Removing Donald Trump is like removing a Thorn, but failing to clean
out the Pus.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/27/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump From Office?
President Donald Trump. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
The dog whistle couldn’t have been any clearer. When Donald Trump said two
weeks ago that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, his
extremist
base of neo-Nazis, Klan members, right-wing militias and sympathetic
service
members likely heard the following: “Feel free to attack Democrats,
liberals, leftists and progressives if the coming Democratic Party-run
House
of Representatives acts on its constitutional right to impeach me.”
Impeachment alone probably wouldn’t trigger a right-wing uprising. But
impeachment followed by the unlikely prospect of removal, which requires 67
votes in the Republican-majority U.S. Senate, might well make it happen. So
too could invoking the 25th Amendment on the grounds that Trump is
incapable
of performing his presidential duties.
Officially, the Democratic Party—led by corporate allies like Chuck Schumer
and Nancy Pelosi—isn’t interested in moving ahead with either of these
constitutionally available processes. That could change, however, if and
when the report from special counsel Robert Mueller directly implicates
Trump. But even if the party’s efforts proved successful, America would be
left with President Mike Pence—an honest-to-goodness Christian fascist.
The case for Trump’s ouster grows stronger by the week. Beyond his possible
obstruction of justice, criminal acceptance of foreign emoluments while in
office and felonious campaign finance violations—any one of which could
provide grounds for legal proceedings against him—the president has
routinely embraced authoritarian rulers around the world and engaged in
obvious appeals to violence. He has, at every turn, revealed himself to be
entirely unfit for office.
Ironically, the most effective means of achieving his removal may be to
revolt, albeit in a fashion radically different from the one the president
has envisioned. America must instead engage in civil unrest that targets
not
just the current inhabitant of the Oval Office but the entire bipartisan
ruling class that birthed his monstrous presidency. Forget Watergate; think
sit-down strikes and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France have given us a taste of what’s
required. Among their list of demands is a real and functioning
democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have called for a
referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French
Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within one year. Evoking the
French Revolution of 1789, there have even been calls for a Constituent
Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to create a new French
government—a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and majority rule
rather than the demands of a de facto corporo-financial dictatorship.
Imagine!
That Trump has never had a functioning democracy to overthrow is evidence
enough that this kind of activism is long overdue. Released in the early
spring of 2008, Sheldon Wolin’s classic study “Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” revealed
that
the U.S. was no longer a “democracy,” if it ever had been. America, Wolin
found, had mutated into a new sort of totalitarian regime wherein economic
power and state power were conjoined and virtually unchecked by a
demobilized, atomized and politically disinterested populace, conditioned
to
stay that way. “At best,” Wolin determined, “the nation has become a
‘managed democracy’ where the public is shepherded, not sovereign.”
“Should Democrats somehow be elected,” he prophesied, they would do nothing
to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially
revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party
mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that for the
poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no
opposition party working on their behalf.”
Sure enough, a nominal Democrat was elected president along with Democratic
majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What followed under Barack
Obama (as under the prior Democratic administration of Bill Clinton) was
standard-issue neoliberal rule in the service of big-money bankrollers and
their global empire. The nation’s first black president implemented the
preferred policies of Wall Street and the Pentagon more effectively than
wealthy white Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney could have ever
hoped to. America’s “inverted totalitarianism” was rebranded, to deadly
effect. Fed by a widespread and easily exploited sense of abandonment and
betrayal, the country’s rightward shift grew more pronounced, as the
Democrats depressed and demobilized their purported base. Over a period of
eight years, the party lost more than 1,000 elected offices nationwide,
including the U.S. presidency.
Along the way, its power brokers managed to stamp out a progressive
insurgency from Bernie Sanders through dubious means, clearing the field
for
a deeply unpopular candidate in Hillary Clinton. And in so doing, they
handed the populist torch to a far-right reactionary in a change election.
We should expect a similar outcome from the Democrats’ presidential
nomination process in 2020. The smart money is on anti-populist Joe Biden
or the telegenic faux-progressive Beto O’Rourke—this despite the continued
popularity of Sanders and his progressive agenda.
One year after Hillary’s ignominious defeat, the distinguished liberal
political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens
(Princeton) published their expertly researched book “Democracy in
America?”
The volume’s key finding: “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.
When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general
public has been virtually powerless. …”
Whether we vote or not, Mammon reigns in the United States, where, as Page
and Gilens note, “government policy … reflects the wishes of those with
money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out
every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates
for
federal office” (emphasis added). Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
(“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)
Perhaps our only hope is a mass movement for “the radical reconstruction of
society itself”—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the real issue to
be
faced”—and the replacement of the unelected and interrelated dictatorships
of capital and empire by popular sovereignty and workers’ control. As Chris
Hedges wrote earlier this year:
“The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half
shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of
political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed
democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a
functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him
are
somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election,
the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a
political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two
major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back
political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means
massive
and sustained civil disobedience. … If we do not stand up, we will enter a
new dark age.” (Emphasis added.)
“A new dark age” may ultimately prove euphemistic. The original Dark Ages
concluded with the planet still habitable. Humanity now faces the near-term
historical threat of extinction thanks to the grave “ecological rifts”
generated by a global profit system upheld by both ruling parties that is
turning earth into a great, big Greenhouse Gas Chamber. “The uncomfortable
truth,” philosopher Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 17 years ago, “is that
if
there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no
future for humanity itself.”
Sustained civil disobedience in the United States could provoke a response
far bloodier than anything seen in France. But while the human costs of
revolution are great, none can compare with the ecocidal rule of capital.
Paul Street
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League. Street is also the author of numerous
