The 2024 political war is just beginning - The Democratic party has rigged the system

Unheard ^ | 17 Jul, 2024 | David Samuels

[MtnClimber]

In a moment of raw personal courage at local fair-grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump upended America’s presidential race by surviving an assassin’s bullet and then leaping to his feet and punching the air while proclaiming “USA!” and “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The resulting photographs may well change America and the world in ways no one seriously imagined even last week.

Trump’s heroic response to an attempt on his life is a reminder of the extent to which, even in our technologically-mediated universe, the arts of narrative manipulation and framing only reach so far. At the core of every story is a human being whose character, as expressed through his actions, will be judged favourably or not by his or her fellow humans — such stories being especially important in societies where people elect their leaders, as shown by the rapturous reception that Trump received at the opening of the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee.

Trump’s instincts under fire prove him to possess the courage of a leader, however dubious other aspects of his character may be. It is fair to surmise that there isn’t a single head of state on earth, from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wouldn’t trade a large part of their kingdoms for a photograph of themselves standing bloodied and defiant beneath their national flag, having taken an assassin’s bullet and lived. That kind of political charisma is impossible to counterfeit.

SNIP

Yet, the Democratic Party is a well-functioning, massively-funded, centrally-directed machine, capable — as it did in 2020 — of rewriting election laws to its advantage and banking millions of absentee ballots in advance of the election. By contrast, the Republican Party is a ramshackle, decentralised affair whose local worthies tend to be car dealers or pillow salesmen rather than corporate Ivy League types and lawyers. The structural imbalance between the parties has suggested that Democrats could run a cardboard cut-out of Taylor Swift for the presidency in 2024 and still win — especially given the immutable presence of the polarising Trump at the top of the Republican ticket. In fact, some polls showed Biden doing better against Trump after his doddering debate performance.

Trump’s fairground heroics, therefore, hardly guarantee a win in November. To be clear, that’s because America is no longer home to a functioning two-party system, in which each of the two parties represent coalitions of regional interests and can count on the allegiance of local industries and opinion leaders. That’s a concept from political textbooks written 50 years ago.

Since the Nineties, America has morphed from a sprawling, continent-sized democracy to a more European-style centralised federal state with a ruling class of coastal billionaires serviced by a unitary national elite. The Democratic Party is the home of the vast majority of America’s ruling oligarchy, and of the highly-paid, well-credentialed class of lawyers, consultants, researchers, media bosses, and others with degrees from a small number of elite universities who help the oligarchs do business, as well as the class of billionaire-funded NGO workers and “organisers” who harvest votes on behalf of the Party, which is both a self-enclosed life-world and a unitary socio-political machine. Unless you intend to confine your professional life to a few far-flung, largely rural states, being a Republican in such circles, or even being insufficiently “progressive”, is a sure-fire career-ender......

[griffin]

Once we started seeing election results like 49.8% to 50.2% in multiple races, across America, election corruption was obvious. Been this way for 20 years and only gotten worse.