This weekend the political crisis in America may be entering an even more dangerous phase–a phase that I predicted was possible months ago. On Friday,Trump reportedly asked Republican state legislators in Michigan, where he lost the popular vote, to come to the White House. Trump no doubt wants them to select electors who will vote for him, not for the winner of the vote in Michigan, Biden.
The veil of Democracy in America is being ripped away from the body politic right before our eyes. Not only can the Electoral College thwart the popular vote for president; but there are even more nefarious ways for political elites to circumvent the Electoral College if they don’t like it.
The electoral college is, of course, the means by which the popular vote for the president is prevented. Instead of Democracy’s principle of ‘one person, one vote’, we have electors who are selected by their state legislatures who then cast their vote for president. That’s the appearance. But it’s even worse than that.
The timeline for the Electoral College to meet and cast their votes for president is December 8. Each state’s vote in the Electoral College’s must then be sent by December 14 to their state’s governor, who must send that decision to Congress by December 23. Congress then confirms the president by January 6. That’s the actual process how presidents are ‘elected’.
The problem is that state legislatures select the electors who vote in the electoral college. But the electors they select don’t necessarily have to vote for the candidate the majority of the people of their state vote for. The legislature can select electors, or direct the electors they already selected, to vote for a candidate who the people of the state didn’t vote for. Court decisions prohibiting this are not clear cut, so it can be argued the legislatures can select the electors who can vote for whatever candidate they want. Even recent US Supreme Court decisions on this are ambiguous.
By calling Republican state legislatures from Michigan today to the White House–an act that in itself is intimidating, since Republican politicians know Trump can unseat them next primary–Trump is clearly attempting to ‘convince’ them to select, or order, electors to vote for him instead of Biden. If successful in Michigan, Trump will no doubt target another couple Republican majority state legislatures to do the same between now and December 14. Like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia are all Republican state majority legislatures. That’s how he’ll try to ‘reverse’ the electoral college vote in his favor, or at least he clearly now thinks he can or he wouldn’t bother ‘inviting’ Republican state legislatures from Michigan to the White House. He’s not doing so for any other obvious reason.
Those who disagree with this analysis may say, ‘even if he convinces Republican state legislators to select electors for him, the governors of those states will not send the vote of those ‘reversed’ electors to Congress on December 23′. So he won’t get away with that maneuver.
But wait. Not so fast. Trump can then use that refusal of a governor to send Trump electors to Congress as an excuse to call in the US Supreme Court to decide the issue. Trump’s lawyers will then argue to the Court there isn’t a complete electoral college vote total to determine the outcome of the election if one or more governors don’t send in the results. The Supreme Court would then likely ‘pass the buck’ and order the decision on the election referred to the US House of Representatives, per the US Constitution.
Here’s where US Democracy is further revealed as the ‘fig leaf’ it is. In the House of Representatives the vote for president is done by one vote per state, not by total representatives. 435 Representatives don’t vote if the election is thrown into the House, which has a majority of Democrat legislators. No. Each state in the House gets just one vote. All the states with a majority Republican state legislature get to cast one vote for president. With Republican politicians cowering everywhere, fearful of Trump’s 70 million Republican voters, guess how they’ll vote in the House?
And if Trump has more red state Republican majority legislatures–which he does–the majority of red states would out-vote blue states by a vote of around 27 or so to 23. Trump wins!
If this sounds incredible it is nevertheless arguably legal and politically possible. And we know Trump will go to any length over the next 60 days–regardless if it results in the destruction what’s left of even the fig leaf of Democracy in America. Even if it leads to a political breakdown of the system or violence in the streets between Trump’s supporters and the rest of the country’s voters and citizenry (which Trump would no doubt like to see as well).
By calling Michigan state legislatures to the White House today it is clear this is the trajectory Trump now has in mind. We should all be forewarned! The fight to restore what’s little left of American Democracy may just be beginning.
Mural by Diego Rivera showing Karl Marx, in the National Palace in Mexico City – Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber – CC BY-SA 3.0
I keep writing the same anti-populism piece in a different way. Until the disdain for the American people changes I think I should keep writing it. There’s talk about dead people electing Joe Biden. It’s fake news and anyone who peddles such nonsense should be ashamed. The only dead person who propelled Joe Biden into office was Karl Marx. Like Donald Trump, Joe Biden will be forgotten. Just as Trump is a means to stop Marxism, Biden is a means to stop Trumpism. They will be used and discarded, and rightfully so. Both men have egos disproportionate to their worth.
Despite his frequent denials of being a Marxist, Joe Biden was constantly called one. Biden is a career dud on a national scale. Biden only became a winner once he started to get compared to Karl Marx. Any person should deny a comparison to Marx, but only out of humility. Biden denied Marxism because he hated it. Still that didn’t stop the association being extremely positive for him, including an offbeat assertion from Bernie Sanders that Biden would be the next FDR.
By the way how about an election analysis that actually makes sense? Ralph Nader said that this election was a big loss for the left because Sanders and Warren types were boxed out completely of Biden’s election. Why? Because these people bowed to the Democratic Party. Most on the left did actually. It might be worth it to rid ourselves of Trump. But I don’t think so. Biden is damn lucky a man named Karl Marx lived a life worth remembering many years ago. Biden and Trump may be old demented men but they just got beat by a dead man.
Like it or not the idea of abolishing property isn’t a radical idea. I thought I was more or less cancelled from the left when I defended looting. Many “anti-racists” said people of color could never loot (a fairly obvious point about Black Lives Matter, a peaceful organization for many years prior). But my point was simply that a theoretical looting by poor people should be defended even if it’s only a thought exercise. Abolish property and house the homeless.
The number of people in the Twin Cities boarding up their property with Black Lives Matter signs was frankly disgusting. These same people who said people of color could never burn down buildings (yes it was white supremacists who did the destruction) also made the assumption that Black Lives Matter must be the ones during the looting and therefore to protect property they should pretend not to be racist.
They completely missed the point. So did the Minneapolis City Council who just voted to bring in out of town police for a half million dollars. The council said they were going to defund the police during mass demonstrations. But liberals and lefties (this is why I contested there was no left) insisted that the demonstrators were either not Marxist (absurd given their supposed attitude towards property) or not left (the alternative being theoretical rather than direct action). Let’s face it. Most people opposed to these protests didn’t want to be shot or get a criminal record that would endanger their ability to make a living. Just admit that and stop this racist bullshit embedded in white guilt. Being a human being in all its complexity is courageous. If you want to do more, great, but don’t undermine others if you don’t.
If you are against racism, but don’t support the riots against white supremacy, then you are living in contradiction. I think this is a key point. We can certainly debate the tactics but I do think if someone says systematic racism or whatever is bad but doesn’t support the movement against it then they simply don’t want change. Or at least this person is not willing to undergo the painful loss or the unsettling risk of real change. In any real rebellion things are lost and things could get worse. To oppose a rebellion is to support the status quo. To substitute the present rebellion for a theoretical “peaceful”’one also supports the status quo.
I don’t really buy into the whole “what would MLK have done” question. That was a different time. So much has changed in our economies, our technology and the way we relate with each other, it just seems silly to compare historical moments. Looking for our new King, or worse still denouncing anything that falls short, will bring us nowhere. What is going on now? When King was alive, everyone was wrong about him. After he died, he’s a hero. But he never gets to respond to the false characterization of his message. Let’s not make that same mistake.
It is here where I wonder if a comparison to Dr. King actually works in the favor of the present day. What was the basic rationale of an organized bus boycott, for example. It aimed at the entire money making system and it took away a means of making money. Once there was more money to be made in having equality, who would segregate save a sincere ideologue? Likewise, I would argue that the mass protests has been very effective at incentivizing the local government in the Twin Cities and beyond to take Black Lives seriously. The city wants to host big companies. Fine. But do it on our terms.
Now the criticism that comes at this movement must not be as reactionary as “looting is bad”. Generations of the rich looting from the poor and now the poor loot a little. Who cares. Seriously. If anything it makes our society more equal and therefore more safe. From a moral perspective a poor person should always be allowed to steal from someone richer than them. Always. Nobody makes money ethically or without blood on their hands. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you have money, fine. But as long as there is one person who lacks what they need, any excess money should be taken from the rich person.
It brings up broader questions about the law and property itself. How do some people have things and others don’t? It’s not right and we should never commit violence but we should change the law to one where we abolish all forms of suffering caused by ownership and inequality. Everyone wants this. How couldn’t everyone want this?
Let’s end homelessness, hunger, thirst, violence of all kinds. Do I really have to listen to another minute about what Jesus would have thought about Q? He didn’t talk a lot about pedophiles actually. More focused on poverty.
Anytime I hit Q (QAnon) I know I have gone off topic. If only everyone agreed on that. Ok what was my original point? It was that I am going to keep saying the same thing until the end of time: Trump is not working class. Trump is not working class. Trump is not working class.
Why do we have to keep saying it? I listened to Thomas Frank’s appearance on Useful Idiots. I confess I did it out of a “hate listen”, I had an itch that needed to be scratched. Why was this idea of Trump as populist repeating itself and why was it annoying me so much?
Perhaps it was just personal experience. Poor people I know hate Trump. Rich people I know like him. It seemed so cruel this narrative of blaming poor people. This narrative of people “voting against their interest”. It is so condescending to the intelligence of poor people and so backwards to blame people for their own oppression. It’s dangerous in a couple of ways.
Let’s break it down. The first implication is that the people, when left to their own devices, vote for Trump, and therefore should be controlled. The second implication is that Trump is of the people and therefore he should not be controlled. Both willfully deny data about voter turnout and voter suppression. Take Juan Gonzalez at Democracy Now making an excellent case that it was actually historic Latinx turnout that sent Trump packing. I also am beyond disgusted with this scapegoating of white women as Trump loving agents of the police state while the left refuses to address the epidemic of domestic violence taking place in right wing (and left wing too of course) homes. The hate for poor people is appalling.
Thomas Frank brought something more to the table. He made the argument that populism isn’t right wing and that the mainstream media distorts it. This is a refreshing argument and more than I expected from the Useful Idiots podcast. However it doesn’t quite go far enough.
Just as we must abolish fossil fuels, borders, etc. we must also abolish the use of the term populism.
Unfortunately all analysis under neoliberalism runs far away from Marx while at the same time always invoking him. Marx is relevant today because he cuts through the massive amounts of information, true and false. Rather than vaguely criticize the mainstream we should explicitly embrace Marx. Too often this anti establishment criticism misses its target and ends up accepting things that are false just to confirm its own alienation.
For Marx, ideology was born out of class. For today’s critics class itself is merely an ideology. There is nothing real about the relationship one has to class in America because the question is always about desire, not class. As long as people can have their own personal interests channeled through Trump, who cares about their class interest? For the rich personal interests may appear to hide class interests but it’s never the case. The rich endorse Trump because of class. They may believe they have another reason but Marx teaches us the class status itself produced the reason they think they support Trump. It’s not that people don’t know what they’re feeling or what they want it’s just that Marx was the one who could tell us why we wanted what we wanted.
Noam Chomsky hits it on the head when he describes the scapegoating by the ruling class: “Since the actual causes are hidden in obscurity, it must be the fault of the undeserving poor, or ethnic minorities, or immigrants, or other vulnerable sectors. In such circumstances people grasp at straws. In the US many working people voted for Obama, believing his message of “hope” and “change”, and when they were quickly disillusioned, sought something else. This is fertile soil for demagogues like Trump, who pretends to be the voice of working people while undermining them at every turn by the brutal anti-labor policies of his administration, which represents the most savage wing of the Republican Party.
