Trump, McConnell, Putin, and the Triumph of the Will to Power

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At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it.  GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused.  The evidence just wasn't there.  But it was.  And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton's perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI.  So much for Continue Reading...

Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy

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Liberal democracy faces grave dangers, most significantly, perhaps, from rapacious capitalism that unremittingly concentrates wealth.  Putin is another threat.  After consolidating his own power in Russia, he has stepped up a campaign against liberalism abroad, first in Russia's "near abroad" in Eastern Europe, and now the US.  Is Trump his latest trophy? Continue Reading...

The Victory of ‘No’

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For eight years, the GOP employed strategic obstructionism to stymie Obama's mildly progressive agenda, even when his proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act or the stimulus, closely aligned with their own.  Putting country first?  Nope.  This was pure partisanship in the service of partisanship.  And it worked! Continue Reading...

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

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Is the so-called "liberal," "elite" media really as cosseted and cloistered as its critics suggest?  Actually, yes.  Like the Democracy Party, the media - defined here as the mainstream variety - largely comprises well-educated, coastal types who have little in common (and often disdain) middle-America, working class whites.  Little wonder it has earned the latter's ire. Continue Reading...

Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt

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What happens when the purported party of the working class abandons its proletarian roots, while the other major party pushes crazed conspiracy theories, paranoia, and racism as an obfuscatory tactic to conceal its plutocratic agenda?  A virulent populism that threatens the republic.  Whose to blame for Trump?  We all are. Continue Reading...

In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent From ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue

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How did a clownish buffoon rise from obscurity to lead one of the world's great civilizations that produced soaring art and culture?  Historians have been asking the question since the demise of the Third Reich.  Hitler confounds.  Here are some clues: cunning exploitation of nativist fears, exploitation of irresistible propaganda, and "bottomless mendacity."  Found familiar.  It should. Continue Reading...

Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired

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Welcome to the modern Orwellian workplace, replete with bogus paeans to changing the world and congratulatory parties for being cashiered.  Labor has evolved over the decades and centuries, to be sure, but some thing never change.  Fundamentally, the worker is an expendable drone who must be plied with bogus moral-boosting empty gestures to hide that fiction.  The solution: be a trust fund baby and avoid peonage entirely. Continue Reading...