Shit is Out Da Box

The Future is Already Radical: What are Our Plans for After the Election?

A Head-Spinning Summer

“There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin once wrote, “and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Think about all the head-spinning shit that has gone down in in the last six weeks:

·        US president Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical decline was stunningly exposed during his June 27^th debacle of a presidential “debate” with the malignant fascist maniac Donald Trump, who was the frontrunning US presidential candidate despite having attempted to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy” four years ago.

·        The US Supreme Court ruled on July 1^st that current and former US presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes they commit in connection with their official duties as president.  Under this Fascist Fuhrer ruling, Trump is largely protected from prosecution for his many-sided coup attempt and yes, a president can enjoy criminal immunity for sending out Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.

·        On July 15, the hack Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon summarily  dismissed the federal government’s strong case against Trump for stealing federal classified documents and obstructing federal efforts to retrieve them after his presidency.

·        Trump was nearly assassinated, his right ear clipped by a deranged young gun nut with unclear political motives and a shockingly clear line of sight at a Trump hate/campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The head of Secret Services was forced to resign after this incident.

·        Trump and many Republifascists attributed Trump’s survival to divine providence, feeding the “Chosen One” narrative of Trump as a “modern day Cyrus” that Trump has used to win Christian fundamentalist votes.

·        Trump named as his running mate the sickeningly cynical Senator JD Vance (Rf-OH), a sinister snail of a pretend “working class Appalachian” who likened Trump to Hitler in 2016 but subsequently became a strident MAGAt in order to climb the Republifascist Party.

·        A virulent and menacing  Republifascist National Convention featuring the violent white hyper-masculinism of the fascist Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a rambling 93-minute Trump “speech” loaded with lethal falsehoods, ear-bandaged Trump cultists chanting “fight, fight, fight!,” and signs calling for mass deportations. (Gendarmes brought in from the racist police department of Columbus, Ohio to help protect the fascist gathering killed a  homeless man in Milwaukee during the insane proceedings.)

·        The Black man D’Vontaye Mitchell died from asphyxiation after being pinned to the ground by four security guards in Milwaukee just days before the Republifascist convention was held in that hyper-segregated city. The murder looked very much like the killing of George Floyd four years and three months before.

·        Kevin Roberts, the head of the right-wing neofascist Heritage Foundation threatened “the left” with bloodshed if it tries to stop plans for the consolidation of Christian white nationalist power in 2024-25. That was the essential meaning of the following comment he made while speaking on the fascist strategist and Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s deranged “War Room” podcast on July 2^nd:  “The left has taken over our institutions…[But]  we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

·        The Heritage Foundation (lead author of the menacing white Christian nationalist governance blueprint Project 2025) held a Washington DC event claiming that the 2024 presidential cannot be free and fair unless Trump wins. Heritage epitomized the “paranoid style” of right-wing US politics by workshopping various bizarre Biden-Harris  “election theft” scenarios including “Barbra Streisand being kidnapped by Hamas, Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility, and the FBI arresting Trump two days after winning the election.”

·         The Washington Post reported that Heritage officials were participating with other right-wing operatives in “war-games”  meant to develop “counter-measures” to ensure Trump’s victory in 2024-25. The Biden campaign accurately described the exercises as “nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6.”

·        We learned that the nation’s film distributors and media corporations are too scared of Trump and Trumpism to release in the US an acclaimed and important movie about Trump’s early rise in New York City.  This is darkly reminiscent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM) refusal to go forward with a film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here because of opposition from Hitler’s Third Reich.  

·        Body camera footage was made public showing that a white Sangamon County police officer murdered the Black woman Sonya Massey with a point-blank head shot in her own kitchen in Springfield, Illinois on July 6.  The murder was one more terrible episode in a continuing plague of racist cop killings four years after the George Floyd Rebellion and ten years after the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

·        The British medical journal Lancet estimated that the US-Israel war on Gaza may have led to the premature death of  more than 186,000 Palestinians.

