Obama Democrats will be abandoned by progressives, but none of them yet "get" the libertarian nationalism towards which tea partiers are moving

(Chris Moore) -- Writing at AntiWar.com, John Walsh says that even though he believes the tea party movement is not really grass roots, the progressives are going to sit this election out and watch the establishment Democrats who have betrayed the anti-war movement take a viscous electoral beating at the hands of the reinvigorated GOP; and because of Democrat corruption and betrayal, this, he says, is a good thing:

Why does no one on the Left say it outright? Obama and his Democratic Party gang should be punished mercilessly in the November elections. If they escape such punishment, then they will continue to break every real and implied promise to their base, and the goals of an end to wars and a decent, secure life will continue to be trampled under foot.

Let us remember that Obama was not, and is not, simply the candidate of the Democrats. He was and is the candidate of the most “liberal” or “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, the candidate of “Progressive” Democrats of America, of Norman Solomon, Medea Benjamin, Michael Moore, and on and on. If this wing of the Democratic Party betrays the hopes of its supporters, then surely there is nothing decent remaining in the party. And so it has become apparent in the last two years.

The people understand this fact far better than the liberal pundits at the Huffington Post, The Nation, etc., and the people have already registered their discontent. A striking fact bears this out. Since 1970, the turnout in Democratic primaries has been dropping inexorably as the Democrats piled betrayal upon betrayal. And this year, according to data compiled by American University, the “average percentage of eligible citizens who voted in Democratic primaries was the lowest ever. The average percentage of citizens who voted in the GOP statewide primaries was the highest since 1970. … Democratic turnout was 8.3 percent of the eligible electorate, lower than the 8.7 percent of the electorate who voted during this period in 2006 and continuing [an] almost linear descent in Democratic primary turnout since 20.7 percent voted in the party’s primaries in 1966.” Why? It is a simple reflection of reality. In his 2008 campaign, Ralph Nader patiently and exhaustively documented how the Democrats have become more and more like the Republicans with each passing year, and so it is not strange that the response of the electorate to both parties has ranged from disinterest to disdain.

So what remains for the Dems? How can they scrounge up some badly needed votes this November? Scare tactics are about all they have left – which I might add is also the only thing the Republicans offer. If your e-mail inbox is like mine, it is brimming with pleas from the Dems to fill their campaign coffers so that they can save us from the Tea Party, China, and a handful of shadowy billionaires. The Tea Party is especially useful in this regard. It is great for the Republicans because it gives the appearance that the GOP has some connection to real people at the grass roots.

But for the Dems the Tea Party is even more bountiful, since it is pictured as a mass movement, racist to the core and about to plunge the country into a fascist abyss.

I agree with Walsh that it's good that some of the corrupt establishment Dems are going to be swept away, but I disagree that the "progressives" to their left are any less fascist (and ultimately warmongering) than mainstream neoliberal Dems or the mainstream neocon Republicans. Here’s why: Left-wing economics, including our current Keynesianism, are inherently parasitical. One of the biggest reasons Obama continues the wars is to preserve the $USdollar as the world’s reserve currency for as long as possible, so that Big Government programs and left-wing social pursuits (and left-right statist-corporatist fascist profits) can be continued as long as possible.

The dollar is being propped up by the U.S. military at the point of a gun, and has to be, because “progressives” and liberal capitalists in search of expensive social and environmental ideals and corporate profits have racked up the debt, hollowed out America’s industrial base, and globalism and outsourcing is now destroying America’s white collar base. Open borders, internationalism, globalism, atheist-materialism -- all of these "progressive" causes have resulted in a bloody scramble for the continuation of Keynesianism (the economic "moral authority" to get away with printing money out of thin air, with the world continuing to buy the debt) and thus continuing the parasitical liberal-capitalist material existence.

And at some level, Walsh seems to get this:

Obama is racing about the land in an unseemly panic, railing against “the failed policies of the Bush administration” – presumably the policies of waging war, bailing out the banksters while neglecting job creation and mortgage foreclosures, handing over the health care system to the murderous moguls of the health insurance industry, spying on antiwar activists, continuing the extraordinary renditions to torture chambers all over the globe, increasing military spending, and so on. There is no danger of returning to those policies, because Obama never abandoned them. They are now the failed policies of his administration.

What Walsh doesn't get, however, is that all of this is a natural outgrowth of the Keynesian, statist "progressivism" and socialist globalism and open borders internationalism that he and others to the left of libertarians advocate.

He also doesn't seem to get that while there are most definitely sinister and anti-libertarian subversive fascist elements within the tea party movement, the thrust of the tea party indeed comes from grass roots-level Americans who seem to instinctively sense the reality of our situation, but due to a lot of noise, misdirection, and blind alleys being engineered by corrupt socialist, neoliberal, neocon, and statist-corporatist elements to the left and in mass media, haven't yet felt their way completely towards libertarian nationalism.