Do Democrats Have a Message?

As odious as the opposition may be, it's not enough to simply assume Democratic supporters will turn out. But it's also disappointing to hear complaints about lack of message while claiming that being "too leftist" can't win. Pia Gallegos points out:

According to polling, a majority of Americans support a progressive agenda, including higher taxes on the wealthy, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, stronger environmental protection, improved public transportation and criminal justice reform.

It's a struggle, but corporate influence works against what might otherwise be a winning agenda. What's the point in asking people to vote for someone slightly less evil than the Republicans?

Update (October 28):  Andrew O'Hehir argues there's no "normal" to go back to in U.S. politics.

[Fuckface] was uniquely positioned to capitalize on perceptions that were at least partly true, but that he did not create. Those included the perception that the nation’s bipartisan leadership caste had condescended to the American people for years, lied about their true objectives and collaborated in a regime of endless war and economic inequality. He translated those perceptions into an especially ugly and dangerous form of cultural warfare, some of whose consequences we have observed this week. That does not mean the underlying feelings of cynicism, apathy, abandonment and disenfranchisement — which are felt across the political spectrum, not just among [Dear Leader's] demographic — are entirely illegitimate.

Democrats have a lot riding on this election: They may suffer a severe implosion if they lose, and have no clear idea what to do if they win. The ... coalition loosely termed the “resistance” can agree that it wants an America that is less conspicuously divided and diseased. But its members absolutely do not agree about the roots of that division and disease, or about how to address it.

Update (October 30):  T.J. Coles makes the case for why modern capitalism constrains what liberal or even progressive political parties can accomplish. The dominance of markets forces everyone to be most concerned with their own self-interest with no one looking out for the common good.

If this decades-long model continues to be imposed across the world, especially in nations with huge populations like India and China, which are increasingly adopting neoliberal policies, today’s divisive politics and crumbling infrastructure will seem like a minor headache, particularly against the backdrop of diminishing resources and climate change.

Update (November 1):  Craig Collins warns that "rising energy prices and ballooning debt are poised to strangle the global economy once again" and that "a healthy economy that encourages people to take care of each other and the planet is incompatible with exploiting labor and ransacking nature for profit". Capitalism's death throes could be a nightmare.

Without enough energy to generate growth, catabolic capitalists stoke the profit engine by taking over troubled businesses, selling them off for parts, firing the workforce and pilfering their pensions. Scavengers, speculators and slumlords buy up distressed and abandoned properties – houses, schools, factories, office buildings and malls – strip them of valuable resources, sell them for scrap or rent them to people desperate for shelter. Illicit lending operations charge outrageous interest rates and hire thugs or private security firms to shake down desperate borrowers or force people into indentured servitude to repay loans. Instead of investing in struggling productive enterprises, catabolic financiers make windfall profits by betting against growth through hoarding and speculative short selling of securities, currencies and commodities.

"Green capitalism" won't be the way out.

[I]n a growth-less economy, catabolic capitalism is the most profitable, short-term alternative for those in power.

[C]apitalism’s overriding profit motive is fundamentally at odds with ecological balance and the general welfare of humanity.

Update (November 4):  Andrew O'Hehir continues to point out this election won't really solve anything--we're stuck with "the only car in the driveway that will actually start".

It’s important for the Democrats to win, but not because they are thriving and strong and know what they’re doing. That would be a laughable claim. If anything, the Democratic Party seems strikingly unprepared for this moment. It’s a timorous and internally conflicted coalition with no clear ideology and no core constituency, which deliberately avoids controversial or confrontational positions and has spent almost 30 years defining itself entirely in negative terms: not Republicans, not tax-and-spend liberals, not the left.

In fact, it might be more accurate to describe the Democratic Party, in its weakened and deracinated condition, as a different aspect of the same cultural and political decay that produced [Fuckface], rather than as an actual antidote to [him].

