I’ve been fantasizing lately about the idea of Stephen King’s Dome. If you recall, it’s this story where an invisible force field suddenly pops up around a town cutting them off from the world. I frankly didn’t watch the campy series, but the idea of the invisible dome, the barrier, conveys this contemporary idea of the bubbles of reality people live in. Though invisible, the barriers are real, constantly reinforced by discursive shepherding of the political class. Go against the rules of discourse and be expelled from the dome. Stay in the dome, however, and get nice and acquainted with the rules of the game – the Orwellian buzz words like “national interest,” “sanctions,” “presidential,” “optics,” “messaging,” “democratic” and so on. And what is the purpose of the game but to maintain the status quo with slight variations here or there to the left or right, but always maintaining the privileged narrative of the climate-denying jingoistic corporate consensus?

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For such a powerful, free, optimistic society that believes it can achieve anything, there is a great deal of nay-saying. Nay to universal healthcare, nay to rolling back empire, nay to stopping climate change. The radical center is remarkably pessimistic on a great many issues. All it can offer is pablum, bromides and incrementalism because while it uses the language of democracy, it’s more interested in capitalism. Question captialism at your peril. Instead, as Thatcherism made famous about this neoliberal economic system, “there is no alternative.” Go outside the consensus and you politically disappear.

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The taboos against speaking of any alternative are met with a gauntlet of smears, jeers, ostracism, and finally silence – all symptoms of the corporate takeover of every corner of public life and discourse. The late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this current condition “inverted totalitarianism.” I just call it postmodern totalitarianism – that’s our bubble-dome today. It’s walls are invisible. It’s barbed wire fences and brainwashing re-education camps rendered banal hidden in plain sight on the evening news. It’s doesn’t have that old imperial goose-stepping flavor, but a more stylish, entertaining, a subtler, more liquid form of perceptual manipulation. The U.S. doesn’t need a state-run media, it’s media is all too happy to spread the propaganda of the radical center, the unquestionable, omnipotent consensus of neoliberal policy. As Chomsky said somewhere, “any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.” Who needs a central government when you’ve got a corporate consensus like this? You know, sort of like a postmodern North Korea.

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But the dome’s power is derived from our collective agreement that it exists. If a critical mass of people stop believing in the basic pillars of the neoliberal system, it will crumble and join the rest of the old ideas of history – like slavery, imperialism, soviet block communism.

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Is the dome showing its cracks? The center waning? When is the tipping point for the radical implacable center? Is it withering under the weight of populist outrage, doubt, cynicism of all the supposed experts and pundits trying so hard to shape society? Is the radical center in fact done? A walking corpse waiting to be replaced by the new big idea? Has it reached its maximum point? How is this done, and what does it mean to finally fundamentally change the locus, the epicenter, of the privileged narrative?

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The Implacable Radical Center

