They'll Preside Over the Ruins

Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer demands that we hold the corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) accountable.

Nah Gah Nah Happen.

This is not just power, there are a whole class of people at the top of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) whose living depends on the incompetence and corruption to continue, and, to quote the great Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

They would rather rule over a a Democratic Party in shambles then lose their power over the party.  

The title is the Boies Penrose quote.  When he was accused of destroying the Republican Party in Pennsylvanie to preserve his power within the party, he replied, "Yes, but I’ll preside over the ruins.."

While the presidential election wasn’t called until early Wednesday morning, by midnight the overwhelming evidence was that the Democrats were heading for a catastrophe on par with 2016. Donald Trump was already leading in all the battleground states; Republicans were poised to win the Senate, and the House of Representatives remains agonizingly close. There is a real danger of a Republican trifecta once the last votes are counted. It also appears that Donald Trump has won the popular vote—something he failed to do in his first two runs for the presidency.

Trump is now in a position to do enormous damage during his second term in office. We can expect that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will resign from the Supreme Court soo—and be replaced by much younger right-wing ideologues of the same ilk. This would ensure a right-wing stranglehold on the highest court in America for another generation. Trump will also be able to renew his tax cut of 2017, ensuring that trillions of dollars in wealth will be kept by billionaires rather than taxed for the benefit of the country. Trump will also be able to implement the extremist agenda of Project 2025, a plan to remake the American government along plutocratic lines.

Aside from Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory included Bernie bros who allegedly sat out the election in spite, James Comey for releasing two letters about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, the media for overplaying the Clinton e-mail story and giving Trump too much airtime, and the general bigotry of the American public. While some of these factors did play a part in Trump’s victory, they functioned mainly as distractions from the inconvenient—to the party elite—truth that Clinton and the Democrats bore a much greater share of the responsibility. Clinton ran an uninspired campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal foibles, while her party refused to take responsibility for neoliberal policies that had immiserated the American working class. Further, Clinton focused her message so heavily on winning over suburban college-educated voters who were normally Republican, and who in fact overwhelmingly stayed with Trump. This caused her to ignore the much larger number of voters who were working-class and non-college-educated.

………

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency—and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.

I believe that this last paragraph is fundamentally wrong.  "Anti-system politics" were present, and in some election cycles ascendant (2010 "shellacking" anyone?), during the Obama administration, but Obama had the good fortune to be facing someone even more establishment than he was in 2012.

In fact, I would argue that "Anti-system politics" as a political force were in large part created by Barack Obama, when he bailed out corrupt and criminal bankers on the backs of ordinary people.

It's no wonder that a large number of voters want to burn everything to the ground.

Hell, I want to burn everything to the ground, nationalize health insurance, prosecute corrupt Supreme Court justices, throw anti-abortion terrorists in jail, and fire every single major political pundit in the country.