The inevitable rightward march of America

Every two years, the deck chairs rearrange on the Titanic known as American democracy, as it continues to head towards certain disaster. The 2014 midterm election was another harbinger of calamity.

The result was a typically American product of equal parts apathy, ignorance, the rage of the stupid, and corruption—with corruption the central ingredient of a malodorous imperial stew.

We witnessed historic low turnout, with two-thirds of voters uninvolved and/or uncounted with the militant right-wing fringe fanatically mobilized, whipped into a frenzy on waves of massive corporate funding. Then there were the “protest non-votes,” alongside the glassy-eyed and stupid who never vote anyway. What little is left of democracy was ceded, abandoned, and stolen.

Corruption won this election. Right-wing corporate money bought it.

This election was the first real test of the poisonous effects of Citizens United, corporate “personhood,” and unlimited campaign spending by corporations and unsavory PACs “expressing their free speech.” The result of big right-wing money plus an absent electorate resulted in an easy theft of power. The richest 1% poured billions into this election, and got what they wanted. You can almost hear the giddy, hysterical cackles from the likes of the Koch Brothers.

This was also the first election of what can be viewed as the post-voting rights era. In its criminal 2012 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court essentially gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates for blatantly discriminatory voter ID laws to gerrymandering, all of which hand the majority of the country to the right wing. These processes are in full flower throughout the red states, across the South, and will only become even more of a factor in the future, with no countermeasures in sight.

Add to this the usual electronic vote fraud and voter suppression that, not surprisingly, is never fixed.

The powers that be have done their best to systematically prevent democracy from functioning. And it has led to this:

• The militant right wing, goose-stepping to power, dominating both houses of Congress, its lunatic membership thinking it has a mandate, wielding violence.

• A gridlocked Washington, with the establishment Democrats neutered and exposed, to be forced even more rightward.

• The “crazy” wing of the Republican Party—the delusional Tea Party fanatics, militant Christian dominionists, etc.—with new license to “go after” the “black communist,” with no regard to the fact that Obama has been the best friend corporate America and the CIA could ask for, short of a Bush.

• The loathsome and malignant Mitch McConnell heading the Senate, across from the equally loathsome obstructionist John Boehner. McConnell, who has had his dirty hands in every Republican misdeed since Iran-Contra, vowed the moment Obama became president to do everything in his power to destroy Obama, and nothing else. He will now continue to this nothing else even more aggressively, with his wife Elaine Chao, former Reagan/Bush apparatchik and Heritage Foundation/Fox News favorite, by his side. America and the world will suffer from the reign of this most arrogant of right-wing royalty.

In other words, for the next two years, a zero-sum civil war will ensue within Washington, sapping time and resources, the infighting itself certain to metastasize. The conservative corporate agenda, much of which Obama already supports, will ramp up. And the suffering masses will become even more disillusioned and angry.

The mendacious Obama has fallen back on the excuse that Republican obstructionism prevented him from delivering on his original promises. But the fact is, when he and the Democrats had a genuine mandate, they did nothing with it—because, as establishment war/corporate shills, it is always just rhetoric to temporarily assuage their naïve base. The economy was destroyed in the outgoing days of Bush/Cheney, by design (and conveniently crippling the Obama administration even before he took office), a process that the Democrats did nothing to alleviate. Bush/Cheney’s global “war on terrorism” has escalated and expanded.

As written by Roger Hodge in his book, The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism: “A proper understanding of our predicament can follow only from the realization that Obama, on his own terms, has not failed—his change-hope vision was always a mirage. In fact, Obama is doing what he set out to do . . . If we are to move forward politically, we must come to terms with the fact that Obama did not come to save American liberalism: he came to bury it.”

Obama now has the same Republican-obstructionism excuse, only more so. “Hey, I can’t help it.” He will continue to give lip service, make passing attempts on easy issues that he believes will support his image or help his fellow Democrats score public relations points, as long as they do not threaten what the top 1% wants. (The powers that be could care less that gays can marry, for instance.) Mainly, however, Obama will simply continue to facilitate the consensus, as it becomes more right wing.

The danger faced by the world in the next two years cannot be underestimated. While there may not be “a dime’s worth of difference” between Democrats and Republicans on the main issues, there may be a nickel’s worth, or even a penny’s worth. Within that small difference, with increased Republican power, matters of tone and style, timing and method, and will affect the lives of multitudes of human beings in very real ways. The deciding factors will be violence and fanaticism.

What the world faces now is full blown right-wing extremism, Bush/Cheney on steroids. It is a scenario nightmarishly similar to the rise of the National Socialists and Hitler, seizing power in Weimar Germany, fueled on waves of popular disaffection, stupidity, and rage.

There will continue to be bipartisan consensus on war, but violence will escalate more quickly, and more violently. All war and intelligence related agendas will be on fast track. Count on the bogus ISIS war to lead to a full blown regime change in Syria and Iran, and sooner. Count on more belligerence against Russia, in Ukraine and the Baltic region, sooner. Count on more covert operations, pogroms, false flag operations, surveillance, and even more unbridled CIA muscle flexing.

