Responding to Some Snarky Liberal Know-it-Alls

On Biden, Trump, and the Desperate Need for a New Revolutionary Politics

What would a Democrat have to do for you to not vote for them? If a genocide doesn't cross the line, what does?

— Stephen Tokarski, May 14, 2024

I recently jumped on a “social media” thread started by a brilliant leading liberal public intellectual and historian who shares my understanding of Trump and Trumpism as fascist. He posted the following statement a couple days ago:

‘I've learned via Twitter that lots of callow young people, and a shocking number of otherwise mature (one hopes) adults with the disadvantage of being "radical" college professors, don't think Donald Trump is worse than Joe Biden. Let's presume this is a statistically insignificant number, for the sake of our mental health.’

Later in the thread the public liberal intellectual identified the unnamed academics said to be arguing that Biden is worse than Trump as “Marxists” and those who “used the be called ‘the dirtbag left.’”

Here are some of the comments from the intellectual’s social media “friends,” all down with doctrinal Lesser Evilism and disgusted by ungrateful “radicals,” “Marxists.” and young people.

• “Education via Tik Tok and YouTube.”

• “I resemble that nausea.”

• “ Did they stop teaching civics to kids after 1990?”

• “It is insane and many of them are on the liberal side of the political spectrum.”

• “That brain worm gets around.”

• Nick du Plessis: “There are better issues for the American farther left to hang its hat on than the Israel-Palestine conflict. A lot of today's Keffiyeh Kids will end up just as racist and reactionary as their white Gen X parents, and Black, LGTBQ, and POC folk that don't play the pick-me white adjacency game will be set back a century.”

• “Otherwise intelligent and reasonable adults on here are telling me we already have fascism, so it doesn’t matter if Rump wins. It’s a terrifyingly distorted and privileged view.”

• “A lot of those types have a very shallow understanding of history in general.”

• “Some just want to burn the world to the ground for the fun of it.”

• “The thinking is to burn it to the ground and from those ashes something better will come out of that. My parents live with me. One is 75 and the other is 70. I know that I have to prepare for that day when they're no longer here. I don't have time for the foolishness of ‘radicals.’"

Without reading others’ comments, I responded as follows: ‘I don't know any actual and serious radical left analysts or activists who don't know that Adolph Trump is worse than Biden. I know many who think as I do that a system that gives us the lame choice between bloody jawed Genocide Joe and Donald "Poisoning Our Blood" Trump is a system long past it's overthrow date. I certainly understand why people will vote harm reduction especially in contested states but I must say that: (a) it's not looking good at all for Joe this fall; (b) I think it'll be really weak to blame his distinctly possible loss to the monster Trump on college kids protesting genocide and some wacky profs I've never met (names? Who are these alleged characters?) instead of more fundamentally on the archaic democracy-flunking Electoral College (don't send your kids there, it leans to the right!), dark money, global inflation,  the pathetic corporate media and other systemic things: (c) I'd strongly suggest deepening and widening our horizons of the possible and necessary beyond these quadrennial candidate-centered big money major party corporate-mediated electoral extravaganzas! Capitalism breeds fascism "like white on rice" and creates the conditions for Trump 47 along with a living history of white supremacism, patriarchy, palingenetic nationalism, nativism and anti-intellectualism, etc. Want to blame Palestine protest kids and some Trumpenleft goofball adjuncts? Whatevuh!’

The smart liberal public intellectual and historian responded to me as follows : ‘Tenured Ivy League profs and the most popular podcasters on the Left, too, to clarify. And humans don't pick new social systems out of a catalog.’

To which I said: ‘Okay, well I know some horrific fascism-deniers in the Ivy League. (Samuel Moyn, for example)…I'll defer to you as I don't follow academic culture anymore. I do get occasional lectures from a Progressive Labor Party (his party is neither) activist about how Biden is worse than Trump, which is nuts. If you mean horrible grifters like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald and the truly disgusting Jimmy Dore, I don't even consider them on "the left.

