In terms of finance and communications, politics as
usual--political candidates and narratives mandated by the parties' Ruling
Elites and the MSM--is dead.
Hillary and Trump are symptoms of a fatal condition: politics as
it has been practiced for 70 years is dead.
As my friend G.F.B. observed, the key development was not the
nomination of insider-Hillary or outsider-Trump--it was the enormous success
of Bernie Sanders' campaign, a campaign that arose outside a Democratic
Party establishment that tried to suppress or destroy Sanders' campaign at
every turn, a campaign funded not by the Goldman Sachs of the world that funded
Hillary but by tens of thousands of small donations from the citizenry.
Who drew the mass crowds of enthusiastic supporters? Bernie, not
Hillary. Who inspired thousands to donate small sums that quickly
accumulated into millions of dollars? Bernie, not Hillary. Who won primary
after primary despite a virtual Mainstream Media blackout and a Democratic
Party establishment that relished plunging a poisoned blade into Bernie's
campaign at every opportunity? Bernie Sanders, not Hillary.
Many observers believe an accurate accounting of votes would have
revealed Bernie received more votes than Hillary did in aggregate. In terms of
mass crowds and voter enthusiasm, there was no contest at all: Bernie won
hands-down.
In a parallel fashion, Donald Trump's campaign succeeded despite
the active resistance of the Republican Party establishment. By
some accounts, Trump's campaign has received more small donations than any
other recent Republican candidate.
As for Mainstream Media bias: Bernie was fortunate to only be
blacked out, Soviet style; Trump has zero MSM newspaper endorsements and
has been subjected to MSM bias that is laughably ham-handed, reminiscent of
old-style Communist "running dogs of Imperialism" propaganda.
By the established rules of politics as usual, it wasn't
supposed to happen this way. Hillary went out early and
raised millions of dollars, the acme of campaigning success in politics as
usual. Having banked millions for advertising, she was supposed to cruise
to victory.
Instead, Bernie happened.
A mainstream blah-blah-blah Republican candidate was supposed to
emerge from a bloodless primary, and the two Party insiders were supposed to
engage in the usual polite jousting of an election that was pre-ordained to
change nothing in the political, economic and social orders.
Instead, Trump happened.
Hillary's disdain for average Americans of all genders and
ethnicities is not an outlier; it's the unspoken norm of the Ruling Elite. In politics
as usual, Party bosses (backed by big-money contributors) ordain the
candidate and then send down the order to the little people to support
the candidate.
Accustomed to passive, unthinking obedience, the Party
Establishments are recoiling in enraged horror that the little people
are refusing to follow their orders. The Ruling Elite considers
themselves the betters of the the little people, and their
disdain for the "deplorables" (i.e. the bottom 95%) has sunk from
mere loathing to barely-concealed hatred. How dare they reject Hillary and Jeb
in favor of Bernie and Trump!
As G.F.B. observed, technology has leapfrogged the parties' reason
to exist and the Mainstream Media's role of coronating the parties' candidates
and policies. The political parties arose to fill critical financial and
communications needs: a mechanism was needed to aggregate campaign
contributions and to distribute party platforms and narratives to far-flung
voters.
The parties took on a larger role after World War II, which
transformed the U.S. from an industrial trading nation wary of foreign
entanglements into an interventionist global empire. The foreign-policy
differences between the Democratic and Republican parties shrank to semantics,
as both party Establishments embraced the globalist agenda and narrative.
In the postwar era, the Mainstream Media of newspapers, magazines,
radio and TV broadcast the Ruling Elite's narratives and agenda.
Broadcast blanketed the nation, and dissenting views were relegated to the
margins: I.F. Stone, Ramparts magazine, etc.
With the rise of the Internet and social media, broadcast
propaganda is now competing with narrowcast: blogs, Twitter and
Facebook enable self-organizing tacit tribes (G.F.B.'s term) with their
own networks of communication, narratives and agendas.
Bernie Sanders' campaign showed that candidates no longer need the
Party Establishment to raise substantial sums of cash.
Stripped of the power to control the flow of contributions from millions of
individuals, the parties have been reduced to bastions of everything that is
corrupt, venal and backward-looking about politics as usual: big-money
contributions from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Big Pharma, Saudi princes, etc.
Tens of millions of Americans are rejecting both the parties'
Ruling Elites and their globalist, interventionist consensus. The
technology of micro-payments has leapfrogged the party Establishments, and the
Internet has leapfrogged the MSM and parties' control of narratives and
agendas.
The MSM and the parties' raison d'etre has been dismantled
by technology. As ownership of the media and the control of party insiders have
become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, competition from the
many (narrowcast) has exploded.
In terms of finance and
communications, politics as usual--political candidates and narratives mandated
by the parties' Ruling Elites and the MSM--is dead. We
will all look back in 2026 and wonder why the recognition of this reality took
so long.
