by John Young
The successful showings of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump – and the reactions of the ruling elite to that success – demonstrate something really important.
When Bill Clinton became President, he had a Democrat majority in both houses and in most cases a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court. Yet, other than the infamous “Crime Bill” which included a ban on cosmetic accessories on firearms as well as Midnight Basketball(tm) for black youth, he didn’t actually achieve anything substantive in terms of his left-leaning campaign promises.
The same applies to George Bush. He became President in the wake of the Republican “Contract with America” which gave him a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, and in most cases he had a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court. Yet, he achieved nothing substantive in terms of his right-leaning campaign promises.
What both presidents achieved without fail, however, was an internationalist agenda. That is, an agenda that sacrificed the economic security of Americans to force them into competition with child slave labor abroad, illegal immigrant labor at home, and policies that forced Americans that managed to find decent jobs to literally subsidize their own displacement while those who funded the Democrat and Republican campaigns reaped profits secured offshore.
President Obama was no better. Though on paper he seemed to achieve a left campaign promise through Obamacare, in practice he moved health care beyond the reach of many working families. He likewise destroyed mom and pop jobs while providing generous guaranteed profits to already-wealthy insurance companies that donate generously to both Republican and Democrat campaigns. Meanwhile he continued to economically displace his own constituency through subsidizing illegal aliens to compete against them, and making it even more attractive to send work offshore. Somehow, he never managed to keep his campaign promise of repealing the privacy-destroying Patriot Act or disengaging us from the Middle East.
Whether a person leans left or right in general is a product not so much of their intelligence and knowledge as a combination of genetic predisposition with their environment impressions of resource scarcity or abundance. This is why it is almost impossible to sway someone’s politics with a well-argued and fully-documented position on social media. The primary real way to sway their politics is through changing their environmental impressions. (Thus the adage that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, though even that doesn’t always work.) A primary example of this is the well-known difference in average political leanings between single women (liberal) and married women (conservative).
Most people on either the left or right are simply expressing what is a political instinct. It is not really a reasoned position. Rather, it is an instinctive drive based on genes and environment, so what they instead do is rationalize their position based upon selective adoption of facts that suit their position. You may even find they will repeat positions and reasoning verbatim that they have derived from a TV show or a talk show host.
(For more about this, read The Evolutionary Psychology of Politics by Anonymous Conservative.)
So what does all of this have to do with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump?
The increased availability of information through the Internet and social media have leaked through to a lot of leftists and rightists, and caused them to THINK. While it has not changed their environment, it HAS caused them to question the words of politicians, and they have started to see quite clearly that the politicians who purport to represent their favored political leanings … do not.
And this is where Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump enter the fray.
Whether you love them or hate them, whether you agree with their positions or not, there is absolutely no question that even though these candidates are human and imperfect, they are absolutely sincere.
Bernie Sanders really is a Socialist, and he makes no apologies for it, and he has no qualms about suggesting that stock trades should be taxed to pay for his universal free college plans. He means it, and people know he means it. And he has clearly called out and identified the corruption of the system, wondering publicly how his rival, Hillary Clinton, can really represent “the little guy” when she has made speeches to Goldman Sachs – making more money in an hour than most families make in two years.
To make matters even more uncomfortable for the powers that be, he has even taken some clear economic nationalist positions – such as the need to re-negotiate trade deals like NAFTA and GATT so that the economy serves American workers rather than the other way around. Though he has since toned down the rhetoric in this respect, early in his campaign he also clearly identified the fact American workers should not have to compete against illegal immigrants.
These sorts of positions have made him very popular with his supporters, and with good reason. Trade deals that benefit a handful of power brokers while impoverishing Americans, and an open border for cheap labor that makes it almost impossible for Americans to compete are a major problem for a lot of people – a problem that neither Democrats nor Republicans have addressed because doing so would alienate their campaign contributors.
Donald Trump was likewise the first Republican candidate to identify the elephant in the room that other Republicans feared to address: illegal immigration. And like Bernie Sanders, he has focused on trade deals that have destroyed our manufacturing base and turned us into a paper-shuffling economy full of credit-consumers living on the edge rather than economically secure producers. Economic nationalist positions like this are good for the American people, but bad for the power-brokers that fund Republican campaigns.
And Donald Trump means it, and people recognize that he means it. He has seen fit not to run and hide from accusations of political incorrectness, and instead to face them head-on, earning the respect of people who lean right and have been frustrated at the empty words of the George Bushes of the Republican establishment.
And that brings me to the best thing about this election.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have forced to political establishment to show its hand.
While their manipulations usually take place in backroom deals so that the appearance of democracy is preserved, Sanders and Trump have presented such a clear existential threat that they have had to take off the velvet glove, and show the American people the putrescent gangrenous corrupt hand underneath.
As early as the New Hampshire primary, people learned that Democrat Party, Inc. has something called “super delegates.” These are delegates to the Democratic convention that are tried and true members of the party apparatus – and that no matter what the voters determined, those delegates would be voting for the establishment candidate: Hillary Clinton. So even though Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton actually got more delegates.
A quick glance at Hillary Clinton’s financials show her major contributor is a billionaire financier who made his money through currency manipulations that plunged millions into destitution – George Soros. The openly revealed existence of these pledged super-delegates has made it extremely apparent that Democratic Party, Inc. has nothing to do with democracy – and rather serves the interests of high-powered investment banks and billionaire financiers.
Though this won’t sway certain people, you can rest assured that this has awakened leftists who support Sanders – and that is millions of people: millions of people who, even if we disagree with them on certain things, now have common ground with us in both economic nationalism and more importantly a recognition of the corruption of the system.
Meanwhile, the establishment Republicans who owe their livelihood and campaign contributions to billionaire financiers, bankers, Florida slavers and international corporations have gone into full-scale meltdown. They don’t have the stop-gap measure of super delegates that the Democrats have to assure an establishment candidate. But they have openly conspired to deny Trump the nomination.
The most revealing aspect of where their loyalties lie is that they would literally rather see Hillary Clinton – the establishment Democrat candidate – win, than Donald Trump. The open machinations, ranging from Mitt Romney’s public denunciations to spurious claims of assaults against his workers to underhanded manipulation of the process of selecting and influencing delegates to the Republican convention show just how desperate they are.
And even though a certain number of people who will vote Republican will not notice this, you can rest assured that those who voted for Donald Trump – millions and millions of them – not only have common ground with us on economic nationalism and immigration, but will also be very very aware that the status quo is unspeakably corrupt.
If Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump do not win their respective party nominations, that will break the last straw of faith that millions of voters had in the American two-party system. A lot of people will have their environmental impressions altered.
They will be looking at alternatives. They will be looking … at us.