It has nothing to do with “populism”, a concept with a mixed history, often quite respectable.”
The Marxist term often used for this “voting against your own interest” is ‘false consciousness’ but this again implies a certain freedom that is not accessible to poor people. The cost of resistance is always high. Risking arrest, violence from the state, deportation, eviction or loss of job/benefits is simply not available to most people. Many are courageous and resist anyways, many have other commitments to family or local causes that prevent explicit political resistance. Needless to say the coronavirus pandemic has made things more precarious.
The other almost contradictory claim made by most people who use the word populism is that the Democrats are intelligent and therefore the Republicans are more working class because they’ll get a beer with you or whatever. I struggle with both those assumptions. The Democrats give a bad name to the Ivy Leagues and the Republicans are on something far harder than beer.
Structurally as unions are squashed and safety nets outside of employment are cut there is more risk to risk. Marshall Pomer’s argument regarding upward mobility also misses the mark. The idea that the poor falsely believe in upward mobility and therefore don’t resist is almost the opposite, once again. The more upward mobility is a possibility the easier it is to resist.
Antonio Gramsci had a more Marxist analysis of ideology itself with his theory of cultural hegemony arguing that the ruling class had a dominant ideology just as they were the dominant class economically. Ideology more or less was like civilization in that it is an alternative to more brutal class war but with the same winners and losers. It’s a similar argument that Steven Pinker makes in his argument about the decline of violence in civilized society. Peace, while welcome, is not synonymous with justice. This may be something we need to remind Joe Biden of as he attempts to heal a divided nation without any plans for restorative justice.
Louis Althusser pinpointed the institutions behind this propaganda and Althusser is pretty sound because he focuses on how people are disempowered as subjects, not just in the strictly material relation in production. I’m open to any conversation about power, whether it’s ideology or material is a good debate.
Is it as simple as the Marxist divide between those who control the means of production and those who labor for it? Maybe not but the appealing thing about Marx is that he develops a real reason that people are having conflict. And more importantly a real solution, that is the inevitable rise of socialism as more and more finance capital alienated from labor emerges.
The argument by some on the left is that since Bill Clinton the Democrats have become the party tied to finance capital while Republicans remain tied to the capital of labor, however unequally they let those companies run. While it is true that different industries finance different parties and politicians and that in some ways Democrats are uniquely tied to finance I still don’t think that says much for the Republicans as a working people’s party. What’s the difference when both represent the owners of production rather than labor?
For better or worse Democrats remain the lesser evil as far as human beings and the planet is concerned. The relationship with labor is worthy of scorn but labor itself under this stage of capitalism has no guarantees of providing for the poor. We need to expand our definition of people from working people to poor people. How do we provide for the poor? Work is one way but Marxism’s inevitable socialism arose out of this crisis within labor and a system arising outside of it, not just a return to good jobs.
Perhaps this is part of the crisis in defining populism is that pundits are scared of people not forming coalitions around work. This is bad for labor itself as workers have little to no rights to negotiate. This crisis in labor creates a possibility for programs like Medicare For All that isn’t necessarily tied to work. However in the absence of such transformative programs we are left with catastrophe.
I don’t think it’s as simple as some leftists do for the Democrats to return to labor. The Democrats made the decision to bolt from organized labor because they could win elections with the other side of production. The challenge then is not just how to form a coalition around work but how to get workers and others involved politically to solve inequality and democracy. To me the left’s singular Neo-Marxist focus on labor has had the twin effect of labeling poor people as dumb because they pit labor against consciousness as well as a hostility to coalitions outside of of labor which led to some garbage takes on police unions, polluting industries, and sexual abuse in the workplace.
Beyond this the cut and dry issue is that there simply is too much of of a surplus workforce under globalization to really gain leverage as a worker without a union. Marx predicted the global economy problem. The solution of course is more unions, if possible. But that moderate goal seems about just as realistic as a far more radical one of massive government programs for all, ownership of profits for workers and trade policy in the interests of nations and people not global corporations. Let’s not return to FDR or LBJ, let’s move forward with Marx.
This to me has been exposed especially by COVID. A society where no one really has the capability to survive for even a month without a job where they could get COVID begs the question about what populism actually is. Is it really that people are being fooled into working during a pandemic for the chance to become a CEO? People don’t have that much of a choice here. It’s not that the Democrats need to start talking down to people and abandon all these smart people things like technology and science as the populists claim.
The Democrats or whatever can replace them should be talking policy. That works. What are we going to do to keep up with this changing world? The way forward isn’t this nostalgic Trumpish nationalism. It’s a serious engagement with the challenges ahead caused by climate catastrophe among other obstacles. No one needs to be hand held. What’s the plan here? Some of it will involve radical transformation but some won’t. Is there anything the primarily centrist Democrats have planned outside of slogans? The problem is they think people are just as stupid as the populists do and merely land on on the other side of platitudes.
The left should follow Nader and company into a people’s party but we can’t go forward until we know where we’re going and if this idea of Trump as populism continues to spread I fear anti-establishment energy could make things worse (always a possibility) rather than better.
What is clear and what is dangerously being denied is that the ideology of the ruling class is not working. To replace a convincing argument inequality and cruelty are turned up. The consciousness needed is not about who the enemy is but about what we the people can do to stop them.
Trump’s firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, two months before leaving the White House, may mean Trump is keeping a domestic military intervention in his playbook.
Esper publicly rebuffed President Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act in June. Trump wanted to use that act to justify Esper sending active-duty military troops into cities experiencing violence associated with protests. Esper’s statement, “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” was counter to the president’s wish. Trump told Fox News,”Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in, and we do it very easy.”
At that time, Trump was referring to the massive urban unrest that was occurring over the police killings of several Black citizens, many of whom were unarmed. Those protests and the ancillary lootings have largely disappeared. So why would Esper be fired now?
Think about it for a moment. Every military commander-in-chief must look at all options for how to battle the enemy, even if those options are never pursued. President Trump is no exception. In this instance, as he has often implied if not said, the enemy is the Democratic Party. As of this writing, he has still refused to concede defeat on the electoral battlefield. He is employing both legal and political strategies to try to retain the presidency by denying former Vice President Joe Biden the more than 270 electoral votes needed for victory.
Trump understands that he lost the popular vote by even more millions of votes than Hillary Clinton beat him by. (The spread is over 5 million ballots and counting.) Many of those folks are concentrated in the Democratic-dominated urban areas that witnessed last summer’s street protests. Should Trump’s strategies result in overturning Biden’s legitimate victory, he is not blind to the high probability that there would be massive street protests in those cities. Most of all in Washington D.C. which was the greatest anti-Trump voting city with 95% plus voting against him.
Given public anger over Trump negating Biden’s election, the chances are that those urban gatherings would witness stores being looted, buildings set on fire, and other types of physical damage. Such destruction is almost always the result of a tiny contingent of street agitators who are more intent on the direct action of destroying everything they can lay their hands on rather than pursuing more abstract long-range reforms. But these instigators provide a platform for Trump and his allies to attack the democratically elected local representatives who pursue various responses to such chaos. Trump’s solution is to simply overrule local governments’ efforts with military force.
Esper’s resistance to using the Insurrection Act to employ our national military for domestic law enforcement in our cities does not spring from liberalism. He is no liberal. Esper served as chief of staff for the very conservative Heritage Foundation. He made clear to whom he feels a loyalty to when he responded to his firing with a letter to Trump saying, “I serve the country in deference to the Constitution, so I accept your decision to replace me.” Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, a former Pentagon official, said in a statement that Esper’s firing may signal that Trump “wants to take actions that he believes his secretary of defense would refuse to take.”
Expecting personal loyalty from the person in charge of the Pentagon appears to be critically important to Trump. Others, besides Esper, have apparently fallen short of that expectation. Esper’s replacement, Christopher C. Miller will be the fourth Secretary of Defense since Trump came into office. Miller is seen as a straightforward soldier who has served his country admirably. But he has no experience running a massive bureaucracy.
Professionals within the Defense Department have expressed doubt that he could stand up to any of the president’s requests.
Esper’s departure was not a one-off incident. It has been followed by the departure of the top Pentagon officials overseeing policy, intelligence, and the Defense Secretary’s staff. They have been replaced by people who are considered more loyal to Trump.
The new Undersecretary of Defense for policy is Anthony J. Tata. Trump nominated him for the position last summer, but the nomination was withdrawn when even some Republican senators considered him too extreme. As recently as 2018, Tata tweeted that Barack Obama was a “terrorist leader” who did more to harm the US “and help Islamic countries than any president in history.”
Trump will be unable to stage a coup to stay in power. If he doesn’t concede by December 14, which is the date the electors meet and vote, his probability of retaining the presidency approaches zero. His only hope is that the courts, in concert with Republican state legislatures, toss out Biden’s victory. And if they did, as I said, there would certainly be major demonstrations in many cities for overturning a legitimate vote.
Trump could again try to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in troops to quell riots. It would not be the first time a president has used the act for dealing with that situation. Since the end of FDR’s time in office, George H. W. Bush did it twice, Lyndon Johnson did it four times, and John F. Kennedy once.
However, since municipal officials and state governors have not requested such assistance under Trump, doing so now could still be seen as exceeding the Act’s intention. Which is what Esper determined when he told the New York Times this past June that active-duty troops in a domestic law-enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”
The easiest way to avoid these scenarios is for Trump to realize that he not only didn’t win the election, but that the longer he fights the election result the more he damages his own standing and his chances of running again in 2024.
As I pointed out in my Oct 21 Citizenship Politics, Trump needs to once again be a media star of his own reality show. This time the show would be titled “Watch Former President Donald Trump Become the Future 2024 President.”
German American Bund parade on East 86th St., New York City, October 1939 – Public Domain
Fascism is both a symptom and the essence of capitalism in decay. Its development into a movement tends to begin when small-time capitalists (the petit bourgeoisie, if you will) see their wealth, political power and survival as a stratum of society disappearing in the maws of the giant monopolies and financial houses. Not having the patience or in many cases the desire to join the working classes in creating socialism, these shopkeepers, tradespeople, gig economy workers, et al. find themselves drawn to a social movement which promises them their old lives back while providing easy scapegoats to blame for their financial pain. If the fascist party is able to take power, it becomes capitalism’s essence—bleeding the petit bourgeoisie even more, enlarging the monopolies of capital and industry, brutalizing select minorities, exploiting the laboring classes even more, and mobilizing society against enemies new and old. Its primary purpose in this exercise is the enhanced enrichment of the wealthiest and most powerful among us.
Fascism is a politics of contradictions that cannot be resolved. This is a fundamental argument author David Renton makes in his recently updated text Fascism: History and Theory. It is because of these contradictions that it usually falters and fails. Equally important to fascism’s occasional (if fleeting) success is its dependence on a genuine social movement to grow and take power. Unlike most other political parties of the capitalist class, fascist leaders are dependent on the popular movement supporting them. This movement, which crosses classes but has its origins in a disgruntled petit bourgeoisie fearful of having to become part of the working class to survive, believes it is acting in its own interests. As history proves, however, when fascism takes complete power, it only truly serves what is currently known as the one percent. In other words, fascism is not interested in the advancement of the laboring classes, but rather its total acquiescence to capitalism. While this is arguably the goal of most right wing (and even liberal) capitalist parties, fascism is not even interested in any pretense of equality or democracy. Instead, it seeks uniformity under the banner of nation and leader; indeed, the party leader becomes the nation.
