If Hillary Secures the Nomination, the Next Casualty of Regime Change Will Be the Democratic Party

Hillary Clinton has a talent and a propensity for toppling established systems of authority and leaving power vacuums in their place. This usually happens in places far-flung from the average American voter (such as Honduras, Libya, etc.), but the chickens of Clinton’s chickenhawkishness are about to come home to roost for the Democratic Party.

The Democrats can only send one message to the American people by nominating Hillary Clinton: that they would rather preserve the current system of pay-to-play politics than win the presidency.

We all know that’s true, of course. But we also expect our professional politicians to do a better job of concealing their cupidity and corruption. This reasonable expectation of the electorate puts Hillary in a bind, since it’s difficult for one to conceal what one embodies. 

Every speech Clinton makes and every press stunt in which she participates is a dazzling display of disconnectedness from voters whose concerns she cannot fathom. From her perspective, however, it’s only fair to hold ordinary American citizens in contempt. If we commoners wanted to avoid economic hardships in our own lives, then we should have been more eager than Clinton was to trample on people weaker than ourselves. Those of us who didn’t seize the opportunity to profit from the school-to-prison pipeline or to advocate fracking in struggling economies all over the globe or to exploit worldwide sympathy for Haitians to line the pockets of our friends and family members—well, we only have ourselves to blame.

If Hillary could really win a general election in November, then the Democratic party might be able to survive her nomination. But she can’t win an election because there are only two kinds of people who will vote for her: the misleaders and the misled.

The misleadership class that supports Clinton consists of the people who are already on her payroll and others who seek to be on her payroll. Their motives are clear; their incentives are real; and their support of Clinton is perversely genuine inasmuch as they are championing the candidate who is most like themselves. Some of them work in politics; some work in churches; some work in the media; but they are united in their purpose of putting themselves as far ahead as possible by making sure the people whom they influence stay as far behind as possible. These folks will vote for Clinton, but there aren’t as many of them as Clinton likes to pretend. 

The class of the misled includes rank-and-file citizens who trust their local politicians, their local clergy, and the corporate media to tell them what is in their best interest. Such people are often overworked and underpaid. They are too busy and exhausted to pay close attention to national politics, and they may only have access to information via frequencies approved in advance by the Clinton machine. These folks will also vote for Clinton, but the existence of the internet means that the ranks of the misled are dwindling by the hour. 

The misleaders and the misled who support Clinton do not even constitute half of the Democratic Party—much less half of the general electorate. Clinton therefore has no realistic chance of winning. She has relied on the foil of Donald Trump to prop up the sputtering viability of her own candidacy, but as we watch the wheels falling off the Trump campaign, we must realize that Clinton is going to have to beat another actual politician with an actual ground game. She can’t do it. 

But as I indicated earlier, the elite members of the Democratic Party are determined to nominate her not because they believe she will win in November, but because they know that her Republican opponent (whoever that turns out to be) will pose less of a threat to their gravy train than Bernie Sanders does.

I understand why the DNC leaders believe this strategy will work. They’ve seen how successful Clinton has been at destabilizing and disenfranchising people throughout the world by removing their leaders from power. Why should it surprise anyone that she’s willing to destabilize and disenfranchise the Democratic base by running as an unelectable candidate—a candidate who cynically relies on her own toxicity to prevent the people she purportedly represents from having a voice in government?

But there’s a critical difference between cutting power off at the head and cutting it off at the base. If you remove the democratically elected leader of Honduras from power, Honduras doesn’t cease to exist. But if you remove the voting base from the Democratic party, all you have left is a train starving for gravy.

So good luck, Paul Krugman. Good luck, Barney Frank. Good luck, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Good luck, Queen Hillary. Good luck with your glorious future of presiding over nothing and no one.

Inevita-Hillary

It’s early April of 2016. Perhaps the mainstream media outlets are right; perhaps Americans have resigned themselves to a Hillary Clinton presidency as inevitable. 

