Abandoned Americans exacting their revenge
WE CAN THANK THE U.S. LIBERAL ELITE
If you’ve recently come to conclude that American democracy has degenerated into a hopelessly dystopian reality-TV spectacle and it seems as though we’re all teetering at the abyss of a broken America that is no longer a force for good in the world, you are wrong. It’s worse than you think.
That’s the good news. Because there is quite a bit of terrain to traverse between now and the Nov. 8 presidential election, and the odds are at least even that by then, the penny will have dropped and American voters will have awoken to the realization that shrieking vulgarities and unceasing assaults on both reason and common decency have dragged the United States to the point of no return. If this keeps up, it’s banana republic time. That’s looking on the bright side, which at the moment is a difficult thing to do. The past few days will not have induced feelings of sunny optimism in any reasonable person.
The Republican Party is gone. Its national convention in Cleveland was a four-day carnival of shrieking vulgarity, a meticulously stage-managed incitement of the lowest and ugliest impulses in the American political character. Its climax was something almost unimaginable only a year or so ago: the Republican nominee for the office of the president of the United States of America is the loudmouth caudillo, Donald Trump.
With the nomination of Hillary Clinton, this week’s Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia is concluding with the party’s least-popular Democratic presidential contender since Jimmy Carter ran in 1980. It remains to be seen whether her close rival, Bernie Sanders, a genuine democratic socialist, will be capable of mustering his impressive talent for oratory with a vigour sufficient to persuade his legions of hard-core supporters to stop burning Israeli flags and parading around with giant, bus-sized spliffs long enough to actually expend some effort in the attempt to get Clinton elected.
All this would be amusing enough from the outside looking in, but even from the comfortable and arrogant perch that ordinarily comes with being Canadian, the implications of this election are alarming. The Canadian economy relies on foreign trade. Nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports go south. The neo-liberal globalization to which successive Canadian governments have devoted their energies since the days of prime minister Brian Mulroney is a shambles from Beijing to Belarus. Closer to home, Trump has vowed to rewrite the entire North American Free Trade Agreement in his own image.
The penny has got to drop at some point, even among the self-aggrandizing galaxy of A-list celebrities, Democracy Now pundits and Daily Show guests that constitute what is derisively known as America’s liberal elite. What we’re seeing is the fruit of all their years of cultivating contempt and mockery of the hillbillies and the hayseeds that are too stupid to be in thrall of the genius U.S. President Barack Obama. That abandoned mass of Americans is now Trump’s base, and the worst and most cunning of the racists and xenophobes among them are now exacting their revenge.
All those years of championing the vandalism of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, of dismissing the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine as an understandable response to NATO’s warmongering encirclement, of justifying their indifference to genocide in Syria and Iraq with plaintive claims of upstanding antiwar virtue, it’s come full circle. To Michael Moore, Medea Benjamin, John Pilger, Susan Sarandon, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, George Galloway and all their acolytes and admirers: look at what you’ve done. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
There are reasonable arguments to be had about whether or not the hack of the Democratic Party’s mainframe is on the scale of Watergate, and there are differences of opinion among intelligence agencies about whether the operation was carried out on Trump’s behalf by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s FSB, the successor to the KGB, the Kremlin’s central intelligence directorate, or both. The FBI investigation continues.
It is also unclear, as if it even really matters at this late hour, whether the Kremlin is doing Assange’s bidding or it’s the other way around, or whether Trump is doing Putin’s bidding or it’s the other way around. Here’s Assange on the damage he was happy to do Hillary Clinton: “She has a long history of being a liberal war hawk.” Here’s the celebrity pseudoleft journalist Pilger: “The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.”
Back in 2010, it didn’t matter when it was only Cuban democrats, Zimbabwean dissidents, Afghan reformists and Russian bloggers whose lives and liberty were put at risk by WikiLeaks’ wilfully negligent data dumps.
ONE HAS TO HAVE SOME SYMPATHY FOR THE AMERICAN VOTER TRYING TO SORT ALL THIS OUT.
The thing to do was ignore the pleadings on their behalf by Amnesty International, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the International Crisis Group. But now that it’s the reputation of Democratic National Committee bigshots that’s at stake, we’re supposed to be upset?
One has to have some sympathy for the American voter trying to sort all this out. All they’ve been hearing for years, from all sides, is that the mainstream media are not to be trusted. The latest opinion surveys show that only 21 per cent of Americans put any stock in what they get from television news and a mere 20 per cent of them have faith in what they read in newspapers. Is it any wonder they’re as easily persuaded by what they get from RT News, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel? This is the organization that, just this week, hired the famous Christopher Hedges, conspiracy-theory champion of the Occupy movement.
Still, there are months left to go, and if this has all come across to you like some media elite shilling for Hillary Clinton, enjoy your “narrative.” Have a nice dystopia.