America’s Major Political Parties are Imploding

Within a single, short week, scandals and upsets have run amok at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, the latter of which has barely even had a chance to begin. In their resulting desperation, both of America’s juggernaut political parties are cannibalizing themselves at the altars of their respective conventions, and amid all the chaos, democracy is actually winning.

In the wake of a catastrophic RNC sideshow–which was poised from the start to be defined by the party heavyweights who refused to even show up, but ended up being overshadowed by Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech and Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse Donald Trump–the Democratic party is now taking fire for a scandal involving almost 20,000 emails, stolen from Democratic National Committee servers, which were leaked over the weekend.

The emails, which suggest a certain impartiality on the part of DNC officials as they discussed efforts to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign to undermine Bernie Sanders and thwart his bid for the presidential nomination, were released as a searchable database by WikiLeaks just days ago. DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has wasted no time in falling on the sword for her party by promising to step down after the convention this week, which she will no longer be speaking at.

Wasserman Schutlz has since been given a position as an “honorary chair” within the Clinton campaign.

Some of the more egregious emails exchanged between DNC officials during the primaries include one from committee financial officer Brad Marshall, suggesting that Sanders should be portrayed as an atheist in order to hurt his performance with Southern Baptist voters. Another was sent by Wasserman Schultz herself in which she calls the prospect of Sanders actually winning the presidency, “silly.” Other exchanges refer to Sanders as “obnoxious” and ponder strategies to make him appear to be a mess who ‘never ever had his act together.

And just for good measure, a bit of racism is laced throughout. One email, outlining a strategy to win over Latino voters, declares that “Hispanics” are “The most brand loyal consumers in the world,” and that they are “unforgiving” once that brand has lost their loyalty.

So far, the Democrats’ response has done little to put the authenticity of the emails into question. Rather, the DNC has attempted to recast this all as a hit on Clinton by Russia in support of Trump, pointing to a security breach in their servers earlier this month which was allegedly linked to Russian government hackers.

Speaking to ABC News Sunday, Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook deferred to the Trump-favored ‘experts are saying [some unverifiable conspiracy]’ method of deflection, seeking to shift the focus away from the content of the emails and appeal to fears of Russian espionage and foreign meddling in American Democracy by suggesting that this was all planned and executed to undermine the Clinton campaign and boost Trump’s favorability.

Clinton campaign chief suggests Russian hackers behind DNC leak, may be trying to help Trump https://t.co/u1pCAj4bNU https://t.co/PzKCWwjTfz

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) July 24, 2016

Perhaps it was. But ironically, this strange response only serves to cast Trump as a hero in the #DNCLeaks narrative, lending credibility to his anti-establishment rhetoric and suggesting that he, like Sanders, has been victimized by the party-first politics of the Clinton campaign. Trump made multiple references to such in his speech at the RNC convention last week, and wasted no time in seizing this opportunity to try to court Sanders supporters yet again via twitter:

Even though Bernie Sanders has lost his energy and his strength, I don’t believe that his supporters will let Crooked Hillary off the hook!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2016

The Democrats are in a total meltdown but the biased media will say how great they are doing! E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2016

Regardless, the strategy of martyrdom and deflection on the part of the Democrats hasn’t stopped the emails from being relentlessly scrutinized by media and voters alike, and with major protests by Sanders supporters already underway in Philadelphia at the site of the DNC convention, things are looking bad for the party as Clinton formally steps into the nomination and this whole election cycle flutters into a downward spiral before it has even officially begun.

There are plenty of reasons to be at least a little bit terrified at this point. There is a very real chance that the United States will soon be helmed by some orange-faced monstrosity so offensive to human decency that the depravity of his entire platform doesn’t even seem to register with a large portion of voters. This racist, egomaniacal byproduct of 1980’s capitalistic excess, who has called for banning an entire religious group from the US, could be the next Commander in Chief of the most powerful army in the world.

Alternatively, the future of this country may well belong to the very establishment that got us into this mess in the first place. The most likely candidate for the presidency is still the one who supported the military interventions that helped put Iraq and Libya in the hands of the most perverse Islamist organization the Middle East has ever seen, who as Secretary of State granted arms deals to dictatorships in exchange for donations to her foundation, who has intimate ties to the financial sector that recently drove our economy into a massive recession, and whose dynastic presidential bid has been assured of success this year by a Democratic party that was willing to treat any opposition to her as a threat.

These are the two possible futures for the United States, existing in superposition and awaiting orders from a voting public that seems to understand, in large part, that no matter what happens, everyone loses.

But fear shouldn’t be the main takeaway from the events of the past week, nor those that will follow. Fear is what drives the pervasive political strategy of convincing us that we must always be forced to choose the ‘lesser evil’ in an election. This strategy suggests that American Democracy is a swimming shark, and if we allow its established trajectory to be impeded for even a moment, the shark will die and democracy will fail. As such, the only responsible thing to do is bite the bullet and vote for the less nefarious of two candidates while dismissing all others as interlopers.

We may very well be presented with a choice between the lesser of two evils at this point in the election cycle, and it should go without saying which of those two evils is, in fact, lesser (it’s still Clinton). But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the momentary implosion of the parties that prop up this static, two-party system of lesser evil. Such an event is actually a net gain for our democracy, as it forces the prevailing players to stop listening to each other and start responding to the public.

This election was always Clinton’s to lose, and it still is. But for the first time in quite a while, two ostensibly anti-establishment candidates have entered the race and rattled the cage in a significant way. One was thrown onto the rails by the party he sought the nomination for, and the other was abandoned by his party’s stalwarts and left with the keys to the liquor cabinet. In both cases, however, the candidates’ respective parties have been spooked into searching for their souls, and lasting impressions have been made.

For Sanders’ part, there is evidence that his influence has helped move some of the more contentious issues surrounding his campaign in favor of candidates who might follow in his steps. Clinton has moved left on her previously inscrutable stance on college funding, and the DNC has voted for new rules regarding superdelegates in primaries, a system which had been criticized as weighing heavily against Sanders’ chances for the nomination.

On Trump’s end, the Republican party has split into two camps, with one simply washing their hands of the problem, and the other opting to go solemnly down with the ship, doubling down on an absurd party platform and hoping for the best. Assuming that there’s any future for this country worth prophesying about, Trump will lose the election, and the RNC will spend at least the next four years rethinking its entire existence. Potentially, what comes out on the other side of the next administration will be a party that has forsaken the bigoted bottom-feeding of its forebears and found some semblance of integrity to build upon.

These are the growing pains of a democratic system that has been long overdue for a reset, and is now facing down the dual threat of an emerging generation that simply does not take establishment politics for granted, and an indignant political movement that has little regard for standards of decency. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, but for now just enjoy the spectacle, and try to rest assured knowing that it’s all leading to something meaningful…probably.

Or just watch this video of Eric Andre crashing the RNC again, because this is about as meaningful as anything you’re going to see at these self-congratulatory political pageants, anyway: