Why I’m So Mad at the Democratic Party.

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So a long time listener and friend of UNFTR echoed a sentiment recently that I've heard a lot over the years, just paraphrasing here.

Why are you so hard on the Democrats when it's the Republicans that are so villainous?

And I think it deserves more than just a, I expect more from Democrats. So here goes everything.

Shifts in political paradigms are pressaged by seismic economic events. Of course one can argue cause an effect in this regard.

Perhaps a war created the condition for political upheaval.

Likewise, epidemics, famines, and technological revolutions have all had a hand in shifting the wind and the tide.

But radical political change is always mired in economics.

See, populations never tire of security and stability. They don't yearn for change when there's food on the table and their doors are unlocked at bedtime.

They don't flee and migrate on mass when there's a possibility to build or rebuild even after something like a natural disaster.

But a genuine and prolonged economic crisis will always bring about a political revolution. It's just a question of depth, duration, and character.

And the way forward is always lit by those who are most prepared. Hold on to that thought.

The United States has had political continuity on the surface at least for 250 years. So the framework has certainly held.

But there have been several title economic shifts in political power throughout this experiment.

After all, economic disasters don't always lead to the collapse of empires, but they can significantly alter the politics of a nation.

Before the Civil War, there was the panic of 1857. The Second Industrial Revolution caused enormous boom in bus cycles, but gave rise to the labor movement and progressivism.

The Great Depression pushed us toward FDR economic liberalism, and then into the Second World War. The stagnation crisis of the 1970s gave rise to neoliberalism, and heralded the long painful death of New Deal Policies and Johnson's Great Society.

Like I said, cause and effect, root causes and symptoms. The timing is muddled, but the circumstances echo through time.

Now because the general framework of the United States has mostly held, even withstanding its greatest test in the Civil War, we have a tendency not to notice the political shifts in the moment.

Wars are straightforward, as our pandemics, famines, and natural disasters, at least ones that are big enough to alter the course of history, but economic upheaval percolates.

It takes years, sometimes decades, to realize just how much has changed, and we tend to judge the character of a nation in the moment by who is in charge.

The president, in many ways the avatar of American sentiment, as is the case with most nation states and their leaders.

The repeated bus cycles of the late 1800s gave way to the abulliant and brash optimism of Teddy Roosevelt.

This overconfidence manifested in several ways, and it held for decades until the disillusionment of the Great Depression.

So then we took on the character of Teddy's cousin, a kind of sanguine resolve that maybe we could recapture a bit of that turn of the century luster.

And through multiple wars and revolutionary geopolitical changes, we found ourselves at the top of a mountain in the back half of the 20th century,

only to revisit that haunting feeling that it might have been built from sand when the stagnation crisis interrupted our winning streak.

Now on the other side of it, Reagan's inch deep but mile wide appeal invited us to once again climb the mountain only this time in pursuit of a shining light on top of a hill.

It's tempting to think that we can diagnose what ills us today and search for perfect answers by looking to the past.

But the best that we can do is find the pieces that resonate most within today's puzzle and ask if they still fit.

See, the world is moving faster and faster, which makes it difficult to to pause and to try and make sense of everything.

There's no picture on the side of the puzzle box to guide us. The puzzle is alive. It's ever changing.

In the past quarter century, we have collapsed the extended timelines of history into a frenzied and dizzying collage, 9-11, extensive wars abroad, a global financial crisis, a pandemic, a monetary regime that has no historical corollary, existential climate threats.

Less than half of the US population was even online in the year 2000 and now every one of us has a high powered computer in our pocket.

And the worldwide population has grown by a third.

So what does it say about us? The speed of these cycles, the pace of change and the depth of despair that we would elect Donald Trump twice in a decade.

A man who is somehow both the avatar of disillusionment and the face of change.

These are the actions of an electorate that doesn't know what to feel or how to think about the world as it is.

Like I understand how what we were thinking in the 1800s when we elected Cleveland to non consecutive terms, it makes sense why the guild that elite of the 1920s were cast aside for someone who promised to be a traitor to his class.

I totally get why Ronald Reagan was able to break through as the star of the Republican Party when he was actually regarded as a radical conservative and a zealot for most of his career by his own colleagues.

From my money, it all comes down to preparedness. See, throughout our brief history, the United States has been run by people who were the most prepared to seize opportunity within chaos.

