When FDR died in 1945, Truman took over as president. Had it been Henry Wallace, history may have taken a much different course, writes Marjorie Cohn.
From left to right: James F. Byrnes, President Harry S. Truman and Henry A. Wallace, during funeral for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 14, 1945. (Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Archives, Wikimedia Commons)
In 1944, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ensured that socialist Henry Wallace would not succeed Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) as president. Is history repeating itself in 2020?
Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democratic socialist, received the most votes in the first three primary elections. After former Vice President Joe Biden, a centrist, scored his first primary win, the DNC consolidated the Democratic Party Establishment around him. Candidates Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor, and Senator Amy Klobuchar immediately dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke, a former candidate, did the same. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, who had already quit the primary race, followed suit and New York City’s former Mayor Michael Bloomberg did as well. The party bosses likely wanted to ensure that Sanders would not upend the corporate order.
Wallace, who held many of the same political positions as Sanders, was one of the architects of the New Deal. He served as FDR’s agriculture secretary, vice president and commerce secretary. But the ailing FDR’s 1944 bid to select Wallace as his vice president for what would be his final presidential term was derailed by the corporate party bosses who made sure that Harry Truman would follow FDR as president instead of Wallace.
When FDR died in 1945, Truman became president. Had it been Wallace, “there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War,” Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote in “The Untold History of the United States.”
Parallels Between Wallace & Sanders
There are several parallels between Sanders and Wallace — both in their ideologies and in the opposition they engendered from the leadership of the Democratic Party. In a June 2019 speech, Sanders invoked FDR’s 1944 economic bill of rights, which proposed many policies similar to Sanders’. When he defines himself as a democratic socialist, Sanders said, he means “Economic rights are human rights.” The core of his Medicare for All plan is, “Health care is a human right.”
At the March 15 debate with Biden, Sanders asked the rhetorical question: Where is the power in America?
He then answered, “Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage? Why do we pump up the oil industry while a half a million people are homeless in America?”
The debate was framed by the coronavirus pandemic, which, Sanders noted, “exposes the weakness and dysfunctionality of the health care system.” Although we spend twice as much as any other country on health care, Sanders pointed out, we aren’t ready with test kits and ventilators.
“While we work to pass a ‘Medicare for All,’ single-payer system,” Sanders said during a speech from his home in Vermont three days before the debate, “the United States government today must make it clear that in the midst of this emergency, everyone in our country, regardless of income or where they live, must be able to get all of the health care they need without costs.”
Senators Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders during Democratic primary debate, February 2020. (Screenshot)
During the debate, Sanders criticized the bipartisan $8.3 billion coronavirus spending bill. It mandates temporary paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave. But, according to The New York Times, various exemptions could potentially exclude millions of workers. Moreover, the exemptions disproportionately hurt low-wage workers. And it contains no limits on the ability of the pharmaceutical companies to profit from the coronavirus. “It’s clear the fingerprints of the business lobby are all over the exclusions in the bill,” said Vicki Shabo, senior fellow at the think tank New America.
Wallace, like Sanders, was a champion of the “common man.” And that also incurred the wrath of the party conservatives.
‘Century of Common Man’
American farmers were reeling economically from the Great Depression when FDR appointed Wallace as secretary of agriculture in 1933. During the eight years he held that office, Wallace instituted many policies that vastly improved conditions for the nation’s farmers.
“Wallace was a great secretary of agriculture,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote, adding,
“In time he widened his concern beyond commercial farming to subsistence farming and rural poverty. For the urban poor, he provided food stamps and school lunches. He instituted programs for land-use planning, soil conservation and erosion control. And always he promoted research to combat plant and animal diseases, to locate drought-resistant crops and to develop hybrid seeds in order to increase productivity.”
In addition to “his reputation as one of the New Deal visionaries on domestic policy,” Wallace “carved credentials as an outspoken antifascist,” Stone and Kuznick wrote.
When FDR ran for a third term in 1940, he chose Wallace as his running mate. As vice president, Wallace was a strong anti-imperialist — criticizing the British, German, French and American empires alike. “No nations will have the God-given right to exploit other nations . . . there must be neither military nor economic imperialism,” Wallace stated in a 1942 address.
In that speech, widely regarded as one of his most important, Wallace said, “Some have spoken of the ‘American Century.’ I say . . . the century . . . which will come of this war — can and must be the century of the common man.”
