Thomas Frank on how the Democrats are sidestepping their own responsibilities:
What’s more, I think every critically minded individual has a responsibility to understand not only the ridiculous Republicans’ role in the grand disaster of our times but that of the Democrats as well. After all, the unraveling of the American middle class has been going on for decades. No national politician of the last thirty years can claim ignorance about it. The great American turn to the right, which made it all possible, is also a decades-old phenomenon that has been much-discussed over the years. No responsible person can any longer regard the right’s familiar inverted-populist trick as a postmodern mystery or a counterintuitive shocker. We understand now how conservatism has warred against “elites” in order to win over a big chunk of the working class; we have seen how the movement constantly moves the goalposts; we know about its worship of markets and its excursions into racial anxiety.
But somehow, given all this knowledge, the party of professionals and experts can’t figure out how to beat these guys once and for all and turn the economic narrative around. Instead, they gawk and laugh and fuel the right’s well-known persecution complex. And even though conservative economic ideas are the obvious culprits for what has happened to average Americans—even though conservatives have burned their bridges to the fastest-growing segments of the population—the right is still able to mount wave after wave of fake uprisings, successfully persuading a big part of the country that they are the only ones who will really do something to rein in what they like to call “crony capitalism.” For chrissake, the cover of today’s New York Times Magazine presents the market-minded Rand Paul as some kind of heir to the punk rock movement. It is crazy-making to acknowledge that, after all the disasters that these people have rained down on us, they might still control the House of Representatives, but they do—and they have a pretty good shot at winning control of the Senate this fall.
Think about this panorama of political dysfunction for long enough and an unpleasant thought begins to form: That maybe our boon companions in the Democratic Party are just as comfortable and as blind, in their own way, to what is going on in the country as are the GOPers. Maybe they are satisfied to leave well enough alone, to let demographic destiny do the hard work of delivering their majorities, and to avoid straining themselves too much. After all, it is so much easier to laugh.
Jon we live in an oligarchy where the two major parties represent the same people and it ain’t the 99%. “McCain and Hillary sittin’ in a tree…..” Maybe someone can explain the difference between McCain’s foreign policy and Hillary’s foreign policy? (Forget about our domestic policy because the capitalist 1% runs that.) Both Hillary and McCain are neo-con interventionists who will arm any terrorist group who agrees with them. In the new Atlantic Monthly magazine Hillary claims that Obama’s foreign policy is a disaster. Her soul-mate McCain thinks and says the same thing. It wouldn’t be surprising when and if she wins the Democratic Party’s nomination that she will chose McCain as her running mate. You know….to help create a bipartisan political utopia in the country. Remember Jon we live in an oligarchy and not in a representative democracy.