History in a Handshake

The birth of a new People's Party

[NOTE: Just want to let you know that my fears were founded. I did in fact lose subscribers by wading into politics. Upon receiving last week’s post, four people dropped their By My Reckoning subscriptions. However, thanks to a surprising (and gratifying! 🙏🏻) number of shares and restacks, I gained well over a hundred new subscribers to console me! 😊 Welcome one and all!! I appreciate every one of you being here. And THANK YOU! to all my readers for your confidence and interest in my writing. It’s a dream come true.]

Looking at this photo, most Americans see either a kooky grifter selling out to a dangerous demagogue, or a principled apostate teaming up with Captain America. I see two stubbornly determined, battle-scarred rebels on parallel missions, finally converging — from the Left and Right — to wrest America back from the warping grip of profiteers in its halls of power.

And I am so on board this train.

I’m praying that it’s unstoppable.

One of the greatest ironies of my personal politics is that I might be a Democrat right now if that party hadn’t forsaken its role as champion of the Little Guy. You see, my first vote at 18 was to re-elect Ronald Reagan, and I’ve voted solidly on the political right (with one major exception for a Democrat governor) because I perceived Republicans as the defenders of free markets and advocates of personal responsibility — two concepts still believe provide optimally for prosperity and order. Well.

It’s been nearly two decades since I felt at home as a Republican. From where I stand, corporatism corroded the Republican party —the Party of Wall Street—first. As the champions of business, corporate donors were its natural constituency and their money indeed provided for a lot of influence in favorable legislation and lax regulation and, it turns out, lax enforcement of them. I was too committed for too many years to the sacred ideal that capitalism is the champion of individual liberty, the driver of prosperity, and especially to the faith that free market incentives would keep its guardrails solid, to recognize that crony-capitalism, its greedy imposter twin, was actually behind the wheel.

Time and technology unmasked him, though. The digital age arrived, allowing the industrial West to rapidly globalize. American businesses, in their pursuit of cheap off-shore labor and ever-expanding markets and bottom lines, began merging and morphing into multinational corporations. That rogue pretender successfully hid for years behind free-market slogans and false promises, while well-funded lobbies eroded the guardrails, selling-out American interests and hollowing out the political Right until the Republicans’ acclaimed role as champions of opportunity and free enterprise collapsed under the weight of their corruption.

Turns out that in a global economy, Big Business is not so much the ally of small business as its mortal enemy.

One of the greatest ironies of American politics (or maybe it’s just a tragedy), is that at the very moment that Democrats—The Party of the People—could have risen to new glory taking on the cronyism that put gravy-train profits ahead of American citizens, the Clinton administration threw the working class overboard to pursue a more lucrative constituency: that same corporate donor class lining the Republicans’ pockets. And so it has been through the last thirty years that U.S. party politics has provided double opportunity for global corporate interests to flourish at the expense of American workers. Crony culture has ballooned, metastasized, wholly capturing our systems for consumer protection, exploiting them for profit, compromising the health and wellbeing of citizens throughout society. And the voices of the people, and their influence, have withered accordingly as the dark money fueling the machine and steering our path has funneled unchecked out of the opaque depths of corporate coffers.

In the wake of Clinton’s redirect of the party, Democrats managed for years to camouflage their betrayal of the underclass by muddying the waters with their own imposter twin: “the Marginalized,” whose mantle of assumed victimhood they protected with the same zeal and rhetoric, but with zero acknowledgment that “privilege” (their favored term of obfuscation) is most universally experienced, most reliably measured, as a factor of socio-economic class. Thus the party’s pivot to fostering the politics of group identity — a 21st century retread of Marxist doctrine — has relegated the very people they once made righteous cause defending to a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton so famously cast them. And all without a hint of shame. Or apology.

And now we arrive in 2024, with this shocking photo that brings into focus the political fight of our times. It’s a battle that’s been raging for years and intensifying as growing swathes of Americans have discovered their voicelessness, yet all the while it’s been ignored or dismissed — even mocked — by legacy media and the special interests they serve.

That handshake between America’s two most vilified class traitors signals a challenge to the entrenched power of their fellow elites—the Uniparty—who have co-opted our institutions, degraded their value, and channeled prosperity and security out of reach of average citizens. To the cheering masses, that handshake signals: Game on!! The dispossessed, the disillusioned, the unheard of the Left and Right are merging to form a united front against the managerial class and the patron bankrollers behind the curtain: Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Tech—the bullies of Big Business.

