Pandemic Trumpery

Democratic leaders are in a real quandary. As much as they'd love to give more aid, sustenance and comfort to ordinary Americans suffering so horribly through this pandemic, doing so would only prop up "Trump's economy" and boost his re-election chances. People having more cash in their pockets and food in their bellies would only end up thanking Donald Trump for the relief. And that will never do, Because beating Trump in November is more important to the feckless Democrats than making people's lives better in the here and now. 

As Michael Grunwald chillingly writes in Politico, since putting compassion over winning back power would be "politically clueless," House Democrats are loath to use the enormous leverage they now possess to ram through such measures as emergency single payer health legislation, a guaranteed income package and forgiveness of debt.

Why? Because Trump wants these things too. Not because he's even remotely humanistic, of course, but because he wants a second term, even if it means having to relinquish his own clueless "all Democrats are socialists" manufactured hysteria for the duration of the crisis.

Therefore, the Democrats are effectively claiming that they now have no other choice but  to "resist" Trump from the right wing of the political duopoly.  

Grunwald writes:

For example, they want to pump money into underfunded state agencies overwhelmed by unemployment claims, which makes sense on compassion and policy grounds—but that would also be a political bailout for Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis. And while Schumer’s call for a “heroes fund” to increase the pay of essential workers during the crisis is a worthy idea, it’s not hard to imagine the heroes being grateful to Trump for the extra cash.
The art of negotiation is about using your leverage to get things that your counterpart doesn’t really want to give you, and Democratic leaders don’t really seem to want to do that.

If millions of people have to needlessly suffer and even die and become martyrs for the Democratic Party cause of retaining Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker and installing Joe Biden in the White House, then that is the price we have to pay. This is not only a matter of Greater Vs. Lesser Evil, it is a matter of Feckless vs. Feckless. Which of our two corrupt parties can win the contest of loathsomeness?

Simone Weil, my favorite French philosopher, was right. The only and ultimate purpose of any political party is to win power and then to hold on to power. Never has her assertion been more glaringly proven than during the ongoing pandemic catastrophe.

Since winning power entails the generation of "collective passions" in the electorate, it's even harder to fathom why the Democrats have put up a senile groper and accused rapist as their presidential candidate. Does the sight and sound of Joe Biden rambling in his basement bunker generate any passion other than disgust - or at best, sheer boredom? 

Weil writes:

"Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade. Hitler saw very clearly that the aim of propaganda must always be to enslave minds. All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it... Political parties do profess, it is true, to educate those who come to them: supporters, young people, new members. But this is a lie: it is not an education, it is a conditioning, a preparation for the far more rigorous ideological control imposed by the party upon its members."

So Grunwald's premise that the Democrats are "terrified of being seen as obstructionists" if they dare to play hardball with Republicans is just excusing them and ascribing their inaction to well-intentioned timidity. The truth is that the Uniparty actors are simply playing the parts they've been assigned for the ultimate benefit of their oligarchic donors and for the increasingly hollow cliffhanger entertainment of the rest of us.

Propaganda and platitudes and posturing simply don't have the oomph they used to, especially when the thrust of the elites is on "opening up the economy" while ordinary humans in the millions are bleeding from their open veins.

"How the poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into common graves of every parish with those hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along." -- Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year.