The Democratic Party has chosen Hillary Clinton as its candidate for president of the United States.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders did not achieve that honor, though he attracted the enthusiastic support of many young and better-educated persons, and received more votes than any avowed democratic-socialist in history.
It’s significant that his supporters were not bamboozled by those who hoped to discredit Sanders by calling him a “Bolshevik,” the name of 1918 Communists who implemented Lenin’s murder of party members who’d departed from current doctrine.
The Democratic National Committee has now finalized its party platform, the policy-promises its candidate will – or should – make to the American people. And Sanders has exercised what party influence he had to include in this platform as many of his policies as could be managed.
The result falls far short of what a political progressive would have wished. It shows that Democrats plan to ignore the current tides of history – huge as they are – and hope to win an election simply by declaring “We’re not Trump!”
Looming over this party’s decision, like dark clouds on the horizon, are a number of recent events in world history that are, as I see it, linked by intertwining threads: Occupy Wall Street; the rise of Bernie Sanders; the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit.
Occupy Wall Street was a populist, peaceful demonstration by thousands of Americans of all classes, all ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds and especially those from lower-middle-income brackets. In Ghandi fashion they employed peaceful civil disobedience, occupying New York City’s parks, streets and sidewalks in an effort to display to the country’s political, social and economic powers their resentment of the political, economic, social inequality that these wealthy and lobbyist-funded policy-makers had forced on them. The local police, dealing with social protest as they usually do, harassed the occupiers, brutalized many, made false arrests that they knew could not be upheld in court and, in general, showed how force is used to disperse and intimidate the powerless.
Whether Wall Street hedge-fund managers and financiers in front of whose offices the protesters had massed, looked down from their lofty windows and laughed, is not known by me. But they may as well have, since this ominous notice to the upper echelons of the country as to their peoples’ political temperature was sloughed off and forgotten.
The appearance of candidate Bernie Sanders, however, gave these “occupiers,” and many more, renewed hope: millions who now more fully understood – and felt – the economic wasteland in which they were stuck, the political emasculation that big money had brought them, the failure of their supposed representatives to understand or to make more tolerable their struggling, difficult, lives.
Sanders was – and still is – the only presidential candidate who wanted to deal effectively with the country’s fundamental problems: economic, political and social inequality; campaign finance; the crushing weight of educational expense.
Butlike the occupiers before him, his wave of popularity did not rise high enough to give hope that the system could be cleansed.
Millions of other Americans who felt their lives were as hampered and foreclosed as those who supported Sanders, but who also had priorities involving racial superiority and who felt that their representatives had betrayed them, not only for ignoring their economic well-being, but had not sufficiently embraced their social values (abortion rights, gun-carrying rights, same-sex marriage prevention) and who had come to fear and resent the rise of non-white proportionality in America, who feared and resented the immigration of persons not of their religious/cultural beliefs – these other millions have found in Donald Trump a champion who ignores the despised “establishment” of the Republican Party, “says it like it is,” wants to restore America to a past where it was clear who was in control.
In the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn, a political figure with striking similarities to Bernie Sanders, arose to achieve leadership of the Labour Party, largely, like Sanders, with the support of younger, and newer, voters.
But those in the UK who wanted to represent – or exploit – the resentment of Brits at the impoverished nature of their lives, the fear and resentment of many at the large-scale immigration by those “not like them” – these Conservative Party leaders, like Trump in the USA, appealed to their constituents’ vague but anguished hope to return to a past, in this case a past in which Britain had no obligation to any state or group other than its own government, a government once again to be independent, proud, though unfortunately (they may have thought) no longer a colonial empire.
So Conservatives convinced Brits to leave the European Union.
This widespread resentment, and fear, of foreign immigration, is a substantial part of Trump’s support in the US and of the Conservative Party’s Brexit result.
In both cases, the majority of citizens are unwilling to look at their own countries’ responsibility for the vast movement of peoples seeking refuge from the terror of murder and bombings that have driven them, in hope of safe haven, to move in masses through the Middle-East, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Germany, France, England, Sweden and the United States. Of course the terror and murder of these victims were, and still are, largely the work of troops, planes and drones employed by the US, Britain, Germany, France and their allies.
These atrocities, as you may imagine, have not gone unnoticed; they have created widespread hatred of the instigators by the victims’ families, onlookers and sympathizers, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of whom have decided to return the favor, acting alone or in concert.
These events and movements have resulted in turbulent reactions throughout the world. It is almost as though an early trembling of some planetary seismic event is being felt everywhere.
Certainly it is true that the people of this country are deeply unhappy with the difficult – to some, hopeless – nature of their lives; with the seeming failure of their supposed representatives to provide them with substantial hope for properly-paid jobs, equal opportunity to vote, a decent share of income and tax treatment, equal treatment under the law, a government not dominated by corporations, the possibility of sufficient education without crushing debt.
And a failure to provide potential leaders in whom they can trust.
Enter the Democratic Party as it presents its program for presidential leadership at a time when 67% of the American people think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Indiana Democratic National Party member Carli Stevenson said “Our program should be aspirational!” In other words, it should tell the American people that Democrats want to address the country’s major problems in specific and effective ways, not just say, “Vote for us – up and down the ticket – because we are not the irresponsible Donald Trump.”
How have Democrats responded to Stevenson’s appeal?
The Democratic Party platform does address the need for criminal-justice reform and the need to empower workers; if does recommend measures to deal with climate change and banking reform.
But Democrats have gone weak in the knees when vision and courage are needed specifically to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, corporate-welfare
schemes, and lobbyist abuses. And this moral delicacy is evidenced in the face of widespread distrust of its candidate’s character and judgment.
As Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton prepares to address the nation, she might well “ … review the address of another Democrat who was nominated in Philadelphia.
“Warning that ‘economic royalists’ had ‘created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction,’ Franklin Roosevelt [in 1936 declared] ‘government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster. … ‘In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity,’
“ … And Americans responded by embracing Roosevelt as they had no other president.” (John Nichols, thenation.com, July 16, 2016)
Will Hillary Clinton ask Americans for their support in this way? And if she does, will we believe her?
William Smithers
Santa Barbara