General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Let's be honest....nothing progressive can happen under HRC as president. [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)What I'm saying is that a Democratic president is supposed to stand up to capital with just as much passion as Republicans blindly serve it.
We are supposed to be different than them on everything.
We are supposed to represent everyone who is left out in the cold by the existing order...we are never supposed to endorse the exclusion and agree to continue it.
And, especially, we are never supposed to barter our party's soul by taking massive corporate donations.
Every time we do that, we lose more and more of ourselves.
This left us, at the worst moment, in the dead zone of the Nineties, where our Democratic president agreed with the Republicans on everything other than choice and environmentalism. He was just as brutal to the poor as the Right were...he was just as contemptuous of labor as they were.
And we are now being asked to endorse a candidate whose nomination implicitly commits the party to going back to that era...and also reduces us to the disgusting spector of alternating ruling families, a kind of politics in which ordinary Americans have no hope at all.
Obviously, a president can't by her or himself transform the country. But she or he can, at least, make it clear that she or he will NEVER stand in the way of transformation from below. Do you honestly believe that this candidate will ever do that, being committed, as she is, to the notion that political decisions should be made solely by elitist "insiders"?