Democratic insiders like David Brock, rather than learning lessons from the Clinton defeat they helped create, instead are plowing ahead begging money to – wait for it – finance more of the same oblivious tactics that lead to Trump winning. The real problem with DC insiders like them is they value order and no waves above almost everything else. The transition to Trump must be orderly, why even Obama says that. Rowdy disorder and serious protest upsets their cozy little DC bubble. They are the apparatchiks, loyal defenders of the established order. Our side lost? Oh well, our think tanks will spew out think pieces, we will have pricey conferences looking for solutions. It matters little to them if the working class is hurting. They are insulated from such trifles. Or so they think.
They will work to protect their class, which includes monied members of both parties. This is key. They don’t want real change and often say, in many different ways “we agree with your goals but not your tactics” or “change must be incremental.” They are afraid of grassroots protest from the streets because they can’t control it and it is alien and strange to them. Yet grassroots protests is where the real fightback from Trump will come from. And will spread upwards until the Brocks can no longer ignore it. Then they may act. My point is, we all need to start now protesting Trump when he does something outrageous. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.
However odious he is, Brock should be seen as an outgrowth of the donor class that enables him. And enabled Trump. Carriers of a worldview that regards those to their left as vulgar naïfs, liberal political elites have assiduously tended to the Beltway consensus for years, moving in a social circle entirely isolated from poor and working-class people.
Now that consensus has exploded, in no small part because of their own myopic smugness.
Trump at least pretended to care about the poor and said I hear you.
David Brock would have us believe that he can step in and drain this fetid swamp. But for all his sharp barbs, he and his wealthy cronies are members of the same plutocracy that has given us Trump. Their sanctimonious spending won’t just spark more anti-elite enmity — it will fail to produce any meaningful remedies to economic insecurity.
Multiracial, working-class politics remains the only way out of this hideous landscape. Otherwise we can expect years of acute economic precarity and rising right-wing nationalism.