Casting Impeachment, Preserving Neoliberal "Normalcy"

There seems to emerge a game of de facto cooperation between Creep1, the DNC and important parts of the "liberal" media, (See, e.g., The Guardian, The Washington Post, the BBC, CNN, or CNBC ), actually presenting Joe Biden as the most important (no; actually, if you read most of the impeachment chatter, the only) challenger to Creep1. What I am pointing at as important in these messages is not the actual content--that pits Creep1 against democratic forces, with lower case "d". What is significant is the list of characters in the drama. Users of media messages are taught a lesson that "the script" is, on the challenger side, all about Biden, to the total exclusion of Sanders or Warren. The drama is set up with Creep1 on the one side and Biden as the opponent.

Creep1, the DNC and the Big Business media might be at each other's throats on a host of other issues, but in this particular regard, when it comes to the future of the most powerful state in the world, they are all teaming up on Bernie and Warren, while they, at least pro forma,

  1. supposedly represent opposing political parties, and
  2. supposedly play different roles in the process (party politics vs the media).

I don't want to sound alarmist, least of all a pessimist, but this looks a tiny bit like the last years of state socialism in eastern Europe. In both cases we are talking about the implicit pushing out all left (in both cases, genuinely social democratic, and culturally a tiny bit more indigenous) alternatives to neoliberal hegemony, often, in eastern Europe, taking the form of EU-worshipping . We might want remember where that has led eastern Europe (and the world). It is an imperfect simile, the conditions and the stakes are different--but I still feel there is something to it. The game is really, really never really "open-ended." Jus'sayin'.


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