Election 2016: The Farce Continues

“And so we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust.” Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

The farce continues. Donald Trump will be the standard bearer of the Republican Party, whose movers and shakers must now swallow their bile and put on a display of party “unity.” Much was made of Trump’s visit to Capitol Hill last week for a meeting with Paul Ryan, the putative Party genius. It doesn’t matter that Ryan has never hatched an idea beyond the typical Party doctrine -- he’s the man whose ring must be kissed. Media reports concluded that Trump and Ryan didn’t agree on anything major. No surprise there. Trump is a wild card, totally unpredictable, and therefore uncontrollable, and most of the GOP big shots have denounced him at least once during this campaign.

Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia primary, though the mainstream media continue to write him off because the delegate math favors Hillary Clinton. The honchos in the Democratic Party call on Sanders to submit to the inevitable and call it a day, urge his supporters to tip their energy and money and votes to Queen Clinton. So far, Sanders vows to fight on, though the day of his capitulation is only a matter of the changing of the calendar.

For those of us out here in Reality Land, where the impact of neoliberal policies (low-wage, contingent jobs, student loan debt, crushing medical expenses, etc.) is felt and paid for, the choice offered us is no choice at all. Trump is a gilt-edged novelty for media moguls and pundits, but the man is a dangerous buffoon with no core beliefs other than money and celebrity. Clinton, on the other hand, is more of the same: austerity for the needy and welfare for the rich; imperial wars and domestic surveillance; lip service for the existential crisis posed by climate change; and continued privatization of the assets and services we are supposed to own in common for the good of us all.

Regardless of who wins this tarnished election, private profit will remain the primary organizing principle of the U S of A.

The whole game is rigged, of course, designed to keep the duopoly in power and limit the issues that are allowed to be discussed and the people invited to discuss them. Flip on the network shows and it’s the same faces all the time talking about the same trivial BS. Can anyone remember a period in US history when the country was involved in so many wars simultaneously, none of them formally declared or approved by Congress? I cannot. And these contemporary wars grind on and on, year after year, with no end ever coming into view. Trump claims that he will “rebuild” the US military, though one has to wonder what this might look like given the disproportionate amount of taxpayer money that is siphoned off by the military-security-intelligence apparatus. We outspend every other nation on armaments. The network pundits don’t talk about this at all.

The political system is corrupt and dysfunctional, and this year it has vomited up two presidential hopefuls who most of the voting-age public either despises or distrusts. I have been ruminating lately on the question of whether or not the country deserves Donald Trump, if his ascent is the logical end to decades of lies and disinformation, patriotic mumbo-jumbo about freedom and democracy and the American Way, enormous giveaways to plunderers and plutocrats, and deliberate attempts to anesthetize the populace. The media moguls are more than happy to gin up controversy about transgender restrooms but cannot be troubled to tell the scary truth about the economy, climate change or nuclear proliferation.

I did hear the economist Richard Wolff say something that cheered me. In a lecture about how pressure for social change often builds unseen and then explodes all at once, Wolff said, “The aristocrats never see it coming.”

Could we be at such a turning point now? I’m fairly certain that our collective survival depends on it.