~~ recommended by collectoivist action ~~
War, children, it's just a shot away Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1969 I have no idea who is going to win the 2024 presidential election other than it will be either the open fascist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump or the lethal imperialist and mass incarcerator Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris. I am aware that the “presidential election Nostradamus” who has correctly predicted 9 of the last 10 presidential elections, historian Allan Lichtman, has picked Harris (on the basis of his fascinating 13-factor formula). I hardly wish to bet against Lichtman, but the race is down to the wire. There is too much volatility and chance and there are too many balls in the air for me to feel strong about any prediction beyond Harris beating Trump in the national popular vote. October is certain to bring big “surprises” at home and/or abroad. As most of this commentary’s readers should know, the United States doesn’t elect presidents on the basis of a national popular vote. Its absurd Electoral College effectively requires the Democratic candidate to beat their Republican opponent by 4 to 5 percent of that vote to keep or gain the White House. And the American first-past-the-270-Electors- To make matters worse, the Trumpist Republi-fascists have been recruiting and putting into place local election officials who will refuse to certify Democratic victories. They are undertaking a concerted voter intimidation program. They have passed state laws making voting more difficult for non-Republicans. They have exhaustively gamed out constitutional and extra-constitutional strategies to deny and cancel a Harris victory. And they have a now fully MAGA-tized Christian Fascist Supreme Court on their side to back them up at the highest level in their legal assaults on the election. Two unsightly Trump victories seem possible: + A “clean” win: Donald “Kamala is a Communist” Trump wins the Electoral College “cleanly” (quote marks are required because of the right-wing vote shenanigans and voter suppression/intimidation that will ensue) but loses the national popular vote as in 2016. + Victory via the Trump High Court: Donald “Retribution” Trump losing both the popular vote and slaveowners’ Electoral College but successfully challenging the outcome, getting it reversed on spurious grounds by a Supreme Court that is predisposed to grant Trump a second presidency. (Allan Lichtman actually predicted the 2000 election correctly but for the intervention of a right-wing Supreme Court in Bush v Gore). The Court will claim to be acting to stave off civil war as Trump’s more violent Amerikaner backers spill blood in the streets – including that of liberal and left activists – and face (legitimate repression from the Biden administration and from Democratic Party-controlled and local state governments. But who knows? Shit is “out da box now.” I hope Lichtman is right about the outcome. Noam Chomsky correctly labelled Trump “the most dangerous criminal in human history” even right before Trump had a chance to spread the Covid-19 virus around the country, killing hundreds of thousands of US-Americas – maybe Trump’s most forgotten and biggest crime among a long list of crimes. And this time there’s no attempt by Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump and his team to hide the fascist agenda. The whole formerly republican Republican Party is on board with their Hitler-channeling Dear Leader along with an army of authoritarian, racist, nativist, and sexist policy strategists ready to implement a comprehensive blood and soil Gilead agenda (Project 2025) for the patriarchal and Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. As Donald “I Only Rape Women I Find Attractive” Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens. Beneath the electoral uncertainty, Ten things seem unambiguously true to me: +1. Even if Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump doesn’t prevail in the 2024-25 election, it is chilling evidence of what an atrocious and dangerous nightmare state the United States of Amerika is (and has been for most of its history in my opinion) that this malignant fascist monster is (a) not behind bars and (b) actually has a good shot at bringing his hate-mongering horror show back to the most powerful and dangerous office on earth. More than 75 million of the US “City on a Hill’s” adults are ready to vote to give a second presidency to the lethal Republi-Nazi maniac Donald “Haitians are Eating Our Dogs and Cats” Trump. Even if the Malignant One loses, this is a terrifying sign of abject and disastrous societal failure. +2. Evin if Harris wins, she will be unable to do much to make her and her party seem like progressive alternatives to the Republi-Nazi party – assuming she even cares to try to do that – under the US slaveowners’ Minority Rule regime. The Amerikaner fascists now have the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court and at least half the nation’s absurdly powerful state governments. The will regain majority agenda-setting control of the absurdly powerful and malapportioned (and filibusted) US Senate thanks to an election line up that puts far more Democratic than Republican incumbent Senators up for re-election. Even if the Democrats maintain a slim margin in the Senate (very unlikely), Harris’s promises to pass various forms of legislation favored by most US Americans will not be fulfilled. Her attempts at reform won’t get past the Senate filibuster (which requires 60 of a 100 votes for a bill to be