When Revolution Becomes a Brand Name: A Non-Voters Take on the Michigan Governor Democratic Primary
My home state of Michigan has a non-conventional batch of democrat vying to be the nominee. There are things I like about both Shri Thanedar and Abdul El-Sayed, and at certain moments I wish I make my stand for a candidate and forget certainties like the fact that elections are rigged, and the fact that even if my preferred candidate won the office, they would be chewed up by the system until their actions in office became undistinguishable from a Hilary Clinton, that is to say someone who loyalties are with the corporations and big business.
The campaigns of Shri and Abdul seem to mirror each other, both talk a progressive game concerning domestic policies, promising medicare for all, more money for schools and infrastructure, aid for the Flint water crisis and both vow to shut-down the controversial Line 5 pipeline which sends oil across the straits of Mackinaw and has shown signs of corrosion. Despite their similarities, the media loves Abdul and has it out for Shri. In a state where Sanders and Trump won the 2016 presidential primaries, I would suggest that the media endorsement might lose Abdul more votes than it helps him gain. Seeing through glimpses of mainstream media that find their way into my awareness, I can tell the media has learned nothing for 2016.
Trivialities like race are the bulk of the story for Abdul in the mainstream media. Abdul is considered a progressive simply for being Muslim, he is given anti-establishment credit for running as a Muslim because apparently the “establishment democrats” think Michigan is not ready for a candidate with the name Abdul, and no, he is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood though certain republicans might say he is. Besides race, the media will talk about his choice to run as a “democratic-socialist,” because titles like this will give ample room for debate and division. And for all the things that the mainstream media is terrible with, I can say this about the state propaganda aparatus: they sure know how to spin stories to create controversy and get views.
Shri on the other hand is more like a Trump anti-establishment type, a self-made millionaire who rose to wealth via the old bootstaps. He seems like the outsider. His deliveries are not nearly as polished as Abdul’s, and in fair elections, this would probably mean his chances of winning Michigan are not as likely as Abdul’s who delivers the generic campaign promises nearly as well as Obama. Maybe this is partially why the democrat sponsored Huffington Post will let you know in lengthy venom that Shri’s progressivism is a mask, and his history explains why.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/31/cort-j31.html
These are the stories that are considered news in 2018. It took an outsider publication like World Socialist Website get at some real meat for the people who remember too well how Obama’s progressive campaign turned into a Trojan horse for corporations. They followed Abdul’s campaign tour of southeast Michigan with another media darling of the democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became instantly famous for being young, not white, a self-proclaimed democratic-socialist, and unseating House Democratic Caucus chair Rep. Joseph Crowley in an upset in New York’s 14th Congressional District. What WSWS discovered is the outsider wing of non-establishment democrats, sponsored by groups like the Justice Democrats and Our Revolution, who claim to not accept corporate money, spoke a “torrent of evasive and dishonest platitudes,” highlighting among many other eye-roll worthy lines Ocasio-Cortez’s speech opener:
“My fingers are tingling right now because I know that this room is not just a rally, not just an audience, or even just a community; this is movement. Movement cannot be stopped, movement is like a wave; that energy cannot be contained, and Abdul, like many others, is just the crest, is just the foam at the tip of that wave. This is a movement so much bigger than just one person, there is no one person that is the future, there is a people that is the future.”
There was no time given to addressing how the campaign trail talk would actually be achieved. No talk about the surveillance state, the fed, or the war budget. Neither even challenged the democrat party itself as Bernie did in 2016. If they were true mavericks challenging the party establishment, one would think they should be concerned with the problems in the Democratic Party like how the 2016 lawsuit against the DNC from Bernie supporters had the DNC lawyers claiming they had a legal right to rig an election for their chosen candidate. Instead they filled their speeches with appeals to the working class and non-conforming identities, and made promises that we have heard before without any roadmap for how they would fulfill their promises. Andre Damon, the writer covering this tour summed the problem with these supposed outsiders refusal to challenge the mission of the Democratic party nicely with this paragraph:
Ocasio-Cortez’s inability to say anything genuinely oppositional, let alone radical, is bound up with her political role. She has quickly been absorbed into the Democratic Party establishment, and her rhetoric conforms to its politics. In promoting a right-wing party, her “left-wing” gloss is reduced to empty slogans.
Whatever intentions Ocasio-Cortez and Abdul had when they began their campaigns are unimportant. Yes, Abdul seems like a vast improvement to Snyder who should be behind bars now. But if he is already unwilling to take on the real power in this country, him winning would be nothing more than a tranquilizer for the Michigan progressives, as Obama tranquilized progressives after the 2008 bank collapse fallout.
It seems obvious to this writer that the Bernie primary run in 2016 has become the playbook for the Democratic Party moving forward. The Justice Democrats and Our Revolution are front groups for the DNC, to keep the Bernie-wing of democrats up for flying the coop, and we will see soon whether it has been successful. Though Justice Democrats and Our Revolution may seem to have more noble ambitions than the DNC itself, the DNC will still get the final say on how someone running under their banner must conduct themselves. It doesn’t matter that Abdul vows not to take corporate money, the Democrats still do, and Abdul is a Democrat. It’s not hard to see how a loophole of two can funnel the money and resources into the hands of these Berniecrats so they can run their campaign. Sure Abdul may not get money directly from the corporations. The corporate funding just passes through a few sets of hands first, so Abdul can make this claim.
Shri, since he is largely self-funded, might have a bit more mobility to say what he wants, which makes him slightly more dangerous to the establishment, hence the hit-pieces. But even in the highly unlikely scenario that he pulls of a Trump-like upset, he will become every bit as much part of the swamp as Trump became. There’s no other option unless he wants to be a JFK.
I will close this piece by reiterating what I have stated in previous articles. Placing your hope for changing the grotesquely corrupt and unequal laws of state in voting once or twice a year, is like thinking you can become a accomplish musician by practicing once or twice a year. Our self-imposed prison of war, debt and wage slavery goes back generations, and it will probably take generations to fix. This writer thinks you would be doing something far more revolutionary by putting down your political grudges and making peace with your enemy, than you would be in supporting any candidate, even if they claim to be revolutionary. Revolution has become corporate brand.
