The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'white house at sunset.'
In the year 2000, the American public elected Al Gore to the presidency. But Gore never became our president because a neocon coup instrumentalized the Supreme Court to install George Bush in office instead. Following this, 9/11 transformed our political landscape, forcing our already-centrist "left" into a center-right stance on most matters of substance.
I was living in Brooklyn when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 on a platform of hope and change. On election night, as the results were being announced, crowds poured into the streets of New York City, celebrating the victory. That night, it felt like the whole city was united, ready for a brighter future. If we could put a Black man in the White House, maybe there was hope after all.
Our jubilation was short lived. Obama escalated overseas forever wars, bailed out the banks and insurance companies that caused the financial crisis, and presided over an increasingly sophisticated mass surveillance empire. On affordable healthcare, the Act he passed was a total joke. At the time, I couldn't afford health insurance and was fined $700 a year at tax time because of this inability to afford insurance.
One great lesson that democrats seem to have learned from Obama's presidency is that substantive change in most areas is impossible, but symbolic change is more attainable. After Occupy Wall Street was stomped out, there was a great shift in the party. Instead of addressing economic disparities, corporate misdeeds, and the horrors of militarism, the party turned its attention to race, gender, and sexuality. This new focus elevated identity politics and eliminated class politics entirely from the conversation.
Bernie Sanders' 2016 election bid attempted to challenge this new orthodoxy. His run had the potential to be successful, but his efforts were thwarted by a conspiracy between Democratic Party officials, establishment media, and Hillary Clinton's campaign. Unlike Sanders, Clinton was in deep with the military-industrial complex, having approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors while she was Secretary of State. She was also unelectable for other reasons, but party officials ran her anyway, and she lost to Trump.
This is the point when I finally stopped believing that the Democratic Party was better than the alternative. This put me at odds with many of the people I knew, most of whom seemed to believe that Trump was the devil. I learned to stay quiet when they'd talk about it, fully aware that Trump had improved my life directly by repealing the ACA insurance mandate. Don't get me wrong, I'd never vote for someone like Trump, yet every candidate the Democratic Party was putting forth appeared at least as corrupt.
When the pandemic began, the democratic establishment embraced the whole basket of unnecessary and repressive policies we were all subjected to. Blue states led the way on lockdowns, masks, and support for vaccine mandates. Soaking in identity politics, fueled by an endless stream of lies from public officials and the media, a disturbingly large number of democrats became woke totalitarians. These proto-fascists became the party's new vanguard, filling a void that had been created by the party's informal expulsion of democratic socialists over the previous decade.
Today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to think that there's still hope for the Democratic Party. He's running for president as a "Kennedy Democrat," and is careful to distinguish between that and the Democratic Party in general. In doing so, he's positioning himself to garner support from the millions of people who, like me, have been alienated by the party. It will be interesting to see if his strategy pays off.
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