Trump is taking Sanders' voters
/Today is the Ides of March, memorable for its connection to Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman politician with parallels to Mr. Donald Trump. Like Trump, Caesar entered politics during a period when the working class (the Roman Plebeians) were being squeezed out of the labor force by imported foreign labor. In Caesar's day, the imports were slaves from newly conquered territory (Gauls, Germans, Greeks, and Spaniards). Today the imports come from human trafficking (a modern euphemism for a form of illegal slavery) and porous borders. Both undercut the price of labor by glutting the market. Caesar's murder at the hands of a group of rich Patrician Senators was due, in part, to his efforts to limit the importation of slaves and secure work for the citizens of Rome.
Like Caesar, Trump is a rich oligarch who has betrayed his class to gain the affection of the common people. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported that 46,000 Democrats had switched to Republican. That's half of all the new voters the Democrats have gained since the 2014 congressional elections. This mirrors huge party-switches in other states, with exit-polling indicating that the candidacy of Donald Trump is the reason for much of the switching.
Many of these voters would otherwise have been voting for Bernie Sanders, but when the Vermont Senator screwed up and told them that they don't exist, apparently they started jumping to Trump.
Hey, doesn't Sanders know that twice as many white people are living on food stamps as are black people? That there are more white people on welfare than black people. Doesn't he know this? Why would Senator Sanders diss the very working class voters he needs, in an attempt to pander to black voters? Doesn't he know that racial and ethnic divides have historically been used to split the working class? To pit group against group within the working class, to undermine it. Is remedial Marxism in order?
Consider this: Black Lives Matter's advocate Al Sharpton is managed by the same public relations firm that manages Governor Chris Christie. Sharpton is a rich man, not a man of the Left.
Of course, Bernie Sanders' ideology was always closer to the 1960's New Left than to the class-based Old Left. The New Left was dominated by academics and the children of the well to do. Frustrated with the cultural traditionalism of the working class, it focused on the grievances of racial and ethnic groups, gender, and sexual identity. Dominated by younger voices, the New Left was in a hurry to tear down the existing order in any way possible and deemed group-identity the quickest means to that end. But of course, these younger voices grew up and, being who they were, inherited the establishment -- proving to be more greedy and rapacious than anything practiced by their parents.
Split along racial and ethnic lines, by gender and all the rest, working class jobs have disappeared overseas, the labor market at home has been glutted, and working class incomes have declined while the inequity between rich and poor is an ever-widening gulf. Perversely, the rich have never been more "progressive." Johnson & Johnson puts out a "progressive" LGBT video to take your mind off them selling products to children and women that cause cancer -- and covering it up for 30 years. HSBC bank signs on to a pro-same-sex marriage brief to keep "progressive" support when it comes out that they laundered a billion dollars in drug cartel money. "Vulture capitalist" billionaire Paul Singer pushes "gay rights" but off-shores his operations in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes and oversight.
Today's Democratic Party is controlled by these "progressive" rapists of the working class -- making the Democrats anything but an old-order party of the Left. As for the Republican Party, it too has long embraced the same neo-liberal economic policies practiced by the corporate "progressives" who dominate the Democrats, while the unleashing of campaign and lobbying money has given rise to an all-encompassing regime of crony capitalism that makes corruption in both parties ordinary, usual, and customary.
The parties "clash" in a series of what Daniel Boorstin called "pseudo-events," everyone bemoans "gridlock," but behind the scenes everything functions quite well if you have the money to buy it. A crisis is manufactured, the working class get taxed, the government spends money, rich lobbyists/ vendors/ consultants/ investors get richer, the solution fails miserably, the crisis is forgotten, the national debt has grown. A recent Princeton University study reported that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
While equal to the Democratic Party in corruption, the Republican Party actually is more democratic than the Democrats, in that its leadership does not exercise the full control over the institution the way the leadership of the Democratic Party does. Being "Republicans" and therefore "bad" in the minds of those who set such fashions, they can't get away with the same level of wrongdoing that the Democratic Party's leadership can. Remember, the Democrats are fashionable and therefore "good." You will never skunk a cocktail party by announcing that you're a Democrat.
So the Democrats get to crush their Bernie, even though the polls show he is the far stronger candidate in any match-up with Republicans.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html
But the Republicans can't crush their Trump... or even their Cruz. The Republican electorate has slipped their leash and gone off the plantation. Can you blame rank and file Democrats for enviously eyeing this outbreak of freedom and wanting to join in? After being lied to for so long, being told what to think, what to do, and what to feel, it is exhilarating for some to just raise their fist and let fly that middle finger.
The real worry to the establishment class does not come from those who are temporarily free, who will soon tire and then be rounded up by their assigned keepers. What keeps the establishment up nights is what Ralph Nader wrote about two summers ago in his book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. It's what groups like Represent.Us are putting into practice:
Represent.Us: End corruption. Defend the Republic.
Unlike the pseudo-left movements funded by corporate "progressives," these groups do not divide Americans by race, ethnicity, or gender. They don't pit this lifestyle against that religion. This is about taking on corporate cronyism and the political class and cleaning up the Republic. This is about the one BIG thing we need to do if any of the little things have a chance of becoming something good. This is about the PROCESS and it's not unlike the coming together of Left and Right in the United Kingdom in that country's battle over who controls their PROCESS -- Parliament or the European Union. This IS THE FIGHT and it has and will produce some interesting alliances, as you can see below.
