The electoral landslide loss of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016 has left Democrats searching for answers within their party and amongst their constituents. While it’s true that the majority of traditional Democrats all voted for Clinton, among progressives, there was a dissatisfaction with the former First Lady that couldn’t be overcome no matter how many singers, rappers or actors she appeared with or how many episodes of Saturday Night Live she starred in.
In the end, some progressives abandoned her for third-party candidates such as Jill Stein of the Green Party or Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party while others actually crossed party lines and voted for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
And while it’s true that Clinton did win nearly three million more individual votes than Trump, she lost electorally by a huge margin and even lost states that were considered Democratic strongholds such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
Clinton’s aggressive infiltration, manipulation and corruption of the Democratic Party leadership and mechanics obviously offended many progressives, and this was proven when supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders walked out of the Democratic National Convention on its second day.
Based on the election results, the majority of these people are now even more dissatisfied with the direction of their party and the decisions that were made during the race.
Compounding matters is that none of the new potential leaders of the party want to make any significant changes, such as halting the flow of money from corporations or lobbyists or eliminating the super-delegates that gave Clinton an impossible-to-overcome advantage over Sanders.
So the question now is, how can the Democratic Party proceed without risking being shattered into two pieces prior to the presidential election of 2020 or even before the midterm elections of 2018?
The fact of the matter is that many progressives are less than pleased with the old-line Democratic Party leadership, which is all too happy to accept money from dubious deep-pocketed donors and court backroom deals while traditional Democrats are used to looking the other way.
In fact, as more than one observer has pointed out, because the Democratic Party traditionally does not represent the interests of entrepreneurs and businesspeople, its modus operandi for generations has been to support itself by selling political favors, and both Clintons were the ultimate examples of that archetype.
Other observers are quick to point out that the label “progressive” can often be used nearly interchangeably with another sticky label — that of “Socialist.” And while Socialism is definitely appealing to disadvantaged young people (one survey last year put the number of people aged 18 to 29 preferring Socialism to capitalism at roughly 55 percent), the label has decidedly less appeal once one’s youth has run its course.
The truth is that Progressives are outnumbered by traditional Democrats by perhaps two to one. But throughout online media, progressive causes get the lions’ share of attention because the online audience by far skews younger.
But “Socialism” from an American political perspective is usually just a cover for a scenario whereby the majority of the population stays poor and gets poorer while a very small elite class of billionaires takes the lions’ share of the profits out of the economy.
Another word for this is globalism, and the last eight years under Barack Obama were a perfect example of it. So it’s no surprise that globalist billionaires are among the first to say that the world (and particularly the United States) needs more Socialism.
If one really wants to generalize broadly, the Obama administration was all about delivering social justice to progressives while destroying the country economically and giving the shaft to other countries from a foreign policy and military perspective.
But among progressives, social justice is issue number one — after all, if everyone is poor, “equality” amongst “the people” is more or less the only real issue left. Social justice captures the largest percentage of complaints and discussions in the world of online media, and it’s also a driving force behind the protests, marches and random violent incidents that have occurred in cities across the country over the last several years.
It’s safe to say that while traditional Democrats may agree with the sentiment of these “social justice warriors,” their tactics, organization and abrasiveness turn them off and call attention to the Democratic Party in ways that aren’t necessarily appreciated.
As with the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, it’s safe to say that the people who were causing trouble in the streets represented a smaller minority within the larger Democratic Party, even if the people inside the convention hall were sympathetic to the protesters outside.
Of course, a strong argument can be made that at least at that time, the protesters causing the violence were extremely aware of the foreign policy of the United States, whereas today’s progressive focus on “social justice” seems self-centered by comparison. There’s no thought about what’s happening to anyone outside the U.S., and this is best exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s promotion of feminist causes inside the United States while condoning and enabling horrible women’s rights abuses outside it, as she did in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Even the traditional Democrats are becoming less and less comfortable with the ties their party has formed with Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Agribusiness and other industries. Whereas in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the flow of funds and political demands from these industries were relatively small by today’s standards, the amount of money involved now and the scale of corruption (as seen in the Transpacific Partnership and other free-trade agreements) is vastly greater than anything that came previously.
The intense focus of progressives on social justice blinds them to some extent to these latter issues, but there’s been a strong call to “get money out” of politics among members of this set; the perennial problem is that the devil is in the details.
When progressive billionaire financier George Soros funds an organization such as Cenk Uygur’s Wolf PAC (dedicated to the cause of getting money out of politics), one of the primary reasons he’s funding such an organization is so he can get everyone else’s money out while his sneaks through and thus speaks louder.
The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as well as in most state legislatures means that Democrats will be furiously pointing fingers at each other for at least another two years minimum, and possibly much, much longer. The circumstances surrounding the drawing of Congressional districts currently favors Republicans, and with state legislatures under their control, it’s unlikely this will change soon.
Will the anger of the Democrats be great enough to split their party in two? Certainly it seems as if the party is already breaking up, and there may even be ways to increase the above schisms further. It certainly doesn’t hurt if Democrats are playing “the blame game” while Republicans pass legislation to their hearts’ content.
