The Election Was Part of the Problem

Step Away from the Bong of Delusion

I guess a lot of folks are weepy and turning inward. Try properly and radically angry and outward....enraged not really at the outcome but at the election itself and the system which shit it up. The whole damn capitalist- imperialist system did this. If you still think there are solutions under that system, you need to step away from the bong of delusion. That's an order: STEP AWAY FROM THE BONG OF DELUSION

— my “social media” comment the day after the 2024 presidential election

Today’s PSR contains some wise words from the visual artist Dread Scott

We are now witnessing the nauseating completion of the Republifascist Trump party’s takeover of all three branches of the federal government. The coup is nearing consolidation. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a dark and dystopian moment. Tell the minimizers and other denialists to piss off. The consequences will be dire, as I have explained (with no special claim to originality or personal horror) in previous posts (see this, for one example).

None of the numerous leftish takes out there on “why the Democrats lost” merit much attention. It’s not that these “progressive” takes are all wrong or without clever angles and useful information. It's that they are based on the very bad and indeed dangerous, self-destructive assumption that we can defeat Amerikaner fascism with US elections and the Democratic Party.

We can't and we won't.  The Democrats are beholden to and part of a capitalist-imperialist system and political culture that frankly preclude it from engaging in a serious fight with the Christian Amerikaner fascism they  have been appeasing for the last eight-plus years.  Fighting this fascism the way it needs to be fought would involve doing things the “inauthentic opposition” party (as Sheldon Wolin aptly labelled the dismal, demobilizing and dollar-drenched Dems in in 2007) simply cannot do:

·        acknowledge the degree of the fascism that the capitalism-imperialism has let loose across the supposed glorious American “City on a Hill” – the purported land of liberty that “Genocide Joe” Biden can’t stop calling “the greatest country in human history” and “the envy of the world for more than 240 years.”  

·        turn from savagely time-staggered biennial and quadrennial candidate contests under an archaic, right-tilted elections and party system to the mobilization of giant masses of people to  wage an epic battle for radical societal transformation in the streets, public squares, schools, workplaces and broad ideological and political culture.

·        acknowledge that the “American democracy” they claim they want to defend and save is in reality a cloak for a de facto capitalist class dictatorship and blood-soaked imperialism, both of which provide critical lifeblood for the fascism they can’t defeat.

·        rise up to seriously confront each of what the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA has identified as five things (“the five stops”) that make up the raw material of fascism while being  indispensable to  contemporary (and past) class rule capitalism: white supremacism, patriarchy, imperialist war, nativism, and the war on livable ecology.

The brilliant visual artist Dread Scott followed up the election with reflections (see this and this) that put to shame all the different Berniebro[1] and Jacobin post-mortems on how the Weimar[2] Dems can “do better next time” to shame:

 “The problem is not the election result.  The problem is that people were voting on the best way to run an empire that is founded on slavery and genocide and based on exploitation and oppression. A choice between fascism and traditional imperialism could never yield a result that is in the interest of humanity. The further consolidation of fascism in the United States will mean terrible things for humanity and other species and we must continue to resist. But let us be clear, this whole election was part of the problem and could never be part of the solution to our problems…President Biden has vowed to ensure ‘a peaceful and orderly transition’ to the Trump regime.  Harris has called Trump a fascist. The fact that the head of the Democrats, and the current President of the United States, is encouraging a peaceful and orderly transition to fascism tells you everything you need to know about the Democrats and why it is dangerous to rely on them.”

“Progressives” who are brain-mashing over what Amerikan Weimar[2] should have done differently --- discovering yet again that the Dems "abandoned the working class"[1] (ya don't say....like starting in the Andrew Jackson era? or when Franklin Delano “I Saved Capitalism” Roosevelt responded to the Memorial Day Massacre by saying "a plague on both your houses"?) -- are living in denial. They can send their analyses to the Democratic National Committee  and see how that works out with the Gavin Newsom, Mark Shapiro, and Pete Buttigieg  presidential campaign of 2028, by which time the capitalogenic climate catastrophe and or US-provoked global war will have done a real number on "the working class” (does that category include the sweatshop workers of Vietnam, the i-Phone proletarians in China, the hospital workers of genocidally assaulted Gaza, and the rest of the vast and diverse global proletariat that the American Empire has done so much to oppress and exploit?) and humanity, courtesy of the capitalist-imperialist system.

Notes

1. Bernie Sanders said this on CNN after the election: “The working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry. We are living in an economy today where people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” What a discovery by the Great and Wonderful Wizard of Bern, “The Conscience of the Senate”! There are at least three problems here. First, just like the middle, upper-middle and capitalist classes, “the working class” contains people of diverse identities and perspectives, including folks who were driven to vote for Trump and other fascists not out of economic concerns but out of virulent white supremacism, nativism, and/or patriarchy.  Sanders’ economistic class reductionism glosses over the revanchist values and beliefs that are all too widespread among working class people as well as other folks in the USA. He seems to think that being pro-worker means denying how far fascism has spread into his beloved working class. Second, Sanders and others taking his line have long and consistently exaggerated the working-class composition and underestimated the affluent professional and petit-bourgeois composition of Adolph Trump’s base, thanks in part to an over-identification of working-class status with the lack of a college degree.  Third, there’s his hypocrisy: the nominally “independent” Sanders has been sheep-dogging and Judas-Goating US voters, including those from his beloved working class, into the right-tilted Minority Rule US elections system and the corporate-imperial Democratic Party for decades! He’s known damn well through all this time that the Democrats have been a “neoliberal” (militantly capitalist) party wherein “the interests of billionaires outweighed the priorities of the working class” but has stumped for dollar Dems like John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris anyway.  He has sheep-dogged/Judas-Goated working people and others not just into the ”corporate Democratic” party but into the horrific US elections system. Third Parties have also despicably steered people into the hopeless quicksand of the US electoral nightmare.

[2] Weimar here refers to the late bourgeois-democratic period of German political history preceding Hitler’s rise of power – a time when “liberal” and conservative German politicians enabled and appeased the ascendant Nazi Party and its genocidal leader.