If the Dems want to look one of the foremost causes of the Trump victory, they need go no farther than to look in the nearest mirror. This may royally piss off our local Dem party folks but therein lies the problem. A dinner table set for true Democratic progressives in Whatcom County would be a small one indeed.

I will, myself, confess to wanting a woman as president. So I voted for one, Jill Stein. But back to the topic…

Paul Street writes in Counterpunch: “Candidate Trump was not wrong to say (in his own maladroit and disingenuous fashion) that the American Dream has died for millions of “forgotten” (the word bears repeating) U.S. workers while the Democrats have advanced Wall Street’s job- and wage-crushing agenda behind the cover of self-righteous political correctness. In one of the many classic ironies of the neoliberal New Gilded Age, the ugly nativist tycoon and enemy of labor and workers Trump is permitted to absurdly pose as a “populist” tribune of the outraged American working man. He gets to do this not simply through sheer cunning and devious, populism- and racism-/nativism-manipulating campaigning but also thanks to the vicious state-capitalist and imperial corruption of the nation’s not-so leftmost major political party, which has abandoned the working class over many decades of rightward drift championed by (guess who?) the Clintons. As privileged upper- and professional-class (neo)liberal Democratic elites give Joe Six Pack/the Plumber the Goldman Sachs-financed middle finger and fake-progressively promote the bourgeois identity politics of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender much of the struggling and furious working class is left like low-hanging fruit to be snatched up by a billionaire demagogue like Trump.”

Read all of Street’s piece The Long Death March of the Dollar Dismal Democrats.