The American election of 2016.

Posted by Pointman on November 4, 2016 · 33 Comments 

“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”

That is the opening sentence of the introduction to the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which most people with an interest in politics have at least skim read or failing that perhaps have heard of. I’d seen what actually lay at the end of that road and read up on the theory of it in order to at least refute its advocates, who seemed to be drawn exclusively from the indulged and feckless sons and daughters of the middle class bourgeoisie that spawned both Marx and Engels, and which were also the objects of scorn by the book.

It’s still a dangerous book to read when you’re young, because in an ideal world it appears to detail how a perfect political system could be constructed. For its time, it was a brave and radical book which at times verged on the poetic even in English translation, but as we all know, the great experiment in building the Communist utopia failed, not only because it was hijacked by thinly disguised despotisms like Stalinism or the murderous aberration of Maoism, but because it did rely on that ideal perfect world only the young actually believe exists.

It was doomed to fail, but that’s not always a strictly binary thing in politics, it’s more a spectrum, with sometimes the better elements retained long after the political theory has fallen deeply out of favour.

What has to be recognised and generally isn’t in these more prosperous days, is that it was a needed book for its time. There were sharp divisions between the people trapped without any escape in a rigid class system or even systems like serfhood that were in most respects tantamount to slavery.

Immigrants flocked to nineteenth century America, because it was the only place on the face of the Earth that offered some hope of escape out of that system that doomed them and their children to the same old life of abject poverty. They hacked a new life out of the wilderness, paying a high price when that was required of them. Freedom and land.

What they left behind them was a rich ruling class which lived in another world the emergent middle class aspired to, and as for the working class at the bottom of the system, their life in the words of Thomas Hobbs was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

They were the majority who did most of the work, derived the least of society’s benefits and every man’s hand was against them. That’s why the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the Manifesto is “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because it was self evidentially true at the time.

Over the last year I’ve been reminded several times of the quote which opens this article, because as revelation has followed revelation, what this election has come down to is whether the ordinary American, of whatever race, colour, creed or political persuasion, is prepared to have foisted upon them by a ragbag of special interests, a person who is not only patently dishonest but corrupt to the very core.

Instead of the baroque sounding selection of oppressors like the Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies – substitute the media through all its organs, the establishment parties both Democrat and Republican, millionaire celebrities perched on their high horses lecturing people about who they should vote for, a law enforcement system that refuses to apply the rule of law to the criminality of the Clintons, violent paid supporters, self-proclaimed experts who know what’s best for other people, and gross campaign violations for which any punishment seems to be a remote and distant prospect.

An FBI that all but destroyed its integrity, an Attorney General, the highest law official in the land, and a Department of Justice whose officials actively connived with the Clintons to pervert the course of justice and are now even more indecently a part of investigating them, a patently corrupt foundation operating hand in hand with an equally corrupt Secretary of State Clinton that operated a pay to play policy in broad daylight, a one million dollar birthday “gift” to Bill personally, a twelve million dollar donation by the king of Morocco in exchange for ninety million dollars worth of business passed his way.

About allowing the Russians to buy control of one fifth of American capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium, about the incompetence and subsequent lies to cover up the needless loss of American lives in Benghazi, accepting monies from states actively funding brutal terrorists who as I write are busy killing American solders, and there are lots lots more. It’s only Friday, so Lordy only knows what more revelations there are to come out before November eighth.

How did we find out all these things?

Well, it wasn’t through any effort on the part of the MSM, who have actively conspired with the Clintons in complete defiance of every basic tenet of honest journalism. Spiking anything critical, running with anything negative of Trump, clearing in advance articles with the Clinton campaign, leaking questions in advance of televised debates. They’ve even studiously ignored a candidate for President of the USA who for nearly two hundred days of the campaign didn’t give a live unscripted interview.

It was the internet Davids of Project Veritas and WikiLeaks versus the mainstream Goliaths.

