[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]Q[/dropcap]ueasy Democrats, it is really this simple.
You allowed the elites of the Democratic Party to rig their nomination process for a candidate who embodies the status quo. For the downwardly mobile working class, that status quo translates to vast wealth inequity, perpetual angst, and roiling resentment. You cannot win a campaign based on punching down at hoi polloi without, at some point, being punched back. President False Hope And No Change’s empty rhetoric rang hollow in the strip mall wasteland.
Moreover, the lesser-of-two-evils canard always fails for Democrats, in particular when Democrats, once granted power, prove to be the more effective evil. The Bill Clinton administration was neoliberalism (i.e., Reaganism) on stilts and steroids, and Obama doubled down on the worst of Bush/Cheney (which explains why the Bush family was with Hillary).
The New Democrats, the party of Wall Street and Perpetual War, have been dispatched to the landfill of history. The hubris of Hillaryites has brought on their fall. You can only humiliate people for so long until their anger rises.
Smug liberals, your citadels of internet snark will not hold back the rage of the strip mall Furies unloosed by the depravations of the neoliberal order, from which you amassed your fortunes.
You have no one to blame but yourselves for acting as apologists for corporacrat tools such as Obama and the Clinton Cartel. You conjured the enmity of the LumpenTrumpetariat with your incantations of indifference, with your canticles of smug. The denizens of Occupy Democrats, Daily Kos, Salon.com, Huffington Post et. al. — your comeuppance has arrived.
And no, Wikileaks is not to blame. Nor is sneaky pants Putin and his (phantom) geek squad of neo-Cossack hackers. Nor is the “extreme left” — who , paltry in number that we are, attempted to warn you about Hillary’s odiousness and the revulsion your Anointed One evoked among the voting public. When warned, you raged at the messenger.
Now, turn that anger inward and allow it to burn your arrogance to ash. Use the ashes to nourish humble soil. Therein brood the seeds of renewal.
Only an honest appraisal of your dismal situation will prove of benefit. Your denial proved your undoing. Yes, the truth is wounding. But, at this point, because your political casuistry engendered your fall, your best option is to take the poetic approach of allowing your wound to become a womb… a birth passage to a new view of the world and who you are in relation to its ungovernable vastness.
Soon enough, Trump and his legions will be confronted by the same inexorable laws.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
