“Yes we can” was the chant. No you won’t was the Republican promise

I want you to watch and listen to the words of a man who in 2008 stood on the precipice of truly making America great. He didn’t want to make America great again, he wanted to build on the achievements of a two centuries old American experiment. Build on the hard fought rights won on the streets by everyday men and women who over decades, had stood up and said NO to legislation designed to marginalise and divide. Men and women who were beaten harassed imprisoned and even killed fighting for the rights millions of hard working Americans enjoy today. Theirs was a fight to defeat the injustice imposed on the vulnerable and the unheard. It deeply saddens me to reflect on what the US has become. It is a salutary lesson that the progress of decades can be washed away in a matter of days, if malign forces are aided and abetted by the highest court in the land to torch two and a half centuries of the rule of law, as set out by the founding fathers.

Barack Obama could have been the antidote to the creeping reality we are facing in these darkest of times. His tenure in the White House revealed a dark underbelly that exposed the smouldering embers of a white Christian America who had never accepted desegregation. Dangerous hard right voices used the colour of his skin as kindling for a new fire of discrimination that spanned every minority group in America. From immigrants, to the LGBTQ and trans communities, the poor, the vulnerable and disabled. These became the fresh targets of a slow moving societal cancer consuming the minds of those who were to become the MAGA cult.

Be in no doubt, politically driven hate is like a wildfire. Unchecked, it consumes everything before it and we my friends, ‘we the people’, are currently the only firebreak between Trump and an authoritarian dystopian state. Congress and the judiciary are smouldering, close to ignition. Regrettably, I am now of the firm belief that revolution is knocking on the door and will destroy America if this march to imperial power and theocratic rule is not halted.

There is much talk about the disarray Democrats find themselves in right now. The narrative is, Democrats are an ineffectual impotent force. Right wing talking heads as you would expect, are painting AOC and Bernie Sanders as ‘socialists’. They believe that America’s ludicrous obsession with the post cold war hangover from Soviet communism, will delegitimize their agenda. How ironic then, it comes at a time when the President of the United States is aligning American foreign policy with that of a Russian war criminal.

Regardless of the current narrative, AOC is a real threat to Republicans They joke that they love her because nobody will vote for a communist. Aside from the fact they wouldn’t know a communist if they tripped over one. If America is bold and wise enough to embrace her, she and the likes of Pete Buttigieg can steer America to a better more just and equitable tomorrow. A tomorrow where ambitious change can be tempered with the required pragmatism to rescue America from the arms of authoritarianism. Before you ask why I’ve suddenly dropped Bernie from the conversation, rest assured I haven’t, his vision is a central tenet to steering the US to calmer waters, he just needs to be able to execute it in a senior special advisor role.

To navigate the challenges of the future, we need to learn from the past. In an America where Republican mediocrity and catastrophic decision making had dominated politics for 8 years before Obama. Let’s not forget, George W Bush had inherited a budget SURPLUS of $128,2 billion from the Clinton administration. I want you to take a moment and pause to consider the consequences of an administration driven by ‘known unknowns’, fiscal incompetence and catastrophic banking deregulation, which resulted in the 2008 global recession. It’s like I’m writing about last week in America?

It’s absolutely emblematic of the fact that 11 out of the last 12 recessions have been presided over by Republican administrations. This is REALLY IMPORTANT in the context of how we arrived at where we are today. The Bush administration was a textbook example of how bankers and the military industrial complex drove the agenda. That’s before we talk about the fossil fuel industry and big pharma. Bush was simply another useful idiot for the self same corporate interests that bought the White House for Trump.

He left behind a budget deficit of $456.6 billion and an economic IED for Obama to make safe without a blast suit. Once again, a democrat had been left to shovel up the big steaming pile of excrement Republicans had left behind. Just as Trump left a $3.1 trillion deficit for Biden to clean up. I often listen to dissenting voices even from the black community who claim the Obama administration was a ‘missed opportunity’ and I fully intend to address why this is a deeply misguided assertion, but I’ll have to do that in a separate post given the complexity of the answer.

