[Working hand-in-hand with the Democratic National Committee to
stop Bernie are their compatriots MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and other media stalwarts that style themselves as
the official opposition to Trump/Fox News.] [[link removed]]

THE DNC AND THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA VS BERNIE'S CAMPAIGN  
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Joseph B. Atkins
February 25, 2020
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_ Working hand-in-hand with the Democratic National Committee to stop
Bernie are their compatriots MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and other media stalwarts that style themselves as
the official opposition to Trump/Fox News. _

, Sarah Rice/The New York Times/Redux.

 

 OXFORD, Miss. - Bernie Sanders’ challenge to the Democratic Party
establishment evokes memories of the Populist uprising against the
nation’s two-party system 130 years ago, as does the Democratic
Party’s current maneuverings to destroy Bernie’s challenge.

Back in the 1890s, the People’s Party, better known as the
Populists, gave the leaders of the nation’s two major political
parties the scare of their lives, mounting the biggest third-party
challenge in U.S. history. It was indeed a people’s party,
challenging the corporate hegemony that had taken over the nation and
giving a long-overdue voice to the farmers, factory workers - both
black and white - and small business folks that both the Democratic
and Republican parties had too long ignored.

In many ways, the establishment parties had become what Louisiana’s
Huey Long would decades later deride as the “high popalorum” and
“low popahirum” of American politics, what Alabama Gov. George
Wallace meant three decades later when he said there’s “not a
dime’s worth of difference” in the two major parties.

As flawed as Long and Wallace may have been, they were on to
something.

Post-Civil War greed and the piles of money coming out of
industrialization had so corrupted American politics by the end of the
19th century that average working folks had nowhere to turn other than
a third party. In the South, ruling “Bourbon Democrats” appealed
“to Southerners when they recalled nostalgic antebellum days and
identified themselves with the romantic cult of the Confederacy,”
but in their hearts they “were preeminently commercial-minded men
who purposely aligned themselves with the Republican-industrial North
in order to exploit the manpower and resources of their section,”
historian Monroe Billington has written.

Well-heeled leaders of the Democratic Party finally managed to pull
the rug out from under the Populists, pushing “fusion” and
co-opting their key issues and maneuvering and manipulating them
eventually out of existence, leaving a legacy of disillusionment that
took decades to repair. The Populists “blamed themselves for ever
consenting to an unholy alliance with the enemy,” Billington wrote.

The modern-day Democratic Party faces a similar challenge in the
populist uprising that Bernie Sanders represents, and its leaders have
and will continue to fight tooth and nail to make sure he doesn’t
become its titular head and certainly not president of the United
States. Working hand-in-hand with the Democratic National Committee
are their compatriots MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and other media stalwarts that style themselves as the official
opposition to Trump/Fox News rule.

“People all over this country worked their way through school, sent
their kids to school, paid off student loans,” James Carville
recently ranted to MSNBC about Sanders’ call for free college
tuition and student debt retirement. “They don’t want to hear this
shit.”

Carville, of course, was a key architect of Clintonian politics in the
1990s, the centrist, neo-liberal, pro-corporate core philosophy of the
Democratic National Committee today.

In response to Carville’s rant, writer Ed Burmila in the New
Republic correctly pointed out that the 1970s world Carville invoked
has little to do with today’s world, in which college expenses equal
nearly 52 percent of a man’s median annual income and a whopping 81
percent of a woman’s. Today an entire generation of college
graduates potentially face lifelong debt from their student loans.

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, himself a relic of “the good ol’
days” when he was an aide to former U.S. House Speaker Tip
O’Neill, told viewers recently that Sanders’ victory in Nevada
reminded him of the Nazi takeover of France in World War II. That
comment prompted calls for Matthews’ firing. Did Matthews forget
Sanders is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust? Even
earlier Matthews talked about the Cold War of the 1950s when critics
of socialist regimes might be taken to a public park and shot, loosely
implying that might be his fate under a Bernie Sanders regime. So
Sanders is likened to both Nazis and Communists in Matthews’ world.
Give me a damn break!

The Democratic Party establishment, as tied to Wall Street as its
Republican counterpart, is scared to death of Bernie Sanders. This was
evident four years ago when its operatives leaked debate questions to
favored candidate Hillary Clinton to give her an advantage over
challenger Sanders. That same establishment spent nearly the next
three years constructing “Russiagate” to claim it was Russian
collusion that elected Trump, not Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign,
Russian collusion that exposed the corruption within official
Democratic ranks. In the process, “journalists” like Rachel Maddow
completely lost credit by buying into the Russiagate conspiracy hook,
line, and sinker.

More recently, the Iowa caucus exposed more DNC and Clintonian
shenanigans as the Iowa Democratic Party decided to use an app
designed by Clinton operatives to tally the vote, ultimately screwing
up the count long enough to make sure Bernie Sanders didn’t come out
of Iowa with any kind of momentum that might help him in the New
Hampshire primary. Well, he won the New Hampshire primary despite
their best efforts and now is the leader in the still-wide field of
Democratic candidates.

Next to enter the stage was billionaire and former Republican Mike
Bloomberg buying his way into second place behind Bernie with untold
millions of dollars in television and social media ads that paint him
as kind of a Lone Ranger there to save the party from a socialist
takeover (which is his real goal, even more than defeating Donald
Trump). Bloomberg’s disastrous performance in the debate before the
Nevada caucus proved that even tons of money can’t hide the host of
skeletons in his closet, but he has already signaled that he’s
planning to spend more tons to bring Sanders’ down as the campaign
heads south.

To get truth about this campaign one has to go to social media and
YouTube programs like “The Hill” and hear former MSNBC commentator
Krystal Ball tell it like it truly is. Another is Kyle Kulinski. Still
another is Jimmy Dore. Here you get the cogent analysis that’s
missing in traditional media. They’re young, sharp, and hungry for
truth, and they speak to the same generation that has become the core
of Bernie Sanders’ movement. They’re the future, not James
Carville, Chris Matthews, and the other troglodytes who believe they
still have something to say to the American people.
 
Joseph B. Atkins is a veteran writer and professor of journalism at
the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Covering for the
Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi,
2008) as well as the novel Casey’s Last Chance (Sartoris Literary
Group, 2015). His blog is [link removed]
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