The dome isn’t perfect. There are cracks all the time with an ideology that has so many contradictions and hypocrisies. But the magic of power is most people tend to ignore these details to get to the more comprehensible and feel good bits, the bits that fit the prepared narrative.
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It’s an interesting time now to witness how the corporate consensus has accepted the rightward swing of global politics. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how the alt-right of the Steve Bannon variety challenged globalization. But the rightward shift has shown to be only juicing the neoliberal order, stretching the excesses of capitalism and only further enraging the public. And for the power elite of Wall Street, they’ve embraced Trumpism’s advocacy of cheap money, and tax cuts for the donor class, and austerity for the poor. The GOP has kowtowed to their supposed usurper. The rightward shift was easier to absorb because it doesn’t fundamentally challenge the structures of capital or the power of the ownership class. Wall Street, like the Mitt Romneys of the world, may not like Trump’s style, but they’re okay with his substance as a rapacious capitalist. In this case, the dome is stressed but it fails to be a true fissure of the ideology. At least not in the area that one would suspect. The stress of the dome is having a boomerang effect on the other side. The progressive side.
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It is fascinating to watch is how the so-called liberal press bristles against progressives. It’s enough to make conservatives take notice of how there’s a difference between liberals and progressives. It must be confusing for reactive conservatives who thought Obama was a communist. Only now, with the rumblings of a grassroots left, does the dome show it’s true worry. The rising influence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) from nowhere to young progressive star has exposed the fault lines of the coming civil war in the Democratic Party. It’s a battle long foretold and long overdue. For grassroots progressives, AOC is a new champion heralding a new progressive dawn. For establishment corporate wing, the so-called New Democrats, or “Clintoncrats” if you will, AOC poses a threat to the status quo, a threat their own ties to the strings of power. Is AOC the harbinger of things to come? The legend growing around her – far larger than her formal power – is made up of this very anxiety.
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But the apprehension around the twenty-nine year old from the Bronx reveals less about a fledgling progressive rival to power, which is straightforward enough, and more about the zealotry of the status quo. The hubbub speaks more to the character of radical centrism itself, exposing the limits of centrist discourse. The tremors of a populist left are waking from a long, long slumber going back at least a half century. Everyone can seem to sense there is a major paradigm shift occurring and it’s interesting to see how the old narratives behave in their resistance, and in some cases, dissolution, as the faith in old narratives dissolve under the inevitable waves of history.
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Like Michelangelo whisking away at the stone to reveal the statue hidden within, so too is the radical center revealed, showing the stories of which it’s made. The Washington consensus goes by different names for different tribes. The populist right calls it “the globalist agenda” or “crony capitalism” of the swamp. The left sees a different face called “neoliberalism.” I’ll contend that the real lines dividing Washington are not between Republican and Democrat, elephant and donkey, but between the corporate capitalist Washington consensus and any other rival vision. It’s often complained how polarized Washington is on The Hill. But this is a phony distinction, for both party brands represent different special interests of the same donor class, which is more or less centrist-right with slight deviations, (but more tolerant of the right, as long as big business is favored. For the last fifty plus years, it’s been easier to call yourself a liberarian in Congress than a socialist). This is why the parties exaggerate their differences on the surface to disguise their real alliances to the corporate consensus and present the illusion of choice. The fact is big oil funded the campaigns of both Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and Rafael “Ted” Cruz in their 2018 Senate race in Texas, assuring that the real victor would be themselves. This is emblematic of politics today, political figures mere representatives of the donor class.
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The Trumpist populist right has the advantage over liberals because in spectacular fashion, they defied the polls and the experts and the pundits and the press. Their loss of faith in the mainstream media, frustration with corruption, and the antipathy for pay-to-play politics showed that all the pollsters and experts were completely wrong about basically everything. The invisible dome became exposed on 11/9 as words like “fake news” entered the lexicon. Anger, discontentment, hunger for change, fatigue from rampant corruption and propaganda, suspicion of old narratives, suspicion of buzzwords and “common sense,” of elites and managed democracy. They were 100% correct, and Trump is a symbol of the revolt of the masses.

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The establishment Democrats, who used to be the party of the people, sadly have become the party of the coasts, the urban professional class, elites who knew nothing of “real America” or “flyover country.” Their party’s been losing ground in the heartland and state houses for twenty years. They’ve almost become like the team predestined to always lose to the stronger party, like the Washington Generals were to the Harlem Globetrotters. Politics became like professional wrestling. After some melodrama and a brief fight, as per the script, the Republicans would go home with the belt. This burlesque of politics was the phony melodrama of the phony choice. It disguised the futility of change and reinforced the consensus of the privileged narrative. Until famously, of course, an actual orange-hued strongman came to power.
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These are the flavors of the legitimation crisis. If populism can make these waves on the right, we’re waiting with baited breath for the response from the left. And will see what lengths the corporate Democrats will go to in order to either appropriate and decaffeinate or quell leftist rebellion.

