Whilst the Nancy Pelosi-led Democratic Party understandably talked up their House of Representatives victory, there was no fireworks barge on the East River and no blue wave on which to float it.
The billions of dollars spent by the suddenly flush Blues yielded a Republican majority in the US Senate (and thus the end of the impeachment threat), the victory of the GOP in the states Trump campaigned in (again), and a Republican Party more beholden to the most reviled president in modern US history.
The Democrats have learned little from their defeat by Trump in 2016. Their ‘identity politics’ celebration of “the first this, the first that” elected to office in US history will be scant consolation to those whose lives continue to be blighted by the neo-liberal brigand-capitalism of the American ruling class.
And as someone who lives in a country led by Theresa May, and Margaret Thatcher before her, I can tell you there is nothing necessarily good about electing women. Out of the 101 ‘Blair Babes’ elected in 1997 as women Labour MPs, well over 90 of them voted down the line for the Iraq War (not to mention cuts in benefits for, amongst others, single mothers).
Ditto the Gay and Lesbian Labour MPs who refused to back Jeremy Corbyn in his call to halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia – capital of a mindset which throws gay people off tall buildings.
Ditto the minority and even Muslim Labour MPs who voted for the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and other Muslim countries during the last nearly 20 years in the British Parliament.
So, don’t ask me to get excited about the election of the new member of Congress for Miami-Dade County in Florida Donna Shalala for example. Hailed as a victory for ‘Arab women’, the former Bill Clinton cabinet member and Hillary Clinton crony will soon be supporting the bombing of ‘Arab women’ again, I assure you.
READ MORE: US voters re-elect lawmakers facing criminal indictments & corruption charges, because why not?
Of course, it’s good when good women win – as in New York with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan with Rashida Tlaib – but just because somebody is an ex-military martial arts black-belt lesbian (I’m not making that up) doesn’t mean, well, you get my point…
The point is that under the leadership of the exact same corrupt incompetent leaders who delivered Hillary Clinton as the 2016 candidate (having rigged the ballot against Bernie Sanders) the Democrats have wasted two whole years chasing a Russian chimera, teaming up with Trump’s deep-state opponents, and sticking to the Clinton-era orthodoxies on the economy, failing to highlight the extreme voter suppression of poor and minority electors the leaders have led, well, not very far.
If you were a gambler, you’d be on your way to the betting shop now to put your wager on Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020. You can be sure he is.
A measure, by the way, of the extent of voter-suppression is revealed by the results of the accompanying ballot this week to re-enfranchise ‘felons’ in Florida (mainly black felons that is, not the white collar crooks and gold-toothed Cuban emigres). Fully FORTY percent of all Florida’s black men woke up on Wednesday to discover their voting rights had been restored. That is 1 million new Black voters in the next election.
READ MORE: 1.4mn former felons will vote again in Florida
Having survived 8 hours of watching CNN on election night, I noted much crowing about the Democrats’ new “candidate recruitment strategy” which on closer inspection revealed that almost ONE HUNDRED Democratic candidates in the midterms were military veterans or ex-members of the CIA and other security services. Nothing could better describe the distance travelled by the former blue-collar party of labor in the United States than this.
My predictions?
The Democrats will waste the next two years poring over Donald Trump’s bank records and tax returns, and the entrails of his global golf courses, offering nothing more than last decade’s health policies. They will offer young people nothing on college fees, offer workers nothing in their pay packets or in job security, do nothing to heal the race cleavages and mass incarceration of young black men in America – how could they? It was Bill Clinton who put them there. They will offer nothing on gun control or any environmental protections which disadvantage their billionaire backers. They will propose no meaningful democratic reforms to cure the grotesquely dysfunctional system which they wish only to inherit (in Georgia, for example, voting machines turned up in poor, mainly black, districts with no power cords to plug them in to the wall). And above all, they will ceaselessly agitate for regime-change all over the world, as they always have.
They will by hook or by crook (probably the latter) ensure that Bernie Sanders is NOT their presidential candidate. And if Trump is really lucky, they will rig the primaries to ensure Hillary Clinton again carries their tattered banner. Some Democrats, some party.
And the world will have to endure four more years of Donald J. Trump, unhinged Tweets and all.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.