patrick.net

When something has been done one way for many years, and when doing things that way has made a certain group of people fat and happy, it is natural that that group of people will want to continue doing things that way. It is also natural that the much larger group of people who have been hungry and neglected for all those years as a result of the way things have been done will want to do something different. Eventually, the larger group, full of righteous anger, will win. But the fat and happy class will cling tightly to what they have for as long as their swollen fingers can hold on. This is essentially what’s happening within the Democratic party right now. The weak grip of the old guard is being broken, one finger at a time.

The election of Donald Trump and the sudden viability of Bernie Sanders as a candidate in 2016 were both enormous flashing billboards reading “THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW”. To fail to read these signs amounts to active, willful ignorance. Many people were surprised by the way things went in the last presidential election, but there is no excuse for being surprised by the same things again.

Four decades of growing inequality and a class war by the rich that has been too successful for its own good have pushed Americans toward political positions that would have been considered fringe back in the carefree 1990s. The extremities have waded into the mainstream. You don’t need to be a genius to understand this basic fact – you just have to watch a little Fox News, look at a few income inequality charts, and have a chat with a couple of uninsured people who are trying to pay the medical bills for their school shooting gunshot wounds via GoFundMe.

People’s patience with the status quo has worn away. Americans themselves understand this instinctively. Political polls confirm it. Donald Trump revels in it. The only ones who don’t seem to grasp it are the wizened establishment figures of the Democratic party, who are making calculations based on a picture of the world that no longer exists. ...

For decades, the Democratic party has been effectively controlled by the sort of people who work at an investment bank but also support gay marriage (at least when the polls say that it’s safe to do so). These people are almost as responsible as Republicans for our current political predicament. Even if they didn’t start the war on terror or the war on the poor, they utterly failed to stop them. The time has come to pay up for those mistakes. The price will be a large chunk of the fortunes that have been built over the past two generations. Those who view socialism as an awful fate are searching in every phone booth for a capitalist Superman to renew the tastefulness of the White House while also calming down the unnerving calls for the sort of equality that can cost a lot of money.