Election 2024 Shows How Much Americans Hate Career Politicians
Several years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a French citizen who was visiting the US. The topic quickly switched to politics. He was critical of both the French government and the US. He was obviously someone who had studied the landscape and challenged the status quo. I asked a lot of “why” questions. One of his responses caught my attention:
Why do I think Americans are dumb? Because they wait for politicians to do everything for them. They flip a lever and think their job is done. That’s childish thinking. When the French government tried to raise our retirement age in France, we went out and protested and wouldn’t stop until they gave in.
I realized afterward that it was true. Americans can be guilty of looking for their messiah in all the wrong places, i.e., a corporately owned two-party system. But I also know many Americans are fed up with where our political system has taken them. But the truth is, one corporate money-taking party will never defeat another one. One party may defeat another in an election, but the structural changes to our government that Americans need to benefit from will never happen. Americans have a legitimate gripe.
This explains why the number of citizens identifying with either party has drastically reduced. Depending on which survey you look at, each party represents about 24%-26% of the county. This means, by far, more people identify as independent than members of either ruling party. Yet because of both party’s tight grip on power, independents find themselves without a candidate.
What beef do Americans have with the parties? That they have been abandoned. Jobs have been sent overseas, and a tiny sliver of people have most of the country’s assets. There are never-ending wars that drain the budget to the point where there is nothing left to spend on the people. Wages have been frozen since the 1970s. Health care is costly for those lucky enough to afford it. This has been a bipartisan effort.
Despite 8 years of calling Trump a racist and Hitler, he was voted in. And it’s not because this country has 72 million racists, as has been maliciously asserted in the past. It’s because Americans are looking for anything that doesn’t look or smell like an establishment politician. That’s the level of despair many Americans are experiencing.
It was a protest vote. The election was a vote against US institutions; it was a vote against partisan politics. It was a vote against war. It was, in some ways, a vote against woke tyranny.
Throwing the Hitler term around the way it has been the last couple of decades is a sordid strategy, and it (thankfully) no longer works. It’s been applied to Sadaam Hussein, Khaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Trump, Elon Musk and others. It’s a way to manipulate people by playing on the collective trauma that World War II has inflicted on the world. It’s lost its shock value and, more importantly, is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust.
If early indicators are a judge of the future, then Trump may not change the US position on the US wars. It’s not confirmed yet, but he may appoint Neocon Brian Hook as Chief of Staff. Brian Hook was in the first Trump Administration and was an Iran war Hawk. He was also quoted in a leaked memo that showed how little he valued human life in the US quest for dominance. You can’t use the deep state to fight the deep state.
The Democrats have their fair share of blame for the current state of the country and why people turned to Trump. After lending money to the DNC in 2016, the Clintons held the party ransom, going against the will of the public and wedging Hillary Clinton in as the candidate. They destroyed Bernie Sanders’ campaign and retrofitted an unpopular politician as the nominee.
This strategy was a spectacular failure. This would also begin a new strategy for the Democrats based on anointing their candidates by sabotaging their own primaries. 2020 and 2024 didn’t offer anything more democratic. In fact, the 2024 primary was an appalling assault on democracy. Kamala Harris was picked as the nominee after not gaining a single delegate when she ran in the 2020 primary. No runoff was held, nor was any public discussion held; Harris was simply appointed to replace Biden. A media blitz about her being the first black woman to run for president drowned out any conversation about the lack of a democratic process. Despite this press deluge, the truth was there for all to see: If Harris’ own party wouldn’t support her, what were the chances she could win a general election?
If you take the same actions under the same circumstances, you get the same results. And so it happened again. Another Democratic candidate was forced in, and another Democratic candidate lost.
I believe that the nation as a whole is more important than either political party. The division between parties has people cheering their party and vilifying the other party on the premise that “as long as my party looks good, nothing else matters.”. But that is not all that matters. What affects one party affects the whole of the nation.
This was most visible during Russiagate, and it was astonishing: People were burning Mueller candles (a votive with a picture of Mueller posted on the glass) as a form of prayer that the accusations against Trump would be found to be true. When the Mueller report said that conspiracy could not be established, many were distraught that their president wasn’t subservient to Putin. How does a country end up like this? This will be addressed in future writings.
The Democrats are warmongers in an age when Americans have grown suspicious of US intent in the wars. For Harris to brag about the endorsement of Dick Cheney, the worst war criminal in this country, who killed millions and made the world less safe in the process, is utterly delusional. It shows how disconnected they are from the needs of the people. The idea that Cheney, a man the Dems have repeatedly called Hitler, and his anti-abortionist daughter are now welcome in the party shows utter hypocrisy.
Bill Kristol, an extreme war hawk from the Bush/Cheney era, has now found comfort with “new” Democrats. It just shows where the party is now:
Even if the early warning signs of a Brian Hook appointment turn out to be benign, the idea of Trump single-handedly bucking the Military Industrial Complex will undoubtedly be more complicated than his promise to “fix the war in Ukraine before he gets into office.” The MIC loves its wars, and trying to interfere with their war fetish may prove extremely difficult. However, the Biden administration likely avoided a cease-fire so they didn’t look weak during a presidential election cycle.
Considering how badly Ukraine is getting hammered, the collapse of its eastern front is not far away. Perhaps the US feels it has taken all it can get from the war or that its mission to weaken Russia has failed and is finally willing to negotiate. Will Trump buck AIPAC? Considering the history of AIPAC’s influence over the US government, that seems unlikely.
Agree. Also agree that one of the more bizarre aspects of the Harris campaign was this: "For Harris to brag about the endorsement of Dick Cheney, the worst war criminal in this country, who killed millions and made the world less safe in the process, is utterly delusional."
Thanks to alternative social media and its capacity to amplify peer to peer (“Hey, did you see this?) horizontal messaging from outside the corporate news bubble, people could still decide for themselves if they wanted to vote for the narcissist and the “weird guy” or, for the ninny and the nincompoop. Who said they couldn't “think of a thing” they'd change from the policies of the current administration. Which still include backing and funding genocide and constant and unrelenting hate mongering for all perceived enemies (foreign and domestic) at a volume level that we haven't seen in this country since the worst days of President Richard Nixon or Senator Joseph McCarthy. The corporate news bubble is still cranked up to choke off independent and objective decision making but at least for the time being, the repeated threats to (in effect) block the First Amendment have been beaten back. (But the complete flip/inversion of the 2 parties' political roles, since 2003, may be an ongoing phenomenon. If we see United States of Blackrock tools like Pompeo, Rubio, Cotton and "Finish Them" Nikki Hailly and other neocons ignored or pushed off and Democrats continue to act like the "Look the other way" Vichy Party.