I agree on social systems not being something you can pick out of a catalogue but at the same time it is my honest judgement that our "modern" mode of production and the political superstructure atop it - capitalism, that is — are in fact conjuring up four interrelated and mutually reinforcing apocalyptic horsemen: ecocide, global war, fascism and pandemicide. So it does feel like a good time to go shopping, well organizing, for another way of structuring our relations with each other and nature. Huge task, of course - and right now yes we have this very real Amerikaner fascism problem.

I burned out on US electoral politics long ago but when I write about the party of Trump as Republifascist I fully expect that to motivate folks to vote "for" the 2002-03 Iraq invasion hawk Biden, who recently doubled down on his awfulness by pushing along the narrative that anti-genocide protesters are antisemites. That's the Joe "We'd Have to Invent Israel if it Didn’t Already Exist" Biden we know so well. Herr Trump would of course be happy to see the Gaza death count hit one million.’

I’ll add more on all this today.

I know a lot of self-declared Marxists within and beyond academia. I am aware of only one or two of them who would actually be stupid and/or alienated enough to say that “Biden is worse than Trump.”

I wish I’d seen the sick Nick du Plessis comment (see above) before I joined the thread. What a vicious and stupid reflection. I’ve met a bunch of the young activists du Plessis cruelly calls “Keffiyah Kids.” They are not so much on “the farther left” — whatever the F that is (no doubt du Plesssis thinks he is part of the “reasonable left”) — as young people who feel morally compelled to stand up against US-backed genocide, pure and simple. Many of them are not especially or particularly ideological or schooled in Marxism, communism, or anarchism. And they are not heading to racism in future years, trust me. How stopping an open US-backed genocide isn’t a good thing to hang one’s political hat on is quite a mystery. Mr. du Plessis appears to be a very nasty and ill-informed man.

It’s news to me that any seriously “Marxist” Ivy League academics are saying that Biden is worse than Trump. I don’t follow academic culture and Twitter so I may well have missed that. From the dialogue that followed the public intellectual’s comment, it seems like I was on to something when I mentioned Yale’s Samuel Moyn in the thread. That’s who the liberal public intellectual appears to mean when he said, “tenured Ivy League profs.”

Well, then F*#k that fascism-denying pain in the ass Samuel Moyn. But if he’s a “Marxist,” and I don’t see it, he’s a C minus one at best. (I’m an A-minus one!)

(But who knows? There’s no end to the nonsense afoot in US higher education. It’s an ever more bizarre and upside-down world where I was once rejected for further adjunct teaching despite strong student evaluations and having published seven academic books. The de facto disappearance of me from the DePaul campus came after the George Floyd Rebellion from a history department chairman who never once published a single volume.)

I also don’t know who the podcasters the smart public intellectual was referring to are. I don’t have time to listen to podcasts. I can barely even keep up with the Refuse Fascism podcast! I’m out of the loop on that world.

I should clarify a further thing or two. When it comes to fleshing out the similarities and differences between the Republicans/Republi-fascists and the Dems, it is important, I think, to distinguish between US foreign policy — sorry, I mean US imperialism — and domestic US politics, governance, and society. American imperialism, including the promotion and protection of what Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman called Third World Fascism — replete with US-backed and US-assisted/-coordinated coups and subverted elections and assassinations — has for all my life (and before) been richly bipartisan. Republican and Democratic administrations have both done this.

But the project of introducing fascism, the cancellation of previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law, such as they are, in the imperial homeland itself now — no small historical departure! — is by far and away located primarily in the party of the openly monstrous Trump, whose last name is a perfect fit for the goal: the trumping of what’s left of popular sovereignty, decency, legality, and humanity (inside the USA). The Trump-crafted Christian Fascist Supreme Court is currently taking seriously Donald “Let Oath Keepers Attack the Capitol with AR-15s” Trump’s claim that he possessed the right to murder his political opponents as president.

There’s nothing new about the current sick spectacle of Democratic Party authorities calling out gendarmes to attack young people and others protesting imperial US policies that murder masses of nonwhite people abroad. (Look at Chicago 1968, the police riot inflicted on antiwar protesters during that year’s Democratic National Convention, for one of many examples.) “Genocide Joe.” who called 1960s antiwar protesters “assholes” (by the way), has backed the repression of this spring’s campus protesters by channeling false neo-McCarthyite narratives accusing the genocide opponents of being "violent” and “antisemitic” threats to Jewish students and education.

