Doom Report (Week -2: That's Enough Flooding, Thank You)

A few months back, I watched a really good Some More News video on Ronald Reagan.  Specifically, on how Reagan led us to Trump, and that included a long section on how Reagan fucked up the Democratic party.  This was a thing I had never considererd before: while I understood that Reagan fucked us over in a number of really important ways (his racism amped up the “war” on drugs; his economic policies started the whole “trickle-down” lie; his man Robert Bork reinvigorated corporate greed by saying that, no, monopolies were actually good for consumers; he killed the popularity of unions by firing all the striking air traffic controllers, which the safety of the air travel industry has never recovered from; etc etc etc) ... while I knew all that, I never thought that the Democrats might have gotten fucked up too.  But, what Cody and team point out in this quite persuasive video is that Reagan beat the Democrats so badly that they all started to adopt his policies.  Clinton, for instance, ran on “ending welfare as we know it” (which he delivered by crippling the program in ways from which it’s never recovered), passed crime bills that led to today’s mass incarceration crisis, and signed NAFTA, which allowed—nay, encouraged—America’s corporations to move jobs off-shore to get cheaper labor, thus screwing over the working class.  Really, if you think about it, Clinton often sounds more like a Republican president than an Democratic one.  Even Obama, who campaigned on hope and change, sadly listened to all those Third Way advisors and in the end actually delivered very little of either.  And the point of all this is, the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from Reagan.  They figured, he beat us, and he pushed this stuff, so now we better push this stuff too.

I think about that this week because there appears to be a lot of learning the wrong lessons going around these days.  I mean, Trump won, right?  So obviously that means that the country wants its leaders to be more racist, attack minorities more, and be nicer to our poor, persecuted billionaire class.  At least that seems to be what people are getting out of it: Zuckerberg, for instance, says he’s getting rid of all Facebook’s fact checkers, moving moderation to Texas (because those evil liberal Californians can’t be trusted, obviously!), and that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” Of course, the roots of Facebook are comparing women like cattle, so the fact that the restrictions against referring to women as property are now lifted makes perfect sense.  Or how about Amazon announcing that it would pay $40 million to the Trumps for the rights to make a documentary about Melania?  Attached to direct: Brett Ratner, who hasn’t been seen in Hollywood since being disgraced during the #MeToo movement.  (Side tangent:  People on the right are always going on about how you can never be sure whether the women who accuse men of sexual misconduct are telling the truth, and that people should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  And it’s true that there were a very few innocent people who got caught up in #MeToo (Chris Hardwick, for instance).  But I’ve never understood why people—on either side—have difficulty with figuring out whether someone is guilty of what they’re accused of when it comes to this particular behavior.  Basically, there are exactly two things that occur immediately after one woman comes out and says that a famous man assaulted her: either a dozen more women come forward to support her, or 3 or 4 women come forward to say they’ve never experienced anything but support from the man and no other woman agrees with the accuser.  If you ever hear about a situation that doesn’t fall into one of those two camps, then you can wonder whether the man’s guilty or not.  But so far I never have.  And, if it does follow one of those two patterns, no need to wonder: you know whether or not they did it.  By the way, guess which one Ratner’s story falls into?)  So, I guess the lesson we learned from Trump’s victory is, it’s okay to call LGBTQ people “freaks,” and also thatarapists aren’t so bad—after all, we’ve now elected our first rapist-American president!  Overall, the nearly immediate flood of fake headlines on Facebook, including one that announced that Zuckerberg was the “recipient of world’s first rat penis transplant,” is cold comfort.

Of course, the news this week has been dominated by Trump’s insane rantings about taking over Greenland and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.  (Presumably, he plans to do the latter by taking his trusty Sharpie and crossing out “Mexico” on all the maps in the world.)  He’s also talked about reclaiming the Panama Canal Zone, and even annexing Canada.  Don’t worry: it gets crazier.  President Musk has even started a poll to ask users of the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter if the US should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” I find it difficult to take any of this seriously, though, because that’s what they want us to do, and I’m just stubborn enough to refuse to do it.  Because, see, all this bullshit talk is Trump following the advice of Steve Bannon, who once famously said:

The Democrats don’t matter.  The real opposition is the media.  And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Or, as Michael Lahanas-Calderón said in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

But isn’t this ... one of the many distractions that the Trump Administration presumably has—if not pre-planned, down the road will make up some—to keep hiding that oligarchic control that you’re talking about, right?  This is to throw people off balance more than anything ...

Which is spot on.  Because now the prime Minister of Greenland has to respond, and the government of Denmark has to respond, and the president of Panama has to respond, and the new president of Mexico has to respond, and the prime minister of Canada has to respond, and even the counter-extremism unit of Great Britain has to investigate.  Trump has managed to send dozens of world leaders—not to mention the media—scrambling after moronic ideas that will never come to fruition ... more importantly, that were never serious in the first place.  Meanwhile, the grift goes on: the billionaires are falling in line, the judge in the one case that managed to struggle through to conviction grants him an unconditional discharge, the special counsel that bedevilled him by actually listing all his crimes is resigning, and the media has no more space to report on his insane cabinet picks, such as trying to appoint a potential Russian asset as Director of National Intelligence.  The zone is flooded, the shit is knee high and climbing, Trump continues to live a consequence-free life, and the rich just keep getting richer.

Let me leave you with this.  I’ve been calling out Robert Reich quite a bit in my previous posts.  Partially that’s because I tend to highlight the opinions of pundits most when they’re different from my own: if we’re all in agreement, there’s not much more to be said.  But partially it’s because Reich, like many of the public personalities whose opinions I respect in spite of the fact that they’re Democrats, has just had some terrible takes on why the Democrats lost to Trump.  But, for all my criticism, I really do like Reich, and I really respect someone who’s achieved that level of old age without losing all their progressive fervor.  (While I like to think that I’ve thoroughly debunked the young-equals-liberal-old-equals-conservative meme, it is sadly true that the right wing tends to be dominated by old white guys, while the progressives are full of youth and diversity.)  And I like Reich precisely because he sometimes says some pretty smart shit.  This is what he said this week:

There really are two kinds of populism.  The right wing the ... Trumpers have been embracing for years: cultural populism.  And that means going after the symbols of elitism—many of them made up!—I mean, transgender people, you know, you go after them; go after immigrants; go after the Deep State; go after all sorts of symbols that people can get riled up again.  But the alternative to cultural populism is real, and that’s economic populism.  That’s going after the Musks and the people who abuse their their wealth, and and turn it into political power.  That’s what’s happening in this country, and this is why I am optimistic (just to repeat myself) that, as we descend into the horrors of the Trump Administration, people will actually see how important economic populism is.  Democrats will find their voice—and, if they don’t, we’ll have another party that will replace them and find its voice.

I’m not sure I share his optimism that the Democrats might actually get replaced one day.  But I think he’s onto something nonetheless: maybe someone, somewhere inside the party, will learn the right lessons from Trump’s victory.  And the right lesson is that people are tired of all the billionaires standing on their necks while picking their pockets.  That people need change which actually accomplishes something, and they’re just going to keep voting against whoever’s in power at the moment until they get it.  That that FDR fellow was onto something when he decided, in the first hundred days of his first administration, that he would thumb his noses at the rich fat cats in the stock market (well, those that hadn’t thrown themselves out windows, at any rate) and actually help the working class for a change.  And, as long as the Democrats keep doing what Kamala did by staying hands-off the big corporations, they’ll keep losing.  When they figure out that that all that corporate money isn’t doing them any good if all the working class people hate them, then maybe we’ll see some change.