It's Over, Folks

Amerikaner Pigs in Shit on the US Bourgeois Democracy Farewell Tour

Buh-buh bye-den bourgeois democracy!

9:15 AM, CST, July 1, 2024: Note to readers: I’ve been waiting to read today’s forthcoming US Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s insane, arch-authoritarian argument that he is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosection for any of his efforts to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election. If the decision comes down before I’m done copy-editing this essay I’ll have to make some more space for it here.

10: AM or thereabouts, CST: Okay, the decision is and I’m going to try to read what I can.

11:15 AM, CST: Okay, I’ve seen enough. See the sub-section below titled “TODAY - ‘A King Above the Law.’” The bourgeois democracy so many of us, including most of "the left" (whatever the F that is anymore) cling to, is DEAD. Deceased. If you want to say hospice, fine, but folks it’s over. It’s over. Time to get in the streets and public squares and fight for a whole new way of life. More on that below.

LAST WEEK

Last week was a very bad one for what’s left of United States bourgeois democracy and a really good week for rising Amerikan white nationalist Christian fascism, for unhinged eco-cidal corporate capitalism, and for the right-wing faux-populist war on “the administrative state.”

“What Was Plain to See”

The most obvious evidence in support of this thesis was the horrific and dystopian presidential “debate,” the unmitigated atrocity that unfolded before the eyes and ears of 51 million television viewers last Thursday. 

Democrats watched in shock and dismay and Republifascists looked on gleefully while “Genocide Joe” Biden was reduced to bumbling incoherence and mental pudding in the face of Donald “Clear Out Marxist Vermin” Trump’s onslaught of sadistic Hitlerian falsehood. The dazed and shuffling codger Biden stood (barely) in befuddled, broke-brain confusion as Mafia Don spewed one preposterous fabrication and vicious insult after another. 

“Sleepy Joe” never recovered.  He failed to seriously counter Trump’s verbal blitzkrieg. No competent debater would have permitted Trump to get away with it.

It was a stomach-turning horror show from start to finish. Running Biden for a second term is starting to look like elder abuse. The notorious “gaffe machine” Biden was never all that eloquent but the failing and antiquated version seen by 51 million Americans last Thursday was a bumbling ghost of his former self.

Recall that the Biden campaign actually and foolishly wanted this unusually early “debate” since they were (and are) ominously running behind :

• a fascist felon, putschist who tried to subvert, cancel, and physically overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral democracy in 2020.

• an orange-hued promoter of political violence who the White House and Justice Department pathetically failed to prosecute and lock up in properly timely fashion after January 6.

• a eugenicist, white supremacist, and pandemic-spreading wannabe strongman for life who wanted as POTUS to crush the beautiful George Floyd Rebellion with the US military and embraced teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020.

• an arch-nativist who as POTUS told border patrol agents that he’d pardon them if they shot Central American asylum-seekers.

• a multiply accused rapist who as POTUS joined with his fellow Republifascist Mitch McConnell to create a Christian Fascist women-enslaving Supreme Court whose many outrages include the brazen cancellation of women’s majority-supported constitutional right to an abortion.

• a “law and order” fascist who openly mocks the rule of law when the, yes, failing bourgeois state tries to punish his many high state crimes.

• a Hitler-channeling malignant narcissist who calls militantly capitalist-imperialist Democrats “radical Left,” pledges “retribution” against all political enemies, and promises to clear “Marxist vermin” from the country.

• an opnely aspiring dictator who is backed by a vast political and policy network that has worked up a comprehensive and detailed plan (“Project 2025”) to turn the United States into a neo-fascist/Christian white nationalist state, replete with a mass deportation and detention campaign and the elimination of all remaining remotely decent social and environmental programs.

But I digress. The awfulness of Biden’s scary-bad performance distracted attention from Herr Trumpenhouse’s maddening, non-stop truth-inversion during the “debate.”

It also sparked numerous calls from within parts of the Democratic Party for Biden to relinquish his 2024 nomination – a remarkable development.  The pleas for the incumbent to not seek a second term should be understandable for anyone who actually sat through the dystopian “debate” four nights ago. Read this from the editorial board of The New York Times two days ago:

“At Thursday’s debate, the president needed to convince the American public that he was equal to the formidable demands of the office he is seeking to hold for another term. Voters, however, cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago. The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence. … The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.”

Dismal Dems in Deep Shit: “At Least His Neck and Torso Are Still Intact”

The capitalist-imperialist Democrats are now faced with what must look to them like two scary-bad options: (a) continuing with their bumbling warmonger of a decrepit incumbent, who is wholly unfit for a second term or (b) finding some way to cancel his nomination and build up support for a viable new nominee between their coming national convention in Chicago (where mass protests against Biden’s sickening backing of genocide in Gaza are certain) and the first Tuesday in November.  If they do somehow open up the presidential candidate selection process (don’t bet on them having the courage and wherewithal to do that), they will have to deal with the difficulty and discomfort of explaining to more bourgeois-identitarian parts of their base and activist networks why they can’t nominate the politically disastrous Black female Vice President Kamala Harris (an automatic loser if she heads the ticket).

