Liberals used to be artists and comedians, poets and rebels, doing their best to stick it to the man with hearts and minds cracked wide open to the sky. They were cynical of power. They were where the art came from.

Now I can count on one hand the true comedians who use their gift to punch up to real power while late night megastars like Bill Maher rake in millions of dollars advancing blatant war psyops. Eminem raps about how much he loves the US military, how great Obama and John McCain are, and how badly Trump “tormented” and “slandered” Hillary Clinton during the election. And just today Jim Carrey — comedian, actor, painter and aspiring Buddha — has shared a painting of the president kissing Vladimir Putin’s butt cheeks, with the caption “They bailed him out, set him up and made him their stooge. With Trump in the WH, Putin may win the 3rd World War without firing a shot. #PuckerUpPOTUS”.

The spark has gone out from the eyes of the starry-eyed artists. The sincere impulse to apprehend the soul of the universe which drove them to create beauty has been snuffed out and replaced with stock portfolios and vapid award ceremonies. In the places where we used to look for truth and light we now find a bunch of stuffy millionaires cheerleading for the CIA and the new cold war. They are McCarthyists and conformists. They are amazingly uncool.

And so are the liberals who conform to the same worldview. Nobody with a hunger for truth and light will be drawn to the crowd that is wearing matching pussyhats and accusing people of treason through pursed-lips. Liberals are forcibly alienating that esthetic spark which gives rise to culture. And culture is upstream from politics.

This is unsustainable. People will necessarily wander away from it.

It makes perfect sense that this is happening. The plutocrats have no reason to support an artist who is constantly taking swings at them. The artists who do get advanced lose themselves trying to advance a worldview where it makes perfect sense that they’re doing so well while so many others are doing so badly, an atmosphere where true art cannot possibly thrive. You can’t create transcendent beauty and simultaneously advance the corporatist agendas of your masters. You just can’t.

This is not sustainable. The worldview being sold by the liberal Democratic establishment is inherently ugly and uninspiring. I’ve worked jobs as a graphic designer where I had to polish a turd for a paycheck, so I know what it’s like. You show up, you do your best, but if it doesn’t inspire the best you’ll wind up with is “I wish they’d Pokemon Go to the polls.” A whole team came up with that joke. A whole team of highly paid staffers.

During the Bernie campaign we saw the exact opposite of “Pokemon Go to the polls”. We saw hundreds of thousands of people acting from inspiration, creating memes, creating art, writing passionate essays, sharing powerful ideas. We saw the same thing happening on the other side, with the naughty boys on 4chan and The_Donald pouring out memes, songs and raw passion for their guy. It was fun. It pissed off their parents. It was cool.

Then “Pokemon Go to the polls” sabotaged Bernie, and the cartoon frog kids won the election.

Someone’s going to have to find an answer to the passion, enthusiasm and inspiration of the young conservatives, or they’re going to win the culture war. I don’t mind right wingers in general, but I don’t want them running our world. I’m doing my best to try and create a healthy planet for my kids, and that’s not going to happen if imperialist capitalism’s death march keeps metastasizing.

I’ve voiced some criticisms of Bernie Sanders, but the passion and inspiration of those who uplifted him was undeniably real. That energy is sustainable. Right now it’s kind of stagnated, diffused between reluctant support of the Dem establishment and “fuck this” DemExiteering, swirling in eddies around anti-Trumpism, corporate protest marches, chaotic counter-protests, and various movements to topple the Democratic party’s hegemony. But it could be unified again, just as it was unified behind Sanders.

That’s what really scares the elites who are choking America to death. Not Sanders; they were never worried about him. What they were deathly afraid of was the unified surge of genuine inspiration and enthusiasm, which they cannot possibly hope to emulate even with all the “Pokemon Go to the polls” campaign writers in the world. That was what they really sabotaged. If the left can find a way to shake off the pussyhat-shaped brain box the establishment has it locked in today, that genuine movement will surge forth and take over.

And then maybe we’ll start seeing the spark return to the eyes of the artists we used to love.

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