The corporate Democrats booted the Virginia governorship. Now they’re screaming (of course) at precisely those who could’ve won it for them.
Thus paving the way for American fascism.
Clintonista Loser Terry McAuliffe’s Virginia gubernatorial race was his to win. Wasting millions on lousy, boring electronic ads, the Dems avoided on-the-ground campaigning and refused to pay grassroots door-to-door canvassers (the Republicans did pay theirs).
With thinly-veiled hostility, they stonewalled the Millennial/Zoomer voters of youth and color who could easily have won the race for McAuliffe, and who hold the key to any kind of democracy-based future.
And now, of course, that’s exactly who the party’s fat cat bloviators blame for the defeat… and all the future defeats they are sure to accumulate.
This is the sure-fired route to fascist autocracy.
The pattern of corporate Democrats assaulting the left dates back to 1896. In today’s perilous descent to fascism, the party has devolved to a conservative gerontocracy routinely alienating the rising generations desperate to save both the Earth and our democracy.
Starting with Bernie and the Congressional Squad, the Democrat gerontocracy is clearly terrified of the youthful progressive tsunami trying to sweep our nation’s calcified governance toward actual community control.
In Georgia 2020-1, we saw how this movement can win. Led by Andrea Miller, the Center for Common Ground laid out a detailed computerized model for how to motivate young voters of color. Democracy centers, written post cards, door-to-door campaigning, paid grassroots staff—they all went where the babbling class refused to go.
The center was joined by Ray McClendon, longtime political director of the Atlanta NAACP, who coordinated with Miller to ignite Georgia’s vibrant core of grassroots campaigners around meaningful issues that matter to voters. What a concept!!
Coming together through the weekly Grassroots Emergency Election Protection networking calls (www.grassrootsep.org) the multi-racial cross-class multi-generational campaign was at the root of Joe Biden’s Georgia victory in November 2020, and the “Miracle” election of the two US Senators who swing the US Senate to the Democrats on January 5, 2021 (guess what happened the next day!).
That winning route was readily available in Virginia to Terry McAuliffe and the corporate Dems. Instead, rather than update their act, they chose to lose the usual top-down way… and then to blame precisely those who could’ve won it for them.
McAuliffe had no grassroots campaign to speak of. He shunned climate, class, race and infrastructure issues that are bread-and-butter to the rising tide of youthful constituents.
With a loss that was very widely predicated by grassroots activists like Andrea Miller and others, the Democrat corporatocracy let out a guttural howl about how the party had gone “too far to the left” when precisely the opposite was the problem. McAuliffe ran a content-free campaign based only on his not being Donald Trump in a race where Trump wasn’t running.
He failed to focus on the social justice and eco-sanity issues that have powered the Sandernista movement for five years, and that have now become mainstream to the American public. To guarantee his loss, he said something to the tune that parents have no control over their childrens’ education.
In fact, Bernie is the new Eisenhower, with Social Security, Medicare for All, ending poverty, homelessness and hunger, universal access to education, protecting the environment and much more have all been embraced by the vast majority of American voters. Even the demonized catch-all “socialism” is openly favored over capitalism by nearly half the millennial/zoomers.
The greatest threat to the American future is a comatose Democratic elite laying down dead for a fascist takeover by the energized, increasingly violent Trump right. They promise little and, once in power, deliver less.
Together they scream at the progressive movement that speaks for the rising generations soon to dominate the American electorate.
As they campaign against progressivism again and again and yet again, they surrender America’s entire electoral apparatus to a GOP/Steve Bannon juggernaut hell-bent on actual dictatorship.
The question is: can the American grassroots transform the Democratic Party before it’s too late?
Georgia says yes. But Virginia and the party’s knee-jerk oh-so-predicatable anti-progressive blather warns us how profoundly out-of-touch the corporate Dems are now….and how dangerous that really is.
Harvey Wasserman co-coordinates the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition (www.grassrootsep.org) Mondays at 5pm Eastern. His PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY will be published in January (www.solartopia.org).
