Dan DeWalt, a frequent contributor to these pages and one of the founders of this newspaper, writes that if he didn't love his country, he "wouldn't spend so much time trying to get it to live up to its purported principles."
WILLIAMSVILLE-In the aftermath of the victory of the felon, Democrats, searching for a scapegoat, are looking everywhere except in the mirror.
To be sure, a sensationalist heavily partisan media spun, obscured, and lied their way through the election campaign, with the resulting misinformation having an adverse impact on the Democrats.
But that was just one aspect of the steady erosion of the Dems' value in the eyes of American voters that has been underway for the last 30 years.
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Let's revisit the '90s, when Bill "I feel your pain (with a little sexual abuse on the side)" Clinton was president. Continuing Ronald Reagan's assault on the unions, Clinton negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which gutted American manufacturing, shedding union jobs and turning our workers into easily exploited cogs in the newly dominant "service" industry.
Forget about nuts and bolts - we entered the world of serving coffee and asking if you wanted that supersized.
And although Clinton loved to be (ridiculously) referred to as the nation's first Black president, he was quick to piously intone his condemnation of Sister Souljah when she pointed out some hard realities about violence towards and by Black Americans. He also proudly killed "welfare as we know it," pulling the threadbare rug that was keeping some families economically afloat out from under them.
Barack Obama came into the presidency inheriting Bush II's economic collapse, which was driven by greed, corruption, and lawbreaking in the financial sector.
The first order of business was to "make the banks whole again," filling their coffers with freshly printed money while the people they defrauded continued to lose their homes and be pushed into dire straits with no bailout coming their way.
Obama's "Si se puede" campaign was fueled substantially by support from the nation's Latino community, hoping that he would, as promised, straighten out the immigration system that had criminalized and isolated so many who were working hard, paying taxes, and receiving none of the benefits that citizens are entitled to.
Instead, he charged Congress to devise a welfare program for the health insurance industry, guaranteeing healthy profit margins and nixing even the ghost of a chance for health care for all. The hardworking immigrants were left twisting in the wind.
During Obama's tenure, the Black Lives Matter movement arose in reaction to the continuous killings of unarmed Black men by the police. Some reform Democrats were elected, and they pushed for nationwide reforms in policing policy.
What was the Democratic Party's reaction?
According to the Associated Press, "In 2015, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told three Black Lives Matter activists they should focus on changing laws instead of hearts. A 2016 memo from the Democratic Party's House campaign arm told politicians to limit the number of Black Lives Matter activists at public events, or meet privately."
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In 2016, when Bernie Sanders was running to represent the people, to make the rich pay their fair share, and to establish some corporate accountability, the Democratic Party machine fell over itself making sure that their corporate and financial masters would be saved from his populist threat.
They pulled every string available to get Hillary Clinton the nomination, thus assuring that the groundswell of regular folks, marginalized people, and disaffected voters who had long ago given up on the process would either give up again, or, as we saw, take their populist leanings and support Trump instead.
Four years later, Bernie had the support to do it again, but true to form, the party went into overtime to support a stumbling plagiarist and reformed misogynist (ask Anita Hill). Amazingly, Biden won. And he, to some extent, did reverse the anti-union trend that the Dems had embraced.
But the party made sure that their masters were well served.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had a raft of proposals that she brought before her colleagues: breaking up big corporate behemoths, taxing (at a fraction of a penny) stock transactions, and stopping the legalized looting of private equity companies, to name a few.
The party recoiled in horror.
Genuflecting at the altar of big money, multimillionaire Nancy Pelosi assured us that "we're capitalists. That's just the way it is."
Every one of Warren's proposals that would have helped the American worker and folks barely eking out a living was killed by Congress.
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The most recent action has been the Biden administration's decision to actively participate in Israel's genocide campaign against the Palestinian people. We have provided intelligence, political cover shielding Israel from U.N. Security Council condemnation, and even the bombs that they drop to kill civilians.
As this nightmare has unfolded over the last year, a majority of Americans have indicated that they oppose this policy. Hundreds of thousands of Americans voiced their condemnation of Biden by withholding votes during the primaries in sufficient numbers to put his chances for victory at a great risk.
Even if a U.S. administration has no moral compass, you would think that the risk of losing an election would prompt it to act.
But no, ignoring what the voters were telling them, the Dems were sure that supporters of human rights and opponents of genocide would have no choice but to vote for them, as Trump and his ilk were assuredly worse. They just couldn't understand why Arab Americans who had family members bombed to death by American bombs wouldn't pull that lever for Kamala Harris.
They wouldn't even give five minutes to Democratic Party supporters of a just Middle East to address their highly orchestrated pageant that was the DNC nominating convention.
Instead of meeting with Americans concerned about renegade violence, poverty, and the neglect of the working class, Harris was busy having lunch with Morgan Stanley's Jamie Dimon and wooing other bankers and tech moguls.
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Any student of fascism knows that while it takes a messianic autocrat who will lie and boast as appropriate to make his case to achieve power, it is also necessary for that autocrat to be able to voice the grievances of the people.
In this case, Trump didn't have to lie about the grievances because the two-party system that is the front for the oligarchy running the country has been and is failing us miserably every day of the year.
When the system is not worth saving, the people may be willing to embrace any promise, no matter how twisted it is or how much it is grounded in greed and meanness.
America has reached that point, thanks to the current two-party system.
Buckle up. It's going to be a difficult and scary ride.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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