It’s imperative for Democrats to win this election because the decades-long process of moral and intellectual rot in the Republican Party has finally ended in a virulent and dangerous form of madness. Republicans have almost entirely ditched traditional "conservative" politics in favor of a radical agenda to "define democracy downward" and remain in power indefinitely at the helm of a pseudo-democratic state built on racial and economic apartheid. A fascist state, in other words, whatever term it might apply to itself. [Von Clownstick] catalyzed and accelerated this process, and became its major beneficiary. But he didn’t start it, and there’s no reason to believe it will stop when he departs the political scene.

Update (November 5):  Heather Digby Parton expresses the underlying anxiety of this moment.

What I think has many of us especially frightened is that we are seeing huge turnout for a midterm election, possibly even hitting the level of a normal presidential election when all the votes are counted. And we don't know if that huge surge means more of us or more of them.

Update (November 14):  Expanding Medicaid turned out to be popular in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah.

Update (November 19):  Kendra Horn won a Congressional district in Oklahoma that Republicans have held for 44 years. It seemed to help to not talk about Dear Leader.

Horn campaigned on left-wing issues like gun control, stricter campaign finance regulations, opposition to private prisons, and more funding for education.

Update (November 21):  Ira Glasser points to Max Rose as an example for Democrats to follow.

Rose was not particularly telegenic or charismatic. But he told his conservative constituents they were getting screwed. They already knew that, but he told them why.

It wasn’t because of Mexicans or immigrants. It was, he said, because the economic system is rigged to benefit special corporate interests and the extremely wealthy. He told them that because of government policies, they were getting the short end of the stick, and that what is needed is better infrastructure and stronger unions.

He talked about what mattered to them: oppressively long commute times and the opioid crisis, which is destroying lives on Staten Island. And he criticized the incumbent congressman for taking money from the company that manufactures OxyContin.

Rose didn’t lecture people, or shame them, or tell them not to be bigots or hostile to immigrants. Rather, like Franklin Roosevelt in the ’30s, he focused on their local problems, and proposed real solutions.

Update (November 25):  Senator Bernie Sanders has a message. Is this really too far to the left?

Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and indexing it to median wage growth thereafter.
A path toward Medicare-for-all.
Bold action to combat climate change.
Fixing our broken criminal-justice system.
Comprehensive immigration reform.
Progressive tax reform.
A $1 trillion infrastructure plan.
Lowering the price of prescription drugs.
Making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt.
Expanding Social Security.

Keep in mind that "red" states voted to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid.

Update (December 2):  House Democrats are focusing on voting rights, campaign finance and ethics reforms in the first bill of the new Congress.

Update (December 10):  Dan Siegel says the presidential election was "a call for white men to fight back against those they hold responsible for their diminished roles in the world". He offers "some ideas for a progressive program to unite the American people".

Guaranteed annual income for all Americans.
Commitment to full equality for all races, ethnicities, religious groups, and genders.
Protect the Earth.
Commitment to World Peace.
Right to Affordable Housing.
Progressive tax system.
Right to healthcare.
Quality Education.
Personal Liberty.
End mass incarceration.
Democratize the political system.

Update (January 14, 2019):  Ted Rall offers his guidelines for progressives.

$25 minimum wage.
Abolish student loans.
Forgive outstanding student loans.
Limit the increase in tuition.
Universal healthcare.
Remove U.S. troops from foreign countries.
End drone attacks.
Cut the defense budget by 90 percent.
Etc.

Update (March 3, 2019):  Paul Rosenberg urges Democrats to learn from the failures of neoliberalism (market fetishism).

Ideally, the Democrats' 2020 primary campaign could and should involve a full-throated debate about the best ways to realize the full meaning of inclusive growth, including all the non-economic dimensions of recognition as well. It should flesh out specific aspects of what progressive populism means, and how to achieve its goals. It should promote sound policies to advance inclusive growth. And it should reclaim the once commonsense idea that while the market can be a good servant, it makes a terrible, tyrannical master.

Corrupted Reality

If humans are wired for distorted thinking, then it's easy to see how Fuckface gets a pass for his crimes from so many. Amanda Marcotte explains:

In the right-wing imagination, Democrats do evil things, even commit murder, on a regular basis and get away with it. So too many conservatives have convinced themselves that it's only fair to let [Dear Leader] get away with similar things, even though the bad things he's doing are all too real and not from the realm of fevered conspiracy theory.