Let’s be in no doubt, from the day Obama stepped into the White House, the war for the future of America began. This wasn’t about foreign adversaries or what was good for Americans, it was now about the stoking an underground civil war to make America white again. The chief architect of that plan was Mitch McConnell in partnership with the Heritage Foundation and American corporate interests.

Leonard J Pitts of the Austin American-Statesman said of McConnell on Obama:

“Why don't you just go ahead and call Barack Obama the n-word?

You know you want to. It'd probably do wonders for your blood pressure. And it would free you from the tiresome charade of using coded language to say the same thing.”

In November 2010 in a speech to the Heritage Foundation McConnell said

“Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office. But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things…..”

It is difficult to overstate the level of obstruction Republicans practiced on the Obama administration under McConnell’s leadership. In December 2019 he said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox:

"The most important decision I made in my entire political career was not to fulfil a Supreme Court vacancy" following the death of Mr Scalia”

When asked about the only 28% of judicial appointments Obama had managed to fill, he said laughingly:

"I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration."

Love him or hate him, McConnell was a skilled political operator and a key asset to the Republican Party. Not that you would know that, since Trump threw him in the wood chipper along with everyone else that criticised him.

The takeaway from this is, Democrats have never been able to obstruct in opposition anywhere near as effectively as the Republicans and there’s a very good reason for that. The number of sleeper Republicans in the Democratic Party. It really is as simple as that and it’s coming to the fore even in this moment, as a constitutional crisis envelops America.

If you cast your eyes across the political battlefield back in 2008. On one side you had Barack Obama, the poor, the vulnerable, hard working immigrants seeking a path to citizenship, women, the descendants of slaves and the LGBTQ+ community. On the other side, you had wealth, greed and the Heritage Foundation, with one single mission, to crush a ‘n****r’ with ‘the audacity of hope’. I’ll conclude this paragraph by saying never have I thought it appropriate to use the n word. However, in the context of this post, it does feel absolutely appropriate.

America was about to bear witness in real time, to the beginning of the end for Representative democracy. The US had been given the gift of one of the greatest agents for change in a generation, and Republicans within hours of him entering the Oval office, were planning his political assassination. Obama was not only going to have to rescue the economy, he was going to have to go to war with the power of corporate America who had bought politicians to fight him from both sides of the aisle. He was the leader of a party where a corporate cancer had been implanted to eat his own party from the inside out. Those who had screamed ‘Yes we can’ were oblivious to the fact that corporate interests had people on the inside dedicated to ‘No you won’t’.

There is much talk today about the auto industry and what it delivers to the US economy. Let’s be very clear, In 2008 Republicans opposed the plan to bail out Detroit automakers, calling the U.S. industry a “dinosaur” whose “day of reckoning” was coming. They said an auto bailout would only postpone the industry’s inevitable demise. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama (senior Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee), said, “Companies fail every day and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down.” In short, there would be no US auto manufacturing had Obama not stood his ground, so Republican claims that they want to bring manufacturing back to America is frankly beyond hypocritical.

It’s hardly surprising that the Republican Party spends much of it’s time attempting to rewrite history. In 1945, more steel was produced in the state of Pennsylvania alone than in Germany and Japan combined. This continued well into the Cold War era too. lest we forget, it was under GW Bush that the US lost around a third of its manufacturing jobs in the search to boost profits using cheap foreign labor.

American arrogance is nothing short of breathtaking. China didn’t hatch out a plan to steal American manufacturing jobs, American corporations flocked to China to take advantage of cheap labor. Nobody from those companies asked to check workers had good working conditions. They couldn’t give a damn, no more than they gave a damn about the American workers they had just thrown under the bus. It was as it is today, purely about the bottom line. Extensive child labor and exploitation at the time, was just the price of doing business. Corporate America is nothing if not consistent in it’s abuse of workers. The American government had spent decades demonizing communism to then invest in a communist regime in exchange for cheap labor. There are no principles when it comes to profit.