More importantly, what that handshake signifies is a ground-shaking realignment of the American political compass that is now underway. Indeed, the days of the reflexive liberal versus conservative matchup are over. The horizontal plane of Left vs Right has finally swung to the vertical axis of authoritarian vs. liberty-minded, elitist vs. populist.

The first, rather comical tell is the recent parade of neocon militarists and old guard Republicans lining up behind Kamala Harris. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the spectacle of Democrats, who spent all the years until yesterday denouncing Dick Cheney as a war criminal profiteer and demanding his conviction by The Hague, now opening their arms to embrace his endorsement and stand in proud solidarity with him. Indeed, the Republican aristocracy’s march into Camp Kamala has exposed them all as Uniparty loyalists. By merging into a united front with the insider-appointed (un)Democratic candidate, who was once-upon-a-second-ago their political “enemy,” their disregard for the American middle and working class has been revealed. One might say it’s the pot making peace with the kettle, but in reality it’s just the Establishment regime converging from Right and Left, breaking character to close ranks in a desperate bid to preserve their death-grip on the wheel. Elites of the world, unite!

Second is the movement emerging from within those same Uniparty circles, seeking to erode the sanctity of America’s first and foundational right: the freedom to speak, especially politically. Donald Trump’s outsider upset election in 2016, falsely attributed to “Russian collusion,” served as the pretext for a campaign to control online information and the inconvenient discourse it begets. Then under the veil of “public safety”during the pandemic, government agencies and their media handmaids further amplified the alarm about misinformation, disinformation, and so-called “mal-information”—an Orwellian term for any truth that is inconvenient to those in power. Now, as the 2024 election approaches, the fear-mongering about the “danger” of free expression to the security of our democracy is becoming more open and unapologetic, boldly targeting the independent channels of X, Telegram, and Rumble through which criticism of elites has popularized across the West.

So here’s the question all thinking Americans should be asking themselves as they are spoon-fed the elite’s talking points in support of censorship:

Exactly when in human history have the good guys ever been the ones trying to censor speech?

Really stop and ponder that.

Because history and logic both show that freedom is the precondition for truth to prevail—its guarantor, not its saboteur. History and logic both show that actual champions of truth and justice do not censor lies, they expose them. They do not seek to thwart the ability of citizens to access information, they protect it. Indeed, the impulse to suppress speech, by definition, signals a distrust of knowledge in the hands of people, a fear of its reach and power. And that distrust and fear, by definition, signal a sympathy for control and deception—the tools of villainy. Of autocrats, dictators, totalitarians. Always.

Thus as the corporate legacy media parrots Uniparty propaganda, trying to condition Americans to put their faith in the authority of “experts,” to trust the managerial class to run things for our own good, to doubt the necessity of our freedom to speak openly and challenge their authority, the central question becomes: Why?

• Why are we being led to reconsider our God-given rights?

• Why do the powerful seek to gate-keep the speech of free citizens?

• Who would such censorship help, and who would it harm?

• Are citizens whose political speech is restricted actually free?

Looking back, even just through the last century, we find the obvious, bone-chilling answers.

Americans cannot afford to be convinced that that history lies behind us, that today censorship signifies something new and different—a virtuous means to noble ends, a path to harmony and peace. We are always living in history and so we cannot afford to forget that human nature’s capacity for corruption does not diminish through time. Its strategies do not change.

Only its weapons do. And its costumes.

Indeed, the wider world cannot afford Americans forgetting these truths, or what is required to persist as the land of the free.

And so I pray the unified coalition of MAHA & MAGA—America’s rising new People’s Party—prevails. I pray we achieve our aims of preserving our sacred rights, of restoring accountability, of renewing our health, returning real economic opportunity and optimism to everyday citizens. I pray we vote out the Cathedral—the Uniparty elites and their corporate cronies who are trying to manage us out of our liberties, accelerating us towards the cliff of global war and authoritarian control. May we see the disillusioned across the land, the disempowered Left and Right, unite to reclaim a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

For the peace and prosperity of our future generations, and the wider world around us.

Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash