Hindsight is 20/20, but usually useless if we don’t apply lessons we learned. This may appear to be calling to just accept our lot and vote for anyone not Trump, but it is just the opposite. Politicians lie, and it appears that narcissistic real estate developers lie even more, but Trump had no political track record while Hillary definitely did.
Hillary suffered from her record, which would not likely change course if she was rewarded with the highest job in the nation. Any realistic appraisal of the ’16 election would show that Trump beet her from her left with the exception of immigration. Hillary was on tape defining herself as a dyed in the wool corporate warmonger and the nation was still adjusting to the same from Obama after he ran on his anti-war/anti-Wall St record.
Remember, we hadn’t yet discovered that Trump’s first language is lying and his promise to disengage in the Mid East seemed genuine. He also said that his fellow billionaires wouldn’t be happy with his tax plan and that he would give us a healthcare plan that would work and be less expensive than the insurance industry wet dream the ACA turned out to be. It was, after all, hatched originally at the Heritage Foundation.
No, I didn’t vote for Trump, but I also didn’t vote for Hillary. Given what we knew about both at the time it would have been a tossup anyway, but voting for Jill Stein sent the DNC the message that they had to clean up their act if they wanted to win future elections. They didn’t completely reverse their corruption, but they aren’t as confident in their love for corporate shills for the MIC and conservative austerity fiscal policy.
We allowed the party to move so far right that Eisenhower now seems like a wild-eyed liberal in retrospect. We are the only ones who can force it back to its roots in labor and FDR’s New Deal ideology that gave us our best decades in American history. Without representation, the people have little chance against the immense wealth that buys politicians like we buy hot dogs at the game. We already know that the party is averse to progressives and that it outright refuses to follow the wishes of the people in deference to the oligarchs, so that is our starting point.
I don’t see an alternative, especially given the dire threat of climate change, other than continuing to press our points. This conflict, in a way, has little to do with Trump. Our survival hinges on the DNC accepting the principles of democracy that it is supposed to stand for. Trump can only threaten to end the world some number of years sooner than would another corporation loving corrupt third way Democrat. The winning strategy for the DNC is to accept the will of the people and give us a “true” progressive. As I see it, there is only one in this race that is up to the task. I will remain Bernie or Bust.
