The Clare Spark Blog

May 4, 2017

Did Hillary fail or was it the labor policies of the Democratic Party?

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:36 pm
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occupy-dc-cornel-west-wideIf Donald J. Trump’s base is the white working class, then it raises the question, how did it come to pass that the candidate of the Democratic Party, once known as the Party of the working man, fumbled?

The well-funded Mrs. Clinton claims that misogyny in tandem with James Comey’s interventions determined her fate in 2016, and perhaps those were to an unknowable extent operative, but we must ask if labor unions solved the problems of industrial society as old time pols insist? (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_trade_unions. )

Recall that the period following the Civil War was also a period of extensive immigration to fill the burgeoning labor demand, and that Democrats were a Party that had persisted in a period characterized by westward expansion and urbanization (while Republicans had been the voice of Big Business and agrarian nativism.) Workers were raising hell, as students of the late 19th century (e.g., Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order) will acknowledge, and (leftist) historians will mark the Progressive movement as responding to strikes and immigration (even as some condemn these WASPs for racism. e.g., https://clarespark.com/2010/03/10/jonah-goldbergs-liberal-fascism-part-one/).

Democrats did not solve the problem of nativism (exacerbated by necessary immigration to develop the continent—also the predictable opposition of displaced Indians and Mexicans); instead they catered to the ethnic preferences of the new Americans, leaving us with the New Deal “innovation” of multiculturalism as a mode by which elites could micromanage group conflict (https://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/), pretty much as labor unions would fare, strengthened in the New Deal, ostensibly to ameliorate worker suffering in future depressions and to advance “cooperation” over (Darwinist) “competition.” And so FDR and his supporters maintained their class position, though the consequences for “labor” were not what “cooperation” had promised.

But don’t expect the very “Green” Democratic Party to raise the question of the effectiveness of labor unions in solving the deeper problems of industrial society—namely the mind-numbing nature of de-skilled “labor” and worker health and safety. Without a qualm bleeding hearts condemn their (inferior) fellow human beings to a life blessed at best by gross material satisfactions, for the redder Democratic Party hearts crave equality of condition, not equality of opportunity to scale the heights of human possibility.

April 6, 2012

Diagnosing POTUS

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 8:06 pm
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President as Antifederalist?

[Update 6-18-16:]

It is my view that Barack Obama meant by “hope and change” that he intended to create a permanent Democrat Party, moved so far left that minorities would overturn what is imagined to be “white heterosexual male supremacy” by 1960s activists, the “social justice warriors.”
Depending on the speaker, the President is either
  1. incompetent (“in over his head”);
  2. suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder (“arrogant” or “out of touch”);
  3. a stealth Leninist (nihilist, opportunist, anti-imperialist, crypto-Islamist carrying out his African father’s failed mission), using black liberation theology to rev up his base, while tearing up the [racist] Constitution during the past week; or
  4. a noble centrist, a “moderate” who makes Democrats and even some neocons or conservatives proud to have voted for the first black (“African American”) president, and who has vindicated their belief in his sane and virtuous  progressive commitments to human rights and community welfare, appropriately reining in selfish individualists.
  5. [Added 3-15-14: I am told that he is not only gay, but that Michelle is a man in drag]

As far as I know, I am one of the few who has defined  his political base as incoherent , thus bringing together most of the items listed above: (See https://clarespark.com/2012/08/16/marx-rivals-and-our-enigmatic-president/, and https://clarespark.com/2010/04/05/is-potus-crazy/, and https://clarespark.com/2012/09/05/proto-fascism-and-the-democrat-peoples-community/. especially the sentence in bold face type: “It is conceivable to me that Obama’s family history (especially the abandonment by his father and who-knows-what-relationships with his doting mother and doting grandparents), set him up to be the perfect candidate for ambitious politicians in Chicago, who could count on the incoherent constituencies of the Democratic Party (big labor, public sector employees, cultural nationalist minorities–including those who profit from undocumented workers, dependents of the welfare state, feminists, gays, veterans of the civil rights movement, wealthy liberal Jews, post60s academics and journalists, Rooseveltian internationalists, environmentalists) to be taken in by his charisma and passionate promises for a national healing that would a. reconcile the irreconcilable demands and interests of his base; b. bring to pass an equally apocalyptic change inside the Washington Beltway; and c. through the power of diplomacy, effectuate an avowedly anti-imperialist “pro-peace” foreign policy. It makes sense too, in explaining his obvious rage at being criticized and blocked, to suspect that his “narcissistic supplies” are threatened. As for the grandiosity that characterizes the narcissist and other would-be healers or “moderates”, such a high opinion of himself attracts others who aspire to greatness and a cohesive human community, and who therefore tend to idealize him and overlook his contradictory statements and broken promises–for he could not and cannot please the diverse elements of the base that elected him and that continues to support him”).

If indeed, the Supreme Court does declare the ACA unconstitutional, and if there are other blows to the President’s self-esteem and conviction that he is ever the Chosen Leader of the 99%, the successful “uniter,” then it would not be unreasonable to predict some kind of crack-up. Should he “lose it” in some fashion or other (including the election), elements of his base will of course blame his opponents. These “reactionaries” will be viewed as variants of the American Assassin, as proto-Nazis or other power-grabbers, as having worn him down through the drip, drip, drip of their day in and day out attempts to undermine the resolve of the last best hope of suffering humanity. The last thing the diehard Obama supporters will examine is their own motives for having elected him in the first place.

In this blog, I have focused on the internal incoherence of the Democratic Party. For a look at differences inside their opponents, see https://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/. Note especially how populism can appear anywhere and is always destructive to sane political thought and assessments. For an example how the populist movement was co-opted by “progressives” see https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/.

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