·        On July 24th, the genocidal fascist Israeli prime minister Benjamin Naziyahu’s gave a loathsome, lie-filled speech (whose vicious smears and deceptions included the claim that US students protesting Israeli genocide are dupes of Iran) before sickeningly thunderous and bipartisan applause in the US Congress  --- this as the Israel “Defense” Force continued to crucify Gaza (plagued with famine and even a polio outbreak) with US weapons, funding, and protection.

·        Naziyahu had separate private meetings with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on July 25^th and subsequently ordered Isarael’s assassination of Hamas’s top political leader in Teheran and a top Hezbollah leader in Lebanon, fueling the movement towards an all-out regional war in the Middle East.

·        The fossil-capitalist climate crisis produced: the hottest four days (July 21-24, 2024) and month (July 2024) in recorded history;  an explosion of  historic wildfires in the US West; epic rainfalls on the US East Coast; temperatures fifty degrees above normal in Antarctica.

·        The recklessly imperialist Biden administration delivered F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, no small provocation in the wake of its earlier sign off on the use of American weapons to attack Russia.

·       Shocked by the undeniable evidence of Biden’s deterioration,  Democratic Party leaders and funders forced Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. The legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s reported that Barack Obama called Biden and informed him that Kamala Harris was ready to invoke the 25^th Amendment, bringing about his removal from the presidency if he didn’t step down.  

·       On July 25, Biden announced his standdown in a nationally televised address in which he said “America is at an inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine our fate of our nation and the world for decades to come…We have to decide: Do we still believe in honesty, decency, and respect; freedom, justice, and democracy?”

·        Overnight Obama-like hysteria and an unprecedented Democratic Party fundraising windfall followed Biden’s “passing of the torch” to the new Democratic presidential candidate, his centrist and pro-Israel Vice President Kamala Harris. This overnight succession (pre-empting “progressive” calls for an open convention) has rejuvenated the dismal Democratic Party with a remarkable identitarian and generational re-branding.  Liberal pundits, talking heads, and activists are awash in excitement over the transformation in their presidential ricket and its chances for success.

·        The Democrats added a charismatic campaigner, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to the ticket, hoping to balance Harris’s West Coast and race and gender identity with plain spoken upper Midwestern white guy “populism.”  Walz’s  appearances in battleground states have been wildly successful, leading some young white Democratic women to call him “the Dad I lost to FOX News.”

·        Trump responded to the centrist corporate and imperial law and order Democrat Harris’ rise with the preposterous neo-Birther/nativist claim that she isn’t actually a Black American and the standard neofascistic charge that she is “radical Left.”  Two days ago, Trump even called Harris and Walz “the most radical Left duo in American history.”  Such absurd red-baiting is seen as red meat for the frothing Ameikaner  base that the nation’s Reich-most party has drummed up since the Obama presidency, which was headed by a deeply conservative capitalist-imperialist whose mere skin color was “radical” for a significant portion of white Amerika.   

·        Giant crowds are now chanting “Lock Him Up, Lock Him Up!” at Harris-Walz rallies and in fact the recently convicted 34-count felon Trump faces a sentencing hearing in New York City in six weeks. The malignant fascist maniac faces up to four years in prison though most experts expect him to get off with probation.  

·        The imminent Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago is certain to be met by significant protests in the metro area with the nation’s largest concentration of  Palestinian-Americans. Veteran Palestinian organizers with and beyond Chicago have no illusions about the new Democratic candidate’s  sickening and strong commitment to Israel. A recent Gaza protest contained numerous posters properly identifying her as “Killer Kamala.”  It remains to be seen how many of those who would have come into the streets and public squares to militantly oppose a Genocide Joe nomination will swallow the Harris-Walz Kool Aid and hep the DNC look like a liberal love fest.  Unforeseen events in the Middle East tinderbox, where Biden’s pathetic failure to properly manage the maniacal mass murder Naziyahu has created real prospects for a  war between Iran and Israel, could expose Harris’s loyalty to the Ziofascist state in ways that bring folks out against her.

·        Two days ago the Republifascist--controlled Georgia State Election Board ruled that local election officials can refuse or delay certification of a county’s election results, making it likely that America will experience another ugly and contested post-election period this coming fall and winter. This measure is part of a broader national Republi-fascist campaign to destabilize elections at the local and state levels,.  The goal is to reduce trust, advance chaos, and produce an environment for subversion when and where Democrats are winning.

