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The lost story-line amid the food-fights and boasting contests that the
“debates” have turned into is the destruction being wreaked on the two major
parties themselves. I don’t see how either the Republicans or Democrats get
out of this thing alive. The primary season now upon us is the event horizon
that sucks these two purposeless clubs into the bottomless hole of historical
bad memories. Both parties have failed so fundamentally to represent or even
apprehend the interests of the nation that they are now merely obstacles to
any sort of plausible future, two infernal machines blocking the road,
shaking themselves to death.
The Republican Party may be closer to outright blowup since the rank and
file will never accept Donald Trump as their legitimate candidate, and Trump
has nothing but contempt for the rank and file. If Trump manages to win
enough primaries and collect a big mass of delegate votes, the July
convention in Cleveland will be the site of a mass political suicide. The
party brass, including governors, congressmen, senators and their donor
cronies will find some device to deprive Trump of his prize, and the Trump
groundlings will revolt against that move, and the whole nomination process
will be turned over to the courts, and the result will be a broken
organization. The Federal Election Commission may then have to appeal to Capital
Hill to postpone the general election. The obvious further result will be a
constitutional crisis. Political legitimacy is shattered. Enter, some
Pentagon general on a white horse.
Parallel events could rock the Democratic side. I expect Hillary to exit
the race one way or another before April. She comes off the shelf like a
defective product that never should have made it through quality control.
Nobody really likes her. Nobody trusts her. Nobody besides Debbie Wasserman
Schultz and Huma Abedin believe that it’s her turn to run the
country. Factions at the FBI who have had a good look at her old State
Department emails want to see her indicted for using the office to gin up
global grift for the Clinton Foundation. These FBI personnel may be setting
up another constitutional crisis by forcing Attorney General Loretta Lynch
either to begin proceedings against Clinton or resign. Rumors about her
health (complications from a concussion suffered in a fall ) won’t go away.
And finally, of course, Senator Bernie Sanders is embarrassing her badly at
the polls.
The Democrats could feasibly end up having to nominate Bernie on a TKO,
but in doing so would instantly render themselves a rump party peddling the
“socialist” brand — about the worst product-placement imaginable, given our
history and national mythos. In theory, the country might benefit from a
partial dose of socialism such as single-payer Medicare-for-all — just to
bust up the odious matrix of rackets that medicine has become — but
mega-bureaucracy on the grand scale is past its sell-by date for an emergent
post-centralized world that needs its regions to get more local and
autonomous.
The last time the major political parties disintegrated, back in the
1850s, the nation had to go through a bloody convulsion to reconstitute
itself. The festering issue of slavery so dominated politics that nothing
else is remembered about the dynamics of the period. Today, the festering
issue is corruption and racketeering, but none of the candidates uses those
precise terms to describe what has happened to us, though Sanders inveighs
against the banker class to some effect. Trump gets at it only obliquely by
raging against the “incompetence” of the current leadership, but he expresses
himself so poorly in half-finished sentences and quasi-thoughts that he seems
to embody that same mental incapacity as the people he rails against.
Corruption and racketeering go unobserved and unchallenged. Even the amazing
effrontery of Ted Cruz failing to report his Goldman Sachs campaign contributions
to the FEC (with his wife employed as a managing director of that company!)
hardly made an impression on public opinion last week.
Political uncertainty has never been so dangerously high in this country
since the election year of 1860. Even the Watergate years pale against
today’s sick scene because for all of Richard Nixon’s turpitudes and evasions
in the White House, the institutions of democracy elsewhere were sound and
worked impressively well. The senate committee steadfastly and systematically
uncovered the crimes of Nixon and his cohorts over two years of hearings, and
the House judiciary committee chugged efficiently through the preparatory
work of impeachment — and then, old Tricky Dick boarded his helicopter to San
Clemente with a ragged smile and a wave.
Nobody knows where the shit show of 2016 is leading. The uncertainty
around it is helping to sink what remains of the old economy, and one can
easily discern a very dangerous set of feedbacks creeping into place.
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