We can choose to believe anything we want, but over time truth is established through what Jonathan Rauch calls the constitution of knowledge. Trolling has become widespread and von Clownstick is the master.

[He] showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with. ... [L]ying reflects a strategy, not merely a character flaw or pathology.

Helping to swing the election shows how much damage can be done, but Rauch is optimistic.

[Will] the trolls triumph? I doubt it. Weaponized trolling has enjoyed the advantage of surprise, but as that diminishes, the troll army will encounter a disadvantage. Trolls have swarms, but the constitution of knowledge has institutions.

Of course, the question is how much time we have for the truth to succeed. Meanwhile we're paying a terrible price with our mental health the longer we're immersed the current political cesspool. Jennifer Panning refers to "[Fuckface] Anxiety Disorder" as characterized by

increased worry, obsessive thought patterns, muscle tension and obsessive preoccupation with the news.

Check, check, check and check. I suppose there's some small comfort in having the diagnosis even if it may yet prove to be fatal.

Update (November 12):  Amanda Marcotte says there's no point to arguing with trolls who "have openly declared that they don't care about reason or facts". Shaming might be the best strategy.

I find [the question of how to deal with them] frustrating, mainly because it assumes that for every problem, there must be a solution — an assumption that the evidence simply doesn't support.

Update (November 25):  Michael Hayne offers ten pieces of bullshit that followers of Dear Leader think are true.

Update (February 23, 2019):  While the Mueller investigation may or may not be winding down, Lucian Truscott explains why that's not good news for von Clownstick.

[T]he thing that should worry [Fuckface] the most is that when Mueller’s investigation ends, the muzzles come off the coterie of criminals [he] has surrounded himself with. As long as Mueller had people like Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and David Pecker cooperating with his investigation, they were constrained from what they could share with the Congress and the press about what they know.

Take the muzzle off the creeps and hustlers [Dear Leader] surrounded himself with, and he’s going to come out looking like the scuzzball lying thieving lowlife he is.

But Amanda Marcotte expands on how conservative voters have been trained to ignore all that.

First, Republicans normalized the idea that all politicians are corrupt by electing a series of deeply corrupt politicians themselves. ,,, [B]y the time Bush administration lies had led us into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq, your average conservative had not only become adept at making excuses for political corruption, but had fully accepted that doing so is a normal and expected aspect of supporting the Republican Party.

Second, Republican politicians trained their base to think of investigations as bad-faith political power grabs by themselves using investigations primarily, if not solely, for this purpose. ... All these endless, pointless investigations and scandal-mongering over Democratic behavior that wasn't corrupt, much less criminal, has primarily served to indoctrinate the conservative masses into believing that "investigations" are never truly serious, but just a tool for partisans trying to score political points. They are now throughly primed to interpret the investigations into [von Clownstick's] very real corruption as nothing more than Democrats seeking revenge for decades of mistreatment by Republican hacks.

Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius

A special report from IPCC addresses questions raised by the Paris Agreement. The limit on warming is still possible, but will require tremendous effort.

Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems (high confidence). These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options (medium confidence).

The Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group, Gebru Jember Endalew responds:

The science makes clear that there is an urgent need to accelerate the global response to climate change to avoid exceeding the 1.5°C limit. Governments must increase climate action now and submit more ambitious plans for the future. This includes increasing the level of support to developing countries to enable them to develop and lift their people out of poverty without going down a traditional, unsustainable development pathway.

Update (October 10):  Problem solved. Or not.

Update (October 13):  Ed Simon reacts to the special report.

Only capitalism was able to inaugurate a new geological epoch in the Anthropocene; unique is our dominant ideology’s status in being able to obliterate all of humanity. IPCC Co-Chair Debra Roberts said that the report is a “line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” but what should disturb us most is the authors’ accurate alarm at the lack of political will to avert catastrophe. In the United States the coal, oil, and gas industries’ obfuscate, high percentages of Americans believe the lie that climate change is a hoax (while record heat affects the Midwest this October), and the ... administration trashes the Paris Accords.

