“What Kind of Country Do We Want to Live In?”

Kamala Harris and the Art of Blowing Smoke Up the Asses of the Masses

The fascist maniac Donald Trump may be the most prodigious liar and prevaricator in history[1], but of course neither he nor his party possess a monopoly on falsehood and deceit.

Obama 2016: “We All Want What’s Best for This Country”

Listen to what the brilliant dissembler Barack Obama said in the White House Rose Garden the day after Trump was elected on the first Tuesday in November of 2016:

“Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. …We all want what’s best for this country.  That’s what I heard in Donald Trump’s remarks last night.  That’s what I heard when I spoke with him directly...That’s what the country needs – a sense of unity; a sense of inclusion, a respect for our institution, our way of life, rule of law; and respect for each other… we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens [that] is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy…. I’m confident that this incredible journey that we’re on as Americans will go on …ultimately we’re all on the same team (emphasis added).”

That was Obama demonstrating his expertise at bullshitting the masses in the wake of a fascist victory his corporate-captive and neoliberal presidency helped produce[2].

Obama didn’t believe a word of what he said about Trump’s surprise victory. Just the previous month, he had said this to the centrist Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine: “Tim, this is no time to be a purist, we’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” The 44^th President of the United States was no fool.  He knew very well that Trump was a malignant, authoritarian, and far-right menace to the republic and the world.

The next eight years, including a fascist presidency[3] that marked Trump as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Noam Chomsky’s judgement on the eve of Trump’s fanning of Covid-19), proved the accuracy of Obama’s all too private judgement on the eve of the 2016 election.  

Kamala Harris, Working Class Hero

Here’s another example.  United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain recently linked his endorsement of the centrist corporate-imperial Democrat Kamala Harris to the claim that Harris deeply understands the labor movement because she emerged from hardscrabble “working class” origins.  

Fain can’t seriously believe his little log cabin story about Harris’ rise from the proletariat. Kamala Harris is the daughter of an esteemed academic biologist and cancer researcher (her mother) from India and an elite Stanford economist (her father) from Jamaica.

I am unaware of Harris saying anything on behalf of card-check union authorization. Even her role model the arch-neoliberal Barack “Trans-Pacific Partnership” Obama briefly pretended to be for that (the quickly abandoned and forgotten EFCA/Employee Free Choice Act) in 2008 (he also made disingenuous noises for Single Payer that year).

I don't care what class politicians are from; I care about what class and system they serve. But I do care about objective truth and I found Fain's false statement transparent cover for his support of a right-leaning (see below) capitalist-imperialist politician.

“Killer Kamala”

Then there’s Harris herself. Last week in Arizona she interrupted a campaign speech to briefly address anti-genocide protesters by claiming to be a champion of a cease fire in Gaza. She is no such thing.  She has never dissented from Genocide Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s savage war on the people of Gaza. She has never called for the US to stop sending weapons of mass destruction to Israel as that key US imperial asset continues to butcher Gazans en masse (the latest horror is a missile strike on a school that killed more than 100 people including many children).

After the genocidal fascist Bibi Naziyahu gave a lie-filled speech to thunderous and bipartisan applause before the US Congress last July 24 he met privately with Harris.  Harris reassured Naziyahu of her “full support for Israel.” Naziyahu then proceeded to potentially set off a broader Middle Eastern war by arch-provocatively assassinating the top Hamas political leader and cease fire negotiator in Teheran (!) and a top Hezbollah official in Beirut, killing may others along the way.

The US protest movement against the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza isn’t fooled. Anti-genocide protesters have nicknamed the Democrats’ new presidential candidate “Killer Kamala” and “Holocaust Harris.”

No, She Won’t and She Knows It

Then there’s this bullshit from Harris’s speech in Arizona last week:

·       “When I am president of the United States and when Congress passes the bill to restore reproductive freedom for every woman in America, I will sign it into law.”

·       “We who believe in the sacred right to vote will finally pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”

·       “And we who believe in the freedom to live safe from gun violence will finally pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and red flag laws.”

Please. Harris knows that none of these statements are true.  She’s a veteran of the US Senate, both as a Senator and as vice president.  As such, she is certainly well aware that (a) the US Senate is an absurdly powerful and malapportioned Minority Rule body wherein the most reactionary, racist, Christian fundamentalist/fascist, rural and patriarchal (“red”)  sections and states of the US are vastly overrepresented; (b) the upper chamber of the US Congress (the Senate) holds veto power over legislation passed in the more genuinely representative lower body of Congress (the US House of Representatives); (c) the Minority Rule essence of the Senate is furthered by the longstanding filibuster rule, which permits of 40 of its 100 members to block debate on legislation they oppose (“the 60 vote rule”); (d) the 2024 US  Senate election line-up strongly favors a return to Republi-fascist majority rule in the upper body of Congress.

Thanks to (a), (b), (c) and (d), there’s no way Congress is going to send the next US president  any of the legislation that she promises to sign. Her pledges are manipulative bullshit and she knows it.  Harris knows she’s letting her mouth write checks the American Minority Rule governance order won’t let her cash.

