CENTRISM FAILS AGAIN. WILL LIBERALS EVER LEARN?

Donald Trump is President of the United States again, helped in no small part by a Democratic Party establishment that thought the best electoral strategy was to pander to the right.

 

ALTHOUGH I DID write that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were playing a dangerous game by running a deeply conservative election campaign, I also thought the widespread antipathy felt toward Donald Trump would be enough to get Harris over the line, perhaps even in a canter. I was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. In the end centrism cannot claim that it saved America. By pandering to the right, it handed Donald Trump the presidency on a plate. Again.

Eight years after the corporate approved Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, the Democratic Party top brass wheeled out the same centrist campaign strategy and duly lost again. It was Karl Marx who observed that the recurrence of historical events, initially tragic, slowly morphs into a farcical spectacle. The second Trump presidency might be farcical, but nobody's laughing at this particular clown show.

There has been some bitter criticism directed toward Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for not stepping aside and giving Harris a clear run. But since the Democratic Party was not going to provide the American electorate with a progressive agenda, Stein had every right to do so instead. It's unbecoming, but not entirely surprising, for liberals to blame Jill Stein for their party's own failings.  Apparently, being a liberal still means never admitting that you are wrong.

But it's also the failing of a so-called 'representative democracy' where, time and time again, the system only allows people the 'choice' between two right wing corporate candidates. It's worth reflecting on how different America would be today if the Democratic Party establishment had backed Bernie Sanders instead of kneecapping him.

It's also worth noting that Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won re-election by comfortable margins. It's not a coincidence that the politics of all three women lie to the left of the Democratic Party establishment, with Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez both members of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's on the left where the future of the Democratic Party should reside but as long as it continues to be the handmaiden of corporate interests, its unlikely to deviate from its disastrous centrist course.

So, incredibly, the United States now has a President who is a convicted felon (convicted on thirty-four counts) and still awaiting trial in three cases and sentencing in a fourth. They will never see the light of day now. Trump is also a rapist and a serial abuser of women. He also mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic that killed over one million Americans.  And he's deeply implicated in the violent attempt to overthrow the result of the last presidential election.

He also won because his supporters, even now, think they are 'sticking it to the man' by voting for Trump. The problem is 'the man' is actually Donald Trump, the embodiment of all that ills late-stage capitalism. The next four years are going to be very dangerous times for America, and for the world.