Even when they lost the reigns of power, they were in charge of everything behind the scenes.

And when it comes to the past half century, I don't think we fully come to grips with how complete the neoliberal victory has been over our politics.

Those fringe cultists from the Montpelloran Society and the John Birch Society worked diligently from the end of World War II through 1980 to construct the ultimate monument to capitalism, but one that's infused with white nationalism.

And what an edifice it is.

They poured a concrete foundation with reinforced rebar and steel. They built it to code to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes, erected scaffolding around it so they could easily change the facade to match and mirror the current times.

And they built underground bunkers in which to hide and adapt because they understood the pendulum better than anyone before.

Here they would gather during periods of backsliding and they watched film. They studied the opposition and they altered the play calls for the next rounds.

So long as the endgame was protecting that edifice, that monument to white nationalist capitalism, they could even allow the other team to periodically put some points on the board.

A young governor from Arkansas beat us? No problem. Just as long as you reinforce the racial hierarchy in the criminal justice system and loosen some corporate regulations and do not touch that military budget.

A black president? Here you go. Just protect the ruling class and the bankers and do not touch that military budget.

A dottering old fool who projects stability during a global health crisis? Fine. Just make it quick. Don't change too much and for God's sake, do not touch that military budget.

And all the while, they chip away at the liberal institutions and they make you question your lying eyes through the mainstream mouthpieces that they control.

They strip away regulations that constrain the worst instincts of the corporate class. They print unholy sums of money, but make it available only for the ruling class.

They extract less and less from the elites and apply a little more pressure to the masses each and every day, a little at a time.

So it's not to break them, just bend them. And the maddening thing is it's not as though we haven't connected the dots read evil geniuses by Kurt Anderson.

Dark money by Jane Mayer, death of the liberal class from Chris Hedges, the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein, the quiet coup by Marissa Barotteran, the family by Jeff Charlotte, democracy and chains by Nancy McLean, the new Jim Crow from Michelle Alexander, capital in the 21st century by Tumah Piketty.

These aren't just great modern works of nonfiction, they're textbooks or you could just read Marx's capital for its teleological understanding of capitalist systems.

Now this moment, this Trumpism moment, if you prefer, is as core to the edifice as to function as the central plumbing, the electrical and the elevator shaft.

It's what keeps this all together. What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine, that which I do not have, I shall take.

You might find this particular facade to be gauche or even clownish with its gold painted ornaments, silly hats, its Ivermectin blood and testosterone-paced skin, but make no mistake.

Underneath it all is the durable core of capitalism, and that's what angers me the most about what comes next.

In this accelerated timeline where we have smashed together a pandemic, climate catastrophes, financial crises and endless war, we both achieve the goals of the original cultists at Montpellor and at John Birsch and move past them.

Even they don't know what happens now, now that they've racked up all these victories, they can't possibly predict what will happen with this fool in charge who's walking around like Buster Keaton with a ladder and a glass factory.

But this much I know, if elections are allowed to stand in this country, they'll find themselves huddled in the bunker once again.

They will lose the midterms and maybe 2028. And in that bunker, they'll move the X's and O's around the big board and they'll put enough money in the pockets of elected officials that they can slow the oppositional momentum, they'll take the temperature of the masses and they'll just plan for the next chapter.

It's the preparedness that gets me the resolve, the forethought, the lengths that the white nationalist power base in this country will go to to protect the capitalist monument at all costs to sow doubt in liberalism, cast aspersions on poor brown people and foment distrust in your own neighbor.

Before there was Project Esther in Project 2025, there was a project for a new American century or PNAC in the 1990s.

And before PNAC, there was the Horowitz report in 1980, a hundred page memorandum by Michael Horowitz commissioned by the Skate Foundation to analyze why liberals dominated public interest law and the legal profession and to propose a plan to reverse it. And they did.

In that same year, the world was introduced to free to choose by neoliberals poster boy Milton Friedman, limits of liberty in 1975 by James Buchanan helped arm neoliberals with an intellectual rationale for treating education, especially universities as self interested public bureaucracies in need of market discipline.

The power memorandum in 1971 was the call to arms to the business community to take back the country from liberals unions and activists, anyone who stood in the way of capitalism.

