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Hillary Clinton, bad penny that she is, recently emerged from whatever swamp she retreated to in November to—what else?—promote her personal brand and cast blame for her loss to Donald Trump on other people. Speaking at a "Women for Women International" conference in New York, the left's favorite right-wing fanatic performed her usual song and dance, pretending to care about human rights while endorsing US military violence, demonizing the Russkies and, since everything is always about her, making sure the audience understood that she has a new book coming out in the fall.

It was classical Clinton chicanery; a case study in pathological narcissism. Asked why she thinks Trump did so well with white female voters (given that, in her view, misogyny played a decisive role in the election), Hillary went full-Maddow and dove headlong into the Russia-hacked-us conspiracy theory, whining about "unprecedented interference" in the election and later asserting that she would have won, God dammit, if not for "Russian WikiLeaks"—as if there was a Russian subdivision of WikiLeaks.

In other words, it was all Vlad the Hacker's fault. What she failed to mention, as a matter of course, is that those blasted emails would have carried no weight at all if they hadn't revealed what they revealed, namely that the Democratic Party was conniving to undermine Bernie Sanders' progressive campaign in favor of Hillary's reactionary one (imagine if Bernie was still bitching about this—not that he ever did to begin with). If Hillary is right, and the emails cost her the election, why not go after the people who wrote them? Why shoot the messenger?

Later on Hillary described herself, with a straight face, as being "part of the resistance" to the Trump regime. This came after she declared her support for Trump's unilateral use of force against Syria, raising questions about the sort of "resistance" to which she's referring. But we don’t really need to ask those questions, do we? No. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows precisely what Hillary means by "resistance." She's talking about the pseudo-resisters: the people who spent two years condemning Trump as a fascist, then, taking hypocrisy to unexplored heights, mutated into slobbering supporters the moment he let loose a few dozen cruise missiles. Because everyone knows there's no such thing as a wrong war—as long as it's made in the USA.

I'd like to be able to say that none of this matters because Hillary has been defeated—hopefully for good—and is no longer a political force to be reckoned with. But that, regrettably, is not the case. Hillary is like Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy's triumphant Blood Meridian (a book that you ought to read now if you haven't already). She's more of a concept than a person, and as such she can never really die. The character of Judge Holden personifies, among other things, war and gratuitous human violence. Since we'll never be rid of those things, we'll never be rid of him. He's immortal. As the book's narrator tells us: "His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

What Judge Hillary personifies, along with her husband and Barack Obama and every other major Democratic leader since Jimmy Carter, is the global capitalist system of neoliberalism. Its endgame: worldwide corporate supremacy. Its favorite tools: privatization, deregulation, austerity, "free trade." Its outcome: economic injustice, and every other kind of injustice, on a monumental scale. And what is the outcome of the outcome? Rage, disaffection, apathy, scapegoating and, ultimately, the rise of the demagogue. Neoliberalism is the underlying disease of which Trump, and Trumpism, are telltale symptoms. Most people understand this; many pretend not to. And while perhaps not as ineradicable as violence and war, neoliberalism is not going anywhere anytime soon. Thus, neither is Hillary Clinton.

Russia-gate proves my point. Think it through. Instead of looking in the mirror and acknowledging the role they played in setting the stage for Trump's reign of terror, the Democrats have decided to help start a new Cold War—with Trump at the helm! Such is their devotion to the neoliberal faith: they'd sooner torque up the risk of thermonuclear war than grapple with the issues raised by Sanders and his supporters during the primary campaign, which are antithetical to ruling class, and ergo Democratic, interests. Thus far the stratagem has succeeded. There's no doubting that Russia-gate has realized its central goal of sidelining progressive concerns (when's the last time you heard someone utter the words "Citizens United"?). For this we can thank the media, particularly the fruitcakes over at CNN and MSNBC, who see a Russian bear behind every tree. But first we should thank Hillary herself, along with her foot soldiers. For it was they who originally set up the narrative, promoting it with zeal both before and after the election.

In March, Hillary's former communications director Jennifer Palmieri published an article in the Washington Post called "The Clinton campaign warned you about Russia. But nobody listened to us." At the Democratic Convention, writes Palmieri, "we were on a mission to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton."

And so the Red Scare redux (Democratic edition) commenced. Amusingly, Palmieri gripes that news outlets didn't cover the story, which will come as news to anyone who read the news at the time. Washington Post headline from July 24: "Clinton Campaign—and Some Cyber Experts—Say Russia is Behind Email Release." New York Times headline from two days later: "Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked DNC." Wall Street Journal, same day: "Obama Says Experts Tie Russia to DNC Hacking." Which newspapers was Palmieri reading? None, apparently. Anyhow, nota bene: the primary had scarcely concluded, and already Hillary had an excuse at the ready in case she managed to blow it in November. She took a page out of Trump's book, in other words. Or perhaps he took it from hers.