They have been the only ones turning over the flat rocks and catching an assortment of variously corrupt and corrupting creatures scurrying out of the light and back into the murky twilight and shadows such denizens live in. They simply got so used to having a sickeningly compliant media attentive to their every whim, that they grew careless, and indeed couldn’t care what scandals might be uncovered about their activities since they would get no coverage in the media anyway. Revelation has followed revelation, and not a scintilla of it all is being covered in the mainstream media.

For so many people, the lies of omission, the lies of commission and just the arrogance of it all means they’ll never trust the media in the same way again. Once trust is lost in anything, it never quite makes its way home back into your confidence; just ask any spouse who’s been caught cheating on their partner.

Just as the Manifesto said in no uncertain terms that the game is rigged to the convenience of everyone else but you, and despite what they might say, none of them is there to help you. The only person who can do that is you yourself, but you must accept that you’re on your own and it’s only through your own efforts that you can break out of the system.

When you go into the polling booth next Tuesday and put your cross by a name, you will of course be voting for a person but in a much higher sense you will be voting for change. For sweeping out a jaded and decadent Washington elite and their establishment politics whose policies are pretty indistinguishable from each other. They’ve been shown up for what they are in this election.

Whether you like him or not, Trump is a change candidate and Clinton is pure establishment, and that’s the basic choice you face in the privacy of that booth. The hope of real change or just accepting the continuance of the same tired and corrupt status quo.

The only other change candidate who was on offer and who should be the one squaring up to Trump was Bernie Sanders, whose campaign was sabotaged by his own party in connivance with the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration, but who also made the decision to be the nice guy in a rigged game finishing last, rather than having the grit to slug it out toe to toe with Clinton and the DNC. He and his treatment at the hands of the Democratic party, brutally disillusioned a lot of young Democrat supporters.

With less than a week to go, what is actually the mood of the country? Which way will they vote? By any conventional means, this question is a difficult one to answer. The mainstream media have the resources to collate voting intentions across the nation, but simply can’t be trusted because they’ve shown themselves to be complete bare-faced liars. The polls are still, as they always have been, predicting a Clinton victory but since the only news organs we’ve learnt to trust for information like Project Veritas or WikiLeaks can’t afford to run such polls, we’ve by necessity had to fall back on anecdotal signs to get a sense of the will of the people.

We have reports of whole neighbourhoods bristling with vote for Trump campaign placards and nary a Clinton one in sight. While numbers always count, what’s interesting is they are in states and areas that one would naturally expect to be voting for Clinton on autopilot. Add in her little pixies going around and stealing the signs (not prosecuted of course), and alarm bells should be going off at DNC central.

We have rallies by Trump everywhere and at all times of day where the doors simply have to be shut but people stay outside to listen via jerry rigged loudspeakers to what he himself has got to say, because people no longer trust the MSM to accurately report what he’s saying, never mind giving him a fair shake. Trust in them has gone. He’s packing in the people and the best the Clinton campaign can do in reply is Photoshop in crowds at her thinly attended events.

We have polls which in the run in to the end of the election, are suddenly showing plunges in the support of Clinton by over 13% points, and that’s prior to the FBI reopening their investigations. Sorry, I don’t believe that. It’s just too big a drop.

Call me cynical, but they’ve been rigging the polls unmercifully and ignoring the reality that Trump has been some way ahead of Clinton for some time. This way, they can shift the blame for losing to the FBI and cover up their deceptive statistical machinations. If you see more dramatic plunges in the polls of Clinton this weekend, you’ll know for sure.

The bookies in USA are now taking 90% of bets on Trump winning by various margins. As far as they’re concerned, it’s only about the spread now. When people are putting their own money on a Trump win and the guy making book is laying off the bets furiously, that’s the sort of poll I tend to notice. To use a salty old phrase, money talks, bullshit walks.

The rumoured slump in African-American turnout speaks to how equally the blacks are as fed up as the whites with an administration and a campaign heavily invested in the politics of race hatred and division. Clinton, like Obama, talks the talk but he still let the manufacturing powerhouse of Detroit wither to ten percent of its size, flinging hundreds of thousands of working men off the production line and onto welfare and food stamps. Thank you very much Mr President.