Fenton utilizes the works of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky, among others, to describe the nature and history of fascism between the two wars. Primarily focused on Mussolini and Hitler, he contrasts the development of each nation’s movement, its taking power and its demise. At the same time, he examines the various Marxist arguments regarding those movements and their meaning. He discusses the united front and the popular front oppositional approaches in terms of the different understandings of fascism he describes. The result is a nuanced and intelligent discussion of what constitutes fascism. Although Renton’s text is primarily historical, the publication of this new edition in the current time is obviously for a reason. From Hungary to the United States, from Germany to Rome, the rise of modern fascist movements has changed the political landscape of the world. In Hungary and the US, the movements are both popular and influential among surprisingly large segments of the respective populations. In other nations, like Germany and Italy, the fascist parties enjoy a similar popular support, albeit not in as large numbers. Furthermore—and perhaps more dangerously—members of fascist groups have infiltrated law enforcement and the military in the US, Germany and elsewhere. Despite their support for fascism (or perhaps because of it), most of these fascist police and troops are permitted to keep their positions with little risk of sanctions. Indeed, several chapters of the police union in the United States endorsed Donald Trump for president, thereby encouraging its members to treat anti-Trump protesters much differently than those marching (and driving their vehicles) for Trump.
Renton, like others writing about fascism (Enzo Traverso comes to mind), points out that the bulk of the opposition to fascism between World Wars One and Two came from Marxists. Traverso took this claim a step further, writing that liberalism cannot defeat fascism, in part because it is beholden to the same capitalist class as fascism. Furthermore, in the same way that traditional bourgeois conservativism relies on the structure of the state to gain power instead of building a social movement, liberals eschew the populist turmoil of social movements, too. Socialists and communists, on the other hand, go directly to the working people precisely to build a social movement. Naturally, it is a movement in direct opposition to the social movement fascists depend on. This is a primary reason the fascists go after Marxists with an added fury.
Let’s jump to 2020. The movement known as Trumpism is a powerful force in US politics and society. Although its numbers do not constitute a majority of the population, its strength is clear. Like the fascist social movements discussed in Renton’s text, Trumpism crosses class; it speaks to the abandoned worker, the scared petit bourgeois, and enjoys the support of a certain part of what we call the one percent. Its basic tenets are nationalism, anti-immigration, and a perception of women that borders on misogyny. It rejects science and rationalism. Its overriding racial makeup is white, but there are other skin tones and national origins represented. This is in spite of its overt belief in white supremacy. Its leadership has made alliances with predominantly Christian sects, members of the military and amongst the capitalist class. The nature of these alliances is often contradictory, especially those with the capitalist class. According to Renton, this is but one of the contradictions which tends to destroy fascist rulers—the capitalist class protects its capital over any alliance or relationship. If fascism no longer serves its interests, it will discard the fascist movement as easily as it supported them when the movement served capitalism’s interests.
Trump’s decision to fight his defeat at the polls is one element of proof that his loss will not mean the end of Trumpism. His defeat does delay the consolidation of these forces inside the US government, but it does not mean the end of the movement. Once a fascist movement has developed and as long as the capitalist class thinks a fascist movement can serve it, there will be a fascist movement. The only possible way to prevent it from strengthening is to build a leftist popular movement against it and the class fascism serves.
If though Joe Biden has won the U.S. presidency, the threat of fascism still remains. And not simply because Trumpites are not going away anytime soon.
Donald Trump doesn’t have the intelligence or sufficient ruling-class backing to actually become a fascist dictator. His desire to be one, however, has been more than sufficient to necessitate the widest possible movement against him and the social forces he represents, and there is no doubt his authoritarian impulses would have become still worse had he won a second term. What little democracy is left in the United States’ capitalist formal democracy would have been further reduced.
It might be better to understand Trump as the Republican Party’s frankenstein — the culmination of the Republican “Southern Strategy.” Richard Nixon was an open racist who developed the strategy of sending dog whistles to White racists; Ronald Reagan promoted “states’ rights,” well understood code words for supporting racially biased policies; George H.W. Bush exploited racial stereotypes with his Willie Horton campaign ads; George W. Bush’s presidency will be remembered for his callous ignoring of New Orleans and its African-American population in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and the roster of Republicans hostile to civil rights is too long to list. Moreover, the Republican Party, with very few exceptions, has been an eager promoter and enabler of Trump’s virulent pro-big business policies with most not even bothering to pretend to challenge Trump’s racism and misogyny.
It was no surprise that a billionaire con man whose business plan has long been to screw his real estate empire’s working-class contractors and use every trick imaginable to not pay taxes or his creditors was going to stick it to working people.
The Trump administration has been the worst U.S. presidency in history with an extraordinarily fierce approach to class warfare. But let us consider what fascism is: At its most basic level, fascism is a dictatorship established through and maintained with terror on behalf of big business. It has a social base, which provides the support and the terror squads, but which is badly misled since the fascist dictatorship operates decisively against the interest of its social base. Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements.
Despite varying national characteristics that result in major differences in the appearances of fascism, the class nature is consistent. Big business is invariably the supporter of fascism, no matter what a fascist movement’s rhetoric contains, and is invariably the beneficiary. We often think of fascism in the classical 1930s form, of Nazis goose-stepping or the street violence of Benito Mussolini’s followers. But it took somewhat different forms later in the 20th century, being instituted through military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Any fascism that might arise in the U.S. would be wrapped in right-wing populism and, given the particular social constructs there, that populism would include demands to “return to the Constitution” and “secure the borders.”
Formal democracy vs. fascism
United Statesians have indeed suffered through four years of militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, the imposition of “constitutionalist” judges and demands to “secure” borders, complete with open racism and misogyny. But the Trump administration and its followers constitute a movement with the potential to bring about a fascist dictatorship, not actual fascism. Should the U.S. ruling class — industrialists and financiers — decide they would no longer tolerate the country’s limited, corporate-constrained variety of “democracy,” the militias and assorted far right street gangs that “stand by” on Trump’s command would be unleashed without constraint. And they would be openly joined by police and security agencies in fomenting violence rather than being tacitly supported as they are at present.
Nonetheless, fascism is the last resort of any capitalist ruling class. Instituting a fascist dictatorship is no easy decision even for the biggest industrialists, bankers and landowners who might salivate over the potential profits. For even if it is intended to benefit them, these business elites are giving up some of their own freedom since they will not directly control the dictatorship; it is a dictatorship for them, not by them. It is only under certain conditions that business elites resort to fascism — some form of formal democratic government, under which citizens “consent” to the ruling structure, is the preferred form and much easier to maintain. Working people beginning to withdraw their consent — beginning to seriously challenge the economic status quo — is one “crisis” that can bring on fascism. An inability to maintain or expand profits, as can occur during a steep decline in the “business cycle,” or a structural crisis, is another such “crisis.”
Industrialists and financiers have an iron grip on U.S. politics (witness the dreadful choice the two corporate parties have just offered), and the overdue economic downturn triggered by the pandemic has not hurt profits for most big corporations, with bailouts provided for those who have taken a hit to their bottom lines. Financiers and speculators are doing quite well, and because Wall Street values stability, financiers likely were more behind Joe Biden than Trump. As the Democratic Party favors financiers (while the Republicans favor industrialists), Wall Street will have no problem at all with a Biden administration. Some industrialists likely have tired of Trump’s antics, or calculate that they have gotten all the services they can reasonably expect from him; some among this grouping probably don’t mind a change. And given Joe Biden’s decades of loyal service to corporate interests, in particular the banking industry, little gnashing of teeth is likely to be found in corporate boardrooms.
There was no need for U.S. capitalists to institute a fascist dictatorship during the Trump administration and there won’t be any need in the near future. So, to circle back to the opening of this article, why should it be said that the threat of fascism is undiminished with the ouster of Trump? That is because as long as capitalism exists, the threat of fascism exists.
The rule of capital
The system is called capitalism for a reason — it is the rule of capital. The owners of capital. Those who have capital generally divide into two camps, industrialists and financiers, as alluded to above. Industrialists own or are the top managers of enterprises that produce tangible goods and services, while financiers trade, buy and sell stocks, bonds and other securities, continually inventing new instruments to profit off virtually every aspect of commercial activity. The two compete fiercely for the bigger half of the profits and thus have sometimes conflicting interests, but there is considerable overlap between the two sectors of capitalists. Crucially, their class interests are completely aligned.
Employees are paid far less than the value of what they produce; this is the source of corporate profit. The bloated salaries and profits generated by exploitation of employees is far greater than can be thrown into spending on luxuries or used for business investment, so these massive piles of money are diverted into financial speculation, swelling an already bloated financial sector, which grabs large amounts of this speculative money for itself. Top managers of industrial firms in turn are paid largely in stock so that their interests are “aligned” with that of finance capital, to use Wall Street lingo.
This is the ordinary and routine working of capitalism. As long as people consent to this arrangement — and thus consent to their ongoing exploitation — all is well for industrialists and financiers. But what if consent begins to be withdrawn? What if an economic downturn is so severe and sustained that it becomes difficult to extract profits? This is when capitalists begin to think about putting an end to formal democracy and instituting authoritarian rule. At the most extreme, this authoritarian rule can slide into fascism. Such a scenario is always a possibility because capitalism is inherently unstable. Twenty years into the 21st century, we’re already living through a third economic downturn, each worse than the previous one.
United Statesians, for now, have pushed back against a potential slide toward fascism by ousting Trump. But the recent global trend is unmistakable: Far right authoritarian ideologues remain in office in countries around the world, among them Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and Poland, and the U.S. has a history stretching back to the 19th century of installing right-wing dictators and overthrowing democratically elected governments. Capitalists have a variety of economic tools at their disposal to maintain their rule, the armed force of governments to enforce their rule, and a variety of institutions and control of the mass media to reinforce ideologies upholding their rule. Elections in capitalist countries decide who gets to govern, not who gets to rule.
Formal democracy is the preferred method of ruling, but if violence, ranging all the way to fascism, is the only way to maintain their power, that is what industrialists and financiers will insist their governments impose. Fascism can’t arise or be raised to power without a social base, a badly confused bloc that supplies support and the shock troops. This social base has to be maleducated enough to believe the obvious lies spewed by the leader and be enthused by the permission granted to openly display their hatreds, be those racism, misogyny, nativism, homophobia or anti-Semitism, permission wrapped in virulent nationalism. The millions of fanatical Trump followers are a monument to the lack of education in the U.S., a pervasive propaganda system and the product of decades of relentless Republican Party ideology. There can be no potential fascist movement without such a social base.
Given this fanatical support of Trump despite the massive failures and undisguised class warfare of his administration, both the followers and the shock troops remain even when Trump leaves the White House. Will they be called on in the future? If you don’t want the threat of fascism to hover in the background, you’ll have to get rid of capitalism.
The 2020 presidential election is heading towards a worst-case scenario in terms of America’s sclerotic constitutional system: a neck-and-neck race in the electoral college that will likely wind up before the Supreme Court.
As of early morning on Wednesday November 4, Trump seemed to be closing in on victory. But four key states were still in play: Wisconsin, where Biden enjoyed a slight edge, plus Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, where Trump had a solid lead. But if Biden held onto Wisconsin, that would mean that the president would have to win the other three in order to rack up the 270 electoral votes needed for victory – a likely possibility, but far from a certainty. So both Democrat and Republican strategies were crystal-clear at that stage: the first wanted to keep the tabulation going until every last ballot was counted, while the second wanted to cut it short.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the election,” Trump tweeted in the early hours. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed!”
A couple of hours later he added at a press conference:
This a fraud on the American public, this is an embarrassment to our country … We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.