Wallace was disliked by the Democratic Party leaders, who were not happy when he called for a global “people’s revolution” and suggested that the United States should work with the Soviet Union. The party conservatives also opposed Wallace’s advocacy for workers, women, Black people and the colonized in European countries. “His enemies included Wall Street bankers and other anti-union business interests, southern segregationists, and defenders of British and French colonialism,” Stone and Kuznick explained.
When FDR ran for his fourth and final term as president, he again sought to put Wallace on the ticket. Wallace was the most popular Democratic candidate, according to a Gallup poll. But in his weakened condition, FDR lacked the energy to fight the party bosses as they manipulated the process to make Truman his vice president. Truman was undistinguished but could be counted on to go along with the corporate program.
After FDR died, Truman succeeded him. In 1946, Wallace urged Truman to tamp down the “armament race” and warned of the dangers of the “atomic bombs.” Wallace would not have used nuclear weapons against Japan. Nor would he have stoked the Cold War as did his successors. Wallace opposed “preventive war,” which violated the then recently adopted United Nations Charter.
Wallace delivered a strong speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City, exhorting the U.S. not to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union. He sought to limit the budget for weapons of war. “No nation should be allowed to spend on its military establishment more than perhaps 15 percent of its budget,” Wallace said, endeavoring to halt the impending Cold War with Russia.
Sanders, too, decries the bloated military budget. “Instead of spending $1.8 trillion on weapons of destruction designed to kill each other,” he declared at the March 15 debate, “maybe we should pool our resources and fight our common enemy, which is climate change.”
In 1948, Wallace ran a third-party campaign against Truman. Although Wallace had advocated for civil rights, opposed the poll tax and would not speak in segregated venues, Black people “tended to be wary of his politics, and voted overwhelmingly for Truman,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker.
During the campaign, Wallace was red-baited and accused of being a Soviet operative. Stone and Kuznick analyzed the results of the election: “The Red-baiting, the dismissive treatment of Wallace by the major newspapers, Truman’s move to the left on domestic issues, and a last-minute rush to Truman by Democratic voters who feared a victory by Republican Thomas Dewey resulted in an electoral disaster for the Wallace campaign.”
Sound familiar?
Supporters at a phone bank at former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign office in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 13, 2010. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr)
Narrative That Sanders Can’t Beat Trump
Aided and abetted by the corporate media, the centrists in the Democratic Party are doing their best to ensure that Sanders is not the Democratic candidate. Nearly all former candidates — except Senator Elizabeth Warren, who remains aloof from endorsing either Sanders or Biden — are centrists and support Biden.
The narrative promulgated by centrists and the corporate media and internalized by many Black voters is that Sanders can’t win the presidential election, even though polls have consistently concluded that both he and Biden have an even chance of beating President Donald Trump.
Like Wallace, Sanders has been red-baited and accused of supporting authoritarian governments. In a front-page story, The New York Times painted a sinister — but false — picture of Sanders supporting the Soviet Union when he traveled there in 1988 to establish a sister city program between Burlington, Vermont, and a Russian city.
At their debate, Biden confronted Sanders about his praise for Fidel Castro’s literacy campaign after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Sanders replied that he opposed authoritarian governments but “it is incorrect to say they never do anything positive.” He cited China’s reduction in poverty. Former President Barack Obama — whom Biden frequently references — went even further than Sanders in praising Cuban achievements when he tried to begin the process of normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Biden said it’s one thing to occasionally mention something positive a country has done, but, he added, “the idea of praising a country that is violating human rights around the world…” It is unlikely Biden was referring to the United States, whose officials are being investigated by the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the “war on terror.” Biden, who was instrumental in securing congressional approval for President George W. Bush’s Iraq War, will be a good steward of the empire.
Sanders Winning Ideological Battle
Although Wallace got few votes and failed to unseat Truman in 1948, he “succeeded in having his ideas adopted, except in the field of foreign affairs,” Stone and Kuznick noted.
Likewise, when he debated Biden, Sanders said, “Joe has won more states than I have, but we’re winning the ideological battle.” Indeed, exit polls on Super Tuesday showed that a majority of voters in Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi — all of which were won by Biden — favored a government medical plan instead of private insurance.
“We are winning the generational struggle” as well, Sanders added. Depending on the states, he added, “we’re winning the 50 years and younger” and “big time with 30 years and younger.”
Throughout the primary season, Sanders’s fingerprints have been all over the debates and have permeated the campaigns. Indeed, all of the candidates have embraced some or many of Sanders’s progressive policies. Just before the debate, Biden adopted a version of Sanders’s proposal that students be able to attend public colleges and universities tuition-free.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.”
