We Shouted Out, "Who Killed Democracy?" When After All, It Was You And Me

-by Bruce Mulkey

As of April 28, I’ve now been on the planet for 74 rotations around the sun, almost three-quarters of a century, 30 percent of the time our country has been a nation. And I’ve seen a lot of changes during this time, personal, cultural, and political. The change nearest and dearest to my heart was my personal transformation.

Yes, there was a dark night of the soul, a bottoming out as they say in 12-step programs. I’d been sleepwalking through life for 40-some-odd years. And, of course, I’d gotten my wake-up calls-- wrecking my car while intoxicated, being called on my sexist bullshit, personal and business bankruptcy, divorce, among others-- but I’d ignored them even as they continued to intensify. Until one morning I woke up hung-over on a mattress on the floor of a friend’s home outside of Baton Rouge-- no job, no friends, estranged from my daughter, stuck in a region that seemed two or three decades behind the times. And, in that moment, I could ignore the messages life was sending me no more. It finally dawned on me: Rather than trying to change outside circumstances-- locales, mates, drugs of choice, drinking pals, etcetera-- if I truly wanted a more satisfying life, what must change was the asshole staring back at me in the mirror. And, in fits and starts, over the next several years, I made a dramatic turn away from immaturity, irresponsibility, recklessness, and my ultra-macho façade toward greater accountability, honesty, integrity, vulnerability, and authenticity.

Similar to my personal somnolence, I believe we, the citizens of this nation, have been asleep for the past several decades. We began to pay more attention to our TV shows, our favorite celebrities, our sports teams, our fancy cars, our iPhones, and making money to buy more stuff than we did to our communities and the fabric of our nation. Most of us demonstrated little concern as powerful corporations and the financial elite bought greater and greater influence in Washington, D.C. and our state capitols, and career politicians of both major political parties began to shamelessly serve the needs of wealthy campaign donors and lobbyists rather than those who elected them.

We sat by complacently as income inequality grew so great that, in 2014, members of the bottom 90 percent in this country earned $33,000 per year while those in the top 1 percent raked in $1,260,000. We sat on our hands, while in the midst of great wealth, more than 20 percent of the nation’s children lived in poverty. In a foreshadowing of things to come, we paid more attention to The Apprentice than a two-tiered justice system that insured justice would, to a great extent, evade the working class and people of color, while the wealthy would frequently escape punishment for their misdeeds through the efforts of high-paid attorneys.

There was hardly a whimper when our civil liberties were curtailed out of rampant fear of terrorism, an apprehension stoked by opportunistic politicians and the mainstream media. We were, for the most part, silent as our young men and women were sent off to senseless wars, then were essentially forgotten when (if) they returned home. Only a few protested as Band-Aid solutions to climate change, an existential threat to the entire human race, were proposed that did little to effectively address the issue. All the while, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other human rights issues went unacknowledged and, thus, largely unaddressed.

As our nation gradually devolved from democratic republic to oligarchy, we the people of this nation received many wake-up calls along the way—a growing number of bankruptcies by men and women overwhelmed by their hospital bills, skyrocketing costs of some essential prescription drugs, unarmed black men shot down by militarized police forces, children murdered in their classrooms, the deaths and injuries from the never-ending war in the Middle East, veteran suicides, a bloated military budget that is larger than the next seven nations combined, the increasing number of deaths of despair, one in nine of the country's bridges rated as structurally deficient, an infant mortality rate higher than 27 other wealthy countries, increasingly warmer weather, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But most of us ignored these harbingers, even as they became louder and more frequent.

Consequently, we now get to deal with an enormous wake-up call to our nation-- an ineffective, dishonest, immoral, narcissistic carnival barker of a president who represents the worst impulses of the American people, a man who tells a radio shock jock that it’s OK to refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass,” a man who mocks the disabled, who asserts that our military men and women do not fight to win, who demonizes people of color, who promotes fear and divisiveness to his own ends, who is interested in fulfilling his wants and needs regardless of the cost to our country.

