In the wake of the 2024 beat-down, the Democrats and their various interest groups promised introspection–as in how the fuck did we get to a point where Trump could make it to the White House, not once but twice?

But, of course, it has never happened. They can’t even come clean about Biden’s dementia, as the reaction to the release of the Biden-Hur special counsel interview, demonstrates. According to Axios, which released the recording, Biden frequently slurred words or muttered, and “appears to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden certainly did not sound like someone who should be president, which immediately raises the question of who the fuck was running the country instead?

Asking us to believe that none of the senior members of his Administration, or ranking members of Congress knew anything about Biden’s condition is an insult. The corporate media deserves a lot of blame, because after the interview they insisted Biden was “sharp,” and slammed Hur’s assertions as politically motivated. And now, with Biden’s cancer diagnosis, we’re supposed to forget all about the dementia and sympathize with the “nice elderly statesman.”

Covering for Biden mental state is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a reckoning. I can’t be the only one who has read the Powell Memo, which was a to-do list for for the right-wing reactionaries, who are rampaging through government and civil-society. Jeebus! The corporate call-to-arms was written over 50 years ago. None of our political and economic elite can act surprised at what the second coming of Trump has wrought.

That brings up the elephant in the room. The reason for the lack of reckoning is simple. Every member of the “Resistance” to Trump has been cool with the policies that brought us to this point. It’s quite apparent that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. But do you see a reckoning by liberals or the Democratic Party? Don’t be silly. You see them putting out statements about how important business-friendly policies are going forward.

The party that enacted the New Deal and Great Society reforms and champion of unions and blue-collar workers in the twentieth century, abandoned its economic program, leaving the US political scene without an organized opposition to neoliberalism. Liberals and Democratic Party have fully accepted the logic of neoliberalism, where the “market” is a mysterious, all-powerful entity, and if your job disappears or your company is offshored, then it’s nobody’s “fault,” it’s just the implacable hand of the market.

The incentives behind everything we do have been affected by decades of neoliberal thinking, and a flood of neoliberal propaganda has swept all counter ideologies away. Everything has been swept away, including common sense.

Accompanying the triumph of neoliberalism has been the embrace of neoliberalism’s cousin–Identity Politics (IdPol). IdPol rewarded and rewards the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who largely make up the “modern” Democratic Party, which brings us to another reason why there hasn’t been a reckoning. The PMC “got their’s”. The goals of capturing positions of wealth and power by (educated and upper-class) woman, people of color and LGBT has largely been achieved, and so policies that benefit middle and working-class Americans languish. And because liberals have lost any inclination to frame politics in economic or class terms, they have no compelling counterargument to the Right’s seductive cultural account of lost American greatness.

You see it with the new Democratic-Abundance Caucus, where the fundamental problem with Ezra Klein’s Abundance, is that it carefully avoids taking aim at the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction of Wall Street and the corporatists that have eviscerated American communities. Abundance is acclaimed and well compensated precisely because it provides cover for the ongoing pillaging by the billionaires who fund both parties. Only by eliminating the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction that has come to dominate the economy over the past half century can you possibly hope to build an economics of wide-spread, equitably shared prosperity.

And, you’re really better off abandoning any sort of conventional understanding of the situation. Instead, view it as a crime drama, with competing criminal syndicates vying for power and control, with an also criminal corporate media covering it along party lines. See Matt Taibbi’s, Hate Incorporated, for a primer on the tribal aspect of the corporate media.

This works because a culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of how both political parties and the corporate media operate. Trump’s secret power is that he makes it visible. He’s like the party guest who spiked the punchbowl with Everclear, fucked the host’s wife, and lit the house on fire.

It’s a familiar dynamic:

“Hey man, did you see that?
Those poor cats are sure messed up
I wonder what they were gettin’ into
Or were they all just lost in the flood?”