This article is from Truthout and reprinted with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Before commenting please read Robert Parry’s Comment Policy. Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive or rude language toward other commenters or our writers will not be published. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. For security reasons, please refrain from inserting links in your comments, which should not be longer than 300 words.
This is a very interesting article.
The decision to replace Wallace with Truman was a very close-run thing and was far from inevitable.
However, it is also true that what happened under President Truman was not inevitable either.
So many decisions were made that could easily have gone differently.
Many in his administration, for example, were against the development of the H bomb. However, when presented with his decision, they do not seem to have fought to salvage anything. They could have urged a twin track approach, that is to say try to negotiate a ban on nuclear tests at the same time. This, if successful, would have prevented an H Bomb from being tested and would have helped considerably to prevent an arms race.
“Derailing a Socialist Candidate”
As evidenced above, perceiving to be engaged in “derailing a socialist candidate” is an effective way of immersing some in efforts/perceptions to “resist derailment” thereby facilitating the continuation of systems of social relationships and immersion there-in.
In simpler terms – those whom are objects of the social relationships facilitating the continuation of the social relationships to the benefit of the subjects of the social relationships – the basis of all class based social relations including empires.
Thank you for your co-operation in illustration.
As many are aware publication is affected on transmission through a portal not when moderated/disappeared by a portal, and hence no need to “publish”.
“Bernie, you are no Henry Wallace.” Unlike Wallace, Sanders has engaged in bashing and denouncing Russia and China, despite the fact that the USSR collapsed nearly 40 years ago and China has lifted 800 million persons out of poverty. For FDR and Wallace, breaking down the artificial barriers between East and West, made policy by Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, was to be replaced by political and economic cooperation. Sanders’ “New Green Deal,” bears no resemblance to the original New Deal, which began with the breakup of Wall Street and used the most up to date methods to increase labor productivity and expand the economy. For FDR and Wallace, it was poverty, enforced by European colonialism, not economic human activity, that was the enemy.
Re: Richard Rhodes book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”
FOR EVERYONE’S INFORMATION THE NOTES FOR CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “Trinity” CAN BE FOUND ON PAGE 836 OF THE PAPERBACK EDITION
We forget sometimes what Truman walked into. Few people have any grasp of the size of the A-bomb project, The Manhattan Engineering District, or the scope and dynamic of a wartime government.
It wasn’t until I realized the ungodly number of snakes in the swamp at the time did I grasp anything close to what life there, then was like. Truman was a little to cozy to Israel for my liking. I would greatly enjoy knowing if he signed of with CIA on the NUMEC arrangement but for some reason the records remain sealed or CIA’s Richard Helms made sure they are no longer around to be had.
If Truman was involved, he made a decision not his to make, if he didn’t some one else did. I hold a position that if the caper was given a green light those involved did not help JFK’s chances for survival and in fact were over joyed by his death.
I believe that as least as much as I believe the Supreme Leaders is playing with American lives here in the Homeland, which is pretty obvious. Whether he likes it or not “THE BUCK STOPS WITH HIM”.
Chao
What this article doesn’t mention is the blatant election fraud that is happening in the DNC primary. The exit polls and final results discrepancies far surpass the margin on error in many states, and coincidentally always help Biden and hurt Bernie. Check out TDMS Research and read the reports by state. Also, please sign and share these two petitions. One is for a lawsuit against the DNC and the other is a request to the UN to oversee our elections. I don’t know how effective either of these could be, but I signed anyway because I figure it can’t hurt.
see: sign.moveon.org/petitions/class-action-lawsuit-15
see: sign.moveon.org/petitions/u-n-is-needed-to-oversee-democratic-primaries-due-to-election-fraud/
Very true. Amazing that the voters aren’t incensed over this!
Far be it from me to second guess the intentions of a lawyer but, incomplete history can be very misleading. Richard Rhodes book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, which won a Pulitzer Prize, at chapter 18 titled Trinity one can learn some very interesting inside information and facts. While Rhode’s wrote the book in the fashion of a novel his note system is clever and revealing.
At the beginning of this chapter the author exposes much information about the not so uncontroversial “Jimmy” Byrnes. However on page 620 Byrnes gets justice for his most positive traits. A very talented individual. No mention of Wallace so far.
By page 620 note that Byrnes seemed headed to the Democratic ticket but was detoured. No mention of Wallace here either.
The facts should not go unnoticed in the last paragraph on page 620 of names of some familiar individuals who would shape the creation United States Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Act and in a matter of two or three years influence the creation of the CIA.