But there’s differences of degree. It wouldn’t take a second term president Trump long to call out the National Guard and perhaps the military itself to crush the current US protests with live ammunition. The wannabe fascist strongman Trump would love to spill blood on the nation’s supposedly “radical left” campuses. Nothing would please him more than to take such revenge on purportedly radical academia.

The orange Hitler fan has already announced his intention to invoke the Insurrection Act on the day he is inaugurated in 2025. He has declared his desire to be a dictator (“for a day”), his determination to send the US military into US cities to round up immigrants, “end inner city crime in one day” (a call for extrajudicial executions in the streets), and, hey, maybe find some of those “Marxist vermin” he says he wants clear out of the country (maybe Samuel Moyn will get a pass!)

I’m guessing that some of my readers know that Trump’s favorite teen fascist and racist killer Kyle Rittenhouse recently spoke at Kent State University, where an Ohio National Guard unit slaughtered four student antiwar protesters on May 4, 1970. You remember Kyle, no? He was the deranged adolescent militia member who worked with local police and murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020. Trump made a chilling point of visiting Kyle’s Killing ground, Kenosha, on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. The “retribution” candidate has since hosted the young white supremacist hero and the open neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at Mar a Lago.

Still, the smart public intellectual and many of his rather snarky friends in the online thread I joined are in my view overly disgusted and surprised at the fact that some left radicals and students apparently think the dismal Dems and Biden are “worse than Trump” and the Republicans/Republi-fascists. I mean…let’s face it, the not-so leftmost US major party has been every bit as lethally imperialist as the nation’s right-most/now Reich-most major party, if not more lethally imperialist than the Republicans, over the last seven decades or so. At the same time, the depressing, demobilizing, dollar-drenched and “woke imperialist” Dems have been far more effective than the Republicans in providing faux-progressive/faux-multicultural/faux-feminist/faux-democratic “nice cop” cover for US capitalism, racism, sexism, nativism, and imperialism. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama gave the US capitalist-imperialist system — whose near-term domestic destination is fascism given underlying systemic contradictions at home and abroad — post-Reagan and post-George Bush[es] re-brandings that “bad cop” Republican presidents could never have provided. The Dems’ top the Republicans when it comes to putting liberals and progressives to sleep as the American capitalist-imperialist order drifts through its brutal and cancerous “neoliberal” phase towards full-on white Christian Amerikaner nationalism/neofascism.

Is it really all that startling that a certain number of left-identified folks are saying “Biden is worse than Trump”? Biden is NOT in fact worse than Trump, but at the same time it’s not like he and his party haven’t given understandably alienated people abundant reasons to think so. It should hardly be shocking that a good swath of young Americans have looked at what Israel has done to Gaza under Biden — yes, GENOCIDE — with US funding, US weapons, and US military and diplomatic protection and come to the conclusion that there is a point at which the Lesser Evil becomes Too Evil to back even with a “tactical” vote.

In the aforementioned online thread, Stephen Tokarski asked a very good question: “What would a Democrat have to do for you to not vote for them? If a genocide doesn't cross the line, what does?”

I’ve been asking this question for years, no decades, since before Bill Clinton ripped up public family cash assistance, signed arch-regressive neoliberal corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), advanced racist mass incarceration and furthered the disastrous deregulation of Wall Street while starving hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children to death: do you have any red lines the capitalist-imperialists Dems can’t cross without costing them your blank-check support?

And I haven’t even mentioned imperial Joe’s bloody Ukraine policy — his provocation and waging of an inter-imperialist proxy war that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians — or his reckless provocation of China or his egregious failures on the climate catastrophe, which happens to be the biggest issue of our or any time (by the way).

The “vote blue not matter who” syndrome might better be understood as “vote blue/Biden no matter what.” I get why many serious and decent people will feel compelled to do that next November, actually, but I also get why many young folks can’t play along, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to make it my job to push the Lesser Evil thing again.

