It's from The Nation. An excerpt:
The 2016 election is shaping up as payback time in our crippled democracy. The people have discovered ways to express their long-smoldering contempt for the regular order. Power politics, they discover, can be both mischievously fun and also purposeful.
Bernie Sanders delivered that uplifting message again with his upset victory in the Michigan primary. The press had been hinting crudely that Senator Sanders should really give it up, so Hillary Clinton could proceed unblemished to the nomination. Bernie wisely ignored the media dopesters.
As I wrote a few months ago, Donald Trump has taken the low road to political upheaval, while Senator Sanders has taken the high road to peaceful revolution. But both candidates are addressing many of the same fundamental wounds and inequities that working Americans have experienced for a generation. Trump is foul and unfair, a shrewd demagogue. Bernie is the honest visionary, urging young people to take themselves seriously as citizens and claim their role in a “political revolution.”
Trump and Sanders are forcing the political system to confront some malignant deformities in American life that both parties have tried to ignore, because, in their different ways, both are to blame. People feel betrayed, abandoned by representative democracy in favor of powerful interests.
Year after year, political leaders and presidents of both parties essentially lied to the people about fundamental matters—war and peace, lost prosperity, and the bruising generation of lost jobs and declining wages. The big media mostly looked the other way. Prestige news outlets witlessly reported the deceitful reassurances that leading economists provided with their statistical flimflam.
Famous corporations, from General Electric and General Motors to Microsoft and Apple, cleverly exploited workers on both ends of the global economy, from Mexico to China. Yet it was a nonstory in the media, despite the distress cries of American workers and the scandalous death-trap factories overseas, where workers (usually young women and girls) made shirts and shoes and semiconductor chips. Both parties in Congress signed off on trade agreements backed up by phony job predictions from so-called Washington think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute, the Business Roundtable, and the American Enterprise Institute.
Lies, lies, lies. Yes, Donald Trump tells lots of lies himself, but they seem modest alongside the monstrous deceptions that Democrats and Republicans used to mislead the country into the multinational betrayal. Not just the unfair trade rules that favored foreign producers, but the recurring scam of tax cuts for the wealthy, who were supposed to create products and lots more jobs....
First, let’s assume that Trump succeeds in securing the Republican nomination and Clinton wins the Democratic race. Sanders retires gracefully so he will not be labeled a spoiler, as Ralph Nader was when Gore lost in 2000.
Then, in the fall campaign, Trump changes his style and launches a ferocious and substantive assault on Clinton, with devastating effect. He does this essentially by taking over the Sanders economic agenda. He denounces HRC as a tool of wealthy plutocrats and speaks for working-class discontents, much as he has done in the primary season. He piles on the ugly personal slurs, but his central thrust becomes more grown-up and closely argued. Indeed, one can already observe Trump moderating his tone, edging toward a more “presidential” performance. Imagine a campaign that merges Bernie’s straight-talk values with traditional Republican values. If so, this could alter the profile of both parties, at least for the 2016 election. It could even define longer-term changes....
A Trump administration, I suspect, would deal with real power in ways that gravely betray his rhetoric. I note, for instance, that the business and financial establishments are more or less silent on Trump hysteria, neither denouncing nor making nice with him. I can imagine truly ugly deal-making that we would not hear about until afterward.
A more severe dilemma would confront Hillary. As the Michigan primary demonstrated, she’s not a convincing candidate on the heavyweight economic questions. Even when she makes strong proposals, many voters automatically ask: Can we trust her? She has surrounded herself with small-minded advisers from the Clinton years who are prone to making nasty counterattacks rather than developing genuinely far-reaching policy ideas.
Greider is quite right that Trump is just a symptom of the dysfunctionality of capitalist nominal democracy in the U.S. But the biggest worry about Trump is that he's a narcissistic fuck-up his entire life, who has been saved from his imprudent behavior by his wealth and lawyers; but in the international arena, neither matter. He could obliterate civilization given his psychological dysfunction. Clinton is a disgrace, and the other Repug candidates are monsters, but, with the exception of Ted Cruz, they probably won't annihilate the world. With Trump, who knows?
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