2024-25 Scenarios

Revolutionary Reponse(s)

My Revolutionary Grandog Oreo (RGO): “Your species is a deadly joke as long as it stays under the command of capitalism-imperialism. Mine lacks a lot of your species' capacities but those capacities of yours are harnessed to planetary destruction until you throw off the lethal leash of capital. I feel sorry for you if you don't get your shit together and figure out how to do that."

So it’s not too early to start gaming out US election scenarios for 2024-25 – not for the fun of it but to sharpen our readiness to respond in a properly revolutionary fashion to whatever goes down.

Seven things to keep in mind before proceeding further:

+1. One of the two United States’ two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties (the formerly republican Republi-fascist Party) has gone fascist under the open Hitler channeler Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump while the other one (the Democratic Party) is that Reich-most party’s “Weimar” enabler and conciliator as well an agent and backer of horrific bloodshed in Ukraine and even of genocide in Gaza.  

+2. The United States’ fascism problem will NOT be resolved in the electoral arena.

+3.  As I and others warned from the start, prosecutors and the courts – the criminal justice system – will NOT stop Donald “Bloodbath” Trump from running for office and returning to power, thereby ending the federal cases against him and nullifying the state ones.

RGO: “Snooze. Wake me up when you get serious about putting the fascist down.”

+4. Scenarios can change quickly in response to unpredictable events.  The criminals Joe Biden and Trump could each die or suffer crippling strokes or heart attacks any day, sending their parties scrambling for a new presidential candidate.  If Biden’s popularity and viability sink far enough,  it’s not inconceivable that the Democrats could replace him with a new contender (with unknown viability). Biden could rally ahead of Trump in the polls (he’s currently well behind) only to lose momentum thanks to a financial or foreign policy crisis, e.g. the Trump ally and Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu launching a bloody “October Surprise.”  Russian use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine or a  record-setting mass shooting could shift opinion back towards the Democratic candidate – or maybe the other way.  Epic extreme climate-driven weather events could alter the political terrain. The current wild and under-reported federal-state border standoff in Texas could blow up, shifting opinion in different ways. Mass protests at one or both of the two major party conventions could alter the electoral terrain. So could a third- or fourth- party candidacy (the grotesque covid conspiratorialist RFK, Jr?) that catches enough fire to impact the electoral outcome.

+5. Beneath all the chaos, capitalism-imperialism is moving steadily and at a dangerously accelerating pace to cancel all prospects for a decent human future regardless of whether the United States’ political superstructure goes fascist or not. Capitalogenic ecocide led by the deepening climate catastrophe is the leading threat to a decent human existence but the resurgent threat of nuclear war, sparked by the US-led provocation of Russia in Ukraine, is also now quite dire.   

+6. Because of point 5, our response to each of the different 2024-25 scenarios discussed below must have the revolutionary socialist transformation of American society and not merely the blocking of a second Trump presidency as our master goal.

+7. It is true that the January 6 insurrection leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump cannot legitimately retake the presidency under the US Constitution because the third section of the Constitution’s post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment forbids giving public offices (including of course the presidency) to a former officeholder who “engaged in an insurrection” against the United States.  But socialist revolutionaries should leave that argument to bourgeois Democrats.  Socialist revolutionaries should don’t oppose what Trump and his followers did in on January 6 simply because it was an attempted insurrection. We aim for a revolution that will inevitably include things that fit the definition of the word insurrection: acts and instances of mass popular revolt against currently existing (capitalist-imperialist) civil authority and government.  We oppose January 6  because it was a fascist insurrection meant to bring about something terrible, a deeply reactionary and revanchist change in “how society is governed. Once in power,” Refuse Fascism notes:

“fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Truth is obliterated and fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movement and consolidate power.”

A socialist revolution will aim for something very different and beautiful: a new and liberating way of life beyond the savage and exterminist rule of imperial capital and a social and political order militantly opposed to oppression, exploitation, and imperialism.  

Here are the top three potential scenarios for the election:

+ 1. Trump narrowly wins the Electoral College with no small assistance from widespread right-wing vote suppression, vote manipulation, and voter intimidation, this while very possibly losing the national popular vote.

+2.  Biden (or his Democratic replacement, certainly NOT the politically toxic Kamala Harris) narrowly wins, sparking a Republi-fascist uprising.  