Republicans have a six-three majority on the Supreme Court, thanks to last week’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, the ultra-right judge from Indiana. So Trump would seem to have the edge, although it is impossible to be sure. But, if that is the case, the results will be eerily similar to the ‘Battle of Florida’ in November-December 2000. That was when the election also wound up in the hands of the Supreme Court and a five-four Republican majority awarded victory to George W Bush, even though he was trailing by several hundred popular votes in the state itself and by more than 500,000 nationwide.
Bush v Gore, as the decision naming Bush the president was known, poisoned US politics for years. Yet now it is happening again in an election that is far more bitter and divisive.
“The president’s statement, delivered in the White House, amounted to a reckless attack on the democratic process during a time of deep anxiety and division in the country,” The New York Times announced with its usual solemnity. “Trump falsely asserts fraud, claims a victory,” added TheWashington Post. Regardless of what happens, a crisis of legitimacy will be the upshot – a crisis that will shake American politics even more profoundly than the one two decades ago.
Mishaps
So how did the United States get into such a mess? The answer is through a variety of mishaps that together added up to a perfect storm.
The most obvious concerns the Electoral College – an ancient mechanism dating from 1787 that was designed to give small states a bit of extra power in choosing a chief executive, but which now tips presidential politics strongly to the right by benefitting under-populated rural states that generally vote Republican. The results are racist and undemocratic, since they give voters in lily-white Wyoming (population: 579,000) roughly three times as much clout as voters in ‘minority majority’ California, where the population now tips the scales at close to 40 million.
But because it only misfired once when it allowed Republican Rutherford B Hayes to eke out a victory over Democrat Samuel B Tilden in 1876 despite trailing by three percent in the popular vote, the provision was largely forgotten. Sure, it made no sense, but what did it matter, since it was little more than a formality? But the electoral college roared back to life in the 21st century, when it allowed Bush to prevail over Gore in 2000 and then permitted Trump to triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite trailing by nearly three million popular votes. Although it is impossible to be sure until all the votes are counted, the situation could well turn out to be the same this year, if the College allows Trump to win over Biden despite once again trailing in the popular vote.
Three stolen elections in 20 years is no small matter. To the contrary, they mean that after years of dormancy the apparatus is now veering radically off course in an increasingly undemocratic direction. Yet nothing can be done, because a highly restrictive constitutional amending clause renders structural reform all but impossible. So, while the arrangement is unjust, it is destined to continue, even though it seems to be growing worse with each passing decade. ‘We, the people’ supposedly made the constitution in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, and so on. Yet the people have lost control over constitutional mechanisms established in their name.
But constitutional mechanics are not the only reason 2020 is ending in a monumental snafu. Another has to do with constitutional politics. Democrats did not need to worry about the electoral college because they believed that victory was in hand. Everyone said so. Didn’t Trump spend his first three years in office dodging charges of Russian collusion? Didn’t he tell so many falsehoods that reporters lost count? Didn’t the release of his tax records show that he is a failed real-estate mogul, who only made money by outrageously manipulating the tax code? Hasn’t his mishandling of Covid-19 led to nearly 240,000 deaths, plus one of the highest infection rates on earth?
The answer is yes. But the fact that Trump was seemingly heading for disaster was why party bigwigs, led by Barack Obama himself, felt they could give Biden the nod last March. To be sure, he was a semi-senile old man, who had trouble remembering what state he was in and who stammered, choked and lost his train of thought mid-sentence. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were smarter and more articulate, while Bernie Sanders generated real enthusiasm among workers, minorities, poor people and the young. All three would have done better on the campaign trail.
Go wrong
But none of it mattered, because Biden was safe, he personified Democratic values (meaning that he is a tired old hack who will do anything to get elected) and he would not scare mainstream Democrats by bringing up ‘socialism’ and other strange topics. All he had to do was position himself one inch to the left of Trump on domestic policy and one inch to the right on foreign, by accusing him of going soft on Russia, China and North Korea, and then stand by and watch, as the votes rolled in. What could go wrong?
Plenty, as it turned out.
Biden’s performance on the campaign trail proved miserably inept. He insulted voters, made gaffe after gaffe, and told just as many untruths as Trump, if not more. As journalist Matt Taibbi put it, he “spent much of 2020 lying about everything from his Iraq war vote to his educational history, to a fantasy about being arrested in South Africa with Nelson Mandela” – the last was a story that he confessed in February was completely made up.1 While denouncing Trump for building a wall along the Mexican border, he neglected to mention that he had championed precisely the same idea more than dozen years earlier.2 In a debate with Sanders in March, he denied advocating a cut in social security benefits, even though he had issued a ringing call for a social security freeze in 1995. “I never said I oppose fracking,” he insisted in a debate a few weeks ago with Trump. Yet, when asked four months earlier whether there “would there be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration,” he replied: “No, we would, we would work it out. We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those either – any fossil fuel.”
This was not the first time Biden was caught making things up. Back in 1988, he was forced to drop a short-lived presidential bid after being caught plagiarising a speech by Neil Kinnock and then admitting to having done the same with an academic article back in his law-school days. Yet, once he headed back onto the campaign trail in 2020, he could not resist doing the same thing again and again.
Then there was corruption – a topic in which Biden also proved inept. Team Trump succeeded in turning the tables on him by revealing evidence that he had worked with his son, Hunter, in an effort to make money off the family name. TheNew York Timescalled the story “dirt” and made fun of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani – admittedly an easy target – for digging it up.3 But the story was solid, particularly once a businessman named Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, gave a press conference and then sat down for an interview with Fox News, in which he stated that Joe Biden was to get a share of the profits and that he met with the ex-vice president on at least one occasion to go over the venture.4
As the Times said about the Biden clan’s dealings with China, “The records make clear that Hunter Biden saw the family name as a valuable asset, angrily citing his ‘family’s brand’ as a reason he is valuable to the proposed venture.”5 Whether that means that Biden is as corrupt as Trump is uncertain. But it certainly allowed Trump to render the issue moot, as far as his own misdeeds were concerned.
Finally, there is the pandemic. Although Trump’s abysmal performance provided Biden with what should have been a fat and easy target, his response in this regard was weak as well. Rather than slamming Trump for failing to impose a nationwide facemask mandate – the simplest, easiest and most effective way of preventing the virus’s spread – he confessed at the outset that he lacked constitutional authority to impose a mandate himself, adding that all he could do was “make sure we have everyone encouraged to wear a mask all the time”. Instead of taking charge, in other words, he would merely try to persuade. Yet the strategy would have little effect on ‘Live free or die’ governors in the south and west, who believe that Americans have a constitutional right to wear or not to wear whatever they like. If that did not work, Biden added, he would reach out to mayors and county executives instead. But that underscored his weakness all the more.6
Biden failed to convince voters that he would do a better job. He failed to hit Trump where it hurt and he allowed his opponent to take advantage of his own vulnerabilities. Democrats expected Trump to self-destruct. But they failed to realise that it was their man who would self-destruct first.
What they thought would be an easy win has thus turned into an explosive constitutional crisis. What happens next is unknown. No-one has any idea how long the vote tally will go on, whether Trump will be able to draw it up short, or whether the Supreme Court will intervene. If Trump succeeds in halting the count midway or if the court acts in a way that is as nakedly partisan as it was in 2000, then there will likely be an explosion – and perhaps a counter-explosion, as the Trump forces strike back. The chemistry is unpredictable.
But one thing is clear. America’s rolling constitutional crisis has reached a new level and can only grow worse and worse.
4) The October 22 press conference is available at youtube.com/watch?v=aiiSq7toqlQ&t=29s. The Fox News interview, which aired five days later, can be seen at youtube.com/watch?v=awgSHHZ7B38.↩︎
“America is the only society that has gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between”
– Oscar Wilde
“Government is not the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem”
–Ronald Reagan Inaugural Address 1980.
“Biden will turn America into a socialist hell like Venezuela”
– Donald Trump, 2020 Re-Election Campaign
The world’s near-richest man, Warren Buffet, has netted tens of billions from over 50 years of betting on stock-market rises, but unlike Trump Warren Buffet can speak the truth: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
American Freedom = Enriching the Rich
In the first campaign of “making America Great Again”, the 40-year-old slogan Trump has brought back from the dead, Reagan defined US freedom as “the freedom to get rich”.
What is not said is that this freedom “from government on our backs” has transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90%of the population to the top 1%.
In the words of Time, the US chose every step. “We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people. – – – If wealth distribution since 1975 had continued in the same manner as between 1945 and 1975, today’s $35,000 salary would be over $60,000. It’s little wonder that so many Americans are lashing out at the broken system”.
The Trickle Down Myth
“Trickle-down” never worked, but the delusion still reigns. So does the big lie Trump tells yet again with his $1.2 trillion of public money hemorrhaged out in 2017 tax cuts. Here too there were assurances that money would be freed up for waiting corporate investment in jobs and R&D. But in the very following year “S&P 500 companies set a new record for buying their own stock to artificially boost stock prices for management and investors — a practice that was illegal until the Reagan years. – – – They have depleted so much of their funds that they have turned to the pandemic-inspired CARES Act for relief to ‘distressed industries. – – [Meanwhile] ‘essential’ workers are experiencing high child mortality rates, declining life expectancies and premature deaths from preventable illnesses.”
This is an epitome of the unspoken agenda of destroying public power to govern in the common life interest while enriching the already rich instead.
Yet in perhaps the greatest irony of US history, the very dispossessed and under-educated white workers who have been most broken by this greatest-ever seizure of American wealth have jumped onto the bandwagon of a demagogue New York developer now presiding over a de-regulated social and ecological chaos.
The Negative Solidarity of the Atomized Masses
As Hannah Arendt long ago acutely observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the mob energies of the dispossessed can be yoked into a fascist juggernaut by “the negative solidarity of the atomized masses”. They no longer think. They resent and strike at the assumed enemy, and feel exhilarating power in their collective hate. In Trump America, Yay-Boo mass spectacles called “Trump rallies” fill the bill, and armed thugs form in ever bigger pro-Trump mobs.
It is US war fever turned inwards again onto “communists’, “socialists”, “liberals”, and “Antifa” (anti-fascists). But is worse than McCarthyism because it street-enforces the class-war agenda Warren Buffet names. Trump tells them to “stand by” to settle the disputed election he orchestrates along with his newly stacked Supreme Court.
The dots are not joined. Trump’s control of the Republican Party remains without an explanation although his every government act is to break the public realm and transfer more wealth to the corporate rich.
Marketing Big Lies is the Karma of America
America has long distinguished itself by the mass propaganda its corporate rich fashion to confuse citizens into buying whatever is for sale for a profit. “Sam Slick of Slickville” was called out by the true conservative author, TC Halliburton, 170 years ago.
So Americans buy their own degradation by the mass- marketing illness commodities sold to them as – in the cover-up language of ‘economics’ – “welfare enhancements”.
Fast foods degrade the body and cumulatively kill it, but public knowledge of the fact is not allowed. It is called “interfering in the free market”.
Incumbent president Trump takes it all further. He rejects any federal government to action even to prevent a virus spread that has already killed over 225,000 of his people. It is Americans’ “free choice” not to wear masks.
Trump extends abdication of public responsibility to defunding or sabotaging whatever public healthcare exists as “disastrous” or “fake”. In 2018, the U.S. spent two and one-half times the OECD average on healthcare per person and still had the lowest life expectancy and the highest rate of preventable deaths.
Trump even invalidates public voting by sweeping repression of likely votes against him, including by mail-in ballots. The pretext is the claim of “fraud” with no evidence, Trump’s signature operation. Trump does his best to rig the election in his favor, but – as always – he accuses his opponents of what he is doing himself.