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The So-Called Liberal Media

A couple of weeks ago I heard comedian Jimmy Dore state a striking axiom that went something like “The Democrats exist to control the discourse.” They do this not only from the position of political power, but from the so called liberal press. As Noam Chomsky noted in Manufacturing Consent, it’s from this so called liberalism from the bastions of the Times and Post, the papers of record, that define the limits and territory of the liberal consensus. If a story or idea is too liberal for the Times – say something like affordable college and universal healthcare, and abolishing poverty – it’s exiled to Mars or something.
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Reading the Washington Post or the New York Times is a study in how language forms the limits of debate, where Sanders is called a “protest candidate” and the so-called experts of the political class question his “electability.” They’ll use the same language for any candidate not beholden to the corporate political consensus. They used it in the past to marginalize progressive candidates like Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and against political figures from the left like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. These later candidates were forbidden from the debates. The Green Party is also shut out from debates, maligned by the corporate press. There is an aura of neg-head paternalistic condescension as they warn that voting Green is “throwing your vote away.” They get democratic voters to group together to shame anyone who would vote their progressive conscience.
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According to the rules of the dome, the New York Times or the Guardian is as liberal as things are supposed to get – papers who themselves purge antiwar journalists, pacifists and activists. It’s always been this way. And why – because there is no monied interest in being antiwar or eradicating poverty. Pacifists don’t have lobbyists. The homeless don’t government contracts. Only political movements or causes that have corporate backing garner legal or judicial or journalistic or even historical concern.

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In the 1970s a sitting U.S. President and his goons famously resigned for upsetting the political establishment by planning a break-in of the DNC at the Watergate Hotel. This was a federal crime. But across the country at the exact same time the FBI was wire-tapping New Left and antiwar activists, jailing socialists like UCLA Professor Angela Davis and jailing and assassinating the Black Panther leadership. Penalties for the Watergate break-in were expected, but there were no political or judicial consequences for cracking down on socialists. That’s a favorite pastime in American politics since the era of Eugene Debbs. Like Joe Pesci in a mobster movie, the liberals are happy to join with the conservatives in an old fashioned beat down on a suspected “pinko.” To maintain power, the liberals joined with right wing hysteria in the Red Scare and McCarthyist era. They had to act tough on unions and socialists throughout the fifties and sixties. The liberals started the US involvement in the Vietnam to assert their toughness in the Cold War and their intolerance for leftists.

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This Cold War liberalism continues today as an excepted branch of the Democrat establishment, as evidenced by the war mongering liberal class – the Hillary Clinton types that are happy to support interventionist wars alongside the neocons. This is how liberals sound today, sounding like neocons from ten years ago – pro war and waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Bush Junior. They also subscribe to the same basic economic theory with modest reforms of the most egregious excesses. What is Obamacare but a conservative free market plan hatched in the Heritage Foundation ten years earlier? The only reason the Freedom Caucus doesn’t like it is because their right-wing donors (Kochs, Mercers, Aldesons, DeVoses) don’t want to pay their taxes. But The Affordable Care Act doesn’t even do what it’s titled – it doesn’t control the ballooning costs of actual care.

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When Republicans try to paint centrist liberals as “radical leftists” it is nothing but smokescreen. The truth is that conservatives know how to deal with liberals. And it’s a cozier relationship than what’s on television. Clintons, Kerrys, Obamas … these names don’t frighten conservatives. What really scares them, the boogyman that they look for in the closet before going to bed at night, is a real leftist. And more than that, the real leftist is also the boogeyman of the liberal because they shatter the allowed limits of liberal discourse. In fact, the existence of AOC in Congress shines a light on the dome we’ve been pretending doesn’t exist. In fact, being anti-socialist is the stuff that dome is made of. That’s how desperate the radical center is prone to defend the moneyed interests and we’re about to hear endless smears and conspiracy theories about this refreshing, authentic, fledgling grassroots power.
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The corporate Democrats might make some concessions of appeasement to lure votes. But they can’t be trusted with their exalting platitudes of “decency” and “democracy,” as the recent Kamala Harris ad shows. The left is suspicious of devils who promise a “decent” sanitized and deodorized version of neoliberalism. They aren’t looking for who is “electable” and “at least better than Trump,” despite them not having a strong platform. They aren’t looking for “just enough to win.” It’s not cute any more. They want real answers. It’s too late for kind capitalism and incremental reform, the stakes are too high. Hell, the earth itself is on the line.
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Changing the Tune of the Left