+3.  The election is cancelled or postponed, sparking a Republi-fascist uprising.

Of these three scenarios, it might seem — seven and a half months prior to the election — that the most likely one is the first. Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump is ahead of the bumbling, blood-soaked imperialist “Genocide Joe” Biden both in national polls and in the handful of contested states that absurdly determine US presidential election outcomes under the archaic, right-tilted Electoral College, which effectively requires the Democratic candidate to win the national popular vote by at least 4 percentage points to keep or attain the presidency.

But, as already suggested, the situation is fluid with many balls in the air and, strange as it may sound to say, the third one – cancellation/postponement – should not be ruled out. Such a wild thing could be undertaken by the White House and the Pentagon:

+ in response to real or threatened right-wing violence, including attacks on election sites, election workers, and voters (and/or)…

+ because the White House and Pentagon acknowledge that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment literally forbids Trump’s ascendancy (this regardless of the Christian Fascist-Trumpist Supreme Court’s recent absurdly unconstitutional ruling that Congress would have to act to execute Amendment 14, section 3) and/or because….

+ the White House and Pentagon determine that Trump’s return to power will be a fatal blow to the American Empire and its key alliances (chiefly NATO) and/or believe (or claim to believe) that “Russian interference” is “undermining a free and fair election.” (US power is in considerable decline  - something the world should hardly mourn [1] – and a Trump return could well be a decisive final blow to US hegemony.)   

So, comrades, what is to be done?

Trump Wins

If Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump wins (likely by a small margin in the Electoral College and possibly while losing the overall national poplar vote), the radical movement we need must flood the streets and public squares, shutting down the country under radical demands including the elementary initial requirement that the rabid fascist dog Adolph “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump not be permitted to resume power. No F’ng way to a second Trump term! The malignant, “retribution”-promising wannabe dictator Trump has in recent months been openly channeling Hitler’s virulent and genocidal rhetoric, calling for the elimination of Marxist “vermin,” saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” promising to build giant concentration camps, pledging a massive deportation program, and threatening to deploy the military to crush protest, to round up “illegals,” and to stop urban crime “in one day.” Just last Saturday, Trump told one of his Hate Rallies in Ohio that nonwhite immigrants are “not people” and said that the nation would descend into mass violence if he is not re-elected: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.” Trump referred to incarcerated January 6 terrorists as “unbelievable patriots” and political “hostages.” A second Trump presidency is simply unacceptable.

Our movement’s ire would be directed not only at the Trumpist-fascists and their party and movement, however. We would also target the war criminal Biden and the dismal imperialist Democrats, who have consistently appeased Amerikaner fascism and used it as their “lesser evil”-ist electoral foil – and whose bourgeois vision of  “democracy” is a cloak for the de facto class dictatorship of imperial capital.

The goal would not be merely to momentarily defeat the Republi-fascist enemy. We would take to the streets and public squares not simply to block the aspring strongman and momentarily keep a Democratic imperialist in power but to set entirely new “people power” political terms for the nation and world going forward.  “We need and we demand” (to use the Revcoms’ language - more below) a new way of life beyond the capitalist-imperialist one that gives rise to fascism while promising to end all prospects for a decent human future whatever political superstructure — bourgeois democracy, fascism, or some mix of these — sits atop its deadly, soul-crushing, ecocidal, and war-generating mode of production.

Biden Wins

A Biden win – likely by a small margin – will  certainly spark a Trumpist-fascist rebellion, eliciting right-wing mayhem. Think “stop the steal,” “fight to take your country back,”  January 6, and conspiratorial Hitlerian claims that the nation has been “stabbed in the back” by a “radical left deep state fix” on steroids.  Donald “Retribution” Trump recently threatened a F’ng “bloodbath” if he loses.  He means it. Sensing the distinct possibility of humiliating federal felony convictions and perhaps even imprisonment, Adolph Trump will go ape-shit calling for violence to return him to power. Something like a civil war may ensue.   