heard) and the God-like Supreme Court. A center-right Dem who speaks the insipid Clinton-Obama neoliberal language of “getting things done on a bipartisan basis,” Harris as president will exhibit Vichy-like accommodation to the far-right that is lethally enabled and encouraged by the Minority Rule structure of US governance and elections. +3. If her vice presidency and presidential campaign are any indication, Harris will continue three disastrous US imperial policies under “Genocide Joe” Biden: (i) “iron clad” US support – funding, equipping, and protecting – of the Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel’s genocidal war of ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its related escalated wars on the West Bank and Lebanon; (ii) the reckless US provocation of the nuclear superpower Russia through the funding, equipping, and protecting of a mass murderous meatgrinder of a horrific imperialist proxy war in Ukraine; (iii) the reckless military encirclement and provocation of the United States main rival superpower China. +4. Consistent with its emergence as a fascist party, the Republifascists no longer accept defeat in elections. An initial Harris victory will set off a firestorm of Republi-fascist rage seeking to reverse the outcome “by all means necessary.” The means will involve political violence in various forms including paramilitary attacks, collaboration between fascist police and militias, and lone-wolf attacks in a nation saturated with guns including 15-18 million military assault rifles. +5. Considerable and possible major civil conflagration will follow the election regardless of its outcome. The most obvious scenarios for mass conflict involve a Harris victory, which will spark right-wing violence far beyond the immediate aftermath – likely for the entire length of her time in office. A Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump victory – especially one achieved through fascist bullying and the intervention of the high Trump Court – also comes with a strong likelihood of violence: the promised Trumpist repression of those who rise up in understandable refusal to accept a second Trump administration. That repression will combine the violence of state gendarmes (perhaps including the US military, as promised by Herr Trump) with the actions of far-right extra-state actors. Then comes Trump’s promised enlistment of the military in a giant mass deportation program and a draconian campaign to “end urban crime in one day.” (It may be worth noting here that fascism has never come into power in a nation as remotely saturated with firearms and literal military weapons as the USA in 2024-25.)
+6. You can’t defeat fascism when you refuse to call it out for what it is because – like the preponderant majority of top Democrats and liberal media authorities – you are either too ignorant or stupid to understand it or too frightened to say “the F-word” (fascism) so because you are afraid of what you might stir up by telling the truth about how supposedly exceptionally free and democratic capitalist America generated a giant fascist movement that took over one of the nation’s two dominant political parties with no small enablement and assistance from the nation’s other dominant and supposedly liberal political party. +7. You can’t even begin to send the new Amerikaner fascism into the dustbin of history (where it belongs by any decent moral calculation) by squeaking by the Electoral College with a faux-progressive neoliberal/capitalist- +8. In the (not at all exceptionally democratic or free) USA no less than in other countries past and present, the underlying capitalist-imperialist system is the seedbed, the societal basis, for fascism/neo-fascism, along with other oppression systems upon which contemporary class rule relies — racism, nativism, patriarchy, nationalism, and imperialism. +9. As terrible as fascism is in in all its forms, times, and places, it is a symptom of a capitalist order that is quite capable of cancelling all prospects for a decent human future without cracking open the outer superstructural shell of democracy atop the underlying bourgeois class dictatorship/mode of production. Even if bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy can stay intact to some significant degree in the US, the profits regime and its Siamese twin modern imperialism will bring humanity to the very edge of extinction through environmental disaster, nuclear war, and pandemicide. +10. American “democracy” is a badly failed endeavor no matter how the election turns out. The fact that Adolf Trump is on a major party US presidential ballot with a real shot at returning to power and not behind bars is profoundly damning and something for which the Democrats must never be forgiven. The presentation of the noxious horse race between ruling class Fascist Trump and ruling class Killer Kamala as a meaningful “democratic choice” and as the full spectrum of acceptable political contention in the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation is a grave insult – a massive “Fuck You!” – and a lethal menace to humanity. It is much to be hoped that the steep, almost pre-Civil War “red v. blue” divisions within and between elites and masses starkly evident right now betokens conflicts that can create a context in which new radical and socialist forces can advance a re-polarization from red against blue to the people against not just the ruling class but the capitalist system on which that ruling class’s wealth and power rests.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022 |
No comments:
Post a Comment