Caitlin Johnstone
The US presidential election
is more than 15 months away, and already we’re seeing elitist establishment
narrative managers rolling out their long-anticipated “Stop Rebelling and
Support Biden, You Insolent Little Shits” campaign. HBO’s Bill Maher spent his “New Rule”
monologue segment last night admonishing his audience to abandon any
notion of progressive reform and embrace the former vice president instead.
“All the Democrats have to do
to win is to come off less crazy than Trump, and of course they’re blowing it,
coming across as unserious people who are going to take your money so that
migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in America
Sucks,” Maher said. “Now
do I want Biden to be president? Not really, but Biden’s the only Democrat who
beats Trump in Ohio. He’s like non-dairy creamer: nobody loves it, but in a jam
it gets the job done.”
“I’m sick of hearing that
Democrats need to excite the base; Trump excites the base,” Maher said. “It’s
the fatigue, stupid. Let’s make it hard for Donald Trump to play on voters’
fears and let the fatigue win the election for us. We’ll get to the revolution,
but remember: put on your oxygen mask before assisting your child.”
Boy, Bill. If that’s not the
kind of inspiring rallying cry that can galvanize people against the president,
I don’t know what is.
Weirdly, Maher inadvertently
explains why his brilliant Biden strategy is doomed to failure earlier on in
this exact same segment. Maher praises
the Trump economy, saying “It’s hard to beat an incumbent in a good
economy; every incumbent since FDR has won if they avoided a recession leading
up to the election year.”
“The voters that Democrats
need to win, moderates who have Trump fatigue, will vote against a good economy,
I think, just to get back to normalcy,” Maher said. “But they won’t trade it
away for left-wing extremism. You say you want a revolution, well, you know,
you gotta get elected first.”
Maher has all the facts right
there in front of him, but because he is a propagandist who is only famous
because he knows how to spout pro-establishment lines in an authoritative tone
of voice, he manages to interpret them in the dumbest way possible. Yes, on
paper the US economy is doing well, but only by the standards used by
neoliberal politicians and mass media outlets to determine economic success. In
real terms a population that used to be able to support a family on a single
income now mostly
requires two incomes, and most of them would
struggle to pay even a thousand-dollar emergency expense.
Americans have gotten much
poorer in terms of real income and income
inequality has been exploding, but because both parties have been
normalizing this paradigm and deceitfully using stock markets and unemployment
rates to measure economic success, Trump is able to say he’s performing
amazingly well economically. In terms of real American spending power he’s
actually performing abysmally, but Democrats are resistant to saying so because
it will mean conceding that the Obama/Biden administration did, too.
The path to beating Trump,
then, is obviously not to hope that Americans will “vote against a good
economy” for the first time in living memory as Bill Maher suggests, but to
address the elephant in the room of growing income and wealth inequality and
how more and more Americans have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
If you can offer Americans more in terms of real economic justice instead of
crap about the stock exchange that puts bread on nobody’s table, voters will
listen. There are some candidates who are campaigning on exactly this platform,
and none of them are named Joe Biden.
Joe Biden has a message for
the millennial generation: Stop complaining. http://huffp.st/PbofqMu
Biden’s platform, in contrast,
seems more and more to consist of him just telling progressives to shut up and
stop whining. Asked on a recent AFSCME forum about his controversial comments
in January of last year that he has “no empathy” for young Americans who fear
crippling college debt and rising cost of living, The
Huffington Post reports that Biden not only stood by his
comments, but doubled down on them, saying that if things are bad then the
younger generation is to blame for not engaging in the political process.
“Don’t tell me how bad it is,
change it,” Biden said. “Change it. Change it. My generation did.”
Biden, like Bill Maher, is
inadvertently giving progressives all the information they need. Yes, they
should change it. And the very first thing they should change is a political
dynamic which elevates warmongering Wall Street cronies like Joe Biden. There’s
absolutely no reason for anyone to accept a status quo that insists the only
way to beat Trump is to take a Hail Mary gamble on trying to elect a Democrat
who’s no better than Trump. They tried that in 2016 and there’s no reason to believe
they’ll be able to bully everyone into playing along in 2020.
The former vice president is
about one click away from coming right out and saying “Vote for me, because
fuck you that’s why.” And elitist establishment narrative managers are already
essentially saying it for him.
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