I simply think it’s a little strange that Ms. Cohn doesn’t mention Mr. Byrnes,
Jimmy as he was known found work at 14, finished his formal education in a law office, one lawyer took him under his wing and Byrnes who had learned short hand from his mother flourished. In 190o , he was 21, became a court reporter, passed the bar in 1904 and this second paragraph on page 619 goes on to list up to and including his position on the Supreme Court. The story continues on, he resins his court position in 1942 to return to the White house under FDR.
It seems a shame that Ms. Cohn seems to be totally unaware of some of the most important history of this country ever. But alas she is not alone in this regard. This book runs 740 pages to the epilogue, acknowledgements notes and index, which totals 886 pages.
One of the first things Americans might want to do is take some of this free time they have and read up on modern American History. This story is one of mystery, intrigue and adventure and is, in my opinion a treasure of history.
Rhodes went on to write “DARK SUN “, no less informative but shorter one might not believe some of what they read in it. They do so at their own. risk or have done so at their own risk.
Ms. Cohn seems to have missed the memo about the two party system being corrupted by money.
Thanks to all CN
I am grateful to Marjorie Cohn for taking the time and effort to write this. Americans have a lack of historical knowledge. And I don’t think *any* of us know how fateful, and far reaching, are the actions of our rulers’ decisions behind the scenes. The consequences of the 1944 VP selection will run 100 years. Forever, really. They are on the scale of the Civil War, which never really healed but became part of the US historical PTSD, alongside the PTSD of the immigration process itself for many people.
News today, Sat. 3/21, is that the California count may not be completed anytime soon “because of cononavirus.”
Of course not. Bernie won. The Democratic Party doesn’t want to count that. They’ve used every excuse to delay until it can’t matter. This is just the latest.
“Is the DNC Repeating History in Derailing a Socialist Candidate?”
Yes. Absolutely.
For four decades Biden has been part of and party to entrapping masses of Americans into service and some into servitude to the hoarder’s wealth. This has come to such a degree that for the past decade while listening over the public airways to the morning news on NPR we are first and foremost subjected to a full litany of the greatest and most important affairs of life reflected down from the stock market and other twists and turns of the business community from on high. This in absence of any recognition that each and everyone in the land is in business for themselves and depend loved ones to secure food, clothes, shelter and enough rest and leisure to keep going and to find it worthwhile to do so.
Of course some people’s business is more important than the mass of other people’s business because we’re suppose to be dependent upon those people who should have no need to be depend upon all of us. Well, until there is need for a bailout, prop up or incentive that makes it more favorable for them to satisfy their abundant greed—one way or another. Hum, not much need on the pubic airways to report, inquire about or promote anything much about how all of those whose only asset is their human toil are doing or for them securing their share of being bailed out, propped up and provided incentives to . . . ah maximize their market share? It does not work that way, be happy to if you can get yourself enslaved at all.
Oh, and young folks, run up a huge college debt to get yourself tooled into an interchange part to fit well into business and industry until you get yourself pink-slipped out—and rest assured that the interest on that loan which you cannot bankrupt free from provides a form social security for generating a return on the pile of money that the hoarders have on hand. And that private health insurance policy that you pay for in full (via half out of paycheck and other half in the cost added to the goods and services that you consume) also keeps you nice and dependent upon the important business folks. As for paying taxes, let’s not even go there, for they don’t.
There was a time, when there was real politics. You could vote for the blue box or the rad box: Labour or Conservative (UK) Democrat or Republican (US). I think that it was John Stuart Mill who coined the term ‘a party of order and a party of movement’. Both represented real choice between a leftish reforming party which did not shy away from nationalisation and interventionist government policies and a more staid party which stood for order and continuity. I suppose the two key figures in this contest were Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. This was real politics.
Today, however, we have an oligarchic centrist blob that apparently does not even a minimal set of political beliefs, but instead simply plays pseudo-political games. Members of either party could easily swap parties and no-one would necessarily notice the difference. David Graebner, author of Bullshit Jobs, caught the zeitgeist in this penetrative work, but his findings could easily be applicable to the political establishment – that is to day – Bullshit politics.