All this fits to one underlying meta pattern that is unseen. Every step is todisorganize evolved society itself from any public accountability, responsibility or action.”
Everywhere We Look Public Chaos and Deprivation Grow
Trump has so blocked public powers to defend the well-being of country that the “greatest society in the history of the world” is reduced to last place in the world in preventing citizen deaths per capita with the Covis-19 pandemic.
He has done the same with climate destabilization. The US leads the world into biblical floods, fires, disease which his own people are suffering, and he reverses any collective action to mitigate them – from the global Paris Agreement to local environmental regulations on deadly pollutions.
Private financial firms have displaced governments in the financing of water, transport, education, housing, environmental services, and health for their private profit, and all decline in growing disorder. But the Trump agenda fast-forwards the process at every point he can replace public control with private exploitation and corporate lobbyists in control.
Trump further assails all efforts to reduce lawless US police-state violence. His actions are telling at the height of protests in Washington DC against evident police murders. An extended metaphor of his rule is a sudden march with his retinue behind a violently advancing phalanx of club-swinging and toxin-spraying riot police attacking peaceful demonstrators so he can photo-op holding a bible in front of the iconic St. John’s Church which he has forcibly invaded against the presiding Bishop’s will.
Less visibly to the public, Trump attacks the International Criminal Court itself as “terrorist” for its investigating documented crimes against humanity by privatized US armed forces in Afghanistan.
Now as he trails in the polls, Trump invalidates the November 3 election itself as “fixed” by his opponents so as to prevent even public election removing him from office. He does not deny his intention to stay in power against public election loss. “Get rid of the [mail-in] ballots”, he says, “and you’ll have a very – you’ll have a very peaceful – there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”
In the background, Trump loads the Supreme Court – used to win the 2008 election of George Bush Jr. – in confidence that it will receive and approve the appeals he has already launched to challenge the 2020 election.
It is a long game.
“Professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest” is what renowned and impartial Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter called the rising big-business power of ‘public relations’ which leads the way in the long fix of the US money-power rule at the deepest level of the American unconscious. .
Trump is the very embodiment of ‘poisoner of the public mind’ and ‘exploiter of foolishness and fanaticism’ of which a once non-partisan Supreme Court Justice warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The chaos is well-prepared.
The Historic Wheel of Public Wealth to Private Riches
Trump follows an agenda of the corporate rich which is not new, but now on steroids. The agenda is to strip the public realm so completely it can never hold multiplying private riches to account or social responsibility again.
The Reagan regime – also headed by a corporate promoter – did this most clearly in the modern era led by his inaugural proclamation: “Government is not the solution. It IS the problem”.
Yet this agenda has been a strong strain of the richest faction of America since its 1776 Revolution. The US revolution was primarily against what is rarely seen – the 1763 law of England prohibiting land seizure from the first peoples West of the Allegheny Mountains.
And whereas it is Just and Reasonable and Essential to Our Interests and the Security of Our Colonies that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected and who live under Our Protection should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominion and Territories, as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them or any of them as their Hunting Grounds
George Washington began his career as a land speculator in 1752 with 1,759 acres in Virginia, and he ended his life with 50- 60,000 acres made legal by the American Revolution.
Blocking public accountability of the rich has also the inner logic of US constitutional construction. Forged in secret 11 years after the 1776 revolution, the US Constitution, which the Republican Supreme Court as sacred writ without interpretation in light of history, is a clever and devious document.
It enshrines guarantee to the private property and commercial interests behind the revolution that their own wealth will be protected against any public re-distribution. This was an almost unconscious framing which the “division of powers” and the electoral complexities of each reliably ensured. The “takings” clause prevented government equalization, and only “the commerce clause” was the basis of “the equal voting act”, which has itself since been disabled by the stacked Supreme Court.
Trump draws his own legitimacy from this “originary” meaning updated to allow the private money power an unlimited freedom from public control.
Once we decode this underlying unspoken pattern to Trump rule today, it becomes predictive of everything he does. However outlandish and usurpacious his government’s actions, they all conform to this agenda. They thereby ensure Trump’s untouchability by billionaire funders of his party. The oilmen Kochs have passed control to Trump without anyone noticing.
It therefore becomes predictable that the ‘anti-Washington’ brand of Trump, in fact, springs to sudden and centrist Washington action to advance the unseen agenda in the Covid-19 pandemic. He refuses any public leadership or responsibility in nationwide preventative fighting against the highly infectious disease. Trump then ostentatiously countermands any nation-wide public action which arises by violating public scientific direction in mass super-spreader selfie events.
While the disaffected jump on board his trashing of public knowledge and public science in everything he does, even Trump’s critics do not see or call out the agenda his every government move expresses.
We can predict that what he does next will also disempower the public realm and enrich the rich. His only decisive governing move in the Covid-19 crisis from the start has been to more deeply indebt and disable the public realm and still further enrich the corporate rich. Hundreds of billions of public wealth have gone to favored US big business (including his own), and none has gone to the public municipalities and states in financial collapse.
Trump forwarded as fast as possible the $2.2 trillion dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act with an acronym (CARES) meaning the opposite of its public-relations name.
Although heavily laced with feel-good rhetoric about those most harmed by the economic effects of Covid-19 lockdown, Bill 116-136 signed by Trump on March 27 2020 (and in the works since January 2019) was structured through the Wall Street banking system to do the reverse of its rhetoric: to select only for the wealthiest corporate clients of the biggest banks who got the lion’s share of the public money. They got it as soon as they activated their high-end bank accounts, and those without such bank accounts – the neediest for help – did not.
At the same time, the branches of major chain stores were entitled to be “small business” to squeeze real small business out, and in the most significant tax breaks of all in CARES, the privatized public wealth went to wealthy real estate developers like Trump and son-in-law Kushner.
In his signing statement of the bill, with Senate leader McConnell smiling with a pen, Trump further emasculated public powers of accounting oversight and responsibility for public fund allocation.
He repudiated any independent government monitoring of the cash transfers or naming of the private beneficiaries. This was because it was multi-hundreds of public billions of slush funds of public money privatized for the possession of favored corporate money powers. Any independent watchdog was therefore not to be allowed.
When the House sought a committee to monitor how the money was spent, Trump charged her with “conducting partisan investigations in the middle of a pandemic” – once more blaming the other for what he was engineering himself by trillions more giveaway of public wealth to the corporate rich. When the House leader continued to insist on public oversight, he raged. “It’s witch hunt after witch hunt”, he stormed. Again his psychotic paranoia and grandiose illusions which have so well achieved his wreckage of coherent public management caught the attention of psychiatric witness
Yet the underlying agenda of stripping the public realm and its capacities of public allocation and oversight while enriching the corporate rich with no limit remains unspoken in the US media and public affairs.
This report from CBS News, however, details the despotic removals of long-experienced public Inspector-Generals from their offices for no public reason. “In a span of six weeks, Mr. Trump has removed five officials from posts leading their respective agencies’ inspector general offices – – The president’s moves have prompted scrutiny and criticism from congressional Democrats, who accuse Mr. Trump of hollowing independent inspector general offices and retaliating against those that have exposed wrongdoing by his administration. Here are [some of the] watchdogs who have been stripped of their positions by the president. – – Michael Atkinson worked as the acting chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption Section from 2015 to 2016. As inspector general for the intelligence community, he handled the complaint filed by an anonymous whistleblower that raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and – – determined the complaint was credible – – “. He was fired by Trump with no cause despite the publicly responsible and bi-partisan committee’s request for it.
“Glenn Fine – – was tapped for the role of the Defense Department’s acting inspector general in January 2016 and remained in that post until his ouster by Trump on April 6. – – with Mr. Trump’s removal of Fine as acting inspector general, he was also stripped of his role as leader of the accountability committee. – – – “Christie Grimm has worked as the Department of Health and Human Services’ principal deputy inspector general since January 2020 and has led the agency in an acting capacity. But Mr. Trump – – replaced Grimm May 1 – – after Grimm released a report detailing testing and supply shortages in hospitals responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Grimm found “severe” shortages of testing supplies, “widespread shortages of PPE,” difficulties in maintaining adequate staffing levels and in expanding hospital capacity.
“Steve Linick is the fourth inspector general to be purged from his position by Mr. Trump in a span of six weeks. Linick worked for the Justice Department for over a decade, including as executive director of its National Procurement Fraud Task Force and deputy chief of its fraud section. – – His ouster has brought additional scrutiny from the House and Senate Foreign Affairs Committees, which announced investigations into Linick’s removal – -[one saying] his “firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.” – – Republican Senator Chuck Grassley [said] “A general lack of confidence simply is not sufficient detail to satisfy Congress.”
Trump’s 2017 government-revenue losses for tax-cuts, his first over one-trillion gift of public money to the corporate rich, more substantially hollowed out public powers with no public good served. They were ballyhooed as “relieving working families of tax burdens” and – where the greatest flood of public money went – as “ensuring new investment [by corporations] in jobs and research”. Yet in fact, the massive privatization of public money funded the S&P 500 corporations to a new record for buying back their own stock to artificially boost stock prices for – yet again – already wealthy management and investors. This corporate fraud was first made legal by the first and long-dead “Make America Great Again” president.
Behind the public narratives pro-or-con Trump, this ultimate agenda of incapacitation of the public realm is never named. So it continues to unravel all life-protective law, regulation and investment in the universal social and ecological life carrying capacities of the US and vassal societies.
Big Lies Required for Destruction of the Public Realm
The underlying Trump agenda is in principle life-blind, so it must boast the opposite of what it is to be believed. This is why “Donald Trump lies every time he opens his mouth”, as his long-serving personal lawyer Michael Cohen reports, after taking the fall for following Trump’s criminal directions.
Trump’s PR machine replies in Orwellian reversal that Cohen should not be believed because he is “a convicted felon”. But not so easy to dismiss, the Washington Post documents over 2000 Trump lies, and still counting.
Noam Chomsky goes deeper. He argues (emphases added): “Trump is the worst criminal in history, undeniably. There has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organised human life on earth in the near future.”
Chomsky rightly asserts Trump is “dedicated to destroying organised human life on earth”. But he does not see that organisation for the common life interest is reliant on the public realm and its capacities to serve this common life purpose that private enterprise, by definition, cannot achieve.
The US public is, however, pervasively conditioned by corporate culture to oppose any force or government regulating it. So only non-government solutions are acceptable within it.
The public realm is most widely invalidated by the conditioned US habit of government hate – even although it is all that now stands between the people and the collapse of US social and natural life support systems. This lesson was learned through much corporate resistance in the Great Depression via Roosevelt’s New Deal, but rich Republicans and ideologues for private riches have been seeking to reverse it ever since. Trump is their final solution.
What is not recognised even by Chomsky’s penetrating observation is that the public law-making realm can alone form effectively bindinglaws and institutions to protect and enable the lives of all. This includes especially the majority of US citizens increasingly lacking the private money to effectively demand education for which they are qualified, healthcare when ill, income to live without jobs available, sufficient old age security, a healthy environment in work and leisure, and freedom of speech and choice.
This public realm of contemporary societies especially includes public science and knowledge not controlled by private market forces. But these forces are worshipped by Reagan-Trump-and-party as God.
So from environmental regulations and protections through working-place standards and living wages to public health programs and disease prevention, virtually all life-protective-and-enabling public laws and institutions are anathematized by this ruling faction. It is their thanatic compulsion which joins all the dots of eco-genocidal US history to now.
In this situation more than ever, all that stands between America and the abyss of growing chaos is the public realm of responsibility and collective action. But they are the enemy of the corporate-rich faction and its many mouthpieces.
