Image by Ivan Radic via Flickr
with Chris Hedges and Paul Street
TheRealNews on Sep 9, 2022
What are we to make of a Democratic Party that has embraces an election strategy that includes demobilizing the majority working-class non-Republican electorate; legitimizing right-wing agendas and narratives; seeks bipartisan cooperation with right-wing politicians such as Liz Cheney; refuses to attack archaic minority rule institutions including the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster; repeatedly backs down from hauling Donald Trump into court and funds far-right Republican candidates in this year’s primary elections, repeating the disastrous Hillary Clinton campaign’s “Pied Piper” ploy of promoting the supposedly “more beatable” Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries?
Why is the Democratic Party lavishly funding Trump stooges such as John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who claimed that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was “mathematically impossible,” by giving his campaign $ 425,000 dollars, investing more money in one pro-Gibbs television ad than Gibbs raised for his campaign?
Why do they see the stoking of fascist fire as an effective campaign strategy? Even The New York Times has called the tactic of funding far right pro-Trump candidates a “Cynical Low for the Democratic Party.”
Joining me to discuss what is taking place on our bizarre political landscape as we head towards the mid-term elections – elections the cultist Trump Republic Party looks set to win – is the historian Paul Street. Paul has taught at numerous Chicago-area universities and is the author of This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021). He also writes regularly for Counterpunch.
Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of eight books to date: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); (with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011); They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014). Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, September 2020); and This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (Routledge, 2022). Paul writes regularly for Counterpunch and The Paul Street Report on Substack. Help Paul Street keep writing here and/or here and/or here.
See also:
The Dangerous, Degenerate Dems: Pied Piper 2022 and Other Forms of Complicity, by Paul Street
From the archives:
PSL Editorial: Reject Biden’s Plan For 100,000 More Cops On The Streets
PSL Editorial: The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Doesn’t Even Come Close
Doing Nothing While the World Burns and Extinction Looms, by Andy Worthington
PSL Statement: Victory in Defense of Abortion Rights: Kansas Votes NO
This Is What It Looks Like When An Empire Cannibalizes Itself, by Rainer Shea
Beyond Passive Resistance: Against Democratic Surrender in a Time of Fascitization, by Paul Street
America’s Instinctive Fascism Creeps On, by Paul Street
Joe Biden’s Hollow Resistance: Words vs. Deeds, by Paul Street
From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: A Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland, by Paul Street
The Resistance Remains Hollow: The Weimar Ways of the Dismal Democrats, by Paul Street
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