Open Letter to A Registered Democrat

1. Your party hasn't changed. It isn't betraying you. That you ever believed otherwise is entirely to your discredit. The onus isn't on you to figure this out. The onus is  you. We've been carrying your credulousness for so long now, you don't realize that you're a burden.

Anyway...

Your party hasn't rediscovered Reagan in the guise of Barack fucking Obama. It's still the same committee of vultures, with the same set of goals. They're just as content to dismantle the res publica now as they were two years after it looked like black people and the womenfolk might really want a piece of it. They're committed to a complete Enclosure of the remaining commons. Nothing is new except your whiny "disillusionment."

2. It's the messaging which has changed. That is all. The media environment is different because the media consumer no longer looks like your working class ward boss grandfather. It's a media market, represented by the credentialed middle manager, the professional and the sub-class of creative mercenaries. They're wholly invested in the meritocracy. They've bought in. The Ratchet moves with the medium.

3. They'll still take your loyalty, when you're ready to give in and give it back to them. They might even make useful noises about homosexuality and domestic terrorism. Ungod knows you're scared silly of god-sots with a microphone. And that's nothing new, is it? The Republicans have been willing to play bogey for seven decades now.

4. Everything you hate about today's Democrats was already in evidence during FDR's Administration. Everything. The compromises, the marginalization of population groups, the handing over of the Commons to private control, the transfer of public equity to corporate holding, the obsession with currency stability, oil supply, hegemony, central banking and European economic liabilities already obtained with Roosevelt and Truman. And the wars, the wars, the corporate bottom lining wars? C'mon now. War was as good for Democrat donors then as it is now.

The problem isn't a change in real relations. No matter what you tell yourself.

The problem is that you were never attentive enough to notice a change in perceptions.

The New Deal Democrats didn't have to worry about how to appease women and black people. That's the unspoken secret to FDR's success. His environment allowed him to appear as a patriarch - a precursor avatar of Rockefeller's bomfoggy united white Republic. The nationalist and universalist language was exclusive. The New Deal had no room for the Negro. It was a deal for the disciplined laborer, for the nationalist who was willing to do what he was told. It was a deal for the company man, not for the undesirables.

5. The Democrats still hate the undesirables. They still want a nation of property "owning" employees. Just like the Republicans do, of course. The Republicans are honest about it. They talk up their merit and bootstrapper rhetoric right out in public. They blame the poor, the Mexicans, the uppity women and the "urban welfare leeches." And they campaign on it. The Democrats treat with the poor dishonestly - as problems to be fixed, as people to be saved from themselves, elevated by Democratic grace into membership in the property "owning" class of behaving minions. The Democrat doesn't want shared responsibility. He isn't interested in cornucopia and the redirection of labor towards the enjoyment of life and the living of it. He wants more people disciplined by crippling debt, thirty year mortgages and student loans with compounded interest.

6. The fault is you. You've been a consumer of propaganda and your own stupidity for so long that you had yourself persuaded by delusions.  Your heroes were bought men. Made men; they were obvious stooges of the real victors of World War Two (transnational corporations). They were never in fact crusaders for the commonweal. FDR wasn't fighting for the little man. He was keeping his ruling class friends from facing down revolution. FDR was first and foremost good for business. Carter was a voice of austerity. Clinton, a remarkably forthright enemy of the little people.

And Obama?

Fucking Obama. It's not his fault you believed in him. He was preaching the Gospels of Austerity, War and the Bootstrap from the first day of his rise into prominence.

So, fuck you, registered Democrat. Fuck you and your self-deceptions. You have been neutering, negating and compromising genuine labor agitation, unrest and revolutionary impulses for so long we're past measuring in decades, and we're on to counts in centuries.

You know what you can do with your disillusionment and disbelief?

You can fucking choke on it.