The Democratic National Committee’s leaked emails preudo-drama
reveals far more than the real story at the heart of the matter – that apparently
neutral DNC discussed means to sabotage the Bernie Sanders primary election
campaign. It thereby violated its claims to political neutrality between rival
candidates and favoured Hillary Clinton, a party establishment darling.
Diverting attention from the substance of the charge of political bias, the DNC
first gently and politely nudged out its chair, Debbie Wasserman Shultz (to a very comfortable honorary position), and
then blamed the Russians for hacking party email servers in a bid to benefit
Putin’s (apparently) preferred candidate, Donald Trump. Trump, rising to the
elite politics game, added his own flavours to the mix and attributed a racial
slur to Putin against President Obama, and egged the Russians to continue
leaking more emails. In the age of post-truth politics, no evidence was
required for these claims but their job was done – eyes were on Russia, Trump,
etc and not on the DNC’s wrong-doing.
While deflecting attention from the original issue, the
episode also demonstrates why the United States is in political crisis today
and will remain so for some time to come. While large swathes of the electorate
scream from the pain of trying to make ends meet as real incomes fall and
inequality rises, health care costs increase, police violence against black men
reaches epidemic proportions, America’s infrastructure crumbles, and people look
to leaders who apparently offer ways out of the crisis, the American political
class has gone back to business as usual. They take or admit no responsibility
for the Iraq War or the financial meltdown of 2008, fail to mention the debacle
in Afghanistan, the massive increase of the power of Wall St corporations in
economic and political life. America’s problems today, it appears, have nothing
to do with the Republicans or Democrats.
This political amnesia is far more likely to damage the
Democrats than the GOP’s Donald Trump – the only candidate reflecting popular
anger against elite power; indeed it plays into his hands and boosts his
chances of winning the White House – unless, of course, he self-ignites
following one of his red-line crossing gaffes. This election was billed as
Hillary Clinton’s to lose – and she and her celebratory coterie, backed by big
money, appear to be heading into a very rough election season up to November.
It may be that Trump fails to win rather than Hillary defeats a candidate
President Obama has declared unfit for office.
Both parties’ conventions provide an insight into the crisis
of elite party politics today and the more significant conclusion that neither
party offers very much to their target voters. The GOP spent their convention
papering over the cracks in their party’s fabric and raison d’etre, attacking
the record of the Obama administration, and promising to make America great
again and give it back to its own people, code for the anti-minorities
xenophobia that galvanises an alliance between loyal Republicans and Trump’s
white working class core support. The latter have been regaled with tales of
jobs for all by abolishing free trade, and bashing the Chinese. But no support
for increasing the federal minimum wage or investment in crumbling roads and
bridges or schools has been offered. All the while, Trump built bridges to
party elites with his selection of Governor Mike Pence as vice presidential
running mate – a dyed-in-the-wool
tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-corporations-conservative from the tea party wing of
the GOP. Trump’s mission to restore America has no place for any redistribution
of income and wealth which is what a majority of Americans and large
proportions of Republican voters actually want. The only threat to GOP elites
backing Trump is from the billionaire candidates own penchant for outrageous
bigotry.
And the Democrats, convened in Philadelphia, and let off the
hook by Bernie Sanders’s full throated backing of Hillary Clinton, and pretended
the Sanders insurgency never happened even as Michelle Obama, President Obama
and nominee Clinton praised Bernie and started a major celebration of America’s
continuing greatness and of its status quo. This left them with one place to go
in focusing attention: Donald Trump.
Trump is not only at the centre of his own
campaign, he is also the Democrats’ sole target. No vision backed by specific
policies and programmes to curb the power of Wall St and big money in politics,
no job creation or infrastructure-building. To be sure, the Democratic platform
bears witness to the compromise with Sanders – on college tuition fees, health
care, federal minimum wage. But on the major question of the neoliberal order’s
attachment to globalisation and outsourcing of factory jobs, and the power of
big money in economy and politics, including bankrolling Hillary Clinton for
decades, and the gross levels of inequality that process has generated, there
is silence. Just more talk about how bad Trump is. Meanwhile Blackwater, one of
the world’s largest private equity funds, whose CEO sits on the board of the
Clinton-Obama think tank, the Center for American Progress, has held
fundraisers for Obama and Clinton, and who some tip as a future treasury
secretary, held a major reception in Philadelphia. And Hillary has received up
to $123 million from such Wall St denizens in contrast to a paltry $19000 (yes,
that’s $19K) donated to the Trump campaign. (Sanders received $0 from
corporations). Hillary has personally earned over $20 million from closed-door
speeches at Wall St firms. That’s why Clinton cannot even understand where
critics of corporate-cash-dominated politics are coming from – to her, this is
how normal politics works. Any plank of the Democrats’ platform needs to be
read in this context.
It is unsurprising that last week’s great celebration of the
glorious Obama years – also funded by major Wall St donors - failed to address
any deep-seated problems of American society; yet it plays directly into
Trump’s hands and threatens a smooth transfer of power from Obama to Clinton.
It permits two things: Trump appears as the change candidate, and he can turn
his guns onto Hillary Clinton in a race to the bottom on who’s part of the
establishment, closer to the people or Wall St, the more dishonest and corrupt.
And Trump is a lot better at playing that game than Clinton.
To Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, what’s
most disturbing about the Brexit and Trump debates “is that there is zero elite
reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to
both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority.” Trump
resonates, Greenwald commented, not due to popular stupidity but because people
feel cheated and let down by “the prevailing order…. that they can’t imagine
that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo.” People are so
angry with the way things are that they simply want out of the current position,
to throw out the existing elite, regardless of the consequences. This
anti-politics is precisely the core appeal of Trumpism, a phenomenon set to
outlive its eponymous hero.
The Trump and Sanders campaigns rode the deep discontents of
a nation all the way to Cleveland and Philadelphia, despite sabotage attempts
from party elites. The Sanders campaign has thrown in the towel and focuses on
Clinton versus Trump, forgetting the structural inequality that propelled
voters into its camp. Trump is in the process of betraying his core
constituency, enjoying the fun and games of elite party politics.
Business as usual, normalcy, has been restored – or, has it merely
been stored up for a future explosion?
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