Jon Queally notes that IPCC reports represent a consensus which tends to understate the risk. And Michael Mann elaborates on the future we face.

Update (October 15):  Rob Urie argues climate change is just one facet of the systemic problems caused by capitalism.

Identification of the industrial age— capitalism, as the cause of climate crisis brings with it a host of related revelations. Capitalist wealth becomes a crude measure of its reciprocal in environmental devastation. The relation of wealth to political power makes timely and / or peaceful resolution improbable. Capitalist accumulation will hereafter be a measure of informed socio-pathology. The writing is on the wall. The American political ‘choice’ between the wealthy or their technocratic servants is a formula for environmental annihilation. The system crisis is a metaphor for the political crisis that makes resolution so intractable.

What again is so provocative about the IPCC report— itself considered overly conservative by other climate commenters, is the truncated time horizon before irreversible environmental consequences begin to unfold. The American belief that progress can be accomplished through electoral politics has always rested on deference to a perpetual tomorrow.

Update (October 20):  Elizabeth Kolbert reiterates that the alarms aren't being heard.

Even as the IPCC warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. 

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report is that every extra half a degree is world-altering. 

Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per the ... Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic possibilities. ... This disaster is going to be as bad—as very, very bad—as we make it.

Update (November 1):  A paper published in Nature offers a new estimate of the heat content of the oceans. The finding is 60 percent more heat than previously estimated. That means climate change has already had a larger impact than we realized.

Update (November 3):  A group of British scientists are calling for mass civil disobedience to force governments to take action on climate change.

Update (November 13):  Carol Dansereau argues that capitalism cannot solve climate change.

Solutions to global warming are sitting right in front of us, but we can’t implement them. We don’t hold the reins, we lack the money that our labor created, and our jobs are threatened if we challenge the corporations. This insane, unjust set-up has got to go.

Update (November 14):  An error in the Nature ocean heat content study overstated the certainty of their finding. But the fact that the rate of ocean warming is increasing is not disputed.

Update (November 16):  A study published in Geophysical Research Papers finds that the arctic is warmer now than at any time in the past 120,000 years.

Update (January 13, 2019):  A study published in Science finds that ocean temperatures have been increasing faster than previously understood.

Update (February 3, 2019):  Just now coming across this article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Climate report understates threat

[T]he report, dire as it is, misses a key point: Self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping points—the wildcards of the climate system—could cause the climate to destabilize even further. The report also fails to discuss the five percent risk that even existing levels of climate pollution, if continued unchecked, could lead to runaway warming—the so-called “fat tail” risk. These omissions may mislead world leaders into thinking they have more time to address the climate crisis, when in fact immediate actions are needed. To put it bluntly, there is a significant risk of self-reinforcing climate feedback loops pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control.

Update (July 26, 2019):  Matt McGrath notes that the IPCC reports calls for carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2020 to maintain the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. He quotes Prince Charles:

I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.

McConnell's Revenge

Though he failed to hold President Obama to one term, Senator Mitch McConnell has remade much of the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. He gambled he could steal one seat and then rammed through another. McConnell is a conniving bastard who knows how to play hardball. Greg Miller quotes his response to John Brennan as the extent of Russian interference was becoming known in 2016.

I am however prepared to call you out and and call out Obama if you try to do this, if you try to say that Russia's helping [the Republican nominee]. I'll accuse you of interfering in the election. I'm not prepared to accuse Russia of doing that.

Update (May 8, 2019):  Heather Digby Parton refers to Mitch McConnell as "the gravedigger of democracy".

There may never have been a more cynical politician than McConnell. From the moment he became the Senate leader he turned senatorial partisanship into a blood sport.

He is a shamelessly unprincipled gutter fighter whose only goal is to consolidate the power of the Republican Party by any means necessary. If that requires digging the grave of democracy, he's more than willing to do the dirty deed.

Self-Made Fraud

The New York Times reports on the origin of Dear Leader's wealth. And now, state tax officials want to investigate.