A lot of the people in the public intellectual’s social media thread seemed to be older white liberals with a penchant for undue condescension towards young folks coming of political age in Trump and Biden’s America (during what I have called “The Farewell Tour of American Bourgeois Democracy”). Maybe they should try to walk a bit in those kids’ shoes. Some of these senior snarkers might want to reflect back on how they responded to the images showing what the United States Empire was doing to Southeast Asian villagers, children included, in the mid- and late-1960s. Some in the thread might themselves have gone into the streets and campus squares chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did you Kill Today?” (I used a bullhorn to initiate “Hey Israel, USA, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” during a protest march in downtown Chicago last November. It caught on.)

The scenes from Gaza have if anything been more shocking to the senses. The Palestinian victims look even more trapped and defenseless. They are concentrated in a much smaller space, with much less anti-US-imperial assistance from outside. We have seen whole families, babies, buried in the smoking rubble of US-made bombs up and down Gaza. Buried in the rubble of hospitals, for God’s sake! We have learned that children have already died from starvation and that the whole Gaza Strip is at risk of deadly famine, ffs. And still the US military assistance continues, regardless of Biden’s claims to be frustrated at the level of the genocidal savagery inflicted by Israel.

In all seriousness, what’s the goddamned motherfucking mystery (GDMFM) about how a bunch of 18–23-year-olds looking at all this, seeing Biden fund and defend GENOCIDE, and hearing him justify the repression of their protests by slandering them as violent and antisemitic. I repeat: what’s the GDMFM in their conclusion that they can’t vote for the incumbent?

To repeat something I put up last week, the comedian Aamer Rahman recently said something powerful in London. He noted how white liberals are tensely saying this to Black and brown anti-genocide activists who can’t and won’t vote for Genocide Joe this year: “is that what you really want? You want Trump to come back? You want to Trump to win?…You think that’s a good idea? Cuz its’ your community that’s going to suffer if Trump comes back. People like you are going to suffer. What do you think of that?”

“What I want,” Rahman told his audience, “is for you to not lecture us on how to respond to a genocide you didn’t try to stop, okay? I think that a political system that ultimately makes you choose between genocidal dementia and cheeseburger-powered fake-tan Hitler is a system worth overthrowing, okay? Maybe that is the conclusion you should be coming to instead of lecturing Black and brown people on why they should worship the Democrats.”

The Republicans and Democrats are “two wings of the same bird of prey,” as Upton Sinclair observed in 1904. The two wings are not identical: their constituents and policy agendas differ in numerous and hardly irrelevant ways, especially when it comes to “homeland” (a lovely imperial term that took off after 9/11) governance, politics, and society. (Spend some serious time in a red state to get a better feel of what I mean.)

The bird’s not-so left wing accepts defeat and the peaceful transfer of power when it loses presidential elections; the bird’s very right wing no longer does.

But let’s face some cold realities: the big bird of prey is really old. Its domestic flight path has veered well to the right for more than half a century. It’s starboard wing is much stronger than its atrophied portside one now. It’s ready to shed its well-greyed bourgeois- democratic, rule of law “homeland feathers.” And the creeping fascization of the USA, now nearing a critical quantity-to-quality moment this and the next throwdown year, is a richly bipartisan operation in which the Weimar/Vichy Dems are deeply complicit.

The results of this conjuncture are certain to be radical. The old bourgeois democracy, American Style, is on its last legs. The frontier of escape from hard choices is closing. The shit is hitting the fan. The only question is this: radically reactionary, revanchist and repressive capitalist-fascism on the exterminist path to mass social and environmental catastrophe or radically liberating and revolutionary socialism on the path to the end of injustice, oppression, and exploitation. At the current state of “left” consciousness and organization, the odds are with the former.

But it’s not about the crystal ball. Vote “for” Genocide Joe or not, we will either rise up far beyond the masters’ definition of “the only politics that matters” — what the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian rightly calls “the bourgeois electoral bullshit (BEB)” — to change those odds in favor of humanity and undertake the “radical re-constitution of society” or we will contribute to “the common ruin of all,” if I might conclude with the wise words of two young German radicals in 1848.