Listening to the reigning corporate media’s political reporting and commentary leading up the 2016 elections, you might have thought that the Republican Party was on the verge of collapse thanks to its internecine war over the outrageous Donald Trump. Hello? Look now: the GOP has won the White House, retained both wings of Congress, and will soon enough hold down the Supreme Court. It also holds most of the state governments. If any of the two major parties is in its death throes, it is the Democrats.
The Democrats haven’t just lost the one branch of elected government where they seemed to hold the advantage to any old normal establishment Republican like, say a John McCain, Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush. No: now it has given the oval office to a white- nationalist-arch-sexist racist and nativist climate change-denying quasi-fascist.
Ever the accommodating neoliberal conflict-avoider and lifelong Republican-enabler, Barack Obama has dutifully proclaimed his readiness to gracefully oversee a peaceful transition of power to the second President Elect in this century to gain the nation’s highest office without winning the popular vote (how about that U.S. Constitution, fellow citizens!) – to a man who started his sick march to the presidency by questioning the national location of Obama’s birth and who announced that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election unless he won.