All the while the abyss is rapidly forming at every level of social and natural life organisation being destabilized and despoiled by the de-regulated exponential growth of the private corporate demand system. It cumulatively turns the terrestrial biosphere into pervading dead commodities and wastes.
The Meta Program on the March
Only in matters of armed force control by police and the US military is government respected in the dominant US culture.
So long as Trump keeps chaos and disorder in the public realm delivering public wealth to the rich, he is kept untouchable by the Republican Party and their big-money donors, and US police and armed forces take care of the resistors.
Yet even the legacy media outraged by Trump dare not expose these deep-structural facts. Where do their ad revenues go if they do? AndTrump is, besides, a cornucopia of ad-gaining news copy.
Even Social Security, the New Deal retirement program that for 85 years has provided critical support to old or disabled Americans — currently numbering 65 million – is under financial attack by this faction. Trump is fraudulently imposing oval office command under an obscure power of 26.US Code 7508A to defer the funding by the Social Security and Medicare payroll tax by a President-declared emergency, an action which the US Social Security Administration’s chief actuary calculated would empty all its funds by 2023 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/social-security-fund-would-be-empty-by-2023-if-payroll-taxes-were-cut-actuary-estimates/#3e3e64d6a3b2
At the same time since March 2020, US billionaire wealth has risen by $565 billion within the Covid-19 pandemic he avoids. This may lead some to believe the pandemic is a hoax to enrich the rich. But it is rather the way the Trump state operates with or without a pandemic – to force the unseen agenda at every turn. $7 trillion has just flooded into the hand of private investors through the CARE corporate bailout and follow-ups hollowing out the financial capacities of the public realm. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-balance-sheet-tops-7-trillion-shows-increased-buying-of-corporate-bond-etfs-2020-05-21
Meanwhile unconnected to the pandemic and before it, the black-hole funding of the corporate military-industrial-politics complex has under Trump from 2016 drawn down new record levels of public wealth with no real enemy in the field. The two-billion-dollars-a-day funding of mainly private corporate contractors remains essentially unaudited throughout with reported 21-trillions of public money missing ttps://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-s-treasuries-beware-uncle-sam-cant-account-for-21-trillion/#41d29c9b7644.
This uncontrolled US armed-force spending going mainly to big private, quasi-monopoly private corporations further draws down and reverses budgets on social spending, and it more than doubles the military spending of Russia and China put together.
More deeply, it enforces the meta program of private corporate world rule while destroying the collective life capacities of the public everywhere.
US International Standing
Trump treats life-protective international law more brutally than he does domestic human rights. His administration has even imposed US sanctions on senior officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigating evident war crimes and crimes against humanity by privatized US forces (although other criminal prosecutions of the ICC have been supported by the US).
The evident US war crimes and crimes against humanity are not denied. But reverse blame is again a specialty, and so Trump’s US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in September 2020 accuses the court of “illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction” – thus confirming the Trump government holds itself above international law.
In the background, more than 12,000 pages of US government documents show military operations contaminating the Pacific with radioactive waste, nerve agents, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange. Trump ignores all this, but denounces the International Court ratified by 123 countries as perpetrating “threats and coercive actions” against his administration. He sanctions the heads of both the International Court and its Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division from any action or financial account within the US, which includes the United Nations itself in New York.
They respond that this “attack on the ICC represents an attack against the interests of victims of atrocity crimes, for many of whom the Court represents the last hope for justice.” For Trump, this means nothing. In the background he radically defunds UNESCO and the World Health Organization.
While Trump throughout boasts that the US society under his presidency is the “greatest in history” with title to rule, it has in fact far higher child mortality rates than the poor Cuba he wars against, and mass deaths from Covid 19 under his watch lead the world. “We are doing such a great, tremendous job there”, he brags in denial of public knowledge and international science.
The one good shift of US foreign policy under Trump has been not to war against Russia, and to seek exit from “endless wars”. Yet this has long been the aim of the US ‘libertarian’ right, which like Trump deifies the ‘free market’ without public life standards and programs. And Trump’s other policies on international conflicts are vile in nature. His policies continuously orchestrate war crimes and illegal embargoes against starved, helpless and disabled societies like Palestine, Venezuela, and Yemen. All are societies seeking to build social infrastructures, invariably the target of US war crimes and crimes against peace – Iraq and Libya being the most evident US-led eco-genocidal campaigns against the most advanced social infrastructures of the Middle-East and Africa respectively. What has worsened under Trump rule is the war-criminally lawless destructions of the most vulnerable societies of Palestine, Venezuela and Yemen, flagrantly and unprecedentedly overriding 70 years of international law and US-UN commitments in the case of the criminally occupied Palestine society.
All this connects into the meta pattern that the most vulnerable and defenceless are the first Trump is willing to sacrifice to disease and death, even within the United States. During the spread of Coronavirus-19 to 225,000 excess deaths (over 300,000 if other deaths from lack of hospital spaces are counted), Trump has ostentatiously denied and overridden international and public science in abdication of his Constitution responsibilities for “the common Defense and General welfare of the United States” (Article 1, Section 8).
Here again, we can see public chaos is his over-arching program – not just for air-defenseless third-world societies nationalizing their natural resources, but for the most vulnerable people of the US, especially the poor and the black.
The lawless indifference to human and planetary life violation is symbolic of the underlying agenda to usurp any accountability to any instituted public law or common life purpose inside or outside the US.
At the personal level, Trump is the sociopath required to execute the unseen agenda. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”, he has boasted.
Trump always acts against life-protective public norms, but never against the interests of the US corporate rich. This is the missing link of public reporting and understanding.
Inner Logic of the Beast
The “libertarian” Kochs are lead funders of the Republican program to abolish the public realm and life standards which Trump now pilots after their Tea Party success in gaining control of the Party.
The New York Times recently (10/19/20) quoted Charles Koch on the specifics of his program which is indistinguishable from Trump’s program today. It implicitly expresses the unspoken idea of freedom of the private money party from public government itself – “to stop ‘confiscatory taxation,’ ‘safety and health regulations,’ ‘trade barriers,’ ‘so-called equal opportunity requirements’ and ‘many more interventions.” Koch sets no limit to the public realm of accountability he wants erased, nor does Trump.
No public accountability, responsibility and life standards is supported or agreed to by this party at any level. All public responsibilities are to be eliminated except to protect private markets, property and exchanges, and licenses to mine public spaces and lands.
What is never engaged by this doctrine from its inception is that market freedom and right extends only so far as one’s private money demand; and this entails no right or freedom to those with little or none, and in sliding scale upwards, no limit to private money demand power to a dozen individuals having more than the majority of the world put together.
In the backward ‘free market’ model of Trump, the only cost quantified is private money cost to self-maximizing buyers and sellers. All costs of human and environmental life degradation, despoliation and destruction are erased a-priori.
To execute the program, attack on long-evolved environmental standards and rules at every point is launched, but the unseen agenda’s destruction of life organization all the way down is not comprehended even by the opposition.
Thus under Trump direction, the iconic US Environmental Protection Agency is now headed by an agent whose only qualifications are serving private mining interests as a coal lobbyist. As soon as the Covid-19 crisis is established, he declares the indefinite suspension of all evolved EPA environmental-protection rules. Fossil fuel companies like the Kochs or ones in which Trump is invested are given a green light to freely pollute as “self-regulation
The former head of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement has reported that the new Trump policy is “essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future….It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic.”
Accordingly, environmental regulators across the country granted more than 3,000 requests from polluting oil and gas operations, government facilities, chemical plants, and other facilities to stop pollution monitoring and other procedures intended to protect human health and the environment. The nullified public inspections endanger oil and gas workers and allowing thousands of tons of greenhouse pollution to be emitted into the atmosphere.
Observe here how all levels of economic, social and ecological life organization are attacked. Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program reports that the “new Owner Clean Air Act Audit Program does not provide the general deterrence effect that enforcement actions provide and allows those companies who do not volunteer to go unnoticed and likely engage in unlawful pollution. Reducing enforcement actions is particularly problematic in the oil and gas sector where pollution rule violations and non-compliance are rampant – – and local states [must] agree with new enforcement cases being filed and resolved”.
We see here once more the system driver of Trump-faction rule is to dismantle all evolved life-protective law at home or abroad – from war against US social programs to foreign social states having them. Although the war on life fabrics at all levels is unconnected even by the opposition, it ranges from complete abdication of US national powers to stop the pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of US citizens, to massively disabling US public powers to serve all Americans in life-serving public capacities, to nullifying long-evolved government regulations protecting the life carrying capacities of the US and the world.
Public wealth and power are going instead to the corporate rich. “I have just made all of you a lot richer”, Trumps smiles to them after signing his monster tax-cuts into law at the White House in 2017. Smirks appear all around led by Mitch McConnell. His Senate co-leader, Lindsey Graham, had earlier told his colleagues that unless the tax cuts for the corporate rich came soon, the “Republican Party won’t be able to raise another cent”.
The program is fanatical. Even to reduce carbon emissions, strengthen labor unions, raise taxes on the rich, and make college and health care more affordable is warred on by Trump as “the Democrat program of a socialist hell-hole”.
It is worthwhile remembering here the words attributed to Crowfoot: “Only when the last tree has been cut down, only when the last river has been poisoned, only when the last fish has been caught will you realise you can’t eat money”. It rings particularly poignant as the US coasts are increasingly flooding, the forests are burning out of control, the storms of every kind increase, and the ice-cap water towers of the world collapse.
Will the US Election Catch Up?
The Covid-19 challenge across borders has shown the life-and-death necessity for the united public action that the Trump-faction agenda rules out. The 2020 US election in a few days is about this underlying meaning.
Public law and power based in universal life necessities is the moral ground and compass not seen. Yet it has been behind universal life-protective law over centuries – to ban slavery, men-only voting, violent child abuse, death from disemployment, unsafe vehicles, conditions for disease, toxins in consumables, and right to spewing viral loads in public which Trump calls “free choice”.
Public law and power alone ensure all the life enabling programs for clean air and water, sewage plants, green energy, universal literacy, public health, parks, libraries, art, broadcasting and all that private money does not buy.
We are at the visible edge of an unfolding system chaos. It demands public re-set to collective life-protective law at every level for the evolution of humanity and the natural world to have a chance.
The cable news talking heads seem obsessed with Joe Biden’s “significant” lead over Donald Trump in the national polls – as if this lead signifies a certain coming Biden victory in the presidential election.
Also feeding the narrative that Biden is likely to win are stories and film clips of millions of Americans standing in long lines to vote early in record numbers.
This is dangerously pacifying. Nearly two and a half centuries since its founding, the United States, self-described homeland and headquarters of democracy, does not select its top elected official, the president, on the basis of a national popular vote. The Electoral College, devised by slave-owning constitutional framers for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare, restricts the presidential election to the contest for all-or-nothing Elector slates in a relatively small number of states. And in these states, the horse race between Biden and Trump is much closer than it is in on the national scale. It seems likely that Trump will receive a significant amount of hidden white support, not captured by pollsters.
Overall, the Electoral College leans well to the right, over-representing the country’s most reactionary, white and rural regions so extremely that Biden cannot win the final tally without beating Trump by far more than a simple majority of the national popular vote.
But that’s not all. People telling pollsters how they are going to vote is one thing. Getting votes adequately taken and fairly counted is another thing altogether.
Reflecting their captivity to the Republifascist party, many of the contested states practice partisan and racist voter suppression (both legal and extra-legal) in ways that hurt Biden’s chances. The violence promoting Republifascist president’s campaign has added physical intimidation to the mix in and around battleground state cities and towns.