We’re assured daily that it doesn’t really matter whether we like her. It doesn’t matter whether we trust her. It doesn’t matter whether we think she will prevent the planet from being raped, the taxpayers from being plundered, or innocent civilians from being gunned down by forces of their own government (domestically or abroad). 

We voters know that Clinton championed the war in Iraq as a senator and then lobbied for a series of regime changes as secretary of state. We wish we could elect someone who wouldn’t commit the U.S. military to perpetual worldwide warfare—but we seem willing to settle for that outcome as long as the person we elect isn’t Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “not because a corporatist candidate is such a great thing, but because it beats the heck out of an autocrat or a theocrat.”)

We voters know that Clinton was merciless when it came to destroying the credibility of a series of women who spoke out about having been sexually abused and exploited by Bill Clinton. We would prefer a candidate who touts herself as a feminist to be capable, at the very least, of empathizing with women less privileged than herself—but we’ll overlook Clinton’s viciousness as Bill’s attack dog because she isn’t Trump or Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “even though she spent her time as a board member at Wal-Mart diverting attention from the union-busting activities of the corporate giant by focusing on the hiring of female executives. If you want, you can fault her for routinely distorting feminism into whatever is most expedient for her at a particular moment, but does that really mean you’re going to vote for an autocrat or a theocrat? Get real.”)

We voters know that Clinton, by her own admission, exercised poor judgment in setting up a private server to handle her email correspondence for the State Department. We think it’s kind of embarrassing that just five years after the Cablegate scandal made that department—her department—look incompetent at managing its own intelligence, the hacker Guccifer is now being extradited in conjunction with his exposure of Clinton's e-correspondence. We are reluctant to elect a candidate who appears to be incapable of understanding that internet security is really a thing—but we’ll accept her carelessness as long as she isn’t Trump or Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “despite her childlike impulse to excuse her own misdeed on the grounds that Secretaries Powell and Rice made similar mistakes. Instead of acknowledging the immaturity of her response, distract yourselves by debating the degree to which her use of a private server compounds the error of relying on a private email account. And now that the topic has become sufficiently tedious, just overlook her cybernegligence and elect her instead of that autocrat or that theocrat.”)

We voters know that when the Clintons took furniture from the White House after Bill’s time in office, it was reportedly because of a clerical error. We know that when the Clinton Foundation failed to pay appropriate taxes, that was also reportedly because of a clerical error. We understand that electing Clinton means putting her in a position to report monumental clerical errors on a routine basis. We wish we didn’t have our suspicions about the Clintons—but we will try to look the other way when we see her hand in the cookie jar because at least it isn’t the hand of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “because even though you have every reason to suspect that she is on the take, you can’t prove it to yourself without doing a lot of boring research. Why spend all that time reading when it doesn’t matter anyway, since you’ll still vote for her ahead of that autocrat or that theocrat?”)

We can’t trust her with money. We can’t trust her to handle sensitive information. We can’t trust her judgment.

And yet we will elect her.

Or maybe we won’t.

Maybe the inevitability argument advanced by the corporate media on behalf of Clinton is about to buckle under the strain of its own preposterousness. Maybe we can’t be made to swallow a candidate we don’t want simply because of repeated assurances that the election has been settled in advance.

Maybe we care enough about each other to come together in defense of our most vulnerable citizens, our most beleaguered communities, and our most cherished democratic ideals. 

Maybe Bernie Sanders will win.

The delegate math is daunting, but it’s heartening to see articles such as this piece by Darrell Delamaide that sheds important light on how flimsy Clinton’s lead is becoming.

Of course, the same day that Delamaide’s article came out, we got this piece from fivethirtyeight.com that explains how Sanders is even further behind than we think. 

The press is going to keep whispering to us. We simply have to remember that in 2016, the job of the Democratic National Committee isn’t to persuade us to elect Hillary Clinton, but to con us into believing that she has already been elected.

But can a dynasty-fatigued electorate really be gulled into adopting the principle of inevita-Hillary?

We shall see.