I am reminded of Yeats: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/…surely some revelation is at hand.”

Good Luck Holding the Center

The Harris-Walz ticket might seem to portend a holding of the center.  That is the hope of those parts of the nation’s ruling class and populace who want to retain the tried-and-true ways of bourgeois democracy, American-style, cloak for an underlying de facto dictatorship of capital and empire. 

Good luck! A deeply conservative faux-liberal politician deeply committed to the bloody-jawed American Empire Project in Ukraine, the Middle East and around the world, Harris is a highly flawed politician who will have to defeat her deranged opponent by 4 percentage points in the  national popular vote to have any chance of prevailing in the nation’s archaic slaveowners’ Electoral College (EC) system – a critical part of the nation’s right-leaning Minority Rule structure. Her race, ethnicity,  and gender and her San Francisco origins  are  liabilities for here among significant racist, sexist,  and rural swaths of the US electorate. The Republi-fascists have an army of vote-suppressors inside and outside ballot sites and vote-counting offices to dampen the Harris vote and mess with the outcome in the contested states.

Chaotic developments at the DNC and in the Middle East could significantly damage her electoral viability.  Ugly repression of anti-genocide protesters in Chicago and/or an expansion of bloodshed in Gaza, the West Bank and the broader Middle East could expose her bloody-jawed imperialism in ways that damage her ability to mobilize young, Arab, Muslim, and progressive voters.

Future stock market volatility and a possible economic downswing or even recession could doom Harris since the party in White House power typically pays the price for downswings in the business cycle.

If Harris is somehow able to pull an initial EC victory off, the Republi-fascists will refuse to accept her victory and undertake significant actions to cancel it. They will engage in a many-sided coup attempt whose chances of success will be enhanced by the anti-majoritarian Christian Fascist majority on the archaically lifetime-appointed and undemocratically selected US Supreme Court and by that Court’s recent emergence (see above all in its wild Fascist Fuhrer ruling of July 1^st) as a now fully MAGA-tized entity.

Beyond legal, procedural, and other “constitutional” subversion efforts and shenanigans, the Republi-fascists will respond to a Harris victory with significant real and threatened extra-constitutional violence, no small problem in a nation saturated like no other country with guns and military assault rifles. (One of the underestimated ways in which the United States is an extreme Minority Rule outlier compared to other bourgeois democracies around the world is its constitutionally protected spreading of guns, including more than 16 million military style assault rifles amongst is population. These weapons are disproportionately owned by the right.)

Given right-wing threats from both within and outside government,  the Democrats may capitulate to a Trumpist-fascist coup. Remember Al Gore in 2000-01, meekly surrendering after the right-wing Supreme Court handed his victory over to the messianic militarist George W. Bush in an openly absurd decision? Consistent with Sheldon Wolin’s 2007 description of the dismal neoliberal Dems as “the party of inauthentic opposition,” the Weimar-like Biden administration has failed to: to promptly and otherwise properly prosecute and incarcerate Trump for trying to overthrow American “democracy” in 2020-21; properly identify the other major capitalist party as fascist; cancel the Supreme Court’s women-enslaving Dobbs decision by ordering the provision of abortion services on federal properties in all fifty states (and the protected mailing of abortion medications across the whole country); cancel Texas’ fascist governor Greg Abbott’s military occupation of a key section of the US southern border.

Should Harris manage to get past all these hurdles, half or more of the nation’s powerful states (states’ rights is a critical component of US right-wing Minority Rule) will remain under the control of Christian white Republi-nationalists.  The archaically and absurdly malapportioned US Senate, where the nation’s most reactionary and rural forces are massively overrepresented (more right-tilted Minority Rule), is certain to fall into majority Republi-fascist control next year, something that will doom any liberal and progressive legislation that might come out of the US House of Representatives (should the Dems take back majority House control).  Even if the Dems somehow keep a majority in the Senate (very unlikely given the 2024 Senate election line up), the archaic Minority Rule Senate filibuster rule (which allows 40 of the Senate’s 100 members to cancel consideration of legislation) will continue its ugly history of vetoing the passage of anything halfway decent through Congress.  

