"What's Past is Prologue..."
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on November 5, 2014):
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
The Republican Right's Electoral Takeover of Both Houses of Congress, the Feeble Political Response of the Democratic Party, and the Real Meaning And Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections Nationwide
All,
The fundamental challenge facing the national Democratic Party today following the ongoing, horrific, and ever expanding catastrophes in all three branches of government is what it has always been since 1968: Will it have the courage and the determination to actually demand and fight for real and lasting transformative change in our political economy and culture or will it as usual merely shrink back, bemoan its self inflicted "fate", and then pretend and further delude itself that there is some magical, infantile, and utterly braindead "centrist" solution to the structural, institutional, and systemic crises facing and actively destroying this nation. All the typically aimless, fatalistic, and cowardly talk from the Democratic Party about somehow combatting and defeating the clear domination of the far right in national Republican politics and ideology by offering a conventionally rightwing agenda and vision of one's own has always been and can only be a gigantic and absolutely deadly disaster for not merely the DP alone but especially for the nation as a whole. This has been proven over and over again in the past half century in U.S. politics and it's being proven today as we speak. If we (and by "we" at this point I mean the national progressive left) don't collectively stand up and fight for a real genuine alternative to both national political parties from both INSIDE AND OUTSIDE the Democratic Party writ large across the entire country as well as in the federal government then the virulent, rapidly expanding, and ever metastasizing neofascist forces within not only the White House and the Republican Senate as well as the Supreme Court will immediately and for at least the next 40-50 years continue to completely dominate, control, and determine the direction of both the national political economy and our culture.
The stakes have never been higher in my estimation and if we fail this test (and I mean from the upcoming 2016 national presidential and legislative elections, and even more urgently and importantly at the level of fighting for and implementing a truly progressive and transformative national political, ideological, and ethical PUBLIC POLICY AGENA AND PROGRAM we (and by "we" here I mean the entire damn nation and any realistic or rational claims for a constitutional democracy as a whole) will be systematically and comprehensively destroyed, and will thereby be replaced by a national fascist government at both the levels of its bureaucratic apparatus and its national policy program and agenda. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever about that and anyone who knows or cares anything at all about modern Western political history since 1930 knows exactly what I'm talking about. Stay tuned because unless and untill we actually organize and mobilize ourselves to counter what our enemies are actively preparing us for in both the immediate future and for many decades to come there is no future worth talking about and most especially worth living in...
Kofi
March 2, 2016
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and dangerous fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless propaganda campaign in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional...
...except for only ONE other occasion in the past 66 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has utterly failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 62 years to the presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not—an astonishing 15 times or 93% of the time overall. . The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 elections combined Democratic Party candidates have won a absolutely pathetic cumulative average of just 38% of the national white vote...
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly and rather loudly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not politically supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (maybe in a decade from now when the current generations born before 1945 begin to pass away) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020).
It also tells us that President Obama who won only 43% of the national white vote in 2008 and an even more dismal 39% against Mitt Romney in 2012 NEVER HAD THE POLITICAL SUPPORT IN WORD OR DEED OF THE GREAT MAJORITY OF WHITE AMERICAN CITIZENS. This bedrock and very important fact cannot be emphasized enough because a major part of the gigantic media haze and irrationally wishful thinking that has followed Obama around since 2007 when he initially began running for the Democratic Party nomination for President has been the willful fantasy and utterly absurd notion (unfortunately heavily encouraged and given far more credence than it deserved by Obama's campaign team and by Obama himself) that the United States was not as divided as it most clearly is on racial, class, and gender grounds as many people made it out to be and that he was not really handicapped as a candidate, and later President, by these persistently disturbing racial and ideological factors. In truth of course like every other Democratic Party president since 1952 Obama owes his two terms almost exclusively to the always heavily supportive black vote—and since 2008 to the Latino vote as well—despite the fact that the President hasn’t always been as politically and strategically appreciative of these facts as he could and most certainly should have been…(End of Part One)...