There are some interesting parallels and good points raised in this piece. But it would be stronger if it squarely confronted the fact that Henry Wallace was a flawed vessel for left-wing aspirations after WWII. This article relies too heavily and uncritically on Stone and Kuznick’s “Untold History” (“Cherry-Picking Our History” was the apt title of Sean Wilentz’s review of it in the NY Review). There are helpful links in the article to the Arthur Schlesinger and Alex Ross pieces about Wallace — I recommend reading them for a fuller, more balanced picture. You’ll see that, while there was ugly Red-baiting in the 1948 election, in which Wallace showed great courage in directly challenging segregation, the Progressive Party was indeed dominated by Communists and Soviet agents, which led to the opposition of most New Dealers (including Eleanor Roosevelt) — not because they were corporate shills or imperialists, but because they saw more clearly what Stalin and the Soviet Union truly represented than the hopelessly naive Wallace. He would recant in a 1952 article, “Where I Was Wrong.”
I’ll have to get the Stone and Kuznick book “The Untold History of the United States”. That said Ms. Cohn’s comparison between Wallace and Sanders is a solid observation but has seems to have little to say about influences behind the scenes of the Truman administration. Many of the forces at work behind the scenes then still have representatives working for them behind the scenes today.
Anyone out there have any idea of how many pieces of legislation were passed by congress 1946-1947? If our congress hadn’t gotten away form us during WWII it did then.
The DNC is not derailing a socialist candidate because Bernie Sanders is not a socialist candidate. Sanders’s platform does not advocate that the government or workers should control the means of production. If it did, then maybe he would be a socialist.
Not only is Sanders not a socialist, but, to paraphrase Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders is a moderate. He is moderate because the majority of USA citizens support Sanders’s policies. That is the definition of a moderate.
Part of me wonders if Sanders’s campaign was doomed by people who wanted to turn the whole thing into a battle of “Socialism vs. Capitalism”. The real battle should’ve been between policies that the majority of USA citizens support vs. policies that the majority of USA citizens do not support.
Yes
It won’t matter, we already have a Socialist President but he calls it “Americanism”.
A correction to the identities of the two men next to Truman – the man on Truman’s right is Wallace.
He looks worried – appropriately.
To Truman’s left is the odious Byrnes.
Bernie having ‘most votes’ following the first two caucuses and the primary in NH, is not indicative of Democratic voters’ intent as it relates to progressive vs moderate. For simplicity let’s say all Sanders/Warren voters are progressive with Pete, Biden and klobuchar voters all moderate. Well, moderates won by near 10 pts in those states. A walloping. And I might add, the dnc didn’t drop out after SC, Pete and Amy did. And after they did, senate races moved. AZ’s from lean R to toss-up, and MT’s from likely R to lean R. Montana may not flip, but Arizona’s seat is of course vital to any chance we have of flipping four republican seats (we’ll of course lose our AL seat). Marjorie, stealing a good line I heard, I’m so far left, I gotta use smoke signals to find the fucking commies. But that doesn’t matter now. We need take seats from republicans as was done in the midterm. That was done largely by moderates. AOC has taken nothing from Republicans. I know that if one is holding a pair but has a chance to draw to an inside straight, only the fool fights the odds.Long time dems like myself remember the McGovern debacle. Intelligent voters have handed you Biden by showing our appetite for real politic at this crucial time. We did the same in ‘16 but there were just too many pricks like Sarandon whom chose not to vote. We (moderates) are handing you a candidate with the best chance to win. Give him down ballot coattails by pulling your …
Really? Aren’t you wonderful- not. Your idea of moderate is a bunch of neolib Republicans.
Biden will be trounced by Trump. You’ ll see
People don’t want what you want!
1944 was not the only election sabotgaed by Democrats. They did it as recently as 2016 when the DNC actively colluded with Hillary, who used that ‘democratic’ institution (really a private corporation) as her personal piggy bank and attack dog.
The DNC’s platform is not ‘anybody but Trump’, it’s “anybody but Bernie’. They are perfectly happy to have another 4 years of Trump as it gives them the illusion of relevance. Biden is irrelevant except to the extent that his unlikely installment would maintain the status quo. The political duoply is in the sole employ of the oligarchy and that is not going to change until the system is burned to the ground or collapses under its own corrupt obesity.
COVID-19 brings to light yet again the endemic failures of the system: massive ongoing bailouts for Wall Street and the banks, no money for health care, and a paltry handout meant to keep the slaves from rioting in the streets.
What should come of this is a completely overhauled national health care system, a dramatic increase in capacity from the 2 beds per 1,000 (less than half the rate of China, which a population of 1.6b), and the elimination of private health insurance that drains at least 1/3 of all health care spending for no purpose but profit.
What will come of this is yet another transfer of wealth to the top from bailouts (socialism for the rich) and the inevitable bankruptcies and foreclosures by the ever-shrinking working class brought on by lost income.