There has been much discussion about who’s to blame for the election of Donald Trump-- people who voted third party, those who refused to vote at all, the DNC’s clumsy maneuvers to fix the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign’s shortcomings, the Republicans’ unwillingness to halt Trump, the media’s free publicity for his campaign, a frustrated white working class, the FBI’s last minute tactics, Russians interference in the election, and on and on. But, if you want to find the person who’s actually culpable, merely take a look in the mirror. Donald Trump is the natural consequence of our indolence and apathy. And this time the wake-up call is so immense, so threatening, that it cannot be ignored.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, however, Trump’s election may, in fact, serve the greater purpose of those of us who desire a more compassionate, just, and sustainable society. For it is clear that, since his election, we the people have been awakened. Millions across the nation marched in the Women’s March, the Tax Day March, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, and others. Elected representatives are receiving phone calls and post cards from constituents at a rate never seen before. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have turned out at town halls and rallies. Democratic Party precinct meetings in many states have overflowed with participants who have never been politically active before. Our Revolution, Indivisible, The Resistance School, and others are supporting thousands upon thousands of concerned citizens to move into action.

A powerful cultural shift is afoot, though you’ll likely not see it reported on CNN or in the New York Times. And Trump and his fellow travelers do us a great service in supporting this shift. For now, our national disgraces-- white supremacy, patriarchy, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, xenophobia, wealth disparity, oligarchy, and others-- are brought into full focus. Now we have the opportunity to clearly perceive these injustices, and then channel the frustration, anger, and despair that many of us are feeling toward reconciliation, equality, justice, and the acknowledgment that there is much more that connects us than separates us.

Bruce Mulkey is an essayist and author from Asheville, North Carolina. He's a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, Elephant Journal, and The Good Men Project. He currently spends much of his time writing his memoir (A Tale of Two Fathers: The Memoir of One Man and His Two Daughters Born 42 Years Apart), playing handball, trail running with his wife Shonnie, and doing his best to keep up with a high-spirited six-year-old on the meandering footpaths of the Appalachians. You can learn more at brucemulkey.com.

Hillary, During The Primaries: "I don't Understand What's Happening In The Country"

I haven't read Jonathan Allen's and Amie Parnes' book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign and I can't imagine a circumstance where I ever would. Terrible candidate, half the country had learned to loath loses to semi-human baboon... not something I want to spend my precious time reading about it. The DailyBeast pointed out that the book is "based on interviews with more than 100 unnamed sources from within Clinton’s orbit-- each account given under the condition that the tales would be told only after the final ballot was counted-- the 480-page report relays the behind-the-scenes drama behind many of the Clinton campaign’s most embarrassing blunders and unforced errors. More damning than any anecdote of petty infighting or a deadly devotion to data, however, is the book’s verdict on the main reason for Clinton’s loss: Clinton herself." Arrogant Clintonian denialism played an outsized role in the debacle and, well... I don't need a book to tell me that.

Despite many obstacles beyond her control-- including a bitter primary opponent who refused to concede long after all routes to the nomination had been exhausted, a Republican rival whose personal attacks shattered all established standards of decency, and a Kremlin-orchestrated operation to thwart her campaign and delegitimize her incipient administration-- Clinton’s race, Allen and Parnes report, was winnable.

But despite its buckets of money, its deep bench of supporters and surrogates, a general-election opponent in a constant state of implosion, and the imprimatur of a popular sitting president, Clinton’s campaign couldn’t overcome its biggest obstacle. “The variable she couldn’t change,” Allen and Parnes write, “was the candidate.”

Maybe it goes too far to suggest that anyone who depends on the vultures at EMILY's List is probably doomed but "part of the problem, Shattered implies, was Clinton’s Cersei Lannister-like reliance on a cadre of informal 'advisers' who offered counsel that was often equal parts sage and self-serving, in the hopes of maintaining close relations with the Clinton political dynasty-- or, better yet, undercutting a rival for her attention. That same dynamic bled into the campaign apparatus, Allen and Parnes write, hampering efforts from speechwriting to debate prep as staffers feared undercutting 'protected' members of the Hillaryland old guard. The candidate’s tendency to 'favor loyalty over competence' turned the campaign into a popularity contest. 'There’s one goal here: to win the fucking election for president,' said one speechwriting source. 'It’s like, do you want to win the goddamn thing or are we in junior high school again?'" It's much easier to blame the misogyny.