Palmieri proceeds to sum up the Democratic game plan going forward, writing: "If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us." She adds that "Democrats should push for this relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview." And: "If those Republicans feel enough heat for helping Vladi­mir Putin attack the United States to assist Trump, they will abandon the White House and support an independent commission."

There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Russia-gate is a red herring. It has nothing to do with resisting Trump and everything to do with saving face. It's about regaining power in a manner that won't irritate the owners of the country. By hysterically insisting that The Russians Are Coming, the Democrats let themselves off the hook. After all, what could be more pressing than "an attack on our republic" by the sinister Russkies? That's serious stuff; much more serious than, say, financial corruption, or radical wealth inequality, or environmental devastation, or war. These are issues for another day. Of course, if they're ever redressed (big if), it certainly won’t be the Democrats who lead the charge. As Paul Street notes in CounterPunch,

the issues "Russiagate" pushes to the margins, including racism, classism, ecocide, and the undermining of the public sphere, are all problem areas for the corporate and imperial Democrats too. The dreary, dollar-drenched Dems have been deeply complicit with the Republicans in creating the rightward neoliberal drift of U.S. policy over the last four-plus decades. It is (never forget) their first and foremost function (in service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire) to keep left forces and sentiments marginalized. Russiagate makes perfect sense for establishment Democrats on numerous levels, including how it absolves them from guilt for blowing the 2016 elections (because "Russia and Comey did it") by running a horrible campaign with a terrible, highly unpopular and two-faced neoliberal presidential candidate atop their miserable ticket.

The Democrats, then, have decided to fight demagogy with demagogy. This is Hillary's "resistance"—the one she and her henchmen inaugurated last summer in Philadelphia—in practice. They get to feel, and appear (to the gullible), high and mighty while doing precisely nothing to mitigate the horrorshow that is Trump. It's beyond contempt. But it gets worse. On top of diverting attention from the substantive issues plaguing our country and the world, the pathological fixation on Russia-gate makes it necessary for Trump to create diversions of his own. This explains his crazy attack on Syria, a major-league crime for which he earned high marks from the "resistance." So not only did the Democrats and their media flunkies stir up an atmosphere that encouraged Trump to wag the dog—they rewarded him for doing so. Which means he's liable to try it again, and again, and again. How's that for a vicious cycle?

None of which is surprising, of course. This is how the Dems do business. Their job is not to govern so much as to stay in power, which they accomplish by serving the interests of their donors at the expense of their voters. Take a look at their adolescent response to the House's passing of the psychopathic American Health Care Act. "Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye." The cold-blooded GOP had just taken a big step toward throwing millions of Americans off their health insurance, killing many of them, and the Democrats … gloated. Again, this comes as no surprise. Several days before the vote, Heather Caygle wrote in Politico that "the best thing to happen to House Democrats since they pushed through the [Affordable Care Act]—and lost the majority as a result—could be the Republican drive to dismantle it." The reason:

"After seven years in the minority, rank-and-file members, many of whom were elected after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's tenure as speaker, are restless. There are even whispers of a push for wholesale leadership changes if Democrats don’t post big wins in November 2018."

The key words there are "wholesale leadership changes." Keen to avoid such a frightful prospect, House Democrats engaged in a bit of doublethink. While they naturally opposed the repeal of their own legislation, they were all too cognizant of the opportunity it afforded them. "I think we feel increasingly that public opinion has swung to our point of view," Congressman Gerry Connolly explained. "And that accountability is going to be a big factor in next year’s election because of this vote." That, fellow Americans, is why the Democrats found it appropriate to break into song as the GOP proposal sailed through. It made their job—staying in power—easier.

Given the heinousness of the American Health Care Act, it's easy to lose sight of how utterly wanting the existing arrangement is. Granted, if you live at, below or slightly above the official poverty line (which is too low), and in a state that accepted Medicaid expansion, you're accommodated. These are the folks Paul Ryan and his smiling band of miscreants are now kicking into the gutter. If, however, you're fortunate enough not to be poor, you're paying through the nose while the insurance and pharmaceutical companies make out like bandits. That's the upshot of commodified health care. It is, quite literally, profits over people.

Here's the score. If Obama had actually given the people what they want, and introduced a single-payer system, the GOP wouldn't have been able to repeal it without triggering something approaching a revolution (imagine if the Canadian government tried to pass the American Health Care Act). But since Obamacare is just another corporate-sponsored racket, signed into law by another neoliberal bribe-taker, Ryan et al. were allowed to carry out their latest attack on We the People, who continue to live under bipartisan siege in the Land of the Free.

If you still believe, in spite of everything, that the Democratic Party can be reformed into an actual democratic party, I've got some bridges to sell you. Or you can keep buying them from Hillary Clinton—if she hasn't already cleaned you out.

*(Image credit: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos/ Airman Magazine/ flickr).