Either way they’re in deep shit. The Times is probably correct that dumping the sluggish, brain-fried candidate is their least bad choice. I’m probably right that they’ll stay with their worst choice.

Team Biden is trying to wait the debate-instigated panic out. The longer the dismal Dems wait to pull the trigger on their failing incumbent the harder it will be to pull off a replacement.

Establishment Dems’ acknowledgement that Biden’s debate showing “wasn’t the best performance” is an extreme understatement.  Here are three of Biden’s most disturbing responses to the fact-checkless CNN moderators (the cold-blooded imperialist lackeys Dana Bash and Jack Tapper) and to Trump’s relentless fabrication and cruelty:

• “We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the – with – with – with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with – look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”

• “There were no jobs [when Trump was president]. We find ourselves in a position where the idea that we’re not doing any – I put more – we put more police on the street than any administration has. He wants to cut the cops. We’re providing for equity, equity, and making sure people have a shot to make it. There is a lot going on. But, on inflation, he caused it by his tremendous amount of seasons in the way he handled the pandemic.”

• “The idea is that we, in fact – we were the only ones of consequence or not. We’re not members of the Paris Accord. How can we do anything we’re not able to, the United States can’t get this under control? One of the largest polluters in the world. Number one, we’re making significant progress. By 2035, we will have cut pollution in half.”

Biden’s corn is long past popped. A lot of the defenses I’m hearing of Biden from big Dems and de facto Dems like Bernie Sanders (see below) sound like saying “We’re disappointed that his head fell off but at least his neck and torso are still intact!”

Come on, folks, he’s done. A CBS News poll after the debate finds that 41% of Democrats and 80% (!) of independents say that “Joe Biden does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as President.” A preponderant majority of US-Americans think Biden is unfit for a second term.

(Once again: thanks alot Obama, thanks for Joe. )

Gee, what if the dismal dollar Dems had permitted real primary debates and elections instead of a Putinesque re-coronation this year? Biden’s sheltered mental and physical fragility would have been exposed earlier in the election cycle, allowing more time for placing a more competent and telegenic face atop the bourgeois-democratic ticket to block the coming fascist consolidation.

Republifascist Pigs in Shit

Narrowing Obstruction

Meanwhile the Christian Fascist Republi-Nazis are as happy as pigs in shit.

Their deranged and aged Dear Leader looked comparatively young and vibrant as he turned Grandpa Joe into a quivering blob of bizarre gobbledygook last Thursday. 

Their Trump-appointed Christian Fascist Supreme Court ruled on Friday that “federal prosecutors had improperly used an obstruction law to prosecute some members of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

The Court refused on Thursday to strike down an Idaho law that tells doctors they can’t perform abortions even to save a pregnant woman’s life.

Iowa Joins the Red State Abortion Ban Club

Meanwhile, Iowa’s Christian Republi-fascist Supreme Court finally used the power (granted to it by the medievalist Sam “Appeal to Heaven” Alito US Supreme Court two years ago) to put Iowa in the abortion ban column by signing off on a “heartbeat [six week] bill.” 

Getting Biblical

The superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma ordered public schools Thursday to incorporate the Christian Holy Bible into lessons for grades 5 through 12.  The command calls for “immediate and strict compliance.” The superintendent argued that “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone. Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction.”

It's a dark follow-up to Louisiana’s Christian nationalist governor recently signing a bill that requires all his states’ public school to post the Ten Commandments in every one of its classrooms from K to PhD.

Look for copy cat legislations across the revanchist “heartland.” Will we soon have red state public high school teachers telling their students that women shown not to have been virgins on their wedding night must be stoned to death?

Something tells me that Oklahoma public school teachers won’t be allowed to assign passages from the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian’s brilliant book Away with All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. Avakian has read the Christian Holy Bible from cover and cover and shows how it brims with divine command and justification for one sadistic genocidal, imperial, racist, and sexist horror after another.  (For related commentary on the proto-fascistic Bible, see my January 9, 2024 TPSR commentary “Sadistic and Genocidal Scripture: Reflection on Actually Reading The Holy Bible.”)

