Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin is always worth a read. Here's his latest, in Canada's National Post:

If you’ve recently come to conclude that American democracy has degenerated into a hopelessly dystopian reality-TV spectacle and it seems as though we’re all teetering at the abyss of a broken America that is no longer a force for good in the world, you are wrong. It’s worse than you think.

That’s the good news. Because there is quite a bit of terrain to traverse between now and the November 8 presidential election, and the odds are at least even that by then, the penny will have dropped and American voters will have awoken to the realization that shrieking vulgarities and unceasing assaults on both reason and common decency have dragged the United States to the point of no return. If this keeps up, it’s banana republic time. That’s looking on the bright side, which at the moment is a difficult thing to do. The past few days will not have induced feelings of sunny optimism in any reasonable person.

The Republican Party is gone. Its national convention in Cleveland was a four-day carnival of shrieking vulgarity, a meticulously stage-managed incitement of the lowest and ugliest impulses in the American political character. Its climax was something almost unimaginable only a year or so ago: the Republican nominee for the office of the president of the United States of America is the loudmouth caudillo Donald Trump.

With the nomination of Hillary Clinton, this week’s Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia is concluding with the party’s least-popular Democratic presidential contender since Jimmy Carter ran in 1980. It remains to be seen whether her close rival Bernie Sanders, a genuine democratic socialist, will be capable of mustering his impressive talent for oratory with a vigour sufficient to persuade his legions of hardcore supporters to stop burning Israeli flags and parading around with giant, bus-sized spliffs long enough to actually expend some effort in the attempt to get Clinton elected….

The penny has got to drop at some point, even among the self-aggrandizing galaxy of A-list celebrities, Democracy Now pundits and Daily Show guests that constitute what is derisively known as America’s liberal elite. What we’re seeing is the fruit of all their years of cultivating contempt and mockery of the hillbillies and the hayseeds that are too stupid to be in thrall of the genius U.S. President Barack Obama. That abandoned mass of Americans is now Trump’s base, and the worst and most cunning of the racists and xenophobes among them are now exacting their revenge.

All those years of championing the vandalism of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, of dismissing the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine as an understandable response to NATO’s warmongering encirclement, of justifying their indifference to genocide in Syria and Iraq with plaintive claims of upstanding anti-war virtue, and it’s all come full circle. To Michael Moore, Medea Benjamin, John Pilger, Susan Sarandon, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, George Galloway and all their acolytes and admirers: look at what you’ve done. I hope you’re proud of yourselves….