Scenarios

It's important to consider various post-election scenarios, thinking not only about the electoral horse race but also and indeed above all about the long aftermath of the election:  

·        What if the Democrats win the presidential election, the Republi-fascists refuse to accept it, and the Weimar-Vichy Democrats pathetically submit to the right-wing theft?  That development would bring  a rare opportunity for actually radical Left forces to fill the vacuum by leading outraged masses into the streets and public squares and beyond.  Those radical forces should hardly advocate giving the presidency back to a party that (a) prefers to hand state power over to malignant fascists instead of mobilize people to fight those fascists and (b) serves a capitalist-imperialist order that menaces human existence (see below) while breeding fascism like white rice.  

·        What if the Democrats win the presidential election, the Republi-fascists refuse to accept it, and the Democrats don’t capitulate to the right-wing theft?  Like the previous scenario, that could lead to a civil war of sorts, a battle in which the allegiance of the armed forces comes into play.

·        What if the Republifascists “win” the election via the Electoral College (EC) while losing the popular vote (PV), as in 2000-201 and 2016? Are “We the People” really going to F’ng put up with yet another right-wing popular vote loser going into power because of the 18^th Century slaveowners’ Electoral College? Really? Seriously?!

·        What if the Republicans win both the EC and the PV? Just submit to the new Amerikaner fascist Project 2025 order because the imperialist Democrats couldn’t mobilize even a popular vote win? Seriously?

·        Are we really prepared to accept the legitimacy of a second Trump presidency, however it is achieved?  What does answering  “No!” mean in terms of our conduct?

·        What plans do we have for what is certain to be a fearsome, reactionary Republi-fascist response to the election, whatever its outcome?  

·        What plans do we have for responding to these (and perhaps other) scenarios that don’t fall into the trap of capture by the Weimar part, the dismal, fascism-complicit, eco-cidal, and warmongering Dems?

What’s So Great About Not Being Radical?

“Surely some revelation is at hand,” Yeats wrote. Hey, how about a revolution?  How much longer do we want to put up with a system that grants us the binary choice between virulent fascist malignancy and a rebranded party of bloody, fascism-conciliating imperialist,  and corporate rule?

Again and yesterday, I heard MSNBC talking heads and Democratic politicos including Nancy “Art of Power [Art of Class Rule]” Pelosi (net worth $250 million) praise Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential running mate pick Tim Walz for not being what the Republi-fascists were calling him: left and radical.

What’s so F’ng great about not being radical?! There’s a problem with that. We need “radical Left” change.  It is a both a natural science and a social science fact that climate change cannot be properly dealt with under the capitalist system. Not a chance. Ten more years of capitalism is an ecological death sentence for humanity. The only way global warming is going to be “solved” by the capitalist order is through exterminist nuclear winter resulting from the drift towards war between the United States and its global competitors Russia and China – a drift that, like climate change, is deeply rooted in the capitalist mode of production and the imperial world capitalist state system. 

If the revolutionary communist Bob Avakian is right, it’s already been decided that the future is radical, and the only question is which kind of radical:

“All this [recent craziness] is an expression of the fact that the way this country has been ruled for generations by a basically unified ruling class can no longer hold. The outcome of all this is very likely to be a radical change of one kind or another. The crucial question is... whether this will be a  radical reactionary change, further intensifying the already terrible oppression and horrific atrocities built into and continually committed by this system of capitalism-imperialism - or will it be a radical revolutionary change, open the way to abolishing the basis for all this atrocity?”

A Harris-Walz victory – far more imaginable than a Biden-Harris victory it must be acknowledged – will  not long stem the drift toward “radical reactionary change,”  towards a new American fascism.  Even if they win and do help the center hold out for a bit more,  the Democrats will do nothing to change the basic existential facts that – this bears repeating – ten more years of capitalism is an ecological death sentence for humanity and other living things and that the country is under the command of reckless imperialists who are parasitically exploiting humanity while preparing the ground for epic and potentially terminal global war.