Are the Left Finally Seeing the Democrats For What They Are? Part 2

Ya’ll dropped the bomb, Democrats! It’s a good thing we got you out of the Oval Office before you did it in a more literal sense! (Image courtesy of Google Gemini)

Part 1 of this series — its preface, more or less — is here.

Here you will find the first part of my response to a fellow Left writer adapted from a comment to their post. This particular author is a staunch supporter of the Democrats that refuses to see them as they actually are in the wake of the crushing defeat the working class handed to them in the 2024 elections. Of course, this writer also refuses to dispense with the Trump Derangement Syndrome that was a great help in costing them the election.

The remarks from this author will be italicized, and my responses will not be. Note that this post of the author I’m responding to began as a tribute to former president and noted Democrat Jimmy Carter in the wake of his passing.

Let us begin.

The Deification of Jimmy Carter

Carter was a good man and a good president by any reasonable measure. The contrast between him and the man who is about to again dishonor the office of president of the United States could not be starker.

Yes, the virulent anti-Trump attitude that went a long way towards causing the Democrats to lose because they tried focusing more on that than building an actual pro-working class agenda — and to divert us from the fact that they didn’t have one.

But that aside, Carter has been chastised — and rightfully so, IMO — for heralding the present era of capitalism by moving the Democrats away from Keynesian economics and towards the rabidly pro-corporate iteration of capitalism we’ve been dealing with since the Reagan era. Carter’s policies resulted in an economic recession that made Americans angry and caused them to vote for Reagan en masse. Sound familiar?

I should mention that the Peanut Man’s reign in the Oval Office was the first Democratic administration during the period of time when the economic “boom” that America enjoyed for about 30 years following the end of World War II had ended. This is because many European and Asian markets were now recovering from the widespread destruction inflicted on their infrastructure during the war.

That was what allowed America to dominate the world with a booming factory & manufacturing industry almost bereft of any competition between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The system was then profitable enough to capitalists that they tolerated a sizable chunk of the working class to receive good pay and benefits for their hard work; and which made upward mobility into the upper levels of the “middle class” a realistic reality for many.

But America’s global economic dominance was beginning to change by the time Carter took office now that so many European and Asian markets re-entered the world economy as major players. As a result, he instituted policies that paved the way for a Democratic Party that began seriously morphing Dems from the FDR and Kennedy type into the Clinton/Obama/Biden type we know today. This is a harsh fact that many Dem loyalists who romanticize Carter refuse to acknowledge.

Chris Hedges put this analysis of Carter’s time in the White House and what his policies led to quite well in this incisive article on the Peanut Man’s legacy.

Carter was ahead of his time in many ways, but he made one big mistake: He thought you could treat Americans like intelligent people capable of looking at the facts and making good decisions.

Carter was very much a “sign of the times” with his deregulation policies and helping to continue the petrodollar mess that Nixon had started, much as Obama continued the bank bailouts that Bush started. If he was truly a “visionary” and “ahead of his time” as you and some of your commentators in this thread stated, he would have met the fate of John F. Kennedy.

As I noted before, the American people are not stupid — they are brainwashed by privately owned news outlets that actually serve us capitalist class propaganda and they are desperate for change. And the Dems have done nothing since the 1970s to provide any change that is beneficial for our class.

What Do Dem Supporters Ignore That Regular Working Class People Did Not?

Well, unless they happen to be poor. In that case, screw them. They aren’t the people we’re talking about.

We are talking about the real Americans — the wealthy ones.

Total agreement! But… how did the Democrats of the past few decades help poor Americans? Certainly not wealthy, pro-corporate, and war-loving elitists like the Clintons or Obama, who gleefully share country club golf games and luxurious galas with the Bush, Cheney, and Trump families.

In fact, the Dems used to love the Orange Guy until he became an inconvenience to the Dems winning the White House by daring to oppose their notoriously conceited corporate darling Hillary Clinton.

And didn’t they embrace Bush in recent years?

And wasn’t one of the many fatal mistakes Harris made in her non-democratic campaign when she started openly working with the Cheney clan?

What does that tell you once you put the emotions and party loyalty aside and look at the things that the Democrats have actually done?

And who, exactly, do you think the Dems are most loyal to when you see them hobnobbing with and receiving endorsements by wealthy neocons like Dick & Liz Cheney and uber-wealthy celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and bevy of extravagantly paid movie stars?

Our best days are behind us.

We elected a madman who has not even started his second term, but is already spreading chaos.

Your best days were behind you once the wealthy capitalist donors captured the Democrats. And many argue that this started during the economic changes I mentioned above with the Carter administration (I would argue it started even sooner, with LBJ, but that’s a whole other topic).

As for being a madman, I won’t argue that Trump is totally sane. But I will argue he is no less mad than politicians from the other wing of the capitalist duopoly who are funding a genocide and pushing us into nuclear brinkmanship with Russia and China, and at war with much of the Middle East.

And speaking of madmen, no head of state in the world today fits that term better than Netanyahu, yet Biden/Harris supported him wholeheartedly despite performative criticism that never got in the way of sending him billions of dollars to carry out a brutal slaughter of Palestinians that they were not spending on helping the working class at home.

But if you’re a Democrat loyalist, you have to ignore all of that. The vast majority of working class Americans did not, however. Hence, the election results.

When you’re ready, please feel free to move onto Part 3 to see the second part of my response to this author.