At the same time and far worse, the Trump administration and GOP have made it crystal clear that they will immediately attack the legitimacy of the record-setting number of mail-in ballots that are required by the very pandemic that Trump has multiplied across the nation. Those mail-in ballots are going to lean heavily Democratic since Democrats take the coronavirus more seriously than do Republicans. With many right-wing state and federal courts on their side all the way up to the now 6-3 right-wing US Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney general William Barr and the GOP’s army of (anti-)election lawyers will move to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, thereby throwing Trump the election in the states that matter and thus in the nation.
Three members of the right-wing Trump court – Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and now Coney Barrett – were Bush lawyers in the high court’s infamous Bush v. Gore decision. That ruling cancelled a re-count of ballots in a single state, Florida, throwing the 2000 election to the right-wing monster George W. Bush. Trump’s first legal assault on the election, telegraphed in advance, will be about suspending the initial count in multiple states.
Even if ballots somehow get fully counted, Trump will challenge Electoral College slates in contested states that go for Biden. There’s nothing in the US Constitution that requires states to send Washington (Congress) slates that reflect their popular votes. Republicans control both houses of the state legislatures in numerous contested states and can be counted on to advance Republican slates even in states where Biden wins the most vote. his, too, could work its way up to the Supreme Court, where Trump would prevail.
The vote in Trump v. Biden before Ruth Bader Ginsburg died was likely 5-4 Biden. With the hard-right Christian cultist Amy Coney-Barrett now in place, the odds lean 5-4 Trump. The chess pieces are in place for neofascistic electoral-judicial checkmate.
That’s a big part of why Trump looks so confident on the campaign trail with an approval rating in the low 40s – and of why his campaign is focused just on turning out his big but minority base.
Many Americans will protest the theft of the 2020 election (the third or perhaps fourth of the last six US presidential contests in which the candidate with the most popular votes loses). That’s why Trump has been preparing violent mobs to suppress anti-coup protests. It’s why his authoritarian handmaid and personal attorney general William Barr is preparing to declare martial law and squelch “Sedition” (protest) with paramilitary forces (from the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE and Border Patrol) accountable only to Trump.
No one should be surprised by any of this. A review of Trump’s horrific record, including stealing babies from their mothers’ arms at the southern border, applauding the execution of civil rights protesters by militia members, ordering and applauding the police state assassination of an antifascist, dog-whistling white supremacists, proclaiming his desire to be president for life, calling Black Lives Matter protesters “terrorists,” upholding the Confederacy, downplaying and spreading a lethal pandemic, and so much more shows that there’s nothing this malevolent orange ogre wouldn’t do to smite his enemies and stay in power. Nothing.
Trump recently led his frothing Michigan backers in hate rally chants of “Lock Her Up” directed at a state governor his armed neofascist backers were plotting to kidnap and murder. Trump has called the nation’s leading infectious disease expert a “disaster,” and described people who advocate public health protections against COVID-19 as “idiots.” Trump has even used his own infection to downplay the danger of the virus, claiming that “we are turning the corner” even as numerous states now set new infection records. This is sheer eugenicist madness, literally on steroids.
Believe the tyrant. Drop the disbelief. Trump “wouldn’t actually move to steal an election”? Seriously? Nothing is beyond the pale when it comes to the wannabe fascist dictator Donald Trump. Nothing.
Trump has been openly proclaiming his aim to cripple and steal the 2020 election. It’s not a hidden mystery. The Trump-Barr coup has been unfolding in the open to no small degree. As Salon’s Chauncy de Vega recently observed:
“Donald Trump continues to make it clear that he does not intend to leave office peacefully if he is defeated… Trump considers any election in which he is not the ‘winner’ to be null and void. Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court is an obvious quid pro quo to secure his ‘reelection’ if his attorneys and other agents can sufficiently sabotage the vote on Election Day and beyond….During his debate with Biden, Trump…commanded white supremacist paramilitaries to be prepared to attack his and their ‘enemies’ if he loses on Election Day or is otherwise removed from office…Trump also wants Joe Biden and other leading Democrats imprisoned and perhaps even executed because he deems them to be guilty of ‘treason’ and a ‘coup’ attempt against him. Trump and his Attorney General William Barr have also threatened to use the United States military against the American people if they dare to protest the outcome of the 2020 Election if Trump somehow finds some extra-legal (if not outright illegal) way to stay in office” (emphasis added).
Liberal and progressive “defend the vote” activists talk about organizing demonstrations and strikes “if and when Trump tries to steal the election.” It’s good to know they are mobilizing for protest after the holy day, but there’s no “if” about it. The “when” is now and has been since at least the beginning of the summer, when Trump and Barr tried to use the George Floyd rebellion as a Reichstag Fire moment – and since whenever it dawned on the Trump team that the Trump pandemic could help them steal the election by requiring mass mail-in ballots they could challenge both in court and in the streets.
“Don’t let them take your power away,” Barack Obama says in a flyer dropped on my steps in Iowa City. “Make a plan now to get involved and vote.” How typically Weimar of Obama, who went to Urbana, Illinois two years ago to tell young people that “the best way to protest is to vote.” Of course millions are going to try to vote the orange monstrosity out of office. But, no, the best way to protest and resist is to protest and resist and this is an election in which sustained popular resistance is required even to have a minimally decent vote and vote count, insofar as such a thing is possible under the deeply flawed, right-leaning US party and elections system. The courts won’t save us. The Democrats and their allied Astroturf movements won’t save us.
A serious commitment to “getting involved” will involve far more than just voting for candidates selected in advance for you by the ruling class once every 1,460 days – and more than resisting the theft of the election. Still, the theft must be resisted. The whole American System that hatched Trump and his inauthentic Dem opposition is cancer on numerous levels. It is both spiritual and material death. It can only be cured through social and not merely political revolution, the “radical reconstruction of society itself” that Dr. Martin Luther King identified as “the real issue to be faced.”
But the Trump regime is a malignant fascistic tumor that must be removed through mass action if the patient is going to have any chance of moving forward towards “the real issue to be faced.” The administration is a loaded gun aimed straight at the head of our hopes for a decent, democratic, and sustainable future. It must go.
By all means, vote, but understand that that voting once every four years is a woefully insufficient form of people’s politics. Make a plan and reach out to activist and revolutionary groups like Refuse Fascism for a deeper and daily engagement beneath and beyond the quadrennial electoral extravaganza. Vote with your feet and your voice in the streets, in the public squares, in the schools, in the workplaces, online, offline, from your car, on the bus, in the subway every single day going forward. The ruling classes of this country all the way up to the military command and top financial elite, needs to understand that America will be ungovernable if they insist on jamming a second and worse racist-sexist-nativist-eco-cidal and neofascist Trump term down our throats.
Even in the unlikely event that Trump is defeated by popular and Electoral College margins so large that he can’t semi-credibly contest the outcome, the wannabe fascistic dictator will remain in position to do unthinkable damage for eleven more weeks. The world can’t wait until January 20th, 2021 for the defenestration of this lethal lunatic.
The death toll of the pandemic that Trump has fanned and continues to lie about (“it’s going away”) may well reach half a million (nearing America’s body count during World War II) by next February. This regime must go now.
The tumor must be cut out. The Trump regime/nightmare must go. Then we must attack en masse the conditions that gave rise to it — the whole damn system, including the populace-pacifying fake-progressive “liberal” operatives and apologists like Obama and his friends at CNN and MSDNC.
In April 2020, Jamie Dimond, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, noted in the company’s 2019 annual report: “As a nation, we were clearly not equipped for this global pandemic, and the consequences have been devastating.” Like a Wall Street preacher, he added, “But it is forcing us to work together, and it is improving civility and reminding us that we all live on one planet.”
In June, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private forecasting group, reported that the “peak in quarterly economic activity occurred in 2019-Q4.” It noted:
The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in June 2009 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion lasted 128 months, the longest in the history of U.S. business cycles dating back to 1854. The previous record was held by the business expansion that lasted for 120 months from March 1991 to March 2001.
It then warned that a recession had begun in February 2020, just around the time the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic struck – and a month before Diamond warned about the “pandemic.” It reported:
A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, normally visible in production, employment, and other indicators. A recession begins when the economy reaches a peak of economic activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion.
Because a recession is a broad contraction of the economy, not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide indicators of economic activity. The committee believes that domestic production and employment are the primary conceptual measures of economic activity.
The unstated question at the heart of Diamond lamentation was whether his reference to a “pandemic” applied only to the virus or to the deeper economic and social crisis beginning to grip the country?
Grasping for straws, Pres. Trump tweeted on June 8th: “Big day for Stock Market. Smart money, and the World, know that we are heading in the right direction. Jobs are coming back FAST. Next year will be our greatest ever.”
For Trump, ignorance is bliss whether confronting a virus or a stumbling economy.
… a prolonged slowing in the pace of improvement over time could trigger typical recessionary dynamics, as weakness feeds on weakness. A long period of unnecessarily slow progress could continue to exacerbate existing disparities in our economy. That would be tragic, especially in light of our country’s progress on these issues in the years leading up to the pandemic.
He went on, despairing:
… Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses. Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth.
Drilling another nail in the proverbial economic coffin, Pres. Trump initially pulled the plug on the on-again/off-again negotiations between Sec. of the Treasure Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a new economic aid package to respond to the coronavirus. Pelosi had initially proposed a $3 trillion bailout plan but then reduced it to $1 trillion hoping to push through a compromise by the November 3rd election.
Trump tweeted:
We made a very generous offer of $1.6 Trillion Dollars and, as usual, she is not negotiating in good faith. I am rejecting their …
.. request, and looking to the future of our Country. I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business. …
The outcome of the failure to even provide band-aide relief for the growing numbers of Americans suffering from the combined pandemic and recession would be a long, cold winter.
In the face of Powell’s report and mounting criticism, including from Republicans, Trump executed a backflip and tweeting the following:
If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?
Sadly, even if the political dance is resolved and a follow-up recovery plan is implemented, the long-term economic consequences of Covid-19 pandemic cannot be fully anticipated. A recent study by two Harvard economists paint a grim picture of total costs of the pandemic. “The total cost is estimated at more than $16 trillion, or approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the US,” David Cutler and Lawrence Summers wrote. “Approximately half of this amount is the lost income from the COVID-19–induced recession; the remainder is the economic effects of shorter and less healthy life.”
And so, the ping-pong of American politics plays on.
***
Six months earlier, on April 27, 2020, Trump stood near a sign that read “Opening up America again” and announced his plan to reopen the nation’s economy in the face of the mounting coronavirus epidemic. “Every day it gets better,” he proclaimed. “We are continuing to rapidly expand our capacity and confident that we have enough testing to begin reopening and the reopening process. We want to get our country open. And the testing is not going to be a problem at all. In fact it’s going to be one of the great assets that we have.”
At the time Trump made his proclamation, the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 was near 1 million and about 55,000 people had died. Now, in mid-October, confirmed coronavirus cases are at 8.1 million and 219,00 people have died. Efforts promoted by both the Trump administration and nearly all the states to “open up” the economy have proven not only less than successful economically but disastrous in terms of the pandemic’s spreading.
Nevertheless, the White House, along with thinktanks, news organizations and state governments, have joined a growing chorus offering analyses and plans to illuminate post-pandemic possibilities. The White House’s March 2020 Executive Order, “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: Response and Recovery Through Federal-State-Local-Tribal Partnership,” laid out its arms-length strategy: “Response and recovery efforts are locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.”