Under a Republican Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA, and any branch of the military-intelligence apparatus will get whatever they want, budgets certainly approved, and all attempts at “oversight” a joke.

Domestically, militant right-wing fanaticism promises violence against working people, with more violent destruction of what little is left of the social safety net. The right’s peevish new darlings, the peevish Scott Walker and the peevish Paul Ryan, will hack away at domestic safeguards and unions, with impunity. The right will push for deep austerity economics while demanding lower taxes on corporations and, of course, ever more war and killing all over the world. The rich will get even richer, gorging on a new wave of privatization, securitization and Republican-orchestrated Washington largesse.

There will be more violence on American streets. There will be more racism, more militarization, more guns, more police state, more confusion and chaos.

The Keystone pipeline will sail through, the literal knife down the heart of the American nation driven through forcefully. Big Oil will not be stopped.

Useless immigration policies will be pushed rightward, towards the methods favored by the hateful, racist Republicans.

The media, already dominated by the right wing, will jam ever more strident propaganda down American throats, and addle more minds.

The lunatics of the right will try to undo every single thing that “Obama the black Communist” has enacted, even where these policies have lavishly benefitted their own conservative sponsors. They will push to kill the Affordable Care Act, even though its beneficiaries are the insurance companies that lavish untold funds into Republican coffers.

They will attempt to make history repeat itself by shutting down the government, the way Newt Gingrich did during the Clinton era, over every infantile dispute that McConnell and Boehner can blow up into “national emergencies.” They will whine like the bully children that they are, throwing hissy fits, refusing to share the sandbox. Given a choice, they would destroy the sandbox and wipe out every human being in it.

Finally, history is likely to repeat itself in another way: Obama is likely to stumble through the next two years in a similar manner as Bill Clinton in his lame duck sunset period. Clinton, hounded throughout his presidency by the right wing, was finally scandalized by the Monica Lewinsky sexcapade, setting off a decisive right-wing feeding frenzy. This noise forced members of the establishment Democratic Party to distance themselves from a “damaged” president. Clinton ended his presidency on a sentimental note with nice speeches that brought tears to diehard fans, but never regained the power he enjoyed in 1992.

The Right will therefore try to impeach Obama, Clinton-style, for some fictional reason or another, wasting everyone’s time and inordinate resources with a gory spectacle pitting villains against villains.

Expect Obama, who is no longer the darling of his own party, to end his presidency in a similar fashion, his halo of martyrdom barely intact and tarnished. But what will follow Obama may be even worse than what followed Clinton.

Recall that in 1999, popular fatigue with Democrats and Clinton’s unpopularity handicapped Al Gore’s presidential campaign (“I am my own man,” Gore insisted), enough to turn enough ignorant voters towards George W. Bush, the darling of knuckle-dragging lowest common denominator types, conveniently setting up the infamous close election of 2000 that the Bush forces were happy to steal. Which in turn brought the world 9/11, endless war, endless power for elites, suffering for most human beings.

If, indeed, Obama and the Democrats do not manage to regain the popularity and political advantage that fueled Obama’s early run and Democratic Party landslides, and if the Republicans avoid shooting themselves in the proverbial foot (no guarantee), the right and its interests are well placed to dominate the 2016 presidential election, and add a dedicated new facilitator to the White House.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive heir apparent, is no alternative to the Republicans, given the poorly recognized fact that she is to the right of Obama on most policies, and even more criminal. The Clintons did more to destroy liberalism than any Democratic Party predecessors. Evidenced by her shrill and failed Democratic nomination contest against Obama, Hillary Clinton is far more hawkish on war and “national security” than Obama, and even more devoid of ideas. One need to watch the vulgar displays of Hillary Clinton yucking it up with John McCain, her dear friend, over foreign policy to know exactly what she is, a world class war criminal. More importantly, there is no Hillary Clinton without Bill Clinton. They are a team. The collective history of the Clintons is teeming with criminality. Their history is intertwined with that of the Bushes, from Iran-Contra/CIA drugs to “Al Qaeda” and Wall Street corruption. The fact is that the Clintons and Bushes, and their intertwined networks, have run the country since the 1980s, their respective camps taking turns in power, with Obama as transitional figurehead (his administration has always been run by neoliberal elites connected to the Clintonistas, including Hillary Clinton herself). They believe, with the American empire in certain decline, that it is time to “get really tough.”

The 2016 presidential “contest” is likely to put forth two corrupt establishment political “friends” against each other. A choice of villains. On one side, the Clintons. On the other side, Jeb Bush, or some other equally criminal figure from the Bush camp, along with scores of Tea Party extremists.

The 2016 election will also be electronically rigged, gerrymandered, voter suppressed, and decided by corporate money. We will once again hear tired calls of those who think “getting out the vote” will overcome these officially sanctioned criminal processes that have become bigger and more sophisticated and effective with time.

What the 2014 midterm election garishly underscored is that the Obama era, as fraudulent as it has been, is over. It sets the stage for something that is worse. Fascism just became even less friendly, and a lot more militant. Even false hopes are gone, and the agenda of the extreme right wing is here to stay. What damage is done in the next two years will not be undone in 2016.

Welcome back to hell.

Larry Chin is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.