We are now, officially, post-political. That is to say that we have now reached the point where it is impossible to assert any will outside that of the oligarchy via the electoral process.
That is an extraordinary claim, and usually such claims are made with reference to convoluted theories that are difficult to prove, or, if they are provable, require someone to wade down numerous rabbit holes for days to encounter all the evidence. And most people just don’t have the time for that, especially if learning the truth would be inconvenient. Thankfully, an official and trusted organ of the oligarchy, Time Magazine, has laid it out for us in broad strokes.
Now, understand, they use their own code words for certain things. What a normal person calls “stealing an election” they call “fortifying an election.” What normal people call “disputing fraud” they call “assault on democracy.” What normal people call “a conspiracy to steal the election” they call “cross-partisan campaign to protect the election.” But don’t be fooled. If you skip the empty phrases and look at what they actually openly admit was done, you will see we don’t exaggerate in stating that the electoral process is now officially dead.
The article describes how a “shadow effort” that consisted of “… the left … with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors,” managed to do everything from changing crucial laws in battleground states to censoring Trump supporters on social media. The Time article, and this is their words, verbatim, described this shadow effort as “… a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Sounds a lot like what we’ve discussed for decades.
The breadth and scope of the conspiracy is truly breathtaking, and involved $400 million in Covid relief funds plus a $300 million grant from the Zuckerberg Initiative. But along with this, the organization of the effort required weekly video conferences including hundreds of people who coordinated hundreds of organizations. These ranged from the National Vote at Home Institute and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to the Voter Participation Center. Both the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO were intimately involved.
On the information side, big data analytics, including “progressive” data firms such as Catalist helped to empower the massive de-platforming of Trump supporters by sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Noticing that the protests over the summer were increasing Trump’s support, the cabal placed leaders from its Democracy Defense Coalition in key positions within the Movement for Black Lives, so that those protests would be shut down, like magic, so as not to compromise the election of Biden.
On the corporate side, they worked through the Business Roundtable to get major corporate CEOs on board, and had all major news anchors, including for Fox News, on-message.
This just hits the high spots. Feel free to read the linked article to see just how comprehensive this effort was. And also, understand, that the election of Donald Trump, as little of a risk as he posed to them, was a mistake they have now put mechanisms in place to assure will never happen again. This is the end of electoral politics on the national stage. There may be Republicans or Democrats in the future, but whichever one is elected will be loyal to the oligarchy, with differences only in rhetoric.
There are still some opportunities to affect outcomes via call-in campaigns and so forth. But even at the local level, the integrity of elections has become questionable. Recently, a manual recount in the small town of Windham, NH revealed that the voting machines shorted every Republican candidate by 300 votes. Why it shorted only Republican candidates is unknown. How pervasive this might be is also unknown, and likely to never be known.
But what we do know is that, according to the official mouthpiece of the oligarchy taking its victory lap, the reason why we have Joe Biden in the White House today is because of “… a well-funded cabal of powerful people … working together behind the scenes,” and not because that’s what a free and fair election actually produced.
You can also look forward to some stacking of the Supreme Court, perhaps by increasing the number of members and other moves to consolidate power.
So it is time to think beyond electoral politics — there is no salvation there. It is time to take efforts such as ours to build a parallel society more seriously. It is only through building a parallel society that we can gain the resiliency and power base that are needed to make real change.