that, but just like Trump, they throw temper tantrums and wild accusations at progressives in a futile attempt to blame us or the Republicans for their own colossal failures. Their record of failure goes back to at least 1993, when Vichy Democrat Extraordinaire Bill Clinton broke his promise and joined with Republicans to push through NAFTA, an act which devastated the entire Midwest and made the very name Clinton an anathema here.

Identity politics itself is based on the flawed assumption that voters have to identify with some ephemeral characteristic of a candidate in order to vote for them. That characteristic can be just about anything; race, ethnicity, gender, gender preference, gender identity, some sort of lifestyle such as “soccer moms,” religion, age, regional accent, height, weight, or musculature.

Notice none of these things has anything whatsoever to do with one’s political or socioeconomic class, and that is quite deliberate. The last thing anyone in our power elite, be they Republican or Democrat, wants is for class consciousness to develop in this country, for such a development is the harbinger of their political doom, and they know it.

Hence Obama referring to criminal bankers as “savvy businessmen” and saying American celebrate wealth and they should, thereby holding out that capitalist propaganda carrot that if we only work hard enough, we too can be rich, which is a contemptible lie. Hence people on sites like DU, and even here, saying that it should not matter how much wealth John Kerry or Beto O’Rourke married into. Hence the calls for “baby steps” on political, economic, and even environmental reform.

Hence the contradictory DNC strategy towards progressives, which on the one hand tells us we are irrelevant and they don’t need us, and on the other demands our votes for whatever corrupt, corporatist swamp creature they put forward. Hence the insulting strategy of calling us racist or misogynist if we refuse to vote for a minority or female candidate, while ignoring the fact that Nina Turner is a proud black woman and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a young Puerto Rican woman.

The only purpose of the DNC and the Vichy Democrats is to preserve the corporatist status quo for as long as possible, raking in all the loot while they still can before the storms on the horizon, be they meteorological ones caused by climate change or political ones caused by massive income inequality and injustice, overwhelm our pathetically unprepared civilization.

For all of those reasons, and more besides, as progressives our task is not only to refuse to support these parasitical cretins ourselves, but to spread the word to as many as possible to stop listening to the Very Intelligent People in the TV, print, and internet media who urge us to vote for those candidates in the primaries who they say is the most “electable.” And how do we counter them? The Joe Friday method, just the facts, ma’am.