One of the astounding things after the 2016 election was the Democrats' failure to engage in self-reflection to understand what they did wrong and figure out how to improve. Instead, they've indulged in a three-and-a-half-year orgy of blaming everything (mostly the Russians) and everybody (mostly Trump) for their election failure. Matt Taibbi, who writes for the Progressive Rolling Stone magazine, is one of the few Progressives who has managed to resist this impulse.

Taibbi consistently looks at the Democrat party with the eye of a man who wishes he could fix it rather than someone who is looking for a scapegoat to relieve the party of responsibility for its failings. In his latest outing, though, Taibbi seems to have given up hope. He's no longer trying to be a reformer; he is, instead, a Cassandra, looking into the future and chronicling what he sees as the inevitable death of the Democrat party. It is a scathing look at the dying convulsions of the world's oldest continuously existing political party.

The article begins with some optimistic Bernie Bros looking forward to the outcome of the Iowa caucuses, something they assume will end in Bernie's favor. All of them, says Taibbi, ended up in Bernie's camp because they felt betrayed by the system and believe that Bernie, betrayed as well, is their political avatar:

Two elements are near-constants in Sanders crowds: life experience with a broken system (Grace told a story of corporate-captured regulators killing an animal rights bill he worked on), and feelings of sympathy for a Senator also seen as getting the short [end of the] stick from establishment cheats.

For these voters, 2020 is about revenge. Every media person who dismissed Bernie, every change in debate rules to aid a New York plutocrat, every story about "troll fighters" aimed at the Bernie campaign — all of them would be destroyed:

Sanders supporters felt sure they'd overcome. With a win, all that invective was just another indication of righteousness. "It just tells me he pisses off the right people," Grace quipped. Then he walked off to catch the victory speech, and all hell broke loose.

The hell Taibbi describes isn't the utter fiasco in Iowa, something that put the lie to the Democrats' claim that they are so skilled in reason and technology that they can and should be made responsible for all decisions, large and small, in America. Iowa was, writes Taibbi a week that "reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a "botched" vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election."

Worse is the fact that the Democrats have become so politically entrenched that, in this election, they are the reactionaries. Iowa and the "flatulent end of the party's impeachment gambit" revealed to the world that Democrats are "an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit."

Taibbi looks at — and then dismisses — the boring Democrat candidates, all desperately scrambling to distinguish themselves without having the dynamism to gather together more than one or two groups of the Left's intentionally fragmented demographics. Each had a flavor of the week moment, but none could (or can) last.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Iowa, people were met with incomprehensible rules that suggested a plan to muddle things so badly that the winner would be impossible to determine, giving free rein to the party hacks:

What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. [snip] No matter what result emerges, it's likely many individual voters will not trust it. [snip] [T]he overall impression was a clown show performance by a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.

Taibbi's right: the Democrat party is dying, and it's dying because it's in the clutches of power-hungry plutocrats. At some point, those Democrats still open to reason are going to realize that President Trump is the real culmination of the "Occupy Movement." Remember that Obama-era protest against the 1%? The Democrat pooh-bahs are the 1%.

Trump, by taking the regulatory yoke off American necks, and unleashing American energy, innovation, and creativity, has freed the 99%. Contrary to fevered Progressive rhetoric, Trump is not a plutocrat or an oligarch. Instead, he is the answer to the modern Democrat party's plutocracy and oligarchy, one that is seeing a Democrat civil war between Bernie's pure, nationalizing communism on the one end and the Democrat Party elite's fascistic fusion between government and big money on the other.