Letting Christian Fascist Judges Call the Regulatory Shots

Back to the corrupt, women-enslaving Christo Nazi US Supreme Court. As awful as all this related above is, the worst thing that happened last week was arguably this crooked and illegitimate institution’s ruling Friday in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The far-right majority “g[ave] itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” to quote from bourgeois liberal Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the [Court] majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” As the bourgeois Natural Resources Defense Council explains:

“We're taught in school about how the U.S. government’s separation of powers is supposed to work: Congress writes the laws, the executive branch carries them out, and the judiciary—including the Supreme Court—resolves arguments about what these laws mean and evaluates whether they're being enforced properly. In reality, these powers overlap at times between the branches of government, and overall, the system relies on a certain degree of trust.  For instance, as society, technology, and the economy have grown more complex, so, too, has the task of governance. Because Congress is not equipped to micromanage the day-to-day administration of the legislation that it passes, it must rely on federal agencies—under the supervision of the president—to carry out laws and policies according to their best good-faith interpretations. Likewise, federal judges have a role in determining the meaning of Congress’s laws in order to settle disputes. But the act of policymaking has always belonged to the two elected branches…Today, however, the Supreme Court seized for both itself and lower-court judges a policymaking role that the Constitution did not intend for them to have. The court stripped many federal agencies tasked with protecting public health, public safety, and the environment—including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, to name just two—of their power to interpret the laws they carry out. Instead, federal judges now get to call the shots.”

….um…federal judges who are disproportionately now far-right ideologues determined to undo all government regulations designed at any remotely serious level to protect the common good by advancing even a small measure of social justice, equality, and environmental sanity.

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is a lethal green light to (among other terrible things) the full-on capitalist rape of the Earth — this at a time when the capitalist mode of production has brought homo sapiens and countless other species to the brink of final exterminist ecocide.   

All of which is perfectly fine with much of the capitalist ruling class, which is why Adolph Trump is getting huge campaign donations from filthy rich US oligarchs drawn to his promises of tax cuts and deregulation and eager to see the country turned into an even more grotesquely open plutocracy than it already is.

Germany’s wealthiest capitalist dynasties made out great under Hitler.

When Do the Weimar Dems Become Vichy Dems?

At what point does a capitalist-imperialist party of “inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin’s apt description of the Dems in 2007) that richly and repeatedly enables a fascist party to take over the country become a de facto fascist party in its own right (even if and as it clings to the remnants of bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law)? Will the Weimar Party (the dismal Dems) fight back after Herr Trump returns to power next year or will it go full Vichy to try to save its skin from a demented party and movement that absurdly and menacingly call the dollar-drenched Dems “Marxist” and “communist” (supposedly terrible things even as the USA and the world are in desperate need of socialist revolution, the alternative to which is “the common ruin of all.”)[1] 

TODAY (11:40, CST, July 1, 2024): “A King Above the Law”

Okay, the fash Supremes have spoken on Trump's immunity challenge and it’s a big win for fascism. Don’t take it from me. Listen to the centrist bourgeois The New Republic (TNR) and the liberal Supreme Court justice Sonya Sotomayor:

"In a devastating 6–3 decision issued Monday,[TNR reports] the conservative [try radical/radical right - P.S.] supermajority of the Supreme Court did what it was installed by Trump to do and twisted the Constitution to shield Trump from criminal liability for crimes he committed in office….The decision effectively gives a green light to all future presidents to commit as many crimes as they want while in office. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it, 'the President is now a king above the law.'”

How’s that for a great way to celebrate the July 4, 1776 US Declaration of Independence, a bill of complaints against the absolutist conduct of the British king!

Buh-bye bourgeois rule of law. See ya, so long!

More from TNR:

“Sotomayor led in the chilling dissent, joined by liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor’s dissent is charged with fierce criticisms of the decision, noting that the conservative majority ‘invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law’ and ‘makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.’

From Sotomayor’s dissent:

“Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more….The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world…Ehen he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune…Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done….The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

The belated federal special prosecutor’s January 6 case against Trump now goes back to district court to deliberate on the distinction between “official” and “unofficial” acts, delaying the prosecution past the point where Trump can kill it once he comes back into power. The criminal fascist faces no more trials before the election.

So, will Joe Biden send out Seal Team 6 to assassinate Trump? That’s unthinkable. That such an action is not unthinkable when it comes to Trump47 is a reflection of the difference between a party that has gone fascist and a party that clings to what’s left of bourgeois rule of law.

IT’S REVOLUTION TIME

The Whole Damn System

The slogan that makes sense this summer is from the Revcoms: “No Fascist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!” Yes, the whole damn system from its political-legal superstructure — with the absurd Electoral College, the undemocratic judiciary, the grotesquely mal-apportioned Senate, the gerrymandered US House and state legislatures, the arch-plutocratic campaign finance rules, revanchist states’ rights— down to the anarchic capitalist economic base, which is wired to crucify humanity on the cross of private profit, and back up to an imperial world system based on a deadly rivalry between top capitalist nations that is moving us ever closer to a poor solution to global warming: nuclear winter.

Speaking of Vichy/France and whole damn systems, yesterday’s far-right election results in the land of Robespierre remind us that bourgeois democracy and capitalism-imperialism breed and empower fascist politics in other rich nations unencumbered by the crippling idiosyncrasies (Electoral College, etc.) of the ancient US constitutional order.

Weimar brings us the Third Reich. “Neoliberalism” (late-stage capitalism-imperialism) ala Clinton(s), Obama, Biden, and Macron bring us Herr Trump and the National Front.