I’ve already covered what China did with that money which you can read about below.

Friends, what I can tell you without fear of contradiction is this. Democrats CAN win this war, but not with the current leadership team. Just my personal opinion, but while there remains the belief among Democrats that they did not fail the American people in November, they can’t win. It demonstrates they believe they’re not the problem when they ABSOLUTELY ARE THE PROBLEM. For far too many Americans there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats and that is a MASSIVE problem.

Americans who identify as Independent now stands at around 40%. This has been a slow shift since 2000 when the number was a little over 30%. That represents a gradual erosion of faith in the binary choice on offer. It presents a problem for both parties, but I suggest it does favour Democrats, because the Republican base no longer holds the center ground. The issue though, is the slow creep to the right from Democrats too, and this has led to political apathy from working class voters who no longer feel heard by either party. Truth is, just 30% of eligible voters voted for this dystopian nightmare. That leaves a lot of voters who turned their back on the electoral process and Republicans are certainly happy about that. The message of ‘Vote for us because the other guy is a fascist’ was lazy and left voters thinking ‘Is that the best you’ve got?’

Democrats are petrified and risk averse to the point of paralysis. I’m more than aware that crowd sizes mean little in an era of social media, but I would defy anyone to dismiss the success AOC and Bernie Sanders have had out on the road across America. The audiences seem in many cases to be politically agnostic, rallying under the banner of ‘Americans deserve a fair shake’. They feel betrayed by politicians of all colors, but are terrified of the consequences of letting oligarchs dismantle the foundations on which America was built. Not least of which, because there’s no place in the new world order for them other than as battery farmed workers living off the scraps from the oligarch’s table. It’s no longer political, it’s a fight for survival. As the tariffs and inflation kicks in, that survival will become more and more desperate.

I believe AOC and Bernie have tapped into a rich vein of resistance that if mobilized skillfully, can turn the tide against tyranny. David Hogg made a controversial, but in my view important statement about primarying what he calls ‘ineffective Democrats’. I actually feel he was generous in his statement. I would have been far more blunt.

I’ve been a longtime admirer of David’s relentless campaign for gun reform. He and I have had exchanges on X relating to videos I created to raise awareness of school shootings.

I applaud his election as Vice Chair of the DNC. I know James Carville, whom I also respect for his service to the Democratic cause, has been highly critical both of David along with AOC and Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately I believe James is lost in yesteryear politics and has sadly become part of the problem rather than the solution.

There is absolutely no doubt, a 27% approval rating from the Democratic base is a vote for change and you would have to be deaf not to hear that. I believe David understands the need to effect change strategically, as is evident from this clip. In my opinion, he gets it. It’s not wrong to ask sitting democrats what do you stand for? I have a fundamental disagreement with James Carville’s position which plays completely into the risk averse same old same old position. If you have become so fearful of your corporate donors, my argument is, why are you in the Democratic Party? I was under the belief that this was about the American people, not American corporations allegedly ‘sympathetic to the Democratic cause’. Am I wrong?

My question is a really simple one, who are the Democrats? I’m am being genuinely sincere when I ask that question. I think it’s a question every Democratic representative at both state and federal level should be asking themselves right now, instead of composing their next fundraising email to send to the people who have lost faith in them. The current argument that we can’t do anything until the midterms is BS. Go read Mitch McConnell’s book and learn how to obstruct. Get to work on the handful of Republicans who still have a shred of integrity and open a dialogue. Go out into EVERY red state and talk to voters, because never have die hard Republicans been more receptive to ending the chaos that looks set to drive them into poverty.

My first new video of 2025 will be released here on Substack at 6pm ET on 22nd April. I hope you will take the time to check it out, because it will give you the first insight into my vision for 2026. More important, it will demonstrate to those investing in a subscription to this Substack, where their money is being spent.

I won’t be posting other than notes tomorrow, as I have a video production session to finish editing the new video. Thanks again for your continued support.

Martin