Those who claim that there is no difference between the GOP and the Democrats are clearly mistaken, for that is hardly the case.
The GOP exists to throttle and suppress the best and noblest impulses of the right while assiduously doing everything possible to serve the mass-murdering, freedom-extinguishing corporatocracy that rules us all.
The Democrats exist to throttle and suppress the best and noblest impulses of the left while assiduously doing everything possible to serve the mass-murdering, freedom-extinguishing corporatocracy that rules us all.
Both parties are wholly corrupt, massively anti-democratic, and dominated by careerist sociopaths who work for the white-supremacist, corporate empire that since the 1980s has dismantled the rule of law, created more refugees and slaves than ever before in human history, revived fascism, and all but destroyed the ecosystem… endangering the future habitability of the planet and kicking off the Sixth Mass-Extinction event, while our oceans acidify and icecaps melt.
Both parties encourage their bases to battle each other and ignore the systematic war our government has been waging on America’s once-democratic institutions: our campaign finance and election systems, the free press, the judiciary, public education/parks/libraries, functioning infrastructure, the social safety net, and the middle class.
Both parties’ faithful partisans expend all their energies on hating those they are encouraged to hate, while Wall Street plunders our society for trillions. When the latest Princeton University study reveals that America is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy, they go on fighting each other. When Pew polling results confirm that the United States is viewed (more than any other nation) as the greatest threat to world peace, they go right back to reflexively trusting in the CIA, Pentagon, Washington, DC, and the corporate media — which Noam Chomsky has called out for “uniformity and obedience” that “any dictator would admire.”
Our leaders torture, overthrow democracies, prop-up and arm dictatorships, flood non-compliant nations with neo-Nazis and terrorists, assassinate citizens with no due process, and invest trillions in war and “usable” nuclear weapons while mocking as heretics any who speak of dialogue and diplomacy with our adversaries. And when the latest Harvard University/University of Sydney study shows that America’s elections are the most corrupt in the Western world, the partisans do not appear to notice. Although the GOP and Democrats have blatantly rigged one election after another in recent decades — while pointing to “illegal aliens” and “Russian meddling” — their obedient partisans have unquestioningly swallowed those paltry, xenophobic lies and resumed dividing and conquering America and the world on behalf of the most destructive regime in human history.
But there are important differences between the parties, the chief one being that the Democratic Party has been far more successful, in recent decades, when it comes to duping the center and brutally suppressing its base — far more successful than the GOP when it comes to pushing the corporatocracy’s neo-fascist, environment-collapsing agenda.
While the GOP is more overtly fascist and morally repugnant — with its overt homophobia, misogyny, and racism — the Democratic Party is the wing of the duopoly that continues pushing the Overton Window to the right, usurping every position the corporatist far-right once held (passing laws the GOP never could)… while throwing many poisoned bones of hollow Identity Politics to fear-addled, culturally “superior” rubes.
(Mind you, the GOP’s base has its own problems with moral “superiority,” linked to the deformation of Christianity in America into a fascist, racist, militantly authoritarian entity that is the very antithesis of Christ’s teachings. There are rubes aplenty in this myopic, reactionary, barely literate land of ours.)
But again, here is the key, most critical difference between the two parties in our corporatist duopoly:
One party has done nothing but discredit far-right fascism in recent decades (the GOP), while the other party (the Democrats) have made far-right fascism fashionable and palatable to the masses in recent decades, aligning the center-left with the policies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bush/Cheney, John Bolton, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Wall Street, the fossil-fuel industry, the Brookings Institution, PhRMA, Monsanto, and the Military Industrial Complex.
While, the GOP’s base is unruly, anti-war, libertarian, agitated/reactionary, and bigoted in the extreme, the Democratic Party’s base is obedient, pro-war, complacent/comfortable, and subconsciously bigoted (mostly against conservatives and Southerners, but also blithely indifferent to The New Jim Crow and the present anti-Arab-Muslim holocaust… if we are to judge them by their actions, that is).
While the anti-intellectual, less literate classes prefer the Republican Party, the more thoughtful, educated, and compassionate Americans prefer the rhetoric of the Democrats — while completely missing the big picture: the GOP and Democrats are devoted partners in a completely fucked marriage made in hell. Both aggressively serve the same despotic masters and are always willing to iron out their differences in the interests of the serially racist, warmongering top .001%.
The one priority they both share is their unflinching service to modern fascists.
But that doesn’t make them “the same.”
(And who ever said they were identical in the first place? That’s just another straw man intended to discredit America’s few remaining critical thinkers, those who put principle before party.)