In this scenario, the radical and revolutionary movement should help flood the streets and public squares with masses demanding among other things the crushing of the Trumpist-Republi-fascist uprising. The Amerikaners’ ugly uprising will not be ours, to say the least. But our radical revolutionary anger is directed not only at the Trumpist-fascists and it is not opposed to insurrection as such but to specifically fascist insurrection. We also target the imperial criminal Biden and the dismal imperialist Democrats, who have consistently appeased Amerikaner fascism and used it as their “lesser evil”-ist electoral foil – and whose own vision of  “democracy” is itself a cloak for the class dictatorship of imperial capital. To repeat: the goal is not merely to defeat the fascist uprising but to set entirely new “people power” political terms for the nation and world going forward.  We stay in the streets and public squares after the crushing of the 2024-25 fascist uprising, demanding a new revolutionary socialist society beyond beyond the capitalist-imperialist one that gives rise to fascism while promising to end all prospects for a decent human future whatever political superstructure — bourgeois democracy, fascism, or some mix of these — sits atop its deadly, soul-crushing, ecocidal, and war-generating mode of production.

Cancellation/Suspension

The same basic principles hold in the event of cancellation/postponement, which will also spark an Amerikaner fascist uprising.  

For any of the properly revolutionary response to be operationally realized, of course, a significant actual radical Left needs to actually exist in the US.  The first “what is to be done” is organizational – to form a revolutionary movement beyond its currently small and offically marginalized and mocked centers.  This requires many left-identified people to shed the various afflictions I have detailed at length in my “Lame Left” series, including but not limited to the rampant passivity and pessimism that is so common among decent and progressively inclined people, reflected in an online friend’s recent comment that “we are royally fucked if Trump wins.”  Leaving aside the deeper fact that we are “royally fucked” if capitalism-imperialism continues to rule the world for another decade, many of us need to change our heart-, body-, and mind-set to where we say something like this instead:

“No to that fascist bastard Herr Donald and no to that lethal imperialist Genocide Joe. No to the Republifascists and no to the Weimar Dems. No to the whole damn system that presents us with the sick “democratic” choice between the fascist Trump and the capitalist warmonger Biden as all that we can hope for. We need and we demand an alternative revolutionary socialist political order that puts us on the path to end all oppression and exploitation while fundamentally altering our relationship to the natural environment and ending the drift towards global nuclear war.”  

Please check out this important statement from the Revolutionary Communist Party (the Revcoms): We Need and We Demand A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System.  Speaking of which, some final words of wisdom from the Revcom leader Bob Avakian’s recent essay “2024 Scenarios and the Challenges,” mindful that divisions within the ruling class like the ones we see in the US today carry revolutionary potential:

“Everything depends on bringing forward a revolutionary people, from among the most bitterly oppressed, and all parts of society, first in the thousands and then in the millions, as a powerful revolutionary force, organized from the start and consistently with a country-wide perspective, impacting all of society and changing the terms of how masses of people see things and how every institution has to respond.  Everything must be focused now on actually bringing forward and organizing this revolutionary force… even if at the beginning of a crisis represented by one of the above scenarios (and/or possibly some others), there is not yet a revolutionary people in the millions, the challenge and responsibility we must strive to meet in those circumstances is to bring such a revolutionary people into being, through the ‘intense swirl” of the crisis: to take responsibility precisely to repolarize—for revolution—in such intense circumstances. And the following statement from Lenin…not only applies overall to the kind of situation we are in now, but would especially apply when everything is coming to a head: ‘people learn in a week more than they do in a year of ordinary, somnolent [sleepy] life.’…This speaks to the possibility of winning masses, yes even millions, of people to revolution in a very “telescoped” way, in the circumstances of rapidly intensifying contradictions, when the whole direction of society is being immediately and sharply contested—even when, in immediate terms, the defining contestation is among forces none of which is revolutionary—and even when winning masses of people to revolution had seemed like a remote possibility, or even outright impossibility, shortly before that…However, this—it needs to be firmly understood and constantly kept in mind—does not in any way reduce the great need and urgent importance of bringing forward a revolutionary people, in the millions, as soon as possible, in order to be in the best possible position to influence the course of events as things continue to intensify, and likely make leap after leap in the intensification of the crisis.”

It's not about the crystal ball.  It’s about organization and action.

A key early work by a man some leading US left thinkers like to call a “counterrevolutionary” (!), which is like calling this animal a cat:

+1. See Paul Street, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,”Common Dreams, February 22, 2018.