Stupidity and Willful Blindness - The Twin Blights Afflicting Uhmurkah

counterpunch  |  Reason number one is why we currently have Donald Trump for president. The man cannot hold a train of thought for the ten or 15 seconds it takes to express it or to type it into a Tweet, lies so often I don’t think he even knows when he’s doing it half the time, and has no moral core. And yet a third of American voters think he’s just great. And even though all his policies are damaging the very people — the poor, forgotten white working class — that he likes to highlight as being his main concern, those people, who are now at risk of losing their subsidized health insurance available under Obamacare, their Medicaid, their Supplemental Security Income checks (available to the disabled and to children and young single parents left in need by the death of a working parent/spouse) and the protection against predatory lenders afforded by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), continue to back him, and will likely vote for him in 2020.

Reason number two is why, despite proof that the Democratic Party leadership and its pre-annointed 2016 presidential candidate preference Hillary Clinton, worked hand-in-glove to steal the nomination from Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and his tens of millions of supporters last year, and despite the knowledge that that same corrupt leadership is hard at work now blocking progressive efforts to democratize the next Democratic primary, and to run real progressives as candidates for House and Senate in 2018 instead of more of the same corporatist mob, Democratic voters will submissively cave in as always and vote for those same lackluster and corrupted corporatists, either handing wins to Republican opponents, or electing/re-electing ineffective, self-aggrandizing hacks.

There are other problems too, of course. To a certain extent, both Republican and Democratic voters in the US are blinded to reality. In the case of Republicans, who tend to be less well educated, or even if they have higher degrees, to be in thrall to fanatic religious doctrines that over-ride any scientific thinking they might once have learned, this blindness to reality is celebrated.  Among Democrats, who fancy themselves to be the “reality-based” voters, however, there is also a blindness to reality.  Democrats refuse for example to see the larger picture: for example that the US is absurdly over-militarized and badly in need of being pacified and disarmed. No amount of calls for better funding for social needs can succeed without first closing down the over 800 bases that the US operates abroad, terminating all the undeclared foreign wars and military adventures in places like Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc., shrinking the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Special Forces   and the nuclear forces and slashing the overall military budget by at least 75%. To fail to recognize this reality is as stupid as your typical Republican yahoo’s refusal to accept the reality of rampaging climate change. It is simply Democratic yahooism.