2020: Democrats Would Rather Lose To Apocalyptic, Neo-Fascist Republicans Than Win With The Mildly Progressive Faction Of Its Own Party

Paul Street, Counterpunch, January 3, 2020:

The Democratic Party's Campaign to Re-Elect President Trump

Anyone who hoped that the terrible experience of a neofascistic presidency might jolt the Democratic Party media and politics establishment into embracing the basic lesson of the 2016 election – that running a dismal, dollar-drenched centrist well to the right of the citizenry for president just guarantees right-wing control of the United States' executive branch – is certain to be disappointed.

In the 2020 election cycle as in the last one, the establishment corporate neo-"liberal" Democrats and their many media outlets have alternately disdained, disregarded, and downplayed Bernie Sanders' progressive-populist neo-New Deal campaign. ... When he isn't largely or (in some cases) completely ignored, the mildly social-democratish Sanders is absurdly discussed as some kind of wildly radical and therefore inherently un-electable leftist because he advances basic liberal-left programs that most Americans unmentionably support – Single Payer health insurance, green jobs programs, re-legalized union organizing, seriously progressive taxation, a doubling of the federal minimum wage, and free public college.

If one follows the lead of nearly every liberal pundit and talking head in U.S. corporate media, Democrats who are serious about defeating the demented and unmentionably fascistic oligarch Donald Trump are supposed to ... rally behind neoliberal center-right Wall Street tools like Pete Butiggieg and the ridiculous right-wing buffoon, racist, and dementia-victim Joe Biden. Even mildly liberal Elizabeth "capitalist in my bones" Warren is considered "too left-wing" by much of the neo-McCarthyite/-"liberal" media-politics elite – this because she partially aligns herself with Medicare-for-All and says she wants to break up some of the obscenely gargantuan tech monopolies.

[Everything] the ludicrous conservative "front-runner" Biden does or says past or present ... gets a free pass ... It's down Orwell's memory hole with: two horrific and laughably poor performances in previous presidential bids (1987-88 and 2007-08) even before his brains started coming out of his ears; plagiarism scandals in law school and during his first presidential run; a long Senate record of supine service to finance capital and corporate America; beating up on the sexual harassment victim Anita Hill during the confirmation of the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; voting to authorize George W. Bush to arch-criminally and mass-murderously invade Iraq; calling Barack Obama "clean" and "articulate" in 2007. ...

2020 presidential candidate Biden has had to be restrained from inappropriately touching and sniffing women and children. He has justified past collaboration "across the [U.S. Senate] aisle" with racist white segregationist senators from the South (who happened to be Democrats) by saying that one of those senators "never called me boy." He has bragged that he would have beaten up Trump "in high school." He has in all seriousness told a comically bizarre story to Black children about how he once faced down a Black youth named "Corn Pop" with a "rusty chain" in a parking lot outside a Black swimming pool where he once worked as a lifeguard (adding that "I like it when kids sit on my lap"). He advocated phonographs as a solution to Black poverty in a candidate debate. ...

Biden is a deeply conservative pawn of the corporate and financial establishment ... [he] recently told an Iowa town hall that he would consider a Republican as his running mate. ...

Despite the blackout and smearing of Sanders by the "liberal" media, the New York Times ["Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat"] and Politico ["Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination"] have recently felt compelled to publish major stories conceding that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination. ... [T]he aim of these articles is not to give Sanders more momentum. As Norman Solomon observes, the real goal it to alert conservative Democrats, funders, and media about the urgent need to escalate their attacks on Sanders:

…the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority…For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks. ...

[T]he overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage — synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party — will range from condescending to savage. ...

For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign. ...

[The Democrats] are not primarily about winning elections, much less about social justice, democracy, and environmental sanity. They are primarily about serving wealthy sponsors and entering the corporate and financial oligarchy. They and their elite backers would rather lose to the right, even to an apocalyptic and neofascist right, than lose to the left, even a mildly progressive left, in their own party. ...

Not that Trump would leave peacefully if Sanders or perhaps even if Biden bested him in the nation's anti-democratic Electoral College. As the conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein recently observed, Trump will "do anything" to stay in office. "Suspension of the election, negation of the results, declaration of martial law are not simply fanciful, alarmist, or crazy things to contemplate. Members of Congress, governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law enforcement figures and the military need to be thinking about how they might respond."