The language of politics on the left is changing. When Rashida Tlaib was overheard at a bar that she wants to “Impeach the motherfucka,” a few weeks ago, it made democrats hold their breath and Republicans clutch their pearls. What’s the big deal? Look who’s tweeting from the Presidential privy. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are used to hearing tough language from the Democratic Party. It goes against the family roles of congressional discourse. Republicans are stern, tough-talking dads. Democrats are conciliatory moms. A tough-talking woman of color … from the progressive wing … that draws attention. It is a bellwether for what’s to come.
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Liberals today are suspicious of big ideas, and do not allow themselves to change, and true to form, the Democratic Party does not allow change. The same party of the New Deal and the New Frontier. The same party of the Great Society. One can hardly imagine today’s Democratic Party having a bold vision that can make universal healthcare, make college affordable, stop the insipid wars, heal the environment and prevent climate catastrophe. For a country that thinks so much of itself, that thinks it can accomplish anything, it is remarkably depressed and ossified. As Frederic Jameson said as he mused on the proliferation of apocalypse and survivalist fantasies in our fiction, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism.” So that today, even proposing a modest curtailment of capitalism or propose the expansion of something like social security, it’s met with fierce reactive hostility. The Democratic Party today in fact has no vision, no message, no platform. It’s only “we’re not bad as the other guy.” They call for “bipartisanship” and “cooperation.” And if you’re a voter you might wonder, “why would I vote for a Democrat when there’s a Republican?”
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What would Harry Truman or Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson think of today’s Democratic Party? They’d have no trouble knowing what to do. FDR and LBJ would, however, face the same obstacles AOC does today, because she, as historian Rick Pearlstein says in a recent New Yorker interview, brings them “back to the future.” She reminds these establishment neoliberals what old school social democrats in the mid-twentieth century used to sound like with all their talk of plans and visions for the future. Her existence in the hallowed ground of Congress exposes their corrupt corporate emptiness, and they hate it. And the more they hate on it, the more they themselves are exposed. Or as AOC put it, quoting The Watchmen’s Rorschach, “I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!”
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An insurgency on the left will be much harder than on the right. This is due to the party rules for the Democrats. In 2016 the Democrats assured there would be no change by constantly reinforcing in the media that a vote for the insurgent Bernie Sanders is a waste because the “superdelegates,” or party insiders, have already chosen Hilary Clinton. The message: “don’t even bother to vote, folks.” It’s a move the party’s been doing since the 1968 convention in Chicago in which the Democrat insiders refused to nominate a candidate with an anti-war agenda. Pro-war Hubert Humphrey beat out anti-war McCarthy by collecting party-insider delegates who were Johnson loyalists without running himself in a single primary. Among actual votes cast, 80 percent of them were for anti-war candidates. The superdelegates are there for one thing – to prevent a populist small-d democratic uprising.

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These ghosts of Democratic machine politics are their undoing and it makes one wonder how they’ll try again in the future. The party has now loosened its rules on superdelegates, but the party chair, currently establishment hack Tom Perez, has the power of erasing any name from the ballot he wants if he thinks the person “isn’t a real Democrat.” Is this how the Democrats will again sabotage themselves so that they could lose to a Republican? They are the Washington Generals after all. The Republicans are the Globetrotters.

