The Reboot Of The Elites

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Riddick
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The Reboot Of The Elites

Post by Riddick » 02-07-2018 01:31 PM

Democrats’ Reflex: When They Go Low, We Go Upper Crust
Edited & excerpted from Chris Lehmann's article at TheBaffler.com

For a party heavily invested in defining what’s normal for the rest of us, our notional party of the people have a rather distressing sense of how the concept applies to their own flagging political fortunes.

Take their SOTU response. Handed a golden opportunity to deliver a forward-looking message they coughed up the heir to an exhausted liberal-managerial brand, to assure a vast nationwide viewing audience that theirs is the American political franchise terminally resistant to new ideas.

Albeit Rep. Kennedy's delivery was capable enough, designating a third-generation scion of an insular dynastic clan as a “rising star” of the opposition party represents a deeper structural disorder—one that’s disfigured the Democrats’ anemic national strategizing for the better part of a generation.

For the keepers of liberal consensus to rally to a global mood of populist discontent with a political brand name steeped in the New Frontier social mythology of the mid-twentieth-century is like trying to extinguish a prairie fire with a series of Scotch and gin shipments.

It also indulges a key Democratic myth long past its plausible sell-by date: that as the party of our new digital managerial class, the Democrats are the country’s true and proper keepers of the credentials for legitimate political leadership.

More than a passing one-off tactical error, the misguided selection of its future-of-the-party respondent to the SOTU represents a full-blown social philosophy that carelessly assigns power on the basis of socio-economic networking, and imagines its lead exponents as the only body of gatekeepers who can channel populist discontent into reasoned social deference.

Among other things, the leadership-by-dynastic-prerogative model is a poor look for a party desperately trying to convey a unified message of social inclusion.

Even the choreographers of Kennedy’s star turn seemed to intuit this failing—and unfortunately sought to correct for it in typically leaden fashion, having the young lawmaker deliver his remarks in an auto body shop in Fall River, Massachusetts.

The staging set off a predictable torrent of social-media snarking over the unfortunate placement of Ted Kennedy’s great-nephew in front of a disabled vehicle—with the words “fall” and “river” thrown into the bargain.

Much more consequential, it had the party's challenges precisely backwards, treating the idea of a working-class constituency as a hurriedly assembled pasteboard backdrop rather than something that should be front and center in a now-desperately urgent mission to reinvent itself from the ground up.

To the lead theorists of Democratic party power, it’s like 2016 never happened—and in view of stubborn obstacles to activist fundraising and participation the leadership caste has deliberately erected to discourage non-establishment candidacies that threaten the party’s dominant, bought-out business model, very much so.

If your first impulse is to translate all this as a loud sustained chant of “F%&K YOU, BERNIE SANDERS” you’re not far off the mark. Clearly, the dull-witted reactionary precincts of Democratic power regard the mere existence of Sanders and the movement he’s marshaled as nothing less than an existential affront.

Indeed, one of the Clinton wing's most tirelessly flogged talking points is actually not a Democrat at all, but an independent Sanders simply lacks the proper creds (as do runaway political “amateur” insurgent candidates in 2018) to be taken seriously.

Greeting a grassroots effort among energized young voters with such door-slamming petulance is like appointing Woody Allen headmaster of a girls’ academy: a willful subordination of urgent ends to complacent means that verges on criminal malpractice.

Ardent neoliberals tend overwhelmingly to come into their own political convictions much as Joseph Kennedy III has, as a matter of class inheritance, and in turn the party's mind-bendingly myopic and insular response to populist dissent is the exercise of the gatekeeping prerogatives of a Democrat permanent political class.

Democrats have increasingly come to envision a system that delivers power on the basis of professional status. In both academia and politics, the wifty rhetoric of the careful, high-professional modulation of reason and merit disguises the bald exercise of privilege for privilege’s sake.

Yet it was not ever thus. While the Democrats’ great modern founder, FDR famously attended Harvard, his successor, Harry Truman, was the last American president to rule without benefit of a college diploma. Just imagine the righteous conniptions that would trigger among today’s Democratic governing caste, and their pious enablers.
A mind should not be so open that the brains fall out; however, it should not be so closed that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. ART BELL

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Re: The Reboot Of The Elites

Post by Doka » 02-07-2018 04:57 PM

The picture burnt into my brain, is of the Democrats (SOTU) dressed in Coven Black , with their sour faces betraying the fact that they where being deprived of an actual "Live Human Sacrifice". I will always remember them in that light or rather dark way!
They made Grant Woods, picture "American Gothic" look like a happy birthday party. What in the heck are they offering their voters!?? That makes them so appealing??

American Gothic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic
KARMA RULES

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities': Voltaire

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