The Establishment Just Can Not Admit It - Yet

There is an excellent recent Salon article by Bill Curry, who once was an adviser to President Clinton, which is worth reading. There is one passage in particular about "what is wrong" with President Obama which is not easily articulated or recognized by educated people who love and appreciate Obama's good points. Curry does see it and articulates it in this article better than anyone else I've read. He writes:

"There’s a name for the bipartisan consensus of party elites: neoliberalism. It is an inconvenient name for many reasons but mostly because it seems odd that the worldview of the Republican elite would be an ideology with the root word ‘liberal’ in its name but it is true, nonetheless. and may even shed a little light on the open, bitter breach between GOP elites and the party base.

Democrats stayed loyal longer to their elites for two reasons. One is their love of two very talented politicians, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whose charm and verbal dexterity masked deep differences with the base. The other is their fear of Republicans.

I often talk to Democrats who don’t know Obama chose not to raise the minimum wage as president even though he had the votes for it; that he was willing to cut Medicare and Social Security and chose not to prosecute Wall Street crimes or pursue ethics reforms in government. They don’t know he dropped the public option or the aid he promised homeowners victimized by mortgage lenders. They don’t know and don’t want to know. Their affection for Bill and Barack — and their fear of Republicans — run too deep."

There is this problem is that educated, articulate, well-meaning, informed, enlightened USA citizens just can not admit that their position, their pay checks, their social self-confidence, their social presentment and self-imagery - that all this is now, and has been for a long time, a falsity, a mask, a pretense.

It isn't just that the public is sycophantic, naive, much less knowledgeable and sophisticated than they themselves believe.

There are now many more people than ever who do see through Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and what is in general called “the establishment.”

I think now just of the experience I've had during this past week with well-paid dentists, medical insurance people, and similar professionals. I am assured that my experience is not unique. These are well-paid people, but they have been able to hide their true incompetence and falsity through diction, tradition, the ignorance and acceptance and collusion of their victims. They have had a lot at stake in not seeing, not articulating, the true reality because they have families to support and other stakes. Further, to discern the falsity of it - Clinton, Obama, the establishment presentment of competence and superiority, the professionals, the experts - requires such deep suffering and disillusionment that it's actually astonishing that it has now developed as far as it has.

It is surprizing how many people now "get it." They see now how many others "get" Elizabeth Warren, who was almost inconceivable ten years ago. Donald Trump recently said that he and Bernie Sanders are the only two candidates who "get" this. My own sense is that this is the reality and that the public at large "gets" that this is the reality but hasn't been adequately able to articulate it or its causes. They blame "the Democrats" which is correct, but they have not understood their own blindness, which is actually the same blindness as the Democrats' blindness, only to a much greater degree. Their belief in the establishment - in "America," for example - has been absolutely visceral. "USA! USA! USA!" - a blood-curdling chant. If you tried telling the public and the elite at the time of the invasion of Iraq that the USA might be wrong, they might even kill you. But now, even Trump can come right out and tell the truth about the invasion of Iraq. It's as if the establishment has now been discredited, rightly, in many more ways that just its wars, but they themselves just can't admit it yet.