JASON HIRTHLER—This media hysteria represented the convergence of the three previously mentioned elements of bourgeois society (the duopoly, the state, and the media). First, the Russian meddling and Trump collusion narrative was created as an attempt to rationalize away the Democrats historic failure in November of 2016 (and Clinton’s corruption of the primaries prior to that). It was a failure thirty years in the making. As the Democratic Party untethered itself from labor and through avarice hitched itself to a neoliberal program itself designed to undermine labor, it cast the seeds that would one day result in a flailing demagogue trumping them at the polls.
"jason hirthler"
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JASON HIRTHLER—Elite capital is itself a minority. And this is the minority that Democrats truly serve; the rest are largely pacified with red-tape half-measures and rhetorical sops. Ethnic minorities must be protected against institutional and individual racism. Transgender minorities must be protected against myopic binary sexism. Gays must be protected against homophobia and legal discriminations. And corporate elites must be protected against the poor. It is this last axiom that sours the profile of Democrats. This is unlikely to change, for as corporate hero Bill Clinton once limned when describing how left-leaning voters would, in the final analysis, vote Democrat, “They have nowhere else to go.”
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JASON HIRTHLER—As Chris Hedges remarks, we still have the “iconography and language” of democracy, but we are made to “kneel before the dictates of the marketplace” and “structure our society around the primacy of profit.” We are left with an institutional “facade.” Which is why it is so proper to treat with derision the reeling hysteria of politicians who claim, in comical hand-wringing interviews, that “our democracy” is under attack.
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JASON HIRTHLER—Rather than face their hypocrisy and do the work of reconstruction, the Democrats hastily constructed a few flimsy scapegoats on which to pin their frustrations. They conflated Donald Trump with what they now call a “Russian influence campaign” into a colossal media construct called Russiagate. They have since herded all the liberal sheeple into a band of bleating resisters who clamor for the president’s impeachment. They recently held a summit at a Republican’s funeral, where they lionized a warmonger and bonded over their shared contempt for the president.
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JASON HIRTHLER—If freedom and democracy are the movie posters that sheathe the reality of imperialism, then the onscreen mise-en-scene is populated by stock characters that supply the illusion of debate, of democracy in action. What it really is, is the insular consensus of a hidebound elite. Their children aren’t being deployed, their jobs aren’t being offshored, their paychecks aren’t being garnished…