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The populist right is ahead of the liberals in this respect – they rightly are suspicious of the press, which exists in its own bubble of experts, polls, studies, pundits, the well-worn opinions of the corporate professional class. To shift left, progressive have to abandon the corporate press with all their games and warmongering and Kremlingate hysteria. The corporate press exists within the dome. It cannot and will not understand anything outside itself. It’s incapable of self-reflection as an institution, as The Young Turk’s Cenk Uygur gloriously trashed the National Press Club to their face. The extent that the liberal press can succumb to a populist backlash is in direct proportion to their failure to maintain the aura of legitimacy. The more they’re found wrong the more their legitimacy wanes.

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A Populist Coalition?

Is there another way? You wouldn’t know it from mainstream American media bubble, but there is something afoot. The French have an interesting grass roots solution. In 2017, they elected the least-worst candidate in young neoliberal banker Emanuel Macron over nativist right candidate Marine LePen. Macron is like a Clinton, a politically correct centrist, who turned out to be exactly what we all thought he was. He’s the very best neoliberalism can do. More handouts for the banking elite and austerity for the poor – crackdown on labor laws, longer hours, tougher pay, shorter weekends, weaker benefits, and the regressive fuel tax. Betrayed by the ballot box, the French took to the streets wearing yellow jackets and shut the country down. The press derided the troublemakers with various stereotypes of the uncouth hard hat class, “les beaufs,” or tried to sensationalize the few protesters who were violent – more alarmist discourse from the establishment press. But the truth is that the gillets jaune were not just right wing populists, but also left wing populists. It became hard to classify them in a singular way. This was old school, cross-spectrum populism and it had over 80 percent of popular support.
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Thought experiment. What if this cross-spectrum populism could occur in the States? What if the social forces bubbling under Occupy Wall Street merged with Tea Party populism? Or something new in which these two sides could be not so easily distinguishable? Could either extend their big tent to include parts of the other?
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The obstacles to this run deep in the American mind because there is a great big weapon that’s like a celestial cudgel that has historically divided the working classes. You’ve guessed it … race. It’s all about identity and the myths of the national narrative that power those myths. The myth of racial realism and whiteness and the purity, power and privilege that entails; versus the myth of multicultural universalism which capitalism appropriates and banalizes. It’s the demagogue’s noxious poison that’s his greatest weapon and his wall the greatest distraction from the social and economic inequality eroding democracy.

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The antidote for racial division is the embrace of a larger narrative, one that can create coalition of the populist movement beyond identity politics. Healthcare. Environment. Peace. The market has no answer for these issues. Only a people’s government can if there’s a vision to achieve it.
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Bursting the Bubble

As they say – or really Gil Scott-Heron – the revolution will not be televised. And frankly, knowing American history, I have no evidence to think that revolution will happen, but if it’s going to happen, it won’t originate on television news. Cable news will have plenty of air time to promote the consensus. It’ll be the hard sell of their accepted candidates, the ones the pundits will try to tell us are “electable” and “charismatic” with the right “messaging” to such and such demographics. They’ll bring out polls to tell us who is popular, who to support and whom not to bother with. They will do their best to shape, rather than report on, public opinion. The candidates will be paraded around like beauty pageant contestants under bright arc lighting with clever marketing with a hipster mononymic signs reading something like – “BETO.”
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Change doesn’t happen with this much encouragement from the neoliberal centers of power. Real change won’t be marketed like the latest iPhone. It won’t be packed neatly and endorsed by the “experts.” In fact, it’ll be called bad names. It’ll be made fun of, insulted, talked down to, ridiculed. The innuendo and probing and narrative construction will go on 24/7 for the next two years. Television news, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR – doesn’t matter which consumer infotainment product you subscribe to – will have pundits who cynically mock anyone with a plan or vision of anything substantially different that might disrupt the cracked dome of the status quo. But this is what change would look like. And if it actually does happen, television personalities will be completely astonished, dumbfounded, delirious, and chalk it up to a strange twist from “out of the blue.” They would have no idea.