Again and again during her Arizona rally, the crowd chanted and Harris repeated “We will win.”  She could win, for sure – she has a shot that Biden didn’t – but she knows there’s no certainty of that at all given the archaic slaveowners’ Electoral College’s effective anti-majoritarian requirement that she best Trump in the national popular vote by 3 to 4 percentage points, the certainty that Republi-fascist officials, politicians, and operatives will use numerous constitutional and extra-constitutional means to subvert a fair vote count and contest a Harris victory, the control of the absurdly lifetime- and undemocratically appointed Minority Rule US Supreme Court by a now fully MAGA-tized Christian Fascist majority. Winning will require a giant battle plan for the election’s aftermath and may even need backing from sections of the military unwilling to go along with a Trumpist-fascist coup.[4] While helping whip her crowds into a frenzy over how they are sure to win on Election Day, would she like to say anything to them about how to prepare for the Amerikaner fascist attacks coming after the election, whatever its outcome?

“Kopmala”  

Liberals and many progressives are reprising their foolishness about “Wall Street Barry” Obama with Hope for progressive Change in Harris. A little history seems relevant here.  A child of prestigious academics who grew up in university towns (and yes, Shawn Fain she did reportedly work in a McDonalds as a teenager), Harris graduated from the University of California Law School and became a San Francisco Bay Area prosecutor with a reputation for the ruthless enforcement of the racist, mass-incarcerating war on drugs, for prosecuting marijuana users, and for viciously locking up poor Black parents as punishment for their kids’ truancy.  

In an appearance before then Chicago “Mayor One Percent” Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 Chicago Ideas Week conference, Harris made strange faces and spoke in a child’s voice as she mocked Berkeley progressives for wanting to shift taxpayer money from racist mass incarceration to public education. She said that anti-prison activists didn’t have a good answer to this question: "why do I have to put three locks on my door?”[5] Maybe because she and her millionaire white husband sat atop a horrific pyramid of savage race-class inequality in hyper-gentrified San Francisco?  

It’s not for nothing that the Bay Area Black Lives movement nicknamed Harris “Kopmala.”

“What Kind of Country Do We Want to Live In?”

Harris on the campaign trail likes to ask, “what kind of country do we want to live in?”  I could write a 500-page answer, calling for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr called very near the end of his life “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters: “the radical reconstruction of society itself.”  But this is just a 2000-word essay I need to wrap up so I’ll mention four things: . 

One, I want to live in a country that doesn’t provide weapons, money, and political and diplomatic protection for genocide in Gaza or anywhere else.   

Two, I want to live in a country that asks first “what kind of world do we want to live in?” and where people regularly hear and act on the following excellent revolutionary communist slogan: “stop thinking like an American, start thinking about humanity!”

Three, I want to live in a country where politicians don’t regularly blow smoke up the asses of the masses with assistance from power-worshipping media. 

Fourth, I want to live in a country where it is considered absurd to call an openly anti-majoritarian Minority Rule structure of governance – a system that violates not only Marxist concepts of popular sovereignty but even the basic limited bourgeois-democratic principle of “one person, one vote” – a “democracy.”

The Power is NOT with the People

“What kind of country do we want to live in? The beauty – the beauty about our democracy,” Harris told her adoring crowd in Arizona last week, “is that we each have the power to answer that question.  Each one of us, in a democracy, has the power to answer this question.  The power is with the people.”

No, the power is not with the people in the US. And you don’t have to read a Marxist like me and my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy to know better. For a sophisticated, highly readable and properly historical account of the “democratic” United States’ electoral and governance order as plagued by numerous interrelated forms of minority rule (including those forms mentioned in this essay), see the liberal establishment Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, The Tyranny of the Minority[4] Harris can also consult the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton), who argue the following in their expertly researched book Democracy in America?:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout…[so that] the general public has been virtually powerless…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”

Even conservative elites like the veteran federal jurist and economist Richard Posner acknowledge this elementary reality, which is well understood and relished in ruling class circles.

Harris knows this all too well. Her task at present is to help the US ruling class more credibly re-brand its oligarchic minority and class-ruled capitalist-imperialist system as a functioning democracy.  It’s about blowing smoke up the asses of the masses. The sickening, widely hated Trump-Biden match-up was too graphically  demonstrating that the outer shell of bourgeois democracy hides an inner de facto dictatorship of class rule overlaid by white supremacy, patriarchy and empire. The revolutionary communist slogan “No Fascist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System Has to Go!” was getting too many thumbs up out on the streets and online.

A big Vibe Change was richly required, like in 2008. And Harris-Walz has reported for duty. Lying is part of the job.  

Endnotes

+1. The Washington Post rigorously determined that Trump made 30, 573 false or misleading statements during his four years in the White House. That must be a record.  I am particularly fasci[st]nated by Trump’s habit of saying that "everybody" thinks some false notion that only a minority of the population thinks? Trump does this all the time. "Everybody" wanted the abortion issue returned to the states, he said during a press conference last week. No. "Everybody" knows that Kamala Harris is "radical Left." Not true. "Everybody" knows that Biden's presidency is the worst presidency in American history. No they don't. "Everybody" knows the 2020 election was stolen. Nope. Not at all.

+2. Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (New York: Routledge, 2010); Paul Street, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch Books, 2020), 85-109; Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), 253-256.

+3.  Street, This Happened Here, pp. 15-135, passim.

+4.  For a sophisticated, highly readable and properly historical account of the “democratic” United States’ electoral and governance order as plagued by numerous interrelated forms of minority rule (including those forms mentioned in this essay), see Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, The Tyranny of the Minority (New York: Crown, 2023).

+5.  California Attorney General Kamala Harris, “Innovation & Evolution in our Criminal Justice System,” Chicago Ideas Week, 2013,

. Go to minute 11.