It’s pathetic that the citizens aren’t in the streets protesting the loss of their rights as citizens of this corporate bastion but most of them are so indoctrinated and propagandized and under- educated they don’t even understand what’s happening
The title is an apt rhetorical question. We have one party, and it’s Wall St.
About right. The political class (plus the media) is totally compromised. They live in a bubble of their own making and and are totally detached from the rest of society. The system is beyond reforming. It is in a state of irreversible disintegration. Opposition is systematically and inevitably co-opted. Tulsi and Bernie were defeated before they even started, as was Corbyn in the UK. Pathways to any future breakout have been blocked. The capitulation of Tulsi and Bernie should confirm the notion that playing the political game is one which is loaded.
Time for a very big rethink for any opposition currents.
Firstly, I supported Bernie in 2016; ultimately voting for Stein as I could not support HRC. I wish instead of dutifully lingering in the wings of the party he had spent the last three years mentoring someone younger to take up the mantle to run in this election rather than going back out for another beating this round. I know he says, “We are winning the generational struggle,” but he can come off as a one man show. If he can’t change it, nobody can. But he didn’t, and we are where we are again. Two pitiful choices. Neither of which remotely offer us a peaceful and more humble role in the world.
It would make perfect sense to me that the DNC would choose Biden if he wasn’t in the early stages of dementia. I understand it is there job to cull any “socialists” or “peaceniks”, but certainly almost any of the other “approved” choices would have a better chance of beating Trump. What are they going to do to prop him up for the remainder of the campaign? Could it be that they are positioning themselves to anoint someone else in Milwaukee after Biden’s condition is undeniable? Maybe the Wicked Witch of the East again, or the other former 1st Lady?
If you think about the atomic bombing of Japan- un-necessary, they were ready to surrender-the cold war and subsequent support for colonialism;substituting reactionary Truman for Wallace had a earth shaking effect upon subsequent history. Truman also gave Vietnam back to the French colonialists then financed their war on the patriotic Vietnamese anti colonialists. The French failure, of course led into the catastrophic and futile US direct involvement. Every US president was warned by his intelligence agencies that that war was hopeless; but only Kennedy had the guts to try to cut bait. This was a major factor in his assassination
A bunch of fat cat millionaire donors and party hacks created much of the chaos, death and waste of the last half of the twentieth century.
What will be the future repercussions of de ja vu 2020?
One thing is different,US power has met its match in climate change.
I have voted as a dem since 1971. I was very disillusioned after the 2016 primaries, caucuses, and the 2016 DNC National Convention in Philadelphia. However, I remained in the party, was elected a precienct delegate, helped local and state dems get elected. Once again I am disillusioned by the manipulative tactics the DNC and their collusion with the mainstream media are using to promote Biden and to kneecap Sanders’ campaign
I will not award such tactics with my vote and my support.
#OnlySandersGetsMyVote
Adios, democratic party!
,
The US might be powerful but it’s not great. As long as we continue to be controlled by the oligarchs, we won’t be great.
They may have been able to knock Bernie out of the DNC primaries but they have also virtually ensured that Donnie Murdo will get another 4 years.
True
“They may have been able to knock Bernie out of the DNC primaries”
This is an illustration of naivete not facility, like many of the attempts at “colour revolutions”.
Mr. Obama was a useful tool in continuing the immersion of some in the spectacle and a woman would have performed a similar function if they had not chosen “that woman”.
Such “choice” would likely be “risk free” since the purpose is to maintain the social relations/system through the framing of “participation” including but not restricted to the conflation agency/voting.
Then because they chose “that woman” resort to charades became necessary to protect the notion of their right/wisdom to choose, including but not limited to “It was these nasty Russians not our wisdom that led to the result and of course some red-necks in fly-over states but what do they know shows”.
Then like the proverbial little girl who sat down threatening to eat worms, the remaining scintilla of deviousness was set aside by not choosing the best charade to continue the immersion of some in the spectacle – Mr. Bernie – the conflation of belief/thinking being a vector in revolutions around a fixed point thereby maintaining the social relations/system through the framing of “participation”.
The opponents rarely cease to amuse.
Re OlyaPola
March 24, 2020 at 11:50
“The opponents rarely cease to amuse.”
Particularly when they seek to “rectify” by capturing “another woman” as potential “vice president” thereby undermining her utility and minimising options for future iterations – even pool is about potting one ball whilst positioning the cue for the next shot.