Dear Liberals

What are Your Plans for After the Election?

Dear Liberals:  

Don’t get me wrong.  I know why you are obsessed with the 2024 presidential election, why you are all caught up in the great horse race. After all, I have been arguing for years that the Republican Party has gone fascist in the time of the Tea Party and Trump[1].

I consider your political organization, the Democrats,  a capitalist-imperialist and neoliberal Weimar party, a potential Vichy party, “the party of inauthentic opposition,” an “enabler and conciliator of the Republifascists,” a party of capitulation and collaboration, “the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems,” and other unflattering stuff like that[2].  I know you don’t want to hear all that from an actual Marxist and communist like me.

Still, you might find it useful for your own electoral purposes that I do not consider your party fascist. My view is that the Dems are clinging to long normative but fading and failing Western institutions, practices, values, and ideology of bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law “democracy.”  They retain a continuing commitment (stronger in some folks than others) to what the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian calls the “outer shell of democracy” atop the underlying dictatorship of capitalist class rule. The Project 2025 MAGA Republifascists are ready, willing, and able to smash that “outer shell” in an arch-reactionary palingenetic nationalist effort to entrench openly authoritarian white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist, and patriarchal Minority Amerikaner Rule.

I can see why you would want to try to keep the “outer shell” at least partly intact by voting to keep your party in power of the executive branch.

I also get why you’ve gotten more hopey-changey and happy about the election since Joe Biden dropped out and handed the 2024 Democratic presidential candidacy to Kamala Harris. Biden was exposed as cognitively cooked beyond repair during his catastrophic debate with Trump.  That epic Biden fail confirmed Democrats’ worst fears about the “Genocide Joe’s” mental and physical decline.

At the same time, candidate race and gender – the color and sexual identity of faces in high places – is a big deal for many of you and Harris’ race, gender, and race help breathe what you think is new indentitarian and generational life into the Democratic ticket. A good number of deep pockets election funders and regular contributors agree with you, as is seen by Harris’s recent record-setting campaign finance haul, which helps feed your exuberance.

I won’t go into a full Marxist/communist critique of your electoral politics here. What would the point be? I’ve been doing that for many years[3] and you are locked down “With Her” (with Kamala, as with Bill [Clinton], Al [Gore], John [Kerry], Barack, and Hillary in previous cycles) right now, given “the stakes.”  Hell, I myself might even give a few seconds of thought to voting “for” the centrist imperialist corporate neoliberal mass incarcerator and genocide-backer Harris if I lived in one of the six or so contested states that absurdly determine presidential election outcomes under the archaic US Electoral College system.

But here’s my question: would you like to take your eyes off the horse race a bit and start focusing on and planning for the aftermath of the contest instead of just the election itself?

Cuz here’s the thing, friends.  The other viable major capitalist party that your capitalist party has helped turn into a fascist outfit atop a Christian white nationalist Amerikaner movement doesn’t accept defeat in mere elections (or in jury verdicts) anymore, okay? If they lose the initial Electoral College count (which still seems unlikely even if the Harris ascendency has brought your party a boost), the Republifascists are going to go apeshit.  They will unleash an all-out assault on the election including no small amount of political violence.  And this time they will have a fully MAGA-tized/Christian Fascist US Supreme Court on their side as they fight to overthrow the results.  They should have the majority of the US Senate in their camp too (given the highly Republican-friendly line of the Senate race this year) along with the governors and legislatures of half or so of the nation’s fifty states and the majority of the nation’s police officers. 

Make no mistake: the RepubliNazis will not acknowledge or concede defeat, blood will flow, and the resulting coup attempt(s) will raise the question of which side the US military will take. The specter of Civil War  has risen like no time since 1860-61.  The Republifascist policy network is war gaming legal and political coup strategies for 2024.  

Then there’s the promised aftermath of a second Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump presidential victory (still the most likely outcome even if less certainly so than before the Harris handoff): mass repression, political and legal retribution, mass deportations, unhinged racist and sexist violence and more terrible to contemplate. In a word: fascism.

And bear in mind that a second Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump victory may well happen even though Trump loses the national popular vote, as he did in 2016 and as George W. Bush did in 2000-01. That’s courtesy of the right-tilted slaveowners’ Electoral College, which effectively requires the Democratic candidate to best her Republican opponent by 3 to 4 points in the national popular vote to prevail in the election.

My questions to liberals and Democrats more broadly:

·       Will you plan to join the actual radical Left to fight fascists the way they need to be fought in the aftermath of the election, beyond the holy quadrennial major party candidate-centered electoral extravaganza – in the streets, the public squares, the workplaces, the schools, in all spheres of society, even at risk to yourself and loved ones?

·       Will you join the actual radical Left in looking honestly and, well, radically, down to the taproot of how and why the USA hatched a fascist party and movement and how that terrible development emerged from the inner contradictions and workings of American capitalism-imperialism?

·       Or, alternately, will you, weakened by the “siren song” and “quicksand” (Avakian’s excellent metaphors) of right-tilted US bourgeois electoral politics (among other and related sources of authoritarianism-enabling human diminishment) capitulate to the white nationalist Minority Rule fascisation of the nation and try to make your “realistic” and “pragmatic” accommodation with the new Amerikkka?

In my next commentary I want to dig into the distinctive US elections and governance order so many of you are determined to defend.  It fails the tests of popular sovereignty and advance of the common good, I will argue, not only from a Marxist perspective (my own) but even from a basic bourgeois-democratic perspective of  “one person, one vote” and majority rule.    

 Endnotes

1. Many liberals still even now seem unduly reluctant to use the F-word – fascism – when it comes to the Republifascists. I think the rightmost of the nation’s two reigning capitalist parties checks off all the definitional fascist boxes (see the first three chapters of my most recent book listed below in note 3). That’s why I sometimes call it the “Reichmost US major party,” not merely “the rightmost US major party.”  

2. And, by the way, as Trump absurdly calls Kamala Harris “radical Left,” I have argued that her career is a perfect match for my critical descriptions of the Democrats. Please see Paul Street, “Kamala Harris and the Maddening Siren of US Electoral Politics,” CounterPunch, July 26, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/26/kamala-harris-and-the-maddening-siren-of-us-electoral-politics/. Harris has recently made her open-ended commitment to the genocidal fascist state of Israel clear to those who can read between the lines of her faux humanitarian concern for the Palestinian people.

3. I’ll skip the hundreds of commentaries and just cite some of my books: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (2004); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010); They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (2014); Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (2020); This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (2021).