The story of this election cycle is fundamentally one of the public realization of betrayal. Institutions we trusted to defend social justice have systematically betrayed that trust. We are witnessing a populist backlash against not just the political establishment, but against many other sectors of society that have abandoned their commitments to serve the public interest. This failure extends even to the Daily Kos blog, whose proprietor was once trusted to serve the interests of the members of his blog community.
Consider the damage:
In Politics, the Democratic Party, which has long represented itself as the champion of workers, minorities, and the economically disadvantaged, sold itself to monied interests during the Clinton administration. After the disastrous Bush II years, it persuaded the public that sweeping reform would result from the historic election of a minority president. Obama’s election snuffed out the anti-war movement in America while continuing armed conflicts and commencing drone assassinations. Within a few months, Obama appointed Wall Street friendly economic advisers and chained up the SEC and Justice Department, preventing any criminal prosecutions of Wall Street malefactors. There were no prosecutions for torture and an unprecedented crackdown on government whistleblowers commenced. A Republican-originated health care program was implemented, granting expanded revenue to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, with little hope of cost relief for the insured. As Obama’s second term came to a close, the party engineered the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, a candidate tied to the tarnished record of her husband, hoping that the novelty of her run as the first female presidential candidate would replicate the distracting appeal of Obama’s breakthrough as the first black President, while preserving intact the political dominance of a plutocratic elite. Our trust was betrayed.
In Mass Media, the “liberal” corporation-dominated mass media solidly backed Clinton, the anointed Democratic candidate, shamelessly shutting out the Sanders campaign from coverage until Sanders’ growing momentum made their stonewalling absurdly evident and they began to relent. The Washington Post barraged its readers with back-to-back negative stories on Sanders while the New York Times ran a steady stream of Op-Ed pieces tearing into Sanders. Meanwhile, the NYT buried coverage of the Sanders campaign in its back pages. Television coverage was similarly slanted, with cable TV hosts fawning over Clinton and dismissing Sanders as a cranky irrelevance. Our trust was betrayed.
In Academia, prominent economists, including Paul Krugman and former top economic advisors of Democratic presidents, relentlessly attacked the Sanders candidacy for claiming that the United States could afford the same level of social services as most European countries. Economists who dared to predict that economic growth would be boosted by the major fiscal stimulus were attacked as having unsound methods and political bias. Our trust was betrayed.
In Business, corporations continued to jack up the already obscene pay levels of CEOs while continuing to substitute cheap labor for middle-class jobs in America. Obama and Congress backed a new round of job-exporting trade agreements. Wall Street criminals paid huge fines (out of stockholder resources) while awarding themselves record bonuses and avoiding jail time. Pharmaceutical executives arbitrarily spiked drug prices oblivious to any concern other than enriching themselves. Meanwhile individual savers endured near-zero interest rates engineered to restore the health of the banking sector and the portfolios of stock investors. Our trust was betrayed.
At DailyKos, a popular blog known for attracting liberal political observers and activists, the proprietor served notice that criticism of Hillary Clinton would be deliberately curtailed well before the nominating convention — despite the fact that the majority of the blog participants favor the Sanders candidacy. Our trust was betrayed.
When the electorate perceives that elites have rigged not just the economy, but the majority of society’s guiding institutions, there is a powerful wave of political reaction. The longer the breaches of trust persist, the more potent and potentially disruptive this reaction will be. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
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