A little aside: the book also exposes Chris Van Hollen for what he is, having "urged unions to not aggressively turn out the state's African American vote because it would help his Democratic primary opponent," Donna Edwards. Since Hillary was benefitting from African-American votes in her own primary, she flipped out when she heard about the arrangement. "Who gives a fuck about Chris Van Hollen?" Clinton asked one of her aides after a campaign event in Baltimore, according to the book. "What the fuck are we going to do to fix this?" Today Van Hollen is not just in the Senate, but Schumer's vile pick to head the DSCC.

My old friend Bruce Mulkey wrote an essay, A New Beginning For The Democratic Party? that is far more instructive than the book about Hillary's collapse. He writes for us regularly but you can find his work far more regularly at brucemulkey.com. For those who would rather look forward than dwell on a past many of us saw spiraling downward from miles away, there's this:

I’m a registered Democrat. I’ve always voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, well, except the two elections earlier in my life when I voted for a third-party candidate. As some say, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. My parents, Mack and Sue Mulkey, were progressive southern Democrats who fervently supported Tennessee’s liberal senators Al Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver in the 1950s and 60s. And throughout their lives they voted for every Democratic presidential candidate who ran-- from FDR to Barack Obama.

After the debacle of 2016, however, I was seriously considering changing my voter registration from Democrat to Unaffiliated. The reason? I believe that, over the past several decades, the Democratic establishment has tilted to the right of center and that they’ve become more interested is serving their big donors than the working people of this nation. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

A 2014 Princeton study that reviewed more than twenty years of data (that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues) indicates that political leaders of both major political parties listen to the economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists (all entities that fund their re-election campaigns) rather than the citizens who elected them. According to the study:

The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

We live in an oligarchy, a country run by the economic elite. No matter how popular a measure might be with the bottom ninety-percent of income earners in America, no matter which party holds the presidency or a majority in Congress, issues that are popular with the public—such as federally-funded healthcare insurance for all Americans, regulating the prices of life-saving drugs, job creation, and effectively dealing with global warming, among others—never see the light of day. Our government apparently doesn’t care what you think. Not unless you are willing to contribute excessive amounts of money to a politician’s campaign, an action that is tantamount to legalized bribery.

Just as I was making plans to change from Democrat to Unaffiliated, I got wind of a group called Our Revolution, an offshoot of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president that claimed they wanted to shift the Democratic Party toward more influence from the grassroots and less from the party professionals. The group’s upcoming meeting was at Odyssey Community School, only a half-mile from my home, so I walked over to check it out. I anticipated twenty or thirty of the usual suspects, and a disorganized gathering that would come to little or nothing. To my surprise, there were more than 150 enthusiastic participants there, some of whom I knew, many I did not. The founder of the group, Matt Coffay, led a lively, well-organized session. Coffay, youthful, spirited, and well-informed, presented an inspiring and clear message: Given that there’s no real path for a third party, we must work within the Democratic Party to reshape it from the bottom up and make it more representative of the working people of this nation. And we would begin at the precinct level of the Buncombe County Democratic Party.

As a result of press releases to local media, e-newsletters, texts, Facebook posts, and word of mouth, at the next meeting on February 18, it was standing room only for the meeting at Rainbow Community Center in west Asheville. Four hundred motivated people received practical information about how the state Democratic Party worked, the importance of attending the upcoming county precinct meetings, and logistical info regarding when and where the precinct meetings would take place. Then, the participants broke into their individual precincts to strategize for the February 25 precinct meetings.

On February 25, many Democratic precincts across Buncombe County reported record turnouts, in some cases ten times the usual attendance. Rather than the predictable handful of graying activists, in some cases approximately eighty percent of attendees said it was their first time at a precinct meeting, and fifty percent of those said that they were there because of the efforts of Our Revolution Asheville. Many of the newcomers were elected precinct officers and chosen as delegates to the county convention on April 8. While deep concern about the fate of our nation during the Trump presidency drove the majority of the new participants into action, they would likely not have known their way into the process without Our Revolution.

Needless to say, I am re-energized and re-engaged in Democratic Party, despite the recent selection of an establishment favorite as DNC chair. It’s exciting to realize that this grassroots activity is taking place in counties across North Carolina and in states across the nation-- California, Washington, Hawaii, Nebraska, Florida, and Michigan. I believe a new day is coming for the Democratic Party, a day in which we will eliminate corporate money, disavow the influence of the wealthy elite, retire the moribund party establishment, and again become the party of the people.