[T]he equivalent today of at least $413 million [was received] from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. [von Clownstick] because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. [von Clownstick] helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

Update (October 3):  Max Boot calls Fuckface "the worst person ever to be president". And Heather Digby Parton notes:

He's not likely to have cheated to benefit his kids the way [his father] did. [Fuckface von Clownstick] cheats for the benefit of one person, and one person alone.

Update (October 7):  Bob Hennelly notes that the rich avoiding inheritance taxes is nothing new.

Update (November 1):  Not related to tax fraud, but a new lawsuit accuses Fuckface and his family of running their business as "a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people". Bring it on--make him regret the day he ever thought about entering politics.

Update (May 8, 2019):  The New York Times obtained information about 10 years worth of tax returns for Dear Leader and found he claimed losses of over one billion dollars during 1985 to 1994. Quite the loser. Amanda Marcotte tears apart his excuses.

[Fuckface], unsurprisingly, took to Twitter to defend himself, saying that he used shady write-offs as a "tax shelter" and that "it was sport" to "show losses for tax purposes" and "re-negotiate with banks."

Well, OK then. So [his] self-defense is that he's not really a failure, but rather a cheat who lied to both banks and the government in order to defraud them and enrich himself.

And cheating is a way of life that suits Republicans just fine.

Update (May 10, 2019):  "Ghostwriter" Charles Leerhsen describes just how great a businessman we have as the leader of the free world.

[F]lipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. ... [T]he main thing about fabric swatches was that they were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn't. One of his aides once told me that every room at the Plaza could be filled at the "rack rate" (list price) every night, and the revenue still wouldn’t cover the monthly payment of the loan he'd taken out to buy the place. In other words, he'd made a ridiculous deal.

Update (June 30, 2019):  The Center for Public Integrity takes a close look at Fuckface finances.

Update (October 16, 2019):  Some Fuckface tax documents have been discovered.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how [Dear Leader's] businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

Update (October 27, 2019):  In addition to mountains of corruption already in the news, Bob Cesca describes peculiar stock purchases timed with Fuckface statements about trade policy that gave unknown investors as much as $1.8 billion profit in one day.

[T]here’s no way of knowing that [Orangeman] would suddenly emerge with that announcement ..., unless the president or someone acquainted with his thinking alerted the investor. If that happened, [Dear Leader] and the investor could be in a lot of trouble.

Update (December 1, 2019):  Is it tax fraud or accounting fraud?

[T]he occupancy rate of the ... Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials.

[Fuckface] had much to gain by showing a high occupancy rate to lenders in 2012: He refinanced his share of [the] Tower that year and obtained a $100 million loan on favorable terms.

Update (August 5, 2020):  Brad Reed reports that von Clownstick's lawyers fucked up.

[T]he president’s attorneys falsely claimed that [Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's] office was only running a narrow investigation into the president’s hush money payments to two women in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, and thus was not entitled to see his financial information.

However, Vance’s office called the president’s bluff and publicly disclosed that it was probing much more than just the president’s illegal campaign payments.

David Lurie:

As a result of his own lawyers’ bad strategy, [Dear Leader] enters the final stretch of the campaign with the cloud of a broad criminal investigation hanging directly over his head. All of that would have been properly kept confidential as the grand jury continued its work if [Fuckface's] own lawyers hadn’t opened this can of worms.

Update (August 6, 2020):  The New York Times reports that Deutsche Bank has complied with a subpoena from Manhattan DA Vance for von Clownstick financial records.

For an International Left

Steve Bannon is running around Europe organizing right-wing groups into The Movement. In response, Senator Bernie Sanders warns against "the rise of a new authoritarian axis".

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

He doesn't call it socialism, but it's clearly not enough to simply defend the status quo.

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

We must look honestly at how [the post-second world war global order] has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same.

Update (October 8):  Walden Bello examines the rise of right-wing movements around the world. He argues the "right has now married ... traditionally left-wing concerns to a vicious racist, chauvinistic, and anti-immigrant agenda".

Call it a welfare state, but only for members of the dominant racial and cultural group.

Update (October 26):  Brazil is on the brink of electing a far right candidate to be president.

