Eric Zuesse -- Democrats Caused President Trump; They Caused His Victory

ERIC ZUESSE | 14.11.2016 | WORLD

Democrats Caused President Trump; They Caused HisVictory

Here’s a video where Carey Wedler explains in her own thoroughly truthful way in just four minutes, how and why Democratic Party voters for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries did more than perhaps any other single political group of Americans to help make Donald Trump become America’s President. But here, in my own equally truthful way, which you can easily verify for yourself by simply clicking onto a link anywhere that you question a statement’s veracity (which, of course, can’t be done with any video), I’ll explain it, very differently:

Democratic voters during the Presidential primaries were given a clear choice, and blew it; they chose the by-far-weaker of the two candidates (Clinton instead of Sanders), weaker not only in all of the head-to-head matchups against each and every one of the possible Republican candidates, but weaker in the progressive ideology that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had brought to the Party and which had made the FDR-era (1932-1980) Democratic Party the engine of progressive change in America. Bill Clinton killed it, and Hillary Clinton’s election would have prevented the progressive Democratic Party from ever being resurrected again; and here’s how that happened:

Bill Clinton had come into office as the new anti-FDR, pro-unrestrained-capitalism, virtual founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, which repudiated not only the anti-Wall-Street tradition of FDR but all of FDR’s approaches and programs to achieve increased equality of economic opportunity in America. Not only did he do this by passing the Republican George Herbert Walker Bush’s NAFTA into law and by passing the Republicans’ deregulation (especially ending FDR’s Glass-Stegall regulation) of Wall Street into law, but Clinton and the DLC rebuilt the Democratic Party as being instead merely a less extreme version of the post-Richard-Nixon Republican Party: Republican-lite, running against Republican-extreme (which was the existing Republican Party). By doing this — moving the Democratic Party to the right— they moved the American political center substantially toward the right, because now, in Bill Clinton’s wake, any Republican incumbent who fails to move toward the right was being challenged in Republican Party primaries by ‘Tea Party Republicans’ who accused any such incumbent of being a Republican In Name Only, or RINO. Consequently: Congress and other political bodies did become more right-wing. 

Voters for Hillary Clinton in the primaries were pushing that rightward movement of America’s political center even further. In fact, on many issues (such as her three policies for war to defeat Russia and its allies such as Syria) she was far to the right of Donald Trump — and she even had the nerve to criticise Trump for his opposition to her on that, calling him «Putin’s puppet». She was resurrecting, but now in the new post-1992 conservative Democratic Party, the hatred and lies from the Republican Party’s Cold War anti-communist Joseph R. McCarthy — and communism and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact had ended long before, in 1991! Hillary was in many respects the super-Republican and the leading neoconservative, and so Republican mega-donors flocked to her more than they did to Trump. (Of course, she swamped Trump even more among the Democratic Party’s billionaires, but Hillary broke all fundraising records for support among Republican mega-donors backing a Democratic Party candidate; she was The Establishment’s — the American aristocracy’s — candidate to an extent that none before her had ever been.)

Like Russ Belville headlined at Huffington Post on 29 February 2016, «The Problem With Hillary, Chez, Is I Don’t Vote Republican». He listed there 25 major stands of the Republican Party that Hillary stood for, and that Bernie stood against, and he concluded: 

«Those are 25 pretty good reasons why we Democrats don’t vote for Republicans, don’t you think?

So why would we vote for Hillary Clinton, the Rockefeller Republican who exemplifies every one of those 25 statements?

If Donald Trump wins the presidency over Hillary Clinton, it’s not the fault of people like me who won’t vote for Republicans. It’s the fault of the Democratic Party for nominating a Republican. For me, the horror of a four-year Trump term is less frightening than cementing in the Far Right / Center Right corporate duopoly in American politics created since Hillary’s husband sold out Democratic principles on welfare, crime, race, labor, trade, drugs, and media».

He expressed my views perfectly. And he expressed the views of many other progressives (including Carey Wedler) who avoided voting for such a candidate: we either voted for Jill Stein, or for Donald Trump (who was actually far more progressive on many issues than Hillary was or than any of the other Republicans were — such as his constant repudiation of the Bush-Clintons’ NAFTA), or else we left a blank on the Presidential part of the ballot November 8^th, or we just stayed home altogether. Turnout was the key, and the Republican-lite Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to match the turnout of the Trump-supporters in the battleground states. Trump got trounced like was expected in the heavily Democratic states, which are always Democratic in Presidential elections, but the Electoral College is won or lost in the battleground states, which is where the lack of passion for Hillary decided the election’s outcome.

By contrast, Trump generated real passion in the Republican base, and so they came out in droves on Election Day. And Trump’s focus on winning the votes of many disaffected Democrats who recognized that the Clinton-Obama mega-corporate politics are part of the reason why America is declining, also brought to the polls on Election Day millions of people who had never voted before for a Republican — including myself (for reasons that I have explained). Furthermore, because of the far higher intensity of support by Trump’s supporters than by Hillary’s, Trump brought into the voting-places far more Republicans than Hillary brought into the voting-places Democrats, and this depressed turnout by Democrats at the polls caused both a Republican Senate and a Republican Senate, and it also greatly boosted the numbers of Republican candidates who won local and state races. 

Liberal voters (the pro-Hillary Democrats) have destoyed the Democratic Party; progressive voters (the pro-Bernie Democrats), the ones such as Bernie who want to restore the FDR Democratic Party, are the only people who can ever bring back progressive governance to the United States.

I won’t return to the Democratic Party until the Bernie-Sanders, Elizabeth-Warren, Sherrod-Brown, FDR, wing of the Party is back in control, as it was from 1932 to 1980. If one of those three individuals — people who have been consistent opponents of Obama’s ‘trade’ deals (which were actually proposed transfers of democratic national sovereignty over to international-corporate dictatorship, a higher world government by the world’s largest international corporations) — takes over the Party in 2020, then I shall again be a Democrat; but, otherwise, one of those three should create a new «Progressive Party» on the ballot in all fifty states with that person’s name on it as being the Presidential candidate, and that will be the end of the Democratic Party, just like Abraham Lincoln’s quitting the Whig Party and virtually starting the progressive Republican Party in 1860 (which lasted until he was assassinated in 1865, after which the northern aristocracy took control of it and turned it quickly conservative) ended the once-dominant Whigs.

Not only have the Clintons and Obama destroyed the Democratic Party by making it Republican-lite, but Hillary Clinton was actually the most dangerous major-Party Presidential nominee in American history — the only one whose policies were aimed straight at producing a nuclear war — and that can’t be forgiven, and won’t be forgotten.

Either the Clinton-Obama, pro-aristocracy, Democratic Party ends, or the Democratic Party itself will end.

Every nation that has a Presidential instead of a parliamentary political system alternates rule between a pro-aristocracy party and an anti-aristocracy party; and we can’t have two major parties both of which are pro-aristocracy. One of the two, in any authentic democracy, ispro-democracy. America needs to become an authentic democracy again. (We’re now ruled by the aristocracy, an «oligarchy».) If it doesn’t happen in 2020, then maybe it never will. But if Hillary had won, then the Democratic Party would surely soon thereafter be ended. Only by the dint of Donald Trump and lots of good luck will the Democratic Party be granted a reprieve: either to transform back to the FDR ideological model, or else to die. Her election would have meant certain death. (And not only for the Democratic Party.)