It’s FBI director Comey, watching the resignations in disgust of his senior men piling up on his desk, reopening their investigations, and apparently he could hear the cheers of his own people floors below him welcoming the news. They’d rather look for a new job than work for an organisation they were too proud of to let anyone get away with being above the law.

That tired old meme that Hillary’s victory is inevitable is wearing thinner by the day. It’s become clear to most observers that the Clinton brand is now toxic to most voters. I think it’s gradually coming down to a choice between saving her and preserving the Democratic brand itself. Certainly there are some subtle indications of them distancing themselves from her. The big guns of the party seem tepid in their support of her these days, since in politics associating with losers is never a good thing. Obama even came out with a statement of support for FBI director Comey, albeit through gritted teeth

Are the Dems throwing Hillary under the bus? This, the last weekend of the campaign, should throw up some signals either way on that slight feeling I’ve had of late.

Up until about six months ago, I though I was in touch with the sometimes gritty reality of grown up politics, but even I must confess to being appalled at the sheer depth of betrayal. There is simply no moral floor. There is no rule of law; indeed it’s just there as a weapon to be used on your opponents. There is no cheat, no line that cannot be crossed; basic democracy is just something to be debased. All the way through the campaign, deception, dishonesty, guile and bad faith have been the guiding principles – just win at any cost.

I thought that sort of stuff was well into the tin foil hat territory, but have been proved wrong time after time. Will that sort of corruption come to a screeching halt as soon as the voting booths open? I think not. To paraphrase Clausewitz, it’ll most likely be the continuation of that same naked corruption by other means. No wonder Trump is already making rumblings about not accepting a rigged vote.

Trump looks to be the required emetic American politics needs to vomit out the bile of establishment corruption and a deeply compromised media.

What’s being voted on here is a return to life’s basics; a complete rejection of the prostitute business of Washington politics, a rejection of the viewpoint that there’s nothing which can be done about it, of wanting a job for you and the kids, some real security rather than noble sounding words, not being killed by people you’re supposed to welcome into your midst you don’t trust and who don’t give a damn about your values because you’re seen by them as weak, of being an honourable part of your neighbourhood, about not hating each other because of the colour of your skin.

Of believing in that despised thing called family values, about not pandering to unrepresentative movements that applaud luring first responders like policemen of whatever colour to their deaths and crowing over it, about really caring rather than just hate, of doing better than just virtue signalling back into a circle of society you don’t belong to, but also one you know for damn sure they’ll never let you into, because you know in their heart of hearts, they see you as being their pet they’re going to look after despite your best efforts to wiggle out of the choke-chain they think they’ve got around your neck.

As I said, it’s difficult to predict where things will stand next Wednesday morning, but some things are clear already after informal conversations with friends. There will be an unusually large turnout by people who don’t ordinarily vote, and they’ll mostly be voting for the change candidate. Given how frenziedly the media are twisting every fact in sight and their incestuous relationship with the Clinton campaign, I’d say the real numbers are scary.

When you’re nagging A-list celebs to go about knocking on doors in a homeland territory like Pennsylvania, things must be bad.

If it’s any help to people wondering whether to turn up and vote in an election they’ve been led to believe Hillary already has in the bag, I’d remind them of the British experience of the last year.

We had a general election and every poll, every pundit and every Wiesenheimer told us it was neck and neck, but the sane party won with more than one hundred seats than any other.

We then had a referendum to leave the EU, and the same bunch of know-it-alls predicted a No vote, and they were wrong – yet again.

On both occasions, the yeomen backbone of Great Britain turned up and delivered a mighty kick up the backside to the lot of them, and they haven’t stopped whingeing about it for a single day ever since.

Draw back your boot America, take aim at that big wide flaccid butt, and do exactly the same to the lot of them. You’ll feel a lot better for it.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

How to get run over by the Trump juggernaut.

The loss of faith in the political class.

Betrayal by those you once trusted.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with 2016, Election, NotAGW, Politics