Update (December 2):  The Progressive International has issued an "Open Call".

The time has come for progressives to form a grassroots movement for global justice: to mobilize workers, women and the disenfranchised all around the world behind a shared vision of democracy, prosperity, sustainability, and solidarity.

A Symptom, Not the Cause

Barack Obama kicks off his fall campaigning at the University of Illinois telling students the country is in a "backlash" moment.

You happen to be coming of age during one of those moments. It did not start with [Fuckface von Clownstick] ― he is a symptom, not the cause. He is just capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear, an anger that is rooted in our past but is also borne in our enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

Update (September 13):  Andrew Bacevich refers to Fuckface as "no more than a pimple on the face of this nation’s history" with no lasting impact.

[He] is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more [Dear Leaders] -- or someone worse -- to come.

Update (October 24):  In an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Chris Hedges elaborates on the "disease".

[Fuckface] is the product of a failed democracy.

[Sheldon] Wolin showed how there are no institutions left in America that are authentically democratic. What exists is the leaching of entertainment into politics. It is the manipulation through the public relations industry as well as a system that's calcified the lockout of third parties or insurgent candidates. Substantive social and political issues are marginalized. Manufacturing consent by the news media and popular culture at large is the norm. [Dear Leader] knows how to manipulate emotion and to operate in that sphere of mediated reality.

Update (December 27):  Paul Street quotes Chris Hedges.

[This] administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. [Fuckface von Clownstick] is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that [Dear Leader] and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not [Orangeman]. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience. … If we do not stand up, we will enter a new dark age.

Update (January 13, 2019):  More from Paul Street on the dangers of a "national emergency". And in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Timothy Snyder says Fuckface is the national emergency.

Update (February 17, 2019):  Andrew O'Hehir agrees there is a national emergency, just not the fake one von Clownstick declared.

[I]t’s possible [Dear Leader] has done us a favor, by making clear to anyone with their eyes open that we can’t go back to the supposedly stable world of NATO and the International Monetary Fund and free trade and fiscal austerity, where “democracy” and “capitalism” and “freedom” were seen as synonymous and interdependent and the financial sector was treated as a priestly caste with unique access to divine knowledge. (I wasn’t going to use the buzzword “neoliberalism,” but I just did.)

That regime bred disastrous inequality, conferring more and more power and wealth on the ruling elite while condemning everyone else to lives of nonstop work, debt slavery and consumer diversion. It sowed bitterness and nihilism by convincing most people around the world (not incorrectly) that the political and economic system was stacked against them and democracy was a sham constructed to protect the interests of the powerful. Broadly speaking, it dealt with the crises of Islamic fundamentalism and widespread migration in piecemeal and self-destructive fashion. It was paralyzed for decades before the worsening climate crisis, unable or unwilling to navigate between the urgent need to reshape the world economy and the sacredness of the profit motive, and so bringing us to the brink of catastrophe (if not over it).

Update (February 18, 2019):  Paul Street has a list of 31 actual national emergencies.

1. Class Inequality
2. Poverty
3. Plutocracy
4. Bad Jobs
5. Corporate Media Consolidation
6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid
7. Gender Inequality
8. Native American Poverty
9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking
10. [Von Clownstick]ism/Fascism
11. The War on Truth
12. Gun Violence
13. Sexual Violence
14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy
15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia
16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies
17. Neo-McCarthyism
18. Health Care and Health
19. Bad Schools
20. Child Abuse
21. Depression and Substance Abuse
22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights
23. The Dreamer Nightmare
24. Vote Suppression
25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution
26. [Dear Leader] and the Imperial Presidency
27. Election Madness/Electoralism
28. Guns Over Butter
29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism
30. Amazon
31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide

Update (March 25, 2019):  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agrees with George Takei that "we have serious issues to sort out".

[R]emoving [Fuckface] will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified and reanimated.

In order for us to heal as a nation, we ALL must pursue the hard work of addressing these root causes.

It’s not as easy as voting. It means having uncomfortable moments [in conversation] with loved ones, with media, with those we disagree, and yes - within our own party, too.

It’s on all of us.