These aren't the same as the textbooks on the left that explained to us what happened, these were the blueprints and the instruction manuals for what actually came to pass.

That is preparedness.

So why this diatribe, why now?

Because we're in one of those moments, this new war might end in the coming weeks or months, but it has fundamentally altered the global calculus with respect to US foreign policy and relations.

I mean, we're at isolated, we might have gotten away with it, we could just chalk it up to the whims of a madman, but it came on the heels of us kidnapping ahead of state.

It's on top of the most egregious and selfish disruption to the global trade order, one that we established by the way that the world had ever seen.

And it will plunge the United States and the world by extension into a period of stagflation.

The mosaic of exogenous threats that remain in addition to this chaos make the situation even more of a tinder box, a catastrophic climate event, another hot war or retaliation of failed state in the global south, terrorist attacks.

Terrorist attacks in the north, maybe another pandemic, since we've pulled all the health funding from every poverty stricken country on the planet and left them with no backup plan.

Before day one of the Trump administration, a lot of us were sounding this alarm, not because Trump was back like Slim Shady, but because the people behind him were all too familiar and eminently prepared.

But even this is more than anyone bargained for. Trump is now Frankenstein's monster and if he's allowed to roam free for several more months, it's going to take more than midterm elections to stop him.

But that's all that the loyal opposition has planned midterms. We'll get them then.

No, the hearings, the trials, the lawsuits, the legislative intransigence, we will slow his role. The bureaucracy strikes back.

That's what we have to look forward to. Outside of winning the midterm elections, I defy anyone to articulate the oppositional vision to the GOP's reign of terror.

Because putting yesterday's puzzle back together is not a vision for tomorrow.

Going back to the way things were when the electorate was so dissatisfied and disillusioned that it chose a known liar, adulterer, and convicted felon over the status quo, not the answer.

Here's what the Democratic Party does not understand. It's the simplest way that I can put it.

Every election cycle, the Democrats promise restoration. This has been the case my entire adult life. A return to normalcy back to center.

Not a nostalgic return to the good old days because that sentiment belongs now to the right. The Democrats offer to divide the pie more equitably and return things to normal, whatever that is.

Now, you might argue the opposite. I mean, after all, Clinton's campaign theme was don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Barack Obama promised to deliver hope and change.

Actually, Biden might have been most on the nose saying that this was a battle for the soul of the nation.

But I'm talking about more than slogans. I'm talking about actual policy prescriptions.

This centerpiece of democratic centrism has been to rebuild the middle class again, a return to center.

And the new Democrats led by Bill Clinton believed that free market neoliberalism was the way to accomplish this.

All they had to do was reorient the market to serve the middle class. Barack Obama believed that free market neoliberalism but aided by technology would serve the same end.

All we had to do was just everybody needed a college education. Ironically, the most forward thinking presidency was that of Joe Biden, the second oldest person elected to the presidency after Donald Trump.

Maybe it's because he lived through pre neoliberal times and knew what that looked like, but even his boldest accomplishments wound up as half measures because he also lived under the illusion of bipartisanship, a long deceased feature of American politics.

Every single policy stance of the democratic party platform is simply an adjustment to the current course and sold to us as not Trump.

Healthcare, restore the subsidies to the Affordable Care Act, the one that was written by the insurance companies, foreign policy, just normalize our relationships with our allies.

Taxes, make billionaires pay their fair share, technology, let's put some guardrails around AI.

Energy, more renewable energy to support our data center growth, but also more oil.

The Democrats always promise a return to center without realizing that this center keeps moving to the right.

And here's the bitter irony of it all. We're in this astounding pattern where Republicans destroy the infrastructure of democracy a little bit more each and every time they take power.

And then the Democrats come in to patch things up. Democrats are just the GOP's pit crew.

Don't you see how insulting it is when we demand a new vision and you offer us Gavin Newsom or fucking Pete Buttigieg?

Can you feel our frustration with the idea that everything will be okay if you just switch seats in your committees?

We're out here fighting for our lives. And you're fighting for who gets the gavel next.

And that's why I reserve my anger for Democrats. It's not that they're incompetent bureaucrats.

It's that they're exceptional bureaucrats. The greatest pit crew in the world. So fucking competent.

But so lacking in vision. We don't need a new race car. We need a new track.

That's why I'm so angry with the Democrats.