Reuters warned, “A month into efforts to broadly reopen the U.S. economy there is little clarity either on the pace and durability of the recovery ….” Scholars at the Brookings Institute laid out a half-dozen scenarios dubbed “the shape of the recovery: Z-shaped, V-shaped, U-shaped, W-shaped, L-shaped, and even the Nike Swoosh.” However, the authors warned, “So, there will likely be no quick recovery. A key question is whether damage to the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services will be long lasting.”
The management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, cautioned: “Recovery from a deep crisis can be uneven, and history suggests that leaders may want to pace their policies over several years.” It poses a series of revealing questions:
Will your city be known for its unparalleled business environment for small and medium-size businesses looking to digitize and expand? Can your state become a top tourist destination? Or will workers in your locality be so successfully reskilled that it will lead the way toward inclusive growth?
It concluded, “The answer to these questions will determine the shape of the ‘next normal.’”
What if the various speculations as to the possible Covid-19 recovery lead to something other than a next normal? What if recovery portends a deeper, sadder possibility?
***
The unasked question is scary if simple: What if, after the coronavirus pandemic is contained, the economy takes much longer to recover, and social stagnation drags on? What if the recovery is a not a stepping-stone forward to a promising “next normal” but a step backward? What if America’s great ideological glue – the belief in opportunity – is frozen into a postmodern system of social relations with ever-decreasing economic mobility, one of deepening inequality?
The modern system of social inequality was forged during the Gilded Age of the late-19th century. In 1897, the richest 4,000 families in the U.S. — who representing less than 1 percent of the population — had about as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families all together. In comparison, by November 2017, the top 1 percent held 38.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. Today, deepening inequality is recasting the lives of ordinary Americans fostering what historian David Huyssen identifies as the “Second Gilded Age.”
Wisman identified three factors that contributed to the Depression’s duration. First, consumption declined leading to “a fall in household saving, and increased household indebtedness.” Second, “greater inequality” led to “reduced household saving, greater household debt, and possibly longer work hours.” And, third, “as the rich took larger shares of income and wealth, they gained relatively more command over everything, including ideology.”
Symptoms of an economic and social crisis are mounting. As of August, the unemployment rate was at 8.4 percent, while far less than the 14.7 percent in April when Covid-19 first took its toll, it is double the 4.4 percent in February. Homeless is increasing; HUD reports that as of January 2019 the national homeless level reached 567,715 people and some project that, by January 2021, could increase by 40-45 percent possibly reaching 800,000 due sustained unemployment and the coming wave of evictions.
These factors are compounded by the burden of debt; the Federal Reserve of New York estimates that total household debt for the first quarter of 2020 hit $14.3 trillion, up from $12.7 trillion in the third quarter of 2008. Personal debt includes (i) household mortgages and (ii) non-housing debt (e.g., student debt, auto loans, credit cards). Deepening despair is leading alcohol abuse, drug overdoses and increases suicides. Sadly, the lifespan of the average American is declining, and the death rate is increasing.
The rise in economic inequality over the past four decades calls into question the notion that anyone, regardless of the status of their parents, can achieve the American Dream. Recent studies imply that America is a less mobile society than in the past and confirm that the U.S. has less social mobility than comparable industrialized nations.
What if ever-deepening economic inequality comes to define the New Gilded Age?
This possibility is anticipated by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, of the Opportunities Insights group, who recently wrote, “our research shows that children’s chances of earning more than their parents have been declining. 90% of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents.” He concludes, “Today, only half of all children earn more than their parents did.”
No one knows when Covid-19 will finally be contained. One consensus suggests that a proven vaccine will likely be available and dispensed in the U.S. by the end of 2021. Moody’s Sophia Koropeckyj estimates that 5 million people will struggle to find work even after the virus has been controlled and that the recovery from the current recession, the “new normal,” won’t happen until 2023 or 2024.
More ominous, a greater economically structured and unequal system – a postmodern caste system — may come to define the next new normal. No matter whether Trump or Biden is elected the next president, a far deeper crisis may await the nation. As is becoming increasingly evident, only a truly popular and democratic social restructuring of the economy and the political order can address the structural crisis the nation faces.
In 2004, a number of prominent progressives issued statements calling on people to vote for Democrat John Kerry in the close states and the Green Party candidate in the so-called safe states where the outcome would not be close. In 2020, many of these same people have moved further to the right and call for a vote for Biden without any support for a Green vote in the so-called safe states.
In 40 states, the vote for the Green presidential ticket determines whether the Green Party retains or gains ballot line for the next election cycle. In most states, it’s 1%, 2%, 3%, or 5%. But there is no support for the Green Party this year from these progressives. What happened to left solidarity?
They have abandoned the idea that the best way for the left to fight the right is to build and fight with its own independent strength, advancing its own program under its own banner against two-capitalist-party system of corporate rule. Instead, they have responded to the rise of Trump by shifting to the right with him, telling the independent left to silence and disarm itself and back Biden, a man who would fit comfortably into the center-right parties of Europe.
Reliance on the lesser evil has historically led to greater evils. In the classic case, instead of running their own candidate for German president on 1932, the largest party, the Social Democrats, supported the conservative Paul von Hindenberg as the lesser evil to Hitler. Von Hindenberg won and appointed Hitler to the Chancellorship. The Communists ran their own candidate in the most sectarian way imaginable, saying the Social Democrats were the “social-fascist main enemy” and “after Hitler it’s our turn.” That was a case where left solidarity against the fascist threat instead of relying on conservatives to stop the fascists. Had the socialists and communists formed a left united front, they would have easily outpolled the rightwing parties.
The result of progressives consistently settling for the Democrats as the lesser evil has created a political dynamic has been moving US politics to the right for decades. The soft-right Democrats ignore progressive demands they pose no threat of taking their votes elsewhere. Instead, they adapt to the hard-right Republicans. Bill Clinton called it “triangulation.” Joe Biden calls it “working across the aisle.”
Meanwhile, the progressives in the Democratic Party are accommodating to Biden’s politics. Bernie Sanders is now for Medicare for All over 55 years old with a public option for the rest. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the Green New Deal slogan from the Greens and diluted the content in the non-binding resolution for a Green New Deal by dropping the essential immediate demand for a ban on fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure, eliminating the rapid phase-out of nuclear power, removing the deep cuts in military spending to help fund the program, and extending the deadline for zero carbon emissions from 2030 to 2050. The words Green New Deal were not mentioned at the Democratic convention, in the Sanders-Biden Unity Task Force recommendations on climate, or in the Democratic Platform, which is pro fossil fuels and, for the first time in 50 years, pro nuclear.
There will be no Medicare for All or Green New Deal from the Democrats, let alone a retreat from military bloat, wars, and coups abroad. But these progressives counsel people to vote for them everywhere, which tells the Democrats to take them for granted because posed no threat to vote for the Greens anywhere.
I don’t support a safe states strategy. Every state is a battleground for the Green Party. The gas industry is fracking the hell out of battleground states Pennsylvania and Ohio where the ducking Democrats join the retrograde Republicans lending no support to the anti-fracking movement. Greens, not the Democrats, are fighting the expansion of the Enbridge oil pipelines that take Alberta tar sands oil and Bakken fracked oil across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota on to oil refineries. In every state, Greens are taking on Democratic machines in the cities, and real estate industry that finances them, when we fight for affordable housing and against the brutality of police forces that do what the Democrats in the cities designed them to do, which is to keep downscale people, particularly Black people, down and out of upscale communities. They are set up to police the New Jim Crow lines of school district and municipal boundaries that segregate us by race and class.
We should all be concerned about the voter suppression activities of Trump and the Republicans. But Greens know from bitter experience that we should also be concerned about voter suppression in the form of party suppression by the Democrats. The Democrats were able to knock the Greens off the ballot in Montana, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania where the Green petitions had two to three times the required signatures, which was difficult to do in the Covid lockdown. But the Democrats are also legislating party suppression. For example, in New York the Democrats rammed through a law attached to the state budget bill in April while attention was focused on the pandemic that triples the number of votes the Greens need to keep their ballot line. Only Nader for president in 2000 and me in 2014 for governor ever got that many votes as a Green candidate in New York. If we lose the ballot line, we will need 45,000 good signatures – triple the old number – collected in a six-week window to get statewide candidates on the ballot. When the Socialist Party lost its ballot line in 1938 in New York, it never recovered it. There was not an independent left party with a ballot line in New York again until the Green Party, 1999-2002 and 2010-?.
I can understand why people in a close state would vote for Biden to stop Trump. I don’t agree, but I share their desire to get Trump out. But why aren’t the prominent progressives afraid of a repressive Democratic Party that is suppressing the Green Party?
The simple-minded trope that a vote for the Greens is a vote for Trump ignores the fact that a Green vote is in the Green column, not Trump’s. It is an anti-Trump vote, a stronger anti-Trump vote, and a second front against Trump that adds to the total against Trump. But instead of a united front against Trump at least in safe states, these progressives are showing no solidarity with the Greens.
That trope also falsely assumes that Green voters will vote Democratic. It ignores the fact that most Green voters are Green voters, not wayward Democrats. Greens bring their own voters out, people who are disgusted with the two corporate parties. 100 million people didn’t vote in 2016. They are disproportionately working class, people of color, and young. They are the potential base of an independent left in the US.
The 2016 exit polls showed that 61% of voters for the Green presidential candidate Jill Stein would have stayed home if she was not on the ballot. Plug those numbers into the close states in 2016 – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. It was Black voter suppression and the Electoral College that gave the presidency to the popular vote loser, Donald Trump. The Greens didn’t do that.
The move to the right by the left in this election has reached into the ranks of traditionally independent socialists who used to take the position of building an independent socialist party and no support for the capitalist parties. These folks used to believe that crossing this line of working class political independence in elections is like crossing a picket line in a strike.
On the System Change Not Climate Change (SCNCC) website, ecosocialists are not calling for system change in this election. Maura Stephens calls for a vote for Biden even in her home state of New York where Biden has been ahead of Trump in the polls by 25% or more since he became the presumptive nominee in March and more than 30% in the polls since late August. Likewise, Ted Franklin on the SCNCC website calls for a vote for Biden everywhere, even his home state of California where Biden has led Trump by an average of 32% since March.
On the System Change Not Climate Change listserv commentaries on these articles, others have chimed in for a vote for Biden everywhere including the safe states. Brian Tokar wrote he was voting for Biden in Vermont where the polls have consistently shown Biden ahead by at least 23%.
Richard Smith is the author of the recent book, China’s Engine of Environmental Destruction, a devastating analysis of the drivers of endless rapid growth embedded in China’s hybrid capitalist-statist economic system and in China’s police state that represses all resistance. His most recent SCNCC post, “The Chinese Communist Party Is an Environmental Catastrophe,” summarizes the book’s analysis. Agreeing with the vote-Biden-everywhere posts, he wrote, “Given our winner-take-all system, no third party has a chance in this country, so left political struggle takes place outside the parties and inside the Democratic Party for lack of any other option.” That is like saying given the Chinese one-party state, the Chinese left of environmental, labor, oppressed-nationality, and pro-democracy activists should work inside the Chinese Communist Party for lack of any other option. What happened to system change?
There is an option for the US left. Greens have won office in over 1,200 elections in the US. Over 100 currently hold office. The left could replicate those wins in the thousands if it stopped saying and acting as if there is no other option but the Democrats, where progressive demands like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and ending the endless wars go to die.
The irony of this shift to the right and no support for the Greens as an independent left by so many prominent progressives in this election is that in hopes of getting rid of Trump, they have followed Trump to the right. After this election if the Green Party is eliminated from many state ballots, the question may not be whatever happened to left solidarity, but what happened to the left, period.
